Where The Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Law, Lucas K.

  Old Souls

  Fonda Lee

  The fortune teller’s nose is speckled with moles. A tie-dyed scarf is wrapped over her scraggly blonde dreadlocks. She takes my left hand and turns it palm upward, tracing its lines with glittery purple fingernails.

  “Ahhhh. Hmmm. Yes.”

  She draws a lungful of incense-thick air and closes her eyes, tilting her head back as if ascending to a higher level of perception. I study her face and focus on the fleshy touch of her hand on mine.

  A grave robber glances left and right into the darkness before snatching at a glint of gold.

  A carnival ringmaster with a waxed mustache spreads his arms to the crowd.

  A man in a pinstripe suit stands at the docks and lights a cigarette, watching silently as casks are unloaded.

  “I can see,” the fortune teller says in a breathy voice, “you have a long life ahead of you. There is a man with you, a handsome man. Your husband? Yes! You have children too—”

  I pull my hand away. The metal chair scrapes back loudly as I stand.

  “What are you doing? The reading isn’t finished!”

  “Yes, it is.” I’m furious at myself. What would compel me to stop in front of a cheap street sign with PSYCHIC in big curly silver letters? To take a flight of stairs down to a cramped basement and shell out twenty dollars for nothing?

  Desperation.

  I sling my messenger bag over my shoulder. “You aren’t psychic,” I snap. “You’re a fraud. You profit from dishonesty. You always have.”

  She stares at me, mouth agape. Her face reddens, darkening her moles. “Who do you think you are? You’re the one who came to me! No one asked you to come. Get out of here, bitch!”

  I don’t need further encouragement. I barge through the curtain of black and white beads, past a woman in a long white coat and sunglasses sitting in what passes as the waiting room, and nearly knock over a lava lamp on my way out the door.

  Back out on the sidewalk, I pause, blinking back the prickle of angry tears, the weight of disappointment so heavy it seems as if it’ll push me through the damp concrete. I zip up my jacket, debating whether to go back to the campus or to skip my last lecture of the day and return to my apartment. My roommate will be gone for the rest of the afternoon, and I’m in no mood to sit through Medieval European History. I start down the sidewalk toward home, arms hugged around myself.

  “Old soul,” a voice calls from the stairwell. “Wait.”

  It’s the woman in the white coat, the one who was sitting in the fortune teller’s office. She follows me with quick strides until she reaches me. Her hand shoots out and catches me by the arm.

  “You see the past, don’t you? Yours and others.” Her words carry a faint tremor of excitement. She pushes her sunglasses on to the top of her head, pinning me with her gaze.

  For a motionless second, I stare at her face, into dark, ancient eyes. Then I look down at the pale hand on my arm, and a shudder of astonishment goes through me. We’re close, touching, but nothing happens, the way it does with other people. No images unspool in my mind like a surreal art house video. She’s the person standing in front of me, and no one else. It makes her seem unreal. An illusion of a person. Either I can’t read her or there is nothing to read. No past. No other lives besides this one.

  I jerk back. My voice comes out high. “Who are you?”

  She gives me a small, satisfied smile. “I am one of the Ageless. And I’ve been searching for someone like you.”

  We walk into the nearest Starbucks. This being Seattle, there’s one less than a hundred feet away. She buys a caramel mocha for me and green tea for herself. She tells me her name is Pearl. She’s been visiting every self-proclaimed psychic in the city, hoping to find someone like me—someone who can see past lives without trying to, the way artists see colour or perfumers detect scents.

  “Most psychics are frauds,” she explains with an off-handed shrug as we bring our drinks to an empty table, “but once in a while, I find someone who can make reasonable predictions of the future by seeing the past, the way you do.” She glances at me. “It’s a rare ability.”

  Not one I’m thrilled to have. I study my mocha. “Do you have it?”

  She leans toward me slightly. “No. I don’t have your clear sight. I can only sense things about people, including those who can see better than I can.”

  “Who—what are you?”

  She takes a long sip of her tea. “Death and rebirth, death and rebirth. So it goes for everyone, except the Ageless. I have had no other life but this one. I will have no other after it.”

  I’m silent for a long, baffled moment. Everyone I’ve ever met has past incarnations. It would be hard to believe Pearl if I hadn’t seen it—or rather, not seen it—for myself. I study her face. She has smooth Asian features that make it hard to judge if she’s twenty-five or forty. “How old are you?”

  She crosses her legs, resting her chin on her hand. Her gaze grows distant. “Five hundred and thirty-some is as far back as I can remember. I’ve lost the exact count.”

  I suck in a breath. I imagine what it must be like to live for so many years without dying, to have the gift of so much time. As my eyes widen with awe, Pearl’s mouth tightens. “Trust me,” she says, “a life as long as mine isn’t something to envy.”

  “But you must have been through incredible times, seen incredible things.”

  A shadow crosses her face. “What I’ve seen is those I love die, while I live on, never changing.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way. An awkward pause rests between us. Quietly, I ask, “Are there others like you?”

  “A few.” She doesn’t say more. “Enough about me. You must be wondering why I want to talk to you.” Her lips curve in a small smile that is beautiful but cool, like the smile on a marble bust. “I think we can help each other. You are searching for something, just as I am. Tell me, what are you searching for?”

  I lower my gaze. Customers bustle around us as the baristas call out orders. I’m oddly unsurprised to be sitting in a coffee shop having this unbelievable conversation with a woman even more unusual than myself. Still, I hesitate. I tried to talk about this to my parents when I was ten years old. They put me in therapy until I said what the therapist wanted to hear and was proclaimed “better.”

  My voice falls to a whisper. “I want to know how to break the pattern.”

  Everyone has a pattern. A template. No matter how many wildly different lives you’ve lived, there is always something constant. Some people are always artistic. Some have ill-fated love lives. Some are always born in a certain place. The fortune teller has been a conniving cheat in every one of her incarnations.

  I’ve had six lives. Seven counting this one.

  The first one is as indistinct as a preschool memory. I was named Cael. I lived in a family of six and spent many a day fishing along the banks of the Tyras River, tying knots with my uncle, the sun warm on my back. I was thirteen or fourteen when Scythian raiders rode into my village. I ran out to fight and remember only the speed of the horseman, his tapered metal helmet, and the arc of his battle axe. It was terrifying, but the end was quick.

  I became Hassad, the rich and spoiled youngest son of an Arab sheik. I owned a beautiful falcon that I raised by hand. It sat on my arm when I rode. I remember the smell of mint and thyme mixing with the chatter of my father’s wives in the mornings. On my twentieth birthday, I went hunting with my brother and was mauled by a leopard. I hung on for five days before blood loss and infection finished me off.

  As Marie Rousseau, I was a midwife-in-training in the Languedoc region. In the foothills near my home there were groves of olives, and in early summer, purple lavender would bloom amid the sun-bleached wild grasses. I made a fatal mistake when I provided herbs to induce a friend’s abortion. Her husband accused both of us of witchcraft—and that’s why today even birthday candles set my nerves on edge and the sight of a campfire reduces me to a boneless heap of terr
or.

  My soul fled to water. I was Yamada Hasashi, the eldest son of a fisherman in the Kyoto prefecture. I felt the salt-wind in my face every day, and grew up on a simple but satisfying routine of daily hard work. Then the daimyo drafted all the men of our town, including my father, leaving me to feed my mother and younger siblings. I took my father’s boat out in stormy weather. When I was thrown overboard, I knocked my head on the prow of the boat before going under.

  I’ve pegged my fifth life, as Sikni, down to the 1770s. I was a member of the Yakama tribe in the Northwest plateau. I listened to grandmother’s stories of Coyote the trickster around the lodge fire, and I delighted in the softness of my favourite buckskin dress, the one with blue and yellow beads. I was fifteen years old and the medicine woman’s apprentice when I succumbed to smallpox.

  Then I was born as Andrew Reed. I travelled one hundred and eighty-some years but only a few miles between being Sikni and Andrew. I lived and went to high school in the town of Yakima, Washington. I ran track, made mixed tapes, got to second base with my girlfriend at the drive-in showing of Mad Max. Two months before graduation, she and I were at a 7-Eleven when it was held up. Someone else in the store pulled a gun on the robber. He freaked out and started shooting. I took a bullet through the neck.

  I’ve ranged across the world and over thousands of years. I’ve skipped across race and gender and vocation. There’s only one thing that connects my lives: how I die.

  Short lives, tragic deaths. That’s my pattern. My ages of death are like a lottery number when recited: 14, 20, 19, 16, 15, 18. I’ve never made it past the age of twenty.

  This time around, my name is Claire Trinity Leung-Hartley. Yesterday was my twentieth birthday.

  “I can help you,” Pearl says.

  “You can?” I lean forward. The paper cup trembles in my hands as I set it down.

  “The Ageless know things. We ride the long journey of history. You mortals merely hop in and out.”

  My voice falls. I feel heavy from having shared so much of myself. “I don’t want to keep dying young. I think it would be easier if I was like everyone else and didn’t remember it at all. I don’t know why I’m different.”

  Maybe whatever process erases past life memory randomly glitched when it got to me. But the truth is, I think there must be a reason why I can remember all my lives and deaths. Maybe it’s so I can finally find a way to escape my fate. Maybe Pearl is part of the reason.

  “Tell me,” I plead. “How do I break the pattern?”

  “Help me, and I will help you,” she says. “I am searching for someone. The soul of a man I knew long ago. I promised him I would find him again, no matter when or where it was.” She smiles a slow, sad smile. “He lives somewhere in this city. I can feel it. Please help me find him.”

  I consider what she’s asking. It doesn’t make sense. “This person you’re looking for—he might be anyone now. He might be an old woman or just a baby. Unless he’s like me, he won’t remember you.”

  “Love never dies.” Sitting across from me, her slim, pale hands clasped around her tea cup, she still seems unreal to me. Her dark hair spills over the shoulders of her white coat. Her eyes are bottomlessly old, as if the blackness of her pupils are windows into the universe, stretching back and back and back. How long has she been searching?

  “I promised to find him,” she says. “I have all the time in the world. When we meet, he’ll remember me, I’m sure of it.” She sounds absolutely certain, as if she’s done this before. Maybe she has.

  I used to want to search out my old families. Andrew’s parents: they would be very old now, if they were still alive. Sitki’s tribe members. I thought about visiting Japan to see if anyone with the family name of Yamada still lived in the fishing village. A great-great nephew or niece of mine perhaps. But even though I wanted to do those things, something held me back. Not just the logistical difficulties, but fear. Fear of reality and memory colliding. Of the past overwhelming the present.

  I looked up Jeanne, my old girlfriend—Andrew’s girlfriend—on Facebook. She lives in Boise now and is married with three grown kids who are older than me. It was strange to look at her picture. It was her, but it wasn’t. Reality didn’t match the memories I had of her, memories clouded by a teenage boy’s lust. She used to have long hair the colour of autumn. Full lips. Devastating eyes.

  But that life, like the others, is gone now. Snatched from me before I was done with them. I can’t have them back. What good would it do for Jeanne to have some college-aged girl show up at her door, claiming to be the reincarnation of her murdered boyfriend from high school?

  This life is what I have now. And Pearl is the first person I’ve ever met who might know how I can keep on living.

  “I would like to help,” I say slowly, “but there are millions of people in the city. How can I possibly find one person? Maybe you have all the time in the world, but—”

  But I don’t. I am on borrowed time.

  “I will tell you how to recognize him.” She leans forward. “Do you agree to try?”

  I arrange to volunteer part-time at the Veterans Affairs office. I figure it’s my best chance of coming into contact with the person Pearl is looking for. Ethan is surprised and slightly peeved. Between our class schedules and this new commitment, we have less time together than he’d like.

  “Where did this come from?” he asks, petulant. “I never knew you had the faintest interest in the military.”

  “Andrew was thinking of enlisting.” I offer a shrug. “Maybe I’m just scratching an old itch.”

  Ethan and I have been together for a year, but it feels longer than that. We’re serious about each other. I know I can trust Ethan. He’s the first person I’ve dated who I dared open up to. I told him almost everything. He didn’t call me crazy, and he didn’t run away.

  “You’re serious,” he said. At the time, we were sitting on the sofa in his place and he was nuzzling my neck. There’s a small red birthmark on the left side of my neck and a much larger, port wine stain on the right side, behind my ear. Usually, my hair covers the bigger blemish. Ethan calls the small birthmark my ‘vampire bite’ as he pretends to be the vampire. That night, after we’d been together for almost six months, I was feeling reckless. Reckless and vulnerable. “It’s not a bite,” I said. “It’s a bullet hole.” I showed him the other side—the exit wound. “Sometimes, when you die tragically in a past life, its mark stays on you.”

  “You really think you were shot through the neck in a past life?”

  I curled in on myself a little. “I don’t think I was. I know I was.”

  He came back a few days later, ashen-faced. “I looked up the Yakima Herald Republic in the library archive. It’s all there—reported the day after you said it happened.”

  I could tell he was struggling to believe me. I said, “You’re thinking that doesn’t prove anything. I could have looked up the same article and made up a story to match what’s in the newspaper.”

  “What car was Andrew—were you—driving?”

  “A 1969 Pontiac GTO,” I said without hesitation. I loved that car.

  “What was the mascot of your high school?”

  “The Pirates.”

  He sat down next to me, searching me with his eyes. “Either you’re pulling a detailed, elaborate hoax on me for no apparent reason or you’re telling the truth.” He touched the birthmark on my neck with the tips of his fingers. “As crazy as this is, I believe you.”

  I hugged him then, and I cried a little. He wanted to know more about what I remembered, not just about Andrew’s life but the other ones too. I was still afraid to tell him too much, afraid of driving him away, even though I knew he was drawn to the unknown instead of repelled by it.

  Ethan has been a medieval alchemist, a native Peruvian river guide, and a university chaplain, but my favourite of his past incarnations is Moloni, the African tribal wisewoman, whose deep well of wisdom and compassion I sometimes see refl
ected in Ethan’s cornflower-blue eyes. I think seeing her in him gave me the courage to trust him. Ethan is a seeker, driven by a desire to know more of the world, especially that which can’t be seen. It’s why he’s majoring in astronomy, which he admits is the “dumbest thing ever as far as job prospects go.” It’s why I’m falling in love with him.

  I trust Ethan more than anyone in the world, but I don’t tell him about Pearl or why I’m really volunteering at the VA office. I want to, but even he won’t understand why I’m spending time on a gamble with such long odds. The closer Ethan and I get to each other, the more committed we become, the more anxious I feel. My boyfriend might be convinced of the existence of immortal souls and multiple lives, but he is too much of an optimist to believe in tragic fate. He sees the future unwinding before us; I see a brick wall, one whose distance I can’t judge because I can’t tell how fast we’re moving toward it.

  “I love you,” he said to me, the night of my birthday. We lay tangled together in the sheets, my head on his chest. I felt his words shift the weight of him beneath me.

  I kissed his shoulder. I wanted to cry. “I’ve never grown up. I’ve never been married or had kids or been old.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Yes, you have,” I insisted. “You just don’t remember.”

  “Then, we might as well be even.”

  I was annoyed at him. “You don’t understand. I have a short expiry date.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I admit I don’t understand it, but I don’t think you do either. Maybe you only remember lives that ended badly and you’ve had plenty of others that were just fine. Also, people died younger back then, from war and disease and accidents. You shouldn’t assume—” He pushed out from under me and propped himself up on one elbow. “Wait, is this why you take those streetfighting lessons? And why you carry a switchblade and hand sanitizer with you everywhere? And don’t drive a car? Because you’re afraid death is waiting for you around every corner?”