by F. C. Yee
“I wouldn’t say no,” Yunie said.
The Great White Planet smiled wanly and patted the empty seat across from him like he owned it. “Come, sit.”
There was space enough for three. I felt a sense of balance, flanked by Quentin and Yunie. Maybe the three of us should have teamed up from the beginning. I wished the Universe had picked a different way to tell me so.
“Guan Yu and I managed to find our way back to Heaven,” the Great White Planet said. “Once Xing Tian was neutralized, we could travel freely once more.”
“The Jade Emperor beat you there, though,” I said.
“He did. We arrived to see the King of Heaven sitting firmly on his throne once again. By then he knew Guanyin had succeeded. He’d already circulated the ‘official’ story of what happened.”
He paused, knowing this was a possible blowup moment for me. But I hadn’t the energy. “What is the official story?” I asked.
“It’s very close to the truth. As soon as the Jade Emperor detected the menace of Xing Tian, he heroically went off on his own to face down the existential threat. Concerned for the rest of our safety, he told no one where he went. After the blunders of lesser gods woke the monster, the kind and noble Goddess of Mercy sacrificed herself to make up for her error. He would have gladly held off Xing Tian himself until the end of existence, but fate had other plans.”
The Great White Planet waited to see if I would have my outburst at that last part. When he saw that I was calm, he continued.
“The Jade Emperor, in his benevolence, understands why the Mandate Challenge was called,” he said, his monotone betraying his disgust. “But seeing as how the crisis is over and he, the incumbent ruler of Heaven, is still around, the window to consider new rulership has closed. In a further display of generosity, he forgives the court of Heaven for its treasonous actions, as well as the individuals more directly involved.”
With that, the saga was over. The Jade Emperor had gotten everything he wanted. It had been his journey the whole time, and the rest of us amounted to only a bump in the road. “Did you tell the rest of the gods what really happened?”
“I tried to. But my word is worth less than dirt now. I bungled the most important task in millennia by trying to replace my boss while he was legitimately combating the end times, remember? Guan Yu raised his voice as well, but no one listened. Or maybe they believed us and didn’t care. The Jade Emperor’s consolidated his power too well.”
The Great White Planet fiddled with his teacup but didn’t drink. “Guan Yu left the court of Heaven to go on a personal voyage. He no longer wanted to have anything to do with such corruption. As for me, I was thanked for my service and forcibly retired for making these statements. Lei Gong or Zhenyuan or another one of the Jade Emperor’s henchmen will take over my job. I’m lucky that I wasn’t sentenced to Hell, honestly.”
They were good eggs, the general and the inspector. Guan Yu’s honor and the Great White Planet’s integrity showed me there was some decency among the people high above us. Just not enough to make any meaningful difference whatsoever.
“Nezha?” I said. “Erlang Shen?”
“Nezha’s loss was mourned—a young god struck down before his prime.” The Great White Planet’s voice quavered. “As for Erlang Shen, what of him? He was a traitor, and his presence in the Mandate Challenge was a foolish experiment with an outcome that should have been expected. He couldn’t contain his rage, and the Jade Emperor killed him in self-defense. What else needs to be said?”
The hurt in his eyes told me that he needed to say much, much more about his former prize student. The Great White Planet condensed the volumes into a few pithy lines of advice.
“You remind me very much of Erlang Shen,” he said to me. “A youth who saw too far into the future and was blinded by the possible. I’m warning you now. Don’t go down his path. Stay focused on what’s in front of you.”
It was advice that might have kept Guanyin alive. “Was Erlang Shen a good contender to replace the Jade Emperor, before he lost his third eye and started to plot against Heaven?” I asked. “You’ve been the grade-keeper for so long. You must know.”
The old god aged another hundred years in front of me.
“He was flawless,” the Great White Planet said, his voice hoarse. “Before the Jade Emperor took away his eye, he would have developed into the perfect ruler of Heaven.”
I disagreed with him about who would have made the perfect ruler. But then, everyone was biased toward their favorites.
The Great White Planet stood up. He seemed shorter than I remembered. I hadn’t meant to cause him pain. “I should go,” he said. “Would you like to know what your final score as the Divine Guardian of California was?”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I feel like there are other things that matter more than grades.”
He nodded as if I’d passed the last category of his test, the part that wasn’t scored with a number. “There certainly are, Shouhushen.”
The inspector of the gods left like a normal person. Through the door and down the steps, back to Heaven or wherever his retirement led him. I wished him well.
My friends had let me do all the talking but figured now was the time to speak up. “Okay, I understood exactly none of that,” Yunie said. “Other than I want to punch this Jade Emperor person in the balls.”
“We all do, Yunie,” Quentin muttered. “We all do.”
She ventured the question cautiously. “Is Guanyin . . . really gone? I know you told me what happened, but I still can’t believe it. If she’s physically still there, in that place . . .”
We couldn’t give her an answer either way. We had none. The Goddess of Mercy was who we usually turned to when we didn’t have a clue.
The beginning of a thought flickered through my head, but it was extinguished by the calendar alert of my phone going off. The device lay exactly where I’d left it, plugged into Ji-Hyun’s wall socket. I’d set the meeting alarm to remind me of an important deadline.
“I have to go see about a guy,” I said, getting up suddenly.
▪ ▪ ▪
Quentin paced uneasily around the perimeter of the fountain. It was a small, modern art-y sculpture made up of black and white squares set at angles, as if a chessboard had been shattered and rearranged. The sun was deceptively high. Really, there were only a few hours left in my long weekend.
“Genie,” Quentin said. “I don’t think this is the time.”
On the contrary. There would never be a more appropriate time to talk to Ax than now.
He arrived late. I guessed that was the power move du jour, instead of being early. I sat down on the concrete lip of the fountain. Ax took a seat next to me so we could talk without facing each other, like spies doing a drop-off. He rudely ignored Quentin again.
“You look like you’ve been deep in thought,” he said.
“I have,” I said. “And I’d like to hear your pitch again, before I give you my decision.”
Ax leaned back, precariously close to falling into the water. “What pitch is there to give? The future belongs to the risk-takers. Those who are willing to gamble. It’s as simple as that.”
A stiff breeze would knock him over and completely soak him. “Like you?” I said. “You took a great risk by quitting school and joining the Nexus Partnership?”
“I did indeed,” he said, his mouth leaking liquid metal into the air. “I risked it all. I was a Dean’s List student at this school, so you could say that me dropping out was like throwing my advantages away and being reborn as a completely new person.”
Ax couldn’t have known, but my eyes were blazing away with true sight, inches from his face. My lie detection was on in full force, the first time I’d ever used it on an unsuspecting human. Every untruth he spoke would make it appear as if quicksilver spewed out of his mouth. Word bubbles drawn by a cartoonist with metallic paint.
“There’s no guarantee things will work out for me,” he said a
s mercury trickled from his lips. “I’m performing a high-wire act without a safety net.”
“Ax, what does your mother do for a living?” I asked.
He was surprised, both by the question and the fact that I hadn’t asked about his father instead. “She’s the CEO of a hospital in Anderton,” he said. That was true.
“Anderton, where the venture capital families live,” I said. “Do you know what my mother does for a living, Ax? She does the books for a billiards supply company in Redpine.”
“Oh,” he said politely. “The one the train passes?”
“Yup,” I said. “The one by the train tracks, with that big vertical sign that needs painting. She gets paid under the table. In fact, I think her main job is helping the owners cheat on their taxes.”
I could tell he suddenly found my musk less palatable. “Okay. You’re telling me this because?”
“Because I think you and I might have a very different definition of risk,” I said. “Ax, does the work you’re doing with the Nexus Partnership mean everything to you?”
“Of course it does. It’s my reason for living. You can’t be a part of this group unless you’re passionate about the mission. Why do you think we ask you to quit school?”
Yes, yes, quitting school, blah blah. “But what would you do, though, if your ideas didn’t work?” I asked. “Say your baby company never made it to fruition.”
“I’d try another, and another,” Ax said. “I’d never quit.”
Bubble. Another lie.
“So you’re telling me that you would eat failure after failure, without end, until you were old and gray?” I asked. “You wouldn’t, say, go back to school? Get your degree and a nice safe job? Take a gap year and travel? I’m sure your parents would support you in any of those options.”
“Of course I wouldn’t do any of those things,” he said, clearly insulted. “I’m on my own in the world. There’s no going back to my former life.”
This time the metal lie balloon was so big it would have killed a small flock of birds had it been solid. I watched it pulse and throb before returning to the conversation at hand.
“See, that’s the difference, Ax,” I said. “People like you have the luxury of failing more than once. The world will pick you up, dust you off, and send you on your way, nothing lost and nothing gained. You get to keep going, and going, until you get the result you want. And if you do decide to give up, there’s a nice cushion for you to land on. That’s why you have mottoes like ‘fail fast,’ and ‘failure is the best teacher.’
“People like me don’t get to fail,” I continued. “Not ever. When people like me fail, we don’t bounce off a soft surface. We hit the ground hard. We lose so very much. We don’t survive long enough to learn anything.”
I peered as far down my nose I could at my own mouth. It was clear. Maybe the detection didn’t work on me to begin with.
Ax got up and dusted his hands off. He didn’t have to waste his time listening to this.
“I get it,” he said. “The answer is no. Frankly, I’m disappointed you’ve made this into some kind of bizarre class resentment thing. We don’t discriminate by socioeconomic background.”
You might not care about your advantages, my dude, I thought to myself. But the Universe we share sure as hell does.
In one small irony, a mote on the scales of life, Ax stumbled a bit in his hurry to leave. Not a lot. The more spectacular finale would have been if he’d tumbled back into the fountain and gotten soaking wet. It would have been the finale to the kind of kids’ movies I used to watch, where the jerk villain got messy as a comeuppance.
His little pitch forward, however, did take him far enough that he ran into the steadying hand of Quentin, who he’d done his best to pretend wasn’t there. Quentin dusted him off and grinned at him like an anglerfish.
“Easy there, chief,” he said to Ax. “You almost had a bit of bad luck. Can’t have that now, can we?”
Only Quentin could scare someone that bad by being that friendly. My hundred thousand dollars fled the scene. We watched him go.
“Are you sure about this?” Quentin said. “Maybe it was a risk worth taking after all.”
“I’m sure it’ll keep me up at night,” I said, completely serious.
30
I was planning to take the train home. That was what we’d agreed upon. Instead I got a call with an unpleasant surprise.
Both my parents had come to pick me up at the college. In the same car no less. Mom must have been dying.
In the parking lot, I saw my dad standing outside his car. I could make out my mom’s silhouette in the passenger’s seat. I walked over to them. Most of the other people around were students coming in the other direction, returning to school after their weekend trips off-campus. They carried empty picnic coolers and bags of car trash. One guy struggled to take his surfboard off his roof rack.
I got into the back seat of Dad’s car. It took me a moment. I hadn’t ridden like this in years, Dad driving and Mom in the front. It regressed me to my younger years like a sledgehammer. The hairs on my neck stood on end. We were silent for a minute, until Dad got past the local town traffic and merged with the highway traffic.
“How was your trip?” Mom said.
“How’s your heart?” I snapped.
“Genie!” Mom shrieked.
“Dears,” Dad pleaded.
We hadn’t lost our touch. The reunited band was playing its greatest hits right off the bat.
And then Mom did something weird. She calmed herself and de-escalated. “Genie, I want to know how your trip was,” she said. “That’s all.”
Jesus, she really was dying. I was being stupid, provoking her to anger. What was I trying to do, push her blood pressure over the edge?
I fought back against the suffocating grip of childhood this car had me in, and rattled off banalities. “The trip was great,” I said. “I learned a lot. Ji-Hyun was a wonderful host. Don’t let me forget to send her a thank-you gift.”
“I won’t,” Mom said. “And how was the party? Did you have fun? Did you drink a lot?”
I nearly kicked the car door open so I could jump out while it was still moving. That’s why they’d both come. My parents had found out that I’d lied by omission about a party with alcohol and leering college boys. They were going to drive me out to the desert, and burying my body was a two-person job.
“You . . . knew about the party?” I said.
“Of course I did,” Mom said, her upset-meter beeping a little at the insult to her intelligence. “I’m not an idiot. You’re a teenager at a college.”
“And you’re our daughter,” Dad said. “We know plenty that you don’t tell us about.”
The one upside of what had happened to my family was that I could no longer receive double-parent dressing downs like these. But now the hydra had regenerated and was going to attack me from both sides. I thought about lying my way out of the situation. Or protesting that I didn’t drink or have fun.
But that risked ruining my mother’s relative tranquility. She wanted guilt, so I would have to give it to her. I sighed.
“Yes,” I said, steeling myself for the inevitable scolding. “I drank too much and partied a little too hard. I got slightly sick.”
“Good,” she said. “Not good that you got sick, but good that you had a lot of fun and drank and tried something new.”
The car kept going, but in my head the brakes had slammed to the floor. My brain came screeching to a halt. I wanted to roll down the windows and scream for help. An alien had kidnapped my mother and replaced her with a malfunctioning duplicate. I was equipped for demons, not aliens. This was a government situation.
“You’re glad I went to a drinking party?” I said incredulously.
In the glimpse I caught of her in the windshield reflection, my mother swallowed a lump in her throat. “Genie, I was hoping you would have the time of your life this weekend,” she said. “I was hoping you would fa
ll in love with that school. I know you want to go somewhere farther away. But I thought if you truly loved that place, then maybe you would stay in the Bay, closer to us, where we could see you more often.”
Subtlety. Recognition of my choices. Hoping instead of screaming. I wanted to grab my mother and shout Are you even Asian anymore?
“That place is hella expensive,” I said. “There’s no good way to pay for it.”
“There’s no good way, but there’s ways,” Mom said. “We can always take out more loans, work more jobs. It’s worth it if you love it.”
She was saying that we should double down on our past mistakes. Lean into the jaws of the shark. “Do you know what would happen to us with more debt?” I said.
“No,” she said. “But that’s not the point. You worry too much about things being clear and certain. Who knows? Sometimes things work out.”
Dad saw that I had extreme difficulty responding. So he changed the subject to a nice, easy, soothing topic of conversation. “Your mother and I are getting back together.”
I choked on my own saliva. My heart couldn’t take this. It was going to explode long before Mom’s did.
“For the health insurance,” he explained while I tried to self-Heimlich. “It turns out that the policy I get from the gym is really, really good. It’ll cover medication, specialists, regular checkups.”
He thought of a joke that he really liked and sent it through the Dad-filter until it came out covered in lint. “It’s what they give us instead of money!” he said.
I didn’t laugh. This wasn’t a fairy-tale ending. This was a slow-rolling disaster in the making. My parents were not good for each other. They were going to make each other miserable. They were going to trap each other in French Existentialist hell.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I said, when I should have been painting warnings on the windshield in my own blood.
“No,” Mom said. “What did I tell you about being certain? We don’t know. But we’re doing it, and that’s that. I don’t want to hear any lip from you about it.”
Knowing what they’d done to each other in the past, this was a sacrifice. And they were making it for me. To free up some resources for my education, my continuing improvement as a human being. They were willing to get back on the Wheel of Suffering right where they’d left, in order to give me the push I needed to break free.
