The White Door by Stephen Chan Page A

his injured knees were hurting and when he finally entered the father, he could only play three images and he played them over and over and they intercut and he thought these were the last strobe-light visions of his father, the living linking parts were being excised.
    1. He saw the White Warrior face-to-face with his father. The father’s back was to his camera and the shot was framed from the upper back rising, and the father had in his soul not lost weight and was the hearty father of his memory and the Warrior was looking into that part where his father’s eyes would have faced him and they could not yet have been death eyes for the Warrior was speaking to him with his eyes and the two men would bring their right forearms together over and over and, in Kent, he was thinking ‘this is the edge of the honey plain, but the Warrior cannot cross to this side of the bridge,’ but it was not the honey plain, merely its precursor as the dying soul imagines where it is shortly to go.
    2. The camera has moved back now. We see more of the precursor plain. The warrior son is bowing and sweeping his arm – strange, it is his useless left arm – in the direction of an unseen bridge. Then the image cuts and plays again, then cuts again, then the two men are in close-up once more reading words in each other’s eyes and making arms clash in that futile last gesture that says love has the strength of well bodies. It is a muscular farewell, the poetry is what they say with their eyes and the camera cannot record something so reserved.
    3. The son holds the reins of the white horse. When he strokes its nuzzle, reins disappear. In the mouth of the last blue cavern of life’s fountain, they are standing. There is an upwards curving hewn-stone bridge across a chasm in the stars and some full moon is in the great heaven, and the bridge leads to a small land of stone and from there the bridges lead across the outcrops of the honey plain until they come to the well-lit sunlit plain itself. The image of the moon and the mouth of the last cavern and the white horse plays over and over. In Kent, the Patient Heart embraces summer air the shape of his father. In the long cloud-strewn islands of the south the father, back still to thecamera, faces the White Warrior who gestures towards the horse and the white horse by the white moon walks slowly towards the bridge and if you walk behind, no longer turning towards the Warrior who cannot cross with you, you can do it smoothly and death will not rattle in your throat because air and soul have escaped clean.
     
    Back in Kent he comes to. He is shaking. He does not know if ever the white horse can return to him, and how can a soul fight if it cannot ride? He makes tea and it shakes in his hand and he is crying now and the sun is shining on the Downs and the five ports, and wind stirs the ash trees but no wind enters the walled garden, but it makes him look up. On his wall, holding his wide belt of office, bearded, not thin at all, is the Red Emperor, and he looks like his father and also like the emperors in all his grandmother’s fairy tales and, as he watches, the Red Emperor slowly rises into the sky and, looking down at him always, takes half an hour to disappear like a kite released by the heart towards the sun.
5: The flying fox and the mud world
    There was a mud world. Wound sleepless in sheets, five years of age, the master of speech and two words in English, and for five years to come, he had every night the same dream.
    There was a mud world, flat under grey skies, a land of neither blue nor green, but brown, grey. Irrigation canals kept the mud what it was destined always to be, mud; and if a man of the living world, or even an angel of heaven stood upon the mud he would sink. But there were people of the mud world who begged release from passers-by. If you passed by, arms would plead and eyes would plead and mouths, encaked, would seek to plead. There was no sound in the mud