The Kunlun Files

Chapter 16: I Don't Want a Next Life

Two nights later, I dreamed of a man.

He appeared beside me without warning, and the moment he saw me he was beside himself with joy — a delight he couldn't contain and didn't try to. Everything in him said he would spend his life itself to stay with me. He was good to me in a hundred ways, and the strange thing was that every kindness he offered was exactly the one I needed. When I was cold there was already a coat. When I was hungry there was already food, and it was always the dish I hadn't said I wanted. He never asked what I wanted. He simply knew, the way you can only know someone you've watched for a very long time.

The me inside the dream understood: this was a karmic bond I could not escape. I never realized, inside the dream, that it was a dream — and yet the dreamer's heart in me was perfectly lucid.

I turned away from every kindness he offered. Only now and then I looked back at him from a distance.

He was heartbroken. In the end even his family came to plead for him — to beg me to be with him. I watched them plead and said nothing.

Later I sat down on a flight of steps and motioned for him to sit beside me. He was so happy. He thought I had accepted him.

I pointed at the night sky instead. *That* is what I truly want.

Above us the stars were out in their thousands. I made him understand: my heart had always belonged to the stars.

He said nothing. He only looked at the sky, and then at me, grieved beyond words.

The dream broke there. I woke with my heart pounding and a faint sorrow I couldn't name at the bottom of it — and then, quickly after, the relief of someone who has survived a calamity.

Because I understood what the dream was: a projection thrown up by the karmic sea of my mind. Some things have to happen. But I had blocked their every path in the waking world — so the things that had to happen ran their whole course inside a dream instead, from beginning to end, and let me live them through.

This trial, I had passed. For the rest of my life Lu Feng would probably keep appearing in my life — but some threads of the bond between us had already begun to change.

The voice in my heart spoke up then: *He is such a good man. He would treat you so well. Why won't you even try?*

"The wind of a past life has blown into this one," I said. "If I walk with the wind, there will be another life after this. And I don't want a next life."

*A love this deep — how can you bear it?*

"Look at the world. Everyone in it is being blown along by some past life's wind. Ask them, most of them — how many carry the calm of a stone set down on the board, never taken back?"

*But this is what everyone does.*

"No one gets to keep all the good things. Something has to be given up. I only want to walk this life awake."

*Being together might not end the way you think.*

"Any ending you can name runs through marriage and a child, and the small grit of daily life grinding all that past-life tenderness flat. Then come the seeds planted for the next life — and next life we meet again, tangled beyond cutting or combing."

Most love at first sight in this world, I'd long suspected, is only the aftertaste of a past life's longing — a heart that once gazed at plums to quench its thirst, reaching for the real plum now. One moved thought, one unguarded moment, and a whole tangle of next lives is planted.

I knew a child — there are many such children — who reached into a jar for candy. The fist closes around too many pieces and the jar's mouth won't give it back. The child holds on and howls. If you were heaven, watching, you'd frown and wonder what was wrong with the creature. Sometimes heaven sends hardship only so a person can finally see how foolish they've been.

Let go of what isn't yours. Cherish what is. Most broken fates are written the other way around.

In the morning, Master Wu called. "Flight's at three this afternoon. The driver's booked; he'll pick you up."

"How many days?"

"Three or four." A pause. "The kid's coming too."

"How is he?"

"Discharged yesterday afternoon. Low spirits — his family took him home. Then at eight last night he turned up at my place again."

"The little assistant is certainly dedicated."

"Dedicated, my foot. He heard me say *you* were going. That's when he signed up."

Of course. What I'd gotten through in a dream, I'd have to patiently walk him through in the open.

At noon the driver came, and Lu Feng came with him, glowing. "Dajie, let me carry your luggage."

"Where's Wu?"

"Still finishing something at the office. He'll meet us at the hotel — after lunch we head to the airport."

All through lunch Lu Feng kept heaping food onto my plate. Wu watched his attentiveness and snickered into his cup. Catching the look, Lu Feng solemnly placed one single rib on Wu's plate — "This one's for you, Master Wu" — then lifted the whole plate of ribs and set it down in front of me. "Dajie, all of these are yours."

I didn't give him much of anything back. I ate with great concentration.

He didn't seem to mind. The less I answered, the busier he got — pouring tea, turning the lazy Susan, telling the waiter the soup was to come first and the rice last, as though lunch were a project he'd been assigned and intended to ace.

On the plane he took the seat beside me and squared himself for a long, long talk. I pulled on my sleep mask before we'd finished taxiing. He tried a few words, got nothing, traded a few sentences with Wu, and subsided.

Somewhere over the clouds, Wu's snoring settled into a steady rumble across the aisle.

The whole flight, I was watching his great soul.

Because I truly could not understand why it was so big.

A person's soul sits between the wanting self and the true self — a bridge between the two. When the wanting self drives, the soul loses its inborn wakefulness; when the true self drives, the soul grows clear, and its power of seeing rises. Most people spend their whole lives driven by the wanting self. The ones whose true self holds the reins are what we'd call awakened — and even they get pulled back and forth between the two.

Lu Feng's soul was vast, and it was awake. It dreamed for him, grieved for him, burned a fever through him to get my attention — all the reach of the wanting self, and all the clarity of the true.

Something that size had to have been raised by one or the other, over lifetimes.

Sitting beside me in the dark of my sleep mask, humming under his breath, the kid thought he was on a holiday.

His soul knew better. It watched me watch it, and it did not look away.