The Alchemy of Happiness: Three Stories and a Hybrid-Essay

by Jason Erik Lundberg

  “Stay here,” she said, and shoved open the car door. He watched through the windscreen as she stepped in front of the Fleetline and then edged herself onto the bonnet, situating herself on its center and settling her legs into the full lotus position, her back as rigidly erect as though constructed of iron pipe. She sat statue-still, hands resting on her knees, fingers curled in an unknown mudra, the slight breeze riffling the strands of her hair. From his vantage inside the vehicle, he could not hear her, but he was given the distinct impression that she was chanting a mantra.

  After several moments, Julian realized that the sky was progressively darkening, although no clouds could be seen above them, as if time were advancing rapidly into night when it should have been only late morning. In less than a minute, the firmament had turned utterly black, and the wind picked up, now tossing Blue’s hair and the tails of her bolero about as if the automobile sat at the edges of a cyclone. The Fleetline rocked on its springs, and very soon Julian found it astonishing that Blue could remain still and unmoving amongst the elemental assault. Lightning streaked overhead, faster and faster until the entire sky resembled a phlogistonically charged lattice encompassing the entire realm, the afterimages searing themselves into his retinas so that he had to look away, the howling wind and constant lightning building to an intensity that forced him to clinch shut his eyelids and clasp his hands together and utter his own prayers to Lord Shakyamuni to see him through such terror.

  The Fleetline abruptly stopped its movement, and several moments passed before Julian realized that the sounds had also ceased. He cracked open his eyes, and gasped. Gone was the endless flat prairie of Bamboo Duo; they were now situated on an island, surrounded by a calm purplish sea. The gentle sound of lapping waves faintly reached him. From her vantage on the vehicle’s bonnet, Blue looked in at him, smiled brilliantly, and motioned for him to exit the car. She slid down on the right-hand side, and he turned his head to follow her eyeline: stretching up into the clouds, punctuated with a node every twenty feet or so like an enormous reed of bamboo, painted the deep green of rainforest flora with accents in red and yellow, was the grandest pagoda he had ever seen, in person or in his history texts. The grandeur and grandiosity of the holy structure filled him with utter awe, and at the time felt intensely familiar.

  Julian was also certain that his mouth hung open like an idiot’s as he followed Blue to the pagoda’s ground floor entrance, an ornately carved gate inscribed over its entire surface with the same perpetually shifting sigils as those on Blue’s left arm, and he focused instead on the back of her bolero jacket to prevent the nausea from overwhelming him. They stopped directly in front of the door, and she placed her left hand on the ancient wood. The air pressure in Julian’s ears increased, and he stretched his jaw to relieve them. A long groan sounded from within the building, as if some gigantic sleeping dragon were expressing its irritation, and then the massive door slowly swung inward.

  To his surprise, the internodal interior of the pagoda was completely hollow, reinforcing his impression of its similarity to column of bamboo; the area was also much smaller than the exterior suggested. Sitting in the center of the packed earth floor, next to a large circular grille, was an elderly Shakyamunian abbot in full robes, eyes closed in meditation; laying across his lotus-folded legs was a hand-carved walking stick, two different types of bamboo, combined, intertwined, one dark, almost obsidian, the other light, greenish. From within the grille inset into the floor came a sound of periodically rushing air.

  Blue took a step forward and the abbot’s eyes opened with a snap, alert in an instant. “Lady Blue,” he said, his voice deep and youthful despite his appearance, and Julian immediately realized that this was the same man in his dream who had married him to Lady White. So had it in fact been a dream, or something more? A generalized pulsing ache began behind his eyes.

  “Fa Hai,” Blue said. “It’s been a long time, old man.”

  “Indeed,” the monk said, shifting his form ever-so-slightly into a posture of readiness. “Is today to be the day of our final battle? It has come upon me sooner than expected.”

  “No,” Blue said. “Do you see my armies? We are not here to fight. Not today, anyway”

  “Very well. Then why have you come?”

  “To visit my dear sister. Please step aside.”

  “No,” Fa Hai said, rising lithely to stand upright in one fluid motion. He spun his bamboo staff from one hand to the other in a circular whirl, then planted it vertically on the ground next to his right foot. “It is not permitted. Even to penetrate the pagoda gate is an ontological offense, and I suspect you have paid a heavy price in order to gain the gnostical ability to do so.”

  The air pressure within the pagoda’s interior increased once again, and Julian could feel the surrounding æther being drawn into Blue’s tensing form, creating a hazy halo of dim blue light to waver and flicker in a field around her. Julian began to sweat, overcome with a feeling of claustrophobia, his stomach in the process of turning itself inside out, and so edged backward toward the doors.

  “I will not ask again, Fa Hai. Allow me to see my sister.”

  The old monk surprised Julian by laughing, not a sound of derision or contempt but of genuine amusement. “My lady, you know very well that I am a match for you, even in such a decrepit physical state. We could indeed spend the next few hours battling one another, wearing ourselves out and possibly even inflicting some light damage, but then we would be right back here once again, and I would still refuse you access to your demon sibling. However,” he said, turning his gaze on Julian, who halted in his retreat, “I will let the young man pay his respects.”

  “Me?” Julian said.

  “Yes,” said the abbot, turning to Blue. “I find it curious that you brought him with you on this voyage, that you would risk traveling through Bamboo Duo to reach the borstal plane, and to do so with an incarnation of the man who originally took your sister from you.”

  “You remember incorrectly, old man,” Blue said, her body slowly relaxing, but the intensity of her gaze remaining fixed on the monk. The air pressure once again returned to normal and the halo dissipated.

  “Anything is possible,” he said, “nevertheless, those are my terms. The young man alone may see her.”

  Julian looked to Blue, who nodded once. He stepped forward tentatively, feeling more out of his depth than he ever had in his life. The grit from the dirt flooring scritched underneath his shoes, producing the only sound inside the pagoda. His heartbeat thundered in his ears, and he tried to fathom why he could possibly be so nervous. Up close, he was taken aback by the monk’s profusion of facial wrinkles, and at the confidence he expressed even at such advanced age, but then the old man gently smiled, and Julian was once again strongly reminded of his dream, and of the kindly abbot who had married him to a goddess.

  He knelt next to the iron grating, took a deep breath, and then peered downward. Beyond the grille, dozens of meters below the surface of the earth, in a bare circular room with mortared stone walls, slept an enormous white snake. Its pearlescent scales shone and glowed in the dim light, the graceful creature’s inhalations and exhalations sounding exactly like the two-storey bellows at the textile factory where Julian’s father had worked for as long as he could remember. Its eyelids flickered in response to its dreams, and it let out a soft sigh, a brief light feminine sound that reached into Julian’s brain and unlocked a torrent of repressed memories, the images and experiences from thousands of years ago, through dozens of reincarnated selves, surging forward into his conscious mind.

  He is a simple farmer named Xu Xian, living in a rural land in the human realm, content with his uncomplicated existence until the day that the goddess in white robes appears, walking the path around the nearby lake where he prefers to fish for carp. Startled into muteness, he is unable to do anything other than nod a greeting on that first day, and the next, and the next. On the fourth day, he rows his small boat into the middle of the
placid lake, and while casting his line, a gargantuan blue serpent streaks up from the water underneath him and sunders his small boat into splinters, tossing him bodily into the water. He nearly drowns but for the intercession of the lady in white, who manifests in front of him and passes life-giving air into his lungs; her lips on his make him feel whole, as if finding something for which he has never known he was looking.

  They are married for years when he discovers the truth: not only is his wife not a goddess, or even an ordinary, albeit beautiful, human being, but is in fact the demon Lady White Snake. The shock of it nearly kills him, but then he realizes that he doesn’t care, that he has fallen in love with her for her kind heart and her adaptability to life on the farm and the way she makes him feel as though he is the most important person in all the three realms. For the way she stands up to passing imperial soldiers, for her tact and diplomacy with their neighbors, for her intelligent suggestions about increasing the yield of their crops.

  Her sister, Lady Blue Snake, visits nearly every month after their marriage, and although she never outright says anything explicitly negative to him, he strongly suspects that she resents him stealing her sister White away. Her initial prank, of wanting to overturn his rowboat but destroying it instead, was laughed off, and he has long ago forgiven her in his heart, as the action was the catalyst for his greatest love, but he never relaxes his anxiety that she could do something similar again. And indeed, during one of her visits, an altercation between Xu Xian and Lady Blue results in her transformation into her true form; she strikes out repeatedly, and her bites severely wound him. The demon poison surges through his body, killing him quickly.

  However, he does not reincarnate straight away. He drifts in a formless void, unaware of the passage of time, and of the epic quest on which his wife has embarked in order to acquire the Great Root of Power, a legendary ginseng root possessed by the guardian sect of the August Emperor of Jade. She has summoned demon armies and declared all-out war on Heaven itself, stealing the root from its imprisoning vaults deep in the earth, and then using it to concoct the elixir that yanks Xu Xian from that realm of nothingness back into his frail human body.

  The night of his successful resurrection, exhausted from her travails but overjoyed at her victories and the restoration of her true love, Lady White Snake is unprepared for the attack by Fa Hai, the Shakyamunian abbot who transgressed against natural law by marrying a human to a demon, and who as penitence has been tasked by the Jade Emperor himself with imprisoning her for her crimes. Xu Xian awakens to the sounds of manual combat, and cries out as his true love, the woman who committed immense sacrifice to bring him back from death itself, is struck down by the monk, gathered in his arms, and then spirited away with a puff of smoke and a crack of displaced air. Xu Xian never sees her again, and suffers with miserable heartache until the rest of his days.

  And there now, below him, rested the demon who had so willingly given her heart so many millennia ago. Drips of saline water plinked down from his face onto the iron grille, and beyond, to land soundlessly on his forever slumbering wife. Julian reached up and wiped his cheeks, sniffing loudly. Even as he gazed on the true form of his long-ago spouse, he recalled the way she’d seemed to float every time she sat down, of the way she would smell of sweet osmanthus even after a day of heavy tilling in the fields, of the unexpected act of tenderness that accompanied a surprise hug, of the way she’d stroked his face and looked directly into his eyes as if verifying her own happiness.

  “I would like to stay.” Julian rose to his feet.

  The abbot cleared his throat. “For how long?”

  “Until her sentence has been fulfilled.”

  “I’m afraid that is not possible, young man. Her sentence is for eternity, although I know for a fact that she will not serve it completely. Lady Blue will free her at some point in the distant future, and I will at last be sent to the Pure Land. You see, this place is not only a prison for demon snakes; I am also still being punished for my hubris.”

  Julian took a deep breath, echoing the inhalation below him. “Let me take your place.”

  “What?” Blue’s startled outburst echoed off of the circular walls of the pagoda. “But, you can’t, not when I’ve just found you again. Do you have any idea how long I have been looking for you, Xu Xian?”

  “Why did you bring me here? Why ferry me into Bamboo Duo at all?”

  Blue looked away, redness creeping into her cheek, and folded her arms. “Absolution, I suppose. I love my sister dearly, but I wasn’t angry at you for taking her away from me. I was ...” She paused and took a deep breath. “I was in love with you.”

  “Then why did you kill me?”

  “I ... I just couldn’t stand seeing you both so happy together, of seeing how you so quickly you preferred her to me. Every day of your marriage was like another slap to the face. I was angry at you. And I hadn’t planned on your memories returning today. I’d hoped, perhaps stupidly, that you would once again see my sister for what she is, and this time you would reject her. And then maybe you could find a place in your heart for me.”

  Julian turned back to the abbot. “Can it be done? Can I take your place as jailor?”

  Fa Hai returned to the floor and folded his legs carefully into the lotus position. “It is possible, although highly unlikely. I will need to meditate and make a petition to the August Emperor of Jade for your request.” The monk’s eyes closed, his entire body relaxed, and he instantly sank into a meditative trance.

  Julian turned his attention back to Blue. “I am sorry your plan didn’t go as intended, Blue. It was a risky maneuver.”

  “Love is always a risk,” she whispered with a note of bitterness.

  Fa Hai’s eyes snapped open and he said, “It is done.”

  “So quickly?”

  “Not so, young man, I spent weeks discussing the matter with the Jade Emperor; time moves differently when in the heavenly plane, but you will soon know this fact for yourself. I was able to convince him that it would be best for all concerned if you stayed here with the woman you love. As her jailor, you will be granted immortality, as well as all of the thaumaturgical strength and defense abilities necessary to prevent both her from escaping and others from breaking in. My powers will be transferred to you upon my departure from this realm.”

  “I understand.”

  “But do you? Do you comprehend the incredible loneliness that comes from such complete solitude? You will require neither food nor water nor bodily expellations nor any other reason to leave this structure. You will never again be able to leave this place, to even go outside to watch the skies or swim in the purpure seas. You will be actively prevented from communicating with any other mortal beings until the end of time, or until Lady Blue is successful in her attempts to extricate her sister. Such an existence, to stay so close to one’s mate, one’s true love, but to never be able to talk to her or touch her or enjoy her presence, could very well drive one to madness.”

  “Possibly. But I still have a major hydromantic problem to solve that affects all three realms. The worlds still suffer under drought, regardless of where I may be. My æ-reader contains not only my course texts, but every work of literature ever produced. I will not want for reading material, and I suppose rather than a formal education in cityCityCITY, I’ll need to become an auto-didact. I’m not unfamiliar with solitude, and I’ll find ways to keep my attention occupied. I have not changed my decision.”

  “Very well.” The monk stood up, this time, Julian noticed, with the aid of his bamboo staff. “Shall we all proceed outside? It has been so long since I have seen the sun.”

  Fa Hai, Julian, and Blue, in that order, stepped out of Leifeng Pagoda’s only gate, and approached the Fleetline Coupe. The light breeze whispered across clothes and skin, the salt smell of the ocean waves drifted through the air, and from far away a gull or tern squawked hoarsely. Julian had just given himself a life sentence, a thought that frightened him to his very marr
ow, despite his show of bravado. Would he be driven mad? Was the option of madness but proximity to his greatest love better or worse than sanity but restlessly searching lifetime after lifetime for that one person who could make him feel complete?

  Fa Hai reached forward and clasped Julian at the shoulders. “Thank you, my boy. I knew that you were an honorable young man when Lady White asked me to marry you to each other, and I’m glad to see that many reincarnations have not altered this essential quality. When those moments of desperate loneliness do strike you—and they will, believe me—do not forget that you can communicate with the gods above. It will be tempting to remain in Heaven for long amounts of time, but you will always have to return to your cell, and you will always find that only moments have passed. This is another feature of your captivity, or perhaps ‘curse’ is the better word, and depressing as the thought may be, it does help to stave off the eternity of being by one’s self. Good luck to you.”

  “Thank you, sir. Good luck to you.”

  “Oh, I need no luck! As soon as I leave this realm, all the centuries will catch up to me, and my body will immediately discorporealise. It will be an instant and painless death, and my consciousness then will be free to pass into the Pure Land. This is an incredible gift you have given me, and I will never forget it.”

  The monk then stood back, and without another word, raised his bamboo staff and drove it into the ground. An eruption of light burst forth from his feet, a dazzling brilliance that immediately produced spots in Julian’s vision, and when he was able to see once again, Fa Hai was gone, with no trace left behind of his existence except the duotone bamboo staff, which stood as straight and unmoving as a post.