“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.