A Year at River Mountain

by Michael Kenyon

  Frank has suggested we go swimming together. He’s afraid he will be swept away and lost, that he will vanish without a trace if he goes alone. He used to be a strong swimmer, he said. He learned to swim in America, before he was blind, and once swam with Thomas Cleary in Lake Michigan. He and the old master always went swimming in the river, every spring to fall, even last summer, though the old master had difficulty climbing in and out. But this year, after all that has happened, Frank is weak and lame, and must swim with someone sound, someone he trusts.

  YIN CORNER

  A noun and adjective, but maybe just an adjective. Weather slanting in with the light, until clouds shut half the sky, three quarters — a lid loose at the edges, imperfect fit. The head doctor has returned to his family again, his intrepid, optimistic colleagues, and all of them are pleased to see him. Why sad? Why the long face? Pacing the green room, the wings: remember, remember.

  URGENT PULSE

  The doctors crossing the lawn, laughing, all but the chief waving their arms and swivelling their heads as they get closer. A knot of cheerful women and men, rank and discipline forgotten. The chief bows his head and places his hands palm to palm. A chittering in the hedgerow, flight and a settling flourish: a robin sits her nest, a real bird, real nest, actual eggs, everything to lose. As the doctors close in, a new thought comes — so right that my knees go weak and a shiver threatens to unhinge my bones.

  The world is the red crown of my dad’s head, these clouds his thin white hair, and my mother’s blue eyes are the sky.

  The doctors approach across the lawn. The chief about to retire; on this last day at the hospital, he will consider his last case, his last intervention.

  “It is many years since I watched a movie,” said Frank. “Tell me where I have seen you.”

  A breathtaking spring breeze blew through the writing shrine as I took my brush to today’s entry.

  CAMPHORWOOD GATE

  God is a vine rose climbing where the fallen fell, where the storehouse fell, blooming on its highest branches only, roots in the swamp. And all between roots and flowers is a thorny tangle: tree: birds, sweet air.

  Down by the river the villagers are busy with their next migration.

  A black-and-white photograph tucked in the corner of my dressing room mirror. Doctors on a sanatorium lawn, relaxing before the official pose.

  CYCLE GATE

  The storehouse rebuilding has begun in earnest. Artisans from another sect use a corner of the temple as their field office. They are quiet men, surly even. I do not quite trust them. They are more friendly with the remaining villagers than with their fellow monks. They seem to resent something — being here, this work, the place itself.

  Today we dug clay for a wall to prevent the ramshackle town from being swept away by the rising river even though the families will soon move on. Frank suggested the village be moved to higher ground. The water level this morning was four metres higher than yesterday. And to think we were swimming just a few days ago. I cannot comprehend anything. I was just talking to my wife on a park bench. We were keeping tabs on our son paddling in a little pond. Remember the Kitsilano park between the ocean and the city, a tunnel of shade in the hottest months, remnant stream meandering through long sticky grass? She asked me what was in store for us, and I touched her hand. Then I was not acting, not a husband, but something far more intimate and mysterious. A crow was washing itself in the green water. Our son saw us and turned heel and ran up the hill to the swing set. An indelible moment of discovery and guilt.

  All manner of items are rushing through the valley on the surging flood: whole trees, bamboo walls, a leopard, a herd of deer, sections of roofs, and a small intact mountain shrine, very old, its carvings scrubbed clean.

  Conception

  Meeting of Yin

  Soon the doctors will cease their diagnostic confabulations, resume their playful antics and continue forward, like advancing troops, across the open lawn.

  A child is hiding at the edge of the forest — I saw her a moment ago, the flash of red, a pale hand. A breeze spins the leaves of the old trees in front of the shrine. The rape. The hospital. The storehouse. There is no storehouse. No hospital.

  CURVED BONE

  And what if Imogen never comes and I never leave and wars escalate? Suppose life simply dwindles to an end. Suppose life ends, click. What is the equation for time and space excluding life? The three or four trillion suns that lit the dusty path one evening when I was quite young. Bits of world rushing through the gorge. Storm tears wet my face. Stomach trouble. Granddad said when you’re old, pains attack and vanish, take no notice; then he died. Dad went to colon cancer and Mother went to suicide. Way way go away. Go go go away. The child at the treeline, a little way into the forest, waiting to be found. Way way go away. Go go go away. Nothing further to report? Nothing to record. A little boredom. Plugged sinuses. A stomach ache. A Mahler melody stuck in the head.

  MIDDLE POLE

  The warrior tree has been encircled and healed. The new well is blessed. All these words are guesses and wishes. I worked on one of the village women. During the quake she’d fallen and cracked some vertebrae. Her body released its pain, channel by channel, till she was asleep, and I stood at her side and smoothed the air above her, head to toes, our bellies in tune. Something invisible thickened above the horizon of her old breasts and lean hips and thighs.

  ORIGIN PASS

  On the path a dead rat. Hail in the morning, sun in the afternoon. I love this more than I can say. What is the equation for life? All the movies, all the paintings, all the novels. All the directors I ever worked with. All music.

  STONE GATE

  Every walk home through the rain. The river. Textbooks. Good friends. Shakespeare. Words. A blast of hail on the roof late in the day. The village woman saying thanks. Frank certain of his way downhill. Pouring rain. The deer bones. My heavy head in my hands.

  SEA OF QI

  Both parents alive, smiling across the table — nothing yet of the undignified illnesses to come, the cycles of resistance and resignation. Julian of Norwich accepting a nice cup of tea from Archbishop Arundel. “Oneing” and “noughting.” All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Ah me Mum and Dad, all at sea with googling and blogging, unfriending and friending. Shewing of Love. The baby’s pursed lips. My pursed lips. “Bowl of rice, milk?”

  “What is the point?” Frank asked.

  “Sea of Qi.”

  “What is the vessel?”

  “Ren mo, Conception, Central Channel.”

  “Please find this point on my body.”

  He lay on his back and I kneeled beside him. The corner of his latest map was soaked with rain, the ink blurring. I placed my left middle finger, Pericardium-9, Middle Rushing, just below his belly button.

  “What is there?”

  “The Great.”

  “What is the qi?”

  “Subtle.”

  “What do you find in this point?”

  “Binary fission. A going and a coming.”

  “Yes?”

  “So different from what I expected.”

  “Yes?”

  “A baby girl.”

  “Is she yin?”

  “Yin of yin.”

  “Good. This is the Cinnabar Field. Please find and hold Mingmen, Gate of Life . . . ah . . . ” He deflated between my hands. “Tomorrow you will leave the valley,” he said. “You will smell the outside world. It’s arranged.”

  Doctors surrounded me, discussing my past, my symptoms.

  Once upon a time. Sweetheart. Do you see what is happening?

  “Do you hear me?” he said.

  “I’m not ready.”

  Beyond Frank’s settled body I could see the warrior tree. I felt the bell’s reverberations in my bones. Young crows cackled and screeched in the forest. Sun slanted through the west boundary plums.

  “These days,” he said, “we must do things we do not want to
do. I did not want to be master.”

  “Where will I go?”

  “As with any journey, you will travel.” His frail thready pulse thrummed between my fingers. “The villagers have rescued an eagle with a broken wing on the mountain; now they must care for it. Zhou Yiyuan has returned, and you are leaving, which you did not choose.”

  YIN INTERSECTION

  At the bridge the three of us bowed and Zhou Yiyuan held out his hand. I stepped back onto Frank’s foot and he yelled and cracked his stick against the rail.

  “What is happening?” I asked. “Are we all going?”

  But no one answered, no one spoke, and we set off. Zhou Yiyuan led us across the bridge to the road and a brand new blue Toyota truck.

  The gas and brake pedals had been fitted with extensions so Zhou could reach. He perched on his cushion and drove all morning, peering over the dash, his big shoulders hunched, through villages and towns and stretches of rough hilly country, then stopped at a small city where we bought gas and shopped for food. Once we were provisioned he sped the three of us along a busy street and parked the truck outside a café.

  We sat through the afternoon in the tiny dim place. Zhou said he had satellite phone, GPS unit, water filtration system, all arranged. We would paddle to a remote island, to a prehistoric site. Sparks flew between him and Frank as they sipped green tea, then rice wine. Outside the window the rainy street swarmed with bicycles and motorcycles and pedestrians; loaded troop-carriers rumbled by.

  Back in the truck we drove north all night.

  “Something gathers to gather us,” said Zhou Yiyuan, slapping the steering wheel.

  “I told you not to say wise stupid things,” said Frank.

  They were pleased with themselves and couldn’t stop grinning and cracking jokes.

  SPIRIT GATE

  We travelled most of the next day and night, slept a few hours at a small inn on the coast and in the morning picked up two kayaks, a yellow double and a red single, and drove northeast to a fishing village on a deep inlet and by midafternoon were standing in the vanguard of a storm on a headland beside a research centre. Overhead, flags flapped and dark clouds passed south. Spits of rain in our faces. Salt stinging our eyes. Wind flicked the tops of waves. A lonesome, frightening, daunting place and yet our ease with one another was all at once wide, wide as childhood. Frank had paddled a kayak on Lake Michigan; Zhou Yiyuan was familiar with these waters. There, in the research centre parking lot, we unloaded the truck, stuffed food and clothes into waterproof bags.

  WATER DIVIDE

  We lashed the kayaks to an aluminium frame welded to the deck of the old fishboat, and stowed our gear in a heap behind the wheelhouse. Then the boat bounced through the inlet toward a string of grey islands.

  “What are those birds?” I asked.

  “Sea swallows,” shouted Zhou Yiyuan.

  “He means storm petrels,” said Frank.

  After an hour, the boat nosed onto a gravel bar at the end of the peninsula, and we jumped off and Zhou and I unloaded kayaks, tent, sleeping bags and mats, food and whisky, and watched the boat power away.

  Frank sat on the gravel facing the ocean.

  Silence. No wind. Pebbles scattered underfoot. Rotting seaweed. With Scotch in plastic glasses, we toasted our lives.

  “What I want to know,” I said, “is what are we looking for? What are we doing?”

  No one answered.

  We packed all the stuff into the kayaks and climbed into our cockpits. I’d done this before. Long ago in another life, but it was strange to be sitting in the ocean again. Snug. Alone. Not alone. Zhou’s access to equipment and technology, the master’s presence, their clowning, our unspoken mission — no need to know. This was a great relief.

  We paddled out into the running sea, Frank in the cockpit ahead of me, his back straight, his red life jacket too tight, his arms flailing, Zhou solo in the red boat to our right.

  On the first island we reached was a beach looking southeast into open water. We pitched our tent. The sun set across the palm trees and the continent behind.

  LOWER CAVITY

  Slept late. Breakfast and a slow packing up. At noon, we carried the kayaks from the high-tide line to the water’s edge. Paddled north across a choppy strait, surfing a following sea, far apart, yet keeping each other in sight. From inside a trough, I could see nothing but water and sky, the occasional smear of Zhou Yiyuan’s red boat. We landed on a wide bay on another island. The white sandy beach was scattered with perfectly round stones. Bear prints led into the forest and Zhou and I left the master to rest and followed the tracks to a sunlit lake. Exquisitely still, as if everything was asleep. Under the surface fallen trees. Weed covered a third of the water.

  That evening we paddled to the next island — hours of working against a rising wind — arriving stiff, weary, with barely enough light to haul the boats above the high tide line. Secured them bow-to-bow to a wind-sculpted tree. Made camp and ate in the dark. Built a fire and settled down to drink whisky, exhausted, long into the night.

  STRENGTHEN THE INTERIOR

  “Look, stars,” I said.

  “Not stars,” said Zhou, “phosphorescence.”

  “Some of it is reflected stars.”

  “Ask Frank.”

  The light in the water.

  “Tell him what we came for,” said Zhou.

  “The caves. To offer a bowl of rice.”

  By noon we were paddling a minor sea surrounded by islands. Fish-eye lens. We struggled up a tidal river into a lagoon on a large island. Deck-mounted camera. Helicopter shot. Handheld. Portaged to another lagoon: three connected lakes, less and less salty.

  On the last lake, we rested our paddles and drifted beneath the overgrown ruins of a temple, gibbons howling from the crumbling walls. We floated on the drowsy lake, almost asleep among chorusing birds and insects and monkeys. Trees festooned with vines and lichen. Hothouse. Steam room. Flies and mosquitoes hovered in the intense heat of the afternoon and dragonflies dipped wings on the mirror surface.

  MIDDLE CAVITY

  That evening, at the northeast end of the island, Zhou and I looked for the caves, but found only black volcanic rock pools full of anemones and starfish and crabs. And one well-inflated basketball. We bounced it off sheets of rock. Swam in the deepest pool.

  We ate around the fire, drinking whisky.

  “Your directions were wrong,” Zhou Yiyuan said. “This is the wrong island.”

  “No,” said Frank.

  “You are blind.”

  “A natural deviation.”

  “What will happen to a monastery run by a blind monk?”

  “New channels are opening,” Frank said. “New paths, new points, new flows.”

  “How can new paths show up?” I asked.

  “Through meditation,” said Frank. “Through crisis. Ancestral intervention.”

  “Do the points ever change?” I said. “Are new points found?”

  “No. Perhaps. Not by us.”

  The ocean, silent at his back, caught light in its ripples; a distant beacon winked.

  Zhou rocked on his heels, staring at the master. “And you don’t miss women?”

  UPPER CAVITY

  I woke before Zhou Yiyuan and Frank and clambered north along the shore; paused in a small bay, amid the jagged igneous rock and tide pools: high in the surrounding cliffs birds were swooping out of three openings.

  A tight chimney climb — fissure with toe-holds — to a flat hallway carpeted with wildflowers, crushed and broken shells. Nothing but the bay and the ocean and the wide calm faded eastern horizon. Sun shone into each cave, directly onto sea swallows sitting eggs beneath grotesque figures etched into the stone walls.

  When I returned we ate an enormous breakfast and drank the last whisky. Zhou and I played basketball on the hard sand, open ocean rolling in, wind-black. He lobbed a high looping ball at Frank; I intercepted it. Inscribed NBA, the ball was marked with the silhouette of a young gi
rl. I didn’t tell them about the caves full of sunlight.

  Late morning we paddled into the wind toward the research station for supplies, but had to turn back because it was blowing too hard. The sea off the point boiled and tilted.

  We tried the wind again in the afternoon. It was a long and open crossing, but with the wind now at our backs we skimmed the waves.

  All things happen at once, at the same time. The villagers find a wounded eagle and feed it mice. People change course and an earthquake rewrites the valley. One master follows another. There’s raping, killing. Thoughts contain the world. The world contains three men in kayaks. The eagle sits on a pile of sticks in its cage and stares fiercely at whatever approaches. Storm petrels wait. Children come. Demons come. My thoughts react to my gazing at them and open their beaks. The rough sea responds to the increasing wind.

  We doubled our strokes when the waves lost order. Red boat to starboard, close to the rocks, the basketball bouncing in a net bag on the deck. The seas rough and disorganised. Wind gusting on our port quarter, then dead astern. The sea churned, confused, white and terrifying, and our small boats rose on tall waves and crashed into valleys, and shuddering towers of spray erupted from surf shattering on the jagged coast.

  Concentrate on rudder and wave and paddle stroke, double the strokes.

  An arm-length ahead of me, Frank’s back was straight, his blind paddle slapping the glassy black roiling surface, almost useless. The eagle in the cage ruffling its feathers. Afraid, yes. Villagers and monks chanting at the dragon festival. A field of dangerous white horses.

  A cry, then a shout to starboard. Zhou was trying to turn into the wind, his deck awash, the kayak tipping. Then he fell into the monstrous sea, capsized, clutching the red hull of his boat.

  GREAT TOWER GATE

  Big seas flipped the red kayak close to the rocks, the basketball was lost and next day, defeated by the storm, we began our drive back to the monastery. I could not speak of what I’d seen. We came upon a car crashed into a ramp railing, police pulling a body from the driver’s seat. I’d seen the cave paintings, seen what they were.