A Year at River Mountain Read online

  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.

  SUPPORT THE MOUNTAIN

  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?

  SOARING UPWARD

  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.

  INSTEP YANG

  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.

  FEBRUARY

  KUNLUN MOUNTAINS

  I SPEND 1/1, THE LUNAR NEW YEAR 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.

  KNEELING SERVANT

  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.

  EXTENDING VESSEL

  It is snowing, slow and steady. All.

  GOLDEN GATE

  It is snowing, slow and steady. All but the music of that. All but the chanting of prayers. How can it be the start of spring? At East Shrine there’s only the smell of wet smoke. A thing is out of my system and it’s time to introduce something new. A new creature, a baby struggling into her world, come down from her tree. I request a sign from the valley or from the mountain, yet when night closes in it’s as you’d expect, quiet, cold.

  CAPITAL BONE

  Zhou Yiyuan has loosened more horror; he and I share another secret. Yet heavy snow prevents outside news from reaching us. This prolonged snowfall cuts us off and we are isolated, stranded. That and our measured routine, the keeping of festival days, our practice, keep us safe from the to and fro of armies.

  The quotidian’s a tunnel each of us squeezed through to get here, and we arrived just in time to face another threat.

  We performed a corner-field ritual this morning; we had to dig down through the drifts to the earth. The corners must be recognized or the fields become infertile. The corners must be acknowledged, otherwise the crops are confused.

  We vanished into the day’s first hour to contend with fog and waist-high snow and incomplete dark, and skirted the great banks, followed the tracks of small animals, until we were in a corner of the upper east terrace, where we used the length of knotted rope to bisect the angle of the two walls and our fingers couldn’t feel but somehow found the corner-point. And burned incense. It was cold, still. Nothing but smoke to send back to the world. No one to hear us, our chants like kids’ fading voices. The armies were out there, planning losses, and we too, as we made our way to the next corner, would soon be smoke. At dawn a thick fog lay on top of the snow and it was already as though we did not exist.

  Gong.

  In the corners we seek disorientation. Monks escape the world to be re-introduced as a kind of ghost story. Once all the corners are claimed, it doesn’t matter that the busy world — marine traffic, street traffic, air traffic — has scuffed our paths all the way back to where we started.

  Dawn. In my mouth a quick taste of fresh wood fibre, and before me the face, no, the eyes of someone I loved. Ah. There’s my own dog barking and my boy asleep in his cot. And, as I unlock the winter-door and enter, surprise surprise, there’s nothing to tell, no more than the briefest exchange of looks. And, oh yes, gratitude.

  BUNDLE BONE

  In these non-days and milky nights, monks and villagers forget their separateness and act as a single wave, a unified energy, with no discernible line to divide the two communities. Our every breath takes us underground and up into heaven. Frank has called the guards from the bridge.

  Above North Gate a hole in the snow has been discovered, a snow cave, an ice chamber, the shape and size of a child, yet empty.

  Some union has taken place, is happening right now, this winter. A moon struck through with a blade of sun. Inevitable, I suppose, now the master is dying.

  FOOT CONNECTED VALLEY

  And yet we are so different. We are the landed, they the migrant tribe. We are vertical, they horizonta
l. From us they receive hospitality and protection. From them we receive a cold respect. Our master, the fortieth since the founding of the order, has said we require them because they are the quick cunning future, the glimmer on the horizon long after the day is done. Our old master is slowly turning, weighty enough, almost, to draw everything together. This new old blood, exiled and distilled and returned fresh, is a new drug, a new point of departure.

  Of course it is Zhou Yiyuan’s shout we hear in the night, and have been hearing since last summer, his voice sometimes low and murderous, other times high and keening. When I hear him now, I feel a kind of dawning comprehension, and imagine Song Wei somewhere down there asleep, the child inside her stretching out a hand.

  “Are you ready?”

  Without a word, he turned and I followed him, and we waded back to the nut trees, almost buried in snow, where he drew his blade and cut a single curved branch. “Bend this into a circle,” he said. “The valley will be safe as long as your people and mine are related.”

  I remember when I shifted the focus of my sexual energy from women to splinters of light. When was that? No, no, it happened, briefly. My foreskin cracked and blistered, a dry envelope, inside which was a letter written on parchment. I put away the parchment (wish I had it now) and the head of my penis reddened and white cracks appeared and infection took hold.

  REACHING YIN

  My dear friend,

  The master is unwell but wishes you to know that all in the valley is flowing, as it should for an aspect of the Great Transformation. We can always use money. We prepare for your presence, and expect you.

  The snow is melting. Silent waveless eternity has washed up on these dripping branches, roofs, hats, noses, fingers. Streams have fed the field-pools and we are on the edge of a sea still as glass, the far trees upside down and the bridge only inches above the surface.

  I dreamed of my son. He was a young man and I was furious at him for parking my car below the tide-line overnight and we looked out of the window in the morning and only the roof was showing.

  At first it seemed to come from the far side of the lake, then from overhead, then was picked up by other voices throughout the valley. News of the master’s death in the flight of arriving birds. Thousands descending at once into the arrow-straight bamboo, and waterfowl splashing, clearly joyous, in the middle of the lake.

  My ex-wife died at winter solstice and I went to Emergency with my hurt hand and began to talk to strangers.

  There’s no question of the existence of these people, this place. And yet at night, when everyone is asleep, I believe I’m someone somewhere else. The habit’s old, a preparation for the play, almost automatic; as instinctive as talking to you to stave off loneliness. You have been here as long as I have, and we both believe in the slow development of this unfinished work, the gradual entanglement of two communities by the shore of a lake that will drain at the end of winter.

  Birdsong increases in volume through the day, then at sunset stops. A single sweet note from the temple bird perched on the warrior tree beyond the two gates. Above our heads the bell continues and men talk in quiet voices in the shadow of great events on the southern plain, while I stand at the edge, in the wings, holding on. I am a something, not-me. I can go crazy or grow wings. Wings from fins. Remember? This is why the valley is so fertile.

  Yin Water

  Gushing Spring

  Sometimes I want to leave it out, the point heading, forget the Gregorian calendar, counting the days. Some mornings. But when I write the point it’s like the first coffee of the day or a tiny green leaf. Or counting money. Spring anxiety opening all the vents along the kidney rivers, little gas jets dancing up. Remember? Remember. Light them quickly before everything in the past overshadows us and any spark will blow us sky-high.

  I was sweeping slush from the edges of West Shrine when Zhou ran to me, breathless, wild. He wished to know who the new master would be.

  What I said was unpremeditated. I asked how could another master enter a time like this? I said there would be no more masters.

  In his incomprehension was something to pity. His pathetic look annihilated all my anchors and sky-hooks and I found nowhere still, nothing organised. And in the flood of memory and raw demands of the present the New Year started. Tree frogs started. A bullfrog, after hunger and home were solved, after a good sleep, began to moan.

  Zhou backed away as if shamed. Before he loped down to the village he said we had something to finish.

  Tonight we carry the master’s body up the path to the death-cave.

  BLAZING VALLEY

  Hawk poised upon her real nest. Skip forward into night. The moment before meditation becomes sleep. Something is unwinding. Something . . . what?

  SUPREME STREAM

  Along the river is evidence of spring. The terraces are flooded, ready to plant. What else? Eerie silence to the south. Zhou Yiyuan and Song Wei inseparable.

  A monk was bitten by a villager’s dog, and women making brooms chased the dog away, and the monk sat abruptly on the path, bleeding. The wound in his calf was deep. I took him to the storehouse and bathed the punctures and bound his leg. We spoke quietly together about the villagers, even though his teeth were chattering, and he said he admired their toughness.

  Song Wei is an astoundingly beautiful spirit who snares men to keep her visible. One version of what I saw south of the river last summer. Today her obsidian hair flew as she pursued the dog.

  GREAT BELL

  One morning my son came home crying, covered in scratches and bruises from crashing his toboggan, and I ran a bath and washed him, naked and shivering, in the morning sun, steam filling the little room.

  And there was Song Wei, also naked, about to step into my bath, the light on her shoulders from the same sun, now a smear in frail cloud.

  There are many approaches to the scene last summer: one a trapdoor beneath my feet, one a rope dangling from the flies, one a rent in the clouds so the pen throws a shadow on the page. Tendrils from the scene lead to drowning. What else? Long illness. Poison. Suffocation. Blood loss. Massive trauma. Insufficient. A slow dissolve. Insufficient. Cancer. Coronary. Shock. Despair. Insufficient.

  The valley is not these words or what they describe, and words, even when they are not describing, or are describing what they are not describing, or trying to say what they can’t say, words are not the mountain, the river or the temple. A book is a collection of ghosts, each day’s entry a lattice of partial visions. If we examine together what has caught in the extended nervous system, note the burrs along the river of qi, threads and buttons and skin of this and that, a dry or moist accumulation, and turn a word into a sentence, perhaps, perhaps, we will be liberated. Ultimately, yes, finally, finally emptied of perspective.

  Crossing the Iron Workers’ Memorial Bridge with Jake. Each word a tower, a finished wonder. Iron Workers’ Memorial Bridge. A mending beyond mending that tends to heartbreak, joy, love, community. But ask these to show. Request a demonstration, a little taste, and what you get will be familiar beyond belief, as insignificant as the ceiling of my room, the ceiling of your room. Remember the old bathroom wallpaper you tore off and found older paper beneath, and older paper beneath that, and beneath that fresh-picked roses? Or this. You sat in the tub and washed the one you loved, but when you turned to tell someone, she or he had gone.

  The valley’s like an accident, a mistake. Misalignment. Harmonic. Overtone. The fox, trotting the bounds of the monastery day in day out, his pace gradually slowed by age to a painful walk, his eyes still bright, stopped one night as though to let something large cross his path, and his head swung left before he died and fell.

  Love will and will not be the beautiful woman climbing the hill each day at the same hour, skirting the forest and passing my hut, her steps measured as she flows uphill and turns east to the clearing where the shrine has burned, where new shoots define the circle of charred ground.

  You read each word, but what’s
really going on? If logos begins the winding up, what attends the end-fuck, aside from a pain greater and deeper than any before, aside from a separation of this from that, aside from a fleeting seamless thisthat? To avoid a bridge of bones I write all night in the opposite direction. (Remember the child from Ethiopia?) To the left of the disintegration there is a movement, a kind of animal homecoming.

  There is no one but you to ask what is the purpose of all this, what have we come here to do, on whom are we spying and to whom should we report. We have information, a billion years’ worth. Who waits to assemble our receipts?

  Can we filter the vital from the insignificant and find a pattern, set the parameters by ancestral tradition, bring science to bear, raid the armoury? Oh and how much of ourselves should we donate to the mission?

  Look. Smoke of returning gangs through the trees. Soon the river will find its summer banks. Zhou Yiyuan was right about summer war.

  Meanwhile I dream of Imogen, and am troubled by Song Wei who climbs the hill every day; I watch for her to come but never see her descend. The master is dead.

  WATER SPRING

  Everything falls. Sunlight on the trees, on our shoulders. My sense of what I am doing, what we are doing. Something: I entered the master’s cold room, forbidden, and in a corner found one of Zhou Yiyuan’s carved figures. No one had been there since we lifted the master’s body to the cave. I lay down on the floor and watched the dusty air above my head simmer in a shaft of sun. How busy were those few inches above the ground.

  SHINING SEA

  Eye in the dust, the world obliterated. The plains occupied. Footsteps approached, paused, then faded away and the room slept, mats, table, figure, pots dreaming, as outside came slowly in with its trees and sky.