The Mountain

by Paul Yoon

  There was a winter storm that Christmas and we all stayed the night. She was a friend of one of the waiters, and as the staff got more drunk she tended bar. I kept her company. She invented cocktails for me to sip. I made up names for them—the Mars Rover, the Panorama. I channel-surfed and found the burning Yule log. The storm grew worse, the snow growing heavy on the sidewalks. We made bets on whether she was in fact leaving for Delphi in two days. She was studying the Pythia. I didn’t know what that was.

  An oracle, she said. The Temple of Apollo. The oracle would stand there on Parnassus and inhale vapors that came up from fissures in the mountain and it would induce something like a seizure and she would speak nonsense, which the priests interpreted as prophecies.

  I wondered what this had to do with geology. She was beautiful there in the bar light and the reflections on the glasses, the fire on the television.

  No, the vapors, she said. I’m studying the vapors. The rocks.

  Outside the snow kept falling. Through the windows we watched people race into the empty street and wrestle. She leaned over the bar. I didn’t yet know her name. She took my cell phone and input her number and the name, the Pythia. It’s still there.

   •

  Here is what my father told me that day on the cliff:

  When my father was young he had a Japanese friend, a neighbor, someone he saw every day, during school and after. He was younger than my father and his name was Takashi Inoue. This was in the 1960s, long after the wars, and Takashi’s father, who was Japanese and a professor, had been hired by a nearby university. Takashi’s mother was Korean and a math tutor. Three days a week, after school, my father went there for extra lessons.

  One day Takashi, who was eleven, went into his father’s office and found a rifle hidden behind a box of clothes, letters, and photographs. The rifle was from a campaign in the Russian Far East and had been a gift from his father’s commanding officer whose life he had saved. The officer had fallen down a cliff and Takashi’s father had gone in search of him, eventually finding him on the bank of a river with a broken leg. In the chaos of a retreat, they survived a journey back through the valley.

  The rifle, though, wasn’t the officer’s. He had found it on their way back, lying not far from the Russian it had once belonged to, the only hint of who the soldier was in another life in a folded sheet of music tucked inside his chest pocket. The officer took it and, years later, it lay in a wooden case, one that Takashi thought contained something else, for he knew his father not as a war veteran but as a geography teacher, and someone who had started a new hobby: taking photos. It was his father’s camera Takashi was looking for that day, fascinated by the intricacies of photography.

  He found the rifle instead. He picked it up, unsure of how even to hold the thing. He aimed, or imagined how one aimed. He pointed it toward the window. Then, hearing footsteps—his sister’s footsteps or his mother’s—he put the rifle away and returned it to where it was.

  Takashi didn’t tell anyone what he did. Not his sister, who was older, or his mother, and certainly not his father, whom he adored but about whose life he had just discovered some new passage to explore.

  A few days went by. The week. Takashi did his homework. He went to school. After, my father visited. As I said, he was older, and perhaps Takashi was in awe of him or wanted to impress him, so he took my father’s hand. They went down the hall and snuck into the office. I don’t know where Takashi’s sister was then. I know their mother was at the opposite end of the house, where she tutored students.

  It was a single-story house, and long, and my father remembered how the shiny floors caught their reflections as they ran across them all the time, infuriating the nanny. Drawings and old photos of Russia hung on the walls. There was a library. And there was always a spare set of slippers left out for when he visited. It was a good life they had, the Japanese family. It was a privileged one. They weren’t unaware of this. They weren’t unaware that my father’s father—my grandfather—was not a teacher but worked in the shop where the family’s housekeeper came to purchase milk, comic books, and cigarettes.

  My father could not remember why they brought the rifle out to the hallway. Perhaps they were in an imagined world where a certain distance was necessary. More fun. Perhaps it was a way to acknowledge that it was now a shared discovery, no longer a secret but something they could call their own. Perhaps they just wanted to show off for Takashi’s sister. He couldn’t remember either, whether they called to her or whether she had heard them and appeared at the opposite end of the hall. She approached. They could hear a student repeating out loud an equation. A piano on the radio.

  Look! Takashi said, and pointed, and Takashi’s sister did, when she was closer. And when she saw what her brother was holding, she stopped.

  Come look, Takashi said, shaking the rifle, and that was when the rifle went off.

  The rifle went off and there was a spark and the noise entered my father and passed as suddenly as he heard it. And his body jerked, feeling something like a hand hit his chest and move through him. He shut his eyes, knowing something was wrong. He wanted to fall but when he opened his eyes he saw it wasn’t him but Takashi’s sister in the air and falling. And then everything was silent. And for what seemed like a long time my father did nothing. And Takashi, not understanding what had just occurred, still holding the weapon, did nothing. And the nanny came. And their mother came. And the student who had been solving equations came. And Takashi’s sister, on the wooden floor, shook. She shook and she went still. She went still looking up, or what she must have thought of as up, for she was on her side. She was looking, when she died, through the open doorway of a bedroom. The window held a clear fall day. A thin shadow. Light on the floor.

  She was fifteen years old. My father’s age. On the same day, in an act of desperation or madness or both, Takashi was sent away, never to see that house or that town or his family again.

  Takashi never saw my father again either. And my father never knew where it was he had been sent. But he used to always believe that Takashi would one day come back. That his parents would bring him back. He used to wait and wonder if that was the plan, if there was a plan in the recklessness of their minds.

  But they never did. Bring him back. And Takashi’s parents attempted to continue their lives for a few more years after that but then left as well, for somewhere else, moving into a small apartment where they spent the rest of their life, my father said, vanishing into themselves.

   •

  As I said, I don’t know why he told me all this that day. Or why he never told me until that day. He told me and then he didn’t say anything else. The freight train appeared and he watched it move north beside the river. He finished his bottled water. I could read nothing in his expression. It was a fine fall afternoon. I was leaving the next morning.

  A young couple came to enjoy the view. They had a beautiful dog that bounded forward and licked Philippa on the knee. This frightened her, and she screamed. The man and the woman rushed to us but I assured them it was all right. It’s all right, I said, to them and to my daughter, and I took her on my lap but she had already gotten over it and was staring at the dog, staring as it sulked through the high grass as though embarrassed or ashamed. Perhaps Philippa sensed this. I felt her take my wrists in a way that surprised me in its adult confidence and she slipped off my legs and followed the dog.

  My father, who had been silent through all this, greeted the couple, and commented on the beautiful dog and then the foliage. And as I watched Philippa try again with the dog, as the sound of the train faded, my father took my shoulder and stood.

  I wasn’t used to his touch. I felt his weight leaning on me for a moment before he switched to his cane. Across the meadow, Philippa reached out her hand. The dog nosed her fingers. They were on the cliff’s edge. A strong wind came, blowing my daughter’s hair, and suddenly my father rushed to her, picked her up with one arm, and returned. It happened so quick
ly, he had moved so quickly, I was still on the bench as he returned Philippa, who was smiling, to me.

  Let’s go home, my father said.

  That was the last day I saw my father alive. The next morning I said good-bye to him and drove to the airport, where I escorted Philippa through security and got her a pink lanyard with a card that read: Unaccompanied Minor.

  There were dog hairs stuck to her jacket. I picked them off and showed them to her. She was delighted that the hair was the same color as hers, a pale blond Philippa inherited from her mother. She opened her pencil case and put them there. I caught the smell of shampoo or soap on her skin as she hugged me, told me to visit soon, and boarded the plane. I sat by the gate window. I left a message on my father’s phone and then my hands shook and I didn’t know what to do, so I stayed, long after the plane taxied away, looking down at the patterns of the terminal carpet, understanding somehow that my world had altered but not yet knowing how.

  I am an only child. Though I didn’t keep the house, I kept his old stethoscope, which, I was surprised to read, in his messy handwriting, was willed to me.

  II.

  For a time after my father died, I thought he shared the story of Takashi Inoue because it was a regret, a regret that they were never able to see each other again. But I eventually convinced myself that the reason he told me was in fact a request: my father wanted me to find his childhood friend.

  I tried for a year. I contacted other family members of mine. My father’s sisters, who had scattered all over, from Germany to Los Angeles. I searched online. I wrote letters to agencies and orphanages in South Korea, Japan, Russia, and China. I thought Takashi must have gone back to Japan or had gone to Russia or China.

  I had dreams about him. In the dreams I was the age I was but he was always a young boy. And the locations were always different. Sometimes we met on a bridge. Other times on the train, the two of us opening a window at night and poking our heads out into the evening and the bright moon. His face was so clear, as though we had known each other since I myself was a child, a face that always vanished from my mind when I woke.

  Of course nothing came up. It was impossible to fathom how many people were displaced and moving and migrating during those many years after the Korean War. How long that went on for. There were some people with the same name, who would have been around the same age, who kindly wrote back, apologizing. There were children who wrote back. I received a copy of the death certificate of one who had been a sailor and had drowned when his ship sunk. I received another of a thief who had been murdered; yet another, an engineer, who died peacefully, in old age.

  He was none of them. Or he could have been any of them.

  In many ways, I knew how silly this was. I was often embarrassed, sending yet another letter, receiving yet another one back. Of course there were times when I didn’t know why I was doing this, when I didn’t want to look for him anymore. I woke one day and realized a year had passed. My life unchanged. My wife, who was no longer my wife, still in Berlin, or wherever she was traveling to for her sites. My daughter still splitting her time between me and her.

  So I stopped. I gave up. We all grew older, Philippa suddenly into an adult, taller than me, healthier. There was a period in her life when she liked to take photographs, and once, she sent me prints of her house in Berlin—the front door, the light in the hallway, the speck of her mother in a room—and I thought of him and was tempted to try again. But I didn’t, I knew it would be the same, that I would find nothing. On occasion, over the years, he reappeared in my dreams but in the dream I hurried past him, pretending I didn’t know him until I woke.

  I wonder whether I would have ever returned to it. Whether I would have continued the search at another point in my life. Philippa was studying abroad in London one year. She was crossing an intersection and forgot to look right instead of left. The car pummeled into her, and the wheel caught her leg, carrying it up into the undercarriage and dragging her toward the lamppost half a block away.

  Philippa was twenty-two. She survived but her leg from the knee down was amputated almost immediately and she spent three months in physical therapy in London. Her mother and I took turns staying with her. During those months I worked in the London office. I slept on the company couch or at the hospital. I used to wake and find her scratching some empty space on her bed, in her half sleep believing the rest of her leg was still there. Other times she would wake shouting, begging for the itch to go away.

  It was the same summer as the Underground bombings and the bus explosion in Tavistock Square. We watched it from a television in Philippa’s room. I turned the television off but Philippa took the remote from me and kept watching in silence, her eyes unblinking as my phone began to ring.

  In the London office they had Tavistock Square up on the screen, a few minutes after it occurred. The mangled bus, the smoke. Someone I worked with, a young man, hit the rewind button. Then the footage played and we saw a figure being propelled backward into the iron fence of the park.

  That month I requested a transfer and moved to England. Philippa was still in physical therapy and I spent every day with her. I brought the curry she liked. I watched her try on her prosthetic. I watched her walk and swim. We played board games and thumb-wrestled. She liked the pool, the cool water, the strokes. I would sit on a bench as she swam and call her mother. Sometimes she answered. I don’t remember anymore if we talked about anything other than Philippa, whether I had called for something else. I saw the arc of our daughter’s arm over the water and there was the comfort of a voice I had known in another life.

  At the end of fall, Philippa was moved to a rehab center in Berlin, to be with her mother. During that time I kept watching the satellite data of Tavistock Square. I had copied the file and brought it home with me. Maybe the office knew. They never said. I stayed awake at nights and from my laptop I watched two people on the bench in the square, in the moment before the bus approached. I had missed them the first time. Perhaps they were on a date or eating or reading a book. There was something on the bench between them but I could never tell what it was. A bag or a hat. Flowers. I watched them there and then they were gone.

   •

  I lived in those years in a flat in Southwark, off of Bermondsey Street. It was on the second floor of a converted warehouse. It was owned by the company I worked for. When Philippa recovered she often visited me, taking one of the budget airlines across the continent, and I picked her up at Gatwick.

  Philippa liked the place because you had to enter through the store on the ground floor and take the cargo elevator. It was a furniture store then, selling bed frames and coffee tables made of reclaimed wood and salvaged metal. I got along with the workers there, seeing them often as I passed through the floor, and they kept trying to set me up with someone. They were young and filled with a kind of yearning that I once saw in my wife in our first year together, when she would lead me somewhere away from everyone else so that we could continue the privacy we had begun to create and cherish in our marriage.

  Some nights when the store was empty Philippa and I would sneak down and try the furniture. We would lie on a bed or a couch and she would, in a mock art-gallery tone, explain to me the trendiness of the piece we had claimed. I had brought down my laptop and popcorn and as we watched a movie, I tried my best not to ask about her mother, who had remarried by then, to one of her colleagues. They seemed to live a glamorous life, in their world traveling.

  I don’t know why it didn’t work between my wife and me. She was often away. I got used to her being away and without being aware of this at first, I began to form a life that no longer included her. She took up less and less space in my mind. I understood it was the same for her. That it would always be this way.

  I told Philippa this one evening, in the furniture store, when she was in her thirties. I think we were binge-watching a sitcom in the dark. I had begun to study the furnishings of the apartment the comedy was always set in, wond
ering how many times it changed. What new decorations and kitchenware they came up with.

  Outside the warehouse, a man walked by on the cobblestone street and peered in. He was carrying a bottle of wine and was drinking from it. He stepped back, his body in silhouette, and he swayed. He hadn’t seen us. Only the faint glow of the laptop screen. Philippa rested her head on my shoulder. It was summer. She had come from France, after a monthlong excavation in the Pyrenees. Philippa, child of a geologist and a satellite programmer, had become an archaeologist.

  The site was on El Camino de Santiago. They were helping the UN uncover the bodies of victims who perished trying to reach Spain during the Second World War. She didn’t feel like saying more that day. She was tired but happy to be with me. I had given her a watch as a gift before she left, and she was wearing it that night while the show played at a low volume, the screen light flashing blue across her face.

  Saint James’s Way, Philippa said. The translation of El Camino de Santiago. Or Way of Saint James. I wonder if there’s a difference depending on how you say it.

  Philippa liked language—translations, etymology. She had been studying linguistics in London that year.

  Saint James, I said.

  Patron saint of Spain, she said, and unbuckled her prosthetic.

  On the show a woman slumped on the couch and began to cry. I had missed the cause. There was a pause and then someone opened the apartment door wearing a Mask of Zorro costume, with a sword even, and the laugh track roared. I didn’t know why but we laughed along with it. And then the episode ended and the screen went dark. In the momentary silence we could hear the heavy footsteps of the drunk man outside continuing down toward the river.