The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘someone is having a joke with you.’

  ‘Whoever it is has been following me. They know where I live. They’ve been watching my wife and child.’

  ‘Unless a law has been broken, there’s nothing we can do.’

  Passengers slide in, front seat or back, sighing with relief to be in the stuffy car-heater warmth. As Wang navigates the streets of Beijing, steering through the arrhythmic stop–start of traffic, they tap tap tap, messaging on phones. They crack knuckles, popping sockets of bone. They yawn and yawn again. They struggle in with backpacks, unfolding German maps, naming a street in strange Teutonic tones. They scowl at Wang, blaming him for slow traffic. A teenage girl points to a plastic bag cartwheeling in the wind and remarks dryly, ‘That bag will get there before us.’ The radio says, ‘There are 66,000 taxi drivers in Beijing. A figure the government intends to reduce by a third by 2010.’

  The sky is stark and white as though bled dry. A woozy woman, her head swathed in bandages, staggers in from outside a plastic-surgery clinic. Mute, she hands Wang her address on paper. Throughout the journey Wang senses her watching him through the eyeholes in her gauze mask. He imagines the reconstructed face beneath. The surgeon’s stitches and the sag of age drawn taut. He longs to call it a day and go home.

  The canteen is east of the Third ring road, between a carwash and a garage. Crowded around Formica tables, cabbies hunch over bowls, chopsticks tugging noodles to mouths. Smoke from the poorly ventilated kitchen and crimson-glowing cigarettes swirls above them in a stratum of clouds. Hacking coughs cut through the dinnertime clatter, and lighters spark and flare as though pyromania, not nicotine, is the addiction here. Wang stands in the doorway, his pupils dilating in the dimness. Cabbies are not a healthy breed; slouching and overweight and in the high-risk category for coronary thrombosis. Irritable from hours of grinding traffic and liable to fly off the handle at the slightest thing. Wang hopes he doesn’t look too much like these bad-tempered, wheyfaced men in the canteen. ‘It’s freezing! Shut the fucking door!’ shouts Driver Liang. Wang steps inside.

  Baldy Zhang grunts at Wang, frowning beneath his bald, ridged cranium as he peels a clove of garlic and grinds it between his molars. Baldy Zhang can get through a bulb of garlic a night and leaves the taxi so pungent Wang has to wind the windows down before his shift to air it out. (‘Germ-ridden, passengers are,’ Baldy Zhang once explained. ‘Garlic protects me from the germs.’) Baldy Zhang has been a cabbie since the eighties, back when Beijing was a city of bicycles and driving a taxi a prestigious job, and though he is arrogant and rude, Wang likes co-renting with him. Baldy Zhang never works during the day, for one, which means Wang hasn’t worked a night in three years. Though fares are fewer, Baldy Zhang prefers the night-time, when there are less of the things that he loathes: traffic, policemen and people. (‘There’s too many people in China,’ he says. ‘The One-child Policy isn’t enough. They should ban childbirth for a few years.’) Baldy Zhang usually works from dusk until dawn, parks the Citroën outside Wang’s building, then goes home to down a few beers and sleep. Baldy Zhang isn’t married. ‘Women aren’t worth the hassle. Not even prostitutes. This right hand is all I trust,’ he says, waggling his fingers at Wang.

  They each own a set of keys, and Wang avoids him most days. But today he texted, asking to meet.

  ‘Know anything about this? I found it in the sun visor.’

  Wang tosses Baldy Zhang the letter, watching for a spark of recognition in his eyes.

  ‘What it is?’ Baldy Zhang asks.

  ‘Read it.’

  Baldy Zhang skims a page, then tosses the letter back, lacking the patience to read on. ‘What is it?’

  As Wang tells him, Baldy Zhang reaches for Wang’s pack of Red Pagoda Mountain, sticks a filter between his lips and sparks the lighter. ‘Mutton noodles!’ calls one of the Sichuan girls who works in the kitchen. ‘Who ordered mutton noodles with chillies?’

  ‘I once knew a driver who got a letter like this,’ Baldy Zhang says. ‘Driver Fan was his name. Few days after he got the letter he was found dead in his taxi. Murdered.’

  ‘Murdered?’

  Baldy Zhang slits his eyes as he inhales, tobacco and cigarette paper crackling.

  ‘Stabbed fourteen times in the chest. The inside of his taxi was like an abattoir. Everything sprayed with blood. It was on the news. Never caught who did it . . .’

  Wang falls for it. Only for a second, but that’s long enough for Baldy Zhang. He wallops the table and guffaws. Other cabbies look over.

  ‘Very funny,’ says Wang.

  He waits for the cackling to die down. He has a headache from the stale, recycled air and can’t wait to get out of the canteen and breathe in the cold winter sky.

  ‘Tell me the truth. Is this letter anything to do with you?’

  ‘’Course not. Do I look mad?’

  ‘How did it get there then?’

  ‘A piece of wire’s all it takes to pick the lock. Done it myself when I’ve locked in the keys.’

  Tilting his chin, Baldy Zhang blows a plume of smoke to the ceiling, then smiles.

  Yida is in the kitchen. Rice-cooker steam fogs the window and the radio talks of Beijing’s preparations for the Olympic Games. A cotton rag pulls back Yida’s tumbleweed curls, and one of Wang’s old T-shirts hangs loosely from her slender frame as she slices a green pepper on the chopping board. Standing in the doorway, Wang watches her move between the kitchen counter and stove, adding the peppers to the onions sizzling in the wok, as rings of flame blaze beneath. Wok handle in one hand, spatula in the other, Yida looks over her shoulder. ‘That you, Wang?’ Wang says that it is.

  The TV is madcap with cartoons. A hyperactive playmate that Echo ignores as she sits in her Zaoying Elementary tracksuit, copying illustrations from an anime comic into her spiral-bound pad. She is pretty like her mother, but her eye-teeth have come through crooked. Little Rabbit, they call her at school, and Wang winces at the orthodontist’s bills yet to come.

  ‘Ba, you’re back,’ she says, not looking up from the spiral-bound pad.

  Echo wants to be a comic-book illustrator when she grows up, an ambition of which Yida disapproves. ‘Stop praising her. Don’t encourage her to waste time on art,’ she tells Wang. ‘Not when her grades in every other subject are so poor.’ Yida is harsh on Echo. Back when she was pregnant, she had bribed a doctor to give her an ultrasound. When she was told the foetus didn’t have a penis, Yida had debated having an abortion. ‘But what if the ultrasound was wrong?’ she fretted. ‘What if I abort a boy?’ ‘Carry the baby to term then,’ Wang suggested, ‘and if you give birth to a girl, drown her in a bucket.’ Wang had shamed her into keeping the baby, and he suspects Yida is strict with Echo because she regrets not having a son. But Wang has no regrets at all. He couldn’t be prouder of Echo. He pats her messy hair, thinking he couldn’t have been blessed with a better child.

  ‘Not so close. You’ll ruin your eyes and need glasses. Then you’ll never get a husband,’ he says.

  ‘Good,’ says Echo. ‘I don’t want a husband.’

  ‘You will,’ Wang says. ‘Finished your homework?’

  ‘Yes,’ she fibs, knowing he is too lazy to check.

  After dinner, Wang opens his laptop and scrolls through blogs online; mentally fidgeting, his attention span narrowing with every click. Yida curls up on a cushioned chair, her baggy, holey jumper tugged down over her knees, her wire-rimmed reading glasses perched on her nose and a best-selling paperback on Confucianism on her lap. Yida has started misquoting The Analects, and Wang can’t wait for her to move on to something else.

  On the living-room wall is a framed photograph of Wang and Yida, nine years younger, posing in the marble foyer of a five-star hotel. Yida is in an ivory wedding dress and Wang in suit and tie selected randomly from the photography studio’s clothing rails. They don’t look like themselves in the photo. Their smiles are forced and unnatural and may as well have been pulled of
f the rack with their clothes.

  The actual marriage had been months earlier. Wang was twenty-two and Yida twenty, and they had been together for six weeks. Wang remembers how young Yida looked that day at the registry office, her hair scraped up in a ponytail, not a scrap of makeup on her joyful face. Afterwards they had ordered steaming-hot bowls of Lanzhou noodles at a nearby stall. ‘This is our wedding banquet,’ Wang had told the noodle-maker, and he had poured out shots of baijiu and they’d all drunk a toast. Wang and Yida had drunkenly kissed, and an old woman had scolded them. Yida beamed and waved the marriage certificate at her: ‘We got married today. Here’s the evidence. I’m allowed to kiss my own husband, aren’t I?’

  They were proud of their wedding day. It was proof they were far more in love than the couples with dowries and guest lists and parental approval. Which was why, when Yida later confessed her regret that they’d not had a traditional ceremony, Wang was disappointed. They went to a photography studio for some professional wedding portraits, to make their marriage seem more conventional. They were nowhere near as ecstatic on the day of the photo shoot as the day they were married. A miscarriage and many late-night fights had brought about a loss of innocence; the sadness of romantic expectations fallen short. Yida is pregnant with Echo in the photo. Queasy with morning sickness and holding a bouquet to hide her bump. The fact that she is also in the photo, as a foetus in the womb, fascinates and delights Echo. Every so often she points at the slight bump visible under the bouquet and cries, ‘There I am. Tucked away in Ma’s belly! Guest of honour on your wedding day!’

  Echo is sleeping when they go into the bedroom at ten, in her narrow bed against the wall. Her cheeks are flushed as though she is overheated, and Wang tugs down her heavy duvet and strokes her brow, thinking how lovely she looks when she sleeps.

  Wang and Yida go to the larger bed they share by the window. Yida pulls her baggy, holey jumper over her head and, standing in her thermal underwear, massages almond lotion into her arms, calves and thighs. Once moisturized, Yida bends at the waist so her hair sways upside-down and drags a wide-toothed comb through curls so abundant you could lose a hand in them. Sometimes Wang hears the comb teeth ping as they break.

  Wang reaches for her as she slides between the covers beside him. He pins her down beneath him and reacquaints himself with the parts of her body that he loves: the hollow at the base of her throat, the curve of her hips, and her breasts that he cups and squeezes in his hands. He kisses her in that generous, wet and open-mouthed way they kiss now only when in darkness and in bed. ‘Shuuush,’ she whispers in his ear, though he hasn’t yet made a sound. Wang longs for the abandon she used to have, back when they were newly-weds. Back before Echo was born. Now she is rigid and tense beneath him. But when he parts her thighs, his fingers slide inside her with ease, and he knows she is ready. ‘Shuuush,’ she says again as he thrusts up inside her. And Wang moves as silently as he can, stifling his moans in her hair.

  Wang forgets time and place, until Yida digs her fingers in his shoulders. ‘Echo,’ she whispers. He pauses, hears a mattress creak and a child’s hollow cough from the other bed. ‘That’s enough, Wang Jun,’ Yida whispers. ‘She’s awake.’ Wang pretends not to hear. He waits for a few moments, then starts up again. Silently. Stealthily. He does not last for much longer, and as he comes feels Yida’s eyes spitting at him in the dark. He sheepishly kisses her damp forehead, then peels himself away.

  Wang remembers a line from the letter. Something about Yida satisfying the needs of the flesh and little else. Whoever wrote that knows nothing about his love for his wife, he thinks. He reaches out and sets the alarm for six o’clock. He falls asleep pretty much straight away.

  3

  The Second Letter

  AS BIOGRAPHER OF our past lives, I recount the ways we have known each other. The times we were friends and the times we were enemies. The times lust reared its head, and we licked and grazed on each other’s flesh. Once you were a eunuch. Your mother bound your wrists behind your back, laid your pubescent organs out on a chopping block, and severed you from the ranks of men. Once you were a Jurchen. The Mongols invaded our city, charging in on horseback, raping, beheading, and capturing slaves. They reduced Zhongdu to ruins, and cluttered our gutters with cadavers and severed limbs. They drove us forth across the Gobi Desert, and we fled during a sandstorm and sheltered behind rocks smooth as prehistoric eggs, jutting up to the sky.

  Once you were a Red Guard, rampaging through Beijing, intent on destroying the Old Culture, Old Society, Old Education and Old Ways of Thinking. You raided the homes of class enemies, carting the ‘Ill-gotten Gains of the Exploiting Classes’ off in wheelbarrows, after beating the rightists in a gang of teenage girls.

  Months later, I aided and abetted your suicide. You bared your thin, blue-veined wrists to me in the school toilets, and shouted, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ as I slashed each one with the blade. Then you plunged your wrists into the mop bucket, and your patriotic blood turned the water red as our national flag. I wanted to rip tourniquets out of my shirt and staunch the flow. But a promise is a promise, and I severed my own wrists with the stinging blade. Once. Twice. And the darkness roared, like the Great Helmsman’s fury, that I had taken my fate into my own hands.

  Can you guess where I am as I write this, Driver Wang? Hint: Baldy Zhang’s Mao Zedong pendant hangs from the rear-view and in the map-holding compartment of the door is a wallet of family snapshots. Echo aged three in Mickey Mouse ears. Yida on your lap as you smile together in a photo booth. That’s right. I am in your taxi, outside Building 16.

  A security guard patrols your housing compound. Three times he has passed your cab, shining his flashlight into the bushes and startling the stray cats. Three times he has failed to see me in the driver’s seat, straining my eyes under the dim overhead light. There are a thousand fading scents here; cheap perfume, nylon tights, cigarettes, the man-made fibres of winter coats and, beneath all this, your distinctive odour of hormones and sweat. Other remnants of you remain here too. Follicles, and scales of dead skin on the headrest. Molecules of breath.

  Building 16 is in darkness. There is no one at your window now, but I have seen your wife and daughter there during the day. Yida hanging machine-damp laundry on the balcony rail. Echo fogging the glass with her breath, then dragging her finger through the condensed steam. Last week I saw you washing the windows. Sleeves rolled up to the elbows, splashing soapy water on the pollution-smeared panes, squeezing out the excess from the sponge. Ephemeral rainbows glistened in the soap bubbles; spectrums of colour that imploded against the glass. Your cigarette smoke billowed in your eyes as you worked. Washing windows you have washed a hundred times before and will wash a hundred times again.

  There is no one at your bedroom window now, because the three of you are sleeping. Echo in her bed in the corner. You and your wife in the larger bed. Cages of ribs rising and falling, as lungs inflate and deflate. Eyelids palpitating with the stimuli of dreams. Three separate minds processing the day’s events. Three warm-blooded mammalian bodies at rest, regenerating cell by cell. Snoring as you breathe into the dark.

  I understand your need to be with your wife. Yida is a woman who stirs up in men the animal instinct to fuck and procreate. Tempting men as spoiled fruit tempts flies. But sleeping with Yida must be a sad and lonely experience, for the pleasure and the rhythm of coitus do not amount to intimacy. Your soul detaches when you conjoin with her and looks away. And I don’t blame your soul for averting its gaze. The thought of you with your wife repulses me too.

  Please do not misunderstand me. You aren’t the one I am disgusted by. In other incarnations I have explored every inch of you, with tongue and fingers and eyes. No matter how dilapidated, scarred and mutilated your body, I have always found you beautiful, for it is the soul beneath I seek.

  The sky is lightening now. In twenty minutes your alarm clock will ring. At quarter past seven you and Echo will leave the building together, bundled i
n your winter coats, fogging the air with your breath. You will climb into the driver’s seat. You will see this letter. You will wait until Echo is in school before tearing open the seal and reading it. Certain emotions will possess you. Anger. Scepticism. Fear. But these sentiments are transitory. Once reacquainted with your past, you will be grateful for my hard work.

  To scatter beams of light on the darkness of your unknown past is my duty. For to have lived six times, but to know only your latest incarnation, is to know only one-sixth of who you are. To be only one-sixth alive.

  4

  Estrangements

  YIDA WAKES ON Sunday morning, shivering and burning up with a temperature so high she half expects the duvet to burst into flames. The fever is incandescent on her skin, and when Wang lays his hand on her brow, she is scalding to the touch. He slips a thermometer under her tongue and mercury expands in the calibrated glass tube. ‘You’re a furnace in there,’ he says, reading the scale. He makes her a cup of lemon and ginger tea and holds it to her lips. Yida’s throat, sore and inflamed, undulates as she drinks it down. Echo peers through the shadows at her mother, then bounds over in her pyjamas and bounces on the bed. She peels a satsuma and feeds the segments to Yida, one by one. ‘There there, the vitamin C in this orange will make you better,’ she sings. ‘Go away, Echo,’ Yida croaks, ‘or you’ll catch my bug.’

  Mid-morning Wang hacks up a medium-sized chicken with the cleaver and simmers the carcass with herbs to make a soup. As the pot bubbles on the stove, Echo sits at the table in dungarees, her rabbit’s teeth sticking out as she sketches a machinegun-toting vixen with a sexy hourglass figure in her spiral-bound pad. This doesn’t strike Wang as the right sort of thing for a child to be drawing but, unsure of how to broach this, he says nothing. He stirs the pot and his thoughts drift to the letter. At the police station they had asked him for a list of people who might play a practical joke on him. Wang’s mind had gone blank. Who does he know who is capable of writing such strange letters? Such sinister stuff about reincarnation? The letter makes Wang feel as though his privacy has been violated – as though the writer has keys to Apartment 404, and enters in the night to watch his family as they sleep. ‘Someone is stalking us,’ he told the police. ‘What can you do?’ They had suggested that he get a car alarm fitted. They told him to warn his family to be vigilant, but Wang hasn’t yet. Something holds him back.