The White Door by Stephen Chan

shivered sleeplessly on the high veld nights, it had shone reliably on him in Durban, and it had rained reliably on him in Cape Town, and by day he had been the designer-suited lecturer of authority – cited by many South African PhDs – and by night he had been the white-suited karate master, the long-haired magazine cover made flesh. The effort of switching identities smoothly made him stand up one winter’s day in Johannesburg, then faint, and when he came to he was soaked in the coldest sweat he could remember, having fallen well even though unconscious. Now he was sinking his breath, he had completed some hundreds of push-ups and sit-ups for the sake of his father’s sight of him, and had tied the hair in the glossy tail of the dream heroes, and he was naked facing his summer-lit garden, and on the other side of the world it was night and a life was coming to its end, and he had read how hard it is for souls to escape the body’s fitful ways of dying. Those shot in war, as he had seen, had an easier time of it than those in the last bed of their lives. So he was preparing now, the soul-master who had jumped several lessons in the lexicon on meditation, out of grief, love, and because he knew he could do it, the crippled soul-master of the Kentish walled garden, to escort his father across the bridge of life and to say farewells to him on the edge of the honey-rich plain where, as his father’s father had said before him on his own deathbed, the souls of the dead begin their journeys to heaven, where they are embalmed in the new bodies of their next lives. And the Patient Heart, a.k.a. the White Warrior, knelt somewhere in summer Kent and some part of that well-trained heart of his was bitter likeunsmoothed gravel and yet he had, in order to do what he proposed to do, to take out the heart’s rake and soothe the gravel into the tall roses and the green chamber of a garden like the one that faced him, to make heart and garden one, so his soul could fly in the summer blue and cross the bridge of the world and take his father’s hand on that walk across the bridge of life, and the neighbours heard the first great sigh breathe out from the garden since a beautiful Finnish girl had lain briefly there, but this sigh, measuring itself away from bitterness, was of the resignation a warrior feels when he stands amidst the last hundred of his fallen companions and wraps some dreamt-of Roman commander in his final red and red-stained cloak.
     
    Because when he had left for his five-week tour of southern Africa his father had sounded strong – for the brief sentences he voiced on the telephone – but when he returned the voice was pathetically weak and limited to a lone sentence, and even his mother, topping and tailing the father’s words as usual, no longer concealed the gravity of his sudden decline. And the son knew even before he phoned since, on his return, he found the plaque his father had given him fallen, face-down on the floor and, the next day, visiting his office, every one of his paintings hung limply on the walls with broken cords. And, he said to himself, he may have been misreading the signs of late, for a full year in fact when it came to the Finnish girl, but there was no doubt someone was sending him signs, and their range of reading was, he thought, sucking in breath, bitterly narrow and he exhaled the taste of it in a bubble over the grubby complex of the LSE and it pulsated like a child’s blown bubble, a child’s breath, over the thunder of Aldwych and Holborn, and became one with the exhaust of one thousand slow-moving summer cars.
     
    And this was how he did it on that Saturday afternoon before his garden, having composed himself and entered himself and summoned the White Warrior and made him pristine and sent him off around the world. It was hard to reach the other side, it was hard to reachthe father, harder still to enter him, and he could not construct the necessary narrative, and in Kent