by F. C. Yee
I took his advice and focused on calming down. Focused on nothing. Focused on him.
I couldn’t really feel my arm retracting. And I certainly didn’t want to look at it happening. I just . . . remembered how I was supposed to be. I kept quiet, kept at it for what must have been a good ten minutes, until I could feel both of my hands firmly on Quentin’s broad back.
“There you go,” he said.
I opened my eyes. My arm was normal again. I was aware that we were sort of hugging.
I buried my face in his chest and blew my nose on his shirt. “I’m a human being,” I muttered.
“I never said you weren’t.”
I raised my head. Quentin looked at me with a smile that was free of any smugness. He didn’t even mind my snot on his lapel.
“Reincarnation as a human is practically the highest goal any spirit can achieve,” he said. “It’s considered the next best thing to enlightenment. If anything, I’m proud of you for what you’ve accomplished.”
I’m not sure why, but the rage that had been so palpable before seemed to float away at his words. Like I could have been angry with him forever had he said anything different.
I was mildly relieved. It was a hell of a one-eighty on my part, but right now I didn’t think I wanted to hate Quentin until the end of time.
“Genie Lo, you are unquestionably, undeniably human,” he said. “You just . . . have a whole bunch of other stuff going on as well.”
“Tell me about it.”
14
“Was there ever anything weird about me as a baby?” I asked my mother at the breakfast table.
The soles of her cheap slippers scraped against the linoleum of our kitchen as she put a steaming bowl of porridge in front of me. Only then did she consider my question.
I was all ready for her to say, What, besides the fact that you weren’t a boy? Besides your size? There was always a certain amount of thorny jungle I had to pass through in order to arrive at a straight answer.
But today was different, for reasons unknown. She shuffled around the table and sat down even though she hadn’t prepared any food for herself.
“No,” she said.
She pulled her legs up into one side of her chair, the kind of thing that young girls did. I’d yelled at her in the past for it, afraid she’d risk hurting her back.
“You were perfect,” she said matter-of-factly. “We’d had such a hard time having you that I didn’t know what to expect when you were born. But the doctors told me you were the healthiest child they’d ever seen. They showed me the chart of your vitals. It was the first perfect score you ever earned.”
“There was nothing out of the ordinary at all? What about coincidences? Full moons? Solar eclipses?”
She shrugged. “There could have been an earthquake and I wouldn’t have noticed. I only had eyes for you at the time. After the labor I was just so . . .”
“Exhausted?”
She smiled at me. “Grateful.”
I looked away. It was best not to think of all the times in the past few years that she and I had proved incapable of a simple conversation like this—where one person spoke and the other listened. It would have been a difficult thing to tally the waste.
“Come on,” she said, nudging the bowl toward me. “It’ll get cold.”
It was a good thing the route to Johnson Square, where I first met Quentin, was so ingrained into my memory. I nearly sleepwalked there, not having gotten any rest last night. I had been too busy reading that book.
It was a bizarre story, Sun Wukong’s journey to the west. As I got further and further into it, the only lesson I could take away was that everyone in Ancient China was a gigantic asshole. Xuanzang’s traveling circus was constantly beset by yaoguai who wanted to eat him.
In addition to monk flesh apparently being the filet mignon of human beings, nearly every demon thought it would gain Xuanzang’s spiritual powers by consuming his body. They were so desperate for this leapfrog in personal growth that even when their schemes were caught by Sun Wukong, they’d resort to open combat instead of running away.
The Monkey King managed to outsmart or defeat most of these adversaries, but what came afterward was rather galling. If the demon at hand wasn’t killed and sent back to Hell immediately, it was often revealed to be an animal spirit from Heaven who had gained magic powers and used them to terrorize people on Earth. After Sun Wukong’s victory, a Chinese god would show up and be like, “Sorry, bruh, that ogre was actually my goldfish. I’ll take him back now.”
And then that would be that. No mention of all the little farmer children said goldfish-ogre had eaten before being defeated by Sun Wukong. No retribution for any damages. Not even a slap on the wrist for trying to chow down on Xuanzang.
Compared to the “regular” evil demons that Sun Wukong killed, the fallen animal spirits suffered the same punishment as a rich kid on a DUI charge. None. Having a god in your corner was the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. Nor did anyone ever call out the various divinities on their negligence. You would think that after the fifteenth time their pet ferret or whatever escaped and caused a whole mess of human suffering they’d accept some responsibility.
And Xuanzang himself. Woof. Dude did nothing but cry all the time. Like he’d literally cry at having to cross a stream. I kept hoping he might be able to pull out some badass exorcisms, being a holy man and all, but spirits seemed to be able to tie him up at will. And he kept using the band-tightening spell on Sun Wukong in ways that were exceptionally cruel. If Sun Wukong attacked a demon disguised as a human, Xuanzang would torture him instead of, you know, trusting the member of the party who has all-seeing golden eyes of Detect Evil.
Maybe I was missing a deeper message. I could ask the guy who supposedly had been there.
I found him in the square in a secluded little spot masked from the surrounding huddle of commercial properties by a row of shrubs. The smell of cut grass and gasoline still lingered from a dawn mowing. It was still early enough that I’d arrived before the old-timers who used the space to practice tai chi.
Quentin, however, had me beat. I caught him checking me out as I approached, his eyes roaming up and down my legs.
I was surprised he’d even bother. “Stop that, you skeez,” I said.
He blinked and shook his head. “I’m not used to the way people dress these days.”
“This is yoga gear,” I said. “And it’s perfectly acceptable for outdoors.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Quentin might not have been kidding about lacking a sartorial sense. He was still in his school uniform, the only concession being his sleeves rolled up for our “training” session.
Guh. His forearms were like bridge cables. My spine twitched at the sight of them flexing in the breeze.
I blinked and shook my head. “You said you were going to teach me how to manage my limbs so they don’t go wonky again.”
“It would be a crime if that were the only thing I taught you,” he said. “You have abilities that most people couldn’t begin to imagine. Sit.”
I lowered myself down, cringing at the dew on the grass. “I don’t want superpowers,” I said. “I want control.”
“You’ll get it, trust me.” Quentin took the spot in front of me, the guru before his disciple. I had to admit it wasn’t a bad look on him.
“Do you remember when we first laid eyes on each other?” he asked.
I nodded. “You were just about where we are now.”
“And you were all the way over there,” he said, pointing over my shoulder far down the park. “You were more than three hundred feet away from me, Genie. You threw your bag farther than an entire American football field.”
“That’s impossible. I could see you right nearby, plain as day. And there’s no way I’m that strong.”
“Your sight works beyond human limits,” he countered. “Your strength is enough to challenge the gods. And, as you’ve clearly seen, y
our true reach knows no bounds.”
I looked at my hands and clenched my fingers. That time when I blocked Maxine into next week. Had I accidentally stretched myself without anyone noticing?
“Close your eyes,” Quentin said. He shut his own and rolled his shoulders a few times.
“Are we meditating?”
“Yes. Close your eyes.”
“Is this the single step that the journey of a thousand miles begins with?”
“Close your eyes.”
I did as he told. And then I cheated. I kept one lid open a crack so I could watch Quentin breathe deeply in and out. Watch him settle his mind. I was only doing it so I could crib his technique.
But damn it if he wasn’t beautiful right then.
This was a completely different side to him. I mean, Monkey King or not, most times he acted like the worst kind of bro. But here, I was looking at a master of the universe. He radiated calm and tranquility, becoming so still that the Earth seemed to rotate behind him like a time-lapse video.
“Truth and spells, revealing all,” Quentin chanted, his voice echoing off I’m not sure what.
“They come from vapor, essence, and spirit.
Stored in the body, never to be revealed
A radiant moon shining on a tower of quicksilver
The snake and the tortoise are twisted together
Then life will bear golden lotuses
Turn the Five Elements upside down
And you may become a Buddha or an Immortal.”
Quentin opened his eyes and smiled serenely at me.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“That made no sense. You just zoned out and spouted a bunch of gibberish. What do snakes and turtles have to do with anything?”
He made an expression like I’d hocked a loogie on the Mona Lisa. “Did you not experience the Way of Heaven and Earth ensorcelling you just now?”
I scratched my head. “ . . . Sort of? I think I felt something. The air around us got a little warm and fuzzy.”
Quentin buried his face in his palms. “Those were the first words of true wisdom Master Subodai ever expounded to me, and all you have to say is that they make you warm and fuzzy, sort of?”
“Look,” I said. “I don’t learn well with vague instructions. Can’t you lay out all the steps from start to finish, so I can see what I’m supposed to be working toward?”
“Lay out!? These aren’t differential equations we’re talking about!”
“Well if they were, I’d pick them up faster! That’s how I do things! I arrange my curriculum into manageable chunks and then I destroy them piece by piece. You told me I had abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Now, what are they?”
Quentin jumped to his feet and paced around, swearing up and down. I sat there unyielding as he glanced at me, which set him off into a fresh round of expletives each time. He couldn’t believe me right now.
Finally he threw in the towel and plopped back down, abandoning a proper cross-legged position for a don’t-give-a-crap-anymore slouch. The guru image had popped like a soap bubble.
“You have the ability to keep up with me as I perform my Seventy-Two Earthly Transformations,” he said, staring up at the sky.
“That sounds lame.”
“Says the girl who doesn’t want superpowers. Don’t you realize what that implies? You can split into as many copies as I can. Each one as strong as the original, and capable of acting independently.”
I thought about that for a bit. Having extra mes to go around would be useful in the extreme. One copy for school, one doing extra plyos in the gym, one racking up more volunteer work in the city. Assuming that recombining let you keep all of the good you did.
“Okay, okay.” I was starting to get vaguely excited. “What else?”
“You can grow as tall as a mountain. You can be like a Pillar of Heaven. As I change, you change.”
Yeah, less interested in that one. The view from my current altitude already wasn’t kind. Stomping around downtown like a ’50s sci-fi monster was far from an appealing prospect.
“What else?” I asked. “Something good.”
“You weigh a whole lot,” Quentin said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re supernaturally heavy,” he explained. “It’s what makes you such a fearsome weapon.”
In his defense, he wasn’t trying to needle me. In his mind he was rattling off a fact. Obliviously.
“Your true weight is seventeen thousand five hundred American pounds,” he said, not noticing that my cheeks were turning red hot. “You can hit like a ten-ton truck because you weigh nearly ten tons. It’s demonic, how much you weigh—OOF!”
I tested out the truth of his claims. On his chest. With my fist.
Just checking to see which one of us was denser.
15
“You need to control your temper,” Quentin said. He winced as he rubbed the spot where I’d clocked him.
We’d hit a roadblock in my training earlier than expected. Meditating wasn’t optional for this project, it was required. And I absolutely sucked at it.
The two of us had spent the entire morning in the park trying to get me to relax and focus. I had no idea why I wasn’t catching on. Discipline, self-governance—those were supposed to be my strong points. Failure got me more and more annoyed until finally Quentin insisted we take a break at a nearby bubble tea shop.
I hate bubble tea. So now I was cranky about two things.
I kicked a rhythm into the steel wire table we were sitting at. The feet of my chair scraped the sidewalk concrete inch by inch. It sounded as if I was abusing a metal songbird that chirped in pain with each impact.
“Get in line,” I muttered. “People have been calling me a hothead my whole life.”
Quentin slurped his pearls. “I didn’t mean it like there’s something wrong with you, I mean you only need to reach the point of tranquility where you can absorb my teachings. After that I don’t care what you do with your emotions.”
“That doesn’t make sense. I thought achieving gongfu requires maintaining a calm, virtuous character?”
“It does, but only while you’re still learning. Think of it this way. At one point you had no volleyball skills at all, right? So you were probably open-minded and humble toward your coaches and seniors. Otherwise it would have been impossible for them to teach you. But now that you have a certain amount of gongfu, there’s nothing preventing you from getting pissed off at an inferior opponent and running up the score in a display of poor sportsmanship. You’re not going to suddenly lose the ability to play volleyball just from that.”
“But I’m not actually that good yet. Jenny and Coach Daniels keep telling me that I’m relying too much on my height and not enough on technique.”
“And yet you don’t seem to be upset about that,” Quentin said. “You have room to develop. Just like you have room to develop as the Ruyi Jingu Bang.”
He swirled the ice around his cup. “If you want another example, most of the enemies I fought on my journeys were animals or demons who trained their bodies and minds in the exact same way that holy men did. They cultivated their conduct and performed austerities. If they can do it, you can do it.”
“Evil beings can also become stronger by being disciplined and working out? They’re not barred from the wizard club? Chinese magic is jacked up.”
“The Way is there for anyone to grasp,” Quentin clarified. “If an evil person trains harder than you, they will be stronger than you, and that’s that. Spiritual power isn’t just or merciful. It’s fair. That’s what makes it so dangerous.”
Hearing him say that actually cheered me up a bit. If learning special abilities required a kind heart or a pure soul, I’d be screwed. This system was like climbing the corporate ladder. Or getting tenure.
“I mean, look at me,” Quentin said. “I achieved spiritual mastery and immortality. And then I made war on Heaven.”
“Which basically makes you Chinese Satan.”
He drained the last of his drink. “Two sides to every story.”
I watched him for a bit. There was nothing about Quentin that betrayed any sort of legendary origin. In the short time I’d known him, his behavior had smoothed out into that of a regular teenager. Albeit the cockiest one I’d ever seen.
“If you’re not from these parts, how did you acclimate so fast? Clothes aside, you picked up modern culture pretty fast. You even ordered the small boba without anyone telling you.”
“I only need to pick up the tiniest part of something in order to understand the whole,” he said. “I simply watched your classmates until I absorbed how to act. Same thing with our schoolwork. It’s all pretty easy stuff; I don’t know why you spend so much time on academics.”
Overpowered bastard. “Is that how you got into my school? You dazzled them with your standardized test scores?”
“No, I just used a harmless spell. All the adults think I go there, but there’s no Quentin Sun Wukong in the records.”
“So then where do you go after school? When you’re not with me?”
He grinned. “I interact with other people. I explore the area. Not everything is about you, you know.”
“Oh, bite me. You were the one who was all, ‘waaah you were my dearest companion, waaah.’ If the Ruyi Jingu Bang was so important to you, how did you lose it in the first place?”
He pretended not to hear me. I never let anyone pull that move on me if I could help it.
“It would have had to die in order to reincarnate,” I said. “So what gives? Did a demon break it? Did you try to crack a magic Walnut of Invincibility?”
“I don’t want to talk about it!”
I was going to tell him that given he’d insinuated himself into my life on the basis that we were once a demon-slaying tag-team in the distant past, I had a goddamn right to know how the partnership broke up to begin with. But my words exploded into a coughing fit.
I turned around in my chair.
“Excuse me,” I said to the man smoking a cigarette at the table behind me. “You’re not supposed to do that so close to the shop entrance.”
