"The separation between past, present and future is only an illusion, though a convincing one..."
- Albert Einstein.
Feet tucked in close, she sighed, picked up the newspaper and looked over the front page, settled on a story and started reading. From time to time she picked up her coffee, took a sip, a little grin crossing her face here, the shadow of a frown there. She found herself in the employment pages at one point, and her hands shook a little as contrary images flew through her mind, but she ventured inside, started scanning -- and daydreaming.
She was a bright girl -- too smart, some said -- and she was something of an empath, which, she thought, had at times doomed her to a life of unwanted insight. Born and raised in West L.A., she had gone to UCLA, then to graduate school at USC, her life ahead always centered on journalism, and then writing. She went to work for the Times a few years after Bill Clinton took office, and the first waves of cynicism broke over her shores as she watched the President lie about Lewinsky and that whole blue-stained affair. She threw away her blinders after that and became a real reporter, or so her friends said, after she won a Pulitzer for her coverage of events at a prison in Iraq a few years later.
She had become, over the intervening years, an outspoken critic of the rich and powerful, and by the time she wrote her first book -- a scathing, fact-based look at what it meant to be poor in America -- she had, of course, made more than a few enemies. Back at the Times after a year off for research, she continued to report on human issues raised by the contradictory impulses she found within America, and she made more enemies. So many her friends weren't too surprised when they heard she'd been summarily fired by the Times one Friday morning. She had packed her Pulitzer in a little cardboard box and walked out into the world with a smile on her face, but then she sold her house and bought a one-way ticket to China -- and she started walking. Walking to the west, always. Her friends didn't quite know what to think about her after that.
She walked most of the time, though sometimes passing trucks stopped and she hopped aboard, but she always did so with her reporters eyes and ears open. She took notes, wrote little penciled sketches of the people she ran across -- and descriptions of her empathic response to other's misery soon filled the pages of her little red notebook. Sketches of pain, but as she walked away from the huge cities of southeastern China, more often of happy contentment, portraits of farmers in Tibet's Racaka Pass, of riverboat operators ferrying passengers, and eventually, about the serene smiles she encountered when she talked to herdsmen in Bhutan. She fought a cobra one morning in the eastern reaches of Bhutan, and lived to write about the encounter, but a few days later she slipped and tumbled down a rocky slope, knocking the wind out of her and hurting her left leg. Badly, she discovered. She was afraid it was broken, and though she knew she was close to her destination, she had never felt more alone, or more vulnerable.
A red-robed monk happened along and introduced himself, and Lindsey told him her name, where she was from, and the ancient man just smiled, nodded his head as he helped her stand. Her left leg buckled as he helped her up, so he helped her up again and shouldered her weight this time, and they climbed back to the path and began walking along the trail again. It took them two days, but they finally arrived at the base of a cliff, and she looked up, saw a monastery in the clouds. They struggled up a steep trail through deep woods, scaled rock walls that led even higher, then he helped her along the last stretch, out along a vast ledge that ended at a cluster of white buildings perched on the edge of forever -- and she lived within that mountainside community for weeks. She lived in a wholly improbable world, an ancient place carved into the side of a sheer face of rock, the waters of a wild river roaring hundreds of feet below -- and she thought about that river for days without end. Where it went, the people whose lives depended on it, and what would happen if the water stopped flowing. In time she saw the river as a metaphor, as a mirror held up to life, human life, her life.
As all things must, she considered, have a beginning, and come to an end.
And one day she realized she had fallen in love with the mountains and the trees, and even the men who lived in solitude with the clouds. She wished she was different -- so she could stay -- but she wasn't. One day the same monk, the same man who helped her that broken day, walked with her down to the river and helped her board a little boat. She watched him recede into the passing landscape with despair, then hope, before she started walking again, still to the west.
She came to a village a day later and fell ill, seriously ill, and deep delirium came for her. In a fevered dream she saw herself being loaded in the back of a truck, then in a hospital of some sort -- at one point she saw brown men in white coats doing things to her she didn't understand -- then one day she woke up and saw the world as it was, perhaps.
A little man, no taller than she, stood by the side of her bed looking at a chart, and she looked at him.
"You are most very ill," he said to her.
"And?"
"I think you must go someplace else. We do not have the resources to care for you."
"What's wrong with me?"
"You have a disease I can not understand," he said, struggling to find the correct words. "I am not sure I may care to you."
"You can't care for me?"
"Adequately, I think is the word I seek."
"Ah. So what must I do?"
"You must take us to Paro. When you are strong enough. When we have a truck."
She drifted away again, and when next she woke she felt a rough road underneath an ancient truck, and through flapping canvas sides she watched a dusty road pass by, just out of reach, and she wanted to be down there, walking. Walking and listening. Sketching portraits of lives she didn't understand.
"Do I understand my own life?' she thought once. 'The purpose of my life?'
She saw the outskirts of a city pass beyond the tattered canvas, and she recognized the hospital for what it was. Careful men came for her and carried her inside, and she felt IVs being started, then doctors or nurses at the foot of her bed talking in hushed, excited tones. She could feel her sweat-soaked gown when chills came, then as suddenly she could feel she was being baked alive -- and she would call out for help, for water.
And one morning an American was standing beside her, looking at her almost ruefully.
"Hello."
"Yes, hello there. My name is Carter Freeman, and I'm from the consulate. How are you feeling?"
She shook her head. "Not good."
"I'm not surprised," Freeman said. "You've picked up a bad bug, and apparently you broke your leg recently. It wasn't set properly and there's some sort of infection in the bone, and that's when they called us."
"What do they need you for?"
"They think you should try to get home, to a more well equipped facility than this, anyway. They're afraid you'll lose your leg otherwise."
"Ah."
"So, you're Lindsey Hollister. The writer?"
"I've heard that rumor too."
He smiled, tried not to laugh. "Well, I've come to get you, to take you home."
"What if I want to stay here?"
"That's your call, Miss Hollister, but frankly, I'd want to know why?"
"Because these mountain, and these people feel like home now."
He nodded his head. "Understandable. There's magic in the air up here."
She remembered turning and looking out the window just then, looking to the mountains as if looking for an answer to the most important question of her life.
The question. What was it? She had seen it, but now it was gone...
"You feel it too?"
And he had nodded his head. "Impossible not to, I guess. You came through China, walking all the way?"
"Yup."
"You landed in Shanghai, eighteen months ago. That's the last recorded entry on your passport. Have you been walking since."
"Yes, aside from the two months I rested after I hurt my leg."
"Where was that?"
"A monastery, I think it was in Bhutan but I'm not sure."
"I came by yesterday," he said, suddenly a little nervous. "I went through your things, read through one of your journals, trying to figure out where you'd been."
She looked at him like he was a thief who'd stumbled into her room.
"I found myself weeping at one point," he continued, "weeping at the beauty you found. I wanted to read more, but I couldn't. I felt like I was walking where I shouldn't. Not without your permission, anyway. Do you plan to write about all this?"
She looked away. "I don't know."
"You should...I mean, I hope you do. I was lost in your words, in the things I saw through your eyes. I wanted to know more, too. About those things, and -- you."
"Me?"
"I fell in love with you, I think -- or with your ability to perceive the human, I suppose."
"Nothing so personal as a word, I assume."
"Yes. Exactly."
"So? What have you planned for me?"
"Lufthansa, tomorrow morning. To Frankfurt, then Los Angeles."
"I see. No choice, eh?"
"It's the recommendation of your government. Mine, too. Unless, of course, you want to die here."
And so early the next morning they moved her to the airport, and Freeman was there, waiting, and he went to the airplane with her, saw her settled in her seat then he asked her to write, to share, and then he was gone. She seemed to sleep and sleep, and never saw Frankfurt come or go. She woke up on a gurney, another IV flowing, and she realized she was in another aircraft -- and she thought that strange -- then sleep came again.
She woke up one morning and felt wonderful, completely refreshed, and she looked out the window in the room she was in and saw palm trees in the distance, swaying in a Santa Anna, and in an instant she knew she was home. The brown air seemed familiar, even the color of the sky seemed to scream 'Home' -- and she felt an unexpected surge of happiness.
A mountain of a man came to her a little later -- he looked like a football player, or a wrestler, but he said he was an infectious disease specialist and that he had been treating her for ten days...
"I've been here ten days?"
"You have."
"And just where is here?"
"UCLA."
"I thought the air smelled familiar. Is that a Santa Anna blowing?"
"Yup. For a few days now."
"So, what's blowing through my veins right now."
"Oh, a cocktail of Vancomycin, prednisone, fluconazole, and acyclovir. Maybe a little Red Bull, too," he said, grinning.
"Is that why I feel so 'up'?"
"Your white counts were in the basement yesterday, so you got another transfusion last night. That accounts for the feeling of energy. What did you do to your leg, by the way?"
"I fell down a mountain."
"Oh? Where?"
"Bhutan."
"Bhutan? What on earth were you doing there?"
"Taking a walk."
"A walk?"
"Yes."
"Uh, yes, admissions wanted me to ask. We can't find a home address for you?"
"I don't have one?"
"But you have insurance. How'd you work that out?"
"I have friends in low places."
"Well, they're going to need an address. Some place to send correspondence."
