The Mountain

by Paul Yoon

  She was wearing a large felt hat with a wide brim that covered her eyes. She told me it belonged to the person beside her, who forgot it on the plane, and she couldn’t find the woman, had lost her in the disembarking crowd, and didn’t know what to do.

  So I kept it, she said, and tilted her head up so that I could see her eyes. What do you think?

  She was glowing and awake and beautiful. My daughter Philippa. How much I loved saying this out loud to myself as though it were my secret, as though I were the only father in the world with a daughter.

  The brother who was out front seemed enamored with her. I caught him looking her up and down and I jabbed him in the stomach, which confused her and made the brother’s pale cheeks flush. He hurried to carry her bags in and she massaged her thigh. I asked her how she was.

  Better now, she said, and slipped her arm under mine and we walked in.

  The rain stopped. Philippa showered, changed, and knocked on the door connecting our rooms and threw two brochures at me.

  This place is fabulous! she said, and wrapped her neck in the collar of the plush bathrobe she was wearing. I’m never leaving.

  She wasn’t wearing her prosthetic. As she threw herself on my bed, I wondered how often she thought of that day. I had saved her some chocolate, and she ate them all, one by one. I opened the brochures. One was for horseback riding on the trails. The other was for clay pigeon shooting. They listed the times they were open. They were both beginning in ten minutes.

  Choose one, she said.

  Horses, I said.

  Probably not a good idea, she said, and tapped her hip.

  She rolled over the bed, reached down, and grabbed the shooting brochure from me.

  Let’s go fire some guns, she said, in a voice that was deep and with a drawl.

  She slipped on her prosthetic. She tore open the socks I had bought, and took the sweater, too, liking the color. I gave her the Wellingtons. She asked where I got all this and I said the town down the road. She thought we could go tomorrow, and I agreed. I hadn’t told her about Maya yet.

  We rushed down and outside. Philippa was wearing her hat again. We found the path to the field that I saw on my first night here. The older couple from the restaurant were there, and an instructor was loading a trap. We spent some time introducing ourselves and then the instructor taught us how to hold and fire the shotgun and before I was able to comprehend it all we were given safety equipment and the game had begun.

  The clay pigeons were released automatically, and we took turns shooting, attempting five targets each. The couple had done this before; they hit several. I missed. I was stunned and sore from the recoil. I watched Philippa take the gun, lift, aim, and fire. I heard the trap release another. I watched her do it again. And again. It was loud, even with our ears covered, and I felt it deep in my chest. I could smell the gunpowder. I could see it rise like a thin fog as we all took turns and kept shooting. Birds, terrified, flew away. We ignored them and kept going. I cheered on the older couple. Philippa hit one target in the air and she hollered and jumped, looking over at me.

  And then, as quickly as it had begun, the hour was over. We said good-bye to the instructor. We promised to see the couple at the fancy dinner that evening. Our ears ringing, unused to the sudden quiet, Philippa and I wandered the grounds of the estate. We found fallen apples under a tree and pocketed them to feed the horses. We took a path that led down a long hill. I asked how her mother was. I asked how work was. I thought again about telling her what happened today but decided I would wait. She pointed at the sky, tracing the path of a light.

  One of yours? she said.

  She never asked me about what I did. She used to, when she was younger, but now she didn’t.

  I shrugged. I didn’t care.

  I don’t care, I said, and gave the satellite the finger, and Philippa laughed out loud, her voice lingering in the trees.

  We weren’t paying attention to the time. As we turned back the sun began to fall behind the woods. The sky had cleared and some stars had come out. We climbed the hill. I caught Philippa rubbing her thigh. She had left her cane in her room.

  We returned to the field where we had shot the clay pigeons. I suggested we rest for a moment and Philippa didn’t argue. She leaned against the wood railing. The traps had been put away in the shed but all the pieces of the clay pigeons still lay scattered in the grass. There were pieces everywhere. Broken pieces and whole pieces, untouched, the size of plates. I saw nothing else in the field but that debris and I couldn’t say why or what it was but in that moment, in the low light, with Philippa beside me, I grew afraid.

  I wondered what she was thinking. I was thinking of her. I was thinking of her holding a gun and shooting and jumping and I was thinking of the screens at work and everything I had seen in the last fifteen years and had the technology to see. I thought of Maya and Takashi Inoue and the two people on the bench at Tavistock Square who were obliterated. I thought of a winter storm and a drink called the Mars Rover and the bridge and my father. I thought about the day when we wouldn’t go on these trips anymore, and I wondered if Philippa would still go, alone, or with her mother, with someone else. If her life would be all that different when I was gone.

  The sun went down. A wind came into the field and moved over us. Then the shadow of something small and quick flickered in the air, crossing our line of sight, briefly.

  Maybe it’s not from mill, Philippa said.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  Milner, she said. Maybe it’s from Millinery. Milliner. Maker of hats.

  Philippa tapped the one she was wearing. She took it off. I saw her eyes. Her bright eyes catching the early moon as she tossed the hat into the field. It spun, flipped, and landed in the grass.

  I think her head must be cold, she said.

  Who?

  The ghost’s, Philippa said, and then we made our way back to the hotel, where we changed into our dress clothes and returned to the main floor.

  I put on a bow tie. I hadn’t worn one since my wedding, so Philippa had to redo it for me. The older couple passed by us and laughed. We were in the corridor and had yet to go into the dining room. We were alone. Philippa was wearing a black dress. She had on a nice perfume and her hair was done up. Candles were burning and I glanced at her back reflected in the tall mirror behind her. The long, vertical scar there that was like a river to me.

  My phone rang. I looked down at the screen but before I could put it away, Philippa snatched it from me.

  Who’s the Pythia? Philippa said.

  I didn’t know what to say. Not because I didn’t want her to know but because I was stunned her mother hadn’t ever told her.

  The phone rang a few more times and then stopped. I promised I would tell her at dinner. Philippa raised an eyebrow, intrigued. There was something else I had wanted to say to her but it slipped away from me.

  So I held her face. I kissed her brow, maybe for the first time, and smelled the perfume on her and still the gunpowder. And we both grew shy about the kiss and peered into the candlelit room, where a group of musicians began to tune their instruments.

  She took my arm. My daughter the river.

  Lead the way, Philippa said. Let’s go in.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book was written at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. I thank Jean Strouse, Lauren Goldenberg, Paul Delaverdac, Julia Pagnamenta, and all my colleagues there for their support, faith, and friendship.

  Thank you to Matthew Chamberlain, Bret Anthony Johnston, Ethan Rutherford, and Nayon Cho. Christopher Beha and Harper’s Magazine. Rob Spillman and Tin House. Allison Wright and Virginia Quarterly Review. Beth Staples, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Emily Louise Smith, and Ecotone. Caroline Casey. Christopher Lin. Zachary Knoll, Loretta Denner, Amanda Lang, Jonathan Karp, and Simon & Schuster. Chris Clemans, Henry Rabinowitz, Marion Duvert, Kirsten Wolf, Simon Toop, Hannah Hester, Drew
Zagami, Jillian Buckley, and the Clegg Agency.

  “Vladivostok Station” was inspired in part by the history of Sakhalin Island in the North Pacific Ocean. The geographies of certain locations—in particular Shanghai—were radically altered to suit the purposes of these stories. The actual Milner Field is located in West Yorkshire, England; the one in this book, which is in North Yorkshire, is pure invention.

  Thank you, especially, to Marysue Rucci.

  To Bill.

  To Ralph.

  And to my wife, Laura.

  Books by critically-acclaimed author Paul Yoon

  Winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award, Snow Hunters is “a subtle, elegant, poignant read” (Oprah.com), featuring a Korean War refugee who emigrates to Brazil to become a tailor’s apprentice and confronts the wreckage of his past.

  Snow Hunters

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © PETER YOON

  Paul Yoon is the author of the story collection Once the Shore and the novel Snow Hunters, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and his work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Tin House, VQR, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he teaches creative writing at Harvard University.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Paul Yoon

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  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition August 2017

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  Jacket design by Christopher Lin

  Jacket Painting of Mountain: Musée Guimet, Paris, France/Bridgeman

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Yoon, Paul, author.

  Title: The mountain : stories / Paul Yoon.

  Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016054159| ISBN 9781501154089 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501154096 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501154102 (ebook).

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3625.O54 A6 2017 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054159

  ISBN 978-1-5011-5408-9

  ISBN 978-1-5011-5410-2 (ebook)