by Oisín Curran
The next day, Myles stuck the last good logs into the stove and sat sharpening the teeth of his chainsaw with a thin file. It was my task to locate the toboggan.
Together we moved out into the foot-deep snow that blanketed the backyard. Myles broke the trail while I dragged the toboggan behind me with such apathy I fell well behind, until Myles turned and exhorted me onward, reminding me that I lived in the house as well, I too benefited from the heat (so-called) thrown by the stove, did I want to freeze in the night, did I want my poor mother to freeze? I caught up and followed him sullenly into the woods.
It was mid-afternoon and already the meagre winter light was beginning to fail, but while the trees obscured the light, the snow that had managed to drift down through the needles and branches laid a slender coating of iridescence over the roots and frozen puddles of the forest floor, and by that thin light, together with the pale grey sky trickling from above, we threaded the tree trunks, looking for our victims. Since this was not our property and we were poaching wood, Myles felt morally obliged to abstain from taking living trees (although, he pointed out, the owners lived on a Caribbean island and had probably forgotten that they owned this land, if land can truly be owned). Nor were old and rotten logs flammable enough. Thus the search was for blowdowns, the recently deceased casualties of the wind sagging miserably in the arms of their neighbours, roots torn from the ground but unable to fall.
The trees were dark, dimensional streaks against the pale blue snow, the hard sky. My toes were numb, cuffs of my corduroys already stiff with ice; and now Myles was cursing over the chainsaw that refused to start as he yanked it and yanked and yanked, yanked, yanked with mounting outrage until at last, impossibly, it sprang to life. To life? No. To death. Heartless, lifeless, angry teeth blurred by speed screamed death to the panic-stricken trees unable to escape, cursed by fate with immobility before the rapacious cyborg that my father had become as he fused with the machine.
Many years later, when I first used a chainsaw, I understood, or rather experienced, that strange transformation. The power of the saw demands to be used as it vibrates eagerly in your hands. Within the cocoon of brutal noise, all objects transform into things that must be cut.
Soon it was no longer merely blowdowns that Myles was aiding in their descent, but trees that looked as though they might blow down imminently, and a short time later, trees that really ought to come down to allow more light to their neighbours. It seemed to me, as I trailed that path of destruction, that I was moving through an arboreal slaughterhouse—the raw, blond ends of the logs that I loaded into the toboggan bled sap and the torn chips of their flesh littered the ravaged snow that was greased and blackened by the chainsaw exhaust.
When at last the machine sputtered out from lack of fuel, the sudden inrush of silence (as of a breath after minutes underwater) was both an overwhelming balm and a tearing of the veil that revealed the forest as an echoing mortuary, a place of sorrow that I felt I must escape as quickly as possible, dragging the heavy sled through a maze of resentful trunks, until I burst free into the open and saw the warm lights of the house in the near distance.
Now the early winter evening was upon us. After stacking the wood, I collected a flashlight and headed back into the woods for the remaining logs. Why, I asked Myles as we loaded the toboggan in the blue gloom, Are we here? He paused and looked at me, but it was too dark to see his face. Only much later did I understand the tone of his voice when he replied: it carried the sound of budding interest.
I think we’re here, he said as he piled some brush to one side, To find out why we’re here. A friend of James Joyce drew a portrait of him in the form of a question mark, because for Joyce life was an open question to be experienced rather than answered.
How do you live a question? I wondered. From there he expanded at length, but I recall nothing of what came after. He had given me the answer I needed from him, and I’ve never forgotten it. Did I thank him? Probably not. I should have. I thank him now. Even as my search for meaning has waxed and withered, become richer or more despairing, lazier and more confused, I guard that moment in the woods. My father’s seal of freedom.
Myles stacked the chainsaw and its fuel atop the wood, and together we pulled the toboggan back to the house. The night was warming and the snow had grown wetter and less accommodating. Gone was the satisfyingly dry, bottled squeak of flakes compacted under advancing weight. It was replaced by a slithering that lasted only a few feet before humidity overcame inertia and the wet snow stuck and halted our forward movement, until we jerked free and advanced a few feet farther.
When we finally stomped the caked slush from our boots and entered the house, it was to find Iris making dinner for the first time in months. And for the first time in months there was colour in her face and her eyes had shed their tarnished sheen. Brandishing a spatula, she gestured at the trestle bed.
Peering through the bunches of drying herbs that dangled from the ceiling joists, we saw Pierce sitting up propped on pillows, chatting with a stranger who sat next to him in a rocking chair. Myles, delighted as always to encounter new people (as though each stranger represented the possibility not only of new and intriguing stories, but also of the perfect friend—a possibility eternally doomed to end in disappointment when he discerned character flaws), advanced with a broad smile and a broad hand extended, his interest piqued, no doubt by the stranger’s shaven head and robed figure and the Asian cast of his features.
This, said Pierce triumphantly, Is Yoshida Roshi.
Yoshida Roshi—a fable come to life! For years we had all heard tales of Willard’s dharma brother, of their training together back in 1950s Kyoto, of Yoshida’s legendary boozing and whoring of which Willard spoke with such nostalgic sentiment that everyone who heard his reminiscences was left with the intense desire to have accompanied those holy rakes on their progress—to have imbibed with them the crazy wisdom of their cigar-chomping master as they sat in excruciating full lotus recovering with vicious concentration from yet another sake-fuelled all-nighter staggering through the antique streets of Kyoto.
And here he was in the flesh, summoned apparently by a letter from Pierce. But of that, neither he nor Pierce, nor my parents would speak, at least not until I went to bed after dinner.
So for now Myles had regaled Yoshida with tales of his visit to Japan years before my birth, while Yoshida listened with a bemused smile and, from time to time, nodded or murmured agreement with some detail that Myles described: the rice-papered screens; the swooping rooflines; the scalding baths; the efficient towels; the superlative noodles.
Then Yoshida responded with stories of his wartime experience. Inspired by his Zen master, he had enlisted and, failing the exams for the air force and kamikaze glory, had ended up a foot soldier fighting brutal rearguard action on Okinawa as the American troops advanced up the island shoulder to shoulder, shooting anything that moved. As his knees trembled and he pissed his pants, he had tried to recall his master’s instructions for wartime action—unite with his fear, use his meditation practice to erase the barrier between himself and his gun, between himself and the bullets he fired, between himself and his enemies, between himself and his death.
He had been shot in the arm, and as he lay there slowly bleeding to death, an American soldier had stumbled upon him and, against orders, tied a tourniquet around his arm and saved his life. That soldier was Willard.
After a moment of respectful silence, Myles said in troubled tones that surely the teachings of this Zen master were corrupt.
How so? Yoshida asked.
Myles responded hesitantly, heavily, that to employ a philosophy of peace to practise war was an outrageous blasphemy.
Yoshida shrugged and said that if Buddhism taught anything, it was that peace was to be found everywhere, in every moment, even behind the barrel of a gun.
That’s sophistry! Myles cried. Or rather, I know now that�
��s what he wanted to cry, what he should have cried, but he was face to face with an ordained Zen master, a Roshi, a man who must necessarily have experienced Enlightenment since he had received Transmission from his master who had received it from his master and so on and so on and so forth for thousands of years back to Shakyamuni Buddha himself.
Who was Myles to debate pedestrian ethics about war and peace with an enlightened being, a man who had experienced the All. And so instead he even-handedly noted the well-known fact that Christianity, despite being founded by the Prince of Peace, had managed to contort its theology into doctrinal support for wartime atrocities whenever Christians wanted to shed blood, which seemed to have been, and continued to be, often.
But (he wanted to say) I’d always thought, always hoped, that Buddhism was not likewise corrupted.
He didn’t need to say it. Everybody, including Yoshida, understood what Myles was thinking. It was the thought of so many Western Buddhists of his generation. But Yoshida did not respond to the unspoken. He clearly had no further interest in the topic.
Instead, he broke a brief lull in the conversation by saying, apropos of nothing, Tell me of Willard, it signalled the end of my time at the table, and I was instructed to ascend to bed.
There, lost in The Lost World I muted the rise and fall of voices, the outrage and resignation, the pained references to exploitation, corruption, power games. But I was pulled from the book by the slick, loud whisper of winter coats, the hasp of zippers, and moments later I heard the loud knocking echo of the Han through the woods. And as the voices and boots downstairs shuffled out the door and the hammering outside increased in volume and speed, I knew that these interior and exterior audio signals taken together signalled that Myles was bringing Yoshida Roshi to sit Ruhatsu, the week long meditation that preceded the birthday of the Buddha.
Far up the hill, the great, thick plank of wood suspended from the eaves of the zendo was struck one hundred and eight times each morning and evening, summoning aspirants to converge upon their cushions and there to perch in snowbound silence and herd their minds, leashing their thoughts to their exhalations as they sought to pierce delusion, banish concept, abandon imagination, and dissolve into the passing instants until the instants ceased to pass, for how could time pass one by if one were one with time? The delusions of old age, sickness, and death, of form, feeling, thought, choice, and consciousness itself, would fall before the power of the breath. And as the rhythmic crack of the Han echoed out over the moonlit snowscape, over the trees quaking with cold, as it coursed down the hill and into my ear, I discovered I was counting and my gaze slipped to the baseball on my shelf and I took it down and counted the stitches in time to the hammering of the Han, and just as Pierce had promised, the number was the same.
As the last echoes died away, I turned wearily back to my book, where I found that Professor Challenger and his companions, having escaped the dinosaurs on the great basalt knoll, had stumbled down into a lost city led by a goddess in human form.
They call her the Delegate.
The Delegate came ashore on her great beast.
The Delegate is the Voice of the People.
Her Voice has spoken for a Thousand Years.
The Delegate will see you now.
We’re in big apartments with big open windows and big curtains. Chisolm sent us here. We’ve had baths. We’ve got new clothes. They’re green-black uniforms like the ones everybody else wears. Now that we’re rested and clean and changed, somebody’s come to bring us to Chisolm. To the Delegate.
We walk through the long, tall halls of the palace. There are mirrors on all the walls with gold frames. We come to a huge room full of people, all in uniform. Chisolm walks out of the crowd. She takes my hand and guides me to the far end of the room. We walk up some steps and turn to look at everybody.
This, says Chisolm, Is our Seer. It was she who led me here to the City, the City that was lost. The First City.
But it isn’t, I say.
Chisolm looks at me strangely.
This isn’t it, I say. This isn’t City.
There’s a long silence. Nobody moves. Chisolm’s face is going bad in a very strange way. Like something ancient suddenly exposed to air when it shouldn’t be. I don’t care. I look away. I was angry before, but now the anger is gone. I feel wrung, grey, nearly invisible.
Down in the crowd there’s one person who’s not in uniform. He’s got white hair, a long, brown face. He’s tall. He smiles at me.
Take her away, says Chisolm quietly. And two people grab my arms and lead me out of the room.
From the window of the jail where they lock us, I can see a big painting of Chisolm coming ashore on Lutra’s back. The picture’s on the wall across the street. There are words written underneath. The Delegate Is Eternal, they say. I hold the window bars and look through them at the painting, at the street. The people going by look sad and bored, tired. Behind me, Rook slumps on a stone bench. The cell is a cave carved from rock. We’re not alone. Thin, sick, ragged people, long greasy hair in their faces, sit or slowly pace. Some crouch in the corners in the shadows. Rook stands and paces too and talks—why did I have to piss off Chisolm? Who cares if it’s City or not?
I can’t lie, I say. I learned that from you.
That’s noble, says Rook, But there’s such a thing as withholding the truth.
I didn’t say it was noble, I say quietly. And I know about withholding truth. There’s something I haven’t told you.
What is it?
I’m the one who told Quill about Severn and Chisolm.
Rook sits down heavily, suddenly.
Why? he asks after a long pause.
Somebody sitting in a back corner moves, speaks.
She was afraid she would be stuck on that island forever, says the stranger.
Her voice is familiar. She stands and walks into the half-light. I know her face. It’s old. Not as old as Chisolm. I still recognize her.
She was afraid she would never make it here, says Quill, And now that she’s here, she finds that it’s not what she was looking for after all.
You’re dead, I whisper.
Obviously not, she says.
How is she alive? She says it’s simple. She never hit the ground. She couldn’t look at Severn anymore so she stepped off the cliff. Halfway down, she landed on the back of something with wings and feathers.
A bird? asks Rook, trying to pull himself from shock.
Large bird if so, says Quill. It carried me for days over open water.
An angel?
Strange angel, says Quill. The wings had black feathers. Greasy.
And that was all she ever saw or knew of it. She passed out, and when she came to she was on a hill overlooking the city.
That was a long time ago, she says. A thousand years ago, some say.
Hardly, says Rook. It’s not a thousand hours since you walked off that cliff.
He means, since he lost her. He doesn’t say that, but his voice is shaking.
If you say so, she says. She doesn’t notice how pale Rook is, or how he’s staring at her like she stepped out of another world. She’s lost track of time, she says. When she came, there was nothing here. A swamp. A river. Mountains.
Then Chisolm arrived with her beast and soon the second boat followed. Finding no city, they built one.
Why are you in prison? asks Rook.
I’m often here, she says, Because I rebel. And Chisolm jails rebels.
Later in the night I wake Quill and whisper to her that I remember the clifftop. I remember the look on her face and that it wasn’t her that jumped. Something took her over. I want to know what it was.
You, she says.
Not me, I say. It was a creature. Something dangerous. It’s been following us.
It was you, she says again. Great black wings g
rew from your back. I looked in your eyes and saw I must jump. There was no other way.
That’s not right, I say, Not at all.
It is, she says. It was. You were right. It was what I had to do. You made me jump and then you saved me.
I saved you?
Who else?
Not me. I’m not a bird. Not an angel either. I have no wings. I was on the cliff. I ran down to the water. I thought you were dead, just like everybody else.
You saved me, she says again. And now I’m going to save you.
I don’t understand what she’s saying. She must have had some kind of vision. It’s hard to read her expression because her face never changes. It’s flat and hard, like the faces of people who’ve been hurt and hope they won’t get hurt again as long as they make their faces into shields. I know that because my face is the same. And that’s also why I think she’s shaky underneath. I think that because of the way her eyelids flicker at the wrong time and how her words bounce to a stop too fast. I know she needs to believe something and so she believes everything I say. And also maybe it’s because her mother doesn’t. Doesn’t believe me, I mean. So Quill believes me when I say this city isn’t City.
And when she says she’s going to save me, she means it.
Very early in the morning two days after coming to jail, we hear shots in the hall. Then shouting, more shots, running steps. A lot of smoke, then four people come through it wearing bandanas. I’ve never seen anybody like them. They look good. Really good. They’ve got velvet hats with brims, pocket watches, big sunglasses, bigger guns. There are two men and two women. They take off their bandanas and they’re beautiful. One of them is holding keys and opens our door. We walk out over guards. They’re tied up. Some of them are moaning, some are bleeding. Never be a guard, that’s what I think. When things go bad, it’s the guards who get it first.