“That’s who I know you are,” he answered. “My dearest friend. My boon companion. You’ve reincarnated into such a different form, but I’d recognize you anywhere. Your spiritual energies are unmistakable.”
“Are you sure? If you’re from a long time ago, maybe your memory’s a little fuzzy.”
“The realms beyond Earth exist on a different time scale,” Quentin said. “Only one day among the gods passes for every human year. To me, you haven’t been gone long. Months, not centuries.”
“This is just . . . I don’t know.” I took a moment to assemble my words. “You can’t walk up to me and expect me to believe right away that I’m the reincarnation of some legendary monk from a folk tale.”
“Wait, what?” Quentin squinted at me in confusion.
“I said you can’t expect me to go, ‘okay, I’m Xuanzang,’ just because you tell me so.”
Quentin’s mouth opened slowly like the dawning of the sun. His face went from confusion to understanding to horror and then finally to laughter.
“mmmmphhhhghAHAHAHAHA!” he roared. He nearly toppled over, trying to hold his sides in. “HAHAHAHA!”
“What the hell is so funny?”
“You,” Quentin said through his giggles. “You’re not Xuanzang. Xuanzang was meek and mild. A friend to all living things. You think that sounds like you?”
It did not. But then again I wasn’t the one trying to make a case here.
“Xuanzang was delicate like a chrysanthemum.” Quentin was getting a kick out of this. “You are so tough you snapped the battleaxe of the Mighty Miracle God like a twig. Xuanzang cried over squashing a mosquito. You, on the other hand, have killed more demons than the Catholic Church.”
I was starting to get annoyed. “Okay, then who the hell am I supposed to be?” If he thought I was the pig, then this whole deal was off.
“You’re my weapon,” he said. “You’re the Ruyi Jingu Bang.”
I punched Quentin as hard as I could in the face.
13
I will admit to being an angry person. Certain things I get upset about. Certain things are worth getting upset about.
But never in my life had I felt as furious as when Quentin called me the Ruyi Jingu Bang.
The volcanic surge of bile rising in my throat collided with a skull-cleaving headache going in the opposite direction. I was bisected by the pain of my anger. Blinded by it. My vision went.
The best way I could describe it was like my life’s work had been doused with gasoline and set on fire. I didn’t have a life’s work yet, but that’s how I felt.
“Genie,” Quentin said from a million miles away. I could barely hear him.
“Genie,” he said again, tapping me on my wrists. “Let up a bit.”
He was coming in garbled, on helium. The lights gradually turned back on.
I had bodily thrown him onto the table. My hands were wrapped around his neck. I was strangling him so hard that I could feel my fingernails beginning to bend.
“Please stop doing that,” he coughed. “You’re one of the few things in the universe that can hurt me.”
“Good.” I squeezed harder.
I couldn’t explain why I was behaving this way. Calling me the Ruyi Jingu Bang should have meant nothing. It should have been a non sequitur, like walking up to a stranger and saying, “Hello my good fellow, did you know you are a 1976 Volkswagen Beetle?” I was overreacting in a way that lent credence to a zero-percent scenario.
Quentin managed to loosen my grip on his throat enough for his face to return to its normal color. “Can we talk about this?”
He slid off the table and got back to his feet. I only let him go because I didn’t want to give my impending speech to a corpse. He wanted to talk? Sure. I was going to go Supreme Court on his ass and hammer home an articulate, lengthy, and logical rebuttal to his claim of me being the reincarnated Ruyi Jingu Bang.
“I hate you,” I said instead.