“Are you serious?” I shouted. “Do you know what could have happened that day!?”
“I hear the torment of billions of souls hammering on my ears every second of every day of every year. I know exactly what could have happened, in every permutation of death and suffering there is to know. I’m not impressed by your guilt, Genie. Or your love for your friends. I get that you want to peacock in front of me how much they mean to you. But I don’t care. I simply don’t.”
“You know what this is to me?” she said. “A numbers game. Perhaps I should have been more up front about that from the beginning. This is about head count. Not feelings.”
Guanyin stepped closer, and it was all I could do not to crumple into a ball from her presence.
“I sacrificed the chance to leave Heaven and Earth behind me,” she said. “I gave up Enlightenment. Can you imagine? The greatest personal accomplishment one can possibly achieve in existence. And I gave it up because one is not a very big number, is it?”
She was nearly toe-to-toe with me at this point. “I keep going because there’s a chance I can help a few more people out of the billions. But you! Getting spooked because it’s finally sunk in for you that stoves are hot, scissors are sharp, and someone could get hurt! If I were as weak as you I wouldn’t have lasted a minute as a Bodhisattva.”
The goddess finally looked off to the side, too disgusted with me to make eye contact anymore. Her jaw flexed angrily like a heartbeat.
I wasn’t prepared for this line of attack. I had thought that somewhere deep down, Guanyin would have given me the same consideration she gave her other supplicants. I thought it was her job to do that, to cradle my hopes and fears. Instead she’d done the math of human suffering and figured I was merely the end of the lever she could pull for maximum results.
It took me a few swallows to force the lumps down my throat. “You ever give Xuanzang this kind of pep talk?”
Guanyin scoffed. “I didn’t have to. Xuanzang was an incompetent boob who had nothing better to do than go on a journey where he faced zero hard choices. He never had to make any real trade-offs in the first place.”
She’d said it with the sureness and momentum of someone treading on familiar ground. If she hadn’t spoken those words out loud before, she’d certainly thought them countless times before.
“Don’t you dare try to compare yourself to Xuanzang,” Guanyin pressed on. “People like Xuanzang and the Jade Emperor are free to do as they please. People like you and me are not.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Xuanzang was free to bumble across a continent and fail upward into sainthood. The Jade Emperor is free to sit on his ass and ignore the world screaming for his help. You and I are not free. You and I have a duty.”
“As what?” I could only spot one glaring difference between figures like the Jade Emperor and Xuanzang in one hand, and me and Guanyin in the other. “You and I have duties as what?”
She raised her palms up, letting her generosity flow out. It was the posture she was worshipped in. It was also a shrug.
“As beings of great power,” she said.
We stared at each other for what could either have been an eternity or a time freeze. Maybe the problem wasn’t that Guanyin didn’t understand. It could have been that she understood too well.
The goddess broke the silence first.
“In the off-chance that it gives you enough spine to resume the hunt, I’ve put your entire town under my direct protection,” she said. “You have no idea what that act cost me among the other gods, and you never will. But at least that’s one less concern for you.”
I didn’t let on how much of a relief it was to hear that. Instead I decided to ask a question that I’d been holding in my head for a while. It wasn’t as if there was going to be a better moment.
“Did Red Boy actually break out those other demons? Or did you make a mistake giving out your karma again, to the point where they could leave Hell on their own?” It would have explained why she was so dead set on me finishing this quest. She might have needed me to right her wrong.
“Please,” Guanyin said. “That’s the first thing everyone in Heaven accused me of. I made one error long ago, thinking that a general amnesty for those sentenced to Hell might be a good experiment, and I’m still dealing with the fallout to this day.”
“Well it is kind of your M.O.”
“Any powerful being can give away their karma. Erlang Shen can do it. The Jade Emperor can do it. I happened to be the only one who was willing to take the risk.”
The corner of her lip hiked upward in amusement.
“But you’re right in that the rest of the celestial pantheon thinks this whole mess is my fault anyway,” Guanyin said. “ ‘That stupid woman was too soft on Red Boy! What was she thinking, putting a fearsome demon on a blessed island instead of sending him to Hell where he belonged?’ ”
“You were thinking that imprisoning Red Boy in Hell would be pointless if he could break in and out so easily,” I answered for her. “You cared more about minimizing the harm he could do than making sure he was punished. You put him on an island in the middle of a Heavenly ocean because that’s as good a jail as any for a fire demon. You took the burden of watching him upon yourself because everyone else was too afraid.”
Guanyin smiled, proud that I’d figured it out
. “There’s my smart girl.”