My name is Benbo'erba. If that's a mouthful, call me Little Ba — the monkeys all do.
I'm a catfish spirit. Don't laugh. Flower-Fruit Mountain belongs to the monkeys, sure, but a mountain has ravines, and a ravine has to have its fish. My family has lived in the deepest backwater bend of Water Curtain Ravine for seven or eight generations. Our genealogy is carved on a slab of green stone at the bottom of the bend — and the first line holds two names, side by side: Benbo'erba. Babo'erben.
Yes. The same name, read in both directions.
As a fry I asked my grandfather: why name us like that? He pulled on his water-pipe and said: those aren't two names, they're a pair of names. Long ago our ancestors held a posting at the Jade-Wave Pool under Scattered-Rocks Mountain, keeping the pool-gate for the Myriad-Sage Dragon King. They served as a paired watch — one patrols the upper water, one the lower; read the names backwards and the shifts reverse, and in a thousand years the rotation never slipped. Then one night calamity came to the Jade-Wave Pool: the trees fell, the pool emptied, and of our two ancestors only one escaped, fleeing east and east until it settled in this ravine.
Which one escaped? Grandfather said: nobody knows. The ancestor died without ever telling. It left only one family rule: every generation must have one child named Benbo'erba and one named Babo'erben. The names must come in a pair, because the posting comes in a pair — "a paired watch is a case one fish alone can never close."
In my generation, the rule broke. I'm the only child the family has.
So one yao works both shifts. In the first half of the night I am Benbo'erba, patrolling the upper water. In the second half I turn myself around and swim the other way as Babo'erben, patrolling the lower. The monkeys say I've lost my mind — three feet of water in the whole ravine, what is there to patrol? They don't understand. It isn't the water I'm patrolling. It's the family rule. Until the case is closed, the watch cannot stop.
The night old Grandfather Taibai's sending lit me up, I happened to be mid-shift-change. The old one asked: will you go west with this child? The first thing I asked back was: does the road pass Scattered-Rocks Mountain?
The East Sea is unavoidable, he said. And the Jade-Wave Pool lies within the East Sea's borders.
I said yes on the spot. Only afterwards did I remember to ask what was in the west.
See, the monkeys picked me for a starter bond thinking I'm simple. Simple? We catfish look muddled and are slippery as anything. I know exactly what I'm doing. For the others, this journey west is about roads and scriptures. For the Benbo'erba family, it is a homecoming to close a case — three hundred years on, I am going to swim back down into that pool, find out which half of our genealogy's first line is the missing half, and learn whether, on that night, the ancestor who stayed behind failed to escape… or refused to.
Before my grandfather closed his eyes, he pointed me to the bottom line of the green-stone genealogy. Centuries of water had blurred it; only the last three words could still be made out:
"…still waiting."
Who is still waiting? Waiting for whom? Waiting until when?
Grandfather smiled a little, right at the end, and said: Little Ba, you'll understand when you reach the Jade-Wave Pool. The thing pressed beneath that pool — when it sees our family's name, it will speak on its own.