Lamb (21 page)

“How?” I asked, that being pretty much what I wanted to know.

“I told her what I was doing,” said Joshua. “She stood perfectly still.”

“You just told her what you were going to do?”

“Yes.”

“She wasn’t afraid, so she didn’t resist. All fear comes from trying to see the future, Biff. If you know what is coming, you aren’t afraid.”

“That’s not true. I knew what was coming—namely that you were going to get stomped by the yak and that I’m not nearly as good at healing as you are—and I was afraid.”

“Oh, then I’m wrong. Sorry. She must just not like you.”

“That’s more like it,” I said, vindicated. Joshua sat on the floor across from me. Like me, he wasn’t permitted to eat anything, but we were allowed tea. “Hungry?”

“Yes, you?”

“Starving. How did you sleep last night, without your blanket, I mean?”

“It was cold, but I used the training and I was able to sleep.”

“I tried, but I shivered all night long. It’s not even winter yet, Josh. When the snow falls we’ll freeze to death without a blanket. I hate the cold.”

“You have to be the cold,” said Joshua.

“I liked you better before you got enlightened,” I said.

Now Gaspar started to oversee our training personally. He was there every second as we leapt from post to post, and he drilled us mercilessly through the complex hand and foot movements we practiced as part of our kung fu regimen. (I had a funny feeling that I’d seen the movements before as he taught them to us, then I remembered Joy doing her complex dances in Balthasar’s fortress. Had Gaspar taught the wizard, or vice versa?) As we sat in meditation, sometimes all through the night, he stood behind us with his bamboo rod and periodically struck us on the back of the head for no reason I could discern.

“Why’s he keep doing that? I didn’t do anything,” I complained to Joshua over tea.

“He’s not hitting you to punish you, he’s hitting you to keep you in the moment.”

“Well, I’m in the moment now, and at the moment I’d like to beat the crap out of him.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Oh, what? I’m supposed to want to
be
the crap I beat out of him?”

“Yes, Biff,” Joshua said somberly. “You must
be
the crap.” But he couldn’t keep a straight face and he started to snicker as he sipped his tea, finally spraying the hot liquid out his nostrils and collapsing into a fit of laughter. All of the other monks, who evidently had been listening in, started giggling as well. A couple of them rolled around on the floor holding their sides.

It’s very difficult to stay angry when a room full of bald guys in orange robes start giggling. Buddhism.

Gaspar made us wait two months before taking us on the special meditation pilgrimage, so it was well into winter before we made that monumental trek. Snow fell so deep on the mountainside that we literally had to tunnel our way out to the courtyard every morning for exercise. Before we were allowed to begin, Joshua and I had to shovel all of the snow out of the courtyard, which meant that some days it was well past noon before we were able to start drilling. Other days the wind whipped down out of the mountains so viciously that we couldn’t see more than a few inches past our faces, and Gaspar would devise exercises that we could practice inside.

Joshua and I were not given our blankets back, so I, for one, spent every night shivering myself to sleep. Although the high windows were shuttered and charcoal braziers were lit in the rooms that were occupied, there was never anything approaching physical comfort during the winter. To my relief, the other monks were not unaffected by the cold, and I noticed that the accepted posture for breakfast was to wrap your entire body around your steaming cup of tea, so not so much as a mote of precious heat might escape. Someone entering the dining hall, seeing us all balled up in our orange robes, might have thought he stumbled into a steaming patch of giant pumpkins. At least the others, including Joshua, seemed to find some relief from the chill during their meditations, having reached that state, I’m told, where they could, indeed, generate their own heat. I was still learning the discipline. Sometimes I considered climbing to the back of the temple where the cave became narrow and hundreds of fuzzy bats hibernated on the ceiling in a great seething mass of fur and sinew. The smell might have been horrid, but it would have been warm.

When the day finally came for us to take the pilgrimage, I was no closer to generating my own heat than I had been at the start, so I was relieved when Gaspar led five of us to a cabinet and issued yak-wool leggings and boots to each of us. “Life is suffering,” said Gaspar as he handed Joshua his leggings, “but it is more expedient to go through it with one’s legs intact.” We left just after dawn on a crystal clear morning after a night of brutal wind that had blown much of the snow off the base of the moun
tain. Gaspar led five of us down the mountain to the village. Sometimes we trod in the snow up to our waists, other times we hopped across the tops of exposed stones, suddenly making our training on the tops of the posts seem much more practical than I had ever thought possible. On the mountainside, a slip from one of the stones might have sent us plunging into a powder-filled ravine to suffocate under fifty feet of snow.

The villagers received us with great celebration, coming out of their stone and sod houses to fill our bowls with rice and root vegetables, ringing small brass bells and blowing the yak horn in our honor before quickly retreating back to their fires and slamming their doors against the cold. It was festive, but it was brief. Gaspar led us to the home of the toothless old woman who Joshua and I had met so long ago and we all bedded down in the straw of her small barn amid her goats and a pair of yaks. (Her yaks were much smaller than the one we kept at the monastery, more the size of normal cattle. I found out later that ours was the progeny of the wild yaks that lived in the high plateaus, while hers were from stock that had been domesticated for a thousand years.)

After the others had gone to sleep, I snuck into the old woman’s house in search of some food. It was a small stone house with two rooms. The front one was dimly lit by a single window covered with a tanned and stretched animal hide that transmitted the light of the full moon as a dull yellow glow. I could only make out shapes, not actual objects, but I felt my way around the room until I laid my hand on what had to be a bag of turnips. I dug one of the knobby vegetables from the bag, brushed the dirt from the surface with my palm, then sunk in my teeth and crunched away a mouthful of crisp, earthy bliss. I had never even cared for turnips up to that time, but I had just decided that I was going to sit there until I had transferred the entire contents of that bag to my stomach, when I heard a noise in the back room.

I stopped chewing and listened. Suddenly I could see someone standing in the doorway between the two rooms. I drew in my breath and held it. Then I heard the old woman’s voice, speaking Chinese with her peculiar accent: “To take the life of a human or one like a human. To take a thing that is not given. To claim to have superhuman powers.”

I was slow, but suddenly I realized that the old woman was reciting the rules for which a monk could be expelled from the monastery. As she
came into the dim light from the window she said, “To have intercourse with anyone, even down to an animal.” And at that second, I realized that the toothless old woman was completely naked. A mouthful of chewed turnip rolled out of my mouth and down the front of my robe. The old woman, close now, reached out, I thought to catch the mess, but instead she caught what was under my robe.

“Do you have superhuman powers?” the old woman said, pulling on my manhood, which, much to my amazement, nodded an answer.

I need to say here that it had been over two years since we had left Balthasar’s fortress, and another six months before that since the demon had come and killed all of the girls but Joy—thus curtailing my regular supply of sexual companions. I want to go on record that I had been steadfast in adhering to the rules of the monastery, allowing only those nocturnal emissions as were expelled during dreams (although I had gotten pretty good in directing my dreams in that direction, so all that mental discipline and meditation wasn’t completely useless). So, that said, I was in a weakened state of resistance when the old woman, leathery and toothless as she might have been, compelled me by threat and intimidation to share with her what the Chinese call the Forbidden Monkey Dance. Five times.

Imagine my chagrin when the man who would save the world found me in the morning with a twisted burl of Chinese crone-flesh orally affixed to my fleshy pagoda of expandable joy, even as I snored away in transcendent turnip-digesting oblivion.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” said Joshua, turning to the wall and throwing his robe over his head.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” I said, roused from my slumber by the disgusted exclamation of my friend.

“Ahhhhhhhhhh!” said the old woman, I think. (Her speech was generously obstructed, if I do say so myself.)

“Jeez, Biff,” Joshua stuttered. “You can’t…I mean…Lust is…Jeez, Biff!”

“What?” I said, like I didn’t know what.

“You’ve ruined sex for me for all time,” Joshua said. “Whenever I think of it, this picture will always come up in my mind.”

“So,” I said, pushing the old woman away and shooing her into the back room.

“So…” Joshua turned around and looked me in the eye, then grinned widely enough to threaten the integrity of his ears. “So thanks.”

I stood and bowed. “I am here only to serve,” I said, grinning back.

“Gaspar sent me to look for you. He’s ready to leave.”

“Okay, I’d better, you know, say good-bye.” I gestured toward the back room.

Joshua shuddered. “No offense,” he said to the old woman, who was out of sight in the other room. “I was just surprised.”

“Want a turnip?” I said, holding up one of the knobby treats.

Joshua turned and started out the door. “Jeez, Biff,” he was saying as he left.

I never thought I’d be happy to get back to the monastery, but after trudging through the snow for half the day, the dank stone walls and dark hallways were as welcoming as a warmly lit hearth. Half of the rice we had collected as alms was immediately boiled, then packed into bamboo cylinders about a hand wide and as long as a man’s leg, then half of the root vegetables
were stored away while the rest were packed into satchels along with some salt and more bamboo cylinders filled with cold tea. We had just enough time to chase the chill out of our limbs by the cook fires, then Gaspar had us take up the cylinders and the satchels and he led us out into the mountains. I had never noticed when the other monks left on the pilgrimage of secret meditation that they were carrying so much food. And with all this food, much more than we could eat in the four or five days we were gone, why had Joshua and I been training for this by fasting?

Traveling higher into the mountains was actually easier for a while, as the snow had been blown off the trail. It was when we came to the high plateaus where the yak grazed and the snow drifted that the going became difficult. We took turns at the head of the line, plowing a trail through the snow.

As we climbed, the air became so thin that even the highly conditioned monks had to stop frequently to catch their breaths. At the same time, the wind bit through our robes and leggings as if they weren’t there. That there was not enough air to breathe, yet the movement of the air would chill our bones, I suppose is ironic, yet I was having a hard time appreciating it even then.

I said, “Why couldn’t you just go to the rabbis and learn to be the Messiah like everyone else? Do you remember any snow in the story of Moses? No. Did the Lord appear to Moses in the form of a snow bank? I don’t think so. Did Elijah ascend to heaven on a chariot of ice? Nope. Did Daniel come forth unharmed from a blizzard? No. Our people are about fire, Joshua, not ice. I don’t remember any snow in all of the Torah. The Lord probably doesn’t even go to places where it snows. This is a huge mistake, we never should have come, we should go home as soon as this is over, and in conclusion, I can’t feel my feet.” I was out of breath and wheezing.

“Daniel didn’t come forth from the fire,” Joshua said calmly.

“Well, who can blame him, it was probably warm in there.”

“He came forth unharmed from the lion’s den,” said Josh.

“Here,” said Gaspar, stopping any further discussion. He put down his parcels and sat down.

“Where?” I said. We were under a low overhang, out of the wind, and mostly out of the snow, but it was hardly what you could call shelter. Still,
the other monks, including Joshua, shed their packs and sat, affecting the meditation posture and holding their hands in the mudra of all-giving compassion (which, strangely enough, is the same hand gesture that modern people use for “okay.” Makes you think).

“We can’t be here. There’s no here here,” I said.

“Exactly,” said Gaspar. “Contemplate that.”

So I sat.

Joshua and the others seemed impervious to the cold and as frost formed on my eyelashes and clothing, the light dusting of ice crystals that covered the ground and rocks around each of them began to melt, as if there was a flame burning inside of them. Whenever the wind died, I noticed steam rising off of Gaspar as his damp robe gave up its moisture to the chill air. When Joshua and I first learned to meditate, we had been taught to be hyperaware of everything around us, connected, but the state that my fellow monks were in now was one of trance, of separation, of exclusion. They had each constructed some sort of mental shelter in which they were happily sitting, while I, quite literally, was freezing to death.

“Joshua, I need a little help here,” I said, but my friend didn’t move a muscle. If it weren’t for the steady stream of his breath I would have thought him frozen himself. I tapped him on the shoulder, but received no response whatsoever. I tried to get the attention of each of the other four monks, but they too gave no reaction to my prodding. I even pushed Gaspar hard enough to knock him over, yet he stayed in the sitting position, looking like a statue of the Buddha that had tumbled from its pedestal. Still, as I touched each of my companions I could feel the heat coming off of him. Since it was obvious that I wasn’t going to learn how to reach this trance state in time to save my own life, my only alternative was to take advantage of theirs.

At first I arranged the monks in a large pile, trying to keep the elbows and knees out of the eyes and yarbles, out of respect and in the spirit of the infinitely compassionate Buddha and stuff. Although the warmth coming off them was impressive, I found that I could only keep one side of me warm at a time. Soon, by arranging my friends in a circle facing outward, and sitting in the middle, I was able to construct an envelope of comfort that kept the chill at bay. Ideally, I could have used a couple of
more monks to stretch over the top of my hut to block the wind, but as the Buddha said, life is suffering and all, so I suffered. After I heated some tea on Number Seven monk’s head and tucked one of the cylinders of rice under Gaspar’s arm until it was warm, I was able to enjoy a pleasant repast and dropped off to sleep with a full belly.

I awoke to what sounded like the entire Roman army trying to slurp the anchovies out of the Mediterranean Sea. When I opened my eyes I saw the source of the noise and nearly tumbled over backward trying to back away. A huge, furry creature, half again as tall as any man I had ever seen was trying to slurp the tea out of one of the bamboo cylinders, but the tea had frozen to slush and the creature looked as if he might suck the top of his head in if he continued. Yes, he looked sort of like a man, except his entire body was covered with a long white fur. His eyes were as large as a cow’s, with crystal blue irises and pinpoint pupils. Thick black eyelashes knitted together when he blinked. He had long black nails on his hands, which were similar to a man’s except twice the size, and the only clothing he wore at all were some sort of boots that looked to be made of yak skin. The impressive array of tackle swinging between the creature’s legs tipped me off to his maleness.

I looked around at the circle of monks to see if anyone had noticed that our supplies were being raided by a woolly beast, but they were all deeply entranced. The creature slurped again from the cylinder, then pounded on the side of it with his hand, as if to dislodge the contents, then looked at me as if asking for help. Whatever terror I felt melted away the second I looked into the creature’s eyes. There wasn’t the hint of aggression there, not a glint of violence or threat. I picked up the cylinder of tea that I had heated on Number Three’s head. It sloshed in my hand, indicating that it hadn’t frozen during my nap, so I held it out to the creature. He reached over Joshua’s head and took the cylinder, pulled the cork from the end, and drank greedily.

I took the moment to kick my friend in the kidney. “Josh, snap out of it. You need to see this.” I got no response, so I reached around and pinched my friend’s nostrils shut. To master meditation the student must first master his breath. The savior made a snorting sound and came out of his trance gasping and twisting in my grip. He was facing me when I finally let go.

“What?” Josh said.

I pointed behind him and Joshua turned around to witness the full glory of the big furry white guy. “Holy moly!”

Big Furry jumped back cradling his tea like a threatened infant and made some vocalization which wasn’t quite language. (But if it had been, it would probably have translated as “Holy Moly,” as well.)

It was nice to see Joshua’s masterful control slip to reveal a vulnerable underbelly of confusion. “What…I mean who…I mean, what is that?”

“Not a Jew,” I said helpfully, pointing to about a yard of foreskin.

“Well, I can see it’s not a Jew, but that doesn’t narrow it down much, does it?”

Strangely, I seemed to be enjoying this much more than my two semi-terrified cohorts. “Well, do you remember when Gaspar gave us the rules of the monastery, and we wondered about the one that said we were not to kill a human or someone like a human?”

“Yes?”

“Well, he’s someone like a human, I guess.”

“Okay.” Joshua climbed to his feet and looked at Big Furry. Big Furry straightened up and looked at Joshua, tilting his head from side to side.

Joshua smiled.

Big Furry smiled back. Black lips, really long sharp canines.

“Big teeth,” I said. “Very big teeth.”

Joshua held his hand out to the creature. The creature reached out to Joshua and ever so gently took the Messiah’s smaller hand in his great paw…and wrenched Joshua off his feet, catching him in a hug and squeezing him so hard that his beatific eyes started to bug out.

“Help,” squeaked Joshua.

The creature licked the top of Joshua’s head with a long blue tongue.

“He likes you,” I said.

“He’s tasting me,” Joshua said.

I thought of how my friend had fearlessly yanked the tail of the demon Catch, of how he had faced so many dangers with total calm. I thought of the times he had saved me, both from outside dangers and from myself, and I thought of the kindness in his eyes that ran deeper than sea, and I said:

“Naw, he likes you.” I thought I’d try another language to see if the
creature might better comprehend my meaning: “You like Joshua, don’t you? Yes you do. Yes you do. He wuvs his widdle Joshua. Yes he does.” Baby talk is the universal language. The words are different, but the meaning and sound is the same.

The creature nuzzled Joshua up under its chin, then licked his head again, this time leaving a steaming trail of green-tea-stained saliva behind on my friend’s scalp. “Yuck,” said Joshua. “What is this thing?”

“It’s a yeti,” said Gaspar from behind me, obviously having been roused from his trance. “An abominable snowman.”

“This is what happens when you fuck a sheep!?” I exclaimed.

“Not an
abomination
,” Josh said, “
abominable
.” The yeti licked him on the cheek. Joshua tried to push away. To Gaspar he said, “Am I in danger?”

Gaspar shrugged. “Does a dog have a Buddha nature?”

“Please, Gaspar,” Joshua said. “This is a question of practical application, not spiritual growth.” The yeti sighed and licked Josh’s cheek again. I guessed that the creature must have a tongue as rough as a cat’s, as Joshua’s cheek was going pink with abrasion.

“Turn the other cheek, Josh,” I said. “Let him wear the other one out.”

“I’m going to remember this,” Joshua said. “Gaspar, will he harm me?”

“I don’t know. No one has ever gotten that close to him before. Usually he comes while we are in trance and disappears with the food. We are lucky to even get a glimpse of him.”

“Put me down, please,” said Josh to the creature. “Please put me down.”

The yeti set Joshua back on his feet on the ground. By this time the other monks were coming out of their trances. Number Seventeen squealed like a frying squirrel when he saw the yeti so close. The yeti crouched and bared his teeth.

“Stop that!” barked Joshua to Seventeen. “You’re scaring him.”

“Give him some rice,” said Gaspar.

I took the cylinder I had warmed and handed it to the yeti. He popped off the top and began scooping out rice with a long finger, licking the grains off his fingers like they were termites about to make their
escape. Meanwhile Joshua backed away from the yeti so that he stood beside Gaspar.

“This is why you come here? Why after alms you carry so much food up the mountain?”

Gaspar nodded. “He’s the last of his kind. He has no one to help him gather food. No one to talk to.”

“But what is he? What is a yeti?”

“We like to think of him as a gift. He is a vision of one of the many lives a man might live before he reaches nirvana. We believe he is as close to a perfect being as can be achieved on this plane of existence.”

“How do you know he is the only one?”

“He told me.”

“He talks?”

“No, he sings. Wait.”

As we watched the yeti eat, each of the monks came forward and put his cylinders of food and tea in front of the creature. The yeti looked up from his eating only occasionally, as if his whole universe resided in that bamboo pipe full of rice, yet I could tell that behind those ice-blue eyes the creature was counting, figuring, rationing the supplies we had brought.

“Where does he live?” I asked Gaspar.

“We don’t know. A cave somewhere, I suppose. He has never taken us there, and we don’t look for it.”

Once all the food was put before the yeti, Gaspar signaled to the other monks and they started backing out from under the overhang into the snow, bowing to the yeti as they went. “It is time for us to go,” Gaspar said. “He doesn’t want our company.”

Joshua and I followed our fellow monks back into the snow, following a path they were blazing back the way we had come. The yeti watched us leave, and every time I looked back he was still watching, until we were far enough away that he became little more than an outline against the white of the mountain. When at last we climbed out of the valley, and even the great sheltering overhang was out of sight, we heard the yeti’s song. Nothing, not even the blowing of the ram’s horn back home, not the war cries of bandits, not the singing of mourners, nothing I had ever heard had reached inside of me the way the yeti’s song did. It was a high wailing, but with stops and
pulses like the muted sound of a heart beating, and it carried all through the valley. The yeti held his keening notes far longer than any human breath could sustain. The effect was as if someone was emptying a huge cask of sadness down my throat until I thought I’d collapse or explode with the grief. It was the sound of a thousand hungry children crying, ten thousand widows tearing their hair over their husbands’ graves, a chorus of angels singing the last dirge on the day of God’s death. I covered my ears and fell to my knees in the snow. I looked at Joshua and tears were streaming down his cheeks. The other monks were hunched over as if shielding themselves from a hailstorm. Gaspar cringed as he looked at us, and I could see then that he was, indeed, a very old man. Not as old as Balthasar, perhaps, but the face of suffering was upon him.