The Formula

Come with me at dawn, the priest said, and Wang Qi came, though he had not slept, and though his heart was beating the way a drum beats before a battle.

At first light the priest led him to the very wall through which he had walked. He stood before it, and he told Wang Qi a short string of words, so short that the young man was disappointed the moment he heard them.

That is all, the priest said. Repeat it to yourself as you walk. Do not rush. Do not look at the wall as something to be defeated. Look at it as something that has always been open, and has only been waiting for you to notice.

But there is one condition, he went on, and he held up one finger, and the finger was not a joke. The art serves a quiet heart. The moment you use it to impress another, or to take what is not yours, the wall will remember you, and it will close.

Wang Qi repeated the words. He walked at the wall slowly, the way he had been told, and when his forehead should have struck the plaster it did not. It passed through, and there was the cool dark of the wall, and then the courtyard on the other side, and the morning birds, and he was through.

He came back. He went through again. He went through a third time, and by the fourth time he was grinning, and by the fifth he was running at it, which the priest watched without smiling, and said nothing.

Enough, the priest said. You have what you asked for. Go home now. Remember what I told you. The wall remembers.

Wang Qi thanked him. He thanked him badly, because he was already halfway out of the temple and halfway home in his mind, and because he had decided, the moment he was through the wall for the fifth time, that he had always known he could do it.

The walk down the mountain was the happiest walk of his life. He did not notice the rags of his coat. He did not notice the blisters on his hands, which were now scars. He noticed only that he was a man who could walk through walls, and that the village below had never known it.

He stopped at the foot of the mountain and turned back, as if to bow to a teacher, but the temple was already hidden in the mist, and the mist was the kind that does not lead people back. He turned again and walked down into the valley, humming.

The short words were on his lips all the way down the last path, turning over like a coin he had just taken from a richer man's pocket. By the time he reached the first houses he had already decided that he would perform the trick that very evening for whoever would pay him to watch it, and that the price would rise with every showing.

He believed, in that hour, that he had outwitted the world. He had not yet learned that the world does not mind being outwitted once, but remembers the face of the man who does it twice.