Stone Junction

  January was a terrible month for Daniel. It rained or snowed nearly every day. He stayed in his tent as much as he could. He discovered, as many others had before him, that the mountains impose you on yourself. He came to some realizations he didn’t like. The first was that he hadn’t recovered from his mother’s death. The raging, wrenching grief, once so palpably present, had faded into a haunting emptiness.

  Daniel’s second unpleasant realization was that he hadn’t dreamed since the bomb explosion. Worried that this might indicate brain damage, he became so aware of his dreamlessness he could hardly sleep. He woke exhausted and eye-sore, as if he were a pilot who’d spent the night fruitlessly searching the ocean for a raft or signs of wreckage. He didn’t mention his dreamlessness to Wild Bill. If it meant something was wrong, he didn’t want to go back to the hospital, and if it didn’t mean anything other than that he wasn’t dreaming or couldn’t remember them, then it didn’t matter.

  His third realization was that obsessive carnal desire and almost daily masturbation was preferable to gloomy contemplations of his heartache and dreamlessness. He remembered Brigit Bardo’s face a hundred times a day, and her mouth a thousand, each accompanied by a pure genital urge for release. An early spring poured fuel on his fires. He couldn’t meditate for five minutes without an image of breasts or tautly curved buttocks or silken thighs affecting his concentration much like a boulder hitting a mud puddle.

  Wild Bill noticed. One mid-February morning, clear and warm, right in the middle of their meditation, Wild Bill jumped to his feet and glared down at Daniel, demanding, ‘Just what in the holy-fucking-hell is bothering you?’

  Daniel wanted to run for his tent. ‘I don’t know if I know,’ he stammered, ‘except I haven’t been dreaming, not since I was hurt.’

  ‘Goddammit, worry about your dreams when you’re asleep. Worry about getting wet when it’s raining. When you’re sitting, just sit. Don’t wiggle. Don’t wobble.’ Wild Bill started to resume sitting when he thought better of it. ‘Actually, I’m tired of fighting your hormones for attention, and I’m tired of looking at you. Go.’

  ‘What?’ Daniel said, both crushed and strangely relieved.

  Wild Bill pointed north. ‘Go. That old fir snag there – go dead uphill from that and about a hundred yards over the crest you’ll find a little spring, and if you follow it down beneath the rock outcrop, there’s a cave. You can stay in the cave or wander around – I don’t care. But if you get lost and I have to find you, you’ll wish you’d stayed lost.’

  ‘Is this personal, or some sort of teaching?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘So what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘First,’ Wild Bill said with exaggerated patience, ‘you go. Then you have dreams and visions. If you can’t dream, just have visions. Explore the visions for value. Examine yourself for value. Try to figure out what’s valuable and what ain’t. In seventeen days you can come back.’

  ‘Fine,’ Daniel said with a touch of petulance, ‘but I’m taking half of everything. Since you’re staying by the lake, it makes the most sense that I take the gun and leave you the pole.’

  ‘Nope,’ Wild Bill said with finality. ‘I’m over sixty and you’re pushing sixteen. You take a knife and your sleeping bag; I keep everything else.’

  Daniel yelped, ‘Forget it! That’s not fair.’

  ‘Bye.’ Wild Bill fluttered his fingers in farewell.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Daniel muttered.

  ‘Way your hormones are flooding, that’s kinda what I’m afraid of.’

  ‘It’d probably be better than getting beat up.’ Daniel immediately regretted saying it.

  But Wild Bill laughed, and waved again. ‘Adios.’

  Daniel stalked to his tent, stuffed his sleeping bag in its sack, and left without another word.

  He spent the first week at the cave, eating from the thin smorgasbord of early spring plants. When he wasn’t foraging, sleeping, or meditating – he continued to sit, but half-heartedly – Daniel was absorbed in erotic fantasies of such sensual detail and endless possibility that he lay on his sleeping bag and masturbated till his forearm cramped.

  To break the siege of desire, he decided to walk north to the headwaters of Cottonwood Creek. The weather was clear but cold. He ate whatever was available, mainly wild onions and some early miner’s lettuce, supplemented occasionally with frog legs. The nourishment kept him going, but wasn’t enough to fuel his usual pace. He tired easily and had difficulty concentrating for more than a few minutes. However, he experienced a lightness that wasn’t confined to his head, a sort of metabolic austerity, and with it came a profound sense of objectivity – uncluttered by judgments or combustible desires. He quit meditating and masturbating. He didn’t have any dreams or visions. After eight days of wandering in a slow loop, he reached the cave just hours before a storm.

  The storm proved the last gasp of winter, but winter died hard that year: blinding lightning strikes; thunder so loud it raised dust on the cave floor; winds that sent widow-makers spinning out of the lashing firs, snapped off snags that splintered as they crashed; and then torrential rain. As he sat snug in the cave, a good fire with plenty of dry limbs stacked against the walls, watching the wind suck smoke out the cave mouth in a ropy braid, Daniel decided he would fast and meditate for his last three days. He wanted dreams and visions.

  As Wild Bill would later rule, Daniel had two near-visions and one for sure, but Wild Bill was a hanging judge.

  One near-vision began with the color pink. At first Daniel felt it was some sort of overture to an erotic fantasy, but as he watched, the color constricted slowly into the terror-brightened pink of a lab rat’s eye. And then he was inside the rat, running a maze, turning left, right, right again, running until he caught the scent of his own fear still hanging on the air and realized he’d tried that passage before. Daniel rose out of the rat’s body like mist lifting from a field. He could see the maze below him, a perfect square, infinitely intricate, no entrance or exit. The maze exploded when he screamed.

  The other near-vision began with him floating just under the surface of Nameless Lake. He wasn’t dead, but had barely enough strength to lift his left hand out of the water. He knew no one would see, but it was all he could do. He floated, gathering the energy and will to lift his hand again. When he did, his hand was seized by another, powerful and sure. As it lifted him from the water, he saw a woman he didn’t know, tall and lovely and smiling, and he wanted her to lift him into her arms and hold him tightly, but in the same motion of pulling him free of the lake, she hurled him into the heavens. He fell through the galaxy, his hand still outstretched, but it didn’t matter – he would fall forever. He might as well have been waving good-bye. When he laughed, the wind-lashed rain was hurtling past the cave.

  The real vision occurred on his last night. The storm had passed, trailing a thin fog in its wake. Feeling faint and dislocated, Daniel was sitting at the cave mouth watching the wisps of fog tatter and swirl in the moonlight when he heard his mother clearly call in the distance ‘Alie-alie-outs-in-free,’ just as she had so many evenings playing Hide-and-Seek at the Four Deuces when he was a child. ‘Alie-alie-outs-in-free,’ she called again, her voice more distant; and then once more, barely audible. She didn’t call again. Rocking back and forth, arms around himself, Daniel wept.

  As he worked his way carefully downslope toward camp the next morning, Daniel felt simultaneously serene and raw.

  Wild Bill was cooking pancakes when Daniel walked into camp.

  ‘Those smell wonderful,’ Daniel greeted him. ‘If there’s extra batter, drop one on for me. I’ve been fasting for almost a week.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Wild Bill tried to flip the pancake on the griddle, then had to pause and unfold it with the spatula. ‘What were you fasting for?’

  ‘Dreams and visions, as instructed.’

  ‘I don’t remember any instructions about fasting. Fasting is tricky. It can put an odd twist on things.’
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  ‘It worked. I had visions.’

  ‘Just a second.’ Wild Bill slid the creased pancake onto a tin plate and handed it to Daniel. ‘So. What’d you see.’

  ‘I saw …’ Daniel started, then hesitated. ‘Well, actually I didn’t see anything.’

  Wild Bill grunted. ‘Good start.’

  Daniel couldn’t tell if the grunt was playful or cutting or both. He could feel the warmth of the pancake through the tin plate against his palm. ‘Do you want to listen or not?’

  Wild Bill looked up. ‘Is it important to you?’

  ‘I cried,’ Daniel said, feeling like he was going to again.

  Wild Bill said softly, ‘Then I’d be honored.’ He gave the pancake batter a quick stir and poured it sizzling onto the griddle.

  ‘It was something I heard,’ Daniel explained. ‘I heard my mother calling ‘Alie-alie-outs-in-free.’ That’s what you yell at the end of Hide-and-Seek when you give up the search. That’s how the other players know––’

  ‘I’ve played the game. When did you hear her?’

  ‘Last night.’

  Wild Bill watched the bubbles burst thickly on the pancake’s surface, then slipped the spatula under the crusted bottom, hefted it a moment, flipped. The pancake turned over two-and-a-half times, splatting down perfectly. But Wild Bill looked glum. ‘Goddamn, Daniel, I don’t want to crap on your parade, but you deserve the truth. That wasn’t your mom you heard last night. It was me. Yodeling.’

  Daniel stopped his pancake halfway to his mouth. ‘Yodeling?’

  ‘Yodeling,’ Wild Bill affirmed. He lifted the pancake and slipped it on Daniel’s plate. ‘Eat. You’re delirious with hunger.’

  ‘You weren’t yodeling,’ Daniel said.

  Wild Bill turned solemnly and faced the lake. He tilted his head back, exhaled slowly, took a slow deep breath, then another, and then astonished Daniel. With a power and bell-note clarity completely unlike his habitual grunts and mumbles, Wild Bill blended and blurred long open vowels and gliding consonants into an undulant song that shifted between rejoicing and keening, delight and lament. Daniel heard it clearly toward the end: ‘Allleee-allleee-ah-sen-freeee.’ Wild Bill repeated the phrase, then whirled it through itself in tight variations, winding it inward, suddenly leaping an octave, then slowly letting it slide into the last haunting note.

  Wild Bill stood listening to his voice echo across the basin until it was absorbed into the air. He turned to Daniel. ‘Yodeling. I learned it from Lao Ling Chi, my teacher when I was doing work on breath and breathing.’

  Daniel said, ‘That was lovely, it was close, but it wasn’t your voice I heard – it was my mother’s.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Wild Bill shrugged. ‘You heard it, so it’s yours to understand. Me, I’m going to go look for mushrooms for tonight’s rabbit stew. If you feel ambitious, I got a stack of fir saplings I thinned that need to be trimmed up and hauled back to camp. They’re piled at the base of that big maple on the west side. Take the hand-ax.’

  ‘Fine,’ Daniel nodded, wolfing down a pancake. ‘See you.’ He wondered what Wild Bill wanted with the fir poles but refused to give him the satisfaction of asking.

  Swinging the horribly lopsided basket he’d woven from split reeds and grasses, Wild Bill made his way around the lake and then up the south slope to the rim. As he went over the crest, he stopped and gave a short yodel: ‘Oodell-a-eee-ooooo.’ It resounded in the basin.

  ‘Jerk,’ Daniel muttered. Wild Bill – always watching for mistakes, and taking a malicious glee in pointing them out. What kind of teacher was that? Daniel was beginning to suspect Wild Bill’s eccentricities were merely a screen for incompetence, and with a mean satisfaction he realized how much he’d enjoyed the seventeen days by himself – no scrutiny, no picking and prodding and little put-downs.

  Daniel did the dishes, then took the hand-ax and headed around the lake. The saplings were stacked on a small bench about a hundred yards upslope from the lake’s edge. As Daniel hauled the first one off the pile he caught a flicker of color in the corner of his eye, thin bright red, thinking snake at first flash, then, with a bolt of terror, realized it was a wire.

  A voice screamed from the sky. ‘Daniel! Run!’

  He swung the ax at the wire but he was a moment too late. The explosion rocked him and he staggered backward, hands covering his temples, staring blankly as the blast-showered confetti of soggy leaves settled around him. He looked at his hands: no blood. He picked up the ax and spun around. When he saw a wisp of smoke from the small crater fifty yards uphill, he let the ax drop to his side and started looking for the wire.

  With the piercing cry of an osprey, Wild Bill dropped on him from the overhanging limb of an ancient fir, driving Daniel to the ground. Wild Bill picked up the ax and tossed it away as Daniel rolled and came up quickly. He hit Wild Bill in the chest with a round-house right, following with a glancing left off his cheek. Wild Bill rolled his heavy shoulders and brought his fists up to cover his face, elbows tucked to protect his solar plexus. Daniel hit him a solid right to the stomach. Wild Bill grunted but kept his hands up.

  ‘Fight!’ Daniel yelled, and hit him hard in the stomach again. When Wild Bill’s hands dropped for an instant, Daniel followed with a left to the head. Wild Bill yelped, staggering sideways a moment before catching his balance. He shook his head to clear it, blinking against the blood running from a cut above his eye.

  ‘Fight, you fucker!’ Daniel screamed again.

  ‘She’s dead, Daniel. Dead.’

  Daniel threw a left uppercut that hit squarely on the point of Wild Bill’s elbows, sending a jolt of pain up Daniel’s arm to his shoulder.

  ‘Come on,’ Wild Bill said wearily, ‘get it all.’

  Daniel hit him with a right hook above the ear but Wild Bill rolled with the blow. Daniel threw a left but there was no strength in that arm so he threw a right that Wild Bill easily blocked with a shoulder. Daniel threw another, another, another, and then he had nothing left, all the rage and fear and loss emptying in a rush, and he fell into Wild Bill’s arms.

  Back in camp, Wild Bill held an improvised compress to his cut eye and Daniel soaked his swollen hands in the cold water. They didn’t speak for a long time. Daniel was exhausted and Wild Bill had nothing to say. Finally, Daniel stood shakily and worked his hands. ‘When are we leaving?’

  ‘I’m heading out in the morning,’ Wild Bill said. ‘You’re welcome to go with me or you can stay if you want. Owen’ll be there around dark if you want a ride.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I’m going to Arizona and put some desert between my ears. All this lushness sort of depresses me. Makes the eye sloppy.’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘You go on with your training. Up to you.’

  ‘My training? I didn’t know I was being trained. What for?’

  ‘Depends on what you learn.’

  ‘Uh-huh, right. Well, one thing I’ve learned is not to expect a straight answer.’

  ‘I take teaching seriously, Daniel. I won’t tell you what I don’t know.’

  ‘Then tell me what you do know.’

  ‘There’s sort of three levels of association with AMO. The first is friends and kindred souls. That association is a loose system of mutual aid and moral support. They don’t pay dues. The second is allies, actual members of AMO who pay their yearly five percent, and who receive and provide direct benefits of the Alliance. And then there are adepts. They are people with particular gifts and understanding who sustain and expand the Alliance’s traditional arts and practices.’

  ‘Is that what you’re trying not to tell me, that I’m being trained as an adept?’

  ‘No one is trained as an adept. An adept is one who has mastered a particular art, who has achieved a certain understanding. You can’t teach mastery. You can only teach certain skills of awareness, which in turn lead to the recognition of possibilities and opportunities for further development – as well as the dangers invo
lved. Beyond that, you’re on your own. But as Synesius noted as early as the fourth century, “There is always guidance available if you’re available.”’

  Daniel considered this a moment, flexing his hands. ‘Do you think I have potential as an adept?’

  ‘I don’t give grades, Daniel. But yes, clearly, you have potential. Most everyone does. But you see, it’s like this: The brain processes information, and information can be an endless ride. With the addition of the heart, some information becomes knowledge. The spirit, or soul, transforms it into understanding. But that’s the problem with abstraction – it misleads by separation.’

  ‘What sort of potential do I have? I mean, what direction should I take? I’m not asking you to make the decision for me, understand – it’s just that I’d value your opinion.’

  ‘I don’t know. But I have a strong hunch that you’d make one helluva thief. Actually, what AMO calls a Raven, which goes way beyond stealing. “Agents of exchange and restitution” is what Volta calls them. Ravens are the only adepts that AMO allows to kill other human beings, and they can only use their imaginations as the weapon.’

  ‘You mean by imagining them dead? Or like shooting them from a hot-air balloon drifting by their window?’

  ‘I mean by writing them a note saying “I’m going to kill you tonight.” And the next day, one that reads “I was detained; it’s tonight,” and the next day, “Prepare yourself,” and do it day after day for a couple of weeks and then catch him asleep one night and fire a bullet just above his head and when he screams awake say, “Oops, shit, I missed – oh well, there’s always tomorrow.” And ten days later the guy runs his sports car into a concrete abutment.’