Free Beautiful Ghosts by Eliot Pattison

“I can find no balance in what happened today,” he said. “Something crushed Surya’s deity.”
    Shan remembered the little statue Atso had with him. The butterfly walked to the edge of the rock and appeared to be staring at the ruins below.
    Gendun seemed to follow the gaze of the butterfly. “It is one of the oldest temples in all of Tibet. Before it was built demons roamed freely across the earth. People forget that. People forget the important things.”
    “I thought it was known for its artists.”
    “What is the work of artists? To invoke deities. It takes a deity to fight a demon. It is how our artists are made.”
    Shan gazed at the ruins. It was the way of most of his conversations with the lama, who used short sentences to punctuate long silences, which with Gendun were always more important than words. “You mean if Surya killed something it was a demon.”
    Gendun looked back at the butterfly, and when at last he spoke it was toward the fragile little creature. “The demon was in the killing,” he said. “A killing is the same act, on the killer and the killed. It just affects them in different ways.”
    “Did you always know about Zhoka, Rinpoche?” Shan asked.
    “No,” Gendun admitted, offering a small nod to Shan, as if conceding a point. For decades the monks of Yerpa had been wary of venturing more than a mile from their hermitage. “Once there were many gompas in Lhadrung, now many ruins. We did not know how different Zhoka was from the other ruins. It had been kept secret from the rest of the world, for good reason. But Surya found an old book in a cave high in the mountains, wrapped in fur as if it were hibernating. He was so excited. It explained the things that had happened here.” He bent low to the butterfly. “Zhoka made the earth quake,” he whispered to the fragile creature.
    Shan resisted the urge to stare at the old lama, to study his face. Gendun had little trust in words, thought they as often detracted from the truth as led to it. He would never try to reduce to words the complete essence of a thought, a person, a place, because words were incapable of expressing the ultimate truth. But he had begun to express something Shan had not understood before, that the hermits had not come to Zhoka simply because it was a convenient place to reach the hill people, or even because it was a ruined gompa.
    Gendun extended his finger in front of the rock and the butterfly climbed onto it. “The child Dawa threw your bag over the edge,” the lama said with a sigh. “I am sorry about your throwing sticks. Your father’s sticks.”
    “I strive not to be attached to physical possessions,” Shan said in a tight voice.
    Gendun offered a sad smile. “They weren’t physical to you. They were the spark of your father, and grandfather, and fathers before them. They raised the spirits of your ancestors within you.”
    For a moment something tightened around Shan’s heart. More than once Shan had explained to Gendun and Lokesh how sometimes, using the old lacquered yarrow sticks, he could sense the presence of his father, even smell the ginger he had often carried in his pocket. “Just some old sticks,” Shan said in a weak voice.
    Gendun whispered to the butterfly and it flew away toward Zhoka, as if on an errand. They watched until it disappeared in the distance, then Shan stood and offered a hand to Gendun. “A sky machine,” the lama said as he rose. “One of those sky machines seized him.” His hand rose and his fingers extended then slowly closed as if reaching for something invisible to the rest of them. “Last spring, in the north, I spoke to a shepherd woman who had lost her husband that way. She went out every day and sat on a hill with her beads, searching the sky because she said he could return out of a cloud at any time.” Shan stared at the lama, for a moment paralyzed by what he saw. A tear rolled down Gendun’s cheek. “Surya.” He said the name like a