The White Door

by Stephen Chan

  As for Walker, he was in one of the countries of his origin. Sky was higher there. Was all jets of sun and blue. One of those eight months to every year in which, definitely, weather reliably making decisions, coats and umbrellas were not needed.

  The sky is black, thought Teresa, knowing that somehow her mother was counting stars, probably talking to them, reeling them through her vision like cinéma verité. The taxi was nearing Guangdung and the sky would soon be a lamp-lit haze. My brother wants to be black, thought Teresa, for the sake of one special conceit. He would like the contrast as he sits on the mythical white horse. Most of his time in the West he wore only black and white, a designer shirt and suit that limped. Even his walking stick, a gift of his African friends, was made from ebony and inlaid with ivory from, she was assured, legitimately-culled elephants. How brother could lean on that and, at the same time, advise CITES and other conservation groups on draft treaties and the like was beyond her. Only force of will had prevented him from strutting his stage with an elephant-skin briefcase, now, thankfully, consigned to a wardrobe. The contradictions of the brother – who imagined himself purely black or, in an occasional though gracious concession to genetics, half-black and half-Chinese. Parents were horrified by his aspiration, and the implication that they should have been black for him. As if being refugees and poverty-stricken was insufficient. But they dismissed it, after a suitable interval of horror, as they had learnt to dismiss most of his unconventional ways. What they did was to abstract from the list of his paradoxes, odd-ballisms and plain stupidities those romantic but reasonable touches that could embellish the telling of tales about offspring. Worked every time. Not one meeting of proud parents when mother and father could not trump all recitations of pride with a single note from their repertoire of son’s adventures under African skies. But he was never, in their stories, the black soul which, son felt, the African sun slowly but surely was drawing to his yellow-bleached surface.

  Empress Wu of the Tang saw the bright lights of Guangdung. She was decreeing the demolition of all modern buildings, of all modernity. Teresa gently removed her wrists from the smudged taxi window. No more thunderbolts tonight, she smiled, and for the first time since it all began in White Stone, pulled her mother to her shoulder then turned and held her and placed their foreheads together. The taxi driver, aware equally of the tumult recovery of the past can bring, and of the prospect of a large tip, began to sing and it was the music of the clouded spheres, and it was not the music of grand courts, it was the music of men who sing because people make light because the night is black. Those in love with the depths of darkness have lost souls.

  5: The black hand

  In the years that came, it emerged that the cancer was not in his stomach but in his liver. By now, doctors were no longer evasive, they were brutally frank, and he had stormed out of the surgery vowing to live long enough to piss on the doctor’s grave. Even if he did not, he vowed to die with the same bravado that had always sallied from his lips and which had always grown in his heart – an organ he understood, for it partook in all his emotions, and was not the clogged and corroded parts that stomach and liver could only be, blind machines that sucked and cleaned. The heart was an eagle of the sky and led him on like a pulling string, and the eagle was red flame in the free daytime gods’ cup of blue. When a god finishes his drink, he thought, he turns over his cup, and a universe is created, from the soaring aspirations of freedom to the blind gropings of disease. The universe as tea leaves or coffee grounds sobered him. Not long to live, he thought, no pain as yet. He planned to let his eagle fly and be towed behind. When he died in flight, the true-heart eagle would cast his body in an arc towards the sun.

  By the time second and third opinions were given (more diplomatically but still unevasively), tests completed, slivers of his liver analysed, scans examined, all while he was fully conscious and watching the television monitors, he was almost enjoying the process. It was a full New Zealand summer. Son was returning for Christmas and New Year, freer emotionally to visit after that first decade-absent return. Well, he hoped the news would not hinder son’s long hours in the sun, still seeking to become brown, then char the brown to black. No ozone layer above New Zealand, he thought: must buy son a full stock of sunscreens. Slow down his sun-dyed project, but he would at least shine – body scars and all – in the long life-measuring days.

  Ah, life-measuring days. Two to six months, the doctors had said. Extra maybe if the mind held out and ruled the body sufficiently. What was sufficiently? He read that meditation helped. Son would have to teach him how to meditate. He would have to learn to sit cross-legged on a cushion on his deck by the sea. His mind raced. I’ll stay in New Zealand. If I am still alive when summer ends, and if the pain has not yet come, I’ll follow the summer and I’ll see the antiquities of Europe and I’ll see in China that small place, Unused Sky, where I was born. I’ll not die under any winter’s mantle of grey.

  And I’ll ask son to explain death to me and what lies beyond, and I know he’ll say ‘nothing’, either ‘nothing’ or ‘nothing we can understand’. He talked of God like that once, ‘oh, something, but something we can’t understand’. The son who detested the human urge to personify the universe and to litter the history books of the species with all too-human all too-flawed appropriations of the Great Beyond that seemed just like the folks and flower-shrubs back home. At least son was now more at ease back home. It’s not that he can’t stand New Zealand, he is in love with that beach at Kare Kare, he cries when he sees it. He can’t stand the thought of New Zealand – so far away from his precious conflicts, such long plane rides away. But, yes, Kare Kare. The first time he came back he asked first to go to Kare Kare, dragged us there, and there we were, me in a suit, wearing my rings, his mother in a suit and high heels. He made us wade the little stream. Then he seemed to enter a different world – his own world of iron sand, bush-clad cliffs, and unused surf. Just bang! As if he’d stepped through a wall, and he didn’t speak to us for an hour. He does this when people point guns at him. Suddenly, in deepest Africa, he is no longer there. His soul almost visibly leaves on its walkabout – sniffing flowers no doubt while his inquisitors, roadblock, whatever, wonder where it’s gone. And they know they have nothing to shoot any more. Is this what the Taoist sage meant about the great master? That he was invulnerable because the rhino had no place to put his horn? The tiger no place to put his claws. Son as master, huh! No, he’ll need a few more lessons with his Okinawan Sensei. I’m sure he’s being taught not to be there as Sensei pounds his left-behind body. When he re-enters he is half broken. He doesn’t mind broken. He dislikes the process of being broken. But how long can he stay outside himself? What if Sensei decides to beat on him for an hour? Does the body die if soul vacates it for an hour or more? And what if the body is dead? Does the soul leave as easily as son’s? Is the untrained soul wrenched or pushed painfully away? Does it mournfully linger? Then, where does it go since it has no home to which it returns? It enters the ‘nothing we can understand’. I’ll ask him to talk to me about these things, and predict every sentence. He will tell his friends his father smiled at the talk of death. After that, I’ll talk to him about the antiquities of Europe and what I want to see before I die.

  Images of Notre Dame, the Vatican and Canterbury Cathedral filled his head. He asked them to leave – too much stained glass, too much mediated light, too many constrained pathways to heaven. He switched to art. He wanted to see Michaelangelo’s David, Picasso’s Guernica, Leonardo’s… then he remembered son’s disquisition about the two versions Leonardo painted of the Madonna on the rocks, one in London’s National Gallery, one in the Louvre, one full of light and painted in youth, one with the colours of life’s evening. I am not yet in the evening, he thought. I see things only in summer colours. I am dying before evening. He decided against Leonardo and thought of Holland. Not windmills or wooden clogs, but red-light districts and how one finger in a dyke could hold back the cascade of
destruction. What could be inserted where and who could be saved by what filled his imagination. But he needed not a finger, but a fist filled with sword to combat, or at least slow down, the mouth-like cancer whose moment to gorge all other tissue had come. It would eat the meals he never ate, and its tongue would wave like the hand transplanted from his stomach, and there would be an army of rapacious cells, all shaped like blind mouths, but equipped with limbs and, with the most exquisite manipulation of knives and forks, would chew noisily at his only liver. Ah, he said, even my cancer cells appear in primary colours. Their lips are Revlon red. And he took himself out of Amsterdam and thought of Oxford, son’s favourite city, but that seemed too much like the cathedrals he had already rejected. Like a pilot slung beneath a hang-glider’s wing, he came to Athens. Ah, yes, there, he thought. This is Europe. Where men spoke well and speech was free and every arm could draw a sword to protect that speech. He came to the Olympic stadium, where son had fought and been badly mauled. Did he go walkabout then? he asked. He came to Marathon and glided over the breathless route to the old city gates. He went to Piræus and flew out over blue seas and dry-lit islands and wheeled free in a light that blazed like Auckland’s. He knew he was in danger of emulating Icarus, Icarus or Dædalus, he could never remember the names of which was father and which was son, but he restrained his blue glide and the scarlet wing bore him well in the Ægean of his dreams and he laughed outside the hospital windows, the laugh of the carpark escapee, you’ll not trap me behind your walls! and he drove away, as whole wards wished they could drive away, and he chanted a new mantra – Black Hand, Black Hand, I piss on you Black Hand, Black Hand, Black Hand, I piss on you Black Hand – and his wheels were like wings in the earliest of seasons and he was telling death to wait its turn and the Revlon lips of his cancer to suck his miles of dust.

  6: The white warrior

  You must not close your eyes immediately. Focus on this point, the tip of the beak of the crystal ibis. Remember the comic heroes of your young manhood in New Zealand. There was a turbanned and cloaked hero, otherwise in a Western suit, he was accompanied by a beautiful woman, and he wielded the ibis stick – a bit smaller than the laissez passer plaques carried by Chinese messengers of the king. In moments of crisis, the hero would hold up his ibis stick and shout (of course): ‘The ibis stick! The ibis stick!’ From the picture of the ibis on the stick, waves of energy would reach out to destroy his enemies. I had a favourite drawing, as if the hero were seen from a point on the ground some feet in front of him, foreshortened, silhouetted against the energy-radiant sky. That is how your crystal ibis sees you now. We are going to take this energy inside you to fight the army of the cancer king. Inside, you have three avenues of help. But you must reach them to bring them instructions and encouragement. You cannot defeat the cancer army, but you can surround and contain it. Look at the tip of the ibis beak, see only the tip, every two minutes I’ll shift the ibis closer to you, until it is only eighteen inches away from your knees. As it comes closer, let your vision of it become slowly more blurred. At eigthteen inches, your eyes will close quite naturally.

  As you sit, just breathe normally – but only through your nose. As your eyes blur, as the vision becomes gentle, loses its restrictive edges, let the breath also become very gentle. Count it in if you like, slow four in, hold it in – very gently – using or seeming to use the lower stomach muscles, slow hold four, then without any effort, no effort to release it, no effort at relief, slow four out. Keep looking at the tip of the ibis beak. As your vision blurs you will become a little cross-eyed – particularly as I bring the ibis closer. See if you can imagine your eyes blurring into one eye in the centre of your forehead.

  As the breathing becomes easier, let your tongue very lightly reach out with its tip to touch the top of your mouth, very near the back of your teeth. Now the eyes close, your heartbeat is having the holiday of its life, you are still counting in and out the breath. You hear me as if from a distance. Later, I will be able only to come to you from a distance. This is how you will hear me.

  When I was a boy you bought me a one-volume encyclopædia. Only afford one volume. It had pictures of an Indian fakir who could slow his heartbeat, endure great pain. If I burnt your feet now, you would feel nothing. You must practise this every day, to be ready when the great pain seeks to eat you from within. Teeth of fire. The interior pain is the worst of all.

  Now the breathing is a circle. In gently through nose, sink gently to navel, rise gently to the one eye. When it emerges from the one eye it is like the free and gentle breeze. The cooled forehead, the cooled forehead. The eye is so small now, the breeze emerges through a needle point, but it does not rush.

  The ibis stick, ah, the ibis stick. Remember its waves of radiant energy. This is what emerges now from the needle point. Father, it is blue, this energy. It is like a cascade, so slow, still voluminous. You are a fountain. The eye is a fountainhead. As you sit here you are the centre of all that is washed, the centre of a cavern of water. Within the cavern, if you enter, is another cavern. Ah, now, shall we enter the cool, blue caverns? This is done on foot. You are a solitary walker. This is how you enter yourself.

  A small version of you enters the great cavernous fountains you have created. It is a washed pure soul that has migrated from the top of your head. Now it walks, dwarfed by the blue liquid caverns. Each portal is succeeded by another portal. Through these fountains it is walking deeply into you. It cannot reach the liver. There is a war there. It reaches, deep in you, a very small screen. The small pure soul has to focus on the very small images. It can choose one of three programmes. Depending on your need, choose each day the programme that will suit that day’s pain.

  There is a very great army. You may choose its colours, design its armour. It is your army. It surrounds the cancer army. But it must never engage the enemy hand-to-hand. No soldier of yours can be replaced. If one dies in battle your forces are reduced forever. While the cancer army grows more numerous by the day. Look at them with their pale cloaks. One day, by sheer force of numbers, they will overwhelm the siege you now prepare. But you can make the siege a long one. Your soldiers must harass cancer from a distance, fire arrows and missiles constantly into cancer’s swollen ranks. Ah, now Father, make not the armour too intricate, but spartan and functional. Your own host is a grim one, yes? But to give it some of the martial panoply that lights up the screen, let the junior officers wear plumes and the seniors, scarlet cloaks.

  Now here is a great general. You must name him. You clasp him by the hand. With him, you plot strategy. The siege must have strategy. Perhaps he has a high command, staff officers. Name them all. They are your intimates. If they fall, the cancer will sweep through the rest with chariots of steel.

  The man with the long white hair and beard is a learned doctor. He surveys the scene from a high mountain ridge. Some days you stand with him. He nurses and heals the wounded soldiers. In this sense, he heals you. He wears the robes of a doctor. Imagine him as yourself from a former lifetime, here to help prolong this lifetime, for he feels it is not yet time for you to die.

  You must not come out of yourself quickly. Meditation is not a daydream. Exit slowly by the same blue caverns. You know how divers get the bends when they surface faster than they should? You will come to yourself and see yourself meditating. When the pure soul re-enters, you may slowly open your eyes. See the world as the pure soul saw the struggle for your liver, as it saw your forces rehearse your right to live.

  Open your eyes now, Dad. How were the blue caverns? You know that strange poem I had to learn at school, the first with oriental characters in it? Caverns measureless to man. A metaphor, I’m sure, of Kubla entering himself.

  I’m surprised your generals and army are Romans. Cornelius is the commander’s name? I thought they’d be Chinese. The doctor is Chinese, ah, that’s good. But Romans… I guess we went to too many Steve Reeves epics when I was a boy. The sun is shining on the New Zealand water. Let’s walk aw
hile.

  Dearest Marja,

  Sometimes it seems so futile and trivial. The masters say there are 7,000 steps in meditation. The first course lasts seven years, and you’re still an apprentice. I gave my father nursery lesson one. Like an unformed child trying to help a sick infant. What help it gives him can only be limited. The disease can circumvent such frail defences. Last night, after training alone at Tokei Dojo near Tower Bridge, I was myself meditating and felt his pain. I heard him cry, ‘the cancer archers have poison arrows.’ I began to weep, Marja, for I could see into my father’s meditation and his soldiers were dying.

  Then I realised that we were indeed meditating at the same time on opposite sides of the earth. London’s night was Auckland’s morning, his time to meditate. This is the conjunction of father and son, yes? That conjunction we never made when he was well. Now a bridge linked the boy beside the Thames and the father beside the Auckland waters. There was nothing his forces could do, the defences within him were falling. Marja, my teacher said this could be done, but I had never thought I might even attempt it. It is possible to detach a piece of your soul. Across that bridge of sorrow and pain I sent as uncrippled a part of me as I could. Reinforcements from outside. The cancer army can only strike down what originates within my father. This will set back my reincarnations a few lifetimes, ha, but I felt the soul part detach himself, asked me if this were my true intention, asked if this could be the trained soul’s purpose, then wrenched off and sailed the bridge from night to morning.