A Year at River Mountain (13 page)

“Why are you still here?” he said.

We listened to the rushing stream outside.

He looked over his shoulder, then down at his hands. “D'you think this valley needs outsiders?”

Together we watched his rough thin restless hands chase each other.

He smiled. “Once the bell was a stranger. I was pleased with your report.”

Sun shone into the library. Webs high in the corners trembled.

“When I was a boy I owned a fox,” he said. “I kept him in a wood cage and we travelled round the countryside. We were a single being. When we came to a town I set him free and we walked up and down the streets.”

My throat, the muscles, thickened, and heat throbbed behind my eyes. “I belong here,” I said.

“No,” he said. “But there is a wildness in you that does.” He waved his hand. “You are unaware of this.”

I have the rest of the afternoon in the library to myself. Since he left, a woodpecker has been drumming from the grove of trees behind the storehouse. I write at the low table, listening to the fire's crackling wood, while a flock of crows is busy in the trees. I am calm. Things can be forgotten. Purposely left behind. I no longer have the sense of impending disaster I have construed in myself variously as anxiety, worry, suspicion, doubt, self-criticism, paranoia.

Imogen's like a carefully wrapped orphan left in a basket on a river, back of winter. The current tugs at the basket as buds on the willows begin to swell.

C
ROOKED
C
URVE

The day was cold and my hands numb, so I was hurrying along the path, on my way to a session with one of the settlement women, when I saw them. Mist lay across the river, dark on top and silver underneath, night already pushing in from the east so the trestle supports were invisible and the bridge deck seemed to float. An insubstantial world, then, with a stage.

The man in a long grey coat was hunched over lighting a cigarette, intent on his cupped hands, and a boy, no doubt his son, was engaged in his own small stooping play. They seemed together yet entirely separate — loose from their tribe — on the platform in the mist. The man's hand wavered a moment above his son's head. This was it, you see, the gesture: a kind of roof, as simple as that.

The settlement woman had been suffering from a month-long headache. Her husband had recently fallen and could not work, her grown son was returned from a failed endeavour in the port, and her younger children were hungry. Fire point in gall bladder. Water point in liver. Gall Bladder-38
Yangfu.
Liver-8
Ququan.

F
IFTH
P
LACE

Up from the pupil of the eye, halfway to the crown of the head. A point through which the bladder looks up at the sky. Clouds like a ploughed grey field. Hold with right middle finger.

Second point
Mingmen
, Gate of Life, ministerial fire, on the spine just below the second lumbar vertebra. Hold with the left middle finger.

Zhou Yiyuan stood at the door.

“Nothing for a farmer to do,” he said. “It's all done. A cup of wine. A cup of thick wine. Nothing else to plant, nothing to harvest. A cup of thick wine.”

Drop left finger down to
Du-3 Yaoyangguan
. Lumbar Yang Gate. To dispel wind-damp.

R
ECEIVING
L
IGHT

The high slopes pure white. The sun-filled room cold without fire. What was lost came home in another form (a lost girl, love between father and son, a point, the master's fox, my pen) as I worked on her migraine. The session cut short because her baby was screaming. As she nursed I stood behind her and held Yang White, both sides, and looked down at the swirls of black hair on the infant's head. She told me when I enquired that Song Wei was ill.

Babies are difficult to dislodge. I listened to ice in the river, then to the nearby knocking of men strengthening or repairing roofs. Momentary wind through the trees outside.

H
EAVENLY
C
ONNECTION

It snowed in the night and my past seemed far away, just a white shimmer out there in the bamboo. One of the babies cried at dawn amid the murmur of prayer; then the bell rang. Snow has flattened every blade of grass yet the young bamboo springs back if given a vigorous shake. I met a village couple on the temple path, an infant tied to the woman's belly, the man carrying a bundle of sticks. Tonight it's bright in the library. I am grass. How is Song Wei?

R
EFUSING
C
ONNECTION

Toward the end of the short day, a monk was etching the margin of the bamboo forest, carefully picking his way through the white drifts at the shore of a long frozen puddle, dragging the old bamboo rake. He paused, then turned to look behind him.

Zhou Yiyuan lurched to catch up and as they met, both swayed, off balance, each leaning away from the other— A moment of great stress. Enough of routines, practices, observances and rituals, a new pattern is emerging! The healing line, true for seven hundred years, is faltering. Wood. Water. Wood. Water creates wood. Water is the daughter of metal, grandmother of fire.

Zhou Yiyuan pushed the monk into the bamboo, then turned in slow motion and strode uphill through fat drifts.

Once upon a time when I was a boy I ran naked down a road in the middle of a summer night to a rough beach, tide high and black, choppy waves rolling in every direction, and leapt from an outcrop into the sea.

J
ADE
P
ILLOW

My only non-actor friend in Vancouver was a forensic social worker whose job was to ascertain mental competency and make psychiatric recommendations for men who had committed violent crimes. The day before Jake drove me to the airport, on my way here, one of his clients had lifted a hammer from a shelf in a hardware store and bludgeoned four shoppers, so Jake was distracted. “The big figures of madness,” he said, “the Caesars, Christs, Hitlers never surface any more, what with the availability and the power of the new drugs!”

Something is broken. Something is leaking, this world into that, that into this. I don't know. Do you? Tree branches now cracked will soon be torn away. New buds shrivel on the fallen branches. Time freezes the apples left for winter birds. Space is altered since I saw what I saw. The valley is filling with snow. The bell is haunted. The man screams in the night, though it's hard to tell whether it's a man or a child or a lost animal. Perhaps it is a baby crying. I dreamed of another baby girl, this one safely tied in a tree by her mother, using her own coarse black hair, wrapped against the cold and out of the reach of dangerous men, yet terrified and alone.

Morning has been quiet, but now there's wind on the river striating the mercuric surface, rushing through the lake fields, and birds wheel in the next teeming storm.

C
ELESTIAL
P
ILLAR

The baby trussed up in the tree will not leave me alone. Now she sucks her thumb and watches massive white clouds with black bellies roll in from the southwest above the portion of the road and river she can see from her branch. Her mother must have forgotten her by now.

There's news of military activity on the southern plains; there are rumours of government spies in the region. Snow has buried the pile of refuse that clings to the village site, which a year ago was meadow verging rice paddy.

I was walking the snow-path at the edge of the settlement, trying to think what the master might want (he has told me we will speak tomorrow), when I met Zhou Yiyuan.

“Is your sister well?” I asked.

“You are not used to fighting,” he said, his breath pluming.

“I saw what happened to her,” I said. “What could I have done?”

“Interfered,” he said.

“I heard she was sick. Is she all right?”

We stood in snow-filled hills, hammered by cold wind. I had the sense I was very small and must make the most of every moment, no matter what the content. The valley seemed infected with crime.

G
REAT
S
HUTTLE

Chainsaws work the fallen trees. They've been running for days now, little gas engines needling the air, sectioning the old pines felled by wind and heavy snow.

“These strangers are wild people,” the master said. “I wonder if they wish to remain wild.” He sat near the fire. The bell sounded, muffled by the falling snow. But for the tinkling coals and his raspy breath, we had been in silence for a long time. He cocked his head, listening. “It is as though our bones are singing.” His head fell, his chin resting on his chest. Then he twitched, and his head rose again. “You are going to tell me,” he said in a low voice. “You are going to tell me what has happened. Wait.” He looked straight ahead, his eyes half-closed, a frail smile on his lips, and when he spoke again, his voice was brittle. “What is that?” He pointed into the shadows.

My pen lying against the wall.

I retrieved it and wiped off the dust.

“I have received a letter from the actress,” he said. “I would like you to respond. Where is it? Wait.” He leaned forward. “Tell me the point in River Mountain that will heal what has been broken. No. First tell me what you have done.”

Shame burned like frost on my skin. I clutched my pen but wasn't able to say anything.

This afternoon the ink flows too quickly. Each word threatens to become a small pond, the nib skating lightly, isolate letters inflating themselves. It is as though I am not where I am. Just now, while walking in the woods at the correct moment doing the precise chore the way I've been taught, my head filled with light and my eyes wouldn't focus and the world tilted. It feels as though I've been telling lies, doing something I have no right to do. I'm someone I have no right to be.

A monk brought the letter to me in the library a moment ago. Imogen has read an Internet blog about the one-point technique and says we must guard our secrets so they do not spill into the social media. Ironic, really, because she has been a factor in our exposure; her fame has already drawn attention to us. She wants to know if she will still find our order intact when she returns next year. Do we need money? I am to write to her in the master's name, saying yes to the money, and reassuring her that she will find all she seeks in our valley.

W
IND
G
ATE

The biggest storm yet kept us awake all night. In the dark an army of demons screamed and tore at the buildings. The bell rang of its own accord. Trees crashed at the edge of the frozen fields, and this morning four of the oldest pines were lying, roots in the air, obliterating the unused East Gate. No power. Still dim at midday, with cold air from the north and its smell of snow.

I must think how to phrase my response to Imogen's letter, to settle her mind about the monastery and its destiny, to say we are calm, unaffected by chaos. Calm? In fact, we are all freezing to death. I hope to God it's warm where you are. The problem is always how to trace a path from one unknown toward another, how shade the closing distance, and do it all without hesitation. Even when subject and object are in place and all that remains to be found is the verb, I'm in a cold sweat. I can't stop shivering and my knees lock and I can't find my feet. I feel as though I'm translating every word from my father's dead language that I only heard when I was too young to understand it.

Tomorrow will you walk with me along the river and help me find the valley point to balance all discrepancies? If you do, I'll write the letter.

L
UNG
S
HU

We had a winter meeting, monks and villagers, and several elders spoke. I had something to say, but when I tried I could not utter a word. Back in my stage days it was necessary when facing a large crowd to lose focus, just for a second, in order to find my lines and the audience in the same room. Now when I lose focus all I feel is danger. The acting world is not the world of contemplation. The last time I stood in front of a panel of doctors it did not go well. The air thronged with questions, all unasked, all mine.

Old women spoke at the meeting, almost singing, like children before they need the world, garbling words due to lack of teeth and the intense cold. Short leathery old sages with round lined faces. The cold grey air hung in thin light from the storehouse windows; toward the rafters smoke gathered in a brown pall. An old woman danced foot to foot, crazy as a pot, and yet the music in her voice turned every face in her direction.

The old monks nodded their heads and she really began to wail, her hands flying about her ears.

J
UEYIN
S
HU

I crossed the bridge, walked the river west. (Do you feel anything? Nothing? A sick feeling? Here we fucking go again?) Song Wei's skin, flashlights, the boys and men. (Is it here where the reeds along the curved bank are blood red in winter?) Probably upstream was the wrong direction. Back at the bridge ice sheets were shattering against the pilings.

Zhou Yiyuan joined me and we teetered on crusted snow slowly east toward the gorge, dainty steps. After about ten minutes huge flakes began to fall. “We have something to unravel together,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“You know,” he said.

“No, I don't.”

“Oh yes.” He pranced like a madman, black hair swinging, upturned face all angles and disgust. He pushed me hard and I almost toppled into the purling water.

I regained my feet and looked down. Beneath his wet black hair his forehead was pale and vulnerable. “Do you want me to see your sister?”

H
EART
S
HU

The memory of someone's death is enough; the day need not include anything else. The day of your death is already filled with itself. Weather heavy. Landscape muffled. Figures distant.

G
OVERNOR
S
HU