The Infinity Sign That Takes Longer to Draw 2

by Zohar Neiger

  "Its flaming passion won't go out, rain may pour," I joined in a hushed tone, trying to locate the singer, seeing a figure clad in white sitting on a huge rock at the top of the waterfall, their back to me.

  "See my son the land that they died for," we harmonized.

  I hopped up a bunch of rocks. I'm used to mountain climbing, luckily.

  "Wispy wailing sobs I'm going down," he sang.

  "It's no use, they're gone, don't wear a frown," I sang.

  He heard me now, startling and swiveling his torso to look at me. What I mistook for white clothes were really bandages all over his arms, and a faded blue dress like those people wore in the empire. A patch on his chest depicted a hummingbird, or some other small bird, looking up to a red sun.

  His face was youthful, almost a teen's. His big, deep brown eyes quivered at the sight of me, his pale lips downturned, until his voice rang out again. "Be mighty as the waters moving down."

  His skin looked silken, and his black hair was short but glossy. His fringe swished across his forehead.

  "See my father the place they're yearning for," I continued, inching closer to where he was. As he grew less blurry the closer I came, I saw how his clothing hung loosely on his lanky figure.

  "The waterfall that's right across the moor," he finished the line. I sat at the edge of the rock, not far from him. The river that the waterfall came from was narrow, and slithered forward, situated to my right.

  "In a windless night the wind against their eyes,

  The waters going down were surely quite surprised,

  See my father the place that they died for."

  The song finished, slipping out of our ears. We looked at each other in silence, for only a minute, before he cracked a smile. It was a tired smile, like one who had too many years to smile, and used the opportunity well, but hadn't had much reason to smile lately. An old smile, on such a young face.

  "You've suffered," he said. His non-singing voice was much more soothing than his singing one. It was rumbly, and so deeply gentle. "Feng Houyi."

  I exhaled.

  "You know me," I said.

  "Of you." He kept his smile.

  "Is it my eye?" I asked. He hummed, his eyes following me as I rose to my feet. "I have your drum. Diana sent me."

  "Diana?" He furrowed his eyebrows, and for a second my heart jolted in fear it isn't him. "Oh. Dian'er."

  Dian'er!

  "My Dian'er," he shook his head, "who is she to you?"

  I blinked slowly, admiring his boyish features as he walked up to me and I slipped the drum off my back.

  "She was… she was a lover," I confessed. How painful that was to say.

  His soulful eyes sliding on my face felt like thick paint melting on my skin. "So, she found you well."

  I was unsure what he meant, but preferred to watch him gaze lovingly at the drum's embroidery than ask questions.

  "She embroidered this. I taught her how," he said. "'Deity's Research'… please." He laughed a little, a dry, pleasant sound, "though, it does look like she embroidered 'Lightning's Rock Dry'."

  "What does it mean? Why use this script?"

  He batted his eyelashes at me. "My name is Lei Caihe. I was one of the first test subjects to drink the first prototypes to Chang'e's Potion…" he stopped to tuck the drum under his arm, "240 years ago. I was 16."

  "I'm not sure I understand," I said.

  "This script was passed on to me by my ancestors, all shamans. 'Deity's Research' – my dear students, Dian'er, and… well," he turned towards the waterfall, "Erkin, they would refer to me as a deity, but I am human. Dian'er is much more of a deity than I am."

  I stayed silent.

  "Ah – only a few years ago, there was no river or waterfall here," he drawled, "before the rising temperatures melted the snow. From up here, to where the lake is now…" he closed his eyes, "Erkin… he chose death, all the way down the cliff."

  I watched the river flow, plummeting to the drop below.

  "Oh," I gulped, looking at the bitter sweetness in his face as his bandaged fingers caressed the embroidery.

  "It's too cold here," he murmured. "I think that's enough sulking by the waterfall for today. Come now, Young Feng."

  42

  Assessor of Maat

  Shaman Lei Caihe propped his drum up against the wall of the sizeable house he had camouflaged among the snow. It was warm and cozy inside, with a heater in the corner spreading hot air around the front room. The blinds were closed, making it dim. The floor was a dark stone, and there was one sofa, with shelves and shelves against the walls.

  "I have been studying your sister for years..." he said.

  "My sister?"

  He slowly inclined his head.

  "Why the potion did what it did to her. The potions themselves, what they are. That is my research. That is how I recognized you."

  Lei paced around the room with his robes behind him as if gliding on a cloud. “Being a few years apart, we... naturally, we drank different recipes. Of the infinity potion, that is.”

  He seemed to decide on a shelf he desired and paused before it, moving around a few knick knacks such as dried herbs, a brass pot and a sand-less hourglass with the lid open at the top, instead being filled with some sickeningly pink liquid.

  “You drank Kaguya’s Potion,” his baritone was the accompaniment to the soprano symphony of the dragging wood, “I drank Chang’e’s.”

  “Chang’e?” I asked.

  “The Chinese are proud,” he said, chuckling, “aren’t we? Wanting to concoct and then name the infinity potion first, no matter the quality - after Chang’e, our moon goddess. We used the herbs on the Kun Lun mountain, among other things. However, the Japanese achieved the better version, reverse engineering the immortality potion at the peak of Mount Fuji: Kaguya’s Potion. When aware of its superiority, we mooched it right off.”

  I decided to let him speak. He submerged his arm completely within the shelf, then took out some transparent box.

  I wondered why immortality's ingredients are always on a mountain. Maybe it's like Akhet said: closer to heaven.

  “Kaguya’s Potion, in the Japanese myth, is the one she gave to a human— it was, from the beginning, meant to preserve a human’s life on earth.” He tapped his thin fingers on the box, which I now saw held a layer of a thinly spread out material of some kind.

  “Chang’e— she was a human once, but the potion she drank in her myth granted her divinity. Freedom from the planet and from its calamities, not a way to cope with human existence and the dangers of earth. This difference in purpose is also what illustrates the difference between your immortality, and mine.”

  His jaw shot towards where the drum was propped up against the wall. I looked at it as if he had ordered me to. “My immortality is divine, hence my dear Dian’er’s description: ‘deity’.”

  I squinted. I didn’t quite understand what he was trying to tell me about the difference in recipe, but he smiled softly before I could even breathe to speak.

  “Young Feng, you understand, making someone immortal is actually easy. It all lies in this.”

  He handed me the box, and I took it, slightly brushing his fingers, feeling they were soft.

  “These are HeLa cells. The cells of a woman named Henrietta Lacks, an American, who died of cancer because her cells would not stop reproducing. She had a component in her cells that caused them to never age. It’s called telomerase, but that doesn’t matter exactly. Give someone this telomerase, their cells don’t 'age'. They don’t grow old.”

  “But they get cancer, because if cells don’t die, they keep duplicating,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Lei nodded, eyes glimmering. “Chang’e and Kaguya’s Potions were different solutions to the same problem: beating cancer. That’s all we needed to achieve to gain immortality. Do you know why?"

  "No," I confessed.

  "The earth has a natural level of radiation," Lei said. "You could only survive for a few hundr
ed years without getting cancer, if you're lucky. With a solution to this, the drinkers could still, technically, die, with enough bad habits, but it gave them the option to live forever.”

  “So, which solutions were those?”

  Lei gently relieved me of the box and slid it back far into the shelf.

  “Your cells are actively being created then dying. This allows the growing of your hair, the healing of wounds, I dare say maintaining your fertility,” he said, "on the contrary, Chang’e’s Potion was made before a way to destroy the excess immortal cells was found. I mean – the cure for cancer in Kaguya’s Potion, whatever it is, wasn’t found yet.

  The scientists making Change’e’s decided that immortality can only be achieved through freezing your cells so they can’t grow cancerous. This means wounds don’t heal, hair doesn’t grow— your body is only strong enough to live if it were living in divine conditions where heavenly protection wards away injury and harm. This is what I meant by ‘divine’ — unlike me, you are actually a living person, whose cells regenerate.”

  He sighed promptly, reaching his hand to detach and re-clasp the bandage on his forearm, which was faintly stained with pink.

  “Like this, my cells are stuck in this purgatory, never dividing, never changing. I am practically undead- refusing to decompose, refusing to recompose. Chang’e’s Potion put all my cells in a permanent Gap 0 state, this for 240 years. I don't live. I exist.”

  The silence washed over us for a few moments. Biology wasn't exactly the most studied subject back in military school.

  Still, I had so many questions I feared to ask. Does his heart beat? Does he need to breathe at all?

  He doesn't live. He exists.

  “So, uhm—“ I began. His eyes sparkled when he gazed at me.

  “I know,” he stopped my next word, “you want to know how Kaguya’s Potion beats cancer.” I exhaled the air intended to ask the question.

  “I’m curious myself,” he said.

  A phantom smile brewed his lip-line.

  “Feng Posuo,” he muttered, hushed, “your sister— her case, it fascinated me.”

  My sister’s name being spoken out loud, correctly, by someone other than me, was a first in decades by now. I was surprised at myself how this didn’t seem to stir me.

  “What was she allergic to? To find out, I required the recipe, but it has been destroyed. It—“

  “Destroyed?” I burst into speech, making no effort to hide my widened eyes or the pulsing vein on my forehead.

  “If there is still a copy, it can only be with the old Jiaqing emperor. So, without any other choice, I dedicated plenty of my time— plenty! What am I saying? Maybe 30 years, trying to theorize what it contained.”

  I stood in a bewitching stupor. I wanted to ask since when it has been destroyed, but that question would not have granted me answers. If the recipe was in my old monastery, and it has been destroyed after I went to it, that means that Lan’er had sent me on a wild goose chase— to the wrong address, when her father was holding on to the recipe all along. In other words, it was never in the monastery, otherwise they couldn't destroy it.

  He never cared I was Lan’er’s lover, he prioritized his control over the immortality potion. Perhaps the emperor knew what killed Popo- my talented sister- and didn’t want or couldn’t help, knowing he could never let me save her.

  He wanted to let the spark of life die from her eyes, the color drain from her face, the passion sucked from her lungs, never knowing it would mean the fall of the very house of cards of an empire they tried to guard by sending me away. They sent me away so I wouldn't cause them trouble.

  And Lan'er helped him. But I don't want to blame her anymore. She sent me to Huapaya.

  Huapaya… why did he really work for the empire?

  Did he only take me in to erase my identity? Is that why he scolded me for remembering? For speaking Chinese?

  Is that why he never suspected that I had another reason for coming to his monastery?

  He wasn't just a researcher for the empire. He was a spy.

  I felt a twist in my gut, like the sickening satisfaction of revenge I got from jabbing back at my ex-lover, but it was more twisted. Jabbing back at the tattoo on my chest. I suddenly hated myself. The hate stampeded through my veins like swarms of tsunami waves, and gave a faraway tingle of a headache, like the faint ticking of a watch you store in your bedroom as you try to sleep. The hours, and the years.

  “Those who reverse engineered— recreated— Kaguya’s Potion, the one they found at the top of the Japanese Mt. Fuji, had reference. I have none. Even if I did have, in fact, it might still be an impossible thing to brew it. Recreating that recipe today would be as fantastic to modern science as making Damascus steel. The technique is long gone. All that’s left are the remnants of it, from the old times in which it was widespread. For the steel, there’s artifacts, ah- archeological artifacts. For the potion...”

  He only slightly bowed toward me, letting his hair twirl to curl over his eyes. “You, the princess, the old emperor, Heaven knows who else. Artifacts.”

  I worried my lips with my teeth. “They’re still alive,” I whispered.

  “Very possibly.” Lei nodded.

  "How did… how did my sister die, then?"

  He nodded. "My theory went two ways. One, she died from a malfunction in the recipe – developing an Autoimmune disease instead of curing her imminent cancer. Either an overdose or an underdose of the potion could have caused this. Two…"

  His eye plunged my way. "The potion worked on her according to medical inspections. She may not have died at all."

  I froze. "What?"

  "That is, it is likely that she did die, the potion was not foolproof, yet… the empire was not beyond manipulations like this. I know of many instances."

  "Wh—why, if she didn't die, where, then… and why? The empire fell because of her death."

  "The person in charge of this manipulation may not have been opposed to the empire's fall," he mused slowly. Then, he shrugged. "Any operative with a form of power could have performed such a feat, whilst also making sure she is 'buried'. It is all speculation at that point, though, unfortunately."

  "Don't give me hope, Lei," I started shaking. "Please. Don't give me hope that she's alive."

  His eyes widened, tearing into a deep gloominess. "Why—"

  "If she is," I murmured, "I don't think I could face her again."

  Akhet's words grinded at my skull. Look, Houyi, sometimes it's better to have no one to come back to than to have someone who you will get in trouble with when you return home.

  "I don't think I could face her and confess that I failed her, or that I waited," I said, "she's a ghost. I couldn't deal with her being a different person."

  "She might as well be dead, to you, is what you are saying."

  I didn't know if I wanted to die or just to stop thinking. I could do neither, so I stood there, inert.

  I turned to look at the drum again. It felt wrong to be standing there. It felt wrong to speak Chinese. It felt wrong to be alive – I wasn't older than a mortal, but I still felt like I should die.

  Lei is 256. I started wondering if Akhet and Lei have the same kind of immortality.

  The air cleared of its tension slightly when I realized that no matter what theories are in the air, the reality is still the same reality I lived in before. My knowledge of this doesn't change the space I am in. A choke gathered in my throat regardless.

  "Did you know, Young Feng," Lei spoke, "they say here in Tian Shan is where they used to grow the Peaches of Immortality?"

  I looked at him.

  "I like gardening, I grow what I can, here and down the mountain… and I tried to grow peaches, here, once," he sighed, "didn't actually work."

  I summoned an obligatory chuckle from the pits of my throat.

  His warm eyes slid to the floor. "It's still cold. Why don't I make you tea?"

  43

  Limbo

/>   Akhet and Alioth sat at the trails of the Heavenly Mountains.

  Alioth watched the dog, who was pacing like a caged tiger, occasionally looking up at the rising rocks piled with snow. There were ridges in its back, like wounds that haven't fully healed overtime.

  Akhet shed their human disguise, draping their wings on the snow, making quite an accurate snow angel.

  "I kept your secret," said Alioth. "But I don't know why you want it to be one."