Part 8 (1/2)
He showed her lightreal light, with color and gradationand so delighted was she that she reached out in order to bring it closer to her.
He brought to her ears the whisper of the wind through the trees, the brief fluttery calling of the birds; when he ordered it, it began to rain and the soft comforting sound caused her to weep with joy.
Colonel Hu told her that they were the tears of a pure heart and a pure mind. Those were the first words she could recall his having spoken to her. She took his hand, s.h.i.+vering with the feel of his callused palm across her fingertips.
The first gulps of water he fed her went down her chin. She was ashamed until she felt him wiping her off with a soft cloth. He gave her a gentle kiss on her cheek and she was warm inside. She slept.
When she woke she was ravenous. Colonel Hu was there to feed her. She tried to do it herself but it was as if she had forgotten what chopsticks were for. She began to eat with her hands but he stopped her.
Instead, he fed her with the chopsticks, slowly and carefully, in a most instructional manner so that soon she was able to feed herself under his watchful gaze.
In all this time she had not said one word. She found that she had no difficulty in understanding the simple things Colonel Hu said to her. As with the chopsticks, she seemed to have lost the ability to speak.
This, too, Colonel Hu taught her in the most patient manner possible. Qi Lin could not imagine anyone being as patient as he was with her and she loved him all the more for it.
There were flashes of course. Times when she would remember with breathtaking clarity her ”other” lifebefore she had been born again through the bright light of pain. At those times she would speak up, tell Colonel Hu that he was wrong, that she knew the meaning of this or that, the true meaning, and why was he lying to her?
Then the darkness would come down like a suffocating blanket and she would not even have the painthe very personal oasisto clutch to her breast. Instead, she would be returned to the nothingness from which she had been born.
The first time this occurred, Qi Lin said, ”This cannot be happening, I have already been reborn.” But no sound whatsoever came out and, besides, she almost drowned on the rush of fluid that filled her open mouth.
Pain had long ago ceased to frighten her. She knew instinctively that she could withstand any amount of agony because she knew the secret of turning it around. Like an alchemist she could transform agony into light, a light that would keep her safe, sound, whole.
During the ensuing episodes she kept her mouth tightly shut. That saved her, perhaps, from drowning but it did little to allay her terror. There was nothing, she concluded, more horrifying than being thrust back into an endless void. It was like dying for all eternity. Or worse, not dying a yet not living either.
Eventually, she learned to hide these bursts of what she termed ”color memory” from those around her, especially Colonel Hu, who seemed to be watching her particularly for these so-called ”regression episodes.” In any case, they began to occur less and less.
By the time Colonel Hu presented her with her target, Qi lin hardly remembered another life, other than the one she had been leading here in the outskirts of Beijing.
He floated on a lacquered ocean. Free of pain, he was able to expand his qi, his intrinsic energy, so that he stretched out across the whole of the South China Sea. Sunlight, warm and life-giving, radiated down, infusing him. He watched the dolphins at play, clowning through the foamy troughs made by the oilstained tankers. In another quadrant, he saw a herd of blue whales sounding. They worked their flukes, diving deep, through layers of blue increasing to midnight. In the blackness they sped, the cows guiding their young with gentle nudges while silvery streams of bubbles trailed behind them and lazily rose into daylight.
”Are you relaxed, a-yeh?” Bliss asked. It was just before sunset and she had been working on his body for more than two hours.
”Very relaxed. Yesterday's pain is gone, and today, I have very little. Your hands work wonders on this ancient body.”
Warmth suffused him, keeping, for the moment, the disease at bay. She is the only one, Zilin thought, who calls me Grandfather. To the others, I am Jian. Even to my son. Though Bliss was more a G.o.ddaughter to him, he loved that she called him a-yeh. Grandfather was something Lan, Jake's daughter, would have called him. Lan. He turned his mind to thoughts of her.
He no longer felt Bliss's hands kneading his ancient flesh. His qi was expanded: he saw and felt other, more momentous things; the petty concerns of the flesh were shut away for some time.
But, in the end, he returned to more human concerns. I am Jian, he thought, half dreaming. I spent my entire life seeking to attain that exalted state. Now I can have no regrets about what it has brought me.
But oh, I do, I do! It has cut me off from the life of a normal human being. I come home to no wife, no family gathered around the fireside. I have sacrificed the traditions of the agestraditions that have made us the most unique and civilized people on earthin order to secure a safe pathway to the future.
We must learn new traditions if we are to survive and prosper, but I do not know what they are. I have nothing of that sort to pa.s.s on to Jake. I am truly suspended between two worlds. I am of the old Middle Kingdom, antiquated with superst.i.tion, so I deliberately cut myself off from that level of thought. The first Jian, the master of the fantastic garden in Suzhou where I was born, taught me the meaning of artifice in building a new world. In school, in Shanghai, my peers thought me odd, a rebel whose views they could not fathom. I can never forget my debt to the Jian. And I thank Buddha every day that his living legacy, Bliss, his great-granddaughter, is here with me now in Hong Kong.
Zilin could still remember that day when Bliss's mother came to him. He was still a rebel, with Mao, hiding out in the hills of Hunan while Chiang Kai-shek sought a way to destroy the Communist army. He had done all he could for her in those dark days: he had fed her and, when she was sufficiently rested, had used his influence with the leaders of the Shan tribes in Burma to get her through to Hong Kong and his brother Three Oaths Tsun.
Only microns thick, his qi spread itself across the vastness of the lacquered ocean. Zilin was surprised by the continuance of its strength. The disease that had been ravaging him for years now could only affect his body. Still, because of the intense pain that would otherwise incapacitate him, he had been obliged to draw more and more heavily on the power of his qi to keep himself sane and functioning. It was good to know that he could not deplete that mystical reservoir. In that sense he was as potent now as he had been when he was in his twenties. No, he thought now, even more so because he developed the wisdom to know how to use his qi in ways he could not have imagined at that younger age.
But he also realized that his flaccid body required a trigger now to release his qi so completely. It was no easy accomplishment these days. With his nerve points so blocked with disease and pain, it was difficult to maintain the free flow of energy throughout his system that allowed the release of his qi. Bliss worked his body like a magician, using one set of unblocked points to aid her in freeing the next set, and so on all along the nerve paths under siege by the ravages of time.
”Bliss,” he said now.
”I am here, Grandfather.”
”You are good for an old man. You make me feel young again.”
”Thank you, Grandfather,” she said, her head down. ”But as to the other, you are like granite. You will never die.”
”Ah, my precious gem, all who live must die. It is Buddha's will. To defy that is to be greedy.” He sighed at something she could not discern, some inward vision perhaps. ”Do you know what happened to the greedy man?”
”I don't, no.”
”He at last came over the rise of a hillthe last of many in his travelsand saw before him a valley so vast that he could not determine its dimensions. And this entire valley was encrusted with everything he had sought to possess during his lifetime. Everything. He spent days running from piece to piece, examining and sifting, happy beyond all imagining.
”At first his intense excitement and joy pushed the thought of food and drink from his mind. But eventually the sight of his endless possessions began to pale beside his gnawing hunger and thirst.
”Now he stumbled through the encrusted valley but no longer did he care which bauble he pa.s.sed. Hunger consumed him; thirst dizzied him.”
Zilin was silent then, and Bliss was forced to prompt him. ”Then what happened?”
”The man found that he could bear his thirst and his hunger no longer. He had no choice. For the valley was indeed endless, and nowhere within it was there food or drink. All his life he had coveted riches and at last they were his. But because his desire for them was so omnivorous, there was no room even in that endless valley for food to grow or water to surface, or for another soul to inhabit his universe.”
Bliss shuddered. ”It seems a cruel fate.”
”Cruelty breeds cruelty,” he said softly. Adrift on the lacquered ocean, he became aware of a disturbance. It was as if a storm was brewing on the far horizon. Stretching his qi to its limits, he sought its source.
”We are through for the day,” Bliss said. ”How do you feel?”
”Wonderful,” Zilin said, feeling his qi rus.h.i.+ng back to his core as if with the onset of night. ”Because of you, wonderful.” Still, he thought of that far-off storm and because of that he said, ”Are you ready again to journey to da-hei?” He spoke of the great darkness within which all human spiritual energy dwelled.
Bliss nodded. ”But I do not understand.”
”A cat does not understand why it is able to fall from a great height and land on its feet. A bird does not understand how it is that it can fly. It merely seeks the air and becomes one with it.” Zilin held out his hand. ”It is the same with you. Do you imagine that anyone may enter the sphere of da-hei?” He grunted. ”Now give me your hand, your eyes. Here. And here. Are you afraid?”
”No.”
”Not of da-hei. That I can feel. I mean are you afraid of that which has no explanation?”
”I have been trained not to be.”
”Yet you are afraid.”
She bowed her head and whispered, ”Yes.”
”Then you must know why it is you are afraid.” Zilin waited until her head came up and their eyes met again. ”It is because that which has no explanation is also without limit.”
”The responsibility.” The small cabin echoed her words, her feelings. And when she pa.s.sed through with him into da-hei, her exhilaration and her dread.
Jake was dreaming of his daughter, Lan. He often did that and it was never pleasant. Always he was on the banks of the Sumchun River. The muddy water flowed over his feet so that he could neither see them nor feel them.