42
An eight-year-old standing next to a man with a bullet hole on both sides of his head. Not necessarily the most educational experience a girl can have. But in that land of no time, or all eternity at once, I am fine. Just fine.
Strangely detached, even. Feelingless.
One of the monkeys hops down from the bamboo. The blackest of them. We stare, our eye-lines almost at the same level. There are no words, no language. Yet we communicate. As if he was talking into my brain, but not like Simon used to do. Deeper. Thought to thought, before words can form.
I point at his feet. There is no shadow under him. I have mine. The trees and rocks have theirs. But him, none.
I ask if I am dead.
“Butterfly.” I’m not sure if that was something I thought or something he said inside my head. He nods. A new life ahead, I think. Riddles…
I try to do it too, speak in his mind. But I have no idea how. He holds my hand. His motion so slow, his face so serene, it reminds me of the old monks in China. Dressed in their yin-yang-colored robes. Like my master. Those annoyingly jovial beings for whom everything was always good. “Acceptance,” they used to say when I asked them why they were all so happy. They respected Shifu, and he respected them back, although Shifu was a little more demanding of life than the others.
Myself, I always had trouble accepting. Now, this.
Upon the monkey’s touch, I feel calm. Words are fine if I want, he says with no voice. Am I imagining all this? I ask, “Is this the Dao or a computer simulation?”
He stretches his fingers and makes a symbol in the air between us. The Chinese character for pig, then the character for roof, making one. “Home,” I mumble. He nods. Touches his chest. His home. Points at me. Mine too. The question I asked, he ignores like Shifu used to when he thought it wasn’t worth his time.
Full of wonder and curiosity, I feel like an eight-year-old indeed. Although not so infantile. A thick smell of incense burns through my nose, and when I search for the source, Simon is made of ashes the wind carries away.
Goodbye, Simon.
I feel for him. Kind of. No, bullshit. I wish he had suffered more. We walk.
The pink sunlight warms my skin. The breeze cools it. Like my childhood memories. Tall and colorful, the mountains around reach to the skies. I bet if I count, they will be exactly seventy-two. They are so big and insistent. And next to us, the river, so long, so passing. Shifu’s words come to me. One of the days he pushed me to test my stance. “Be unmovable like Wudang, flowing like Wudang.” One of those riddles you can only understand once you’ve been there and saw the river and the mountains being one.
Is Shifu ever going to join us?
The Shadow Monkey lowers his head. Respect, not sadness. Not to him, not to Shifu. To me, and the pain he anticipates. I understand, appreciate. If there was one thing I always longed for in death, it was to see Shifu again. “Normal death, not.” I hear his thoughts. We keep moving. Bordering the river. Near the booths where, in my memory, tourists buy fruits to feed the monkeys. The same ones. We pass the theater where my master used to entertain the kids with his shadow puppets. Things aren’t dire like when Simon showed me. Everything’s new again, just like I left them. Maybe a little abandoned—I guess that’s what happens to unvisited memories, they fill with dust. I run inside, around chairs and tables, steps and doors. Still know my way as if today was then.
Lost in the debris, right next to the broken lights that used to cast shadows, it waited for me. An old wooden box. Shifu’s most precious belonging. The one he promised he would give me some day, but never did.