A Year at River Mountain (20 page)

P
ALACE OF
T
OIL
, G
HOST
C
AVE

After the middle of the night. In the darkest part of the wood. Zhou bent the branch into a circle and we stretched the skin over it. An owl called. I had to pull off my left shoe to scratch the itch inside my big toe.
Dadun
Liver-1. Jing well point and wood point of the liver channel. Did Large Hill itch because of the hour? Did I have an overabundance of earth? I showed Zhou the centre of my palm, Pericardium-8, ghost cave, fire point, good for fever.

He helped me fasten the skin to the drum frame, warned me not to sound it. “This master has evolved from winter,” he said. “What is his purpose?”

“I don't know.”

It was dawn by the time we were back across the river. Song Wei greeted us at the bridge in a flying gown. Angry eyes and brand new green wings.

C
ENTRAL
S
URGE

Count the breaths it takes to climb from the storehouse to the temple. One hour's meditation equals seventy-two inhalations, seventy-two exhalations. A small olive-coloured bird has fallen in love with the Quan Yin statue — the past few days it has been fluttering around Quan Yin's face, trying to penetrate her eyes. Counting my breaths downhill. The new master, the temple, the storehouse, the gates, the walled garden, the warrior tree — no matter how many I counted, the number seemed unreasonable.

Like the surface of the well, the drum was still.

Yang Fire

Rushing Pass

Voices entered our heads as we meditated: goats on the temple path, rain on our shoulders, the small cries of blossoms, smoke from cooking fires, angry shouts. Yet our words were gentle words.

W
ATER
D
OOR

Two boys swam out to rescue a cat in a tree collapsed across the river. They in turn required saving. Everyone in high spirits.

C
ENTRAL
I
SLET

The master has agreed to accept the boys. Three of us accompanied him down to the village where the women paused in their work and men came out of their makeshift huts. After a few minutes' silent greeting, the master explained that the boys would begin their training right away. The boys laughed and sneezed as he described the flows. The men drifted back inside their warm nests and the mothers touched their sons' foreheads, and then we followed the master to the temple where he took their fingers and traced a journey on his own body. The boys grew bored then sleepy, their eyes closing late in the afternoon. They would never again be so full of promise.

I made my way back to the village to see Song Wei. She was alone, near where the children were playing. One hundred steps took me across the bridge. This count had never happened before so I retraced my steps and the count was one hundred again. She pretended not to see me going back and forth.

I remember my son sobbing all night after finding out he'd failed the art school entrance requirements. He was twelve and knew his life had altered course. I bought for him a detailed model of a World War II Spitfire, complete with ground crew, but he built instead a tiny replica of the acropolis and my wife sliced off the tip of her finger cutting dowel for the pillars.

On the wall of my hut is Zhou's stag skin sewn onto its circular nut-branch. The pulse stored under the skin.

Y
ANG
P
OOL

Everything is possible. You love a person or you love no one. Lives begin and end in a rough instant or they never get started. God is alive in the world or not real. The middle of the ballpark is just that, minus the guesswork. You sit or stand, unaware of breathing, until you forget to breathe. Any number of zeros, without a prefix, accounts for the dead. Forever travels in small groups, never more than six. There are twelve types of chaos.

The master waited for me by the cave and turned in silence and I followed him up the path to Spring Shrine. We crouched and wet our mouths.

“It has been some years since I was last here,” he said.

“You have been here before, though.”

“Yes. When I was a boy I studied here.” He gestured toward North Gate. “I have never climbed all the way up the mountain.” We waited together as if for a signal. Eventually he raised his head and spoke in a quiet voice. “Once this mountain was under an old sea, and our sea was over another land.”

A goat screamed from across the valley.

“Is that Zhou Yiyuan,” he said, “or Zhou Yiyuan killing somebody?” He smiled.

“He says we will lose everything. He says it is inevitable.”

“What does he want?”

“I don't know.”

Time was preparing an evening meal. A family reunion feast. The familiar bend in the river hit me with force. It stunned me. I paused on the bank and didn't know whether I was east or west of the monastery. The birds fell all at once silent, as if exhausted, or as if working at something fiercer than song, shaping an internal storm that might carry them away unless they clutched their branches tight. With similar force the river flowed. Tonight the quiet was the absence of what we did, our own song and dance — monastery, well, garden, gates, bridge — quiet that would only expand with what we tried to do in darkness.

Toward the end of my marriage I was capable only of endless words. Each time we stopped talking, I struggled madly for the next words, knowing my wife only wanted more words, just as I longed for hers. She kept saying she wanted me to listen, and I said I was listening, and she said no, I was listening to the world as if it did not contain her.

When people fall out of love, they push each other around. We were trying so hard. But I did not know, really, what she wanted, and I didn't even think about what our son, alone in his room, wanted.

O
UTER
P
ASS

The master gathered us at the temple. “At the top of the mountain,” he said, “lives a young man who every moment changes to suit the moment's needs. He can't be seen because he adapts so quickly. He is just out of adolescence, and wild. When he runs, his legs and arms are untidy. His need for where he's going is breathtaking.”

Frank sat with a blanket round his shoulders, leading the chanting.

“The connection between us and the boy on the mountain will aid the success of human projects all over the world,” the master said.

“He is not sure what is going to happen,” said Frank.

I asked Zhou Yiyuan when I should beat the drum. He said I would know.

“The master wants to know what you want.”

“We travel the same path but in opposite directions.”

My over-charged system found the furniture rearranged, the right people in the wrong place, morals askew, exaltation and paranoia. Stage sickness call it, instinct locked into a vicious loop. I dried.

Zhou Yiyuan cackled; he crouched, grasped a fistful of dirt and tossed it west.

The reason I went to theatre school and then found an agent and then jobs, stage and screen, was to create a face and body acceptable to the world, but ultimately I was unacceptable to myself. I couldn't find the emotion and couldn't hold the line and couldn't time a response, and that spelled the end, that ended the spell.

River Mountain's one-point approach adjusted my pattern and (
he sold his red Lotus and voluntarily paid a retroactive carbon tax
) swept away my audience, neighbours and the dead, like so many brilliant leaves, and soon, at the end of my life-long skid, I will find myself toothless on a grand alluvial plain, unbelievably vast, one-third the planet, say. Just wait.

Like the birds or the cat or the boys, I must cling to what I know: the way the son grows into the father will determine how the father will lead or leave his son.

I would like to play the boy on the mountain. I'd look forward to his scenes, in the middle act, with Nietzsche and Parmenides, not to mention the wild girl. This would help me to puzzle out everything so I can tell Imogen when she comes. If reason is driven by desire, then lust accrues around a kernel of truth.

B
RANCH
D
ITCH

This is my place for now, to conjure from the mists lung and heart, river as drainage ditch, and rain to nourish the black pond. I hope one day to see my son; perhaps he will fly into the valley as clumsily as I once stuttered past my father's and mother's deaths. My own waits down a crooked lane through windswept leaves, the broom fallen aside, a breeze in the long grass, no one to call.

A
NCESTRAL
M
EETING

Amid many broken things. Branches. Worm casts. An upturned beetle.

T
HREE
Y
ANG
S
PIN

I have found a stone more like a fish with glittering eyes than an egg, though I thought of placing it in a nest built this time of twigs and twine and lined with soft dry grass. I have been watching crows to improve my engineering skills. This kind of attention is free of learning, free of knowledge. And they laugh at me.

F
OUR
R
IVERS

Such self-deceit and pride. All I do is human, if a million years old, only the latest version of animal. I'm just another person holding aloft the next cruel or tender act to the night sky and opening his fingers. This notation measures my humanness.

Consider the distance from sky to earth and the distance from the top of your head to your chin. Consider low sun purring along the edges of trunks, branches, roofs and gates, and the constantly shifting sparks on a river. Childhood in each cell, and that death room down the crooked lane, from which you will not rise.

I remember being a boy sick in bed with a cold, home from school, the radio on, hearing distinct footsteps on the street, a barking dog . . . ultimately consumed by the smell of Dad returned late from work at twilight to say night-night before it got utterly dark.

S
KY
W
ELL

This day, sunny with perfume, loud with birdsong, I walked to the river and along, taking my time, and found the lakes shrinking. After months of grey the sky was sublime — the inside of a gorgeous bowl — although the coldness of night and winter were sulking somewhere behind the light. Meanwhile I study the drum, circle and skin.

C
LEAR
C
OLD
A
BYSS

We left the river hours ago and came through the bamboo, past the cave, by forest path to North Gate, and climbed steadily through the evergreens, and were in snow nearly to the tree line. The new master strode ahead of us. We were to discover the doorway between physical and spiritual passion, he told us. We must release our thoughts. There were four stages to all human endeavours, he told us. This uphill walk, for instance. First the scrambling feverish hurly-burly dyslexic beginning, all of us panting and staggering, calling for rest. Then our rhythmic rolling gait through synchronous slips of fragile nature. He stopped and grinned. “Soon,” he said, “will come the weary dogged dreamy struggle. And last the terrible stumbling climb. But we will not reach the top today.

“How do we achieve knowledge?” he asked.

The two boys at his feet adored him.

“By tracing the channels,” one said.

“How often?”

“Four times a day.”

“Why do locals leave food near the spring?”

“For the boy on the mountain!”

“What is the point to save the world?”

“The mountain!”

“Let's go.” He took each by the hand. “Let's find a dry place for the night.”

I held the question I wanted to ask, and found beneath a tree the broken blue shell of an egg and set it on a mossy stone. This secretive act reminded me of something I've been trying to do since the fall. My nest-building was a kind of self-promise.

Below us the river was red with ore stirred in high streams. The mountaintop, pure white, looked near enough to leap over. I closed my eyes and flew over the summit into the next valley as easily as I once flew through life.

D
ISPERSING
R
IVERBED

The master looked at me for a long time. We were above the tree line, watching the sunrise and listening to the bell ringing far below, our breath pluming.

“Zhou Yiyuan has been to see me,” he said. “You are in some trouble. Please think of one word a day for four days, then bring them to me.”

U
PPER
A
RM
M
EETING

If experience is assimilation — adaptive process born of instinct — then choice is a mill whose flour is safety. But what words?

S
HOULDER
C
REVICE

Knot.

A
PRIL

S
KY
C
REVICE

Story.

W
INDOW OF
H
EAVEN