A Year at River Mountain (19 page)

The summer before last Imogen walked among us in a white dress and sandals and we stopped praying. We had no work. Behind her the grey river heaved in rising mist.

The briefer the exposure, the smaller the aperture, the higher the resolution of the image, and the greater the capacity for close-up; all depends on light and the lens. The lens through which this world is projected is finely scratched and the speakers can't handle the wind-in-bamboo frequencies.

S
PIRIT
S
TOREHOUSE

New ink for my pen and rain all morning, small quake last night. I must see Zhou. I must speak to the new master. Not yet. First talk to Frank. Something is shaking loose.

I watched a slow beetle crawl the edge of what must have seemed a vast sea. It's love manifest with a couple of options. Slide downhill, zigzag uphill, or move to a new neighbourhood. Remember a dog on each lawn, daily trips to the city, coyotes and gangs roaming in packs? Every beetle, of course, belongs in a hole or a tunnel. I'm describing her progress along the shore of the great lake to close the gap between us, something like that. As Imogen knows, written lines of dialogue precede the players; the Greek chorus is reborn in the vacillating subject-object of the movie theatre; epic boardroom confabulations ghost the domestic shadow box. Whatever, we seem determined to shift some raw blunt thing into the next cavity. At last the beetle disappeared inland, headed west.

Deeper and deeper we settle into sleep, as the ground shakes, the valley crumbles, and the river sweeps it all away. Imogen in her white summer dress was a living spirit; her body was clean lines and foam.

Likewise, the hole we dug today was deep and great in diameter, an almost perfectly round pond. We dug to water and kept going, but the hole was impossible to control, the sides caving constantly into brown water. Impossible to dig and yet we continued, all of us hurling spades of mud into the rainy air, until mud and spades were a blur and we couldn't raise another drop. Swans peered at us over the edge and shrikes called back and forth overhead and the river ran away mocking.

Of course, such struggle is customary, and bodies are obliquely familiar, like daylight. Who the hell should I consult?

M
IDDLE
E
LEGANCE

My father gave me his wallet and watch to look after while he had his surgery and in the wallet was a picture of my mother taken on their honeymoon. Black and white, dogeared, private. She's in a doorway, facing the street, one toe dangling over the threshold. He had the tumour removed from his colon and a stoma opened in his belly to take the colostomy bag. He told me he'd visited his own father in hospital when I was six or seven. It wasn't far from where he worked and he'd drop in every evening on his way home for a half-hour chat until his dad died.

Last night, shy of sleep, I kept watch with the new master over the body in the cave. The old master, with his round dry face and downturned mouth, lay on the cold packed dirt, his gentle brown eyes and shock-white hair gone away.

The temperature has risen and decay lingered at the cave mouth. The new master told me he had hiked the lower mountain paths.

“Yes?”

“Have you often been to the top?”

“Not often.”

“Have you seen the Rockies?”

“Yes.”

He was so happy to hear this. His fingers, long and thin, twined in his lap. “Tell me about the Rockies.”

My sister and I took turns with our father, back and forth across the country, to and from the hospital, shepherding our fractious mother, until the end. What amazed me at his death was the realisation that he had always been with me, even though I'd taken him for granted.

Signs of spring grow more blatant. Zhou Yiyuan and Song Wei exhibit a nervous restlessness. Change, major change, seems unavoidable.

S
HU
M
ANSION

My parents again, sightseers, are rambling through the valley, taking in the bridge, the storehouse, the shrines, six views of the mountain, five views of the river. I stumble into them at the high garden wall.

They do not speak, but stand together at the gate, white-haired and inconceivably dear, nodding their heads at the first plum blossoms, affected and puzzled that they cannot enter. They do not understand this life. What they did, deliberately or accidentally, to nudge me into the world, we will not do here. My mother talks about the ocean. She says the sea is all she cares about now. “I made mistakes,” she says. “I fucked up. I had a lot of fun but I was mostly miscast.”

Dad says, “Preston North End one, Liverpool nil, at Anfield.”

Unlikely.

My mum's a nervy wave clattering onto a pebble beach. Dad's a disappointed fan. But at least here they don't have to boost their relationship.

Yin Fire

Sky Pond

The new master looked like a tall woman as he stilted among the villagers, slowly through the heavy rain, while they ran bandy-legged, sloshing mud. I was in anguish when he stopped to talk to Zhou and Song and she looked up toward the mountain, toward my hut, where the rain screened me and a woodpecker caught my attention with his wavy flight. He is in his forties, younger than I thought, with a slight tremor in his long hands. Present in him is clarity, and he has a kind face, and people have loved him, and he has loved them.

He asked me to meet him at the cave and I took the path after the violent afternoon rain, sunset thickening the clouds. Outside the cave steam rose and on the bushes sticky leaves were beginning to unfurl.

H
EAVENLY
S
PRING

He seemed surprised when I told him that Zhou Yiyuan might not be trustworthy.

“You know him well?” he asked.

Mist over the river and fields. Black clouds to the south. Both of us breathless.

A coil of smoke rose from the fire outside the cave where the youngest monk, still a boy, was cooking rice. This boy was so new, so smooth; his ears were fresh and his neck a pure delicate column. I recognised a son turning at his father's voice: he was lost in the new master's clear eyes. Greenfinches chattered back and forth.

Then there was a crashing in the trees below us and an old brown bear swarmed up to the boy's fire. Shocked, the three of us scrambled deeper into the cave; the bear upset the rice pot. Groggy, his smell sharp, he stepped into the cave and huffed.

“Make noise,” I said.

“He is a cloud bear,” said the new master.

The bear nosed the master's stiff body then, as we all yelled, he strode from the cave downhill and into the bamboo and I rushed after him along the cave path, sun glancing off the tops of trees, and he stopped and turned. The cloud bear was the old master, the river twisting beneath his outstretched claws, and when he vanished I returned, shuddering, to make an offering. The smoke from the little fire still rising into the sky.

“We should have let him have one of the master's arms,” said the new master. “You should have given him your arm,” he said to the boy. “That's all the cloud bear wanted.”

M
ARSH AT THE
C
ROOK

My parents stood outside the garden, close to the locked gate.

“What's in there?” said my dad.

“Flowers and trees.”

“Likely.”

“Winding paths and a lake in the middle.”

“Very believable. You haven't been in there, have you?”

“Gardeners repairing fences.”

“What fences?”

“For beans to climb.”

My own dear parents stepping down the incline of short grass to the large flat stones that mark the west limit of our grounds.

This afternoon Frank and I tried to get the old crane on the ruined dock working; the icy wind was full of disinterested birds. Song Wei walked by us; rust flaked from the threaded nut as I forced it, the village men laughing, my mouth full of iron bolts.

X
I
-C
LEFT
G
ATE

“The hills are dark with the sun behind them,” said the master. “But the river shines.”

We were gathered outside the temple door. Crows darkened the late afternoon, flying west to roost. Below them, on the horizon, was chill blue weather, electrical storms, earthquakes, disorder plus an underworld, trouble on the south plains.

“Our hill gives an unimpeded view of the valley and the mountain guards our back. There can be no approach in numbers, except by the river. So we are safe.”

His hand was bandaged. He had burned his fingers on the last of the cave fires. Left hand, the palps of two fingers, large intestine and pericardium. Hammer and tongue, metal and fire. Constitutionally, he's an earth being.

“What have you heard in the cave?” said Frank.

“You are a bellringer, yes? We will go and wash off this mud.” And he led us down through the plums to the bathhouse.

We have begun to compete for his attention.

The village children, invisible in silver rain, shrieked.

The bus still flashes upstream twice a day. One warm evening Imogen will alight. Chances are fair. Although she has not responded to my letter, she has sent money. Since the end of summer, we've been hanging fire, our work here a perpetual antebellum promise, nothing finished nothing begun.

M
ESSENGER
B
ETWEEN

Skirting the fields this morning I found deafening birdsong and Song Wei in the middle of a rice paddy, her robe tied around her bulging waist, dancing head down amid flying water and ice crystals and mud while a hawk circled above, and
What have we done
to isolate ourselves from such joy, in the name of the family, in the name of good deeds, in the name of the earth,
Guilty as sin
, and I circled the paddy, to be on the safe side, to see things from all angles, to listen.
She is drop dead, she is a fox
. Song Wei dancing in the rice paddy while the hawk circled above.

Meditation is desire. Without sex, the foreskin shrivels, dries out, till it's a fragment, a pink birthday balloon lost in a ditch, a baked rubber gasket, cracked leather button, gritty chewing gum. My penis feels like a snake too old to shed its skin, though I will piss every day until my breath stops. Kidney, old secret best friend, hold your tongue in darkness. I won't stop drinking. I will give you rivers and rivers to mark the route we took, including detours and resting places and everywhere we spent the night, shivering. (Liver, guide my anger home.)

I
NNER
P
ASS

Slept the night right through without waking. At dawn went to the river to watch the ducks roll and play with light and current's inflection, the clarity of the water. The dotted surface meant nothing to the little ducks making a journey downstream beneath a sudden rain.

We worked on one another in the big room west side of the storehouse, only our breathing and rain on the roof, gusts of wind, for company. A fish squirming against the flow — my finger on a point, gall bladder fire — nudged the surface. Surface: dynamic witness. A hawk screamed. The bamboo stick that held the shutter open snapped and except for my fingers and this monk lying on his mat all was in motion.
Picaresque
. Ah. That word I keep losing. The storehouse, closed, was complete — all planets and stars trapped inside — so we monks could complete our work, each bent over another.

Here's the monk's story: One day the boy ran to the edge of his town, cast his eyes in each direction and reeled in nothing but blowing dirt. But wait: to the west was a gathering of mountains and a dirt devil spun at his feet and his life depended on what he chose, though now I was responsible for the way it would go next.

G
REAT
M
OUND

Before the war my father fished Ullswater in the Lake District. He set nightlines for eels. He slept in a feather bed in the attic of his aunt's hotel and got up before dawn to check the lines and to row city men out into the lake. As they fished, he tied flies and readied the spare rod. And even though the beck by the hotel ran grey from the tailings of a lead mine high in the hills, there were buckets of eels and the businessmen were always able to catch several trout in an hour. By the 1960s the lake was empty.

Today we burned the old master's clothes in a ceremony to release spring. They blackened slowly, creating a lot of smoke, because spring must creep in, otherwise flooding would cause damage. Our clothes used to be made by women from a village in North Valley and were called “winter-spun.” Now they are produced in a small factory in the port. The old monks say the colours are brighter but the material is not as warm as it used to be. A smoke river followed the flight of geese across the sky. Our feather design is still reflected high above in these spreading clouds.

This transition from death master to new master, accomplished in the cave through ancestral agency, is a process of weaving surface and depth. I think it's right for me to be apart from others of my kind and to be here, shocked or not, but soon it may be necessary for me to live alone. There are threads connecting all things, it's true, but the death of our master has brought cataclysm and uncertainty into high relief, and solitude may be the only way to tease a way through. What d'you think? My solitude might be useful to others — holding a door open — in a way I've never thought of before.