We get out to stretch our legs. At first I feel light-headed just looking at the gorge. But then I watch as Little Bat approaches with steady steps. He walks right up to the lip and sits down on the rim. A billion billion of him would not begin to fill it.

  In our universe there are four previous incarnations of the Buddha. Each one is just a man and lives the life span of such. We believe that when the teachings of the Buddha are no longer remembered on earth, a new Buddha is born in the darkness and that each interval lasts for two thousand years. The teachings of this latest Buddha last five hundred years longer than expected. As I stare at this vast breach in the landscape, I think of the vows of the four great Bodhisattvas—Firm Practice, Pure Practice, Unlimited Practice, and Superior Practice:

  However innumerable living beings are, I vow to save them all.

  However innumerable hindrances are, I vow to overcome them all.

  However innumerable the Buddha’s teachings are, I vow to master them all.

  However supreme the Buddha Way is, I vow to reach it.

  I rub my eyes to clear my mind. We are standing in a place of wisdom, a place of unfathomable patience as practiced by the very earth itself.

  Amazing, says Uncle. It reminds us of our place in the universe.

  Yes, I say. We are nothing.

  Uncle looks at me. Far from it, he says.

  Saran doesn’t seem to know how to enjoy a moment of leisure. She opens the back door of the Machine and begins repacking our supplies. It’s okay, Mun calls. He waves her over to where he is standing. Just come see, he says. I watch as she stops, puts down a jar. She seems to be thinking it over. Finally she moves toward him. I remember the feel of a single strand of her hair in my mouth earlier in the day. I watch my brother pretend to push her over the edge, hear her delighted scream at being teased. I feel something darken inside me, a candle blowing out as a gust of wind rushes in through a window. The fact that I can feel such human pettiness in the face of absolute vastness is an indication of how much I still have to learn.

  As we get back in the car, everywhere the shadows lengthening, Uncle spots an ovoo on the other side of the gorge. Because we cannot reach it to place a stone on top, Mun honks the horn three times as we head out on our way. It brings us luck. Each rock someone’s inner light.

  An Hour to Sundown

  We stop to make camp. Tomorrow we should arrive at Khövsgöl Nuur and the summer settlement of the Reindeer People. Already we are in Khövsgöl aimag, Mongolia’s northernmost province, a region famed for its beauty. After dinner, Saran piles the dishes in a plastic bucket and heads off toward the river. One of our water jugs is empty so I grab it and follow along. The spot where we choose to spend the night is idyllic. A lazy river winds its way through the landscape. The grass is filled with dung, the small black pellets that signify goats and sheep, and the large coiled droppings of yaks. A small herd of horses clusters on the far side of the river. The sun is still up though rapidly sinking.

  I hold my free hand out at my side, dragging my palm through the tops of the grass, the long blades tickling my skin, the stems bowing down around me as if I am a boat cutting through water. Everywhere the loud mechanical stirring of insects in the grass, an impromptu symphony, the grasslands a metaphor for the mindlessness we attempt to achieve each day through meditation. In places, the grass is knee-high, its feathery tips gone to seed. With each step clouds of grasshoppers rise up in the air, my legs tickled by hundreds of tiny wings, the chirruping of insects like a sonic aura around me.

  At the river’s edge I dunk the jug. Instantly my knuckles start to ache. The water is cold. Siberia lies just on the other side of the Sayan Mountains. Despite the livestock, we drink freely of the rivers, usually boiling the water first but not always. The jug should be heavy when full, but we are not too far from camp and I should be able to manage it. Here by the river Saran and I have just enough distance for a conversation that can’t be carried on the wind to other ears. Lightning flashes in my mind. This is another first for me.

  Before this moment, I am never completely alone with a woman.

  We Lower Ourselves into the Old Shafts

  I remember places like this, says Saran. Once again there are wildflowers laced into her braid. I imagine what it would be like to pull them from her hair each night at day’s end.

  The water by the bank is shallow. Soon the jug is heavy enough that it doesn’t float away. I let it go and take a plate from the bucket full of dishes, rub its face with my palm. Her statement puzzles me. Isn’t all Mongolia like this, I say. I think of the places where Mun and I grow up in the shadow of Yatuu Gol, the beauty of the volcano something that is always there.

  My family are herders, Saran says. I remember summers like this. Blue skies, endless herds, the rivers clear and cold. I’m four when the first zud hits, she says.

  I nod. I also remember the zud. It is at the start of our first year in the monastery. We are eight years old. Our father moves the flocks south before it hits. The people who stay on the grasslands during the zud come to the gates looking for food. The Rinpoche gives what the monastery can, but when the zud drags on, turning the grasslands into a sheet of ice, there is no longer extra food to share. The older monks cut back, eating only one meal a day so that there might be something to give any supplicant that arrives at our gates.

  There are two back-to-back zud, I say, one terrible winter following another.

  Saran smiles but there is a sudden hardness in her usually dream-heavy eyes. She nods, tells me how in the first winter, two-thirds of their flocks die, while in the second, only a handful survives, though the next summer the grass is tall as her shoulders because there are no animals left to eat it. Without animals, she says, my family becomes ninja miners.

  I take another plate from the tub. I am familiar with the term, which is used to describe people illegally scavenging in old Soviet mines that are abandoned after the USSR collapses, but I don’t know where the phrase comes from. Why the word ninja, I ask.

  She laughs, says the miners look like those cartoon characters—the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the way they carry green pans on their backs. We lower ourselves into the old shafts, she says, me, my siblings, my parents, my oldest brother staying on the surface to pull us back up. She tells me that clouds of coal dust can explode, how it gets in your lungs. We all have colds, she says, our noses constantly running a thick black sludge. Once a week a truck comes and we sell what we have. All over the landscape people crawling around under the earth. All of us trying to make enough money to buy new herds, to start over.

  She tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Three years later we have enough to buy new animals. Then when I’m twelve, she says, a convoy of trucks rumbles over the grasslands, and everything changes.

  Who are they, I ask.

  She sighs. The Chinese. She explains that after Mongolia becomes a democratic country, foreign companies begin to arrive, the old Russian mine where her family scavenges bigger than anyone knows. It also has copper, she says. The government claims it’s the world’s largest deposit of copper plus one of the largest deposits of coking coal, which you need to make steel.

  Saran wipes her brow with the back of her hand. It’s constant, she says. Trucks coming and going day and night. Construction expands the mine. The earth stripped open. There are no paved roads, so the trucks kick dust up in the air. It looks like darkest night even at noon. Our animals start to get sick. The babies don’t thrive. The grass begins to die. Then our local well dries up. They say that in order to extract copper, the mine is using almost a thousand liters of water a second!

  She places the last clean dish in the plastic tub. I remember this one time out with the animals, she says. We go to cross into one of our traditional pastures, but there’s a barbed-wire fence where there is never a fence before. Several of the animals get caught in it. She nods to where the water jug is full and beginning to sink. I rush over and haul it up on land.

  So we move to Ulaanbaatar. My oldest brother gets a job driving a cab, my mother sells clothes in the black market. She looks off toward the horizon. I can sense her slipping away, back to a world of clouds.

  What’s your family name, I ask.

  Borjigin, she says.

  I laugh. Yes, I say. Borjigin is my family name too.

  Back when Mongolia is a communist country, surnames are unheard of. Then the Soviet Union collapses. We have no choice. We can go on being communists, a system that fails us at every turn, or we can change, open the door, and see where history might take us. With the coming of democracy, we are slowly brought into the modern age. For a while, everything is in chaos, though most of us don’t know. Life on the grasslands goes on as it has for hundreds of years. On the steppes, the seasons continue, flocks fattening or not.

  One day the government in Ulaanbaatar decides everyone needs a surname. It becomes a top priority. Previously, we never need to distinguish ourselves like that. It is enough to know your name and who your father is, your patronymic. I am Tsakhiagiin Chuluun, son of Tsakhia. There are three million of us scattered across the country. How would a last name change anything?

  Still, we are excited by the prospect of reimagining ourselves, of becoming something new. People let their imaginations run wild. They consider various possibilities, like features of the landscape, dreams, horses. When it comes time to put name to paper, the most common surname adopted is Borjigin, the clan name of Chinggis Khaan. According to The Secret History of the Mongols, the Borjigin lineage begins in the world’s first dawn with Blue-Grey Wolf and his wife Fallow Doe. Today Borjigin is as common a name in Mongolia as I hear Smith is in English-speaking countries.

  Nice to meet you, Borjigin Sarangerel, I say, ta sain baina uu, are you being well? Saran smiles. I feel my brother’s presence somewhere in the growing dark, most likely smoking beside the Machine. What might he think to see me speaking so freely with a woman? Why do you speak Tibetan, I ask.

  For the first time since we meet, I watch as she blushes. Something in her face tells me that she is one who holds the deepest of secrets within her, and that this secret is at the heart of her identity, that to be without it would efface everything she is. I don’t pry. I know what it is to have a secret, the letter in my robe like an inner darkness waiting to find the light.

  I just do, she says, the dreamy quality back in her eyes. She lifts the tub of dishes to her hip and turns to walk back to camp. The sun sets, the earth cooling. I struggle with the weight of the water jug but try not to let my effort show.

  The One for Whom the Sky Never Darkens

  Since the sixteenth century, it is said that the One for Whom the Sky Never Darkens always incarnates as a thoughtful prankster. Often he is born with thumbs that can be bent back at any angle, a trick he uses to fool others into thinking he is injured. His skin is said to take the sun at his will, darkening even when there is no sun in the sky if he so chooses. Unlike other holy men, what makes the One for Whom the Sky Never Darkens especially invaluable is that he is always birthed with all his memories intact, remembering the day when the first Ocean of Compassion is born in a cowshed in the snowcapped mountains of Tibet. It is said he can also recall his various lives in the animal kingdom—for example, the time his dark and juvenile feathers molt as he comes of age among the golden eagles, or the iciness of the water streaming past his gills during his existence as a trout.

  If all goes well, tomorrow we should encounter the first candidate, a small boy living in the pine forests beside Khövsgöl Nuur. Details of the One for Whom the Sky Never Darkens must be kept secret lest some well-meaning grandmother inadvertently feed the signs to her grandson, telling the child of his life in Lhasa—the interminable hours spent at court, the sand mandalas constructed in the Potala’s Great West Hall wide as the city’s avenues, the sound of the beautiful sand being swept up and poured from a ceremonial urn into Lake Manasarovar.

  And so, it is only now, as the five of us sit in the light of the fire, Saran carefully wrapping up the leftovers from dinner, that Uncle tells us these details of the one for whom we are searching, his voice tinged with the barest hint of wistfulness. Only Mun asks the obvious question, the one that plagues all our hearts, perhaps even Little Bat’s, though his stolid demeanor does not betray it, his baby face forbearing yet rosy.

  Mun lights a cigarette. Already he is beginning to ration them. Today he wears a T-shirt with a red tongue sticking out of an overly large mouth. How you gonna know it’s him, he says, gesturing to his own face as if to demonstrate what he means.

  Saran hands Uncle an orange. He accepts it, head bowed, his left hand placed respectfully under the crook of his right elbow. He begins to peel it, the rind coming away in one long continuous strip. I’ll know it’s him, says Uncle with confidence. There is the usual gleam in Uncle’s eyes when he talks of reuniting with his oldest friend in corporeal existence. He holds the peel in the air as if to demonstrate something about the nature of life. And he’ll know me better than I know myself, he says, tossing the peel on the fire. For a moment, the air fills with the scent of orange. We’ll know each other as we always know each other, he adds. In the way that true friends do. With our hearts. When Uncle smiles, I think of statues of the seated Buddha, His eyes heavy lidded with wisdom and nothingness. Anytime the smoke from Mun’s cigarette drifts toward Uncle, Little Bat shoots a giant hand in the air to wave it away.

  You Are Not Who You Believe Yourself to Be

  Eventually the fire burns down and we prepare for bed. The others sleep in two separate tents. On occasion Little Bat drags his sleeping bag out in the open under the blanket of stars, his snores the night music of a big man with the yak’s five-chambered heart. The first few nights of our journey Mun and I both sleep in the Machine, but mornings we rise more tired than when we lie down. The proximity to each other’s mind at day’s end is exhausting, the constant straining to discern which thoughts are mine, which his. Now Mun takes his sleeping bag and crawls under the car. In the morning he often smells of oil, but it is enough to keep our thoughts apart.

  Tonight before Mun shuts the car door, he pauses. He is wearing a headlamp, what Uncle likes to call his third eye. All around us the world is dark and strange. Then something unexpected arises. I can feel my brother extinguish the fire in his mind. Tentatively, like a miner intuiting his way along a dark vein deep in the earth, I feel my way into my brother’s thoughts.

  We shouldn’t be doing this, he thinks. We shouldn’t be out here looking for some poor kid to pile all our problems on. For a moment I rummage around in his inner life. Among his doubts I feel something I do not expect. A glimmer of guilt.

  Have courage, brother, I whisper out loud.

  Forget it, he barks, shaking his head, and slams the door shut, angry at himself for allowing this moment of intimacy between us.

  He’s right, of course. I can never know the anguish of being told you are not who you believe yourself to be. To be handed a photograph of an old man and told this is you in your last incarnation. That everything about who you are is already established. That you are not original.

  The sound of the car door slamming shut hangs in the air. I want to lift the icy sheet in the back of my mind and let all my doubts come rushing forth. To speak of my anguish with my twin who knows better than anyone what is lost when one renounces the body. I want to find out I am not alone in my loneliness, in my hunger to know the passions of the flesh. But the moment is gone. I do not know if it might ever come again.

  Follow the Trail of Notes

  Something is licking my face. The feeling soft and warm, amniotic, as if I am riding on a wave of good feeling that never crests. Though I do not want to, I open my eyes. Starlight, moonlight, blood-light, love. I am the sole being in the cosmos. The sound of my heart’s drumming the only sound in existence.

  In the sand, tiny hoofprints lead out into the indigo night, each print lined with silver. There is nothing else to do. I follow the prints through a world of tall grasses, rocky escarpments, trees festooned with prayer flags, small bottles of vodka strung on twine and draped in the boughs, the clear glass tinkling.

  Someone is singing. Two notes simultaneously reverberating as is the ancient way that comes down to us from a time when people learn to sing two notes at once—one to tell the story and the other to flesh it out. I stand and listen. One like ice moving down a mountain, the other like a dragonfly alighting on a blossom. Then I realize the one singing is me, the sky filled with stars big as seashells, the night a reef alive with colors.

  The hoofprints stop at the edge of a river. I kneel and wash my face and feet, the back of my head, my mouth and heart, the parts of me that err the most. All the while I hear it. What I am brought here to hear. Slow and rhythmic, building. The sound of the morin khuur, the horsehead fiddle, the most traditional of Mongolian instruments, the morin khuur with only two strings, a horse’s head carved just above the pegbox, its sounds low and mournful, nocturnal, and in among the morin khuur’s music I hear a second music, one I somehow recognize as something new to the world. I follow the trail of notes as they hang in the air, each one primitive but stirring, my blood beginning to course faster through the rivers of my body.

  I come to a tree. Moonlight slipping through its branches. Two figures lie in shadow. I walk right up to their coupling. The way a wild animal sometimes presents no fear and walks straight toward you to lick your palm. Both of them naked. The woman on top, her breasts swaying gently from side to side like ripeness itself, the man with his thumbs stroking the dark stars of her nipples.