‘Yes.’
‘The Watcher isn’t real?’
She shakes her head and whispers, ‘No.’
Wang is relieved. He feels terrible for shaking her so hard, and he says he is sorry, but she gave him a scare. She shouldn’t make up things like that. She shouldn’t let her imagination run wild. She shouldn’t read horror comics any more, because they are a bad influence. Now if she ever does see anyone watching her — an actual man — she must tell Baba at once. Understood? Because Baba wants to keep her safe. Wang strokes her hair and promises to leave the light on until he comes to bed. But just for tonight. Because sleeping with the light on is a bad habit, and she is not a little girl any more.
‘Ba?’ Echo whispers. ‘Is it true that you used to be mad?’
Wang starts and hesitates. Echo is too young to know about the time he was in hospital. He and Yida had agreed. ‘Who said that to you?’ he asks. ‘Lin Hong? One of the neighbours?’
‘The Watcher.’
He is angry enough to shake her again. ‘Echo, stop making up silly stories! Who said that to you? Tell me now!’
Echo sniffs, and Wang’s heart tightens to see more tears trickling down her cheeks. He knows he won’t get a word out of her when she is upset like this. Lin Hong, he thinks. Who else?
‘Well, it’s a lie,’ he says. ‘I was never mad. Next time anyone says so, tell them they don’t know what they are talking about and walk away. Understand?’
Echo nods. Wang had meant to speak calmly, but his words had seethed out, drunken and ranting. He steps back from the bed. ‘’Night, Echo,’ he says.
Echo lies down and pulls the duvet up to her chin, staring up at him. Wang sees the fear and mistrust of him in her eyes and knows tomorrow he will be remorseful for losing his temper. But tonight, alcohol and righteousness course through his veins. ‘’Night,’ he repeats.
Then he turns and walks out, flipping the light switch before shutting the door and leaving his daughter in the dark.
12. The Fourth Letter
TODAY IS MY tenth day of exile. Newsprint blocks the windows and electricity drips through the cord into the 40-watt bulb. The machine wheezes and gasps, as though protesting the darkness I feed into its parts.
For ten days, I have abstained from you, Driver Wang. No letters. No visits to Apartment 404. No riding in your taxi or watching you in the street. For ten days, I have been chained to my desk, preparing your historical records, my fingers stiffened by the cold, struggling to hit the correct keys. The machine huffs and puffs and loses consciousness. I reboot and wait impatiently for its revival, several times a day.
The Henan migrants gamble and scrape chair legs in the room above. I curse and bang the ceiling with a broom. I don’t go out. I hunch at my desk and tap tap tap at the keyboard, as singleminded as a prisoner tunnelling out of solitary confinement with a spoon. Though I have kept away from you, Driver Wang, you are my every waking thought.
Do you remember what it was like to die? Though your death count is higher than average, your departure from the host body is harrowing every time. Your soul, overcome by grief, floats above the rigor-mortis-stiffened corpse. You mingle with the gases of decomposition rising from the rotting flesh. You leap back into the stopped heart with such force the cadaver jerks (to the fright of workers in the morgue). However, to stay in the host body past the expiration date is a serious offence. Latecomers to the Otherworld are disciplined, and so you leave.
Our souls have never met in the Otherworld. We suffer for our prolific sins against each other separately, and our paths never cross. After incarnation is when we meet. After the hand of fate has snatched up our souls and placed them in the womb to be born again, kicking and screaming into the human world. Fate throws us in the same family, the same harem, the same herd of slaves. But fate sets us against each other. Fate has us brawling, red in tooth and claw. Fate condemns us to bring about the other’s downfall. To blaze like fiery meteors as we crash into each other’s stratosphere, then incinerate to heat and dust.
Now the time has come for my exile to end. For me to go out into the city, to the housing compound where you live. Past the junk-mail-stuffed letterboxes, electricity meters and internet cables, and up the concrete flights of stairs to Apartment 404. I will stand with palms and ear against your door, my eardrum straining at the sounds within: the TV selling cars and fast food; the water heater banging; the clatter of Yida washing dishes in the sink. My eardrums will strain to pick up the sounds. You and your wife and child a mere heartbeat away.
The time has come to deliver this letter. For in your sixth and current incarnation, Driver Wang, we must rebel against fate. So read on. Fate must be outwitted. It must no longer stand in our way.
13. Arise, Slaves, Arise!
Jin Dynasty, 1213
ATURNIP IN THE gutter. Purplish white and wrinkled, with dirt clinging to the furrows and roots. A miracle in our famine-stricken city, that a vegetable could survive this long, even interred in the ground. I think I am hallucinating. But you have seen the turnip too, and stare at me rivalrously. Hunger gnawing in our guts, we size each other up. Two Jurchen boys with starved-mutt ribcages, and eyes bulging in our gaunt skulls. Your face has been mutilated by a branding iron, with three wide scars burnt on each cheek. The brandings are tribal and deliberate, and a warning that you are much tougher than I am.
You stiffen and clench your fists. If we fight I will lose, so I pretend that I am deranged. I growl and gnash my teeth (wobbly teeth in bleeding gums, too loose to break your skin). I claw the air, as though ready to rip your throat into geysers of blood. I toss my head this way and that and howl, shuffling wolfishly towards the turnip. Are you afraid? Or could that be a smile on your lips? A smile in this city of hunger-deadened wretches; that would be the second miracle of the day. Now or never, I think, and pounce at the turnip. And there is no mistaking that you are smiling now. You swing your fist, and the battle over the turnip has ended before it has begun.
I come round on a hard wooden floor. You are standing over me, gnawing the turnip raw. ‘Here,’ you say, and toss what remains to where I lie. I devour the vegetable, dirty tangled roots and all. Maggots have burrowed inside. Wriggling maggots. I devour those too.
We are in a glassblower’s workshop, with a workbench of crucibles, scales and long glass-blowing horns. Vases, elliptical bottles and paperweights glint on the shelves. A wind chime of glass pendants tinkles above. The beauty of the glassware does not move me, however. Glass cannot feed a man, after all. Breathing ragged and shallow, you collapse beside me like a sack of bones. The branded scars on your cheeks are like barren riverbeds. How sickening it must have been to smell your own flesh, sizzling under the metal of a branding iron.
‘Who are you?’ I ask.
‘Tiger.’
Your brandings are like tiger stripes. Your name is apt.
‘I was Glassblower Hua’s apprentice,’ you lie, ‘but he’s dead now. We were fishing in the river, when he fell in and drowned.’
You stare at me, challenging me to challenge you. You were never apprentice to Glassblower Hua. Those hands of yours have never painstakingly crafted glass. You are savage as a stray cat. Clever in the way of rogues and thieves and those who live by their wits.
‘Who are you?’ you ask me.
When I was a child, they called me Boy. After my mother died, and I came to live in the Craftsmen’s District with Uncle Lu, they called me Carpenter Lu’s Boy. ‘Turnip,’ I decide. ‘I worked for Carpenter Lu. Though he is dead now too.’