The Unfettered Dream Read online

sits in the corner, drinking the rice beer through a long, slender, hollow bamboo that he keeps behind his cushions.

  He does not wash. He sits and drinks the beer and the blood dries on him and we stare at each other. He drinks fast. I want to speak, to curse him, but the words will not come.

  In my head I wish that a tiger had found me in the woods, found me and devoured me. The tiger is coming.

  My brother walks into the room, his limbs long and thin and loose, swinging them in innocence, as always. Like a small child, he does not expect ill of the world. He is older than me, taller, thinner. Thinner because he is by nature and always moving, moving, moving, even when sitting still his hands pick at each other and his feet tap the floor. But he is thinner also because Father takes the food from his bowl and gives it to me, saying I must have more if I am to grow into a warrior. Father suffers my brother because while my brother is simple, he is not too simple to work. He can pull weeds, pluck vegetables, skin animals, break soil, thatch the roof.

  Brother asks Father if he wants water. Mother calls from the kitchen, calls for my brother to come help, trying to spare him a cuff. I can hear the tired urgency in her voice, the same as every day when she does this very thing to draw my brother away from the danger of my father. Tonight, it does not work.

  Father’s face darkens, but he does not stand at first. He looks at me and tells me that today is a day for hard lessons. Then he stands. He tells me that a warrior does not suffer what is useless. Father is the tiger. He is the stone in the dark.

  Mother calls again, voice high and frantic like a lowlands monkey at the tone of my father’s voice.

  Father punches Brother in the side of the neck. He moves all at once, in a burst. His foot pushes against the floor, his body swivels at the waist, his shoulder rolls like when a farmer pushes the plow forward to break a hard root. It is not a cuff, a slap, not simply another beating.

  It is the way a man punches another man when he wants that man to die. Brother lands on the ground, his sticks of limbs rattling, chest heaving, lips wide and loose and gasping at the air like a fish drowning in the air on the riverbank.

  This is what a man must be, Father tells me, and he stomps and I hear ribs crack. A man must be hard and feel nothing. A man cannot have attachments, must be ready to destroy. Stomp. Crack. A man does not weep or mourn, but keeps on. The tears run down his face. His face wavers and smears like an illusion through my own tears. Far away, Mother screams. Stomp. Crack.

  Father sits, sucks beer through his straw, glares. Daring me to see the tears on his face. My brother’s lips stop groping for the air.

  I have no brother.

  I help Mother carry my brother to the creek, wash his body. We let the water carry him away. The current sweeps his body, stiff and rolling like a log, down toward the lowlands and out of sight. I want it to take longer, to say goodbye and hear him answer. Instead, he is only gone.

  On the bank, we look at each other but do not speak. When the tiger is near, the monkeys are silent.

  When we are in the house again, Mother stops just inside the door, in the kitchen. She goes to the larder, begins roasting spices for the evening rice. I watch her. Her face is pale, blank; it stays still like a dead person’s face. Like my brother’s face. When we gave him to the river, we gave her to the river too, I understand. Whoever she is now, she is not the woman who had three living children.

  I do not know this new Mother. She is something other, some child born out of my father’s killing fists. Her face is not blank like a corpse’s face, I now see.

  It is a baby’s face, an infant’s, a newborn’s. There is a spot of blood under one eye, where she cleaned it from my brother’s lips and then rubbed away a tear.

  Birth blood. She is terribly reborn. I am not sure who she is.

  And who, now, am I? Of that, too, I am unsure. I pass through the room where Father still sits, tracks of tears untouched through the soil of his face. Eyes half-lidded with beer, he still dares me to notice that he has wept in defiance of what inhuman thing he says a warrior must be. Dares me to notice the tiger in our midst, the stone who can break his own flesh and blood.

  I keep my face down, not noticing him, and watch my feet carry me to the thin pallet on the floor of my tiny room. I close the door, kneel on the pallet, and watch the light shift through the narrow slit of window until the night has arrived.

  Then I leave. I stop in the main room, look at Father untouched on his nest of pillows, beer straw still near his snoring lips.

  I look to where his spear hangs. I imagine my hands lifting it, gripping it. I imagine driving it into his chest, blade carefully held with its flat facing earth and sky as he taught me, so that it might slide between ribs to reach the lungs, the heart. I see the blood burst out. I see his eyes fly open, the shock as he understands my revenge for my brother.

  I see pride behind the shock. Pride that he has made me a killer like him. Pride at the terrible tiger he has made.

  I touch nothing. I leave him sleeping. I go out into the clear sky night under the moon with only the clothes on my back.

  It is cold. The moon is feeble but its light covers all I can see. I am hungry. I walk into the night, feeling each step, the earth under my feet reaching up to cradle me. The cold, the moon, the hunger; they clean me. They wash the spear and the blood from me.

  But they cannot clean my father. They cannot clean the fear from my mother. They cannot clean the death from my brother, nor my desertion from my sister.

  I am a warrior without a spear, a warrior without killing. I pad through the dark wood with deliberate steps, feeling each lump of earth and stone and fallen twig under my feet.

  Somewhere in the moonlight with me the tiger coughs. It is an acknowledgement, not a hunting cry. We pass, each hearing but not seeing the other, in peace.

  In full night, between the turning of the dusk and the dawn, I come upon Old Holy Man’s hut.

  Still and black, charred and fallen, the old timbers and bamboo rafters are broken in embers. The wood I wrote my lessons on, smooth with age, is now rough and pulled into chunks like a crocodile hide I saw once when I was little, heaped on the back of a groaning cart pulled by merchants’ oxen from the south. It is all black. It is all the soot I mixed with oil to make ink.

  I pull a half-burned pole of bamboo from a larger pile and pry the pieces apart. My hands turn black and stained with the soot. It will wash away later but I know that in my memories they will always be stained black, wrenching at the wreckage of an old man’s life, covered in moonlight.

  My prying releases wisps of smoke, a few feeble embers, a warmth I can feel on my face but not see. I work in the night, leveling the piles of junk. I do not know what I am looking for. I do not find Old Holy Man’s burned bones. I do not find his cookpot. I do not find his scrolls or his walking staff.

  I find a few writing skins, a brush, a wooden teacup. I wrap the brush in the skins and carefully slide them under my belt. I fill the cup with ashes. Ashes in one hand, burned staff in the other, I walk into the gloaming light as it eases into the treetops. I walk deeper into the woods. Farther from my family.

  A warrior has no attachments. I carry my thoughts and memories into the woods. I walk, I find a place to sleep. I wash in a different stream than the one that carried my brother. I catch a small fish in my hands there and I eat it raw, crouching on the grassy bank like an animal, not in savagery but at peace and in harmony. I spit the scales into the flowing waters and watch them sail south into the lowlands together, each alone in its own current, each a point in a shifting and widening constellation.

  I wander toward the east, toward the rising sun, day after day. I do not count them. I stick to the north, following the curves where the great stony roots of the mountains sink into the Earth. When I hear humans nearby I vanish into the trees until they pass. When I hear animals nearby I freeze in place, si
lent, and watch them go. I am something in between, or something not between them at all but only different, not above or beside or below the animals and people.

  I am what I am. I drink from the streams I pass. I make a point on the end of my charred staff of bamboo and I take fish to eat. I eat the soft stems of reeds I pluck, where they turn white down near their roots. When it grows cold I weave a tunic of reeds and stuff it with grass, and when it grows warm again I return the tunic of reeds to the water and watch my effigy drift into the south to be with my brother. I dream. I make ink with the ashes from Old Holy Man’s teacup and the little bit of fat the fish hoard under their skins. When the moon is bright, I record my dreams, a few characters at a time, on the writing skins I rescued. Slowly, deliberately, I drive the ink deep into the skin with the point of my pen ground sharp on the river rocks, to be sure that it will not easily fade.

  The characters are my life. My life if I were born differently, into another life. If I grew differently, if I thought differently. And yet the path of this life comes to the same place, beneath trees and beside flowing water, wondering, searching, waking. Seeing.

  In my dream I am born to luxury and not want. I am born to learning and not fighting. I am nurtured in kindness, not molded by a killing hand moved by a killing mind. And in my