Falling
by Jim Stone
This story is about a man who became enlightened by learning the art of falling. He was born a day’s walk into the hills from Manapong, the son of the village carpenter. Small pox decimated the village when he was twelve. He lit the five pyres on which his mother, his father, and his three sisters lay. Sullen and trembling, he went to live with his mother’s brother, a one-eyed widower who owned the village’s only store. Each day the uncle squatted in his shack, the boy beside him, selling salt, tobacco, oil, spices, and colored cloth. He died when the boy was sixteen, leaving him the store, a house made of stone in the village’s center, and twelve acres of terraced land farmed by tenants.
The boy devoted himself to increasing his inheritance. He hoarded grain from his land. When the monsoon didn’t come, he sold it at high prices to starving neighbors whose crops had failed. He loaned money at interest to penniless farmers, seizing their land when they could not repay him. By the age of thirty-six he owned much of the good land around the village. He moved to Manapong, bought a warehouse and sold his grain in the bazaar. Now he was rich but he did not marry, thinking only of business. He feared that thieves would raid his warehouse, that his crops would die, that he would grow old. At night he cried out in his sleep, dreaming the world was on fire.
At the beginning of the monsoon season, the rich man returned to his village to supervise the barley planting. He sent his servant to the bazaar to hire porters, cautioning him to offer only the lowest price. Next morning the four barefoot porters shouldered the poles of his sedan chair and splashed across the shallow river on the road leading to the hills. At the outskirts of Manapong they passed a man limping along beside the road. He was wrapped in a clean white cloth; he was very old. He strained to quicken his pace.
“Sir” he called up, panting. “I go to your village. My sister is dying. Please sir, let me ride with you. I’m too frail to be a burden.”
For a moment the rich man thought he would tell the porters to stop. Then he thought: “He might have a disease!” He clicked his tongue and the porters began to run. The old man raised his arms in the air and the cloth fell away, exposing his withered body.
“Fool!” he cried. “Will you not lose everything, as I have?”
The road narrowed into a trail that wound like a mottled serpent up into the hills. Earth turned to stone with steps hewed into it. Early in the afternoon they came to a plateau from which they could see beneath them the entire valley from which they had climbed. Here the path passed an extraordinary natural phenomenon, a hole in the ground ten feet wide at the mouth, that was thought to be bottomless. The people of nearby villages had thrown refuse and boulders from cleared land into it for generations, yet it never filled up. Also, they buried the bodies of dead saints and holymen in it, amid noisy ceremonies. Some said it led to another world.
The porters put the chair down next to the hole and surrounded the rich man. They would not carry him further unless he paid them more money, they said. They banged on the side of the chair to make sure he understood. The rich man lost his temper entirely. He shouted that he could have hired better porters at a quarter of the price. If they did not go on at once he would report them to the police at the next village. In fact he would report them no matter what they did. When they did not move, he stood up in the chair and began flailing at them with his stick.
The porters stopped routinely at this place in order to coerce more money from their customers, but this time they knew they were being cheated. They were exhausted and drunk, for they had been drinking whisky from a water pouch as they walked. Stung by the flailing stick, they picked up the sedan chair and dumped him into the abyss.
The rich man howled as he fell. His stomach rose in his chest and he clawed at the walls racing upward around him. The opening shrank to a prick of light above him. His mouth opened as if he were drowning and his eyes rolled up into his head. He became insensible to what was happening to him. The air through which he was falling became warmer. His body began to relax. Slowly he curled into a ball and fell asleep, falling through the darkness.
He awoke blinking, with light in his eyes. He was falling through a vast cavern with luminous walls funneling outward in the distance. As he watched he saw several holes in the walls of the cavern speeding upward.
“Perhaps every world in the universe has an abyss” the rich man thought, “and they all meet here.”
He was floating in the midst of a sea of falling objects, which stretched all around him to the walls of the cavern far away. He saw boulders, clumps of earth, chunks of wood, objects of all shapes and sizes. He looked down. Several hundred feet below him an impenetrable layer of white cloud appeared to be descending as fast as he was. Suddenly he realized the cavern’s floor might be just beneath the cloud, seconds away, and he braced himself, terrified. Then he laughed aloud.
"How foolish!’ he said. “I’m lucky to be alive this long.”
He was amazed to find himself hungry. He took a deep breath and stretched. His body began to float upwards through the sea of falling objects. He began experimenting, moving in different ways. If he curled in a ball, he found he fell faster than the objects around him. If he stretched out his arms and his legs, he rose. Steering was a matter of leaning in the direction he wanted to go.
The rich man flew about the sea of falling objects looking for food. Finally he saw something green beneath him. He spiraled down and plucked a cabbage out of the air. He ate it as he fell. A saw a leather pouch falling a distance above him. Spreading his arms and legs, he rose until he caught its strap in his hand. Inside were worn carpenter’s tools and a smaller pouch full of nails. He tied the strap to his wrist. Looking down he saw a tangled length of greasy rope, rising to meet him. As he began to untangle the rope, he had an idea and he started to laugh.
“Why not?” he said aloud.
Coiling the rope around his waist, he flew off, singing to himself. He collected chunks of wood and boards which he tied together. Then he opened the carpenter’s pouch and set to work. He handled the tools with pleasure, bracing the boards against his legs as he hammered in the nails. He worked until he had built a small house. Finally he fixed long strips of canvas and cloth to the roof so that the house would fall upright. Exhausted, he tied himself to the floor and slept.
Finding himself still alive when he woke, the rich man flew about in search of more food. Later he found cracked glass for the windows of his house and a worn carpet that he nailed to the floor. He could no longer see the walls of the cavern, no matter how far he flew. ‘The walls must funnel outward,’ he thought. Also, there began to be periods of darkness, during which he slept.
One day, as returned from his morning’s foraging, he found rocks and clumps of earth clinging to the bottom of the house. Every day the landscape extended further, until it stretched for miles in all directions. Plants sprouted from the earth and streams flowed among the rocks.
“What gravity draws this world together?” he wondered. “Perhaps it is desire” he thought. “I’m making a new world in which to live.” When the landscape stretched in every direction as far as he could see, the rich man could no longer fly. He wobbled about the land on uncertain legs.
“Amazing!” he exclaimed. “A universe falling through empty space, liable to be smashed to bits any moment, held together only by desire. Yet real as anything there is, real and unreal both.” For the first time he slept on the floor of his house without tying himself down.
He awoke in an abandoned shack just outside his village, the pouch of tools pillowing his head. Outside it was teeming rain. He tramped through the mud to the center of the village, stood in the street before his house, and laughed like a lunatic. Then he went to the village elders and gave them everything he owned, except the leather pouch and the clothes on his back.
“What will you do?” the elders asked him.
“I will be the carpenter” the poor man said.
He built a shed out of scrap lumber and began to take jobs. Within a year he married a girl from a neighboring village. They had seven children, three of whom died as infants. As the years passed, people came to think of him simply as the carpenter, as ordinary a man as they were. It was only when he died, a withered old man, that they came to feel something about him called for commemoration. A few old people remembered that he had once been rich and given all his land to the village. Everybody knew he had always been an uncommonly kindly man. There had been a depth to his laughter, some said, that expressed an understanding of things of which he never spoke.
The elders declared a holiday. The people dressed in their finest clothes. Blowing flutes and banging drums, they carried the carpenter down the mountain to the grassy plateau and threw him in the abyss.
