A Year at River Mountain Page 3

  Whatever they are, gypsies or refugees, they danced this afternoon, down by the river while grass-fires smoked in hot light. The scene glowed red. Ah. That question. Mummy and Daddy, why did I give up on my boy? That question’s old in the room of what’s to come; that room will never be complete. The shadows of this room have occupied me recently. They run like rivers. The master’s face. The girl who nearly drowned.

  HEAVEN’S TRIPOD

  The bridge is of corrugated metal over a bamboo frame; slung across the widest part of the river, it rides nine pylons in a series of swoops that give the effect of humpback hills. The cement footings are uneven, sunk into dry mud. From the middle of the bridge you can’t see either end because of dust. The riverbanks are obscured by hanging dust this time of year. You can tell when someone else is on the bridge by the swaying.

  I stopped still and listened. Someone else had also stopped to listen.

  I was an actor. I earned my bread by acting, on the stage and before the camera.

  I made a cage of my forearms and enclosed my head and rested my elbows on the railing. A shrill cry: hawk quartering the blank paddies.

  On stage or on the set, I wore amulets and disguises. I required protection from nerves, inherited from my ambitious mother, who was also afraid, also an actor.

  Perhaps this is a sanatorium not a monastery, this role not what I thought it was, and I am approaching the time when questions must be asked of the medical staff. There must have been interviews and assessments and family visits. In any case my pockets were full of river-stones and I started to arrange them along the corrugations of the bridge.

  SUPPORT THE PROMINENCE

  At the bottom of the valley the numbers are increasing, with more tents every day and at night loud and frantic music. The makeshift village sprawls on both sides of the river, scribed by tiny moving lights. Perhaps I’ve accomplished all I have to accomplish here. There seems nothing more to do except continue my routines and wait. It is the time of year, no doubt. The sadness of late summer.

  MOUTH GRAIN CREVICE

  Everything dying, only the great bell through the day to speak this valley and its forested hills. I can just hear the wind through the temple grounds shaking the small bells. The berries, past ripe, rot on green canes. My shrine is beautiful, remote, a long way west of the cultivated fields, below the masters’ cave. There’s a story about this clearing. A massacre took place once upon a time, men killed and women tied to trees and raped. The oldest hardwoods in the region grow around me, their trunks charred black. West Shrine is a place most of us avoid after dark. It hasn’t rained for more than a month and dry leaves lie thick on the ground. The top branches stir the sky in a lazy way. At the far edge of the clearing are the bones of a deer that came to die. This morning I sat here and closed my eyes and saw a great hall, almost without limit, whose vaulted ceiling was black curved branches and whose floor was red leaves. Now geese, more geese, cross the river; their cries will turn me from the shrine and trudge me back home.

  WELCOME FRAGRANCE

  They are building down there in the river trees. They’ve been working for the past three days, hammering, sawing. A small stage, pale in the evening light, a pale rectangle in the green trees. The women have been stitching together bits and pieces for a carpet. I will walk down and talk to them.

  SEPTEMBER

  Yang Earth

  Container of Tears

  ON EITHER SIDE OF THE PATH to the cliff is a margin of black bamboo around thick green tangled forest. The wild lands quivered, green blades twirled. Quick stink of rot — dead fawn — the dirt blazing red as I advanced, glimmering black-red, rising with each step. I was almost there, turning back through the memory of days with my family, filling my lungs with spicy dust and vapour infused with that intense green.

  The cliff is not obvious until the path and the forest end, and then there’s only pale wet air ahead and the river far below rushing for the dark gorge.

  Upstream there was banging and sawing; but I was too taken with a blinding headache to consider what was going on, except there were women working as well as men, women like giant flowers come loose from the forest. Children swam in the river. Their voices were with me even there, where the cliff crumbled slightly at the edge.

  FOUR WHITES

  A bellyache and no appetite. I shat everything out and got dizzy and went down to the encampment and wandered like a ghost among the villagers. They are small people with dark skins, quick to smile, not alarmed by the presence of a Westerner in monk’s garb, yet not inclined to speak either. A faint rotten smell off the river. The rescued girl saw me and ran to hide. By noon I had to lie down and sleep in the shade of a big river tree. What? I woke up asking myself. What is it?

  I vomited all afternoon.

  GREAT CREVICE

  Slept under the stars with three other monks. Woke in terror to footsteps in the fallen leaves. It must have been midnight. I lay bathed in sweat, trembling and prepared for assassins, and saw soft animal faces among the branches and the stars and remembered the fawn on the cliff path two days ago, her eyes black with flies. She had not been dead long; she had not lived long either, perhaps four months. A kind of circular song shook my body until morning.

  I had a conversation with a young woman on the bridge. She and I were crossing in opposite directions. For my part, I was coming back from collecting supplies from the bus; she was leaving the settlement for some guilty occupation, or so it seemed from the way she hurried, and kept her eyes on the corrugated deck, only looking up at the last moment.

  She stopped and said, “You are ill.” In her small dark face was the ripple of a question. Perhaps just concern. Perhaps fear: she was in the territory of men who do not farm or go out to hunt.

  “Yes. I am feeling unwell.”

  “I hope you will soon feel better,” she said.

  We stood still. I set down my load. A warm fragrant breeze blew from the fields. Dust swept against our faces. We turned together to listen to it hiss through the river trees.

  “Do you hear a child singing?” she said.

  “It’s only wind in the cables.”

  We stepped to the edge, our clothes flapping.

  “It is in the river,” she said. “Up there.” She pointed upstream at a distant tangle of branches and bamboo. “Where my son drowned.” She looked at me in fierce sorrow and turned away. I watched her cross the bridge to the road and disappear.

  What sights we witnessed in each other on that bridge under the weight of a child’s death. And she was beautiful, proud, hurt, angry. Beneath me the current had wrapped a blue plastic bag around one of the pylons.

  EARTH GRANARY

  The settlement woman was probably twenty-six or twenty-seven though she carried her small dense slender body with the self-conscious ferocity of a girl. Her face and arms, especially her neck, were dusky, such a contrast to Imogen’s fair skin. Just now a heron laughed. I am not myself. I’m cold, then hot. My stomach and sides and upper arms have a bright red rash, though the nausea has passed. I’m concerned to know whether she has returned to this side of the river, my imagination fired by images of her meeting a lover or an enemy alone on the desolate country road. Delirium draws me to embroider the story with darker shades of violence. Actors play out such stories in discrete, disjoint, feverish units, making films.

  A moment ago the bell sounded the start of night. Down below, a circle of torches burns, voices and drumbeats rising into the air, fading and surging with the intermittent wind.

  Now it is quiet but for the occasional laughter and yowls and hoots of men.

  In my hot fevered state I sense invasion, forced change, instability. Six crushed beer cans found under the old cedar above East Shrine have fed my new fear of roving gangs. Some of these men are not as poor as they seem and are venturing freely through our community and onto the lower slopes of the mountain. Unfamiliar, unwelcome, especially when we’re preparing for autumn.

  The master
told me I was about to do something sacred or forbidden, but he would not say what. Something to dispel wind-heat. Sitting with him earlier this evening, I was light-headed.

  “Do you know what you will do?” he said.

  “I feel like buying cigarettes.”

  He laughed.

  “Or perhaps I need to get rid of something.”

  The master said to calm my thoughts and loosen my robe. “I will balance your body.” He lit a candle and I undid my clothes. The rash on my chest was a range of angry red hills on a white plain. What strange diminishing fevers! Then I felt complete, seamless, as though death might be tomorrow, death the next turn, the new direction.

  GREAT WELCOME

  A slim woman in a short black dress and her arms full, slung her hip against the edge of her car door to slam it shut, the action turning her toward me; her complicit grin was outside time, outside language. Now it’s tucked safe in memory’s closet to be brought out on an occasion like this. The end of summer. The first day of school. I was on my bike and just aware of women’s bodies and hers was young and wise and poised and wide open: hip shot for balance, leg extended, knee bent; inches of thigh.

  What else?

  A woman in a black dress. A glossy black car. A flurry of forbidden activity. A leap of some kind, then, over something my father had already tamed.

  JAW BONE

  There you are. My goodness. Audience member, reader, witness.

  I’m cool again and safe for now from external pernicious influences, and remembering my wife’s cunt, how it opened when I sat before it, that beautiful cowled monk above the petal gate — surely the point of points when all the channels are singing! I won’t see another, not in that glorious way.

  Curlicues of river current are repeated in the heated air. My chills were simple echoes of what is always spinning through the breezes and mirages. My body knew women’s bodies. My body used to know my mother’s body. And my wife’s body was the strategic bridge from that past to this future.

  Women are agents or spies; they travel without portfolios. What a mood I’m in! And what about children? These children are a reminder of my own child. They are also reminders of a boy who has drowned.

  BELOW THE JOINT

  The water rose over the child’s head and his hands shaped something delicate below the surface, some earthen artefact old as bones, a hello to darkness.

  Two pretty children played by the river where cold water ran swiftly at that deep place regardless the season.

  Excessive cold along my spine, along the midline from sternum to pubic bone, makes me unsure I will be alive by the time Imogen comes, a year from now. This central channel reminds the body it was once a single cell dividing into two. I can feel a daily shift in my surface pulses, below which is madcap frenzy, and there are many indications of change in the valley, too, that suggest fire overacting on water. By next summer all will have changed.

  The village woman’s name is Song Wei. Her child, I have learned, was a boy named Suiji. He drowned after falling from a rocky outcrop when playing with his friend. Water will not wet his skin again; air will not dry him. And the girl has not spoken since the accident.

  Fearful as a rabbit, I sit on my haunches and grasp the pen and write words to wake the god who will want them. The master says it is good to write. Sun on the horizon trees, the river whitely brimming. A small bell tinkles close by — one of the children. Then voices, men speaking in low tones. My brothers are at their various occupations, just as I am at mine. All of us elements in the moment beyond moments. The bell is circling me. An invisible child playing a game. Like me, you will sicken. Like me you will heal. My wife sickened and died, though we were already divorced. And I’m getting well again. Are you still there? Yes? Like mine does now, as I stand up to see the child, your shadow crosses the paths of others who don’t notice. You cross the paths of others who love you. Like mine, your body will give up the ghost. One thing more: ghosts here are different than ghosts in the West.

  HEAD’S BINDING

  Today I went down to the bridge and crossed without knowing what I was doing. Crossing the bridge was like encountering resistance in a point, say triple warmer fifteen, Heavenly Crease, though the discordance was fleeting. What I have learned here is that nothing is entirely my own. Between heaven and earth, as Shakespeare knew, runs a current that we vertical ones must transmit or suffer the consequences. Put more than two of us together and we collect what the universe throws at us, but don’t know what to do with it. Only two and the container has a kind of perfection. What I feel might be what you are feeling; only lifetimes of whimsy and intuition — not interpretation — will shade the difference between us. What delight and misery!

  I looked down from the middle of the bridge. While not quite leaping up and waving bandanas at me, the river people, some of them children, were looking in my direction, some with expectation in their eyes. Already I recognised many, though some seemed distant, seemed to belong to other times and places.

  Across the bridge, outside the monastery, I was entirely alone. Ah. If I remove myself from results then everything I do will set in motion energy along the path that needs the juice; every intersection will light up like a transit schedule.

  MAN’S WELCOME

  On the bridge home at noon I met someone again, not the woman but a small man, a dwarf with a large head of black hair and the blackest eyes, who was leaning over the rail scanning the water below. He’d seen me and as I approached gave me such a look that I stopped in my tracks. I waited beside him for further acknowledgement while he returned to his searching. The sun came out of the grey sky, hot on my back. The weather was unsettled. Rain had fallen in the night and it had been cloudy all day. We watched mist flowing around both banks and in and out of the forest. Perhaps he was waiting for the river to reflect these changes. We stood an hour in silence, during which time I had the feeling we were in conversation already, and it was not going well. The perfection between two beings seemed unlikely. My stomach went from unease to embarrassment, then to such shame that I couldn’t move. Eventually he spoke. The sun burned deeper into my back. Hot nails into metal and fire points: pericardium, lungs, heart. I glanced down at the water and saw something float by and at the same instant the man’s shoulders hunched and he got down on his knees and gripped the sharp metal edge of the bridge.

  “My sister, Song Wei, has lost her husband and now her child,” the dwarf whispered.

  WATER PROMINENCE

  We spread carpets under the plum trees in the margins of the storehouse courtyard in order to practice point location and the subtle pulses. The monk I worked on was the youngest among us. He giggled when I felt for Kunlun Mountains behind his ankle where water meets fire in the heavenly star point.

  I found it difficult to concentrate. I couldn’t stop thinking of the meetings on the bridge.

  The boy monk had dusky skin like Song Wei’s. His body had weak pulses on the left, and gall bladder felt like a kite in gusts of wind. Around us, monks were murmuring the names of points, and for a moment I got lost and couldn’t feel the pattern of his deeper paths. Song Wei’s face wouldn’t go away. Nor would her son Suiji’s identical drowned face.

  When it was my turn to lie on the carpet, the young monk said my pulses were big, bigger than usual, too big, like proud judges! Circulating sex, kidney, wham, wham, wham!

  QI ABODE

  Every morning the sun lights the bamboo outside the storehouse window; this is the first thing we see when we sit down to eat, after the body’s electricity has left the core for the skin and the orifices are wide and dreams have ebbed to leave bits of image and sensation in pathways of the strange flows.

  Yang bridge, couple point, Back Ravine, Small Intestine-3, edge of each hand between the root of the little finger and the wrist. I hold this, talking to heart’s minister near the inner frontier gate. How’s it going?

  I kiss the jumping skin of my inside wrist and the minister responds. “
Hold qi abode, those notches either side of Celestial Chimney, that pocket above the centre of the sternum.”

  The dwarf came today to ask, on behalf of the rest of the village, if they might attend the next shrine festival. I was late for meditation, on my way to the temple. He touched my hand and backed into the forest and said he wished to present a petition to the master from their counsel of elders, all of whom, he said, were women. He glanced up at me and asked for my name and I shook my head. I had another encounter with his black glistening eyes and experienced his body this time as a proud nerve encysted in dense muscle. As I looked, the muscle relaxed and black waves rolled out — physical violence, or something more dreadful.

  “I am Zhou Yiyuan,” he said, and bowed. “Because you have come from far away, from another country, my people think you are the one to represent our interests in the valley to your master.”

  “Who are your people?”

  “The first to live in these valleys.” He stooped and looked around, a dumb show of caution. “No one remembers that we were forced north. And now the north that nursed us has buckled and blood runs under the mountains and we are the flow manifest.” And he cackled to himself: “There is no war in this country. There is no discontent in this region.”

  “You would like an introduction to the master?”

  “Yes. At a ceremony.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “We count on the blessings of people who understand the true position of human beings. We were farmers. Now our villages are floating. We are a remnant that acknowledges other remnants. I tell you this because you know nothing. We have been pushed farther and farther north into remote regions. Now the ground will not respond. We dwindle with each generation. It is time for us to come home.”