Existence (7 page)

No one says anything about his mother.

True to his word, he has not asked about her in six years. But he has not forgotten.

He knows that an answer given to a child is not a promise—and that the only promise his father ever made him was that there would be pain and, beyond that, more pain. But there is a part of him that chooses to believe that today is the day. That the moment he has been waiting for is real, that he has proven his worth and his strength, and so his mother will finally return.

Except that the day passes, and then the evening, and soon An has completed his nighttime rituals and received his daily dose of pain—easily accomplished, tonight, with a hand pressed to the fresh brand marks.

His father is not a man inclined to explanations. But gradually, over the years, An Liu has come to understand the man's philosophy of strength and weakness.

Weakness derives from fear, and all fear is fear of pain.

Thus it is only the man with no fear of pain who has no weakness;
as An Liu learns to inure himself to pain, he will relinquish all fear, and he will grow strong. The theory has borne out. The body and its tortures hold no secrets for An Liu. There is nothing he will not risk, for there is nothing he cannot endure. As for that other kind of pain, the pain of losing that which he loves the most? An Liu's father has taken care of that too. He's stripped An Liu's life of everything and everyone that could be loved. There is nothing left to lose but his life, and that would be a mercy. There is nothing left to fear.

This, his father says, is how the Shang mold a Player true of spirit, capable of victory. This is his father's claim, but An Liu has come to understand many things over the years: he has learned to read his father's expressions, and he can see the joy on the man's face when skin tears and burns.

Other men may fear pain; An Liu's father feeds on it.

Perhaps this is why he says nothing about An Liu's mother—perhaps he can see the desire burning in his son's eyes, and enjoys watching as the hours pass and the fire burns itself out.

“Bed,” his father commands, as he does every night at precisely 10 p.m.

This time, the first time since the day his father arrived, An does not obey. He stands up and faces his father, who is the only thing left in the world that can frighten him. An is no longer the boy he once was, no longer the soft and weak worm that his father first met. He is still a boy, yes. Still smaller than average for his age and thin as a reed, with soft features that offer the illusion of innocence. But his arms are muscled, his legs powerful; his mind is sharp, his will unbreakable.

“Where is my mother?” he says.

“Excuse me?” His father looks surprised. It has been a long time since An has spoken anything but the direct response to a question.

“You said she would return when I was ten years old, and today I am ten. Where is she?”

For the first time in An Liu's memory, his father starts to laugh. “Did I tell you that? When could I possibly have told you that?”

An's hands are curling into fists. He doesn't like to be laughed at. Especially in front of his uncles, who watch from the kitchen with avid interest. An Liu is surprising them tonight; he's surprising himself.

“The day she left,” An reminds him. “You told me if I worked very hard and made a man of myself, she would come back. When I turned ten.”

“You? A man?” His father snorts. “You, little worm? I suppose you think you're worthy to be the Player now too?”

“Yes, Father. I do.” An Liu has three more years before he will be old enough to take on the mantle officially, but he feels ready right now, to fight for the life of his people as he's been groomed to do.

“Then you're dumber than you look.”

This is An's cue: to scurry away before he earns a punishment. Always before, he has done this. But always before, he had a purpose. He had this day to look forward to; he had hope.

Now he has nothing.

“I want you to bring my mother back,” An says. He's older and wiser now than he once was; he understood long ago that his mother wouldn't have left voluntarily. Her absence or presence is under his father's control, just like everything else. In this home, his father is the only god. “It's time.”

“Are you suggesting that your life is missing something? That this life your uncles and I have given you isn't good enough?”

An summons all the courage he has. “Yes.”

“Then I suppose I've failed, and you're just as disgustingly weak as you ever were,” his father says. “We'll have to redouble our efforts.” He turns to An's uncles. “Brothers, join me in giving An Liu his final birthday gift.”

An Liu knows the uncles will do as he says—they always do. Unlike his father, they take no joy in cruelty, but they believe in doing what needs to be done. When he was younger, he struggled to understand them, how they could have allowed his father into their lives, how they could have turned on the boy they once claimed to love. Before
that, they had not been gentle, but neither had they been cruel. Once, An Liu cared about this change, wondered whether, secretly, they hated his father as much as he did, whether they were equally afraid.

But An Liu has learned how to stop caring. He sees his uncles clearly now, not for what they once were, but what they now are: the enemy.

The men form a ring around An and raise their fists. Now it's An who laughs. He will not cower away from them; he will not hide or fear what is to come.

He will fight like a man.

He will fight like a man with nothing left to lose.

“You've taught me well, Father,” he says, raising his own fists. “I have no fear left.”

He doesn't wait for them to make the first move. Instead he swings a punch at his father, and the crunch of his father's nose against his knuckles is the sweetest sound he's ever heard.

His father shrieks with rage. As An fights his uncles, whirling and ducking and holding his own, one well-trained 10-year-old against four grown men, his father takes up the branding iron from its home by the fireplace. He slashes it through the air and strikes An solidly across the chest, knocking him to the floor. His head smacks hard against the concrete. Thunder and lightning explode at once, and he is consumed by the noise and the light and the pain.

Then all is still.

An Liu is somewhere else.

Far away, in the black.

Untouchable. Untouched.

He feels nothing, sees nothing, cannot know that even after his eyes close and he goes limp, his father continues to beat him, teaching him a lesson he will never learn, because he is gone.

His uncles are tasked with curing him of his fears.

When he is five years old, the uncle who was once his favorite nails him
into a coffin and buries him in the ground
.

An screams in the dark. He kicks at the pine walls closing him in, tries to catch his breath, feels like he will lose his mind if he doesn't get space get air get free get out get out get out
.

He does not get out
.

His voice goes hoarse; his mind goes blank
.

He lies still, in the dark, whimpers, waits
.

Somewhere above, up in the light, he hears his uncles' voices raised in argument. He clings to the sound, evidence that a world still exists
.

“This is not right, Hua. You know that. He's only a boy.”

“A boy who will be the Player someday, and
you
know that makes all the difference.”

“The things we're teaching him . . . what kind of Player will he be?”

“To harden a Player's spirit, to teach him the shape of pain, you know this is the Shang way. He learns pain now, or he learns death later. This is how we help him survive.”

“No, Hua. Not like this. Pain tempered with love, with mercy, with wisdom
. That
is the Shang way. This is . . . I don't know what this is.”

“This is how our brother sees fit to train his son, Chen. It's a father's right to train his Player. This is also the Shang way. And if things go too far, at least we will be here.”

“Too far? He's got the boy in a coffin—”

“Keep talking like this, it might be you in a coffin. You know that best of all.”

The argument ends there
.

Endless time passes. An Liu cries
.

“Peace, Little Liu.” His uncle Chen, from above, pain in his voice. “Patience.”

He cries out for Uncle Chen, who once fed him sweets when his mother wasn't looking and told him stories about dragon slayers and princesses when he had trouble falling asleep. He says, “Uncle, don't you love me anymore?”

There is a silence, and then a low voice. “This
is
love.”

And so An Liu learns: Pain is love. Fear is love. Violence is love
.

Life is love, so An Liu learns to hate it
.

He learns other things too: how to shoot all manner of guns, how to speak the languages of the modern world and those long dead, how to use a computer to explore and dominate, how to manipulate code and circuitry to make machines do exactly as he wishes, and this is his favorite language to speak, because the machines are the only things that obey him. Inside the computer, he has ultimate control; inside the computer
, he
is God, and his father doesn't exist
.

Xi'an, China, is filled with wonders. It was an imperial capital for 1,000 years, the seat of 13 dynasties, ruled over by 73 emperors. It is surrounded by the world's largest city wall and home to remnants of glorious civilizations past: the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, the army of terra-cotta warriors, the sacred mountain Huàshān—An Liu sees none of it, knows none of it
.

He is not allowed out of the house. He is rarely, and only with supervision, allowed out of the basement
.

An Liu's world is dark and small, peopled only by his father and his uncles
.

His time is structured and scheduled. Like everything else in his life, it is not his own
.

It belongs to the Shang, his father tells him. His life belongs to the Shang
.

“You will Play and you will win,” his father often shouts, when whipping An for minor failures. It becomes a mantra, drilled into An's subconscious, something he knows about himself as surely as he knows his name
.

He
will
Play
.

He
will
win
.

He will be the savior of the Shang people, rescue them from extinction when Endgame comes. He knows this; he simply doesn't know why he should have to do such a thing, why the Shang would ask it of him
.

He doesn't understand how he can be the only one who dreams of escape from this life. Who are these fools, that they would choose to survive?

For fifteen days, An Liu is unconscious, drowning in the black.

His body lies in a hospital bed, strung with wires and tubes. Monitors beep irregularly as his pulse bounces, his heart soldiers on. One tube delivers fluids; another carries them away. A machine breathes for him. His head is shaved, wrapped in bandages. Skull fragments have been carefully extracted from his brain. Gray matter has been pared away, damaged bits sliced off and dropped into a metal bin. Pieces of An Liu, of who he used to be, now medical waste, put out with the trash. A steel plate replaces the chunk of skull that was lost. The brain swells against its casing, the coma persists, and the doctors have little left to do but wait.

He will wake, or he will not.

He will be the same, or he will not.

Time will tell.

These are hard truths the doctors are prepared to tell his loved ones—but An Liu is alone in the secure private facility, abandoned to expert care. The doctors receive their payment, and know who to contact when the time comes, when there is an answer, one way or another.

In the meantime, no one sits by An's side. No one holds his limp hand. The nurses gossip over his still head, about their bosses and their love lives, and sometimes one will put a soft hand on his forehead and wish him well.

He is just a child, they say to each other. Broken, probably beyond repair. He shouldn't be alone.

His eyes twitch behind his lids, and they wonder if, in his state, he can dream.

He dreams of a different life.

He dreams of a different An Liu, one who has a mother, not a father. He dreams of a 10th birthday full of cake and presents and love, a mother's radiant face and gentle kiss. He dreams that he goes to school, has friends, sleeps in a room with a window and posters on
the wall.

He dreams of warmth and joy and human touch.

He dreams himself into a fantasy world, and when the images dissolve in a shower of blinding light, when he blinks himself back to reality, a stranger aiming a flashlight at his pupils, a voice asking if he knows who he is or where, a stabbing pain in his head unlike anything he's ever known, he wishes only to return to the dream or, even better, to the mercy of death that lay just beyond it.

After, things are
blinkblink
different.

An Liu is
shiver-SHIVER
different.

The world jumps and jitters, will not
blink-shiver-blink
sit still. His tongue is clumsy in his mouth; his limbs are numb blocks of wood. And when he
blink
tries
shiver
to
blink
focus, to
shivershiver
stand, to
BLINKblink
read, his mind jitters, his body rebels; he tics and shudders and eventually
blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​blink​BLINK
loses himself to frustrated rage.