Book of Numbers: A Novel (55 page)

The Master Classman disapproved, or so we thought because he sent an unsui to collect us, and though we were not supposed to think or refrain from thinking, this was what we thought, let it pass. He mentioned nothing about our informal sesshin, however.

He just reminded us of the schedule for the impending tech retreat. The Valley visiting the valley.

Then he handed us a parcel. Our luck has not been strong with parcels.

It was an SFO dutyfree plasticbag containing a Canada Post box stuck with customs stickers and addressed to Kor at the Tetplex, which contained a permit to transfer human cremains from the ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux du Québec, taped around a canister containing Moe, or what was left of him.

[Fuck—but this was legit?]

Every field for name in the documentation had been filled that way, just Moe.

[Are ashes even matchable for DNA?]

The lid was sealed. Glued.

[Kor was using Classman to make his peace with you or what?]

We shook it. There were contents.

[Or did Classman get this together on his own just to fuck with you?]

He who insists on having the end before the beginning. Vagary might be requisite to life.

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[You’re hanging around a monk monastery in rural Japan with your burnt friend in a thermos?]

Sitting lotused for the welcome meal with staff from Gopal, Dell, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Verizon, Sprint. Threading rice on hairs. Not boring. Unbearable.

[Or just with what might be your burnt friend in a thermos?]

This was living Buddhism, with the bone confetti of a Hindu saint just at our side in a container that resembled a water tumbler. Everyone was cur about why we got our own special water tumbler.

Moe had hated Buddhism, incidentally. He would always remark, if any Tetrateer mentioned meditating or practicing yoga, that they had the wrong tradition. It was Hinduism, not Buddhism, which was relevant. The contemporary was about multiplicity, not the unicity of void. The void was the easiest thing, or nonthing, to commodify. Or commoditize. Tetrate which term is currently popular. Do not.

All around us the talk was of popping, of bursting, who was going out of business, who had already gone. The atmosphere was that everyone present would survive, had been karmically intended to survive. What might once have been the will of the JudeoChristian God had become sexier, wiser, as like a destiny or fate. But our face must have disagreed with them, because we were asked, by the Gopal people, whether we felt our being here was preordained, and we answered no, and then the Gopal people asked how else to explain how we got here, and we answered we flew United.

Point is, that meal made it clear to us that 1.0, the first online generation, was over. The stocks had dissolved, if the businesses themselves
were frauds shares of them were doubly fraudulent, hallucinations of hallucinations. Now that enlightenment had arrived in the form of the NASDAQ Composite in spiral, gratitude was called for, they were calling for a reevaluation of priorities. Young companies, they said, young execs as like us, had to respect their elders, learn what the market was teaching. We had to put off going public, stay lean, buckle down, attain profitability through ubiquity. If we did that, they said, we might just be the ones inheriting the lineage, becoming the online manifestation of IBM, the second bodhisattva emanation of Xerox.

Haiku, only haiku, got us through dessert, because now the kakuchi was serving dessert, mochi and red bean tarts.

The talk turned to antitrust law and the Microsoft precedent. Citigroup being fined for misleading investors.

The execs were talking Gautama Buddha and the differences between renunciation and moderation but as like they related to diet and exercise, the middle of the Middle Way. The affinities between Buddhism and capitalism. How compatible they were, how adaptable. If mindbody was a product, meditation was an unparalleled interface. Access was intuitive, direct. Divestment of material possessions would become simpler than ever online, even temporary, reversible, everything we owned would live on “the cloud.” “Aesthetic ecology,” “cultural conservation.” But put them and “the cloud” in quotes.

In the future we would have total storage, all of us would, our media libraries would dematerialize and just float above us, books would no longer sit on the shelves reminding us that we had not read them, music and TV and film formats would no longer clutter the den reminding us
of all we had not yet listened to or watched. Also reducing domestic mess, the many devices on which we might ever decide to read or listen or watch would become integrated, merged, fewer.

We would not be bound to our possessions, nor would we ever be forced to produce them ourselves. Between the time we are recounting and now, everyone at that meal, drinking gunpowder tea but also café au lait, would go on to outsource and offshore their Buddhisms. Even us, betraying. Our Tetheld and Tetbook processors are made in Dalian, Guangzhou, the batteries and casings in Thailand, Malaysia. Our design sensibility was to buy design sensibility off Nokia, which we did by buying Nokia. But that was later.

Some tech obsolesces, some has been engineered to obsolesce, all is basically nonrecyclable. Moe was manic about that recursion, the tech afterlife, the device eschatology. When products die, they are exported back to where they were made, to the nativity of the East, to India. This being the true cosmic cycle, the pdas and comps and printers illegal to dump in the West instead leaching their mercury, lead, cadmium, beryllium, barium, into the foreign groundwaters, and rewarding the same populations that manufactured them with silicosis and neurotoxicity, just enough to numb against irony. Meantime corporate atrocities are offset by quarterly donations. 10% of gross to related causes.

[Atrocities aside, disingenuousness too, aren’t we way offtopic?]

Moe. His hatreds, his dichotomies. To him, hardware was Hindu, each machine an integrated system, software was Buddhist, repetitive series of flawed instructions. The net was Hindu, the underlying protocol, the web was Buddhist, undesigned empty sites, framed nothingness with noodly chanting.

[You agreed with him?]

We had to agree. Except about JudeoChristianity, which Moe loved, but in that same exoticism way. The way you love cancer patients, not relations or friends. He felt for the irony, the cynicism, the turning the other cheek while turning a buck, the imperative to monetize, capitalize, whether a material or intangible asset, the mania for advantaging, for
leveraging one into the other. The regard for worth, exchange value. Valuta, the catallactics.

Transactions, he had a sweet tooth for transactions.

We are trying to remember the last time we met.

Not at the Seed Factory. He would always order the candied cashews, which though they are definitively seeds

Not in the lot. Harassing the Trapezzi Sisters into giving his van a spongebath.

Maybe we just passed in a hall, or maybe only he was passing but

[Just hold up. You mentioned cancer?]

There were tumors among the monks, there had been tumors. Environmental radiation from the neighboring plant. We did not mention. You did.

[I didn’t mean the monks. Can we talk about it?]

We would prefer to talk about every other omission, as like your own. The porn and the pill consumption rivaling ours, by prescription at least. Your career before this and after. We would prefer to talk about your wife.

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[Prompt?]

Please.

[“… The atmosphere was that everyone present would survive, had been karmically intended to survive. What might once have been the will … they said, we might just be the ones inheriting the lineage, becoming the online manifestation.…”]

The meal. After the meal the monks clattered the trays, and the jikijitsu gonged for a calligraphy workshop, but we grabbed the putative ashes of Moe, set out on our regular kinhin along the river.

The canister, even the canister had a taint at bottom, Made in China. We stuck it down in the pouch of our rakusu.

The route of our kinhin was always pine-tree-slicing-serpent-belly-river, the bridge to the cemetery to the hill between the mountains to the south, the hyperboloid coolingtowers of the nuclearplant and the evacuation drill beach to the north, out to the flies-aggravating-mouth-tidalpool, and then around again, returning. But this time we were interrupted. The Master Classman. He was the gate itself.

He asked to accompany us, which was to accompany the current. He asked if the people from, he mentioned an acronym, DBA, had mentioned his proposal. Wind shattered everything into acronyms. The current switched. He talked about DCents, talked siting, the top six concerns, top four concerns, energy costs, cooling. He was familiar with our specs. We sped up and put trees between us. Transmissions lost efficacy with spatial gain. Information over distance weakened as like a voice, an echo. All that buffered us was green.

He caught up on the hilltop, laid out his proposal as like the vista.
There were realestate opportunities, he said, also religious preservation opportunities. There was a chance to ensure a bold future for the kakuchi, by investing in the surrounding grounds. Someone was going to do it, and a monk was a someone, if he had to be. If Tetration purchased certain lots from the Ishikawa Bureau of Land Development, and DCentered them, contracting with TBA, or TBD, or breeze, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry would surely accelerate efforts to convert the nuclearplant to geothermals. Electricity would be green, cheap, and just below us, a mangly contamination of oxidized pumps and pipes, a single siren spinning mute light. The whole peninsula would benefit, Kanazawa especially. The Master Classman too, who would receive a fee for the brokerage.

He told us to meditate on it. For serious he told us. We were still atop the hill but facing the mountains. Then he was gone, smacks of rain and righteous sandals.

The massive trees were dripping, had us missing Palo Alto. A scurry through the branches had us recalling that primates were the only mammals whose behavior did not predict tsunamis. Only mammals besides humans. Fact, no fact ever contradicted a tree.

We made our way down to the beach. The descent steepened us into feeling as like we could leap and begin again, we could just jump and land, splash stars or sand. Startover. The tideline was vast with trash, wet reactor core trash, washing in and out and in. But just beneath us on the slope and tangled in shrub was a runningshoe, a neon and 10 other types of fading yellow runningshoe, gel midsole/heel, meshed vamps crisscrossed with kelp and logo bolts, all phylon pronating lacelessness. This is immaterial. It was just us out in the rain above a single runningshoe. A moment. Not kensho, not satori, this was just being conscious, aware. This was our maturity. Our disabuse. A discarded runningshoe out in the midst of nature was our nature. We held a culm of bamboo, reached for the shoe, struggled to unshrub it and slid, but it was as like a misty vine binding all the culms hauled us up and steady again. We reached into our rakusu for the cylinder, fitted it down into the shoe and under the tongue and then, aiming for the rainy waves, we chucked it, and whether it even made the waves is immaterial.

We had the oshō drive us to the station, took a train for Kanazawa.
The Ishikawa Bureau of Land Development informed us that all Shinto shrines were owned by the prefectural government. Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist temples and monasteries were the property of their respective sects, all except the kakuchi we were cur about. In 1992, Sōtōshu Shumucho, the official body of the sect, had deaccessioned the kakuchi, and put it up for auction, citing reservations about its proximity to the new nuclear powerplant in Shika. It was purchased by a company of gaijin, Americant Unholding, S.H., which traded on its history and shukyo hojin, religious nonprofit, status but staffed it with unaccredited monks and even laypeople and operated it as like a tourist enterprise, eliciting complaints from Sōtō roshi in Fukui and Hyōgo. But the Sōtōshu Shumucho practiced detachment, the prefecture refused to get involved. Americant Unholding, S.H., was registered in Tokyo. We took a train to Tokyo.

The current owner was the half Japanese, half Sacramento exwife of the Master Classman, a cosmetic surgery nurse with her own taxes in arrears. She had won the kakuchi in the divorce in 96, kept the Master Classman as like director out of mawkishness and torpor, but given how paltry and sporadic the transfers had become was now convinced he was skimming. We called Gutshteyn collect from her pebble garden, got Carbon or Keiner to recommend a local lawyer to negotiate purchase and structure the deal. We installed the oshō and shike in cocharge with the sole stipulation that they let the Master Classman stay on as like an unsui. Basically, the Master would become the student, but he refused and so had to be escorted off the premises. Immaterial. After our death kakuchi ownership will revert to its board in perpetuity, immaterial. We emailed Kor who rented a plane for us and already in midair we decided we would purchase one too, a better one, and an airport. You are still wondering about the source of the ashes. Whether Classman or Kor. But we are too. Fall 2000.

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Buddhist calendars are lunisolar and delay their approach to our secular time, adding extra months only every approx 20 years. Hindu calendars are lunisolar too but keep up with ours in realtime, adding days to weeks as like necessary, adding weeks to months as like necessary, each with their own unbooley appellative. The fundamental unit of the Hindu clock is the breath. In Buddhism it is the thought, or nonthought, because time is actualized only in its absence.