Hieroglyph (67 page)

“This place was destroyed in an avalanche,” the monk tells him, pointing to the mountain behind them, from the high spur on which the monastery perches. “The glacier melted and brought down half the mountain with it. It rained boulders. Many were killed, and the place abandoned. I live here alone, except for the odd scientific team that comes to study the glacier.”

Yuan is silent.
So much for the university that would save the world
. But how could his dreams be so vivid, if they weren't true?

When he feels a little better, Yuan goes with the monk to a high terrace from which he has the best view of the glacier. The terrace is broken in places—holes have been torn out of it, and the room below is littered with massive stones. The still-intact portions of the floor make a zigzag safe pathway across the terrace.

The terrace is open to wind and sun, and the immensity of the mountain overwhelms him for a moment. Squinting, he looks up at it and nearly loses his balance. The monk steadies him.

Far above them, what remains of the glacier is a bowl of snow above sheer rocky walls. A great, round boulder bigger than a house stands guard at the edge of the bowl, rimmed with white.

“Don't worry,” the monk says. “If that falls, it will fall right here and finish off this terrace, and what's left of the western wing. The part of the monastery where we sleep is not going to be affected—see that ridge?”

Yuan sees a ridge of rock high above and to his right, rising out of the steep incline of the mountain. A fusillade of snow, ice, and boulders falling down the slope would be deflected by it just enough to avoid the eastern edge of the monastery, which is why it is still intact.

Yuan begins to shake. The monk guides him silently across the broken floor, and they return to the room. He sinks onto the bed.

“Why do you remain in this terrible place?” he cries.

The monk brings him tea.

“Thirty-three died in the avalanche,” he says, “my teacher among them. So I stay here. The others left to join another monastery.”

Yuan is thinking how this does not answer his question. He is beginning to wonder about this monk and his excellent English. After a pause the monk says:

“Tell me about yourself. You said you came up with an idea.”

Yuan rummages in his rucksack, which is at the foot of the bed. He draws out a handful of orange wristlets. Each has a tiny screen on it, and some are encrusted with cheap gems.

“I am a student of computer engineering,” he says. “In my university in Shanghai I was working toward some interesting ideas in network communications. Then she came—Dr. Amina Ismail, my teacher—and changed everything I knew about the world.

“Most of us think there is nothing we can do about climate disruption. So we live an elaborate game of denial and pretend—as though nothing was about to happen, even though every day there are more reports of impending disaster, and more species extinctions, and more and more climate refugees. But what I learned from my teacher was that the world is an interconnected web of relationships—between human and human, and human and beast and plant, and all that's living and nonliving. I used to feel alone in the world after my parents died, even when I was with friends or with my girlfriend, but my teacher said that aloneness is an illusion created by modern urban culture. She said that even knowledge had been carved up and divided into territorial niches with walls separating them, strengthening the illusion, giving rise to overspecialized experts who can't understand each other. It is time for the walls to come down and for us to learn how to study the complexity of the world in a new way. She had been a computer scientist, but she taught herself biology and sociology so she could understand the great generalities that underlie the different systems of the world.”

“She sounds like a philosopher,” the monk says.

“They used to call scientists natural philosophers once,” Yuan says. “But anyway, I learned from her that whether we know it or not, the world and we are interconnected. As a result, human social systems have chaotic features, rather like weather. You know Lorenz's metaphor—the butterfly effect?”

“I've heard of it,” says the monk.

Yuan pauses.

“She said—Dr. Ismail—that we may not be able to prevent climate change because we've not acted in time—but perhaps we can prevent
catastrophic
climate change, so that in our grandchildren's future—my teacher has two grandchildren—in that future maybe things will start turning around. Maybe the human species won't go extinct.

“So one day I was walking through the streets, very upset because my girlfriend and I had just broken up, and I didn't look where I was going. I got hit by a motor scooter. The man who was driving it yelled at me. I wasn't seriously hurt—mostly bruises and a few cuts—but he didn't even stop to ask and went on his way. I dragged myself to the curb. People kept walking around me as though I was nothing but an obstacle. I thought—why should I go on with my life? Then a man came out of a shop. He bent over me, helped me to my feet. In his shop he attended to my cuts, and he gave me hot noodle soup and wouldn't let me pay. I stayed there until I was well enough to go home.

“That incident turned me away from my dark thoughts. I realized that although friends and family are crucial, sometimes the kindness of a stranger can change our lives.

“So I came up with this device that you wear around your wrist, and it can gauge your emotional level and your mood through your skin. It can also connect you, via your genie, to your computer or mobile device, specifically through software I designed.”

He sighed.

“I designed it at first as a cure for loneliness. I had to invent a theory of loneliness, with measures and quantifiers. I had to invent a theory of empathy. The software enables your genie to search the Internet for people who have similar values of certain parameters . . . and it gauges security and safety as well. When you most need it, based on your emotional profile at the time, the software will link you at random to someone in your circle.”

“Does it work?” said the monk.

“It's very buggy,” Yuan says. “There are people working on it to make it better. The optimal network architecture isn't in place yet. My dream is that one day it can help us raise our consciousness beyond family and friend, neighborhood and religion, city and country. Throughout my journey I've been giving it away to people. In every town and village.”

He taps the plain orange wristlet on his left arm.

“I'm connected right now to seven other people, seven strangers. The connection is poor, but sometimes I hear their voices or see them on my notebook screen. On the way here I stopped at a grassy meadow crisscrossed by streams, a very beautiful place. The reception must have been good because all at once I saw an old woman on my computer screen. She was standing at a kitchen counter feeling like she had nothing to give to the world. Helpless, useless, because she was old. So I told her—I didn't know what to tell her because I felt her pain—but finally I told her something clichéd, like a fortune from a fortune cookie. I said, ‘Something good will happen to you today.' I don't know if that turned out to be true. I don't even know who she is, only that she's from another country and culture and religion, and I felt her pain like it was my own.”

The monk listens very carefully, leaning forward. The little creature has gone to sleep on his lap.

“Perhaps you suffer from an excess of empathy,” he says.

“Is that a bad thing? I suppose it must be, because of how I've ended up. As you grow up you are supposed to get stronger and harder, and wiser too. But I seem to be less and less able to bear suffering—especially the suffering of innocents. I saw a photo of a dead child in a trash heap, I don't know where. The family was part of a wave of refugees, and the locals didn't want them there. There was violence. But what could these people do? Their homeland had been flooded by the sea. They were poor.

“I once saw a picture of a dead polar bear in the Arctic. It had died of starvation. It was just skin and bone, and quite young. The seals on which it depended for food had left because the ice was gone.

“There are people who don't care about dead polar bears, or even dead children in trash heaps. They don't see how our fates are linked. Everything is connected. To know that truth, however, is to suffer. Each time there is the death of innocents, I die a little myself.”

“Is that why you are so sick?” the monk says harshly. “What good will it do you to take upon yourself the misery of the world? Do you fancy yourself a Buddha, or a Jesus?”

Yuan is startled. He shakes his head.

“I've no such fancies. I'm not even religious. I'm only trying to learn what my teacher called the true knowledge that teaches us how things are linked. My sickness has nothing to do with all this. The doctors can't diagnose it—low-grade fever, systemic inflammation, weight loss—all I know is that no treatment has worked. I am dying.”

The monk walks out of the room.

Yuan sits up weakly, finds the cooling yak butter tea by the bedside, and takes a sip. He is bewildered. Why is the monk so upset?

Later the monk returns.

“Since the third day you came here,” he says, “you haven't had a fever. Once your strength returns, you should go back, down into the world. You have things to do there.”

Yuan is incredulous.

“Even if what you say is true,” he says after a while, with some bitterness, “how can I trust myself? My vision of this place—remember? The university I dreamed of—the hope of the world. My reason to keep going. It was all false.”

“Maybe it was a vision of the future,” the monk says gently. “After all, your teacher was real. If she mentioned this place to you, then that must mean that others are dreaming the same dream. Go back down. Do your work. This malady, I think it is nothing but what everyone down there has. Most of the time they don't even know it.”

He gestures savagely toward the world below and falls silent.

Yuan has not allowed himself to feel hope for so long that at first he doesn't recognize the feeling. But it rises within him, an effervescence. He looks at the monk's averted face, the way the animal on his shoulder nestles down.

“If I am cured, then you have saved my life. You took me in and nursed me back to health. The kindness of strangers. I am twice blessed.”

The monk shakes his head. He goes out of the room to attend to their next meal.

As Yuan's condition improves, he begins to explore the ruined monastery. There are rooms and rooms in the east wing that are still intact. The meltwater from the avalanche has filled the lower chambers of the west wing. In that dark lake there are splashes of sunlight under the holes in the roof.

“We got all the bodies out,” the monk says.

Then one afternoon, when he is exhausted from exploring and has taken to his bed, Yuan is woken by the monk's little pet. The animal is scrabbling frantically at Yuan's shoulder, whimpering. Sitting up, Yuan looks around for the monk, but there is no sign of him. There is a great, deep rumble that appears to come from the earth itself.

At first Yuan thinks there is an earthquake, because the mountain is shaking. Then he realizes what it is. He rushes out of the room, conscious of the little creature's scampering feet on the stone floor behind him. He runs up the stone stairway to the broken terrace that lies directly in the glacier's path.

The monk is standing on the terrace, gazing upward, his black robes billowing behind him. The enormous boulder that was poised at the lip of the glacier has loosened and is thundering down the mountainside, gathering snow and rocks with it.

“What are you doing?” Yuan yells, grabbing the man. “Get away from here—you'll be killed!”

He grabs the man's robe near the throat, shakes him. The monk's eyes are wild. With great difficulty Yuan pulls him across the shaking, broken terrace floor, toward the stairs.

“You die here, I die here too!” he yells.

At last they are half falling down the steps, running down the broken corridors, over to the east wing. When they get to the terrace, there is a sound like an explosion, and the ground shakes. It seems to Yuan that the whole monastery is going to go down, but after what seems like a long, endless moment, the shaking stops. They look around and see that the east wing is still standing. The small creature leaps up the monk's robe and trembles on his shoulder. The monk caresses it.

There are tears in his eyes, making tracks down the lined face. Yuan sits him down on the low wooden seat. The kettle has fallen over. He brings water from the great stone jar, pours some into the kettle, gets the fire going.

When the first cup of tea has been made and drunk, when the monk has stopped shaking, he starts to speak:

“I'm not a monk. I'm only the caretaker. They took me in when I came in as sick as you, but where the world made you feel like you would die of grief, it made me burn with anger. I was a city man, living what I thought was the only way to live, the good life. Then some things happened and my life unraveled. I lost everything, everyone. I ran away up here so that I wouldn't hear the voices in my head. I was full of anger and pain. My sickness would have killed me if the monks hadn't calmed it, slowed me down. Instead thirty-three of them died when the avalanche came—my teacher among them. And I lived.”

“So you were waiting for that last rock to come down,” Yuan says slowly, “so you'd have your death.”

The man starts to say something, but his eyes fill with tears, and he wipes them with the back of his hand. The creature on his shoulder chitters in agitation.

“Your little animal needs you to live,” Yuan says. “He came and called me. That is why you are alive.”

The man is holding the animal against his cheek as the tears flow.