The Taoist at the Temple Gate

A fortnight slipped by. Wang's wife, kept at a distance by her illness, sent word one evening that she wished to see the cousin who had come to stay. She had heard laughter from the garden room, she said, and it puzzled her.

Wang put her off. He said the woman was shy and weakly, and that it would frighten her to be stared at by strangers. Even as he spoke he knew he was lying, and the knowledge sat uneasily behind his teeth, like a seed that will not dissolve.

The next morning he went to the city gate to buy fresh paper for his brush, and there, at the edge of the crowd and the noise, he met a Taoist priest who was standing very still, watching the passers-by.

The priest stopped short the moment he saw Wang, and stared at his face as though he had seen a ghost step out of a butcher's stall. What has happened to you? he said, stepping close. You are marked, and not by any sickness I know.

Wang laughed it off, though the laugh came late. Marked by what, sir? By a long winter and worse papers than I deserve? The Taoist shook his head slowly, as though he were sorry to have to say it. You are hung about with evil, he said. Do not pretend to me.

Wang's laughter died in his throat. He thought of the quiet girl in the garden room, who never asked him the time of day, or the name of his family, or anything that would have made her real to him. He thought of how she did not seem to cast a shadow upon the wall beside her bed.

I have nothing in my house, he said at last, and heard how thin it sounded. I keep only my old mother's books, and the quiet. The Taoist looked at him a long moment, and his eyes were not unkind. Then he said: Fool. There are people in this world who borrow what was never theirs to wear.

When they take a friend, he went on, they mean to take more than his friendship. They mean to take the warmth out of him, one small kindness at a time, until there is nothing left but the shape of a man. You have let yours in already, and it is sitting in your best room.

He pressed a paper charm into Wang's hand, still warm from his sleeve, and told him to hang it above the door of whatever room he feared. Hang it, he said, and watch what it does not do. Wang took the charm because it would have been rude not to, and he did not hang it anywhere at all.

He walked home quickly, and his heart beat too fast for so ordinary a street. He told himself the old priest was a madman, the kind who haunted temple gates and lived on pity and the small alms of travelers. He told himself this all the way down the lane.

By the time he reached his own gate he had almost believed it. He almost believed it when he let himself in, and almost believed it when he passed the garden room and did not look through the window.

Almost. But that night, when he went to the room, he noticed for the first time that the latch of her door was warm to the touch, as though a fire inside had been burning not for an hour but for a very long, patient while.

He told himself it was the weather. The weather, he repeated, as he undressed, and the weather was the last lie he told himself before the world he knew began to come apart.