The Kunlun Files

Chapter 9: The Grandson Who Cried

The pain in my chest woke me before the alarm did.

It wasn't a sickness kind of pain. It sat over my heart like a stone — an obsession that wouldn't disperse, winding itself through my past and present lives alike.

Outside the window, the wind still hadn't stopped. As I watched it, I heard a voice say: *Old things should be thrown away when it's time. What you throw out is never the thing itself — it's the past that clings to it.*

I looked around my rooms. There wasn't much in them, but everything that was there had been there a long time. A teacup with a chipped rim. A wooden box I had never once opened in front of anyone, and never once managed to throw away.

"Is forgetting good," I asked the empty room, "or bad?"

Deep in my chest, the sleeping beast cracked one eye and smiled — a smile of pure contempt — and went back to sleep.

For a moment I felt strangely dazed. The truth is, I had already answered most of my own questions long ago. It's just that all the answers in the world don't help against the things the heart refuses to accept.

At noon, Master Wu called. He had a friend, he said, who was about to "go crazy," and would I take a look?

"I knew it," I said. "Not one mouthful of your wine was ever free."

He laughed so hard the phone crackled. "Today there's not just wine. There's meat."

The restaurant was nothing fancy, all steam and noise. Wu was waiting at the door, and beside him stood a middle-aged man who looked — to my mild surprise — completely ordinary. Neatly dressed, clear-eyed, nothing clinging to him.

"This is Old Li," Wu said.

Old Li seized my hand like a drowning man. "Master, you really are as young as they say! I've been hearing about you nonstop — every time I run into Old Chen, he starts talking about you again."

So Chen was out and about, and talking. That was something.

"On the phone just now," I said, "Wu told me he had a friend going crazy. Is that you?"

"Me, it's me."

"Inside," Wu said. "We eat, we talk."

Over the dishes, Old Li told me his trouble.

He had a son, and half a year ago the son had given him a grandson. A new baby in the family should have been a joy. But Old Li couldn't feel any joy at all — because whenever he so much as came near the child, the baby would burst into wailing, cry until he spit up his milk, and then fall sick afterward.

It had gotten to the point where Old Li could only see his grandson in photographs.

Halfway through his story, he pulled out his phone and showed me a picture. One glance was enough. This child and this man were bound together by a karmic bond so deep it was almost alarming.

"My family all say I'm a jinx," Old Li said. "That there's something unclean on me, scaring the baby. They won't let me near him now — won't even let me be in the same house. But I love that child. I look at his photos every day, and — don't laugh at me, Master — I couldn't tell you how many times I've cried over them."

"To get near the baby," Wu put in, "this man spent a whole month chanting sutras and eating vegetarian. Didn't matter. The boy still howls the second he sees him."

"It's eating me alive," Old Li said. His eyes were going red again, and Wu clapped him on the shoulder.

"You know what I did last week?" Old Li went on. "The boy had a fever. My son texted the family group, and I drove over at six in the morning with two bags of things for the baby. My son came down, took the bags at the door, and thanked me — through the doorway. I stood in the stairwell for ten minutes afterward, just listening. The baby was crying up there. I could hear him. Sixty years old, standing in a stairwell, listening to my own grandson cry through a door."

Nobody at the table said anything for a moment.

"Yours is a small matter. Look at Old Chen — how bad was he? One pointer from the master and he's already on the mend."

"It's all old bonds from former lives," I said.

Old Li leaned forward. "What kind of old bond makes a baby cry and fall sick at the sight of his own grandfather?"

"The child is six, seven months old. He still carries traces of his past life's memories. And the reason he has come into this family at all — is you." I held his gaze. "He cries because he recognizes you. He falls sick because the old feeling between you is too heavy for a body that small to carry."

Old Li tried to hold it in. He failed. He put his face in his hands and wept, right there between the dishes, while the restaurant clattered on around us.

When he could talk again, he said, "Master, what's wrong with me? The moment you said he came into my family because of me — why did that hurt so much?"

"Because your soul recognized him too," I said. "Your flesh is just slower."

"Then tell me, please. What was between him and me? What kind of bond is this?"

"That," I said, "I'll have to look at."

I settled back, let the restaurant noise fall away, and entered the Stillness.

The thread between Old Li and the child was easy to find — it was enormous. Most family bonds show as lines, thin as silk. This one was a rope, thick as my wrist, twisted out of strand after strand, and every strand was a lifetime they had spent near each other. Neighbors. Brothers. Master and servant. The strands went back further than I could comfortably follow.

One strand outshone all the rest — the most recent one, the life just before this. It glowed with a warmth so strong it was almost sorrowful, and when I touched it, the pictures came up out of it like heat off summer stone.

A village. A reservoir, green and still, with hills folded around it. Two boys on the bank — one sharp-eyed and quick, the other slow and smiling, a little older, a little softer in the face. Summer light on the water—

I let go of the strand and came back to myself.

I sat quietly for a moment. What lay between this grandfather and this grandchild had left even me turned over and over inside.

"Old Li," I said at last. "Do you know what a village guardian is?"