A Year at River Mountain Read online

  “The boy and his father and mother were untouched by loss for thirteen years, but then one day the monastery was overrun by bandits. Enraged at the sight of outlaws carrying off the temple’s treasures, the boy drew his sword and rode in pursuit and at dawn came upon a wagon toppled into a river and the upturned bell full of bloody water.”

  WRIST BONE

  Deep in the wild forest is said to be a large square pavilion of white stone inside a circle hedge of red berries. Inside the pavilion a circle of river stones, a square of reeds, a circle of clay figures, a square body of water contained by green marble sides, and in the centre of the pool a round island with four gates; in the middle of the island a small roofless pentagonal temple with a moat and a single entrance, south. Inside the temple a fountain. Water rushes from the temple fountain into the moat, through each gate back to the pool.

  When you pass from our world through the gateless hedge into the white stone pavilion the squares and circles come so quickly one after the other that by the time you’re standing in front of the temple you’d swear you had been travelling a long time, and when you step inside the temple, the fountain is so loud that you keep hearing voices, Someone calling your name over and over.

  YANG VALLEY

  We were both in our own dreams until Frank sneezed three times. He cleared his throat and spat. He touched my arm.

  “So the prince organised the rebuilding of the temple and supervised the rehanging of the bell . . . those were terrible war years . . . and named himself Abbot and established a sect of monks who forged bells and smuggled them out at night into the divided world while the dead of endless skirmishes washed up at their gates. Within a few years thirty million families had been destroyed and yet many monasteries and temples had new bells.”

  He performed a flourish with his brush between his thumb and forefinger planted on the paper, then tilted his head back. “One night the bell did not sound, the palace was sacked, and the royal family cut to pieces, their limbs hung on the monastery gate. The old abbot escaped a valley filled with flames.” Frank returned to his brush strokes.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He went out into the world. His monks were massacred around him in this valley, by our river. Oldest Grandfather was bearer of our bell.”

  The timbers of West Shrine are black and wet where they touch the earth. Some boards need replacing. But above our heads, his bent to his writing, cheek smudged with ink, mine angled to look up into the gloom, birds in the silver rafters rest from the rain.

  West Shrine was built a long time ago to shelter conversations with God. We should be able to hear words in the thing built to house them. We should be able to see characters in the shape of these beams. The day after tomorrow I and my brother monks from Leopard Pass will board a bus to the next town and take a plane to the first city of our tour. Gone out, like the old abbot, into the world.

  You are furious at me. What’s wrong? (When I was young I’d frighten my sister by pretending to be dead, and once she was under my spell I’d spring back to life.) You want me invisible? You want me not to exist? You are always trying to see through me and I’m always ducking and weaving, a thin man, fast as glass, right?

  After shouts and screams from the village, two men staggered bleeding into the storehouse. (“Who are these wild people?” the master wanted to know.) Two men with knife wounds, such small slits and so much blood, their eyes white, froth on both pairs of lips.

  NOURISH THE OLD

  The two men lay side by side on the storehouse floor, their wounds dressed, faces and arms pale, while two monks ran their hands over their torsos and limbs, gathering and dispelling qi . . .

  “All the men of my family become blind,” Frank said. He touched my back with his forehead. “I was glad to see America.”

  Outside the storehouse, the sky was utterly white, with clouds massed on the horizon. Once I was a bird and loved this wide view that meant travel and held it in my heart for so long that it kicked me twice a year. The faster the wingbeat the swifter each flight between cloudbanks, surely ocean down there, surely some merchant container ship, and human again — can’t stay bird long — human and up to something, I couldn’t even take in the view without question.

  The master bowed to me. Zhou Yiyuan waved an arm as he hurried on his way down the storehouse path from visiting his wounded men. Frank clutched my sleeve and would not let go. Snot fell from his nose. The sun came out and beautifully lit the villagers and monks as they hurried around the grounds attending to ordinary things after these days of rain. Red-and-black robes. Pink shirts. Purple head-cloths.

  BRANCH TO THE TRUE

  A baby was crawling on the bridge toward the monastery as the three of us left. No mother or aunt to be seen. I scooped her up and she snuggled in my arms as the mother appeared from the forest at the end of the bridge.

  All three of us were sick on the bus. Each of us held hoku, the valley between thumb and forefinger. How anyone, much less these thousands of people, can find their way through the maze of an airport and complete all the security rituals and ticket inspections in time to board the plane is now beyond me. I felt like a young bull, a sweet-eyed calf who had lost his mother and was destined for veal. If I wasn’t already steeped in shame I’d begin to moan.

  Once our plane rose above the clouds bright sunshine illuminated stately slabs of white mist, baroque, rococo, magnified beyond mobility, too slow for our eyes, dense as marble, eternal, until we landed at the large airport at Z.

  In the racket of television, refrigerated food-and-drink machines, hidden fans stirred the air, and the human voice could hardly be heard. The cover of National Geographic showed the picture of a child with chimp mouth and flyaway hair.

  Found Earliest Child. 3.3-million-year-old bones discovered.

  An owlish three-year-old girl from Ethiopia. What kind of innocence was this? I tapped Silk Bamboo Hollow, the end of the eyebrow, to clear the damp. Could the world be more precarious or more surprising?

  We sat on moulded plastic chairs, taking turns visiting the airport bathroom until our next flight was announced.

  An oval window on the small plane looked out at the silver nose of the propeller. Soon the blades vanished. A kind of vertigo. The plane so small that all the passengers had window seats. Blake’s “dark valley” was behind us; ahead were three jewelled cities. Manipura. The novelist e quotes Blake. As does Tagore. I’m recording fevered thoughts. The lost child, the found child, the ancient child. The poison tree, the knowledge tree. The Plutonium, dark throat of the earth, where Ulysses was said to have descended. A Sybil on a knoll shuddering in ecstasy. The cloud Lord speaking to the Lord of Destiny about football. The building of the Manchester Ship Canal. The Iron Worker’s Memorial Bridge. My wife’s warm arms, some last time. Spiralling down. Where would we land? When would all this be destroyed? When would the big bits be retrieved from chaos and assembled for a new winter coat, no one the wiser? We were travelling back in time. Wisdom was a fool’s game. Loud and bumpy and unsophisticated.

  SMALL SEA

  The village airport was a dark field and the village itself a cluster of lights on a hillside beside miles of factories and worker housing. We were met by the two famous exiles who drove us through interconnected courtyards and narrow lanes and covered passages to an old wood house. The central fire-pit had been tiled and we sat on cushions. The prophet spoke of the simple life they led now. Her husband said, yes, they were happy. She told us he walked miles every day, even through this snow and bitter cold, while she tracked down world leaders on the Internet. They fed us vegetables they had grown in the shadow of the great factories. He had his students; she kept up correspondence with the outer world. They were still afraid of arrest and deportation, though nothing had happened for years.

  “Time is required for the dust to settle,” he said.

  “He is too patient,” she said.

  “Time is part of the original agreement,” he said
. “Human time does not count.”

  They both smiled.

  After our meal, we sat and drank tea. The woman asked me why I became an actor.

  “I have no idea.”

  My brother monks gazed about, as if to catch some important detail: drips on the icy bare branches outside the window; a spear hung on the wall across from a triptych of Mongolian warriors; a parrot on a branch beside the prophet’s stool.

  Her husband said, “The temperature is rising and soon it will snow again and snow deep.”

  The woman fed the parrot a chunk of fruit. Her husband watched her. A monk arrived to lead us to the evening meeting with traditional doctors.

  “I am not patient,” she said. “I have some waves to make.”

  He said, “I have a sister teaching in Paris. I hope one day to teach in Paris.”

  TRUE SHOULDER

  The monastery overlooked a river and the site of an old battleground. The land descended to the river in terraces developed long ago, now smooth white snowfields, and in the vague distance a long rail bridge spanned the river. We performed in a small tapestried room. The doctors watched us demonstrate access routes to the Great Point.

  “You are like old warriors,” one said. “Five elements has not been taught for years. Your armour must be tarnished and rusty. The points are just points.”

  We gathered in a large hall. On the other side of glass doors snow fell heavily, the flakes slow and aimless, into a courtyard. Tables were set up and monks chosen to receive treatments. I was stiff. I could barely move my arms and fingers. I couldn’t free my clogged joints and clenched muscles as I hunted points on an old man with extreme pain in his neck and shoulders and in his hips and thighs.

  Taking his pulses I saw a tumbleweed trapped against a prairie fence and a magpie fluttering briefly in a dawn sky, a car passing, children’s faces pressed to the windows, thin snow whirling by the rear tires. I knew I was one of the children, but where was the old man? Something was pushing him, pushing him forward; he wanted to go; he did not want to be pushed.

  The monks we worked on were all in pain. We explained that pain was a bridge from one place to another. We encouraged each monk, as his points were held, to see the places pain bridged. The old man I’d treated turned to a doctor taking rapid notes. He tapped the doctor’s knee. “Pain,” he said, “is the bridge between me and death.”

  The doctor returned to his notes. The old man leaned toward me and laughed. In a voice so quiet on one else heard it, he said, “I may choose not to go there yet.”

  On TV screens back at the big airport young people danced around an elderly man in a tuxedo who held a long microphone like a magic wand. Each tried to outdo the others in wild leering wide-eyed leaps at the camera, giving exaggerated thumbs-up signs every few minutes. The old standards of rank have clearly broken down.

  Sigmund Freud died at the outset of the Second World War. He managed last words: “Dog people run things when Babel falls.”

  And Dedaelus invented images, Pasiphae’s bull, the labyrinth, and wings to fly him safe and sound to the sun and home.

  Poor Icarus. We are such a busy species. Tumbleweed alongside the creaky warrior. Brittleness and the urge for self-sacrifice. How do we keep pliant and receptive in this image-strewn and deceptive maze where genetic research will save our souls? Here we go. The dreamy long view, melting linkages. Stop struggling! For sure we don’t know who we are. Bones are intact longer than flesh. The three-year-old Ethiopian girl entered the long wind of history and the wind changed direction and her fossils rattled free. Yes, she was a girl who suckled her mother’s breast. Yes, she saw the world with unique eyes. But she is nobody’s ancestor.

  I’m trying to tell the truth. I’m never fair to you. I know we’re bound together in some way I don’t understand. Your life continues, somewhere, perhaps without indecision. Perhaps it’s summer where you are. These are ways of getting our feet on the ground. Freud’s death. The little girl’s death, before Ethiopia. Artificial wings. Ambiguity. Fledged truth. Can I bring us both safely home to River Mountain?

  UPPER ARM SHU

  A memorable lunch of noodles in broth, spices difficult to identify. A cheerful monk I met some years ago sat across the table. Astonishingly, he took from his pocket a publicity photograph of Imogen and passed it to me. It was a still from one of her recent films. She is shown side-on, emphasising the adolescent shape of her flanks and hips, looking down at the ground, and seems to be standing in a deluge of rain, her face glistening with droplets.

  An evening demonstration for a handful of doctors, one of whom had a bag full of old texts, medical and spiritual, from which he consulted diagrams and anatomies throughout our sessions. I was flustered and blundered in a daze through the long discussion that followed.

  SKY GATHERING

  Past midnight, giddy from lack of sleep, we asked where these people had come from.

  “They are patients from the mental hospital,” a doctor said.

  Another doctor opened an old book and said: “Have the energy levels in the Great Points been measured and compared?”

  We couldn’t stop laughing. The doctors had been drinking and were loud. One played old songs on the violin. My head sank for a moment. I heard voices from outside. “Where are my brothers?”

  “They are in the parking lot building a snowmonk.”

  GRASPING THE WIND

  Another flight after a short sleep. The future seems to be coming from the past. Snow on the fields and the trees jagged with frost.

  When seeking points on a young woman I found myself imagining a whole life with her. What work we might do together, where we’d travel, how we’d educate our children.

  Later, walking with a doctor from Saskatoon, talking about healing and the delights of combining allopathic treatments with five-element approaches, I looked up and saw a house burning. Snow blowing down the street hit our faces and blurred my vision and I had to blink and turn away. Ice crystals sparkled on the reeds by the wide river. The house stood in a row of other identical houses and was brilliantly lit but not on fire.

  For a moment the young woman of the morning lived with me in that house. That was where we raised our kids.

  CROOKED WALL

  Today I worked on a patient who wore a band of fat around her waist in which was stored a million years of abuse. She had developed an impressive list of symptoms. The bones of her spine were fused and walking was difficult. Doctors had diagnosed diseases. She had accepted each diagnosis. I palpated her gall bladder meridian, then focused on two points: one for the little girl free of illness, one for her ancestral line. Afterward the physicians in the room remarked on the youth of her face. Although she was not free of pain, she felt peaceful and, for the first time in a long while, hopeful.

  OUTER SHOULDER SHU

  Through the airport windows we watched men and women steer machines round the banked snow, lights blinking in the blowing orange flakes. Then the machines dashed for the buildings and people in fat jumpsuits and puffy headgear leapt out and disappeared underground. A plane was sprayed with antifreeze. Daylight filled the runways with grey and white streaks.

  As our plane took off my bits and pieces felt nearly integrated. The temperature plunged and wind worried up what snow the horizon grasses could no longer anchor; the war-toll rose; human population increased; icecaps north and south melted. What drove me down and threatened to bury me in the past — compost, deadfall — had been shifted by an upsurge. Wings were still attached. The wax had not melted. The visible sun and the echo under mountains were tapping each of my toes as I held my breath. Rivers meander until the slow sea calls them down. Oxygen circles with blood. And she will come and I will talk to her about River Mountain Bell, a new play in which she is my wife and I am the abbot-prince.

  On our way home we found sunshine once again above the clouds and were confident our trip had been a success and that some reversal had occurred, was occurring.

  We tr
udged behind the luggage cart toward the terminal. Behind the tall windows were businessmen and women with digital devices organising their realms.

  I must apologise to you. I must apologise. I do not know what you do. I do not know what you do in your own unassuming work. I am no doubt proceeding as you expected. But I had high hopes.

  A young woman in the airport loading area, as we waited for the bus, received a phonecall and howled. It sounded at first like laughter. She turned to us and said, “He’s already dead,” then looked at the sky, tears rolling from her eyes. A squat grey-haired woman ran out of the airport doors, arms spread wide, and the young woman warded her off.

  I must apologise. This isn’t what I set out to do. Confusions. Interruptions. Problems of foreground and background. Soon we will be home. I will try, in the coming days, to see how it went wrong; it is crucial, especially now, that you have a life of your own.

  Until now my task has been to record each day’s thoughts, to get them down fresh, before they fall to any depth in memory and are impossible to retrieve without being distorted by the upheaval. The trouble is there is an active warp; the fault-line that divides imagination from memory is unstable. But I wanted to write the physical world and arrive at an untold story, and I have failed. I wanted story as schist, irregular truth, but any notation will bear the pattern of the warp.

  MIDDLE SHOULDER SHU

  I went one last time to my father’s rest home.

  “Why are you always so sad?” he asked me.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “When will you let it all go?”

  “I’m happy, Dad. I doubt myself, of course. But I’m not miserable.”

  “You have always worried, just like your mother. As if any kind of belief would be a mistake. It’s fear of losing things makes you worry. When will you give it up?”

  “Dad. Everything is okay.”