I was looking forward to meeting the shaman.
I have my gifts: I am apparently immune to age and forgetfulness. I possess freedom beyond any human understanding of the world. But my cage is all my own, too. I am trapped in one waking state of consciousness. I have never found any way to sleep, or dream. And the knowledge I most desire eludes me: I have never found the source of the story I was born with, and I have never discovered whether others of my kind exist.
When I finally left the village at the foot of the Holy Mountain I travelled all over south-east Asia, searching the attics and cellars of old people’s minds for other minds without bodies. I found legends of beings who might be my kindred, but of tangible knowledge — I found not one footprint. I crossed the Pacific in the 1960s.
Remembering my insane doctor, I mostly maintained a vow of silence. I had no wish to leave behind me a trail of mystics, lunatics and writers. On the other hand, if I came across a mystic, lunatic or writer I would sometimes talk with them. One writer in Buenos Aires even suggested a name for what I am: noncorpum, and noncorpa, if ever the day dawns when the singular becomes a plural. I spent a pleasant few months debating metaphysics with him, and we wrote some stories together. But the ‘I’ never became a ‘We’. During the 1970s I placed an advertisement in the National Enquirer. The USA is even crazier than the rest of humanity. I followed up each of the nineteen replies I received: mystics, lunatics, or writers, every one. I even looked for clues in The Pentagon. I found a lot of things that surprised even me, but nothing related to noncorpa. I never went to Europe. It seemed a dead place, cold in the shadows of nuclear missiles.
I returned to my Holy Mountain, possessing knowledge from over a hundred hosts, but still knowing nothing about my origins. I had tired of wandering. The Holy Mountain was the only place on Earth I felt any tie to. For a decade I inhabited the monks who lived on its mountainsides. I led a tranquil enough life. I found companionship with an old woman who lived in a tea shack and believed I was a speaking tree. That was the last time I spoke with a human.
‘Come in, daughter,’ said the shaman’s voice from inside the ger.
Sun-bleached jawbones hung over the door. Gunga looked over her shoulder, suddenly afraid. A boy was playing with a red ball. He threw it high into the hazy blue, and watched it, and caught it when it fell. There was an Ovoo, a holy pile of stones and bones. Gunga asked for its blessing and entered the smoky darkness.
‘Come in, daughter.’ The shaman was meditating on a mat. A lamp hung from the roof frame. A tallow candle spluttered in a copper dish. The rear of the ger was walled off by hanging animal skins. The air was grainy with incense.
There was a carved box by the entrance. Gunga opened it, and put in most of the togrugs that Caspar had tipped her the day before. She slipped off her shoes, and knelt in front of the shaman, on the right-hand side of the ger, the female half. A wrinkled face, impossible to guess the age of. Grey, matted hair, and closed eyes that suddenly opened wide. He indicated a cracked teapot on a low table.
Gunga poured the dark, odourless liquid into a cup of bone.
‘Drink, Gunga,’ said the shaman.
My host drank, and began to speak — the shaman halted her with his hand.
‘You have come because a spirit is living within you.’
‘Yes,’ both Gunga and I answered. Gunga felt me again, and dropped the cup. The stain of the undrunk liquid spread through the rug.
‘Then we must find out what it wants,’ said the shaman.
Gunga’s heart pounded like a boxed bat. Gently, I shut down her consciousness.
The shaman saw the change. He picked up a feather and drew a symbol in the air.
‘To whom am I speaking?’ asked the shaman. ‘An ancestor of this woman?’
‘I don’t know who I am.’ My words, Gunga’s voice, dry and croaky. ‘I want to discover who I am.’ Strange, to be uttering the word ‘I’ once again.
The shaman was calm. ‘What is your name, spirit?’
‘I’ve never needed a name.’
‘Are you an ancestor of this woman’s?’
‘You already asked that. I’m not. Not as far as I know.’
The shaman struck a bone against another bone, muttering words in a language I didn’t know. He sprang to his feet and flexed his fingers like claws.
‘In the name of Khukdei Mergen Khan art thou cast hence from the body of this woman!’
Human males. ‘And then what do you suggest?’
The shaman shouted. ‘Be gone! In the name of Erkhii Mergen who divided night from day, I command it!’ The shaman shook a rattling sack over Gunga. He blew some incense smoke over my host, and sprinkled some water in her face.
The shaman gazed at my host, waiting for a reaction. ‘Shaman, I’d hoped for something more intelligent. This is my first proper conversation for a very long time. And you’d be doing Gunga more good if you used that water to wash her. She believes that the Mongolian body doesn’t sweat, so she doesn’t wash and she has lice.’
The shaman frowned, and looked into Gunga’s eyes, searching for something that wasn’t Gunga. ‘Your words are perplexing, spirit, and your magic is strong. Do you wish this woman ill? Are you evil?’
‘Well, I’ve had my moments, but I wouldn’t describe myself as evil. Would you?’
‘What do you want of this woman? What ails you?’
‘One memory. And the lack of all others.’
The shaman sat back down and resumed his initial repose. ‘Who were your people when you walked as a living body?’
‘Why do you think I was once human?’
‘What else would you have been?’
‘That’s a fair question.’
The shaman frowned. ‘You are a strange one, even for one of your kind. You speak like a child, not one waiting to pass over.’
‘What do you mean, “my kind”?’
‘I am a shaman. It is my calling to communicate with spirits. As it was with my master, and his master before him.’
‘Let me explore your mind. I need to see what you have seen.’
‘The spirits do not commune with one another?’
‘Not with me, they don’t. Please. Let me in. It’s safer for you if you don’t resist.’
‘If I allow you to possess me for a short time, you will leave this woman?’
‘Shaman, we have a deal. If you touch Gunga, I will leave her now.’
I experience memories like a network of tunnels. Some are serviced and brightly lit, others are catacombs. Some are guarded, yet others are bricked up. Tunnels lead to tunnels, deeper down. So it is with memories.
But access to memories does not guarantee access to truth. Many minds redirect memories along revised maps. In the tunnels of the shaman’s memory I met what may have been spirits of the dead, or delusions on the part of either the shaman or his customers or both. Or noncorpa! Maybe there were many footprints, or maybe there were none. Or maybe evidence was there in forms I couldn’t recognise. I deepened my search.
I found this story, told twenty summers earlier on a firelit desert night.
Many years ago, the red plague stalked the land. Thousands of people died. The healthy fled in its face, leaving behind the infected, saying simply, ‘Fate will sift the living from the dead.’ Among the abandoned in the land of birds was Tarvaa, a fifteen-year-old boy. His spirit left his body and walked south between the dunes of the dead.