Glimmering

Leonard fell silent, his dark gaze fixed upon the window. Jack grew increasingly uneasy. In motion Leonard possessed a certain predictability; sitting still he filled Jack with alarm. He tried to think of something to say that would disarm the moment—like, who in their right mind would have been waiting for Leonard ?—but any answer to this question was too ominous to contemplate.

“So I went to Pelgye Kieria. That was the name of the island, and the monastery. An amazing place, Jack! Only seven monks are left there, from this sect that goes back to Genghis Khan. They say they protect the door between the worlds. They protect us from Brag-srin-mo, the demon of the cliff. Beneath Pelgye Kieria is the secret gate to her heart, which leads to the underworld. That’s what the monks believe, anyway…

“I was at Pelgye Kieria for three days before I learned that there was a Japanese monk there with them. Quite an elderly man—the others were relatively young, I mean in their forties or fifties—but this monk was old, and very frail. He didn’t take his meals with the rest, and no one at Pelgye Kieria mentioned him to me, even though I told them that the monks at Nechung had sent me there specifically to meet someone.

“I tell you, Jackie, the whole place gave me the fucking creeps, and by then I was pretty goddamn sick of yak butter and tsampa. They wouldn’t let me take any pictures inside the monastery, so I spent all my time out on the rocks, looking for the Himalayan griffon.

“Without any luck, as it turned out; for all I know they are extinct. By the third day I figured I’d just about shot my wad at Pelgye Kieria. I was outside taking pictures of the cliffs, trying to think of some way to get back to shore, when this very old man came up and started talking to me.

“He had his head shaved, and he was wearing the same robes and everything as the rest of them. So I probably wouldn’t have figured out that he was Japanese and not Tibetan: he just looked like another incredibly ancient monk. But he spoke English—I just about swallowed my gum when he started talking to me—and he said that he had heard I was looking for him. I told him about the monk at Nechung; he just nodded, like he knew all about it. But when I asked what he was doing there, he just shook his head and said ‘Nga lam khag lag song. Ha ko ma song?’

“‘That means ‘I’m lost,’” Leonard explained, smiling wryly. “One of the few bits of Tibetan I do know. ‘I am lost: do you understand?’ I thought he was joking, and so I laughed.

“His name was Keisuke Hanada. Doctor Keisuke Hanada; he was careful to tell me that. He had heard that an American photographer had somehow managed to enter the country, looking for the griffon, and had visited Nechung and shown interest in the paintings of the demons there. He thought I was a newspaper reporter; he very much wanted to talk to me.

“He told me that he’d come to the monastery in 1946, right after the war. I don’t know how or why they admitted him; he was pretty evasive about answering any questions. He described himself as samsara—‘wandering on’—you know, that whole Buddhist thing of being trapped between here and various afterlives. He’d had virtually no contact with the outside world since after the war, and the other monks at Pelgye Kieria pretty much left him alone. I guess if you were to look at it from our perspective, he was there to make atonement, to ease his guilt. But guilt’s a pretty Western concept—I don’t think that’s how Dr. Hanada would have put it.

“He invited me to his room, and—and showed me what he had in there. He said the time had come for him to tell someone the truth about his life. He wanted to tell an American. It was very important to him, that he talk to an American…”

Jack looked up, surprised at the hesitancy in Leonard’s voice. His friend only stared at the window, then continued.

“His room was your typical Tibetan monk’s cell. But he had set up this sort of—laboratory—in it. Not exactly state-of-the-art, either. He’d brought his own equipment with him fifty years ago, and since then he’s just sort of jury-rigged everything with—well, you can imagine the kind of shit you’d find in a Tibetan monastery, right? No electricity whatsoever. We’re talking Dr. Caligari here, Jackie. And he had a bunch of other stuff—photos and documentation, field notes—though he didn’t show me those on that particular visit.

“But it was a real working lab, and he’d been working in it, for all those years. He showed me. And he told me this—story. This very long, almost unbelievable, story. For two days, he told me—oh, everything! It would take me a week to do it justice.”

Leonard turned. There was something in his expression that Jack had never seen before. A look of abundance, of satiety. It would have been captivating in anyone else. Seeing it on Leonard’s merry death’s-mask of a face, Jack shuddered. When Leonard spoke again, his voice was a hoarse whisper.