A Year at River Mountain Read online

  EMPTY BASIN

  “Zhou Yiyuan requests a place at the autumn festival.”

  The master looked at me sharply. “For himself?”

  “For his people.”

  “All of them?”

  “The elders, I think. Women.”

  “No.” The master’s willingness to hear me was at an end. “How did you meet this man?”

  “His sister, Song Wei, is the mother of the drowned boy, Suiji.”

  The master stared at me then waved his hand. “Let another monk bring me information. These people have no names. We will not speak again.” He shivered as if cold and closed his eyes. “He must be your master now. Meet with him. Meet as often as you like.”

  The rest of our meeting was silent. My qi looked out at the arrangement he had set in front of me. I could not put aside Song Wei’s name or her face or her grief. And now her brother: how could this squat man’s anger have anything to do with me? I felt fear ripple the surface of my skin.

  QI DOOR

  I remember a boy with an AK47 running down a busy street and pedestrians scattering as the boy fired at shop windows and into the crowd and at stopped cars, drivers and passengers spilling into the street. The boy began turning in a slow circle, firing bursts at those standing till most everyone was lying down, trying to crawl away or get behind a car. My wife was crying. We were both crying. We had been drinking coffee at a café, talking about the final division of property, years after our separation. This was before Amsterdam. Our own boy, who had delayed university for a job in the North Sea, was this boy’s age. For days the sudden onset of tears. No control as the weeks went by. Our son’s voice on the phone, at least with me, was terse and noncommittal.

  Today was overcast, with cool wind whipping through the long grass in the fields by the river, hissing in the bamboo, then the lonely dry sound of crickets. On the path to West Shrine, inexplicably, I found a crumpled black robe, old and musty, with face-like markings on one side, so I hung it in a tree beneath one of my manufactured nests.

  STOREHOUSE

  “What did your master say?” Zhou Yiyuan asked.

  “He won’t meet you.”

  He leaned to one side. “People are in ignorance of what is about to happen.”

  I was visiting him in his lair, a kind of lean-to at the centre of the ramshackle settlement, and the sky drew our attention, clouds streaming continuously westward, their patterns repeated on the lower slopes of the mountain.

  “Armies took days like this as a sign to march,” he said.

  “The weather is restless,” I said. “How is your sister?”

  “Song Wei has been sent to live alone in the forest,” he said. “Until the festival.”

  The villagers around us had stopped what they were doing; they wouldn’t take their eyes off me. Sunlit clouds were massing on the southern horizon.

  “The master will not allow you to attend,” I told him.

  “Every shift in life is accomplished by loss,” he said, his eyes cast down. “We find no footing. And yet we meet. Song Wei will wait for you at a place of your choosing.”

  ROOM SCREEN

  It felt as if I was swallowing something unwholesome. There’s no one but you to tell. But that’s all right: my confidence in you is absolute.

  Zhou Yiyuan told me that his sister must meet me before the next festival. Some taint in their community needed to be cleansed. I listened yet couldn’t follow him. He spat words from the side of his mouth as he spoke of greater and lesser generations. Ours was a lesser since our master was great and lesser generations nurtured great masters.

  Because the villagers stare yet won’t meet my eyes, and Zhou speaks in code, and the master has cast me out, and brief fevers still visit, my mind is in turmoil. These worries beg the memory of other shocks.

  My aunt sent me to the shop for uncle’s fags and a tin of cat food and I looked at pictures a long time by the magazine rack and when I got home she’d been electrocuted and rushed to the hospital and I never saw her again.

  A physics teacher explained chaos by blowing cigarette smoke at the open window through which I saw a man thin as a signpost in shorts and nothing else sending lines of traffic left and right by flailing his arms until an old lorry took him in the midriff.

  When I was sixteen and had more or less shed my accent, my mother drove me out of Vancouver and let me off by the side of the freeway and I stuck out a thumb and, ride by ride, travelled east along the Trans-Canada.

  BREAST WINDOW

  I dreamed I was in a boat, letting the current take me, and the river was flowing away from the sea, and I woke up ecstatic — so happy to have avoided the threat of evolution and heredity, to have found the river guilty of reversing its course.

  I have a great number of dark moles on my arms and sides and back, more each year, and each is an ancestral eye looking out at the people in the valley. Each is a point and innocent. If I take off my robe the moles see Zhou Yiyuan. Cancer is the fear of seeing too much and doing too little. All my father’s family died of cancer. Cancer tasks vulnerability with horrific patience.

  MIDDLE OF THE BREAST

  I can’t think straight today. I lost my glasses and found it difficult to manage the details of the demonstration. I couldn’t remember the day’s point. Everyone waited while I stared at the point chart, then at the names, then at the expectant faces. I couldn’t see and felt so tired. Elaboration of the deeper paths, though clear within my own body, seemed impossible. The monastery and its practices seemed remote. Any attempt at explanation fell short. I fell short. Am falling still, if not short, then asleep.

  ROOT OF THE BREAST

  I remember waking up alone in a hotel room, standing at the window in the morning light. The building was perched on a cliff overlooking a Norwegian river town, three streets converging on a bridge, the river below chaotic with spray. I paid the bill and walked out into autumn, all that dirty sky, got into my car and started the engine, defrost on high, coffee on the dash, childish excitement at the journey ahead. A successful run had ended — Hamsun’s In the Grip of Life — and I wanted to cross Europe by car. Goodbye to the cast the night before. Then hours and hours behind the wheel, heading out over mountain passes, through local weathers, limping through the rain on the deck of a ferry, still Blumenschøn, insecure and arrogant, pushing on through border crossings, past forests and lakes, following river meanders and skirting villages and towns. I’d stop only to buy coffee and a sandwich at a fuel stop, or to piss by the side of a desolate road, the car ticking like clockwork on the empty snaking highway, the first dry snowflakes falling on my shoulders. So travelling east again, stitching each morning to night. And by night I’d be gaunt and gormless in the car with only headlights to illuminate the physical world, the flaring lights of others to keep me company. And tomorrow, with dumb luck, would be the same.

  Five snails on the path today. A monk with a long-handled broom must be careful to sweep around them. Let them have their pilgrimage undisturbed.

  NOT CONTAINED

  Resin has sealed the earlier pages of my work — I left it on a fresh-cut stump — just as I was deciding to read what I had written. The potential of the past is sealed with fresh sap. The exposed rings of the stump left a pattern that may be read, but not by me. The rings, let’s say, the episodes, the days. The tree’s dying wish to over-write human history.

  Let me try this. The past is not worth figuring out — my life, my accomplishments, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Synge, Beckett, Handke, my rise and fall, my responses to theatre’s roiling manifestations and joy then filmmaking’s tedium and belly laughs. What happened yesterday, even the snails, is not worth present contemplation. There is music, a pulse, from the village by the river; geese honk overhead; rain falls so gently it doesn’t stir the dry leaves of the willow. I will find a way to enter the centre of the village, to be accepted and acknowledged; the heart of that pulse was an empire a moment ago.

  SUPPORTING FULLNESSr />
  Let me try this. An ordinary working man barrowed compost from the pile to fertilise the field. Let’s say the dirt, inadvertently carried from work to home, from relationship with cast and crew to relationship with a woman and child, had in it seeds to some important change. Let’s say a dream told at work returns the favour, seeds internal change.

  I think I understand Zhou Yiyuan. Certainly, I look forward to our next meeting. Meanwhile I keep my fingernails clean and bend over bodies to jar loose matter no heavier than the sum of my intangible parts.

  Last night I was woken by the voice laughing then howling and yipping like a dog. It pulled me from sleep and I stepped outside. All dark, the soil wet, the trees dripping, though not from rain, from heavy dew. The other huts silent. The bathhouse steaming. Afraid, I could imagine the monks as orderlies and nurses. The master was a special doctor. The villagers were visiting their sick relatives. Who beside me was ill? Why was I so wide-awake? For the remainder of the night I stood listening to drops of dew falling from leaves onto the roof.

  Season fire is over and season earth carries us toward metal. We will cut and carry wood for winter and the cooking fires. Listen. The yellow grass is hissing. I am dirt before the axe descends. Soon I will be water.

  BEAM GATE

  The morning bell in the day’s third hour is a ceiling to sleep. A calling in of the living. The deer look up, their triangle faces all knowledge and care and strategy.

  In my salad days, when the alarm woke me for theatre school it called me into loneliness. Folks under the pink sky at the bus stop were accidents. We paused in unison to light our cigarettes and nod good morning. Only accidents. I’d lose myself in roles, notes, affairs, then return home on the tube to further accidents and greater loneliness, a troubled sleep and fresh alarm. The electronic trill had to do with community, but also with authority. The pair that have confused and terrified me since the first day of kindergarten are now embodied in Zhou Yiyuan and Song Wei.

  The blind bellringer, one of the oldest monks, lives in solitude near the spring above Mountain Temple. His bell hangs on a massive frame under a tile roof on an elevated piece of ground; it and North Shrine are the last edifices of our monastery complex before North Gate and the steps up the mountain. A short zigzag path leads from the bell mound down to the spring, then up to the gate. The blind monk teaches others how to use the bulldozer and the dump truck. He is good at small engine repairs and speaks rusty English since he lived several years in Evanston, Illinois, where he worked as a mechanic and met Thomas Cleary. He rings the morning bell when metal yin is fullest.

  Today I was up and running to his hut before I was properly awake.

  “I’ve fallen in love with one of the travellers!”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does the master know?”

  “The master has told me to follow her brother.”

  “Follow how?”

  “Zhou Yiyuan is my new master.”

  The bellringer’s shape moved back from his doorway. He sat on the floor. “I have never heard of this. Bring me some water.”

  I filled a cup from the barrel by the door and gave it to him.

  “You may come in and sit with me, but I can’t help you.”

  This valley, the monks, the temple and shrines, the bamboo forest, the paths. Close my eyes and I’m living close to where I was born, on the banks of the Ribble in rural Lancashire, in a secluded asylum for people who can no longer cope with the discrepancy between their inner lives and the highly textured boxes into which the world has been sorted. As the doctors cross their lawn, we retreat into backwaters while our bodies run amok, amok, and have to be restrained with drugs and jackets, then pacified with elaborate illusions: now we are actors in a play; now we are monks studying the ancient eternal classics, each day woken by a bell rung by an old blind man who once spoke with Thomas Cleary, who says that he has in him a book of his own, who says he can’t help me.

  There is perfection in the idea of this being a dream, but when the old monk speaks to me in his rough American English of the birds in the valley, those that live by the river or on the mountainside or in the bamboo forest, how some he knew when he was a boy have disappeared, then I see that perfection does not have enough room. Perfection is not big enough. In the storehouse a room is always kept empty; it has dark corners and a trapdoor to the cellar and a sealed door to the granary.

  My father and mother were born in Preston near the Ribble. My father lived in my grandfather’s attic with my great grandfather’s chest of tools. My dad was a diluted cabinetmaker with many physical skills and a talent for silence and absence. I’m a talking version of him. The old tools he left me I lost or sold.

  PASS GATE

  Everyone slept on his feet on the night journey to the sea. The start of fall, named for the squirrel, involves the expression of human sorrow for all life between sky and earth and a long walk to get news from the hermit monk.

  “Wasps have invaded two shrine festivals and a temple ceremony,” he told us. “Something is happening. Late Heaven is being rearranged. Wasps in great abundance.”

  And it was true. Even in lantern light wasps caught in our sleeves and danced drunk in our faces. Everyone was stung.

  On the island we ran Wei mo, the Great Regulator.

  (What is lost is lost in the great death or in one of the many minor deaths. My heart grieves for you. My heart grieves for all who have made way for me. My heart grieves for the mother of the drowned son. The laugh I hear from the river in the dead of night is a premonition of the arrival of the unknown. My heart grieves for the birds the old monk remembers from sixty years ago. Something has happened. A final curtain. A wrap. A book put down, finished with. A moment of hesitation and doubt.)

  I lit lanterns on the posts around the island shrine to illuminate the four paths. Then I carried three lanterns to the three points of the island; at each location I had to wait until the place had forgotten me. Then I gathered the others and led them to the shrine.

  Later, alone on the shore, sand squirming beneath my toes, the black-silver current twirling watery acres of twilight, I dug my fingers into the rich soil of the river plain; I thought I might bring something home to the temple, something precious from the time before our valley was inhabited. And hunched there, I saw our valley filled with rubble and fallen shrines and myself trying to climb through the detritus without sending the whole patchwork crashing in on itself. What d’you think? Is Song Wei the new Imogen? Is she the embodiment of all I have made way for?

  SUPREME UNITY

  When the alembics are unpacked from their cases and arranged for use and the hermit is consulted and the straw dogs burned and the blind bellringer’s bobcat has smoothed the land behind West Shrine after burying the drainrock so the shrine won’t flood this winter and the leaves have been swept away and we have gathered to hear the birds at sunset, last sun red and hot on our shoulders, our breaths held in unison, the actors take their places and the slow autumn dance begins. The monks and the villagers, complete, no one missing. The master and two priests are all that’s needed to bridge heaven and earth; their movements and chants fill not only the vessels, but each fissure in the valley’s mantle and every political hiatus in history with water as innocent of life as the first rain. We washed sea-salt from our feet. We salved our wasp stings. We prayed until we were all asleep.

  SLIPPERY FLESH GATE

  Once through the great outer gate, a curved path runs north past the warrior tree, under the small gate, and then along a wooden walkway through the courtyard. Bow to the wishing tree and the well. This morning, walking to the storehouse, I came upon Zhou Yiyuan practising on the walkway. As he crouched, waves of heat rippled out from his belly and blew me back a step. Mountain Temple seemed to float in the air on the left shoulder of the storehouse. The mountain reared above the temple, its face brilliant in the sun. Zhou held his qi and I passed him quickly, shuddering, and forgot to bow to
the wishing tree. Rain was falling into the well, not real rain, but a kind of focused downpour of tiny red blossoms.

  The storehouse is vast. Built of massive fireproof timbers five hundred years ago, it is the oldest building in the region and attracts more visitors than the temple, which is only two-hundred-and-sixty years old. When I entered the south door, the west side of the building was lost in shadows, and the tall windows high on the east wall were like the night buildings of a distant city.

  The great practice hall doubles as a drying room in winter. Time moves slowly here. The ceiling arches high overhead. The stairs, of black wood, lead to a railed walkway, to rooms and chambers where the belongings of the community are stored. In the lower northwest corner is the library. In the northeast corner of the groundfloor is the empty room.

  After an hour of darkness and silence there, I blinked and returned; the red petal rain filled the doorway; it only faded when I walked through it and was outside again — the dwarf nowhere to be seen.

  Calmer, I bowed to the mountain. Two late swallows were dipping and swooping above the temple’s layered roofs. A building said to break the hearts of those who see it by moonlight covered in snow.

  HEAVEN’S PIVOT

  A slow passage into tidal disturbance is how I remember the end of life in Canada, physical energy rousing me only a few moments each day for the small film parts and theatre festival appearances that had all but vanished. A gradual turn northward out of Active Pass, final sun flashing on the water, seals rising from green depths, their silver-grey bodies streaming bubbles. Who is passing above? What motors are stirring our world?

  I was on a ferry from Vancouver Island, having abandoned a short run in a small production (local troup, local playwright), glancing up from my computer screen. It was midwinter, my hand was bandaged, and I’d just received news of my ex-wife’s death, and was absently clicking through a website dedicated to Asian village shrines.