Bardo is a charming coastal town, with its lighthouse and market, and winding cobblestone streets, but you have to see it properly. I didn’t when I arrived. Like you, I came on a boat—a a fishing sloop in a large and sundry fleet that cast its lights in the black bay. I reached the shore on unsteady legs, I don’t remember when.
At first, I felt disoriented. How could I live in this unlivable place? The sky is a starless void, the lighthouse casts its beam into the sea as the steady stream of ships with new inhabitants arrive. There is no way to mark the time in Bardo: no years, no seasons, no nights and days. Nothing, except for a fish and vegetable market that is held regularly.
One day, as I sat in my dilapidated apartment, eating a lunch of bland steamed cod I bought at the market, I hit my lowest point. In the clarity that only despair affords, I realized “I’m in Hell.” A further thought struck me: What did I do to deserve Hell? Memories of my life have become a meaningless blur. Some days I can barely remember my first name, Masashi. My skin fits tightly on muscular arms. What’s the point of being a young man in a place like this?
A fairytale tells of a mountain made entirely of diamond, tall like Mount Fuji, and a little bird that flies by it and sharpens its beak on the summit once every hundred years. When the entire mountain is worn away, one second of eternity has passed. Hell isn’t torment, it’s boredom.
Yet, one day, as I strolled on the beach watching the combers glisten in the lighthouse’s roving beam, I thought of a running gag my wife and I used to have, an imaginary dog we called “Choco.” Landlords never allowed us to keep pets. At that moment, a large dog ran up to me. An Irish setter.
The dog stood panting with that earnest, silly enthusiasm only dogs can muster. I took a piece of driftwood and threw it. He ran and brought it back.
“Choco?” I asked. He barked and wagged his tail. My imaginary dog had become real.
The sky was still pitch dark, my apartment still a shithole, but with Choco by my side it felt almost bearable. We walked to the market. I’d buy fish for him and carefully pick out the bones, as dogs can choke on fishbones just like humans can. I wasn’t sure if a figment of my imagination could die. I didn’t want to take the chance.
I pondered, and stars lit up the black expanse. My knowledge of astronomy has always been sketchy. After I thought about stars for a while, the Big Dipper’s solemn shape appeared. Next, Pegasus’ gloomy square swung itself above the sea’s horizon, and then came the Little Dipper with its North Star fixed like a precious jewel. More stars were flung back from the recesses of my memory into the world. I probably got most constellations wrong. It doesn’t matter.
Finally, I made the sun illuminate the darkness, coaxing a pink and frosty dawn at the horizon when I took Choco for a walk. That same day I met you on the beach. You disembarked from a schooner, disoriented and confused. You appeared as a young woman, with black smooth hair tied in two braids, but I could tell that, like me, you had a long life of experience that even the fog of Bardo’s ever-present cannot erase.
But unlike me, your memories of your past life were sharp and brimming with experience. You dreaded the thought of spending eternity here. This afterlife, you said, is not worth living.
“Just try! You can choose to see things how you want! You too can see a pretty coastal town with a lighthouse and a market, if you want to.” I gestured around to help you to see Bardo’s many charms. I added, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. Milton wrote that.”
You remarked, “Those lines were said by Satan in Paradise Lost.”
“So what? It’s still true!” I retorted.
“I refuse this self-deception,” you said. “Objectively speaking, you’re just as miserable as me. That dog you keep on mentioning isn’t even real! If it were, I would see it too!”
Choco flickered ominously.
I took a few deep breaths and regained my calm. He became solid again. “You are wrong. Try again. Just focus: there’s a large Irish setter sitting next to me, on his haunches. He’s sniffing your right hand right now.”
You looked doubtful. I pressed on. “Look, Yuriko, if you don’t like it, you can always go back to how you felt before.”
I ought not have promised you that, a promise I could not keep. You did hold out your hand to Choco there and then.
And now, you too can see my rosy-fingered dawn, you too can smell the rich vapors of seaweed soup emanating from large bronze cauldrons in the market.
You and I live in my apartment now, which has morphed from a cramped one-bedroom into a nest of coziness. The bed is no longer an iron frame, but made of delicate wooden joinery, our bedspread festooned with gay and colorful birds.
We’re taking pottery classes. We practice several styles of martial art in a dojo you conjured up. I finally learned to cook. Next, I will learn how to sail. In this happy state in the charming coastal town of Bardo, hundreds of years have elapsed.
Our bedroom window affords a panoramic vista of the diamond mountain, glistening in the lazy afternoon sun. The little bird has not even worn away a millimeter of it.
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Helen De Cruz is a Philosophy Professor, holder of the Danforth Chair in the Humanities at Saint Louis University. In their spare time, they play the Renaissance lute and archlute. They write fiction, and draw and paint. Their fiction has appeared in EscapePod, HyphenPunk, and Kaleidotrope. They are co-editor, with Eric Schwitzgebel and Johan De Smedt, of the anthology Philosophy Through Science Fiction Stories (Bloomsbury, 2021). |