Al Steiner: Doing It All Over

"Yes," he nodded, sipping out of a bottle of Chinese beer. "I remember everything."

"How did you do what you did?" I asked. "What powers do you have?"

"Powers?" he scoffed, "I have no special powers at all. None except for one special gift that I'm allowed to pass on at my moment of death. I passed my gift on to you Bill. I shouldn't have done it, but I did. What has allowed you to do what you have done was the result of a miscalculation of thinking on a dying old man's part. An old man whose judgment was severely impaired by the effects of enough narcotic painkillers to kill an average person. An old man who'd been consumed by loneliness and loss but who should have known better. When I think of what might have happened, what could have happened, I still shudder to this day."

I stared, unable to comprehend exactly what he was saying.

"I am descended from ancient Chinese royalty," he told me. "My family has been instilled with this gift, the granting of a single wish, for the past sixty generations at least. The gift is intended to go to the first born grandchild of each recipient. It is intended that no one else but that grandchild even know about the gift. Don't ask me who gave it to us, why we have it, what entity powers it. We have this gift, I know not why. Only the bare essentials of it were explained to me when I received it for reasons which will become clear in a moment. The gift must be passed on by each holder upon his death or it is lost forever." He looked sternly at me. "I had no one to pass the gift on to, at least no one I would have trusted it to. I'd spent the years of my life thinking that it was finally going to die when my cancer took me away."

"You have no kids or grandkids?" I asked.

"My only son is dead. I have no daughters. My only grandson lives in Seattle. He is a greedy, shallow man who is only interested in himself. It is he who had me sent to that horrid place when my cancer finally reached the stage that I was unable to care for myself. If I had given the gift to him, God only knows what horrors might have occurred. I'd decided long before you were even a part of this earth Bill, that he would not receive the gift. I decided to let it die with me before he would have it."

"You were given this gift?" I asked, sipping from my beer, trying to comprehend.

"By my grandfather," Mr. Li nodded. "It was 1938 and I was nineteen years old. This was in Nanking, in Manchuria. We were under occupation by Japanese troops and it was not a gentle occupation. The Japanese were running wild in the streets, killing men at random, especially service-aged men such as myself. They were raping any women they could get their hands upon, even the elderly and children, often killing them afterward. They burned houses, temples, dug mass graves, slaughtered thousands.

"All of my family died that year at the hands of the Japanese," he continued. "I was not the one intended to receive the gift, I had two older brothers and a sister. I was the baby of the family. My oldest brothers were both killed in the army, fighting the Japanese. My parents and my sister were killed in Nanking on a night that I had been out visiting the girl I was courting. Even in the horrors of war some things still go on. Love is one of them. I was taking a great chance by leaving the safety of our family house to go see her. Had any soldiers seen me I most likely would have been shot on the spot, maybe even tortured first."

"It is perhaps ironic that I had been the one taking a huge risk in leaving the house but that while I was gone on that day, it was the house that became a deathtrap. A squad of soldiers had wandered by while my sister was out getting water. They took a liking to her and followed her back home. There, they held my family at gunpoint while they took turns raping her in front of them. Then they shot everyone, leaving the bodies there to rot while they continued about their business.

"When I returned home I found all of them dead in the living room, my mother, my father, my sister, my grandmother, all except for grandfather. Can you possibly begin to imagine the horror of finding such a thing? Can you imagine it Bill?"

"No," I answered honestly, shaking my head.

"Grandfather had been shot twice in the chest," he continued. "He was covered in blood, both his own and that of grandmother who had been shot in the head while she'd been sitting next to him. He was dying fast but he was awake when I came in, he was alert. And he was staring at me, beckoning me over to him.

"I was still trying to deal with the knowledge that my entire family had been slaughtered like pigs, worse than pigs actually, people didn't torture pigs first. I was looking at their corpses, their beloved faces that were now dead and locked in screams of terror. My sister was lying naked in the middle of the room, her legs spread wide, bruises on her body, a hole in her throat from a bayonet. Father had died trying to protect mother with his body, he was lying atop of her, more than twenty bullet holes in his back. The bullets had simply traveled straight through him and into mother.

"I wanted to scream. I wanted to go find a rifle and start killing any Japanese that I saw. I wanted to attack their headquarters in Nanking personally, seeing how many of them I could kill before they cut me down. I wanted revenge Bill.

"I knew nothing about the gift that grandfather had for me; I wasn't the one whom it was intended for remember, but grandfather knew my state of mind at that moment and he also knew his time was very short.

"The gift can be a very dangerous thing. Extremely dangerous if it is used improperly. It is customary for the giver of the gift to act as advisor to the recipient long before the time comes for the passage. It is imperative that the gift be used wisely and not for the purposes of achieving power or influence. Grandfather did not have much time to convince me of several things. One that the gift existed in the first place, two, that I should not use it to either wish for the destruction of the Japanese Empire, which I probably would have done happily considering my state of mind, or to have my family back alive again. I must not do either of those things he told me as blood ran out of his mouth and he gasped for every breath. Do you know why he told me these things Bill? I suspect that you do."

"Fate," I answered. "You would have been tampering far too much with fate. If you had wished for the destruction of the Japanese Empire, who knows what could have happened, what sort of world would have resulted. Even though the major events of World War II hadn't happened yet, it would have altered the entire historical timeline."

"Yes," Mr. Li nodded. "Grandfather explained that was not a wise choice for that very reason. And as for wishing my family back alive,"

"It would have been basically useless," I finished for him. "They were fated to die. If you had brought them back alive then they simply would have been killed again the next day or the next week."

"Correct," Mr. Li said. "Grandfather told me that the use of the wish had to come from my heart and had to be a wish aimed at personal betterment. He was going fast, reaching the end of his strength when he asked me the question at last. What was my greatest wish?"

"What was it?" I asked, fascinated.

"Song, my love, the girl I'd been out to see that day, was the only thing I had left. The only thing. I wished for her and myself to survive the war unharmed." He told me. "A very simple wish, just as yours was, but one that had far-reaching implications, just as yours did."

"Song and I left Nanking, sneaking out past the occupation zone in the dead of night. We were never seen, never challenged. Of course not, we were guaranteed to survive the war unharmed. We made our way to Chinese controlled territory and we got married. The next day after our wedding I joined the army. For the next six years I fought the Japanese, killing as many of the bastards as I could get into my rifle sight. I charged machine gun nests in order to drop in grenades. I cleared paths for other soldiers across dangerous territory. I always took the point when out on patrols. Bullets whizzed around me so close that I could hear them. Artillery exploded all around me, sometimes close enough to knock the wind out of me, but never was I struck by anything. For those six years I was basically immortal. Then the Russians invaded Manchuria to help drive out the Japanese. The Americans dropped a couple of atomic bombs. The Japanese Empire was destroyed in the way it was fated to be destroyed and the war was over at last. The limits of my wish had run out.