Mountain

by Ursula Pflug

  “You can see,” I said. “There is a little light inside you, and if you turn it on, you will see everything, everything.” He did then, at first tentatively, like an experiment, and then the whole yard was shining, illuminated, and he could see the faces of the children, some sleeping, some waking. They could not see his light, but they knew something had changed. They stirred in their sleep, smiling, cuddling one another.

  “You aren’t a human being,” he said. “You cannot know how it hurts.”

  “Oh?” I said, but my heart hurt for him, for his hurt. Then he was better again, and happy. How I loved him. One day I will go back for him, and then we will be together. At night, when they were all sleeping, I made the rounds of all my window boxes, gathering seeds. Seeds from tomatoes, from echinacea, cucumber, geranium, hyssop, basil. Parsley, horsetail, garlic. Valerian, bergamot, mint. Sunflowers, zinnia, sweet pea. And of course, the beans and corn. I dried the seeds on the roof, under the sun. Then I climbed the stairs again, at night. Up, up the stairs, all around the shadowy building, leaving it behind: its weight, its solidity. Each floor I went up I looked at the sleeping faces, blessed them all. Each floor I went up I felt a lightness, a greater freedom. On the roof there were stars. One of the stars moved and came closer. In a great swoop of the mind I was lifted up up among them. They welcomed me, princes of peace. I recognized them all. We skimmed over the night, looking for lights. Where we saw lights, we hovered and sent our minds down into their dreams, the sleeping children. They did not know we had been there, but they felt a presence, a kindness, a benevolent intent. We were happy and shining.

  ***

  Far below I saw a girl, walking over a hill. In her knapsack she held a packet of seeds and a bottle of water. Through the canvas of the knapsack I could see the seeds, the life inside them glowing like light bulbs. And on another hill, there was a man. He was making something, a new kind of machine. One day, I knew, he would put it on the roof, and it would spin light and energy down from the stars.

  THE END

  14

  DAY THIRTEEN. Skinny sought me out at breakfast, once again at the row of pushed together picnic tables outside Kitchen.

  “I guess your mom’s not back yet,” he said.

  “No. She left on day six, which makes it a week.” I gestured for Skinny to sit down but he shook his head no.

  He had the faintly jittery look he often got, as if he couldn’t keep still long enough to sit down for five minutes, even beside me, who he mostly seemed to think was sort of okay for company.

  “What do you do, scratch the days on the tent wall?”

  “Or Daniel either,” I said, ignoring that.

  “Two since Daniel hasn’t come back.”

  I scooted over to make room. While he could stand there drinking coffee and holding a bowl of oatmeal, there was no way he could eat his breakfast that way short of slurping it down.

  “Sit,” I said.

  He smiled, gave me his coffee, and ate standing up. “Later. I’ll sit with you in Second Meadow later. But I gotta go in a minute. There’s been trouble in the parking lot overnight. Folks sleeping in their vehicles got in an argument about their dogs fighting.”

  “I miss having our truck to sleep in,” I said. “Our tent fell down in the storm and when I put it back up it sagged all down one side and it leaks now. Either the tent’s half dead or I’m a terrible camper, take your pick.”

  I didn’t tell him how much I missed Laureen. I didn’t want him making fun of me. In spite of his perpetually laughing eyes, there was something a bit scary in him, a little intense. I couldn’t tell if it was real or for show, and I had to think about what the difference even was.

  I looked up at him, noticed his hair was growing in under his hat; he had tattoos and piercings both, but all the same his vibe was a little like the orange-robed Hare Krishnas I’d seen panhandling in Vancouver or more accurately, I suppose, Zen Buddhist monks my mother knew in Toronto.

  The oddest part was that, along with his menacing undertone, he had this eminently believable quality. Based on that, I’d have given him my life to look after in a second, and not only do I not trust strangers, I barely trust my parents to keep me safe.

  I mean, who would?

  Like Marie said, she brought me here and left.

  Of course I knew who she was.

  There’s only ever the one, isn’t there?

  “What are you,” I finally asked, “a punk or a monk?”

  “Good one,” he said, and took off to make his security rounds but half way across the meadow he turned and waved. It seemed like he was always turning back, to wave, to collect dishes, to smile, to see if I was still there. I liked it.

  I sat there for a while and then thought maybe I should try and learn something after all, walked to the lower meadow where the workshops were being held. I came across a group sitting under a pine. A young woman with long red hair lay on the ground in the middle, whimpering, while the others stroked and prodded her with their fingers.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, after watching for a while. A new technique, foreign sounding name, some type of deep body massage. “Kind of like reflexology,” I offered when nobody answered, trying to sound in the know. “I’ve always wondered why there are so many kinds of bodywork. Why can’t they somehow amalgamate them all under one heading? It’s all energy work, right?”

  Not just the guy demonstrating but everyone in the group, including the whimperer, gave me the evil eye. What they were doing wasn’t like reflexology at all, apparently. And if I didn’t know why there were different kinds of bodywork, I knew less than nothing.

  I wondered where I’d gone wrong. You were supposed to be able to say anything at these gatherings; they were very big on free speech. I missed Skinny. I knew he would’ve laughed and then wondered how I knew. Maybe it was just us. Maybe right from the beginning there was a powerful current of empathy between us.

  I wished my mom would come back for a new reason. If she did, I could ask her everything she knew about him.

  The group leader said, “Sit down and join us, everyone gets a turn. I’m Ron, by the way.” He held out his hand, accompanied by a warm smile.

  I shook. “Amethyst.”

  “Amethyst,” Ron beamed. “Beautiful name. Very soon you’ll see just how advanced we are here from reflexology.”

  He sounded just condescending enough for all to notice and some to titter, but I sat down anyway. Making an effort, I guess.

  Ron continued to demonstrate the proper technique on the same volunteer. She allowed all six members of the group to copy him, poking her soft abdominal tissues one after the other. By the third prodder her screams had died down a little. Maybe the prodding was working and she was being healed of her trauma, whatever it even was. Or maybe the prodders were learning, no longer poking her so hard or so ineptly that screaming was her only recourse.

  Or maybe she had gotten tired of her own performance.

  “Trauma alters your brain chemistry so the necessary amounts of serotonin for you to experience a feeling of well-being on a regular basis are no longer released,” Ron told us. “The purpose of this work is to stimulate the brain centres responsible for chemical manufacture so that once again, serotonin is increased to a pre-trauma level. And sometimes heightened. It’s not reversible; the change is permanent. It’s more effective at altering brain chemistry than talk therapy,” he droned on. “Let’s face it, we’re basically all suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, whether from something that happened in this life or a previous one.”

  “Can PTSD carry over?” the woman being prodded abruptly asked between faint cries. “We have different bodies from one life to the next. Different brains.”

  “True enough,” Ron said. “Let’s put it this way. It sure feels like it sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  Then it was my turn
to prod. She abruptly began to scream loudly all over again.

  “I’m being raped,” she explained between screams, “by my uncle in China three hundred years ago.”

  I disengaged as politely as I could, standing up to say goodbye. Ron stepped in to take my place. The woman was still screaming by the time I reached the edge of the woods. I took a wide berth around the past life regression workshop, heading to Kitchen instead.

  When you’re at a loss, chop wood and carry water.

  It was some famous Zen thing Laureen told me on some road trip long ago, by way of encouraging me to help with camping chores. There was no guarantee you’d feel better afterwards, but you’d have a woodpile and filled buckets. Or, in our case, aired sleeping bags, a clean frying pan, and coffee set up and ready to go in the morning. While I did all that, she’d check the oil and tires and do other car stuff I’m ashamed to say I still don’t understand.

  I stopped thinking about Laureen being gone while I worked, and Nan was appreciative. If Tribe was a collective, I’d wondered more than once, why was Nan always running Kitchen? I finally asked her.

  “Because I can’t stand other people’s incompetence,” she said. “It’s not very egalitarian, I’m afraid.”

  “Plus it’s way more work for you.”

  She shrugged.

  In the evening after dinner I sat by the big fire circle, listening while people played instruments and sang, including a kid younger than me who did an only respectable rendition of “House of the Rising Sun.”

  “First song I ever learned,” he told us when he was done.

  “Yeah, like everyone else,” I said, but quietly, and Skinny, who had snuck in behind me unnoticed at some point chuckled and said, “And it was never all that good to begin with.”

  “He’s so smug,” I complained. “I’ll bet he’s got parents.”

  “Pretty soon they’ll be a bigger status symbol than top-tier Nike shoes.”

  I laughed and squeezed sideways so Skinny could sit down beside me. “I remember Lark telling me it was the first song he ever learned too. He was eleven and didn’t have a clue what it meant but it still made him feel like crying. He said music gives people a chance to show feelings they don’t let themselves share otherwise.”

  “You can’t mean it heals,” Skinny said.

  “Not when that kid does it. God, I know how awful I sound. Maybe it’s spoiled me, having Lark for a father.”

  “And what about Lark?” Skinny asked.

  “Lark?”

  “Does your father’s music heal?”

  “My mom said it did.”

  Skinny didn’t seem like the type who carried a comb in his pocket but he procured one just then and gently took it to my hair.

  “Ouch,” I said, although it didn’t hurt, not at all.

  “You need it,” he said. “When was the last time this hair saw a comb? You’re halfway to dreadlocks.”

  “Uh, Tuesday? What day is this?”

  Skinny didn’t answer, maybe because the next guitarist was actually good, and after “Woodstock,” he put his comb away and snuck off before I could stop him.

  I waited for him to come back and when he didn’t I got up and crept back to Kitchen, where I’ve been sleeping since my tent fell all the way down. It’s dry on rainy nights.

  In the middle of the night someone shone a flashlight in my face. I was as terrified as the time last summer when Kaylee and I got caught pool hopping by the police. But the cop hat was just Skinny’s. “So this is where you sleep? I’ve been wondering.”

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Three o’clock,” he said. “Everyone’s gone to bed. You awake enough to get up? I got a couple beers.”

  “Yeah, I’m awake enough.” I sat up.

  “Nice bag, man, is it a Mountain Co-op?” He toed the pile of discarded sweatshirts and coats I’d been using for covers. I’d abandoned my sleeping bag, a drenched crumpled ball under the most collapsed corner of my tent. Chopping wood and carrying water I was not.

  “My mom forgot to leave me one,” I lied, standing up.

  “Nice going, Laureen. C’mon let’s go,” he said, and because I trusted him I followed, not knowing where we were going.

  “She’s always been absentminded,” I explained, following the flish flash of his little light along the trail. “I guess it’s ‘cause she’s so smart and her head is too full of her power projects to remember day to day details.”

  Skinny stopped dead in his tracks. He turned around and stared at me, a fact I could make out even in the dim light. I felt like I had on the first day, when he’d asked me what I did other than my nails. What had I even said?

  I didn’t want him to disappear like he usually did when I said something dumb, this time leaving me alone on a trail I didn’t know, in the middle of the night, without a flashlight or even a candle in an empty pickle jar, so I blundered on, “for some stupid reason I’ve been too shy to ask anyone to borrow a sleeping bag.”

  “I see.” We were walking again and then I heard the sound of a zipper. The torch flashed on orange nylon; Skinny disappeared inside the flap and came back out with a fraying but dry and clean quilt. He folded it in half and draped it around my shoulders. “You should have said something sooner. There’s still a little bit of fire down at Circle, and it’s nicer now that the crowds are gone.”

  When we got back to Circle, Skinny reached between two large boulders, took out a little soft-sided cooler, and got us each a cold Molson’s.

  “You have ice?” I asked. “What’s with you?”

  “Daniel went to town today. I asked him to pick me up some.” Skinny stopped, as if he shouldn’t have said anything. Daniel going to town meant Daniel had come back from San Francisco without my mother and already left again.

  No one had told me. Spare the child, with the emphasis on child.

  “Never mind,” I said. “So, you’ve just got these little stash boxes everywhere, haven’t you? Coffee here, beer there—where do you keep your drugs?”

  “A man’s got to take care of himself.”

  So dark I couldn’t see his face although I knew that even if I could, he’d look like he was just about to laugh. Wondered too that he called himself a man. What would have to happen for me to start calling myself a woman? Wondered how old he was, who his parents were, if he had any. But I didn’t ask any of that. Asked him what he wished instead.

  He didn’t hesitate, as though he’d been waiting for someone to come along and ask that. “I wish I could sit with them all and be so innocently healed of something that was pretty minor to start with.”

  “Or else was something you don’t even know about,” I added, “something that happened half a world away in another lifetime.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s not even that I don’t entertain the possibility of all that. But I have enough pain from this life, thank you very much.”

  “That’s what I thought today too,” I whispered.

  “I know. I talked to Rocky—”

  “Ron.”

  “Whatever the fuck his name even is. He didn’t think much of you, not that you should care. But those weren’t your feelings, they were mine.”

  “They were mine too,” I said, slugging back the delicious beer. “Where’d you get it?” I asked, legal age being twenty-one in California and he didn’t strike me as that old. Not only that, but alcohol was banned at the gathering. Gets in the way of healing, Nan told me. Probably true, except that Skinny and I were having a little healing moment of our own that happened to include a couple of beers. The way I figured it, we weren’t cheating much, if at all.

  He only said, “I like Canadian things. The beer, the lakes, the people.”

  “Can it really help you get better, all that screaming?” I wondered aloud. “Or is it just an indulgence
? Or is that what healing is? An indulgence? Of what? And by whom?”

  “Beats me,” Skinny said. “More prosaically, you trust me enough to sleep in the orange tent tonight? You shouldn’t be all alone at Kitchen. You could get hypothermia if the temperature drops which it’s done before, even in June, this high up. And bears have been known to show up.”

  “Okay, but no hanky panky,” I said.

  “Not on your life.” He said it so sombrely, not like a joke at all, as if he meant it. Which disappointed me more than a little.

  15

  DAY FOURTEEN. Skinny was already up and gone this morning when I woke, bathed in orange light, wondering where I was. He didn’t show for breakfast but I wasn’t mad, figuring our three a.m. beer for a better date than chatting at the mess table, in the presence of perennial eavesdroppers. After I ate and did four tubs of dishes, I walked the trail through the Ponderosas to our log pile in Second Meadow. I hoped he would show but he didn’t. When I checked the thermos it was empty.

  In the line of trees to the west I noticed a trail entrance I’d never seen before, and decided to follow it. Went into that walking trance; kilometres passing with my thoughts underfoot. I remembered this from other trips with my mother, how once the dullness of no media wears off, you start to notice things again. How there’s seven thousand shades of green in a meadow, another forty-two hundred in a forest, how you can drift on contemplating that forever. And our early morning conversation still in my pocket, like a warm comforting worry stone. We’d finally gone to sleep just as it began to get light out, Skinny giving me a camping pad on the ground beside his own, and a pillow, yet.

  In a high meadow I bumped into lovers on the grass, a couple who’d pitched their tent far away from the madding crowd for just this purpose. Embarrassed, I hiked still higher, found an alpine meadow with a stream running through it and so many tiny wildflowers in so many shades I had to sit and look at them for at least an hour. Kept going then, for the trail, while faint, continued. More woods, another meadow, where I stopped at old fire rocks and dug in my pocket for the film can of safety matches Skinny had given me. I found enough dry kindling to get a small fire started; enough to keep me company and something to do.