it was hard to believe humans actually lived down there, endless miles below, and that innumerable towns and villages lay between these mountains and the coast. Was it worth trying to make that prospect today? He lay on his back, staring into clouds and the pale blue shards between clouds, munching his sweet plum and trying to regain his strength. Something vibrated against his chest, deep within his parka—not his heart, but the cellphone once again. Habit. He begrudgingly dug it out from layers of down and Gortex, and, squinting, tried to read the lengthy number of the incoming call.
A small, very tinny voice shouted up to him from across half the width of the northern hemisphere: “Is this you, cuddly bear? Have I made a surprise?” The voice sounded more British than Chinese, which was the result of a good Hong Kong education. “Hallo, you there?” There were a few attempts on both ends to start a proper conversation with proper greetings, but they kept stepping on one another’s words due to the long international delay. “Hallo, this is you? Hallo!”
“Tsu-Chi, isn’t it late there?” he was finally able to get in before being interrupted. It was the first they had talked on the phone since September, and now, here of all places…
“No, it is very early, actually! You I cannot hear so well.”
“I’m at the top of the world, that’s why. New Hampshire. How unlike you to bother to call.”
The voice grew fainter, wobblier, was lost for a moment in a crackle of static, and then came back much louder than before: “…had to call you, Bear, and warn you about the virus. Am I too late?”
“Virus?” He felt that sickening lull before panic sets in. “Are you all right?”
“Well, my computer is screwed. That’s why I had to call, to warn you about the virus.
Don’t open that last email from me. Sorry. Some new bug.”
“Oh.” There was silence on both ends, though all around him the wind flung great fistfuls of snow down the rock-face.
“I haven’t heard from you in so long, I though uh-oh, you must have it, too. But am I wrong?”
“No, I’m sorry, I’ve just been away from my email for a while. I should’ve told you, I’m taking a little vacation.” He tried to picture Tsu-Chi, with his big trustful eyes and blunt little boy’s haircut on the other end, but instead, maybe because of the crackling interference, he could picture his former lover only as an old man, a stereotypical Asiatic sage, with acolytes gathered around his feet—an ancient mandarin in a saffron kimono with long chin-whiskers, puffing on a long ivory pipe. If it weren’t so cold, he would have laughed. Baby-faced Tsu-Chi an old man!
“How are your classes?” was all he could think of to ask next.
“Terrible! This equipment they expect us to do with here!” The voice went on to mention something about the effect of electromagnetic fields on neutrinos, but it was as lost on him as when he used to try talking about fonts and kerning with Tsu-Chi. After that came a long rant about Guangzhou hygiene and overpriced nightclubs. It was apparent that even though Tsu-Chi might have aged fifty years, he could still rattle on about nothing very important for as long as one allowed him to do so.
“Listen,” he interrupted Tsu-Chi at last, “you’re fading again, and my hand is freezing. Why don’t we talk another time, ok? I’m feeling a little—a little out-of-sorts. Or better yet, send me email when you get your computer fixed. I promise I won’t open anything that came in the past couple of weeks.”
“I am sorry to have called at the wrong time.” He could tell now that Tsu-Chi was feeling a bit hurt, but he would get over it. He wasn’t one to pine. “I also wanted to wish you a merry Christmas.”
“Christmas? I almost forgot. You should be receiving my present in about a month, if the boats aren’t too slow.”
“That is exciting! You never gave me a real present before.”
“Well, you know, I’m not that sort. Not that I don’t love everything you gave me. Hey,
I’m wearing that red shirt right now, and… and I think I’m beginning to understand Celine Dion’s appeal.”
“You are teasing me, Bear.”
“Listen, I miss you.”
“You said it first! You!”
It took him a moment to respond in a cheery manner. “I’m not so bad. You’re the one who left me, remember.”
“It was my student visa’s fault, you knew that.” He could picture the aged Tsu-Chi fluttering a silk fan, one embroidered with butterflies. Better yet, the acolytes would be fanning him, and the smoke from his pipe would whirl merrily to the ceiling. Absurd. Even if Tsu-Chi had aged fifty years, he would be just another old Chinese man grown thick at the waist and thin on top, living in a high-rise pension and recalling a bittersweet love affair in America decades past.
“This is costing me,” Tsu-Chi suddenly said, as if he had consulted a timer, “and I don’t make American money. We’ll talk again soon, won’t we? You call me.”
“Sure,” he said. “Sure. Hey, it was nice hearing from you, Tsu-Chi.”
They ended with further pleasantries, but by the time he had hung up something inside him was raging. This might be the last time he ever talked to Tsu-Chi, and he had squandered the call with petty complaints and guilty excuses! Tsu-Chi had seemed as petulant as ever, and he had thought of nothing too important to say in return. And here he was near the top of this mountain, and the sun was already quickly going down, and he’d forgotten to take his pills that morning, so his stomach was complaining, too. For the first time since he’d left the hospital tests behind he was feeling anger—not just at Tsu-Chi, but at the whole world. And ridiculous—he felt ridiculous to be so alive today when he might be dead the next. Catching himself as he automatically began to tuck the cellphone back into his parka, he seized the phone with his other hand, as if a separate half of himself had taken control, or someone else entirely, and hurled the device as hard as he could down toward the valley. It splintered against a boulder a hundred feet or so down, and its myriad pieces fell soundlessly into the snow like spent shrapnel. He staggered back against the stump of a tree, astonished at what he had done, feeling he had broken something even more fragile inside himself. The sky was completely overcast now, the color of —oh, the color of whatever, and even if he did make it to the lookout this afternoon, it would be too dark by the time he reached there to see beyond the immediate vicinity. He leaned against the stump for a long time, breathing heavily, until the first of the snow, thick and heavy as felt, began to fall around him.
Steps had been cut into the bare rock of this highest slope long ago, to make it easier to attain the summit and also, perhaps, to give one the feeling that one was ascending the winding stairs of a tall tower, perhaps, or a vast Olympian palace. Trees had given away to bushes and those to frozen weeds and granite alone. The air was purer, antiseptic even, as it always is at great heights, but also thinner, more difficult to breathe, although these mountains were far from Himalayan in stature. The sky was dark now, and the snow was falling fast, but a brilliant half-moon, like a boat with a high prow bobbing between the clouds, could be glimpsed now and then, and was enough to illuminate the endless snowfields and snow-covered crags around him.
He was not afraid. He was no longer angry, and he was not afraid. The stairs wound on…
Later, deeper into the night. Only after climbing much higher did he notice that these were not snowflakes any longer, but plum-tree blossoms, white as snow and almost as cool to the touch. And in the air was the faint scent of jasmine, sandalwood, or some other token of the Orient. Incense? He cast off his parka, feeling warmer now; he trod no longer over snow, but across a field of tiny alpine wildflowers. It was then that he noticed that these were temple steps, and the temple—a sort of pagoda or shrine, all filigree and flourish—lay directly ahead, chiseled out of solid rock, polished so that it gleamed like marble in the moonlight. Melodious as a garland of little bells, a spring trickled down the rock-face above and into a se
ries of decorative fountains along the pedestal of the temple, and theirs was the sound of flutes and pipes. Torchlight reflecting off the pools brought the very stone to life, casting rippling, golden shadows like the aureoles of a restless panther. Doves fluttered out of carven dovecotes in the cliff-side, and sacred hamadryas baboons scampered over the boulders. The perfume in the air was enough to make one swoon.
The Buddha was in the likeness of the great recumbent Buddha at Chaukhtatgyi Paya in Burma. (He had seen it once, during his year abroad in college. It was enormous, over two hundred feet long, polychrome ornamented with gold-leaf. Pilgrims left great quantities of flowers and fruits all around his dais, and fortune-tellers mobbed him for the chance to read his fate in tea-leaves and smoke.) This Buddha was very young, very pretty, his skin smooth as jade, his hair like black silk, pulled straight back and up from his forehead and plaited into a tiara like that of a Cambodian prince. He wore a long shantung robe, cinched with a brocade girdle at the waist. Between thumb and middle finger of one hand he held a lotus blossom, with his smallest finger pointing upward, the way a very genteel lady might hold a dainty tea-cup, and he seemed to be drinking deeply of the intoxicating scents within that lotus. His eyes were closed, as if in thoughts
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