A Year at River Mountain (9 page)

Mornings are thick with fog that soon burns off, trees dripping dew onto yellow and red leaves. Sadness, though, accompanies earth. It will soon be the season of metal, grandfather of wood and spring, time to release grief. Then winter, fire's grandmother: the Great. Here, unlike North Valley, the seasons are still ordered.

Every night I dream of cities. I've already been displaced twice this month. I still do not want the responsibility of transmitting or translating our knowledge.

“I don't want another journey,” I said to the master.

“And yet you will go and meet these physicians and masters. You will see the prophet.”

“I don't want to leave the valley.”

“It's only an aspect of yourself leaving.”

E
ARTH'S
C
RUX

I have the intimation of something, yet it feels like memory: a specific memory, something that happened to me, a happy thing; the light in my wife's eyes when we were very close, before it all fell apart and I left and she got sick.

Once we were in the woods, I remember. We'd walked a short distance from the country road into the ferns and firs of a sunny hillside. We were on the soft ground and I was on top of her. We were unexplored then, and the light in her eyes was a new reflection of blue sky, her eyes themselves the colour of earth. So this intimation has to do with that moment.

Last night the master raised his head and let me see his face. We had finished our sessions for the day. I'd felt his presence as I worked — gall bladder, following metal and water along the great central channel, my partner's body releasing in a series of muscle spasms — and after bowing at the session's end, I turned. The master let his hood fall back and his face was open in the dim light, eyes full of tears.

I can't believe this world has other countries, lovers, other shocks and deaths and thoughtless blunders. At prayer, just now, my knees were screaming with pain and the small of my back ached, so that I could concentrate on nothing else, and time slowed until all meaning, all responsibility fled my consciousness. The other voices went on, but I heard mine skip syllables and stop.

Something is coming out of the future and all I can imagine belongs to the past. The master's tears. The ridge of bird shit. The fist of rice on the snow.

The last time I saw my wife was in the hospital. No, not that moment. Later, on the city bus, going home after she'd died. Hollowed out. Some words spoken behind my back: “He would like to canoe down the Mississippi.” An old woman across the aisle eating a tomato in a fastidious, slightly ashamed way, eating it like an apple, her head nodding, a book half-closed in her free hand.

Why have I kept such a thing all this time? And the seals in Active Pass. And we even had a child, a boy, and mine and loved by me. And you who read this. Who are you anyway? How and why did you happen?

Y
IN
M
OUND
S
PRING

The temple, the cave, East Shrine and West Shrine, South River Shrine, the lesser shrines, all the paths between. I am in dread of the bridge because I will cross it soon and fly away and perhaps never return.

Heavy frost this morning. The temperature is falling every day. The village is diminishing, its inhabitants going off, one by one or in small groups. Their enemy invisible, if one even exists. Now the bridgework is almost finished only a few families remain.

All the day's light is focussed on the tops of trees, birds singing last songs. A couple of frogs spoke a moment ago. I heard this afternoon a whisper in my partner's lung — we both heard it as we released his large intestine channel. We both knew it was the whisper of a shadow.

I've taken to reading by the well afternoons when the weather is clear, on the small seat there, reading from old texts. From there I can see through the two gates to the warrior tree, which has lost nearly all its leaves.

S
EA OF
B
LOOD

Lonely, today. I have not seen Song Wei since returning from North Valley. A day of rain and at every prayer and chant I fall asleep. Meditation is sleep. The bell is sleep. I hold onto nothing else. The forest teems with yearnings for hibernation. Let the snows fall. The cave is empty, its last miner dust, its last master crumbled. Let me take their place and sleep all winter.

D
USTPAN
G
ATE

Each season is an enclosure, each month, each day and each moment separate. I hated leaving the valley, yet I loved being on the mountain. I always hated performance, yet loved rehearsal. I bought my lucky leather jacket in London. It was thin and beautiful, scarred and lined with scruffy wool and I kept it on a hook beside the doctors' photograph. The people over the pass, pale and disturbed by illness, were envious of us. The abbot, who will visit us next summer when the world is different, may steal something. What has he told the master?

The turning of a page. That sound. The page turning, the whisper of millennia this side of history. Pages turning and the hiss of brush or scratch of pen or quill, ownership and mystery on speaking terms. Monks have always sat hunched and shivering with cold while they copied the contents of some vision, startled by a door crashing, invaders on horseback, but so embarked and hungry that even as boots echo in the halls, they hold to their squinty path between laziness and passion.

It would take only a single well-armed man to hold Leopard Pass. This thought arises because I'm afraid of losing what might already be lost.

What value have I for the world? Today I practiced in the forest, alone except for the wind and twirling leaves and didn't want the day to gather darkness, but it did.

R
USHING
G
ATE

It sounds dry, the page turning in a room, thumb and forefinger of the left hand rubbing the page to make certain of a single leaf. When the thumb pulls up two or more pages the sound is large and chaos threatens. The creak and kink of the page, so pleased to be turned, separates two faces that have been nose to nose in obscurity for years, even centuries. Perhaps it's the first time they have been apart or the last time they will be separated. They lie flat, gazing at the ceiling, stunned by light and solitude, and as suddenly as life began it is over and they're plunged into darkness, dark word to dark word, every page trapped, the boards shut, one book in a shelf of books.

Do I miss you? Yes I do. Turn the page. Do I miss you? Still yes. Turn a new leaf. Let's see what I can imagine.

Turning seventy. Going away. Unseen.

A
BODE OF THE
F
U

Out with the tribe, I would have said, talked about this and that over croissants and espresso. About theatre and ambition, what we have and haven't done, how to advertise ourselves so we may survive a little way into the future. No.

I wanted to see Song Wei — afraid she might have been cast out — so left my digging in the field to go down to the river.

She sat on a rock, legs wide, pots in a circle on the gravel around her, her sleeves pinned back. The river noise masked my approach and she jumped when I called out. She was washing pots, her hair loose to her waist, a black curtain against the yellow robe, wet at the tips. Almost immediately her brother came over and crouched at her side and looked up at me. Sly gargoyle blink and grin.

A
BDOMEN
K
NOT

“No names,” said the master. “No names for the channels or the points.” He studied the edge of his robe. Dust furred the folds. He turned to me. “That woman will show you a change of course. A new direction.” He shook his head. Thin wisps of hair moved in the icy breeze. “Ah, it's cold today,” he said. “It was warm yesterday.”

“I do not wish to go on a journey.”

The two other monks, my brother travellers, were still, their heads bowed. Even with three braziers burning in front of the statue, the wind penetrated. The master's face was half in shadow, the lit part serene, the dark part anxious. This would be our last meeting before we left.

When he cleared his throat we looked up. “Go to the river,” he said. “Consult the River Map.”

I lay on a mat. My partner chased
qi
along the tributaries of my body. Fire, earth, water — his fingers guiding me down. The smell of apples cooking, apples and rice. When I woke (it is always like waking, getting up from the mat) it was already dark, the path to my cold hut marked by a deep drift of yellow leaves.

G
REAT
H
ORIZONTAL

When we read the river map yesterday, Song Wei was performing a ritual on the bank. I paid more attention to her arms rising and falling than to the dripping knots. Then half a moon last night and a storm, so many swooping leaves that sunrise vanished in gold fractions, no sooner swept into piles than lifted in whirlwinds. One spun across the bridge toward the far shore, another twirled in the storehouse courtyard.

A child shouted, “Uh! Uh!” every time a family staggered over the bridge into the monastery grounds. The families that left have been returning all day. Has Song Wei made it possible for them to come back? Did they run into trouble?

Each day we see farther into the death cave now the sun is low and the shrine has been taken down, each day farther, as far as light will penetrate. And since the entrance faces southwest, evening gives us particles of light dancing where shadow begins — and beyond that?

A
BDOMEN
S
ORROW

Words are names or parts of a name, and because we cannot name, I sit with my folding desk by the shore of this pond and name.

Once part of the river and since split off, this pond is the temenos of the heron now, and heron stands in a reed-room, neck parallel with the water's surface. He is blue-grey and leaning toward fish in a sway begun centuries ago. When he is roused by the bell from his hunting to this page, I myself am abruptly split off from the putter of ducks in the pond into a dream so large its edges overlap with sky as I furnish the dream with labels.

I remember Imogen walking slowly around this pond, the reeds light yellow, olive green, dying; new shoots waiting in the bank, in the silt of the soft bank.

The low west sun warms my right cheek though all else is freezing. What's next? Building a stone tower and living inside its walls, finding a friend, cutting down a forest, renovating a cave, eating all the honey, revisiting my birthplace, listening to children?

Mountain is cut close to the blue sky. A warrior lights briefly on the bridge and his armour clangs like a bell.

Then Zhou Yiyuan is crouched beside me. He reaches into his robe and pulls out something wrapped in cloth. His breath smells of metal. He places on the ground a small wood carving. I am still writing, only vaguely aware of the heron walking on water, making an exit across the mud shallows, a writhing glossy snake in his beak. The ducks applauding.

N
OVEMBER

F
OOD
C
AVITY

T
ODAY WAS SPENT CUTTING DOWN TREES
with a howling chainsaw in a blue-grey fog, chips flying, then loading wood, three of us, into the truck bed, rear wheels axle-deep in mud, air stinking of gasoline and shattered branches.

Fell asleep at meditation.

The master has been low these past few weeks. We travelling monks are still parsing the knotted strings pulled from the river.

S
KY
R
AVINE

The appearance of a wisp of smoke sent me into the rain and uphill to the walled garden. Just north, near an old mineshaft, I disturbed Zhou Yiyuan. He trundled into the rocky woods, furious, his figure crashing into a tree, and quail flew up from the tangled grass. The remains of a corner-field ritual hissed at the northeast angle of the high wall. I ran to him and he caught my arm, pulled me to the ground and held me, his chest against mine.

“What are you doing?” I said.

We rolled in the grass. “Your child,” he hissed, his lips close to my ear. Then he was up and away.

I walked back to the charred effects wet with rain still smouldering on a flat rock. Just burnt wood. Nothing human.

C
HEST
V
ILLAGE

So much rain in the past few days that a whole section of hillside collapsed when a small number of us were at East Shrine, soil and sand slipping around us, a horrible noise of splintering timbers. I died in the slide and haunted the village by the river.

E
NCIRCLING
G
LORY

Wind and rain have invaded the valley. All the paths are mud and all the shrines dark and dripping. Smoke drifts above the river from the tents and shelters, and from our own numerous fires. We have turned on the electric lights. The master slipped and fell. He cracked his head on the frame of the storehouse door and is now lying in his room, flat on his back with his eyes open. Death seems close, if not his then someone's. The death of something. The village, the monastery, you. I'm counting again.

G
REAT
W
RAPPING

Perhaps the world is dying. Until dawn we prayed in the northeast corners of each field and then the master appeared for the Dragon Festival, though he could not turn his head and seemed more than usually distracted and forgetful. The dragon set sail on the river but got so wet and heavy that her wing caught in a bare willow and she was dragged into the fast current. Several villagers waded in to rescue her and were carried downstream and had in turn to be rescued with bamboo poles. She was last seen flailing in rapids, approaching the gorge. The bits and pieces torn from her before she vanished have yet to be divined. We stood along the bank in our ceremonial robes. One sign was water-supporting-fire — the dragon's kidney — for me, I suppose, since I dredged it from the brown cataract.

The master's voice cracked like a whip. “Can anyone read this?” Then he fell again, unconscious, his robes flapping in the mud. The morning's blue sky gone in angry cloud; then rain, torrents, a dark deluge.