Roy Kesey
Scree

Tonight it is the father’s turn again. He checks the thermostat and turns off the hall light. Walks into his bedroom, stands beside his bed, sways with exhaustion. Lies down as quietly as possible beside his son, and the boy does not wake. The father smiles. Closes his eyes. Then something is wrong and he sits up. The curtains, still open. Digs his thumbnails into the sides of his forefingers, deeper and deeper. Goes to the window and takes a curtain in each hand. The draft is cold against his chest and if the building across the street were demolished, and the one behind it, and another three or four along that same line, his apartment would have the view of San Francisco he’d promised his wife six months ago when they agreed they had to leave Beijing. There is the smell of dry dusty heat as the furnace kicks on. He draws the curtains tight. Lies down carefully again. Slips toward sleep, away from it, back toward it, is driving down a Beijing side street and that sound, he knows that sound—idiophonic, the fish, muyu. The river had risen, flooded its banks, was now a rough dark liquid plain too wide to see across. A monk came, stood at the edge, watched. Then a massive fish roiled the surface, disappeared, appeared again and spoke: I will carry you to the other side, it said, if you promise to ask the Buddha to forgive me for cursing my master, to free me from this body and guide me toward wisdom. The monk agreed, and was ferried damply across. Seven years later he returned, his sack bulging with the palm-leaf sutras he’d gathered. He found the river once again flooded, and the giant fish was waiting. And? it said. What was the Buddha’s answer? Am I now free? The monk covered his face with his hands. I am so sorry, he said. I forgot to ask. Furious, the fish flared out its tail, knocked the monk into the river and swam away. A fisherman saw what had happened, rowed over and saved the monk, who opened his sack and found the sutras waterlogged, ruined. Seven whole years wasted! It took the monk another week to arrive home. Once there, furious in turn, he carved a wooden fish and smacked it on the head with a wooden mallet, but instead of the sound of wood on wood, what he heard was a word. The monk hesitated, then smacked the fish again, and heard another word. He closed his eyes, remembered, yes, the first two words of the first sutra he had been given. He smacked the fish yet again, and out came the sutra’s third word. He grabbed an inkstone, a brush and an inkstick, a blank scroll. It took him another seven years, but in the end there they were, all of the sutras rewritten, the hollow fish now a common musical instrument, mulberry or sandalwood, the fish eternally wakeful, beaten to accompany the chanted texts, to mark the beginning and end of meditation, then brought into orchestras, court music and opera, and its sound, something like water dripping into a well, the very sound of a certain depth and the father hears it now as he drives, not just one muyu but hundreds, a rain of that sound, impossible, and in front of him there is a splintered scurrying in the street, hundreds of tiny bits of movement along the asphalt, quick darting jumping runs like those of mice but these are smaller still and bright blue. He catches up to them and they scurry alongside his car, on all sides of it, the music continuing: hundreds of plastic bottle caps pushed by the wind. They lift and bounce and that is the sound, the music of bottle caps, though at points where the asphalt is perfectly smooth they roll cleanly instead like slanted wheels, the wind bearing them on the diagonal and they run and the asphalt roughens and they bounce and the music is all around him. He slows to exactly their speed. Then the wind dies and the bottle caps roll more slowly, more slowly still, fall finally to their sides and rattle to their rest, scattered now like coins at the bottom of a fountain, and the figure at the center of that fountain is a beautiful woman standing perfectly still, her eyes closed. The father stops the car and gets out. The woman opens her eyes. Did you hear that? he asks. Yes, she says, from all the way around the corner, and I had to come see. They stopped right at your feet, he says. She smiles, turns away, steps carefully through the bottle caps and he jogs to catch up. She asks where he is going. He invents a restaurant around a corner and across an avenue and up another side street. The Burmese place? she says. So he nods. Why didn’t you just drive all the way there? she asks. He doesn’t have an answer, and after a moment she says that she hadn’t been sure where to go for lunch but now that he mentions it, Burmese sounds perfect. Funny, she says. He nods again, lets her lead. They arrive, enter, and the owner is a friend of hers; he seats them, brings menus, shimmers and disappears. He gave us the best table, she says. The father looks around. All of the other tables seem identical to theirs, but he and the woman are seated precisely at the center of the restaurant, and perhaps this is what she means. The owner reappears and they order the usual food. Then small talk: traffic, weather, bottle caps. What were they doing on the street like that? the father asks. Maybe someone dropped their collection, the woman says. But they were all the same color, the same kind. Yes, she says, someone obsessive. The father wonders where she is from, doesn’t want to ask directly but if he had to guess from her appearance and accent he would say nowhere, would say one European parent and one African parent and birth on one continent and school on another and now some job here, some allegedly interesting job, but he doesn’t ask about this either, as it so often turns out like traffic, like weather, like polishing silverware with a paper napkin. He polishes his silverware with his paper napkin. Then the food comes, the usual food, ohn htamin and goorakathee kyawjet hin, thanatsone and pe thee pin pauk ngabaung kyaw, wetha see byan and panthe kaukswe, lychee juice to wash it all down and sanwinmakin for dessert. As they eat he asks her if she’s ever heard the story of the muyu and she says, Of course, yes, dozens of times, so instead he tells her of a party he once accidentally went to, a fetish party, glass after glass of absinthe and all of the female guests were naked except for their leather aprons and unarmed except for their cleavers and unadorned except for the heads of pigs—real heads from real pigs, and the women carried them by the ears. The woman laughs and nods and finishes her lychee juice. She’d heard of that party too, had actually tried to go, got all dressed up and bought her pig head and everything, but then the taxi driver couldn’t find the address. It was kind of hard to find, says the father. When they are done eating, he pays and she tells him that her apartment is only an eight-minute walk away. And so they walk. She leads in and up the stairs, through a door, tilts her head at the sunlight. He sits down and she serves him something, a drink, unbuttons her blouse. The woman of the future’s svelter, she says, or, The woman of the future swelters, the father is unsure, and the voice wasn’t her voice, wasn’t anyone’s voice. For a moment he has no idea where he is and it is all his fault. I am so sorry, he says. Sits up. It has started again: his son, coughing again. The father closes his eyes as if the cough might stop on its own, and of course it doesn’t, this deep hard rasping cough, five nights now, horrible. He doesn’t understand why the antibiotics aren’t helping. Opens his eyes, rolls toward his son, rubs the boy’s back, strongly and then softly. The rubbing doesn’t help either. Nothing helps. Each time it is eight coughs, four sets of two, like a telegraph, and the father thinks about tomorrow: a dozen interviews, new teachers for the TESL school he has started, six hours of answers about skills and experience, mistakes and amends. Then he thinks about his wife asleep in the son’s room, and most likely their daughter has crawled in with her and thank god the daughter has not gotten sick as well, in Beijing it was always the daughter but now she seems strong. Four sets of two and again and again, he is so very tired but at least his wife is getting some sleep and then he hates her for it. Except that she is probably not asleep— is probably awake, listening, has always been a light sleeper, has never slept well. Again the smell of hot dry dust and the father listens for the furnace, hears nothing, waits, waits, and there is now a glow of some sort coming in through the curtains, brighter and then dimmer and off, makes no sense. The boy coughs on and on but it seems slightly quieter now, not quite so deep in his chest. The father starts rubbing his son’s back again, in case it helped and helps.

    A woman in her forties on a motorcycle, and tied to the sides like obscene padding are six sheep. The traffic is heavy, the father stops and starts and stops, the motorcycle slips past him on the shoulder and disappears. He does not recognize this road, does not know why he is here. The traffic thins a bit and he catches up to the motorcycle, counts the sheep again, sees that strictly speaking they are not tied to the sides, are in fact strung together in pairs as if saddlebags, the front legs of each sheep bound to those of the other in its pair, and the back legs not quite scraping the ground. The first pair is tied across the gas tank, the second across the seat, the third across the frame behind the seat; the woman sits on the forelegs of the middle pair and the motorcycle is a large one but the road leads slightly uphill and the father can hear the engine straining with the load. The sheep are on their way to stud or shearing or slaughter and now he remembers, Datong, the road into Datong, but still doesn’t know why. Traffic thickens, thins. The legs of the sheep are tied with blue twine, a soft beautiful blue stained in places with reddish brown and now the sheep are out of sight behind him. Beneath Datong the coal glistens in bright black veins. There is also coal in the air, gray and particulate. It is fueling the factories on all sides, will be loaded onto the trucks that are causing this thickening traffic, and the very act of extraction can be observed at the Jinhuagong Mine—the tour includes a shower afterwards, he is sure of this. Bituminous, he thinks, and there is a Steam Locomotive Museum somewhere in the city and perhaps this is why he has come. Again the sheep, and now the woman is svelter, glances at him as she passes, swerves slightly away, the tendons rise on her neck as the motorcycle tilts back and forth but then she regains control and the sheep are saved. The Steam Locomotive Museum, and also a mass grave, tens of thousands of Chinese tossed into a mine by Japanese soldiers, preserved now under glass, their skin and hair preserved or perhaps he is here for the Yungang grottos. Yes, he thinks, more likely the Yungang grottos. The Turkic Tuoba sixteen hundred years ago, Taiwu’s twenty-eight-year reign, the monks he executed and the temples he destroyed but his grandson Wencheng makes restitution: five master sculptors brought from India, forty thousand local slaves, and it takes decades but in the end there are fifty-one thousand sculptures carved in fifty-three sandstone caves in the bluffs above the Wuzhou River. The smallest sculpture is only an inch high, and the tallest is more than fifty feet from top to bottom; the father watches the sculptors at work, shudders and the coughing again this coughing it has started again, the boy’s body hunches, shivers, hunches and now two sets of four and much worse, much deeper in the boy’s chest. The father looks at the clock. Slightly less than halfway through the night. Cough medicine as pointless as rubbing and the father pours a spoonful anyway, the fake cherry smell a thin wave of astringence in the close warm air. The son sits up when asked to, sways, coughs and the medicine mistimed, coughed straight back into the father’s face and he turns and says Fuck! almost shouts it, or maybe did shout it, grabs his son, pulls him close kisses his head hopes he didn’t hear, and of course he heard but maybe he didn’t understand, and of course he understood. The father lifts a corner of the bedsheet, wipes the medicine off his face, kisses his son again. More rubbing, rocking back and forth, useless, the coughing again, fading, stares up at the monastery stuck to the side of a cliff a hundred and fifty feet off the ground: Hengshan. Wooden cantilevers fixed on small ledges, wooden beams embedded in the stone and of course yes this is why he has come. Three stories tall but only twelve feet deep; six pavilions and dozens of smaller rooms linked by roofed corridors; an altar where Confucius and Lao-tzu and the Buddha sit in a quiet row. The guide acknowledges the absurd location, ticks three reasons off on her fingers: silence, protection from floods, shelter from bad weather. The father nods, makes notes for the guidebook entry, stops. These reasons are not sufficient. He asks the guide for more, and she shrugs. He squints but then knows: Sacsayhuamán, and the Mound of Óengus, and La Grande Chartreuse, and here at Hengshan, the air vibrating differently in these places and of course that is why they are chosen. He says this to the guide, and she agrees, says that one of the first monks must have suggested the site as a joke, and the other monks all laughed and shook their heads but looked again and yes, no other choice. The father asks the guide if she knows the story of the muyu, and she doesn’t so he tells her: On his way back from India, Xuanzang sought refuge one night in the house of an old man whose son had just been thrown into the river by the man’s new wife. The old man was horribly distraught but knew what was required of him as host. He prepared a dish of spring onions and celery and bamboo shoots, but Xuanzang refused to eat it, asked instead for fish, not just any fish but the largest fish in the river, and the old man was aghast: what kind of Buddhist master asks that an animal be killed? But this was Xuanzang himself, and so the old man sent for a fish to be caught, specified that it had to be immense, and when it was brought he cut open its stomach and found his son inside, still alive. The man, overjoyed, asked Xuanzang how he could repay him. Carve a wooden fish, said Xuanzang, and hang it in a temple courtyard, and let it be beaten to call the monks to their meals. The old man did exactly as he had been told, and the sound of the muyu was found to be so pleasing that thousands more were made—muyu everywhere, everywhere you look! The End, says the father. The guide smiles, and the father steps closer. The guide steps back, asks what happened to the murderous stepmother. The father says that as far as he knows she simply disappears from the story. The guide frowns, and now the father is driving again, driving home. The traffic thins, thickens, and this is wrong, is again the road into Datong. He waits for a chance to make a U-turn. Waits. Waits, and there is no chance, will be no chance, the traffic in the opposite direction even thicker but he must get off this road and the next cross street is only fifty yards ahead and the shoulder is just wide enough here so he guns the engine, wrenches the wheel, and hits the woman on the motorcycle. The father stops the car and jumps out and runs to her. There is the stench of singed wool. Three of the sheep are dead, the ones on the side that hit the ground. The woman’s right wrist is broken, her right leg a rash of blood and shredded flesh. The father kneels down, hears the screech of brakes behind him.

    A jolt. The father looks at the clock. Four minutes since the last time he looked. He decides not to look again, and immediately looks again. Watches the clock until the next minute clicks over. Stands carefully, sways, walks, drinks a glass of water. Back to the bedroom. To the window, opens the curtains and looks out. Nothing. Lies down carefully again. Looks, and yes, he’s left the curtains open. Fingernails into his palms until just before blood or just after, doesn’t look, and if she wants a divorce she can fucking have one but no, no, no, no, he’s so stupid, she never once mentioned divorce, or maybe mentioned it but never as a threat. The father reaches to smooth his son’s hair but stops, afraid of waking him. He closes his eyes, and there is a black pipe five feet in diameter and sixty feet long suspended from a metal frame built above a two-wheeled cart that four men are pushing across an avenue, four more men at each end of the pipe, guiding, but now the pipe is no longer moving, is blocking the entire intersection. Drivers honk and search for a way around and fail. The sun is very bright, the heat sweltering. The workers stare at the ground while another man screams at them, and this other man is wearing a suit, stands next to a black Mercedes with tinted windows and government plates. The near end of the pipe extends over the hood of the Mercedes, hovers inches from the windshield; a bus has drawn up tight behind the car, other cars are tight against both sides of the far end of the pipe, and thus stasis except for the screaming. Typical, says an old woman. The father turns. She must have been beautiful once. He nods, typical, yes, this standoff, this stasis and screaming. He walks to the corner, looks more closely, sees that the pipe isn’t made of metal or PVC, isn’t sure what other materials are possible. The old woman has walked with him, stands again beside him. Bimodal polyethylene resin, she says, or maybe ethylene-octene copolymer. The father looks at her again. The Mercedes man shouts for the pipe to be pivoted slightly so that he can get through, but of course any pivoting and the other end of the pipe will sweep across other cars, so there will be no pivoting. The old woman’s blouse goes translucent in the sun, and she is gone and there is no Mercedes and no pipe and the father walks up to his apartment building. The doorman does not look at him when he says hello, does not open the door or respond in any way, simply stares out at the street; on other days there is a doorman who looks exactly like this one but smiles constantly and helps in any way he can, and these two doormen, they are monozygotic twins or a single bipolar individual and the father does not know how to ask. He also does not much care: his top-floor suite is splendid in so many ways and only slightly overpriced. He opens the door himself. Walks to the elevator, presses the button and waits. The elevator doesn’t come. Presses the button again. Watches the flat-screen television mounted there on the wall, an advertisement for a diet pill, a faucet inserted into the lower back of a slender naked woman, the faucet turned on by a beautiful genderless hand, and liquid fat pouring out. Still the elevator doesn’t come. He presses the button again. Waits. Waits and waits and walks back to the lobby, through it and out; the doorman is gone, and this is not the father’s apartment building, is not anyone’s apartment building. He looks at his hands, finds them already taped, does not remember taping them but must have. The spire above him is five hundred feet of good granite. He stretches, scans the first pitch. Chalks his hands and fingers, deep breath, reaches for a low jug. Works his slow way up a varnished dihedral. A quick rest in an alcove, and the second pitch, thin hands up a long straight crack. Edges and smears for a time. Stems in a corner, bone-hangs off a slammer and cams his feet, sags and rests again. A breeze brings him the smell of pines, crushed ferns, cool stone. By now he is two hundred feet up, and every part of him feels strong and clean and fast. He makes his way up a bulge, hand-traverses right to another crack. Butterfly jam, high heel-toe in the crack and another beneath; shuffles his hands upward and starts again. Half a dozen of these, then he leans into a layback, brings his feet up, gains a chute and scrambles through scree to the start of the next pitch. Another stemming corner gets him to a hollow flake. A step-through left, another crack, and he stops to rest where it flares. Now the crux: twenty feet of smooth off-width. He grovels, searches for jams, works up to where the crack goes wide enough to chimney. At the top of it, an awkward move out right to clear the roof, then up an arête with nice incut holds. Good edges to a rim, up and over, slows as the rock gets chossy. He slots a hand jam and locks off, laughs, laughs again, has never in his life climbed this well. Another overhang, backstep and hip roll, pushes off, latches a horn and pulls up. He wombs for a moment, catches his breath. Bright blue sky. The last section, exposed but pocketed. Finally he mantels up over the edge, collapses there on the summit. Closes his eyes. Polished stone warm on his back. Silence. Then he stands, turns, and before him is what’s left of an old building: a single apartment still intact, loose brick fringe around it, wires and pipes protruding. An old man is sitting on the stoop. The father goes to him, kneels down, feels stupid and stands back up. Who the hell are you? says the old man. The father knows he should have questions but can’t think of anything to ask. He looks out over the city, glances back. The old man has four long black hairs growing from a mole on his cheek, a thin gray beard, is wearing a Beijing Ducks jersey and light green pajama bottoms. Is this about Huaihai? asks the old man. About what? says the father. The Huaihai Campaign, says the old man. The father shakes his head, steps past the man into the apartment, sees a photograph of a beautiful woman, her skin at the precise midpoint between light and dark, and on the far wall a poster, fields of sleep or sheep. He comes back out, sits down beside the old man, stares at the massive pit around them—the backhoes and bulldozers at work below, and the thirty-foot wall of aluminum siding beyond to keep passersby from seeing the dig and this nail house at the center. The father asks what will be built. Shopping center, says the old man. Big fancy thing, glass, I don’t know what exactly. They’ve got posters on the outside if you want to go see. I don’t, says the father. Has it been rough? Rough enough, says the old man. Two years almost. First they offered us these shitty little places outside the Fourth Ring. A couple of people took them. Then they showed us bigger ones south of the Fifth Ring, middle of fucking nowhere, and most of my neighbors took them just to be done with it. Then the goons came, started pushing us around. Government goons or developer goons? asks the father. Both, says the old man. Cut off the power, cut off the water. They even started a fire in an empty unit to scare us. Couple of months later there’s nobody left but me. I rigged up a pulley, and one of my old work unit friends brought me food, coal, water—hooked it all to the rope and I pulled it up, but then they started hassling him at the bottom, stealing the stuff he brought. How much longer can you hold out? asks the father. Can’t, says the old man, but I don’t have to. Last month one of those internet people found out that I fought in the Huaihai Campaign, that I marched with Chen Yi himself. Internet people? says the father. They ran a bunch of pictures, says the old man, and then others started running them too, and yesterday the developers brought me a contract. Got everything I wanted, almost. New apartment off of Fucheng Lu, two bedrooms, elevator and everything, all ready for me to move in—I just climbed back up here today for one last look around. The old man nods to himself, then squints. Or maybe the developers just got tired of waiting, he says, and the internet thing was a coincidence. He scratches his chin, shrugs, points at the horizon and the father looks but there doesn’t seem to be anything in particular, just city stretching out away from them. There are worse views in the world, says the old man. The father agrees, starts to re-tape his hands, asks the old man if he knows the story of the muyu. The old man has no idea. Of course you do, says the father. The novice monk who curses his master? Wakes up the next morning as a fish? The old man shakes his head so the father continues: Not just any fish but a huge fish with a small tree growing out of its back as further punishment, the skin perpetually bleeding there at the base of the trunk, the master himself encountered one day in a boat, the confession and prayer and forgiveness, the novice at last free of his fish body and the tree donated to the temple where he once studied, the trunk carved into the form of a fish, hung in the courtyard, beaten to remind new novices never to curse their masters. Hm, says the old man. Well, says the father, it’s getting late. The old man says, Funny thing is, this wasn’t even really my apartment. I’ve lived here for years, but it was my son who bought it. Then he died and it became my daughter-in-law’s, and the developers paid her for it so legally they didn’t owe me anything. She had already remarried, so it wasn’t like she was going to take care of me. Not that I blame her. The old days are gone, I understand that, and she’s a perfectly nice girl. I even like her new husband. But there isn’t anyone else for me, so all I could do was wait and hope. The father nods, wants to ask about the old man’s dead son and unmentioned wife, about his daughter-in-law, about love and pain and forgiveness but there isn’t time—if he stays any longer, darkness will catch him still on the spire. He chalks up, says goodbye, starts the downclimb. Ledges of broken concrete, rubble nubbins. He slows, picks his holds carefully, and then there’s a sound, a sliding and roar, and he ducks tight into the face. The stream of loose rock hits just above him and bounds outward. He waits for it to pass, takes a deep breath, listens, hears nothing, looks up just as the sound starts again. Dust rains into his eyes and a stone cracks him in the forehead, his hands come loose and he swipes at the wall, falls and falls, knows then that he is dreaming and waits to wake, falls and falls and lands. He can’t move. Feels nothing and knows that he is dead. Wonders why he didn’t wake, why he can still see, but then a cloud, black, lowering, thicker and thicker until there is nothing else. Still he waits. Waits and hears, it has started again, the sliding and roar and a deep hard cough. The father sits up, his son awake and staring at him, his wife silhouetted in the doorway. What is it? she says. What is what? he says. You screamed, she says. It’s gone, he says. What are you talking about? she says. He rubs his face. The thing, he says. I don’t understand, she says. The cuts burn in his palms, and he doesn’t answer. She goes to the window, looks out. The curtains, he thinks, motherfuck, and his anger rises, anger at her for being angry with him over this thing, this nothing, and he waits for her to ask why they are open, why he left them open, the draft and their boy so sick and how could he leave them open? Instead she says nothing. Isn’t angry, he sees. Is only tired, as tired as he is. She draws the curtains, comes to the bed, sits down and takes their son in her arms, holds him, and the boy’s cough is no better and no worse than it was last night or the night before. She holds him until he stops coughing, rocks him until he falls back to sleep. Thank you, whispers the father. She mumbles something back that might be You’re welcome. He waits, says, But there’s no sense in both of us being here, and it’s my turn, so why don’t you go get some rest. There’s no answer, and he turns, sees that she’s asleep against the headboard, her arms still around their son. The boy coughs once and the father reaches, rubs his back, because rubbing helps, of course it helps, of course touch helps. The clock says there are two more hours before the father must rise and dress and drive. Then movement at the doorway, and he looks. Their daughter. She stares at him, waits, and usually he doesn’t let her but now he nods. She comes and climbs in, falls quickly to sleep, and the curtains are ever so slightly parted at the top, a sliver of sky, black, and then not quite.

[Read an interview with Roy Kesey.]