A Year at River Mountain (14 page)

I'm imagining what it will be like. Let me see if I have your death right. That winter after the friends visit. Brandy and milk in the microwave oven. Stain in the clawfoot tub. Your wildcraft remedy. The big house where you keep your things. I only want what might slip through your fingers when you cross that line. A clue, I think, that would serve me now.

I ran into the freezing dawn and found an intact nest!

D
IAPHRAGM
S
HU

So I visited Zhou Yiyuan and his sister. We sat on old carpets over the dirt floor beside a pile of dried mud and they showed me a small tree they had decorated with cloth stars, in my honour, for Christmas, for crissakes. I chanted with Zhou and his sister and some villagers round the fire in their room and in the dim light I could not tell if she was really pregnant. She seemed thin, her face gaunt.

Whisky flowed the winter of my wife's death. In Vancouver, I sat with best friends in front of their natural-gas fire while they held a throwaway lighter to their mortgage and, slightly nervous as they glanced at me, laughed about their success and my redundant divorce.

These villagers own next to nothing. More crowded in, smiling to see the tree. Zhou retreated to the shadows, anger threatening to erupt. Shivering children gathered outside the shack and stared in at us, their eyes quick and hungry, as we sipped tea, clutching our bowls. Then I walked uphill through the smoke from village fires and turned to look at the river, black gulf in the snowscape, and saw my own breath rising into night.

L
IVER
S
HU

I fell into one of the seasonal streams that run this time of year down the north-facing hillside below an old battle site. Drawn again, you notice, to the wicked south paths, to the bend in the river where the rape took place. It was dark, early morning, and I wasn't properly awake, but stood in the reeds and stared a long time at the log Song Wei had been draped over, black bile in my throat, and then turned and slipped. I was no sooner in the shallow icy water than I was out, cursing the stars, recrossing the bridge to change my robe before climbing the hill to calm myself at the storehouse fire, and then trudging to the temple where I was late and bruised for silken movements.

G
ALL
B
LADDER
S
HU

The rest of the day was so: emotional hesitancy; look no one in the eye; curse myself and winter; do nothing but stare through the storehouse windows. I know why I fell. The valley point has to do with family and home and sex, and in that wheeling constellation I got lost. Must I have a plainer statement for you or for the master? What would you have me do? (Quit your whining, do I hear?)

Outside, the sky puffs up grey around the tall bamboo. Ice discs lie on the snow, one for each barrel under the storehouse roof; a small wave from a drop radiates to the barrel lip. Close my eyes, all I see is Imogen's body: once when I worked on her I fell into the plane of her belly between navel and pubic bone, at
Ren
-4, Gate of Origin, yin fire, the fire closest to heart's minister . . .

S
PLEEN
S
HU

Here's mine. Family at the end of the universe, we sat together on the bed of our East Van house and watched
Star Wars
: laugh-track robots and idiot humans, incomparable adventure, pure noise and bombast. One becomes Four; Two becomes Five; Three becomes Six. What would they think of next? The father saves the son. The son saves the father. The son burns the father. In Vancouver before we separated we were a family of three at the end of the short December day, solstice tree in the corner hung with white lights. Popcorn passed from lap to lap.
Once upon a time.
Mandarin oranges peeled and divided. Tu Fu's translated poems on the floor. Meanwhile, in Ch'eng-tu, beyond the Ch'in Ling Mountains, Tu Fu found his thatch hut. The year 766 — Western count — Tibet about to invade again. What are we concocting? Homunculus from a retort or binary Yoda?
Remember it always, I will
. My father's ashes drifting off Striding Edge in the Lake District. Now that valley. Now this valley. Now the bell. Now my son. Now yours?

S
TOMACH
S
HU

It's Christmas Eve. I see my life stretched behind me, each summer a vector, a blade, path to a place not home but like home: a facsimile of home, and ahead there's Imogen in river light, in a white dress, hair a curtain, a tall white swan with folded wings stopped on the edge of the bridge. Somewhere, even now, you breathe air. You go to sleep. Make a call. Mark your place in the book before putting it down. Perhaps. Although I'm closer I still can't find words to tell that I witnessed a brutal act and did nothing. Can the place of rape be the valley point? The tether between human and nature? Unimaginable, another person's life. Mine included. Fathoms deep.

S
ANJIAO
S
HU

It's good to be alive, close to the bamboo and river, in the warm storehouse library, studying this formal life represented in woodblock prints. Black ink, white page. Stillness dozing inside paper. The new shoots. The old. The new shoots the old.
Once Upon a Time in the West.
The old West is the new East. Elsewhere Christ's birth.

K
IDNEY
S
HU

A thousand birds come down to the river, to the streams and frozen ditches; flocks sing in the forest, gulls mutter on top of the storehouse roof and a songbird calls from the warrior tree; bird tracks maze every white expanse. Imagine taking scissors and cutting the grey clouds to make a roof — and it isn't guesswork, clockwork or binary work, but a strict emphatic statement. A swift act to do with time, the absence of space. A pulse. Outgrowth of the human pulse. This feather as physical song. Invisible embrace in place of buildings.

S
EA OF
Q
I
S
HU

Eating the first meal today I broke a tooth. Wind and subzero temperatures, the exposed fallen grasses white and the bamboo whistling. Terrible, the end of teeth. When teeth start rotting and crumbling there's not much time left and every look from every person, if annoying, is a wondrous event. The achy path leads downhill, bump bump bump, rocks jagged and the climate wetter and colder, till I'm toothless, beyond pain, on a frosty skerry beach, my fingers numb, my lungs flapping like dead leaves.

L
ARGE
I
NTESTINE
S
HU

All morning I collected fallen branches and broke them into pieces to burn, even the smallest twig, so the snow was free of leaves and bits of wood. From down here I watched Frank's distant figure strike the bell and slowly make his way back to his hut. Today's the finest, sunniest, coldest we've had in weeks. My tooth pain is gone. Villagers and monks came out to greet one another and stood blinking together, the men in ceremonial clothes and the women and children dancing from noon till now, till it's quiet. The blinding sun skips along the south hills, the pines bristling copper, and the combined smoke from our fires slinks east and the Northern Dipper, origin of yin and yang, faces half a moon and a sheer universe.

G
ATE OF
O
RIGIN
S
HU

Life has shape, shape and form, schedule. The rape point is blue, spiralling with energy. If I name it I implicate myself. Family is open to what will sprout. Other shapes, including who I was in the past, who you are, randomly drawn, unfinished, are the work of an amateur. What we do alone is useless. What we do alone is without form.

S
MALL
I
NTESTINE
S
HU

But answers seem less relevant than fresh snow on the mountain. Our roof is a long cloud blowing off the peak. This morning the bell rang and the monks chanted and the deficiencies and excesses arm-wrestled and the tea was cold and what did I care whether Frank greeted me or not? These healing places are warrens of disintegrating efficiency with too many patients, too few nurses, with diseases more and more specific and the hunt for causes ridiculous. This drug will target the toothless poet raving in the distance, five fields away.
That trial.
I am pregnant because I raped myself.
That syndrome.

B
LADDER
S
HU

Bottom of the Shu ladder, just beginning the buttock hill climb. Fucking bell. Fucking monks. Fucking valley and river. Fucking tree. Fucking bamboo. What I wouldn't give for a coffee. Fucking snow.

J
ANUARY

M
ID
-S
PINE
S
HU

T
ODAY THE SAME AS YESTERDAY, WITH FREEZING RAIN
, now a small storm passing over, with small winds. Except I'm in love and we are at war. A monk I don't know well said he thought our life here was complete, but that he wanted something more. A disturbing thing to say, and shocking that he should speak at all. There are four factions involved in border disputes and government forces are on the move. Mist veils the other side of the valley. The trees are like ghost armies. One moment there, the next gone. The sleet crackles with expectancy. We're chanting because penguins and polar bears have abandoned their centuries-old tracks and extinction is contagious and the edges of Wall Street are crumbling and billionaires can't help rolling on. A dead soldier in blue-and-white winter uniform rides the river ice. We pray for balance. The valley is apprehensive: rogue winds, some warm, some cold, run above the wild streams. It's hard to concentrate. My broken tooth does not hurt, but its jagged edge has torn my cheek. We chant the things lost or given up. We do not wait for anything. Even on a day like this, sodden and without colour, birds fly sideways down to the bridge timbers, perch, then fly off and out of sight, and children run along the paths and go quiet near shrines and the temple.

W
HITE
E
SSENCE
, J
ADE
R
ING
S
HU

Jewels on every branch when the rain briefly stops. We pray for long ceasefires. Let this be the end of wars, not the end of the world. Don't let all we love pass away. The fourth movement,
sehr langsam
, of Mahler's Fifth. Why did earth move from its place in the centre of the square formed by water, fire, metal and wood, to its present location between fire and metal? Did it happen when we understood that the centre was empty? That God was fishing another pond? The five-element diagram that looked like two integrated sand timers now resembles a star trapped in a house. The jig is up! We have been cosy and bored. As a father I wanted everything the mother had. Everything except pain and occupation. Water in my mouth tingles and shimmers. The broken tooth calls less often to the tongue. All over the valley the sound of water.

U
PPER
C
REVICE

I've never worked so hard in my life. Service, I suppose. Not work. This moment, between sweeping the shrines and silken movements, is borrowed from a day of physical praise. Sun on the water. Amazing light through the clouds, and a boat, a boat pushing upstream, against the flow. Water, wind, reeds and chanting going east, while this boat steams west. Deep clouds, sun in shifting patches on distant snowy fields. Somewhere in these images is Einstein behind a desk, writing equations with his legs crossed. I'm tired and it's beginning to rain. Service is what we have called work, service to state, nation or God. A duty, a birthright, a horror of laziness? I don't have a name for work now.

Smoke puffs from the little crooked stack, and the boat rocks gently, grey weathered hull and plywood housing rattling with the chug of the motor, propeller surging the full river, ice on the margins, wind vexing prayer flags.

S
ECOND
C
REVICE

The boat struggling upstream carried a father and three daughters, the middle sister beautiful, the family escaping skirmishes in the East province, the mother killed. With just a little fuel left, they had to come ashore. We fed them in the shabby camp below the monastery, didn't want them in the grounds, and Frank came down from his perch to bring them sufficient fuel to continue.

When they cast off I watched the father ease forward the throttle. The girls huddled in the lee of the wheelhouse and looked around at the flooding river, our buildings on the hillside, the mountain masked in thunderheads. Wrapped in their layers of clothes, hair flapping, they seemed a bright guarantee of life's flow.

Settlement children on the bank chased the boat as it swung away from shore into the centre channel, the daughters craning their necks as the father steered the next bend.

M
IDDLE
C
REVICE

Snow. Sleet. Wind. Snow.

L
OWER
C
REVICE

No dawn, only an extension of night, an overall milkiness several hours long waning into another night.

Y
ANG
M
EETING

Brigands invade the valley and one of them cuts me open, guts me like a fish. The mountain explodes. Mountain Temple has been pierced on its east side by a huge uprooted tree and Spring Shrine has vanished.

In the storehouse a monk is eating alone, one who has never been friendly to me. When I speak to him, he shrugs and continues eating.

In my former life dreams didn't interest me and the large stories only mattered as backdrop against which we wrestled with our shaky existences. After the seals, the ferry, weeks of fog, I was escorted by Jake over the Iron Workers' Memorial Bridge, then flew across the ocean. That rift in my life so dark; I still can't assess what was seal, what was sea.

When I left the storehouse, I saw Song Wei near the river and hurried down through the gates and caught up to her on the bridge and followed her across and east into the steppeland of scrubby leafless brambles, tracking her wild leaps in the undisturbed snow till both of us were scrambling. “Wait!”