by David Gordon
The movie starts with Bruce Klee as a simple fisherman rowing his boat in from the sea. He pulls it up on the beach and jumps off, barefoot in white pajamas. Then he sees smoke rising from a hut and starts running. It’s too late. They’ve massacred his family. His sister has been raped and killed, and his dad’s hanging from a hook. He spots a few hoodlums at the local waterfront tavern, drinking rice wine and hassling the old innkeeper with the long white whiskers. One of the troublemakers is wearing his sister’s jade necklace! With his bare feet, Bruce pushes his toes against the edge of a brick lying on the beach and pops it up like a soccer ball. He catches it and rams it right into one guy’s chest. Blood shoots out of his mouth. Then Bruce gouges the other guy’s eyes out and snaps his neck sideways. Covered in blood, he puts on his sister’s necklace and, falling to his knees, lets out a warrior scream of vengeance.
Next he has a whole long journey. He learns from clues that the killers are from the Dragon Temple, so he shaves his head and joins, throwing his ponytail on the ceremonial fire. He has to hang out with the Dragon Monks, swallowing his hate like poison, letting it seep into his heart. The contest starts. Guys get their arms ripped out. They shatter ice blocks with their heads. Monks who have rubbed iron dust into their hands for many seasons split logs with one chop and break bricks. Bruce beats everybody in the tournament, even the Dragon Champion. The Champion, who can’t stand it, dishonors everyone by throwing a razor star at Bruce when he’s not looking. But Bruce catches it and throws it right back into the Champ’s forehead. They reward him with the Dragon Robe, but we see his smile is bitter.
Now he’s alone with the Master at last. Bruce tells him who he is, and they fight, first monkey style, then praying mantis, then crane, where they jump up twenty feet in the air and hang like hummingbirds, arms and legs whirling. Finally, Bruce gets the Master down, and we know, from the twisted look of horror on Bruce’s face, horror at himself, at what he is about to do, that this is the deathblow. He plunges his fist into the Master’s chest and rips out his heart. While the Master, still alive, watches in terror, Bruce wraps his sister’s necklace around the beating heart and throws it on the fire, where it explodes. Everyone in the Earl roars in approval. A man leaps to his feet and turns to face the audience, fists raised in glory. Somewhere a bottle breaks.
“That’s true,” the black man in army fatigues sitting in front of us says. “I seen it in Nam. They’d split you belly and take out you whole intestines, like twelve feet of it right in front of you. But the brain is still alive and watching it all.”
The fat white guy a row back agrees. He’s so fat he never has to wear a coat, just parachute pants and a Blizzard of Ozz T-shirt. We can hear him breathing there behind us, wedged into his seat, sipping from a bucket of diet soda.
“Over thousands of centuries,” he explains, “your Chinese has mastered the Art of Death.”
The Earl is a ruined temple, open to the sky, and in its endless night, dreams arise from the void and fall again. The same wise men, in beards and long coats, gather here each time, to see the great forgotten tales retold. Stored on metal reels, a million tiny pictures, bright as stamps, come spilling out into the dark, floating down in a row, dancing like merry soldiers or angels along the dusty beam of light that crosses the vast, empty heaven of that cave. It is like the unscrolling of a lost parchment, unearthed and read aloud for the first time since history began. And as the magic words are uttered, these dead images begin to move. Skeletons gather their bones and march. Monsters awake and crawl out of the sea. A terrible force is unleashed on the earth. Good and Evil fight to the death on the screen. The dead rise up to feed on the living. An army of heroes invades hell, and mutinous angels turn to make war on heaven. The courtesan of Babylon, full of strong drink, does a belly dance for the nobles. The king swears he’ll slaughter a nation to have her. Blood runs in rivers. Heads weep on sticks. There are crucified soldiers on hilltops and fires in the pits of the night. Kings perish and the kingdoms fall at the breaking of the sword. During a storm, the queen gives birth in secret and dies. The orphan prince, born under the curse of Doom, and raised by wolves and peasants, does not know his own name.
Philip’s sister takes my hand and puts it under her skirt. It’s like putting my hand in an oven. Her legs are smooth and coated in soft hair. She moves my hand up her thighs to where the flesh splits and it’s warm. I close my eyes, and another movie forms in my head, as the blood bursts behind my eyes, breaking into roses and flaming hearts against my lids. I am afraid to move or take my hand back. Philip is right there, next to her in the dark. She presses my hand harder against her with her two hands, and grinds her hips until something gives and she gasps. Then she grabs my jacket off the back of the seat and drapes it over my lap. She unzips my fly and touches me down there. She knows just how to work it, better than I do, light and then hard until it shoots. It’s never done that around other people before. She laughs, a mean laugh, and I blush with shame in the dark. Somehow I have been tricked, made a fool of in a way I can’t even understand. Then the film jams and starts to burn. The frame bubbles, and a white hole opens like God’s eye peering in on us. The old men howl in pain. A treasure is being lost, like a Torah thrown on the flames. The lights come on, and everyone looks around, blinking, wondering where they are and how they got there. I sit absolutely still. My pants are still open under my jacket, and my legs are sticky. The audience begins to hoot and clap, yelling curses and throwing empty soda cups at the screen. Philip’s sister wipes her hands on my jacket and reaches for the popcorn. She has a defiant look on her face. Her eyes glitter wildly and her smile curls into a sneer. She is proud.
Finally the lights go down and the movie starts up again. But it’s a different reel, some other part of the story with no connection to what happened before. I can’t even tell if it is from earlier or later. The king is dead, but the wizard he killed before is back. The prince is grown and on a quest to find the sword. He dismounts in the mist and gets on the barge that will take him across the River of Forgetting to Snow Mountain, where everyone who died in part one is alive, where everything lost is regained, where flowers fold their petals back into seeds and scattered leaves leap back in the wind and dance into the arms of the trees. But before you may enter, you must answer questions three.
One. Where do you come from?
Two. What have you forgotten?
Three . . .
It is always night when you come out of the Earl, as if, distracted by the movie, lulled off guard by the darkness and warmth, you fell asleep without realizing it and now you are exiting into a dream. I walk carefully down Roosevelt Avenue, under the steel girders and openwork roof of the El. Headlights rear up, exposing the rain’s invisible connections, the strings of a puppet theater tying the sky to the street. Then the car goes by in a rush. Ghostly faces glance from behind the windows and, splashing through a pothole, it’s gone. Philip and his sister turn off to go their own way. Only Philip says good-bye. His sister holds Philip’s hand and gives me a sly look. Now I’m alone, and whatever has been pursuing closes in. The rain parts and the buildings lean in, closing out the sky. The clouds descend to earth. The streets have rearranged themselves, shuffled like a pack of cards, and I am no longer in my own neighborhood. I have gotten turned around somehow and wandered into the city behind my back, like when you lay your head on the pillow and sink through to the other side of sleep. I pass rows of closed shops with bars drawn across their doors and here and there a lit store window. The door is locked, but a bright box still displays peculiarly chosen objects. It is impossible to say what they mean. One storefront is heaped with foreign candy, pink circles and pyramids tipped in green. Another offers only a broken clock, a fork, an old-fashioned lady’s hat, and two black leather gloves. They are like the clues left behind at a crime scene. A headless mannequin signals from behind her glass. The only place still alive on the street is a bar, a neon beer sign glowing through a steamed-over window, but I’m no
t allowed in bars. A man stumbles out, arms gripping a fat woman like a buoy in a squall, and they vanish down an alley.
Trying to find my way back to a main street, I end up in a park I don’t recognize, or perhaps it just seems different in the dark. Fog seeps through the picture, gathering on the swings. With each step, I grow more apprehensive, as if something is there, watching me, holding its breath when I stop to listen. I hear the crush of feet on leaves and duck down behind a bench. I strain my ears. The park has become an orchestra. Each leaf leans out, a tuned instrument raised in anticipation, awaiting the breath that will move them all. Rain comes, a sheet of water, from a single cloud passing over me. It descends like a flock of sparrows landing everywhere at once, with tiny, light steps, picking at the grass, checking under each blade. Drops line up on the branches and wires. They gather together to draw resolve before falling to the ground. Then it’s gone, leaving only the scent of water and its splotched tracks on the ground, a delicate, unreadable scrawl.
It was then that the world first revealed itself to me in all its awful beauty, rising up suddenly, like a lion in the path, like a monstrous swan beating its wings to say: Everything you know and dream of is nothing, not even a speck of what is. The life of even the tiniest ant is as infinitely complex as a man’s and the life of a man is like a god’s. And even this vast whole is enclosed in my endlessness like the faintest glimmer of the first thought on the dawn of the first day of creation. Everything is still possible. You have not yet begun to live.
I Think of Demons
THINGS TO DO THIS SUMMER
Natural History Museum/Planetarium
Central Park
Subway
3-D movie
Camping
This list is taped to Philip’s wall, written in multicolored pastels and markers on thick paper torn from a sketch pad. In case his parents wander in, he has left off the end of the title: ON ACID. As it is, when we cross off an item, Philip’s dad grunts in approval and gives him more dough. There is a list of records too:
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn—Pink Floyd (with Syd Barrett of course)
Larks’ Tongues in Aspic & Red—King Crimson
Bitches Brew—Miles Davis
Metal Machine Music—Lou Reed
There Comes a Time—Gil Evans
The idea is to put on the record, or better yet pop in the tape so you don’t have to change it, then drop the acid. Lie back with your eyes closed, headphones on, and try your best not to move or stir or blink until the album ends . . . no matter what happens next. It’s harder than it sounds. Some records are interminable, the pressure builds, and your eyes burst open. You sit up, gasping, as if you were drowning in your own mind. Others bury you so deep in dreams you can’t get up at all. The record spins and clicks and ends, and you keep your eyes shut, afraid to open them, or forget they are even closed, as you wander, lost, trying to remember where you are, your name.
Then on July Fourth, the hottest weekend of the year, Philip’s parents drive us up to Harriman State Park to go camping. I let my parents think Philip’s family will be with us, but really they just drop us off with our sleeping bags and a cooler full of food. He brings paints, paper, charcoal, and pastels. I have a leather-bound notebook and a pen. I hope to be a poet, he an artist.
“No,” says Philip. “We already are. If I paint a stroke”—he blobs Kremnitz white on a tree—“then I am a painter. Just like when you write a word, you become a writer.” He taps my new book, leaving behind a white ghost of his fingerprint.
I nod but don’t tell him that all I’ve written inside is the date, now a couple of weeks old. We start setting the tent up, and two hours later, as it leans crookedly against a tree, we eat the acid, two hits of blotter each, and step out for a nice stroll in the forest before lunch.
We wander along, wading through the tide of old mulch, brushing back the branches that hide the inner, leaf-lit chambers, chatting and chuckling, until we hear the silence and it shuts us up. I listen to it, that ocean of silence that is always back there, into which each birdcall and dying leaf falls. It is a presence, this quiet, a medium. I am struck by the fact that everything around me is alive. In the city everything is dead but us. It is a graveyard of ten-story tombs, and we are the ghosts who haunt it. In the suburbs the people are dead but don’t know it, and in the empty, groomed streets and blank windows, only cars and TVs move. Here the trees, the weeds, the hills are all breathing, and the air hums with insects. Even the dead matter, the torn leaves and rotten trees, the earth itself, is alive and seething with bugs, worms, microbes. Of course, I knew this before—but did I really know it? Did I sense it the way I do now, embracing the flanks of a roaring oak and feeling the power surge through me?
“Everything around us is alive,” I whisper to Philip, who is up ahead of me on the path.
“I know,” he answers flatly without turning around.
“But do you really know it?” I ask.
“Oh, I fucking know it all right,” he says, his voice choked with feelings. I realize he’s crying, clean streaks through the dust on his cheeks.
“What’s wrong?”
He wipes away the tears.
“Nothing. What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m thirsty,” I say, and it occurs to me, we have no water, no sunblock, no food. I look around: trees. The cicadas cough like throats choked with sand, dropping their discarded bodies. I see a skull full of pebbles.
“Do you know which is the way back to our camp?” I ask.
Philip stops and peers around, turning in a circle. The back of his neck is bright red. His T-shirt is soaked through with sweat.
“No,” he says. “Which?”
“I don’t fucking know. That’s why I asked you.”
“Asked me what?”
“Oh fuck,” I say, panic starting. “We’re lost.” I institute emergency survival procedures: preserve moisture by collecting saliva in my mouth and smear damp earth on my face to shield it from the damaging rays of the sun.
But Philip stays cool. He pats his pockets thoughtfully, looking for the cigarettes that aren’t there. “No problem,” he decides. “We merely ascend this hill and look around. The whole topology will be laid out before us.”
Comforted, I follow as he proceeds upward, beating his way through the brush. A cloud of gnats swirls around him, whining like static; I picture little helmets, goggles, parachutes. They buzz me and I try to wave them aside, but nothing happens. Are they only motes in my eyes? As the incline grows steeper, I begin to slip and slide in the loose earth. Crooked trees lurch at us like dying old men in the locker room at the Y, trunks covered in black goiters, moss hanging from their armpits.
Now I see: It is only language that separates, say, the tree from the earth that feeds it, or from the sky that it longs to embrace and lose itself in, if it could only tear free. The cicadas might as well be the leaves themselves, brushing together under the blanket of heat. Everything pushes toward the surface. You can smell the sun cooking on the skin of things, bubbling and cracking, melting over the branches, sticking to the soles of your feet. It fills my lungs and eyes with gold. I hear the blood beating in my veins, shaking my hands like rattles. I hear the energy crackling in the twigs as I break their connections. I see the fire frozen in the wood.
“What fire?” Philip asks, turning to me with a wild look. Is he hearing my thoughts? I try another one, beaming him an image of a saint. Philip slaps the back of his neck.
“These fucking bugs are drilling right into me.”
Everything is alive, that is the horror of it. The grass screams when you tread on it, and the trees bleed when you snap their twigs, and the stream rolls over and rocks itself, crying in its sleep. The stones are watching your every move; it takes a thousand years for them to blink once. And the mountain? The mountain is the mind itself, the true and hidden mind. Everything is alive and dying.
We summit on our hands and knees. At the peak sits a bould
er the size of a two-car garage—coarse, black, porous—thrown from a volcano on the moon. I read the alien inscriptions through my fingertips: A star is about to be born. The black rock breaks, like a giant egg, and blows light into my hair. My mind splits like a rotten peach spitting out its pit.
Philip screams. As I watch, a halo of white fire explodes around his skull, burning his hair like nerve endings. His voice is dust. His face is wind. The hill is heaving, throwing trees sideways and cleaving rocks. He sticks his finger down his throat, trying to puke up the poison.
Just then, lightning shoots from my hands, blasting trees into flame. Struggling for control, I wrestle them into my pockets. Clouds rush into the sun and are burned away. I realize that my brain is now linked, as if by wired roots, to the world. I can’t tell the difference between thought and action, between the voices outside or inside my head. Anything I think will happen, so I must not think the wrong thing, the evil thing. I must hold still. I freeze my face, trying not to breathe, and follow Philip with my eyes as he crawls over.
“Evil,” he hisses, crouching like an elf in the shadow of the rock. His ears and nose grow points. “This place is fucking evil,” he whispers in my ear. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
He takes off, stumbling back down the mountain we just climbed. I rush after him. Shadows swoop and dive around me. Trees grab at my legs. We plunge into a swamp, and I stop short as Philip howls. He has sunk into the mud up to his knees. He thrashes around, grunting and baying, like a brontosaurus stuck in tar.
“Wait, don’t fight it,” I say. “The quicksand will pull you under.”
But he ignores my advice and plows through, leaving one sneaker in the sucking wounds. In their depths, eyes open for just a moment and then forever close.
