Once I had found a room, I bought a second-hand computer, as dusty and old as an archaeological find. For days on end I shiver in a shroud of blankets, hunched at the screen. Every so often I pause my typing to briskly rub my hands and breathe warmth on to my icy fingers. I don’t know a soul in Beijing. The computer is my only companion, the overheating machinery spinning its internal fan. Sometimes the machine breaks down, goes silent and black. I reboot and pace nervously back and forth, waiting for the resuscitation of my only friend. The machine comes back to life and my heart leaps with relief. I resume my work and, as your biography takes shape on the flickering monitor, I am full of hope.
I watched you today, wandering with your daughter through the frozen wastes of Tuan Jie Hu Park, wrapped up against the January cold and blowing cigarette smoke into the fog. I saw your fatherly pride as she explored the paths and lake and bounced on the trampoline. I saw your concern as she wept over her lost boot. I saw how important Echo is to you. How you love her most.
But here’s the truth, Driver Wang. Blood, though thicker than water, never lasts beyond the span of one life. When the heart ceases to beat, blood oxidizes to rust and flakes away. And the other things that bind you to wife and child — the marriage and birth certificates, and legal documentation of family life, will be dust in a hundred years.
Our bond, however, transcends the death of the body, though we are hosted by flesh and blood, viscera and bone. Though we eat and sleep, laugh and weep, sneeze and catch colds, we differ from those condemned to live only once. When they die they are dead. After we die we live on.
Listen. Do you hear that? Outside the door? Strain your ears above the TV and the washing machine’s spinning drum. The chained beast of history is breaking loose. Do you hear his deep and ragged breathing in the dark?
History is knocking for you, his knuckles striking the door. Don’t pretend not to hear. Don’t pretend he’s not there.
Open the door, Driver Wang. Let him in.
6. Night Coming
Tang Dynasty, AD 632
I
STRANGERS KNOCK IN the night. The common folk of Kill the Barbarians Village, seeking out your mother to confess the torments of the soul. You, a boy named Bitter Root, huddle with the Runts in the corner, and peer through the darkness at the Sorceress Wu as she lowers her hawkish nose, shuts her piercing eyes and listens to the tales of woe. Envy and lust. Wrath and revenge. Flames leap in the hearth, and the sorceress chants in an ancient tongue and tosses into the fire a mysterious dust that flashes sulphurous and bright. She decants into vials potions to cure heart-sickness, abort a foetus, or punish a husband who rapes the twelve-year-old servant girl. She sells bottles of deadly nightshade, and hallucinogenic venom extracted from the heavy-lidded toad she keeps in a bamboo cage. She sells amulets and anti-lust charms. She sells a poultice to the cabbage-seller to grow back his amputated foot.
A husband killed by bandits. Too many mouths to feed and nothing but steamed grasshoppers to feed them. These are the misfortunes that forced your mother to turn to the dark arts. And what she lacks in supernatural ability, she makes up for with nerves of steel. For sometimes the strangers come back, accusing her sorcery of being a sham and demanding refunds. The sorceress blames the meddling of evils spirits and offers to sell them antidemon charms. She curses them and slams the door. The sorceress never backs down.
You are Bitter Root, named thus to trick the demons into thinking you are vile-tasting and bad to eat. You are thirteen years old and wild, with never-healing scabs on your knees and your eye-teeth knocked out from falling out of trees. Your hair is filthy and gnarled as roots, and your sun-darkened face grubby and snarling. You are a solitary child. You scorn your pot-bellied little brothers and sisters, whom you call ‘the Runts’, who splash about in the river Mudwash and dare each other to gobble spiders up. You spend your days roaming the Neverdie Forest, toughening to leather the soles of your bare feet. A hunter-gatherer, you steal eggs from nests and trap birds and animals for the stew pot. Stealthy and brave, you part the bamboo saplings and swoop your snake-catching net down on serpents coiled belly-down in the grass. You carry the captured snakes, in a fury of trashing in your net, to your mother. The sorceress kills them and slits their bellies, slicing from fanged head to tail, and extracts the gall bladder and poison sacs for medicinal use.
You are not Sorceress Wu’s first-born. You have an elder sister, whom the sorceress named Brother Coming, to encourage fate to bring her a son. One year older than you, Brother Coming is a mute, and too dim-witted to do even simple chores, such as raking ashes in the hearth or fetching water from the well. Solitary like you, Brother Coming spends her days in the forest, wandering through the maze of trees and whistling with a blade of grass in mimicry of birdcall. But Brother Coming is not predatory. She is a scavenger, not a hunter. She gathers bird skulls and scapulae, dark feathers and jagged stones, and stows her treasures in tree-hollow hiding places. Toads ribbit in her tunic pockets and beetles scuttle in her knotty hair. The Neverdie Forest embraces Brother Coming. When she curls up to sleep on a bed of moss, the trees above her shed a blanket of leaves should the air turn chill. The canopy shifts to shelter Brother Coming should some rain begin to fall.
When you encounter Brother Coming in the Neverdie Forest you ignore her. Your idiot sibling is of no interest to you and you pass her without a nod. Then one day in your thirteenth year you catch Brother Coming stalking you through the trees. Whereas you are forest-coloured, streaked with greens and browns, Brother Coming is pale and conspicuous. Twigs snap and leaves rustle under her feet, frightening the snakes away. ‘Go away!’ you hiss. You hurl clods of mud, which splatter her because she is too feeble-minded to dodge them. You run over and clobber her until she hobbles away.
But an hour later she is back. Stalking you through the trees. You charge at her and knock her down, and as you roll over with her on the leaf-and twig-strewn ground, you notice the swellings on your fourteen-year-old sister’s chest. Curious, you pull up her tunic. You tweak and peek. You poke and pry and probe her with your tongue. As you grope her, Brother Coming lays beneath you, quiet and unprotesting. As you have your way with her, her eyes register neither pleasure nor pain.
Many cycles of the moon go by. Starry constellations come and go in the night sky. Skinny Brother Coming is fattening up. As you lay together in the forest, you sink your hands into the ever-swelling bump to push it flat. But the mound of belly grows fatter by the day, warning you things have gone awry. The Runts notice the change in your sister too. ‘Fatty Coming! Fatty Coming! Waddling like a duck!’ they tease. At supper the Sorceress Wu serves Brother Coming an extra ladle of rice gruel. She prepares nourishing herbal soups for her. The Sorceress Wu narrows her eyes at you, her hook-ended nose flaring in suspicion when you are near.
‘Bitter Root! Bitter Root!’
The sorceress is calling, so you fling your fishing pole down by the edge of the river Mudwash and hurry past the Runts (who are squealing, ‘Worms! Worms! Worms!’ and chasing each other with dangling earthworms). You run up the hill to the mud-walled dwelling, eager to please the sorceress, who lately snarls at the mere sight of you.
‘Here I am,’ you announce.
The sorceress is pacing the trampled-earth floor. She looks up and trepidation flashes in her eyes, before the return of her habitual cast-iron will.