A Year at River Mountain Page 13

  This is where he slept and dreamed. No one would recognise the nest.

  What happened was I entered my parents’ room (down the monster corridor) to nourish their union and they hauled me in.

  Now I’m building a nest for you to hatch your own sons and daughters in.

  Hieros Gamos.

  RETURNING CURRENT

  Stood for an hour in the morning rain. Iron Workers Memorial Bridge.

  No more meridians or points, no need in the New World. Night veiled the tops of trees. All the monks stood in the rain and mud after the chores of the day, facing north, the wishing tree to our left, the well to our right, warrior tree farther right. Neither rotting nor transforming. Frozen blue. Unused by anything that matters. Not alone, unless we are all alone. A fixity.

  Zhou Yiyuan stopped by East Shrine. “Song Wei is by the river. Go.”

  “I don’t need you to give her to me,” I said.

  EXCHANGE BELIEF

  Mine was a small East Vancouver house, attended by a wife and son, though with more rooms than we were comfortable with. We grew thin and ravaged. Debt increased. No one got out intact.

  I told Frank everything on a visit to his mound. He listened and picked his nose but said nothing.

  Grass growing up through the water. The swaying patterns at odds with reflections. Disturbed and still. Budded plum trees shelter soggy monks in silent mourning. We cannot find colour yet, only greys.

  When will the credits roll?

  GUEST HOUSE

  Two men crossed the snowy bridge, a pathologist and an actor, headed by car to the Vancouver airport, chattering loudly from fear of loss and fear of being lost, since one must leave and the other stay, and then the goodbyes were quick.

  Inanimate an intimation of animate. Growth everywhere: hill, field, bank. Winter, the season of loss, is leaving us. A master, his last year, going west.

  YIN VALLEY

  Every day we stand together for hours, exhausted. He is not with us, not with me. His spirit has gone to ground. A sturdy length of time must pass while one monk carries the prayer, the rest of us asleep on our feet.

  PUBIC BONE

  No longer encumbered with a body, he slides from his cave through underground passages to appear in this ink and leave a muddy residue that clots the nib.

  The cave was once a cinnabar mine and before that a human dwelling and before that a bear-den, according to claw marks high on the walls. Outside the entrance are green tailing hills; quicksilver still surfaces to gleam in ditches.

  Our robes are filthy from trudging to and from the cave, several monks coughing. On the way to the storehouse I stopped at a water barrel and looked down at my face, the thick fur of algae vivid on the inner sides of the barrel. Villagers passed quietly behind me on their way from the storehouse, having assumed permission to borrow tools to work new terraces. They continued downhill, past all the monks standing in rows, heads bowed.

  Later, I heard them working, farmers with one foot raised and an eye on the river and the far shore. Dressed simply, exalting in the mild wind, their hands steady. And now it’s night, I hear them clacking stones in their fists and singing.

  GREAT LUMINANCE

  They live by the river, at risk, ready to escape. We live above the river, still trying to bind together the mountain’s sky and the river’s sea. I can’t help thinking of what Zhou has said, that they are the privileged and we the homeless, we the newcomers and they the first people, even though we have been here seven hundred years and they arrived yesterday.

  East of the valley the river bolts white into a rock throat to be released, after a mile of solitude, black and sullen on its last supple meanders through the green alluvial plain. I stood above the gorge with Song Wei, looking down from a height of twenty metres, dizzy a moment — would the water be deep should we step into air and join the torrent? On all fours I grasped the red path with spread fingers. Song Wei was laughing, her eyes dancing. “What is it?”

  “I don’t want to lose you.”

  QI CAVE

  One side of the valley is about to leap into spring; the other threatens to collapse backward into winter. The bell sleeps and we cherish idleness. The paths, every puddle, stone and turn, are perfectly known. The sky does not exist at all since we do not look up. Ducks swim the expanded river, and geese returning from their southern campaigns splash-land among them. What in me resists all this? What in me wants to concentrate only on whether Imogen will or won’t come at the end of summer? A lover, a goose. A fox in a girl’s arms.

  FOUR COMPLETIONS

  Two fish swimming in opposite directions. Big dipper aloft, stirring the pot all night, in a fizz of remote stars. I’m a boy, four thousand years old, aware of my Western alignment, hefting the lamb over the dying bull, then abandoning the lamb, and sitting down beside old Mercurius, old pickpocket, fishing the empty ocean, to wait for the sweet water-bearer to come sailing down.

  What are we? The axiom of Maria: 3, 2, 1, blastoff! What are we? Trying to get to the bottom of things, Hierosgamos at the beginning? What a concept. We’re so back-assward.

  One warm day in the middle of June 1958 a crane stretched to complete the steel truss cantilever bridge across the Second Narrows between Vancouver and the North Shore, and the fifth anchor span was too heavy for the temporary arm holding it; seventy-nine workers fell and eighteen were drowned in Burrard Inlet, weighed down by their tool belts.

  The monastery was established on the ruins of a mining village, one the Emperor destroyed because most of the workers and many villagers sickened and died. The Emperor himself lost his reason when the red ore was brought into the palace.

  MIDDLE FLOW

  Roosters call and answer, we answer the bell, and the living answer the dead. Cold fog steals through thin watery light, west to east, and then reverses as morning sun burns through.

  VITALS SHU

  What’s hidden is poisonous when brought to light and I am infected.

  SHANG BEND

  Truth is I need meat and sex, not this thin light. Couldn’t get out of bed today. The tethers were so fucked up, I had to be cut loose by the orderlies. Pissed myself. One said, “Give it a break. Give it up.” The other said, “Poor sod, he’s had enough.”

  Spring is beginning, heralded by raucous coupling crows and great flocks of birds shifting through regions of sky — passerines in short flights around the trees, raptors navigating the high pale blue, and waterfowl beating and cavorting anywhere there’s a puddle.

  STONE PASS

  Not only does the river flood its banks and retreat to a trickle, but sometimes it seems close to the mountain and sometimes far away. Last night’s snowfall looks like a wave on the temple roof above the gold curve.

  “Hold Stone Pass (kidney channel meeting penetrating vessel) to deal with fear, to deal with blood stasis in the uterus and to deal with infertility.” I pressed the point on my own body. “Half a thumb out from the midline between the navel and lowest rib.”

  Song Wei and Zhou Yiyuan were listening.

  “Liver is the time to choose. First house of the day, in fire’s shadow. Now hold Gate of Hope, Liver-14, Cycle Gate, end of the twelve meridians, under the floating rib on the left side — here, find the branch of pain. These two points, you see, are close together, yin and yin, wood and water, anger and fear.”

  When I returned uphill to the lines of monks, the wind was blowing. I took my place and frozen bits of ice blew off the branches into our faces.

  “I believe Zhou Yiyuan is trying to help us,” I said.

  YIN METROPOLIS

  Bright mountain crow-crossed, blue-edged except for vapour. New parts are being handed out. Someone’s being tortured. Someone’s strapping on explosives. Someone’s sharpening a machete. And we need a new master. No one is the obvious choice, of course. Soon we will know who we are. We’ll keep our line orderly, keep our biographies and appointments up to date.

  This morning on my way up the path to the te
mple I was stopped by the whooping taunts of owls. I paused to watch shadows crossing, silent looping lines among the dark trees. Two cat-faced owls stared at me from a low branch.

  OPEN VALLEY

  Spent the day with my dear parents, discussing football standings with Dad, showing him how to access the Internet — he cannot get the hang of the mouse — smelling something sweet on his breath, whiskey it was, mixed with aftershave, his smell. Dad’s fingers were too big for the keyboard; he was worried about his coming surgery; Mother was in the doorway grinding her teeth and tremulous as a caught sparrow.

  Then they went away and the night was dark. Snow fell, then moonlight, then more snow.

  MARCH

  I CAME TO RIVER MOUNTAIN TO BE SHOCKED. But shock, as I record these fat-budded trees and singing frogs, seems paltry. I smelled it then it was gone. For years I thought of nothing but the systems and rituals of the monastery, every day carrying what the master assigned me to carry. Nothing needed to happen, except in dreams, in meditation and through the meridians of the monks and farmers, and the river, as it had for millennia, brought all we required, season after season, while the mountain held us fast.

  When a story or novel is turned into a film some essence, if not alchemised, is lost. Some mythic dimension is bartered for the moment. When experience is turned into writing the original must die. (But it’s true, it’s true: I gave the talk at theatre schools and acting workshops for years!) Alchemy requires yin and yang: a container, material, and process. The valley, these inhabitants, this work. When a player steps out of his role, the experiment is reduced to unstable elements. Since Imogen set foot in the valley all has been Eden, tree, serpent — God! I am the crack she has entered.

  Ah, the sun breaks through the clouds and there’s a goat in the cut where two paddies meet: we’re on the right track.

  SECRET GATE

  In the night Frank knocked on my door to tell me Zhou Yiyuan had killed a warlord from North Valley. He sat on his heels, looking off to one side. A mouse hurried about the room. “Your dwarf has been boasting. Apparently this summer there will be a terrifying conflict.”

  “What can we do?”

  “You talk to him. Find out if he has any real power. There’s something else.” Frank was blinking with exhaustion. “The death master will arrive tomorrow.”

  “Who?”

  “The death master.”

  “But who is he?”

  “Temporary help.” Frank showed his teeth.

  “The new master?”

  “He will spend nights in the cave, listening to the master’s spirit.”

  “Then he will be the new master?”

  My mother crosses the bridge to this side. She’s nothing less than Quan Yin, Mother Mary dressed in cool blue light, her feet leaving tiny prints in the muddy snow. She says she’s looking into less and less challenging roles; as always she carries her mug of black coffee, her list of worries, and is humming a pop song.

  CORRIDOR CLIMB

  I trotted the polished track up to the nut grove in high-keyed orange light, and found Zhou Yiyuan waiting by the tree. Across the river smoke from the cave fire smudged the mountain. Below us, on the edge of the road, monks were gathered.

  “What do you know about him?” said Zhou.

  “Nothing.”

  A tremor to the air as the bus groaned and subsided. Around us a horizontal battle scroll unwound as the death master stepped down, warriors picking up their swords and flying at one another. Exhaust fumes attended the rattling vanishing bus as the monks led him to the bridge.

  “This is promising,” Zhou said. His eyes reflected the river’s last light. “When will I meet this man?”

  “What is happening out there?” I pointed south.

  “The fighting has moved farther west.”

  The death master is middle-aged, tall and thin, with long black hair and an angular face with prominent bones. We monks faced him at the big gate at midnight.

  “Have any of you read Kant?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  We watched him parse the knotted string across the gate.

  “What drives us isn’t what we think,” he said. “Reason always contradicts itself. By reason we always divide.” He coiled the string and laughed; we all laughed.

  The weather has turned dull and the temperature has dropped. We were shaking as we crossed the storehouse courtyard through blowing snow.

  SPIRIT SEAL

  All day preparations for the new era, half of us digging past fresh snow and soil and the others carrying frozen clay down to repair the floodwall. The minor shrine we pass reminds us that a monk hid there long ago and watched men battling across the valley.

  SPIRIT RUINS

  Thousands of ducks bank east on a warm breeze. An eagle flies overhead. First blossoms arrive along with news of distant battles and attacks and massacres. Beneath the mountain we wait: by the cave warming the death master’s rice; guarding the bridge; in the boughs of the warrior tree; in a circle in the storehouse courtyard. Village women have hung flags from branches along the cave path.

  The summer before last Imogen walked among us in a white dress and sandals and we stopped praying. We had no work. Behind her the grey river heaved in rising mist.

  The briefer the exposure, the smaller the aperture, the higher the resolution of the image, and the greater the capacity for close-up; all depends on light and the lens. The lens through which this world is projected is finely scratched and the speakers can’t handle the wind-in-bamboo frequencies.

  SPIRIT STOREHOUSE

  New ink for my pen and rain all morning, small quake last night. I must see Zhou. I must speak to the new master. Not yet. First talk to Frank. Something is shaking loose.

  I watched a slow beetle crawl the edge of what must have seemed a vast sea. It’s love manifest with a couple of options. Slide downhill, zigzag uphill, or move to a new neighbourhood. Remember a dog on each lawn, daily trips to the city, coyotes and gangs roaming in packs? Every beetle, of course, belongs in a hole or a tunnel. I’m describing her progress along the shore of the great lake to close the gap between us, something like that. As Imogen knows, written lines of dialogue precede the players; the Greek chorus is reborn in the vacillating subject-object of the movie theatre; epic boardroom confabulations ghost the domestic shadow box. Whatever, we seem determined to shift some raw blunt thing into the next cavity. At last the beetle disappeared inland, headed west.

  Deeper and deeper we settle into sleep, as the ground shakes, the valley crumbles, and the river sweeps it all away. Imogen in her white summer dress was a living spirit; her body was clean lines and foam.

  Likewise, the hole we dug today was deep and great in diameter, an almost perfectly round pond. We dug to water and kept going, but the hole was impossible to control, the sides caving constantly into brown water. Impossible to dig and yet we continued, all of us hurling spades of mud into the rainy air, until mud and spades were a blur and we couldn’t raise another drop. Swans peered at us over the edge and shrikes called back and forth overhead and the river ran away mocking.

  Of course, such struggle is customary, and bodies are obliquely familiar, like daylight. Who the hell should I consult?

  MIDDLE ELEGANCE

  My father gave me his wallet and watch to look after while he had his surgery and in the wallet was a picture of my mother taken on their honeymoon. Black and white, dogeared, private. She’s in a doorway, facing the street, one toe dangling over the threshold. He had the tumour removed from his colon and a stoma opened in his belly to take the colostomy bag. He told me he’d visited his own father in hospital when I was six or seven. It wasn’t far from where he worked and he’d drop in every evening on his way home for a half-hour chat until his dad died.

  Last night, shy of sleep, I kept watch with the new master over the body in the cave. The old master, with his round dry face and downturned mouth, lay on the cold packed
dirt, his gentle brown eyes and shock-white hair gone away.

  The temperature has risen and decay lingered at the cave mouth. The new master told me he had hiked the lower mountain paths.

  “Yes?”

  “Have you often been to the top?”

  “Not often.”

  “Have you seen the Rockies?”

  “Yes.”

  He was so happy to hear this. His fingers, long and thin, twined in his lap. “Tell me about the Rockies.”

  My sister and I took turns with our father, back and forth across the country, to and from the hospital, shepherding our fractious mother, until the end. What amazed me at his death was the realisation that he had always been with me, even though I’d taken him for granted.

  Signs of spring grow more blatant. Zhou Yiyuan and Song Wei exhibit a nervous restlessness. Change, major change, seems unavoidable.

  SHU MANSION

  My parents again, sightseers, are rambling through the valley, taking in the bridge, the storehouse, the shrines, six views of the mountain, five views of the river. I stumble into them at the high garden wall.

  They do not speak, but stand together at the gate, white-haired and inconceivably dear, nodding their heads at the first plum blossoms, affected and puzzled that they cannot enter. They do not understand this life. What they did, deliberately or accidentally, to nudge me into the world, we will not do here. My mother talks about the ocean. She says the sea is all she cares about now. “I made mistakes,” she says. “I fucked up. I had a lot of fun but I was mostly miscast.”

  Dad says, “Preston North End one, Liverpool nil, at Anfield.”

  Unlikely.

  My mum’s a nervy wave clattering onto a pebble beach. Dad’s a disappointed fan. But at least here they don’t have to boost their relationship.

  Yin Fire