A Year at River Mountain (16 page)

Y
I
X
I

Warm air melts the snow and flocks of birds swoop tree to tree, each trapezist precise as claws hit branch, snappy feet locking on. Then song. After the wind, another pair of monks went out to search for the wild child. I met Zhou Yiyuan this morning praying at Spring Shrine and joined my prayers to his.

The master's eyes were closed, his cheeks sunken. He was white and looked stern. The box Zhou had given him stood empty beside his bed. I sat with others watching his chest rise and fall, the light in the room altering, and wondered what the box contained. The air was thick with the scent of mushrooms and damp cloth and decay.

When I stepped from the master's room, I was weeping. Objects were indistinct — some kind of snow fog was slinking down the mountain from the high drifts. Song Wei called to me from the temple path. How ruddy her skin was! She touched both hands gently to her belly; the corners of her mouth twitched, and she bowed.

There was no colour or substance to the world, only this small dusky woman, her whole history at her back, simply dressed in a coarse brown coat, black and white trousers, black slippers. Opaque air and tears obliterated everything but this.

D
IAPHRAGM
P
ASS

How will we approach the enterprise of riveting these flimsy remnants together? What role will be mine should war enter our valley? How will the world be safe again? What play is there between war and love? You have to play your part, you know. Fair is fair.

All countries provide the raw material for war, yet when I left the town I was born in I didn't know that every city's coffers contained stolen cash. I didn't know that the freedom implicit in love had been fought for by children. Can you tell me what ingredient is so precious or so dangerous it must be hidden generation after generation, swallowed if necessary?

Frank has organized watches on the bridge to check the villagers leaving and returning. Our paths are the same paths, yet not. My large intestine is a glittering fish fat with roe. On the ground north of the bridge rain mixes with ice and mud. There is no traffic on the road. Each time I cross the bridge, I own the bridge. When I leave River Mountain the water flows into my right side and out my left, and when I return, robes flapping against my body, the mountain reeling me in, the river pours into my left side and exits my right.

The south horizon beyond the open plain, so powerful and strange, is a gentle curve from on top of the mountain. My fingers on this page are real, just as the page is real, and something flickers outside, through the storehouse door, while I'm thinking of the place I was born, but I don't know if what flickers is precious or dangerous.

Imogen's a brief light circle. Once we were supposed to appear in the same film — well, I had several lines over four scenes; she was the star — but the project fell through. Song Wei is Song Wei. You are you (can you tell what is happening from your vantage point?) and this is nothing but play.

G
ATE OF THE
E
THEREAL
S
OUL

Every few years a child goes missing and is never found. This has happened since people first settled the valley. Frank tells me there is a mountain upriver beyond the farms and plum orchards, and inside the mountain is a country where the climate is gentle, skies always clear, where descendants of the lost lead peaceful lives and cultivate their wide valleys, and wait for new children to arrive.

A few years ago the master told us we should act like boys. Our healing practice would only work, he told us, if we approached the gold pavilion (with a smile to the stranger at our side) as children.

Y
ANG'S
P
RINCIPLE

Yesterday the monk who taught me the strange flows came to sit beside me. He waited until I finished writing and then, after a silence, began to talk about the master, then about himself, then about a sister he hadn't seen for forty winters, the letter he watched his father write to the master, his mother's hands fragrant with herbs, his uncle's puppet-god waving goodbye, the beautiful things he saw on his journey to the valley, did I think they had all been destroyed? As he talked I kept falling asleep. I couldn't stop my eyes from closing. His voice grew excited and then sad.

I was wakened by another monk when I was missed for the evening ceremony.

A tender-minded optimist cocooned in a dream. Adopted into the strange flow of the region's past. So monks are beginning to speak to one another. Often the topic is the master's health. Although the sun shines, warm on my face, there's a fresh breeze from the melting snow and I want Song Wei. I close my eyes and follow each breath.

W
ISHING
H
UT
(P
APINI'S
C
ORRIDOR
)

Zhou Yiyuan was shouting, his body contorted, feet sliding on the icy ground outside the temple, his tongue creeping from his mouth, his face black. He wrinkled his nose and roared: “Wake and get ready! Taste the dragon fruit! You must plan for summer battle!”

S
TOMACH
G
RANARY

When you look at the same view day after day, with the seasons slowly shifting light so the edges of things blur then sharpen, with animals trotting or fluttering or swimming in and out of the scene, the boundary between who you are and who you might be begins to wobble. The library in the storehouse contains all naming and relationship processes. The ulcer on the inside of my cheek won't settle. A large explosion in the port has left many dead and wounded.

Too much, if you ask me. The earth can't swallow all this snow, then freezing rain, now blood. Even this library, normally the warmest corner of the storehouse, is bitter cold, and water has frozen in cracks across the floor.

When you spend too long in one place, one position, permanent cricks are inevitable. My legs have gone to sleep. Mould patterns on the pages map each day's imperceptible increase of light — is that the lost valley? the country in the mountain? If we could read desire we'd find the girl deep in the margin, where the binding's come unstuck.

It was wonderful to hold my son for the first time: a claiming and a being claimed. Such a beauty! And now, here I am trying to bite off my own toenails, looking for some adversary and finding instead my old face in a dark window. Perhaps my courage will rise again once sun strikes through and illuminates this room.

When I'm gone, when you are gone, when we're asleep, when pain has mocked every boundary, sunlit fog will swirl through the quiet valley and desire once again step forward with its tiny flourish.

V
ITALS
G
ATE

Zhou Yiyuan is a dwarf who carries power and a dream and treats silence as an obstacle, yet when I look into his eyes there's tenderness loose in the chaos streaming up through his body. Because he believes himself thwarted, I don't know what to say to him. Dangerous, crazy and selfish. But perhaps he is a prophet and, if acknowledged, would be helpful.

R
OOM OF
A
MBITION

Twice the taste of metal, horrible and familiar, from gritting my teeth; unpredictable leg twitches and counter-twitches.
Get up and do something!
No energy. Imogen haunts me, my reply to her letter stuck in my throat.

W
OMB
V
ITALS

Better, after an hour at the bathhouse. Again, I couldn't find my pen when I came to write. Frank, back at work on his own story, called me over and showed me his dry speckled closed fists; I tapped one and it opened to produce the pen angled on his palm. I was overjoyed.

S
EQUENCE
E
DGE

Horrible whistling mortar and gunfire all night, awake, crawling across frozen snow to squat shivering over the dark hole trying to vomit.

Y
ANG
C
ONFLUENCE

Walked the valley today, along the river and back. This side. West again. Exhausted. No words. No story. No sign of combatants. Our master is truculent and speechless.

S
INEW
S
UPPORT

Why are you still here? I mean I'm stuck with you, I mean I'll keep it going as long as you're with me, to find things out, to find the fracture. And we will work the fracture together, right, despite differences and tension and stuckness, both of us challenging whatever pops loose. Abstractions and universals. We'll work them really hard, dig and drill deep with our inadequate tools — sorry, sorry,
my
inadequate tools — to analyze the bits and pieces.

At the end, my wife and I were in despair but we had the boy. When we looked at him, he looked at us. But we were like those cave fish so long in darkness they no longer have eyes.

S
UPPORT THE
M
OUNTAIN

What we live, even a disguise, we become; so say what this is, I dare you. Assay meaning. Two rivers that won't meet? A boat and a dying horse?

S
OARING
U
PWARD

Not going well. A battle unit passed upstream on a listing boat. There are things that cannot be shown in movies, things film can't catch: the almost foul smell of woodsmoke, my father's secret language, his words so quiet I believed them. Then another flicker of something — the glint of running water in a still meadow. Not meadow. Wrong continent. No matter how much is translated there's always the original to give things away.

I
NSTEP
Y
ANG

We're going down, without a flow chart, spreadsheet, or even simple accounting. Hold your breath. The mould map is unreadable. I'm old, in a life, here, and you are there, reading the dead, and the longer we go without direction the more frightened I am of losing you. The search for the little girl has been abandoned until the snow on the slopes melts. Edges are missing from every object. Candles are surrounded by a little fog. Beyond what light shows, is nothing but vague pallid shapes, nothing but the bell, as if it lives under a lake, and yet I would not wish a clearer world, not now; not for me the hard lines of bright spring, not yet, okay? Okay.

F
EBRUARY

K
UNLUN
M
OUNTAINS

I
SPEND
1/1,
THE LUNAR
N
EW
Y
EAR
for the truly mad, recalling my roles in the tragedies. My first
Winter's Tale
(comedy, I know, but I died) I played Leontes' son Mamillius, ten years old, whispering in my mother's ear while my father raved; then I landed Titus Andronicus's son Lucius, Duncan's Donalbain, Polonius's son Laertes, and then (
another part of the forest
, jumpcut) I had a son of my own, and then I lose track. Always somebody's somebody until King Leontes in my second
Winter's Tale
, in which I blow everything in a paranoid cataclysm in the first act. Years later I wanted Lear but was offered Titus. “It's a bloody play,” said the director, “but the beauty in it is timeless.”

I went out to breathe in the full blue day and found Zhou Yiyuan crouched with both hands in muddy water. As he stood up, he pointed at the father and son on the bridge. “That man is a spy.”

When they sauntered away we crossed the river and hiked into the south hills along slight paths, in and out of little valleys and gulleys, through dense shrubs and over deadfall, until we came to a grove of nut trees full of birds. Above us was a steep scree slope, unclimbable; behind, through a break in the foliage, the monastery was laid out under the cold sun, a toy town beneath the mountain. I had never seen the mountain so big, nor the monastery so compact and ordered and empty. Even the village seemed tidy, and the bridge was a perfectly angled dash across the winding river.

Zhou Yiyuan hitched his broad shoulders then turned to me. “I am going to show you something.” He crossed to a huge tree and heaved himself into its low branches and let a long arm dangle. I grasped his hand and he swung me up and told me to go as high as I could and make myself secure. He crouched on a branch beneath me and closed his eyes.

Almost dark when two men slipped into the clearing; they were armed yet poorly dressed for the cold. With a grunt, Zhou Yiyuan dropped from the tree to the ground, the men shouted and skittered back, but he was quick.

“Look,” he said. And showed me his wet knife. “Tell your master that we are safe for now. This leader has been eliminated.”

The scientists say it's all chaos in the cosmos, that the deep structure of change is decay and corruption. We are reeled in like the last wild salmon for a taste of home and a glimpse of Eden, for one blissful moment heedless of our own messy natures, not even referencing the stars. Are we? Reeled in?

Hard frost on the ground. What happened in the nut grove? That taste of the ordered valley was instantly soiled. Supper today was one small fish, two dry black plums, a bowl of rice.

K
NEELING
S
ERVANT

East Shrine has burned. No one witnessed the fire, so far as we have discovered. It must have burned alone all night. This morning the smoking coals were still hot, although frost had reclaimed all but a perfect black circle. Because of the general dampness, it is hard to understand how a shrine could burn, and burn so completely, this time of year. Nothing of the contents remains. The master, when told, merely pursed his lips and turned his face away. He has not spoken, nor opened his eyes since the girl went wild. Nothing I say to him about the war will make any difference to anything.

Sunny day. My own exhaustion is all that engages my attention. When will he die? I always worried about losing things and lost many. Dropped cues and missed marks and lost lines. Many parts I read for. Lost my wife. Lost my son.

E
XTENDING
V
ESSEL