"I knew nothing about the gift that grandfather had for me; I wasn't the one whom it was intended for remember, but grandfather knew my state of mind at that moment and he also knew his time was very short.
"The gift can be a very dangerous thing. Extremely dangerous if it is used improperly. It is customary for the giver of the gift to act as advisor to the recipient long before the time comes for the passage. It is imperative that the gift be used wisely and not for the purposes of achieving power or influence. Grandfather did not have much time to convince me of several things. One that the gift existed in the first place, two, that I should not use it to either wish for the destruction of the Japanese Empire, which I probably would have done happily considering my state of mind, or to have my family back alive again. I must not do either of those things he told me as blood ran out of his mouth and he gasped for every breath. Do you know why he told me these things Bill? I suspect that you do."
"Fate," I answered. "You would have been tampering far too much with fate. If you had wished for the destruction of the Japanese Empire, who knows what could have happened, what sort of world would have resulted. Even though the major events of World War II hadn't happened yet, it would have altered the entire historical timeline."
"Yes," Mr. Li nodded. "Grandfather explained that was not a wise choice for that very reason. And as for wishing my family back alive,"
"It would have been basically useless," I finished for him. "They were fated to die. If you had brought them back alive then they simply would have been killed again the next day or the next week."
"Correct," Mr. Li said. "Grandfather told me that the use of the wish had to come from my heart and had to be a wish aimed at personal betterment. He was going fast, reaching the end of his strength when he asked me the question at last. What was my greatest wish?"
"What was it?" I asked, fascinated.
"Song, my love, the girl I'd been out to see that day, was the only thing I had left. The only thing. I wished for her and myself to survive the war unharmed." He told me. "A very simple wish, just as yours was, but one that had far-reaching implications, just as yours did."
"Song and I left Nanking, sneaking out past the occupation zone in the dead of night. We were never seen, never challenged. Of course not, we were guaranteed to survive the war unharmed. We made our way to Chinese controlled territory and we got married. The next day after our wedding I joined the army. For the next six years I fought the Japanese, killing as many of the bastards as I could get into my rifle sight. I charged machine gun nests in order to drop in grenades. I cleared paths for other soldiers across dangerous territory. I always took the point when out on patrols. Bullets whizzed around me so close that I could hear them. Artillery exploded all around me, sometimes close enough to knock the wind out of me, but never was I struck by anything. For those six years I was basically immortal. Then the Russians invaded Manchuria to help drive out the Japanese. The Americans dropped a couple of atomic bombs. The Japanese Empire was destroyed in the way it was fated to be destroyed and the war was over at last. The limits of my wish had run out.
"I returned home to find Song and the now five-year old son that I'd sired before heading off to fight waiting for me. It was time to start our life. It wasn't long however, before another war started, the civil war between the Communists and the old regime. I was loyal to the old regime but I wasn't protected in that war as I had been in the previous one. My immortality had ended. I did not fight. My family was among the first to flee to Taiwan. It was during the trip across the straights on a freighter that I finally received firsthand knowledge of how cruel, how vindictive fate was capable of being.
"We were strafed by a communist plane about halfway across. It came out of nowhere and only made one pass. Song was hit in the chest by a piece of metal that had been thrown from an exploding fuel tank on a jeep that had been hit. The piece of metal, no bigger than your thumb, missed every major organ but severed her spinal cord. She was left paralyzed from the chest down. She spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair. She was never able to give me any more children."
"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.