Hidden Moon

Chapter Three

The first thing that registered was how quiet it was. I walked around the back of the hut with a bad feeling coming over me. The old man was sitting in the dirt, with the dog in his lap. The dog was dead. It had been shot. The old man cocked his head at the sound of my footsteps. “You’ve come back, Inspector, but too late. Look, here, my dog is dead, has been murdered by the bastards. I wish they had killed me, too.”

“Are you alright?” I couldn’t tell if we were being watched. The dog had been shot with a rifle from point-blank range. The shell casing was a few feet away. “Maybe we should go inside.”

“No, I won’t leave the dog, not till she’s buried. There’s a shovel beside the door. If you bring it around, I’ll dig the grave myself.” He put the dog’s carcass gently on the ground and stood up. There was blood on his shirt, a lot of it. “This dog was all I had, Inspector. They knew that.”

“I’ll get the shovel.”

After the dog was buried, the old man stood over the grave, his mouth moving but no sound coming out. I didn’t say anything, just waited. After a while he stopped and turned to me. “There was an old monk that lived at the temple right after the war. No one bothered him. A couple of political types came up that first September and asked him a few questions. When they were leaving, they told me it was my job to watch him. It was funny and we all laughed. Setting a blind man to watch a monk. The monk died a few years later. He must have known it was coming. A few days before, he sat beside me and told me something I haven’t forgotten. He was a small man, tiny hands, a light voice, like the wind in high trees.”

I took the old man by the arm and led him to the steps of the temple. “I’m listening.”

“The monk, he said the world is finite, and everything in it is limited. They all say that, but then he went on. Everything is rationed, you might say. Even pain. Endlessly recycled. Like atoms, and parts of atoms. The same atoms are here as were here when the world began, isn’t that right? Might be some changes because of those atomic bombs, fusion or fission or something. But by and large, same atoms. Life comes and goes, but same atoms. This is not cycle-of-life fantasy, ‘oh, we are all part of a Great Wheel.’ Life isn’t everything. Life isn’t at the center of creation. No. No, it isn’t. What are the elements of the universe but the parts of life, color, and sound, and taste, and so forth. Emotions, goodness, evil, melancholy, sadness. Love. All of it, limited, rationed, finite. Only so much of everything. These elements come in, how can I say, packets. You don’t create red, red is outside of you, but then it strikes your eyes and goes inside, and you remember red. Same with blue, and so forth. Same with the smell of the mountains at dawn, and the wind against your skin in autumn, and the sound of the stars. Only so much of it out there, and it becomes you, over time, you absorb these and they are you and you are them. Emotions, too, you don’t pull them out of nowhere, from nothing. They are part of creation, maybe that first instance in creation, all created, all formed, once and for all. Love and melancholy and hate and happiness. So when people were new, when the earth was new, there was a lot of it around. The sky was vivid blue, the wind was fresh, the meadows would knock you over with the smell of the grass and the flowers. Pools of sadness hung in the air, and if you walked through one of them, you could be sad for a week, but no matter because it was a pure sadness, pure white, sadly white if you know what I mean. And hatred was pure, and maybe it floated and maybe it didn’t. I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this. The more people there are, the less of this there is for everyone. The world is duller and duller. Colors are dull. The seasons are dull. Pretty soon you can’t tell one from another, pretty soon sadness and evil and melancholy and love are all gray, pounding gray lumps that enter you and sit in confused silence inside your heart so you don’t know anymore what you are. But when you die, these things, they separate out again, they go back into the world in their pure form, little splinters and fragments of them, and someone else gets them, and if they bathe in goodness, why, we rejoice and smile at the luck, but goodness is light and usually floats on the wind so no one gets much of it, less that than love, which dances across the empty spaces and so you only run into it by mistake, or by surprise.”