to my youth, and even my adult body begins to shrink. If it hasn't been a dream, then where did the Aunty Wild Mule who isn't my Aunty Wild Mule go? I sit there staring woodenly at the Wise Monk, whom I'd forgotten, as he slowly returns to wakefulness, like a python emerging from hibernation. Folding up his body in that room, suffused with the golden glow of dawn, he begins his qigong breathing exercises. The Wise Monk is dressed in ordinary clothing—yes, it is the threadbare robe the woman who suckled me had worn. He has a unique way of exercising. Folding up his body, he takes his penis in his mouth and rolls round on his wide bed like a wind-up toy with a taut spring. Steam rises from his shaved head in seven distinct colours. At first, I didn't think much of his trifling exercise regimen, but when I tried it I realized that rolling round on the bed is no big deal, nor is folding up my body that way, but taking my penis in my mouth—now that's a challenge.
Once he's finished, the Wise Monk stands on his bed to limber up, like a horse that's been rolling in soft sand. A horse will shake its body to send loose sand flying; the Wise Monk shakes his body to create a rainfall of sweat. Some of the drops hit me in the face, and one flies into my mouth. I am astounded to discover that his sweat has the fragrance of osmanthus, which now spreads throughout the room. He is a big man with large, whirlpool-shaped scars on his left breast and belly. Though I've never seen bullet wounds, I know that is what they are. Most people shot in those vital areas go straight down to the underworld, and to be not just alive but hale and hearty can only mean that he enjoys great good fortune and an enviable karma, a man born under a lucky star. As he stands on the bed, his head nearly brushes against the rafters, and it seems to me that if he stretched himself as tall as he could, then he might be able to stick his head out through the hole in the roof. Wouldn't that be a fright—his head, with its incense scars, sticking up through the roof tiles at the rear of the temple? Just think how stunningly strange that would look to the hawks wheeling low in the sky. As the Wise Monk limbers up, his body is exposed. It's a young man's body, in contrast to his old man's head. If not for a slight paunch, it could be mistaken for the body of a thirty-year-old man; but once he puts on his threadbare robe and sits cross-legged in front of the Wutong Spirit, no one who saw only his face and bearing would doubt that he was a man just shy of a hundred. Now that he's shaken the sweat off his body, and is good and limber, he climbs off the bed. What I observed has vanished under a robe that seems about to disintegrate. This has all the qualities of a hallucination. I rub my eyes and, like the heroes in wildwood tales who ponder their reactions to strange encounters, I bite my finger to see if I am dreaming. A pain shoots through my finger, proof that I am in the flesh and that what I observed was real. The Wise Monk—at this moment he is a faltering Wise Monk—seems to have at that moment discovered me as I crawl up to him; he reaches out, pulls me to my feet, and, in a voice dripping with compassion, says: ‘Young patron, is there something this aged monk can do for you?’ ‘Wise Monk,’ I say, a myriad feelings welling up inside me, ‘Wise Monk, I haven't finished my story from yesterday.’ The Wise Monk sighs, as if recalling events of the day before. ‘Do you want to continue?’ he asks compassionately. ‘If I keep it inside, Wise Monk, and don't let it all out, it will become an open sore, a toxic boil! He shakes his head ambiguously. ‘Come with me, young patron,’ he says. I follow him into the temple's main hall, where we stop in front of the Horse Spirit, one of the five. In this just and honourable place, we kneel on the rush mat, which looks so much more tattered than it did yesterday, dotted,