Autumn Bridge (29 page)

“We should call the Reverend Abbess.”

“It would be better to confirm her condition first.”

“Very well. Then let us attend to the body.”

The two put their hands together in gassho, the Buddhist gesture of respect and acceptance, and moved deeper into the cell.

“Wait,” said the first nun.

She need not have spoken. The second nun had already stopped. They had both noticed the same thing. The girl’s eyes were not flitting around in their usual mad manner, but neither did they have the typical appearance of the eyes of the dead. They were sparkling brightly. And they seemed to be looking straight at the two nuns.

“How unnerving.”

“I thought for a moment—”

“Yes, so did I. But it isn’t so. The dead can’t see. Look. There is blood on the floor around her.”

“She has suffered a fatal hemorrhage.”

“The mind and body can endure only so much.”

“Let us proceed.”

They continued forward, though somewhat more slowly than before. Then another unprecedented event occurred.

Shizuka smiled.

The first nun would have fallen if the second, who was directly behind her, had not caught her.

“Call the Abbess,” the first nun said.

The instant before the change, the voices wailing in Shizuka’s ears were so loud and so many, she hardly knew she was wailing herself. Then the dreadful noise diminished drastically in volume, but took on an even more disturbing quality. She had never heard anything like it before. It was several moments before she realized what it was.

The sound of her own voice.

Never before had she heard it unaccompanied by the cacophony of the other voices that filled her aural world. Its solitary nature so shocked her, she stopped screaming. When she did, she experienced something even more strange.

Silence.

There were no voices screaming, laughing, crying, begging, cursing, talking. There was none of the noise of the vast machines that sometimes roared through her cell, or the herds of gigantic animals, or the crowds in uniforms or in rags, in ranks and files, or in riotous mobs.

All at once, not only her hearing but her every sense attained a singularity it had never before possessed. All at once, moments were sequential, discrete, without the slightest evidence of simultaneity, passing in orderly fashion one after the other, from past to future, and never the other way. Myriad people had always been with her: transparent or substantial in appearance; happy, sad, indifferent; aware or oblivious; young, old, skeletal, unborn; dead or alive. These constant companions were gone.

She was alone.

At first, the clarity, so sudden, so unfamiliar, only added to her confusion.

A terrible stench permeated the air, what she later learned were the foul emanations of her own unwashed sweat, feces, urine, and regurgitated food. She noticed this, not because of its unpleasantness, but because of its uniqueness; always before, odors of every kind from every source were so commingled, she could not distinguish one from the other, a result not very different from having no sense of smell at all.

After her ears and her nose, it was the turn of her eyes. It would have been her eyes first, had they been open at the time, but they were closed, as they often were. There was no particular purpose to having open eyes when what she saw was the same as when they were closed. Now she was fascinated by the sight of four walls, one ceiling, and one floor in all their solidity, unpenetrated by and not coexistent with any other object, natural and otherwise, as they had always been before.

As strange and as terrifying as these experiences were, they did not compare to the one that now seized her entire attention.

Something huge was clutching her.

She tried to get away from it, but when she moved, it moved, too.

When she realized it was inside her clothing with her, she almost began screaming again, which would have returned her to the only way she had engaged the world thus far in her life. But she didn’t scream, because when she opened her mouth she felt it on her face as well and, putting her hand to her face, understood what was clinging to her.

Her own skin.

Her hands touched it, tentatively at first, then with increasing excitement. That which her hands touched and the hands that did the touching were the same. Her skin described the totality of the outer surface of her body, forming something she did not until then know existed.

A limit to her being. Separation between herself and everything else.

It was a liberating revelation.

She and the universe were not one.

Now something else moved, this time within her torso, forcing the bones of her ribs outward to an alarming extent. Just as she began to fear it would do her serious harm, it escaped out of her, and her chest became still once again. She looked around her cell but could see nothing. Had the curse of multiple vision been lifted from her only to be replaced by one of partial blindness? Then somehow, without her noticing it, it got back inside her and began forcing her ribs outward again.

“Ahhh—” she said, and found that air came out of her as her lungs contracted.

She was breathing.

Surely, she had been breathing all along. In the wild riot of everything possible happening at once, she had never noticed. For several moments, she closed her eyes and simply followed the air in and out of her body. Her breathing slowed, her chest moved less and her abdomen more, and she grew calmer. Air, within and without, gave her an intimate connection with all else.

So her skin was not an absolute boundary. She was apart, but not entirely apart.

The sound of wood creaking made her open her eyes. She was horrified to see a section of the wall moving slowly inward. She froze. Had she somehow, unknowingly, found clarity only to lose it so soon? Was she already slipping back into multiplicity, simultaneity, and chaos?

Two beings came through the opening in the wall. Their appearance was substantial enough that she could not see through them. This happened sometimes, though not often. Usually, the beings she saw possessed a vaguer presence. Those of this kind were much rarer. This was no comfort. Solid or amorphous, they would arrive in impossible numbers again, and crowd out her new clarity.

“Wait,” the first being said. The two stopped and stared at her.

“How unnerving,” the second being said.

Shizuka listened to them talk, not daring to move. At any moment, she expected more voices to emanate from every direction, until, in a reflexive effort to block them out, she herself would begin screaming again. But she heard only the voices of the two beings in front of her. As they moved slowly toward her, she saw twin darknesses on the floor of the cell moving with them. They were casting shadows. As she was. They were not hallucinations but actual people, present in this cell. She was not losing her clarity. Indeed, it was growing ever stronger.

Shizuka smiled.

Both beings staggered backward. The one in front almost knocked the other one down as she retreated hastily.

“Call the Abbess,” the first one said.

Shizuka wondered why they were so afraid.

Did they see the terrifying sights she no longer saw?

Shizuka’s newfound clarity did not last. Within three days, she began to hear disembodied voices again, see what was not there, experience the flow of events against the actual passage of time, observe multiple objects and entities occupying the same space and penetrating each other. By the end of a week, she was lost again in chaos.

With the next cycle of the moon, clarity returned. Were these new periods of quiet as random as the madness? No, for something was different. The second time, as the first, her breasts grew tender and swollen, and there was an outward flow of her life’s blood, which she knew signaled the passage of a season of her own body. It was this blood that temporarily stilled the visions. It had to be, for there was nothing else that could account for it so perfectly.

In the ensuing quietude, which she knew would end as surely as had the first, she carefully examined her every action. What did she experience that encouraged chaotic thoughts and imaginings? That enhanced the quiet, and stilled distraction?

Of the first, chief were emotions, particularly those of anger, fear, and greed.

Of the second, the most reliable was the simple act of breathing, with awareness, but without forced control.

There were certain to be many more actions in each category. In the short time she had during her second cycle, these were the ones she found. When chaos returned, she breathed into it, and this time she had moments of clarity even during the madness. They were brief instants only, but they were there and they had never been before.

Shizuka was learning. Until now, chaos had controlled her. If she learned to control chaos instead, she would be free.

The moon made another passage and the blood tide rose in her again. She practiced what she had learned. With every succeeding moon, she did better than the time before. When the bleeding ended, and the visions began, she stayed with her breath, she was not angry or afraid, she did not desire, and the visions were not as overwhelming as they had been. She was not able to suppress them entirely. But she was able to keep them in the background for longer periods.

She began to think she could soon escape entirely.

Until, in the midst of her eighth tide, one of her visions, as vague and as wispy as smoke, saw her and spoke to her.

Kimi led the way to the newly rebuilt abbot’s meditation hut and proudly opened the door for Lady Hanako and Lady Emily.

“It’s just as it was before the explosion, isn’t it?” she said.

“I was never inside this hut,” Hanako said. “The first and only time I ever saw Mushindo was during the battle.”

“Oh,” Kimi said. That was too bad. Since her rescue in Yokohama, she had devoted herself to the rebuilding, along with Goro and the women who had remained with them. Doing Buddha’s work was reward in itself, of course. Yet it would have been nice if someone acknowledged their efforts.

The two ladies had a brief conversation in the outsider language. Then Hanako turned to Kimi and said, “Have you been following a floor plan during the rebuilding?”

“No, my lady,” Kimi said. “We’ve been following Goro’s memory. It’s quite remarkable.”

Hanako said some outsider words to Emily, who nodded and looked disappointed.

“Thank you, Kimi,” Hanako said. “If you are sure it is appropriate, we will spend the night here.”

“Oh, of course, Lady Hanako. This isn’t really used as a meditation hut anymore. We just rebuilt it because, well, because it had been here before. I only regret that so little of the monastery has been restored. The old monks’ quarters would have been more spacious and more comfortable for you.”

“We will be very comfortable here, Kimi. Thank you very much.”

“You are very welcome, Lady Hanako, Lady Emily.”

After Kimi departed, Emily said, “It would have been easier to verify or disprove some of what is in the scrolls if we knew where the old buildings stood. The cell, for example. The writer claims to have left a sign of her former presence there.”

“Even a floor plan might not help,” Hanako said. “The building that contained the cell might have been destroyed centuries ago.”

“Then, with a plan, we could find where it had been, and finding no sign such as that she mentioned, we would know the scrolls are not to be believed.” She paused and added, “I don’t believe them anyway.”

Emily opened her valise and took out one of the scrolls. She and Hanako sat on their knees on the floor and examined it together. Over the years, Emily had learned to sit with reasonable comfort in the Japanese fashion. She could not do so for hours. But for several minutes at a time, it was quite bearable.

“Perhaps we have misread this passage,” Emily said.

“There’s no mistake,” Hanako said. She read from the scroll. “
We will meet in Mushindo Abbey, when you enter my cell. You will speak, and I will not. When you look for me, you will not find me. How is this possible? You will not know until the child appears, then you will know without doubt
.”