A Year at River Mountain (5 page)

I looked down from the middle of the bridge. While not quite leaping up and waving bandanas at me, the river people, some of them children, were looking in my direction, some with expectation in their eyes. Already I recognised many, though some seemed distant, seemed to belong to other times and places.

Across the bridge, outside the monastery, I was entirely alone. Ah. If I remove myself from results then everything I do will set in motion energy along the path that needs the juice; every intersection will light up like a transit schedule.

M
AN'S
W
ELCOME

On the bridge home at noon I met someone again, not the woman but a small man, a dwarf with a large head of black hair and the blackest eyes, who was leaning over the rail scanning the water below. He'd seen me and as I approached gave me such a look that I stopped in my tracks. I waited beside him for further acknowledgement while he returned to his searching. The sun came out of the grey sky, hot on my back. The weather was unsettled. Rain had fallen in the night and it had been cloudy all day. We watched mist flowing around both banks and in and out of the forest. Perhaps he was waiting for the river to reflect these changes. We stood an hour in silence, during which time I had the feeling we were in conversation already, and it was not going well. The perfection between two beings seemed unlikely. My stomach went from unease to embarrassment, then to such shame that I couldn't move. Eventually he spoke. The sun burned deeper into my back. Hot nails into metal and fire points: pericardium, lungs, heart. I glanced down at the water and saw something float by and at the same instant the man's shoulders hunched and he got down on his knees and gripped the sharp metal edge of the bridge.

“My sister, Song Wei, has lost her husband and now her child,” the dwarf whispered.

W
ATER
P
ROMINENCE

We spread carpets under the plum trees in the margins of the storehouse courtyard in order to practice point location and the subtle pulses. The monk I worked on was the youngest among us. He giggled when I felt for Kunlun Mountains behind his ankle where water meets fire in the heavenly star point.

I found it difficult to concentrate. I couldn't stop thinking of the meetings on the bridge.

The boy monk had dusky skin like Song Wei's. His body had weak pulses on the left, and gall bladder felt like a kite in gusts of wind. Around us, monks were murmuring the names of points, and for a moment I got lost and couldn't feel the pattern of his deeper paths. Song Wei's face wouldn't go away. Nor would her son
Suiji
's identical drowned face.

When it was my turn to lie on the carpet, the young monk said my pulses were big, bigger than usual, too big, like proud judges! Circulating sex, kidney, wham, wham, wham!

Q
I
A
BODE

Every morning the sun lights the bamboo outside the storehouse window; this is the first thing we see when we sit down to eat, after the body's electricity has left the core for the skin and the orifices are wide and dreams have ebbed to leave bits of image and sensation in pathways of the strange flows.

Yang bridge, couple point, Back Ravine, Small Intestine-3, edge of each hand between the root of the little finger and the wrist. I hold this, talking to heart's minister near the inner frontier gate.
How's it going?

I kiss the jumping skin of my inside wrist and the minister responds. “Hold
qi
abode, those notches either side of Celestial Chimney, that pocket above the centre of the sternum.”

The dwarf came today to ask, on behalf of the rest of the village, if they might attend the next shrine festival. I was late for meditation, on my way to the temple. He touched my hand and backed into the forest and said he wished to present a petition to the master from their counsel of elders, all of whom, he said, were women. He glanced up at me and asked for my name and I shook my head. I had another encounter with his black glistening eyes and experienced his body this time as a proud nerve encysted in dense muscle. As I looked, the muscle relaxed and black waves rolled out — physical violence, or something more dreadful.

“I am Zhou Yiyuan,” he said, and bowed. “Because you have come from far away, from another country, my people think you are the one to represent our interests in the valley to your master.”

“Who are your people?”

“The first to live in these valleys.” He stooped and looked around, a dumb show of caution. “No one remembers that we were forced north. And now the north that nursed us has buckled and blood runs under the mountains and we are the flow manifest.” And he cackled to himself: “There is no war in this country. There is no discontent in this region.”

“You would like an introduction to the master?”

“Yes. At a ceremony.”

“For what purpose?”

“We count on the blessings of people who understand the true position of human beings. We were farmers. Now our villages are floating. We are a remnant that acknowledges other remnants. I tell you this because you know nothing. We have been pushed farther and farther north into remote regions. Now the ground will not respond. We dwindle with each generation. It is time for us to come home.”

E
MPTY
B
ASIN

“Zhou Yiyuan requests a place at the autumn festival.”

The master looked at me sharply. “For himself?”

“For his people.”

“All of them?”

“The elders, I think. Women.”

“No.” The master's willingness to hear me was at an end. “How did you meet this man?”

“His sister, Song Wei, is the mother of the drowned boy, Suiji.”

The master stared at me then waved his hand. “Let another monk bring me information. These people have no names. We will not speak again.” He shivered as if cold and closed his eyes. “He must be your master now. Meet with him. Meet as often as you like.”

The rest of our meeting was silent. My
qi
looked out at the arrangement he had set in front of me. I could not put aside Song Wei's name or her face or her grief. And now her brother: how could this squat man's anger have anything to do with me? I felt fear ripple the surface of my skin.

Q
I
D
OOR

I remember a boy with an AK47 running down a busy street and pedestrians scattering as the boy fired at shop windows and into the crowd and at stopped cars, drivers and passengers spilling into the street. The boy began turning in a slow circle, firing bursts at those standing till most everyone was lying down, trying to crawl away or get behind a car. My wife was crying. We were both crying. We had been drinking coffee at a café, talking about the final division of property, years after our separation. This was before Amsterdam. Our own boy, who had delayed university for a job in the North Sea, was this boy's age. For days the sudden onset of tears. No control as the weeks went by. Our son's voice on the phone, at least with me, was terse and noncommittal.

Today was overcast, with cool wind whipping through the long grass in the fields by the river, hissing in the bamboo, then the lonely dry sound of crickets. On the path to West Shrine, inexplicably, I found a crumpled black robe, old and musty, with face-like markings on one side, so I hung it in a tree beneath one of my manufactured nests.

S
TOREHOUSE

“What did your master say?” Zhou Yiyuan asked.

“He won't meet you.”

He leaned to one side. “People are in ignorance of what is about to happen.”

I was visiting him in his lair, a kind of lean-to at the centre of the ramshackle settlement, and the sky drew our attention, clouds streaming continuously westward, their patterns repeated on the lower slopes of the mountain.

“Armies took days like this as a sign to march,” he said.

“The weather is restless,” I said. “How is your sister?”

“Song Wei has been sent to live alone in the forest,” he said. “Until the festival.”

The villagers around us had stopped what they were doing; they wouldn't take their eyes off me. Sunlit clouds were massing on the southern horizon.

“The master will not allow you to attend,” I told him.

“Every shift in life is accomplished by loss,” he said, his eyes cast down. “We find no footing. And yet we meet. Song Wei will wait for you at a place of your choosing.”

R
OOM
S
CREEN

It felt as if I was swallowing something unwholesome. There's no one but you to tell. But that's all right: my confidence in you is absolute.

Zhou Yiyuan told me that his sister must meet me before the next festival. Some taint in their community needed to be cleansed. I listened yet couldn't follow him. He spat words from the side of his mouth as he spoke of greater and lesser generations. Ours was a lesser since our master was great and lesser generations nurtured great masters.

Because the villagers stare yet won't meet my eyes, and Zhou speaks in code, and the master has cast me out, and brief fevers still visit, my mind is in turmoil. These worries beg the memory of other shocks.

My aunt sent me to the shop for uncle's fags and a tin of cat food and I looked at pictures a long time by the magazine rack and when I got home she'd been electrocuted and rushed to the hospital and I never saw her again.

A physics teacher explained chaos by blowing cigarette smoke at the open window through which I saw a man thin as a signpost in shorts and nothing else sending lines of traffic left and right by flailing his arms until an old lorry took him in the midriff.

When I was sixteen and had more or less shed my accent, my mother drove me out of Vancouver and let me off by the side of the freeway and I stuck out a thumb and, ride by ride, travelled east along the Trans-Canada.

B
REAST
W
INDOW

I dreamed I was in a boat, letting the current take me, and the river was flowing away from the sea, and I woke up ecstatic — so happy to have avoided the threat of evolution and heredity, to have found the river guilty of reversing its course.

I have a great number of dark moles on my arms and sides and back, more each year, and each is an ancestral eye looking out at the people in the valley. Each is a point and innocent. If I take off my robe the moles see Zhou Yiyuan. Cancer is the fear of seeing too much and doing too little. All my father's family died of cancer. Cancer tasks vulnerability with horrific patience.

M
IDDLE OF THE
B
REAST

I can't think straight today. I lost my glasses and found it difficult to manage the details of the demonstration. I couldn't remember the day's point. Everyone waited while I stared at the point chart, then at the names, then at the expectant faces. I couldn't see and felt so tired. Elaboration of the deeper paths, though clear within my own body, seemed impossible. The monastery and its practices seemed remote. Any attempt at explanation fell short. I fell short. Am falling still, if not short, then asleep.

R
OOT OF THE
B
REAST

I remember waking up alone in a hotel room, standing at the window in the morning light. The building was perched on a cliff overlooking a Norwegian river town, three streets converging on a bridge, the river below chaotic with spray. I paid the bill and walked out into autumn, all that dirty sky, got into my car and started the engine, defrost on high, coffee on the dash, childish excitement at the journey ahead. A successful run had ended — Hamsun's
In the Grip of Life
— and I wanted to cross Europe by car. Goodbye to the cast the night before. Then hours and hours behind the wheel, heading out over mountain passes, through local weathers, limping through the rain on the deck of a ferry, still Blumenschøn, insecure and arrogant, pushing on through border crossings, past forests and lakes, following river meanders and skirting villages and towns. I'd stop only to buy coffee and a sandwich at a fuel stop, or to piss by the side of a desolate road, the car ticking like clockwork on the empty snaking highway, the first dry snowflakes falling on my shoulders. So travelling east again, stitching each morning to night. And by night I'd be gaunt and gormless in the car with only headlights to illuminate the physical world, the flaring lights of others to keep me company. And tomorrow, with dumb luck, would be the same.

Five snails on the path today. A monk with a long-handled broom must be careful to sweep around them. Let them have their pilgrimage undisturbed.

N
OT
C
ONTAINED

Resin has sealed the earlier pages of my work — I left it on a fresh-cut stump — just as I was deciding to read what I had written. The potential of the past is sealed with fresh sap. The exposed rings of the stump left a pattern that may be read, but not by me. The rings, let's say, the episodes, the days. The tree's dying wish to over-write human history.

Let me try this. The past is not worth figuring out — my life, my accomplishments, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Synge, Beckett, Handke, my rise and fall, my responses to theatre's roiling manifestations and joy then filmmaking's tedium and belly laughs. What happened yesterday, even the snails, is not worth present contemplation. There is music, a pulse, from the village by the river; geese honk overhead; rain falls so gently it doesn't stir the dry leaves of the willow. I will find a way to enter the centre of the village, to be accepted and acknowledged; the heart of that pulse was an empire a moment ago.

S
UPPORTING
F
ULLNESS

Let me try this. An ordinary working man barrowed compost from the pile to fertilise the field. Let's say the dirt, inadvertently carried from work to home, from relationship with cast and crew to relationship with a woman and child, had in it seeds to some important change. Let's say a dream told at work returns the favour, seeds internal change.