The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

  Maybe it is an excuse for them to get out, she thinks.

  To stay out late.

  To go to far-off places.

  Everyone in the world: excited for new lands.

  Tremulous for the far shore.

  And indeed, they walk into the night.

  The jungle becomes itself again, awakens from the siesta of the daylight hours.

  Everywhere is the unseen traffic and interface of animals.

  This time she has her own little pack of animals, themselves moving and clamoring and giving dimension to the night.

  They are gorgeous young adventurers, unfazed by the night, limited only by their intent.

  She has never felt safer.

  They reach Du-Wae late in the evening.

  It is a crush of huts along a riverbank.

  The kids come into the main muddy hub of the huts all a-chatter.

  Someone gets up, an old man with face like putty, limbs like jerky.

  The boys go at him and he goes at the boys.

  How the two sides can simultaneously talk and hear she has no idea, because no one lets up.

  There’s no empty space in the conversation.

  The content must be something to the effect of: hey, we’ve brought a special visitor.

  And: hey, I don’t care; it’s a million o’clock.

  Well, you should, because there she is.

  Are you going to be rude?

  Everyone is rude at a million o’clock.

  Most specifically you, coming through here like a bunch of muskoxen in heat.

  Now other people are up.

  Lily is a little embarrassed at this point.

  Awakening a whole village, all these people with their rutted faces, their betel-stained teeth.

  Probably not the right first impression.

  She tries to say something to the kids: let them sleep, we’ll deal with this at sunup—

  But the kids, her gorgeous young adventurers, wave her off.

  We are on a mission here, that wave says.

  We are bold, undeterred.

  What must be must be.

  And this must be.

  Half the villagers climb back inside their huts after a few minutes, satisfied that whatever is going on merits no interruption of the more pressing matter of sleep.

  A few come out, sleepy-eyed, curious.

  These are the Red Karens at night, less their beautiful textiles.

  They are, save their occasional white t-shirt and sarong, a vision of a thousand years ago.

  They are shades of the earth—their skin, their dark hair and eyes, their yellow ochre teeth.

  They are part of the jungle’s palette.

  The kids chatter with one of them.

  A guy, maybe thirty, who seems to knows things.

  Everyone’s rim-lit, carved out of the night by the weak light given off by the fire pit.

  Lily can see this thirty-year-old approach her.

  He could just as well be twenty, beaten down by malnutrition.

  Your grandfa, he says in English.

  The words are like electricity in Lily’s veins.

  Is he here?

  Your grandfa.

  Your grandfa here.

  Though she is standing there right before him, Lily comes apart at the seams.

  No one knows it, no one in this village, for she is just standing there.

  But all that is pent up in her, which is nothing short of everything, is suddenly released.

  Like nuclear fission.

  Like the middle of an atomic bomb.

  It is the impossibility of a prayer being answered.

  Like the universe has all this time been listening, been biding its time for revelation.

  Unbosoming the warm hand that it has silently and perpetually had on her shoulder all along.

  She sits.

  There is nothing else she can do.

  A number of minutes later they are moving.

  Birds wheel in silhouette against the burgeoning dawn sky above.

  She is trying to process, because people are starting to gather around.

  People wanting to get a better look at her.

  The thirty-year-old leads her to a hut, reveals to her what seems almost talismanic to the villagers: a creased, stained old doctor’s bag.

  Your grandfa, he says.

  Lily looks at it, and looks around the hut.

  She sees nothing within at first glance but a solitary mat with no bedding.

  There is no one inside the hut.

  She looks at the thirty-year-old.

  This bag: it belongs to my grandfather, yes.

  But where is he?

  The man motions her to follow and it becomes a parade.

  Her gorgeous young adventurers ever by her side, now joined by village kids, by a handful of the older villagers.

  They’re moving up the riverbank, sleepy-eyed but chattering.

  The sun is molten between the trees on the horizon.

  They are walking right into it.

  The waters bending and flexing and dividing its perfect gold reflection before them.

  The thirty-year-old motions, come come.

  Ahead on the riverbank, crouched there, dark forms rim-lit in gold.

  The thirty-year-old motions again: your grandfa.

  And as they near, and Lily ballcaps her eyes with her hands, she starts to make out the dark forms.

  They’re, right up against the water, in various stages of de-sedimentation.

  Mounds, primarily of black and gray ash, interrupted here and there by tiny pieces of burnt clothing.

  She stops a few feet short, realizing what she’s beholding.

  The remnants of funeral pyres.

  She is by the river a long time that day.

  She has not slept but she does not feel like sleeping.

  Gray is one of three people that died in the village these last few weeks.

  She learns this from the thirty-year-old.

  Kan is his name.

  Lily looks again and again at the ignoble mounds of wet ash.

  They look no different than the vestiges of trash fires back along the rural roads of South Carolina.

  The body, in the end: trash.

  How can this be?

  You chase a man across the decades and he dies a week before you get to him?

  It evokes in her a pained sort of laughter.

  She has already had her guts kicked out too many times to have them kicked out again.

  Kan tells her stories of her grandfa.

  How he was a great man, a healer.

  How he walked out of the jungle and healed the sick.

  Helped everyone, even the lepers.

  The lepers, she asks.

  (Are there still lepers?)

  Kan shows her the lepers.

  They are maybe five in number, consigned to their own set of huts up the river.

  Lily and Kan consider them from afar.

  They are shambling, strange-looking things.

  People with special-effects faces.

  They seem lonely in their compound, like zoo animals.

  They know Lily and Kan are watching.

  Lily offers a weak wave.

  They don’t acknowledge.

  I tell them you are your grandfa’s grand-dah if you want.

  They like you then.

  Lily doesn’t say anything.

  Just shakes her head.

  Is that what he died of, leprosy?

  No, he just old.

  They give her Gray’s hut for the night.

  They erect sheets around her bed to ward off mosquitoes.

  They give her too much food.

  Too many smiles.

  She is her grandfather’s daughter.

  She is hallowed here.

  She tries to sleep that night but knows they are out there talking about her.

  Speculating.

  Who knows.

  She stares at the
weak walls and ceiling of the hut in the darkness.

  Imagines she is Gray.

  Imagines she is accustomed to this sort of thing as he must surely have been.

  That she is not the dumbfounded American girl ten thousand miles from home.

  Dead-ended.

  At a finish line without ceremony.

  No tape to burst through, no trophy to claim.

  Just a trip finished, a sequence of days used up.

  How empty the world.

  How false the promise of expectation.

  You are just you in the end, looking in the rearview at some events that have hopefully tempered you.

  That have hopefully revealed glimmers of a greater truth.

  She doesn’t know about this.

  It is true she fell apart out there in the muddy night.

  That she died to herself and her resistances.

  That a great sweeping catharsis ripped through her and she can breathe again for the first time in dozens of years.

  But what remains is not conclusive.

  It is in fact terribly open-ended, and in the worst possible way.

  For in the naïveté of before, she at least had the expectation of a final arrival that buoyed her, guided her.

  She had a lodestar by which to guide her, even if it in the end was a lie.

  Now that is gone.

  The goalposts forever move.

  Or better put, don’t even exist.

  Just wavering illusions we chase despite ourselves.

  The tightness of existence has been replaced with something else: emptiness.

  We don’t know how tight we are until we let it go, and we usually don’t let go through conscious effort, but instead through crisis, through accident.

  Through that inner secret compulsion that drives us to crash and burn so that we might see the light.

  And oh to release that burden!

  To breathe, to breathe, and realize that stone we bore was nothing, and gained its crushing weight only because of our own unwillingness to lay it down!

  How cool the emptiness after that.

  How cool.

  But, and here, oh no, I understand you, Gray.

  It is not.

  It is not enough.

  To just be free of the burden.

  Is it?

  In the morning, she sits on the stoop in front of the hut.

  Looks out at the villagers, who pretend not to be obsessed with her.

  They go about their day, washing linens, chopping wood.

  The kids throw things and chase things and cast the universal language of children’s laughter around the jungle.

  She wonders what she would have said to him.

  How he would have received her.

  They were like two lonely things, weren’t they?

  Isolated from so much of the world.

  Isolated from each other across time.

  They probably would’ve butchered it, she thinks.

  Both of them: pros at being alone.

  Maybe not so great in groups.

  Would it have been anti-climactic?

  A disinterested old guy who’d run away from the world, nonplussed to see the arrival of generational baggage like Lily?

  (Pointless to think about.

  That’s all in the rearview.)

  There is nothing in the hut save for the doctor’s bag.

  They burned him in the only set of clothes he had.

  The sum total of Gray’s life: the clothes on his back and a doctor’s bag.

  The bag: a weathered old thing, anonymous, a million miles deep in a jungle no one’s ever heard of.

  Lily idles through it.

  Not much to do in this village but idle.

  Idle while you think about next steps.

  Which she will not think about.

  The implements and the gauze look like they have been in the bag for some time.

  The metal of the implements is worn, like they have been used for decades.

  Like they have worked on hundreds of patients.

  And have hopefully saved more than has been lost.

  Not like the ones that worked on her.

  Brilliant, spit-shined, like they have never seen another patient and never will.

  She considers the instruments, imagines what it would have been like to be Gray in Europe.

  Holding them clumsily as she now holds them.

  And yet all these years later he moves through the jungle a healer.

  Not curing Zika or bird flu or leprosy.

  But serving, helping, stealing away little bits of pain from the grander scheme of suffering.

  There was a man, she decides.

  There was a man.

  Beneath everything else in the bag is a small envelope.

  Relatively new, not as wrinkled as the rest of the things around it.

  Written in the unsteady cursive of an old man’s hand on the front:

  One Man’s Observations.

  She considers the envelope for a bit.

  It’s evident there are a few pages neatly folded inside.

  She hesitates before opening it.

  Feels again that sensation of prizing open someone’s innermost thoughts.

  Someone who had no intention of her being his audience.

  But who then was his audience to be?

  This man alone in the world?

  Who’d committed words to page for some reason, posterity or otherwise.

  No, Grandfather.

  I, of all people, am who you wrote this for.

  XXVIII

  I have been a seeker for fifty years. I have searched both within and without for the solution to existence, for the solution to the primordial pain that undergirds everything.

  I realized some weeks ago, after all that time, it was a posture. I was posturing to myself, to my fellow man, to the universe. I was trying to solve the ills of the world, crack the code of existence, with big airy concepts like Suffering and God and Enlightenment. And yet in the end, it struck me that the problems I attempted to solve were not great ones, but rather pedestrian ones, embarrassingly so. It was with some chagrin that I realized that I’d spent half a century trying to cure a broken heart.

  I have seen war, verily, the true terror of what mankind is capable. I have seen things that no man should. But that is the thing: very few do. The problems of men are seldom the great, epic catastrophes that periodically wash across the globe. No, the great persistent pain of the world is the ache of the heart. Few people see what I saw on the battlefield. But everyone ultimately feels some version of what I felt when Tish Archuleta left me. (If whoever should read this letter has the means, they should attempt to find Mrs. Archuleta in Virginia, in the United States—if she’s still alive—and let her know that I forgive her. It was the right thing to do, I realize now, for her to find a stable man, one who would not in all likelihood leave her a widow. I hope to the bottom of my heart she has prospered and lived a happy life.) In the end, I am also grateful to her. For if she had not left me, it would not have colored my vision so as I went through the fields of Europe and the Pacific, where all I saw was suffering when in fact so much of it was in my own heart. It would not have led me on the subsequent quest, which led me here (even with all its detours), for now I see the world clearly, because I see myself clearly. The utter banality of my struggles. Pain should not be capitalized. Pain is not some grand beast. Pain is a worldwide constellation of tiny, mundane agonies winking in and out of existence every day. That it took me a half-century to understand this is embarrassing, as I say.

  I nevertheless allowed my pain to set me apart from my fellow man, as if I alone bore a burden that no other man could understand. And therein lay both my greatest mistake and my salvation. I turned inward rather than outward. I was diligent in my meditation; I tunneled to the darkest recesses of my mind, of my suffering, and it must be said, I did not see God, did not perceive some great dharma. There was nothing but my
thoughts, nothing external to them.

  We are in the end alone. That is what is at the depths of the meditative state. A massive, echoing cathedral of loneliness that we call the self.

  Can that be the sum of things? That we are ultimately alone? Can it be that we cannot deal with the loneliness and the suffering it engenders, so each of us builds our edifice around it, our Lie? We drink and we steal and we meditate and we go to war and we fill house after house with belongings. But beneath that lies the niggling subconscious truth that this is all built on an airy, unstable foundation. That we are papering over the real pain. The whole of our pursuits, of our pain and agenda, are revealed to be wispy manias shouted into the echo chamber of our own mind, a puppet show created by us, to which we are the only audience, and yet incredibly, as an audience, wholly convinced the act is real!

  That, at any rate, was me. My guise was the seeker.

  I thought by being the seeker, I would transcend the mundane world of things like heartbreak. But the world cannot be escaped; there are no initiations into higher, permanent realms. The only divinity we have, I’ve come to believe, is how we confront our suffering, how we confront that echoing vacuum at our core. What we choose to fill it with.

  I don’t know who you are that will read this letter, or if anyone will. But I implore you to see how commonplace your heart is, how unremarkable your pain. And at the same time how much part and parcel it is to this earth and atmosphere; we breathe pain as much as we breathe air. It is in some ways the most egalitarian thing on this planet. All share in it. The only question in the end is whether you will wallow in your own, or tend to another’s. And interestingly, in that latter gesture, both your suffering and theirs disappear. The borders of the self dissolve, for the borders were only ever there to protect, to divide…and if there’s no longer anything there to protect, no pain to be held at bay, borders become unnecessary. And in that moment, the world in its totality spills into you. You are alone no more.

  In a sense, you are god. A god that banishes, if only moment by fleeting moment, pain from this world. A potent and good god. And the only god this world will ever know.

  —GA

  XXIX

  As it should be, she thinks as she looks over his ashes later in the day.

  Village kids squat in the weeds, watch her as she sits on the riverbank.