5 SQUARE

The wash-rush of river rolled on the rocks on the shore.  So stupid.  Kyu looked down on the rough water from the bridge.  I’ve wasted my life. 

“What do you mean, wasted?”  The question came from behind him, in a man’s unfamiliar voice.

“I mean I see my place in it all now.  Jesus Christ.  It wasn’t the disease, it wasn’t a chemical imbalance—it was my way out.  I didn’t enter the 9-Square to heal my depression.  I just wanted to leave earth, to be in a little place where no one would ask me how I was doing, or tell me how precious my life is.  I just wanted to be with my dysfunctions and nurse them like darling treasures in an endless loop, feeling more vindicated against the world the worse I got.  I didn’t want the pain to stop, not really.  I just wanted to fracture and fall so far from nobility and love that I could no longer feel them demanding things of me.”  

A hand rested on Kyu’s shoulder and firmly turned him around.  He stood facing an old man, about as tall as himself, wearing a deep-blue robe with a baroque dragon design set on its golden trim.  Immediately Kyu recognized him as Confucius.  He took in Kyu’s eyes with an immense kindness, like a pond accepting two raindrops.  

“And what if it’s not your life?”

“What?”

“You said you’ve wasted your life.  What if it’s not yours?”  

“What does that even mean?... Are you going to tell me I owe something to my fucking parents for bringing me into this hell-hole?”  

Confucius was silent a moment.  

“Do you want to have children?”  

Kyu lifted an eyebrow.  “Do you know what state overpopulation is in?  Of course not.  You’re from ancient China.  Anyways, I can hardly support the weight of my own body.”

Nodding, Confucius said “Yes, your time sees me as an ancestor fetishist. But my disciples also recorded my teaching to ‘revere a child from the moment it takes breath; but a man over 60 who has cultivated nothing is worthy of no consideration.’ This is a different age than the one I lived in—I said what I said then.  

Many of you no longer wish to have children.  You see them as a burden, or ask “why would I want to bring someone into such misery.”  But this is not the point.  A child is a sign of love, like light is a sign of warmth.  It can’t be helped.  We cannot live unless our life belongs to our children and the children of our friends.  This is what it means to say: your life does not belong to you.”

“Then let me kill myself.”

“That will only be possible when the last child in Tiān, heaven, leaves you.  But you have always felt that being a teacher was your calling, no?”

Kyu was silent.  The bridge stretched out like a piece of gray cardstock set across the two banks.  A cloud wandered across the blue.  

Staring past Confucius’ shoulder, Kyu swiftly diagrammed a square with his hand.  A group of nine children appeared on the bridge, middle-school age, sitting at school desks in three rows of three.  Staring at the old sage, Kyu said “I don’t know how I can ever be a teacher with all the rot and void in my heart.  But let’s make this deal.  I will try to reach these children, to share what they will need to make it in this world.  And if I don't, let me die.”  Confucius bowed to the waist, and vanished.  

Kyu stepped out in front of the kids with salient theatricality: a sun-bronzed gladiator donning his helmet, strapping on his sword for the last time.  He made sharp eye contact with the girl at the desk in the center of the grid.  Her brown eyes mirrored intelligence back. 

Kyu began, “My name is Mr. Okamoto. Life will be hard for you.  In our studies of history we can find no real equivalent circumstances to the technological transformation our species is undergoing. That would be enough on its own, but beyond this the possibility of apocalypse, of the actual end, has escaped the dungeons of myth and entered reality.  Our understanding of life emerges like a newborn chick each morning and dies like a decrepit old hen by night… 

I’ve spent my life seeking wisdom but it hasn’t been enough.  I’m not here to give you an inspirational speech.  I think I have learned things, truly, from the traditions and practices now reduced to secrets in closed books.  But it hasn’t been enough.”

Kyu closed his eyes and began pacing in slow ellipses. The children leaned forward in their seats.  

“There are many healing tools and codes for life, but you will only find what you need in fragments and for a time.  I hoped, then, to give you a genuine collection of techniques—drawing on all the theories and practices at our disposal—so that you would know the best tool to pick up for each problem and at each time in your life, so that you could have a unified philosophy of fragments glass-blown together.  But I’ve failed, totally.  The only damn thing I can think of to tell you is a story, which doesn’t do the job at all.  A story just mushes everything together: the poetry with the philosophy, the myth with the world, the wisdom with the horrific evil.  A story doesn’t contain a linked collection of different sites, like a network, but works rather like a bundled strand of DNA with density but no distinction, no clarifying divisions. It’s painful that after all my study it’s the only thing I can offer that might help you in life.  Well, it is a story about pain.  An old one.  It’s called the Myth of The Wounded Wanderer.”

As Kyu continued to talk, keeping his eyes closed in concentration, he began to smile. He didn’t notice the kids all look downwards.  

“A noble child was born to a king.  The prince was named Wanderer and for many years he brought joy to the king, queen and court as his golden laugh was always heard echoing through the corridors.  But as he grew older he remained childish; only interested in games, jokes, and fantastical diversions.  War came to the kingdom, and the king’s face hardened and darkened like a lake freezes dimly as winter approaches.  As he began to frequent the frontlines the king’s rage, lunacy, and battle-obsession grew.  Military maps and urgent letters cluttered his desk in stacks.  Wanderer did not understand this.

It was in this bloody time of war, when the king had no care for his frivolous son, that Wanderer approached his throne with a grin, bouncing.  “Father, Spring is almost showing its first signs!  Let’s go out on the meadows and hills and compete in a game.  Whichever of us picks the brightest and fairest of flowers wins!  And mother can be the judge.”

“Wins what?”

“Well… the game I suppose.”

“Wanderer, this kingdom will not rule itself.  Every day more of our men are killed.  While you want to play at flower-picking.”  The king barked a dark laugh and, dragging Wanderer by his collar, threw him from the room.  The doors locked heavily.

The crazed king realized his now-adult son was not fit for the duties of any honest labor, much less the burden of kingship.  He could not risk Wanderer ascending to the throne in the event of his death.  Discreetly drawing a guard aside—he instructed him to kill the prince that night.   

The guard, unbeknownst to the king, was a longtime drinking-friend of the prince—who always paid his tabs and showered his bright personal attention on him.  He had quite the soft spot for Wanderer and was at a loss.

Knowing the prince would not believe him about his father, and also yearning to obey the king, he took the prince far into the country on a horseback ride.  Stalling in a glade for food, the guard drew his knife and sliced the back of the prince’s ankle as he looked away.  As the prince screamed and began tumbling on the dirt, the guard turned about with both horses.  “I’m sorry, Wanderer.  This was the king’s doing.  May the forest save you.”

Wanderer felt caged with pain.  He limped far from the kingdom and the father who had betrayed him.  His ankle seemed to heal, but inexplicably blood continued to seep from the wound, no matter how many bandages he applied or medicines he took.  It became his obsession to find the healer or teacher who could cure it.  

He traveled, his wound dripping dark dots in the path stretching behind him.  At last he came to a temple in the clouded mountains where a great spiritual master and scientist of medicine lived.  The master explained the process that could cure Wanderer and at this news his soul rose with hope.

While he continued laying plans with the venerable teacher, however, Wanderer noticed that the blood seeping from his wound had formed a pool around his feet.  In horror he jumped out of it and began running—unable to stand the sight.  Without goodbyes, he fled the mountain to find another teacher.  

And so it went, from temple to hospital to school.  For 99 teachers with many words, Wanderer would listen as the most attentive pupil, until the blood pooled too deeply and, his mind racked with paranoia, he would flee.  

Everywhere Wanderer went he left the zig-zagging trail of blood droplets.  It was a map of agony the breadth of the sea.

At last he stopped.  He lay himself down on the side of the road, an empty animal.  “Is this it,” Wanderer asked, “is this the end of my wandering?”  and prepared himself for death.  

At that moment an old woman came down the road.  She had compassionately resigned eyes, behind glass spectacles.  

Wanderer perked up— “Old woman, you must have a life full of fine experience under your belt, with knowledge piled like pearls and silver crowns.  Tell me the way to stymy this ever-bleeding cut.”

But the old woman just shrugged, then waved her hand in the direction from which Wanderer had come.  She took off her spectacles, laid them on the dirt, and walked off.  

Wanderer sat there, knowing something portentous had fallen on him but not knowing what, for several hours.  In the moonlight the man saw the blood from his ankle marking the earth.  Having nothing left but this clue, he picked up the spectacles, tried them on.  He looked at the moon in the dark.  It looked the same.  The glasses didn’t even appear to distort his vision one way or another.  He half-shut his eyes and resigned his head.

While hazily gazing down at the circular imprint of blood, Wanderer suddenly jolted in a shock.  From the deep red a red shoot was springing.  As he kept looking it grew continuously, like a wave rushing across the beach-shore, up and up.  He looked away and instantly it halted its growth— now as high as he was sitting—a springy sapling.  But as he turned his spectacled gaze back it redoubled its burgeoning—blood-red throughout with soft crimson leaves.  

At last the tree stood wide as an oak and dwarfed him.  Its emergence complete, buds bulbed on the branch-tips and cracked open like sea-stars into a thousand bright flowers.  Wanderer plucked one of these blossoms from a low bough and tucked it in his shirt.  Finally, he slept in peace. 

The next day he woke under the shade of the red tree.  He set off down the trail, scouting closely for each hint of blood to guide him.  And as he looked at them they burst out and flowered, leaving in his wake an organic river of ruby foliage.  

On he journeyed, backwards on the trail of blood.  As he went Wanderer would occasionally pluck another floret and tuck it beside the others, until at last he had 99 sun-red blossoms.  

And finally he arrived at the kingdom’s outskirts.  It was springtime again, all these years later.  

Clanging filled the air.

The city walls were thronged with soldiers desperately trying to repel the enemy—so far lost had the war gone.  

Wanderer continued towards the fighting.  He had carefully interlaced the flowers into a fragrant crown, staggeringly bright and lush on his head. 

He slipped unchallenged into the center of the battle.

There he sat down.  And seeing blood-shed every direction—the gouges of spears, the clubs crushing bone, pain dealing pain—Wanderer began to cry.  As he cried, every soldier on the field vanished, wondrously.  Their steel arms clanged to the ground in the morning air.  In each soldier’s place, friend or enemy, stood a single vibrant flower.  They spread for acres in every color conceivable; a spring tapestry.  

A great silence weighed on the field.  But there was a single soldier left, near Wanderer.  It was the king.  

He was bent over on the ground, so Wanderer walked and stood over him.  “Father?”  The king looked up with dust-stained eyes.  There was a flower in his hand.  “Is this the brightest of the Spring?”  And the king knelt, offering it to Wanderer.  

Kyu finished the story and fell silent.  Slowly his eyes leafed open.  He looked out with real emotion towards the students.  

He found them all staring downwards, engrossed in their phones. 

Kyu’s eyes went mad.  His soul went red.  “The world has been broken.”  And he plunged off the bridge.  

With a start the girl in the center-seat jumped up and threw her phone towards the edge, light flashing prismatically, like a rainbow, from the screen.  She shouted something lost to the wind.  

As Kyu fell, he told himself There’s nothing special about your story.   You can die too. 

[As the reader, you must now decide:

Do you feel this is the authentic way to end the story?  If so, you may exit.  

If not, return to the 0-Square]