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behind. When he died in flight, the true-heart eagle would cast his body in an arc towards the sun.
    By the time second and third opinions were given (more diplomatically but still unevasively), tests completed, slivers of his liver analysed, scans examined, all while he was fully conscious and watching the television monitors, he was almost enjoying the process. It was a full New Zealand summer. Son was returning for Christmas and New Year, freer emotionally to visit after that first decade-absent return. Well, he hoped the news would not hinder son’s long hours inthe sun, still seeking to become brown, then char the brown to black. No ozone layer above New Zealand, he thought: must buy son a full stock of sunscreens. Slow down his sun-dyed project, but he would at least shine – body scars and all – in the long life-measuring days.
    Ah, life-measuring days. Two to six months, the doctors had said. Extra maybe if the mind held out and ruled the body sufficiently. What was sufficiently? He read that meditation helped. Son would have to teach him how to meditate. He would have to learn to sit cross-legged on a cushion on his deck by the sea. His mind raced. I’ll stay in New Zealand. If I am still alive when summer ends, and if the pain has not yet come, I’ll follow the summer and I’ll see the antiquities of Europe and I’ll see in China that small place, Unused Sky, where I was born. I’ll not die under any winter’s mantle of grey.
    And I’ll ask son to explain death to me and what lies beyond, and I know he’ll say ‘nothing’, either ‘nothing’ or ‘nothing we can understand’. He talked of God like that once, ‘oh, something, but something we can’t understand’. The son who detested the human urge to personify the universe and to litter the history books of the species with all too-human all too-flawed appropriations of the Great Beyond that seemed just like the folks and flower-shrubs back home. At least son was now more at ease back home. It’s not that he can’t stand New Zealand, he is in love with that beach at Kare Kare, he cries when he sees it. He can’t stand the thought of New Zealand – so far away from his precious conflicts, such long plane rides away. But, yes, Kare Kare. The first time he came back he asked first to go to Kare Kare, dragged us there, and there we were, me in a suit, wearing my rings, his mother in a suit and high heels. He made us wade the little stream. Then he seemed to enter a different world – his own world of iron sand, bush-clad cliffs, and unused surf. Just bang! As if he’d stepped through a wall, and he didn’t speak to us for an hour. He does this when people point guns at him. Suddenly, in deepest Africa, he is no longer there. His soul almost visibly leaves on its walkabout – sniffing flowers no doubt while his inquisitors, roadblock, whatever, wonder where it’s gone. And they know they have nothing to shoot any more. Is this what the Taoist sage meant about the great master?That he was invulnerable because the rhino had no place to put his horn? The tiger no place to put his claws. Son as master, huh! No, he’ll need a few more lessons with his Okinawan Sensei. I’m sure he’s being taught not to be there as Sensei pounds his left-behind body. When he re-enters he is half broken. He doesn’t mind broken. He dislikes the process of being broken. But how long can he stay outside himself? What if Sensei decides to beat on him for an hour? Does the body die if soul vacates it for an hour or more? And what if the body is dead? Does the soul leave as easily as son’s? Is the untrained soul wrenched or pushed painfully away? Does it mournfully linger? Then, where does it go since it has no home to which it returns? It enters the ‘nothing we can understand’. I’ll ask him to talk to me about these things, and predict every sentence. He will tell his friends his father smiled at the talk of death. After that, I’ll talk to him about the