"We only stayed on Taiwan for a few years before we were allowed to immigrate to the United States. We settled in San Francisco and raised our son there. I found a job at the Port of San Francisco unloading ships. It was hard labor but it paid well. I did that until my retirement in 1980, working my way up to management eventually. Song remained my faithful wife but her health was always poor. She died of congestive heart failure and pneumonia in 1977.
"My son, Chang, attended Stanford University, obtaining a law degree much like your sister. He joined an exclusive firm and worked there for many years. He became fully Americanized, changing his name to John Lee instead of Chang Li. He sired one son before his marriage was dissolved in divorce.
He might have been worthy of the gift had he survived, but he didn't. In 1980, after years of eighty hour workweeks at the firm, he developed a bleeding ulcer, what is known in medical circles as a "GI bleed" I believe. He bled to death internally one night at the office when he ignored the persistent vomiting and diarrhea filled with blood, passing it off as a case of the flu.
"That leaves only my grandson, who is now thirty-eight years old. He too went to Stanford University but his major was business. He is an evil, corrupt man and I have nothing to do with him. His interests are in money and power and mostly in his own advancement. He works in Seattle as a high-ranking corporate officer for Pacific Healthcare. He makes more than two hundred thousand a year, plus stock options. He has a wife, three children, and two mistresses at my last count. His children are exact clones of him. The whole lot of them make contact with me as little as they can get away with, which is fine by me.
"It is here Bill, that we encounter dual realities. In the first reality, the one in which I met you for the first time in 1999, I was living in San Francisco in my old house I'd purchased my second year working at the port. I was a tottering old man, without much to say to anybody, without much to do. I watched the television, I played golf on occasion, but mostly I sat at home and did nothing. I was sedentary and cared about little. Perhaps I'd begun to become a little mentally unstable? I think that possible.
"In early 1997 I began to notice that it hurt whenever I urinated. Sometimes there would be a brown tinge to my urine. Finally it began to hurt a lot and the urine was consistently the color of fresh apple cider, that dark brown. When I finally dragged myself to the doctor to be examined it was discovered that I'd had prostate cancer. I say "had" because by the time I got checked, it had moved past my prostate and into my bladder and kidneys. It was making its first attacks on my colon and liver. It was much too far-gone for me to live much longer. Even radiation and chemotherapy only slowed it down a little. My days were numbered.
"When it got to the point in January of 1999 that I was unable to care for myself anymore, my grandson, who was listed as my beneficiary, pulled a few strings within his corporation and got me admitted to that concentration camp in Spokane. It was far enough away from him in Seattle and most of all, it was cheap. He sold my house in San Francisco and pocketed most of the money. He sent lawyers out to visit me to make sure my will was updated. He made sure that my doctor brought up the "do not resuscitate" order and made sure it was initiated. He sat by simply waiting for me to die so he would have one less inconvenience to worry about. Very American attitude, wouldn't you say?"
"Yes," I nodded, knowing exactly what he was talking about. I'd been in every convalescent home in Spokane County at one time or another during my career. Of the forty or so that we have, perhaps three could be considered a quality type of place. The remaining thirty-seven were basically warehouses that people stashed their elderly relatives in to die. They were sentenced to those hellholes the moment it became inconvenient to care for them. And the vast majority of the residents of these places were not the relatives of the poor, they were not the relatives of ethnic minorities, they were the relatives of good old, white, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class Americans. Mr. Li's presence in one had been an anomaly. One did not often find Asians in con homes. Asian culture has a much greater respect for the elderly than American culture.
"So there I laid," Mr. Li continued, "for more than six months. Getting worse every day, getting weaker, my mind and judgement deteriorating. Sometimes I was delirious, sometimes I couldn't even keep track of which day it was. And then came the final day, the day I met you. All that day I felt myself becoming more and more aware, more alert than I'd been in years.
The time of my death had come and the clarity that went with the gift was manifesting itself. The clarity was there, but my judgment was impaired severely. No offense Bill, but I never would have given you what I did if I'd been in my right mind. Never.
"But I didn't think of such things as the consequences of my actions. I didn't think about how dangerous a thing I was doing, I only thought about how, after the year I'd spent seeing the worst of America, seeing myself dying in that concentration camp, someone had finally come along that possessed some basic human kindness, some empathy. Someone who treated people with respect. I decided to take a chance on you and I offered you my gift. I had no time to explain the ramifications to you; it was an impulsive decision in the last few seconds of my life. I still had the ability to withdraw the offer if you had wished for world peace or immortality or something like that. Something that would have had dire consequences to fate and the world.
"But you didn't. You asked to be fifteen again, knowing what you knew at that point. That seemed almost noble to me. You obviously didn't believe anything would come of it but you used the gift for personal betterment. That was what it was intended for. I honestly didn't see the consequences to fate that might have occurred if you had been a less moral person than I thought you were. Thankfully my instincts were mostly right about you.
"At the moment of truth, at my dying seconds, I thought it had all been for nothing. When my grandfather passed the gift on to me in that house in Nanking, I'd felt a definite power shifting from his body to mine. It was the gift. I'd felt it enter me, felt it as a presence in me ever since that day. I knew at that instant that my wish had been granted and that the gift was now mine to pass on. I knew it."
"I didn't feel anything like that when you died," I told him, confused. "Nothing like that at all. To tell you the truth Mr. Li, I didn't think much about you at all once I wrote the paperwork and left the hospital. It was my nature. I could not allow myself to get involved in the tragedy I witnessed for my own sanity. And I never felt anything enter my body. If I have the gift with me now, I don't feel it at all."
"I understand your feelings at my death Bill," he told me. "I was in war and I probably understand them better than you do. I saw human suffering and loss during the war on a scale that you probably can't even imagine. So don't feel sorry for forgetting about me after you left. But as for the passing of the gift, you didn't feel it pass to you and I didn't feel it leave me because it involved time travel. Your wish was granted but it set up a paradox. Two people cannot possess the gift at the same time. It was not passed to you because by granting your wish I was left alive. That was why I thought it didn't work.
"I remember dying. It's not an unpleasant experience I might add. In fact, it feels almost blissful when your body finally accepts its demise. I'd never felt more at peace, more free of pain. I remember grieving absently that the gift had died with me. Everything finally went black. I was at rest.
"And then, seemingly seconds later I woke up in my small house in San Francisco and it was 1982 again. My body was functioning properly, my brain was functioning properly, and I had every memory of what had just happened. I was horrified by what I had done, by what I had put at risk. I could have destroyed the world Bill if you had wished for the wrong thing or if you had treated your gift differently once you were sent back."