A Year at River Mountain (23 page)

“I had a thought.” Frank squatted with his legs apart, bony knees pointing opposite directions. He stroked his bandaged ankle. “You need not write anymore.”

The rift is in me now, like the horizon, part of the world I've always known but never recognised for what it really was. I have swallowed the split the way the valley has swallowed and quietly digested its own revelations. Touch my own chest — ticker, muscle, fist — read its language. Unbelievable, anyway.

“I didn't feel this presence at all when holding my own son,” I told Frank. “Have I forgotten?”

My own son.
Such an old memory of night swimming, a piece of jetsam butting rhythmically against the least physical part of me — my body turning into a swarm of fishes, a school of birds, a storm of flies, a murder of splinters, and coming apart, the human world too full and likewise coming apart, and the long trip westward nearly done, all but.

A
RMPIT
A
BYSS

“I cannot tell you what to do,” Frank said.

“I can't stop.”

“Chaos and order.” His eyes twinkled in the firelight. The rain had paused and the old woman had taken away the baby. “If what you meet tells its name, say hello. If there's an answer, you will hear your own name.”

My feet were dusty. I sat on the edge of the shrine and smiled at my toes. A bird rattled in the bamboo, settling. There was a gap called Change in the ligament between her body and her wing. There was an earthworm cast by my instep.

If the invisible worm changes the earth, this tells us something of our little travels. If I and the worm share the same physical dimension and thought-space, then traffic stands still and all journeys come under review. What have we learned while eating and shitting and walking to and fro? Only that everything can be copied. That the recorded evidence of everything multiplies every nanosecond. That accumulation takes all our time. Time, needless to say, is smaller than it used to be. Now is ridiculous. And heart-shaped. Of the things I have met recently, stars and earthworms left a trace.

F
LANK
S
INEWS

I walked uphill and stopped. Nothing was missing. Wait. Listen. No, nothing was missing. In my nostrils the smell of cut grass. Then nothing. Then an orange balloon trailing a short string crossed the sky west, gaining altitude as it vanished, and I knew a string was in my fingers once. When I wasn't afraid of losing things. The cat on the back of my legs as I lay on my belly and read when I was nine or eight and truly dreaming: the cat, the book, the carpet, electric fire, diamond window. Scripts, actors and lines.

“Still at it?” said Frank, and he limped into the shrine and sat: “The old master once told me to focus only on small things and animals and people.
Stay calm: the smallest things are beautiful.
But they wear out.”

Back to the page, ravaged by completion. Too much body. What to do? The massive abstractions and universalities and anonymous figures arrive anyway, propelled down institutional corridors by their own momentum, lodging in the pericardium, a
tick
to the heart's
tock
.
Stay calm
.

The afternoon was tranquil. Spring an interval lit by quiet light. Imogen will walk across the bridge, through all this rubble, and life will be unbroken again.

Illness at bay. Pain at bay. False endings left on the cutting room floor. False paternities baying at the moon. Morphine. My father after surgery, smiling at my mother. The end of history is the beginning of.

S
UN AND
M
OON

For years I drove under dark clouds to and from work, the work of moving parts forward and holding others back, shoving traits together then breaking them apart, sweeping up fallen fragments after the rehearsal, joining the sheered bits to other characteristics for later roles; for future selves to sift through in shifts — one set of tired eyes replaced by another. Meanwhile making hay while the sun shines, meeting the agent over lunch, signing a contract in the afternoon. Trips to the drug store for amphetamines, quick drink at the restaurant bar down the alley from the guitar shop, home to late news, night-night to the boy. Who was it detected wisdom in Hamlet's madness? Pause on the upstairs landing, in terror at failing memory — Alzheimer's, amnesia, brain tumour, aphasia. Ah — Claudius?

C
APITAL
G
ATE

And so, try to comprehend the whole by snagging a piece and spending one lifetime in its investigation. This leaf, new green, and its sister seedpod touched with red, in a blue sky, leaf and pod backlit by the west sun. But at the bottom of the cliff behind the cave is the complete skeleton of a deer spread out over several feet, the skull below the ribs, sacrum above the skull, leg bones splayed like spokes of a wheel — a throw to forecast the valley's fate after this quake. Find a deer, put the seedpod on the sacrum, make a wish. Since I was a boy I have been marking time, measuring my passage, waiting for a girl.

G
IRDLING
V
ESSEL

Found the deer. Found the seedpod. With a glance up at treetops and bamboo against fresh snow on the mountains, smoke pluming from funeral fires, I set the pod on the bone.

Deities have flocked in: TV crews and students with tiny sound recorders sneak around monks turning prayer wheels, villagers and carpenters doggedly at their business. But this is not the film industry. This is not a thesis or a smart investment. There has been violence in the valley and this is my record. Here's the story I want: at the end of things, boy and man ride forward together, speaking easily to each other, while animals gather, curious about their fleeting scent.

F
IVE
P
IVOTS

I took my son camping, just the two of us, and we spent the day watching eagles drift in front of our noses at the edge of the cliff. Far below were ducks on the small bay, and in the distance the mountain range of an American peninsula. The day on the cliff edge with my son was the day of days. That light was the light of light.

Spring is always heavy. Real nests are already occupied by fledglings, whose tweets I'd recognise anywhere. I made my penis hard and was amazed that after such a long time I produced so little. The quake turned the world inside out and its effects were catastrophic, yet when I turned myself inside out the yield was paltry. My heart clanked and the valley's music returned amplified.

The bell, knocked sideways, has been reframed. Some heard it clang at the time of the shock. I heard only splintering wood and the groaning of bedrock.

My mother came home from visiting dad in the hospital and said she was done, and recognised nothing, and that was that, except for the bitterness. Dad died a year later.

L
INKING
P
ATH

The days quicken. Technology, the fence around the institution, whose utility is too confused to answer the simplest question (as if an institution can do other than infinitely complicate a question), thrums the air even here. The quake was bigger, though. Our invented forms can't keep up with life and death.

I squatted to shit and looked into a wall of green — life so varied that the measurers and modellers and physicists are millennia at their desks — and wondered if it wasn't all just projection and coincidence. These confabulations. The songbirds might be fewer, but the unfolding of wings is still beyond our comprehension.

S
TATIONARY
C
REVICE

Nothing. Hold Gall Bladder-29 in the hip between superior iliac spine and greater trocanter. Then the path opens west, following the sun, the way life continues if you give still intervals between windy thoughts a little attention. Between no and thing is a breathing space and something else — the end of control, the willing time where a seed sticks and calls for moisture. Before the
no
is the complete story of light, no death near it. In the end a tree splits the hipbone and leaves cover the ground, the last shrivelled fruit softens and falls. There is the mud splash. There is frog-light, the earth covered with pale green bodies. There is water-light, shadows rippling over the trees near the bank. There is land-light, soft and reluctant. There's light in the vivid green sky and clouds bigger than hurricanes closing fast from the east. Children pause in their game to look up. Straight-edged rain divides the hissing river from the hissing trees. When we close our eyes light stays, and in America and Canada we know our children are safe by the electric zap of bug killers in neighbourhoods filled with accountants.

J
UMPING
C
IRCLE

A morning of complete harmony. Sun sat close with each blade of new grass down to the river. Beyond the courtyard, forests tipped the blue. We kneeled in a circle to share food, the village elders and the monks and some government members, to consider the future.

“This monastery has retained its hiddenness, its secrecy,” said an official dressed in blue fatigues. “It is still a lost monastery.”

“We know this,” said Frank.

Carefully, I picked the blades of grass that threatened the stepping-stones.

“A mushroom ring has appeared in the soil outside the cave,”

said one of the new monks.

“Why not?” said Frank.

“Help will come the way it has always come,” said the governor, “from the river.”

The elder women nodded. The crazy one who minded Song Wei's baby said, “And on the next fire night the river will stop flowing and something new will step out.”

“Thank you,” said Frank.

“What is her name?” I asked the crazy one. “What is the baby's name?”

A politician read from a document and placed a cheque on the ground in the middle of the circle. The breeze promptly took the paper and the politician gave a little cry. His associate reacted quickly and snapped the cheque from the air. Everyone laughed.

W
IND
M
ARKET

Once I had a birthday cake, chocolate, with candles, all blue. Each slice had a candle. I held my breath. Eight, nine, ten. This was the year my parents emigrated and I lost my accent and my tongue got tied and the shapes of words were wrong in my mouth.

M
IDDLE
D
ITCH

There is the walled garden, not to be entered. No sign of Zhou Yiyuan.

K
NEE
Y
ANG
G
ATE

Frank is the new master. He sat on the seat outside the garden's tall door in morning sunshine. Earth-moving machinery beeped: backing up. The wall coping made wave shadows, a fringe on the worn timbers.

“I thought you were leaving.”

He raised his head. “I thought you were staying?”

“I am staying.”

“That's news to me.”

Y
ANG
M
OUND
S
PRING

The crazy village woman boiled tea and we sat across from each other in silence. “Where is the baby,” I asked.

She grinned and thumbed to the next hut where the woman I had treated in the winter was stirring a pot. The baby's head covered her breast.

Each bell today reminded me of Yang Mound Spring, Frank's hut and the point in the tender depression below and outside the knee.

Losing an accent is not like losing a language: it is a voluntary betrayal of identity, a sacrifice of ancestral music, a refusal to risk being misunderstood.

Y
ANG
I
NTERSECTION

Frank and I walked north along the garden's east wall, listening to the two monks inside shovelling, scraping, chopping. Left up the steep rock along the north wall, left along the dark west wall, left, the south wall, and back to the door.

“How has the quake affected what is inside?” I asked.

“The gardeners sound busy,” said Frank.

“I've imagined my parents inside, or Zhou Yiyuan concocting a brand new universe.”

“Have you?”

O
UTER
H
ILL

Behind the wall was the noise of water running, perhaps a waterfall, and then a splash, as of a great fish leaping from the surface of a pond. The crunch of slow receding footsteps. A hummingbird twanged at my ear.

Directly below, through the bamboo forest, was the stretch of deep river where the two children fell and Suiji drowned. Swallows hunted the surface.

“How is the rest of the world faring?” said Frank. “The doctors? Their dewy lawn? Imogen?”

B
RIGHT
L
IGHT

The garden introduces at least the notion of garden. Water flows, and since no water enters or leaves, the garden must contain its own weather, rivers and seas.

Suppose the walls enclose a forest, ancient and thousands of meters high, the trees so closely packed that only a child can enter (I'm too big, too old) and standing by the open garden door are my parents, powerful demigods on holiday from their busy negotiations of immigration and shooting schedules and hospitals and ferries and pathology reports, and the gist of their wordless message is
wait
.

When I told Frank, he said, “That's optimistic.”

“The quake, surely, was an aspect of a wider cataclysm. Just as the garden is the region in microcosm, this valley must be a kind of universal gazetteer.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“Can I go in?”

“Possibly.”

“When?”

“I guess we could climb the wall.”

“Don't you have the key?”

“Zhou Yiyuan has the key.”

“Why? You've seen him?”

“Not yet. I'm looking for signs of Zhou Yiyuan.”

A goat approached, her new kid alongside.

Y
ANG
A
SSISTANCE

The gardeners enter the garden, then there's the sound of scraping. Asleep on my feet, bladder points all sore, I spent the afternoon digging a ditch above New East Shrine.