Reincarnation of the Master in the Year 2082
A year after the monks have picked all the pearl relics out of their master’s ashes, it is time to find his reincarnation. Taking their first clue from the footprint in the pyre ash, they set off in that direction, like hunters tracking a bear. Elsewhere, a brainy monk runs the divination. The boy will have been born in such and such a valley. His father’s name will begin with this or that letter. The monks are struggling through the mountains when the monastery drone appears overhead. The kids who run for cover are too old, but maybe they have a younger brother, lying in a crib in one of the stone huts, waiting for them to find him. The location of likely households, based on birth records and fathers’ first names, is sent to the monks by GPS, but to be polite, they ask everyone they meet if any unique boys have been born in the past year, boys who make their parents slightly uncomfortable, who seem oddly precocious? The farmers are shy. They cover their mouths and point up the valley, always up the valley. They know why the monks are there, that in their bags they carry bells and hand drums and prayer beads with which to test the child. But the monks are in a hurry. They need to find the boy before the winter snows close the valley. So they pass swiftly through the villages not marked on their GPS, knowing they’re being watched through gaps in the stone walls. In one village, a village they had intended to pass right through, a woman comes running out of her hut with a baby boy in her arms, claiming her son is the one they’re looking for. They have to admit that he’s a striking-looking child. They spread out some blankets and set the bells and hand drums and prayer beads out, but the baby seems not to care about them. What’s more, the sight of these objects seems to cause him pain. He twists away, clutching his mother’s hair. She begs them to give the child some time, but they’re already packing the items up. They’re so high in the mountains now that their noses sporadically bled. They don’t notice their own noses are bleeding. They have to tell one another, “Brother, your nose is bleeding.” In the very last village, they find an older boy, already able to walk and talk, but born a few days after the master died, so, they say to one another, it is possible. Word of their arrival has preceded them by days and when they arrive, the parents are ready for them, the boy clean, cleaner than any child they’ve seen in the mountains. It’s evening when they duck into the hut. The boy sits in a beam of oblique light, giving them a look like they’re late and he’s been kept waiting. Again, they lay the bells and hand drums and prayer beads out. The boy isn’t afraid of them. In fact, he touches them all, but by now the monks are too tired to care. They each convince themselves that, after some fumbling, the boy has chosen the master’s bell, the master’s hand-drum, the master’s prayer beads. They look at one another, nod. The mother buries her head in her hands. The father stares at the boy, trying to memorize his face, knowing that, come morning, he’ll never see his son again. Night has fallen. The beam of light is gone. The monks lay their blankets out on the dirt floor, preparing to sleep there, in that hut, with the boy they’ve found, while, down in the valley, their master lies awake in the dark.