“So you see,” the abbot said, “he is the only one of his kind. Alone.”
You didn’t have to understand the yeti’s language, if he had one, to know that Gaspar was right.
“No he’s not,” said Joshua. “I’m going to him.”
Gaspar took Joshua’s arm to stop him. “Everything is as it should be.”
“No,” said Joshua. “It is not.”
Gaspar pulled his hand back as if he had plunged it into a flame—a strange reaction, as I had actually seen the monk put his hand in flame with less reaction as part of the kung fu regimen.
“Let him be,” I said to Gaspar, not sure at the time why I was doing it.
Joshua headed back into the valley by himself, having not said another word to us.
“He’ll be back when it’s time,” I said.
“What do you know?” snapped Gaspar in a distinctly unenlightened way. “You’ll be working off your karma for a thousand years as a dung beetle just to evolve to the point of being dense.”
I didn’t say anything. I simply bowed, then turned and followed my brother monks back to the monastery.
It was a week before Joshua returned to us, and it was another day before he and I actually had time to speak. We were in the dining hall, and Joshua had eaten his own rice as well as mine. In the meantime, I had applied a lot of thought to the plight of the abominable snowman and, more important, to his origins.
“Do you think there were a lot of them, Josh?”
“Yes. Never as many as there are men, but there were many more.”
“What happened to them?”
“I’m not sure. When the yeti sings I see pictures in my head. I saw that men came to these mountains and killed the yeti. They had no instinct to fight. Most just stood in place and watched as they were slaughtered. Perplexed by man’s evil. Others ran higher and higher into the mountains. I think that this one had a mate and a family. They starved or died of some slow sickness. I can’t tell.”
“Is he a man?”
“I don’t think he is a man,” said Joshua.
“Is he an animal?”
“No, I don’t think he’s an animal either. He knows who he is. He knows he is the only one.”
“I think I know what he is.”
Joshua regarded me over the rim of his bowl. “Well?”
“Well, do you remember the monkey feet Balthasar bought from the old woman in Antioch, how they looked like little human feet?”
“Yes.”
“And you have to admit that the yeti looks very much like a man. More like a man than he does any other creature, right? Well, what if he is a creature who is becoming a man? What if he isn’t really the last of his kind, but the first of ours? What made me think of it was how Gaspar talks about how we work off our karma in different incarnations, as different creatures. As we learn more in each lifetime we may become a higher creature as we go. Well, maybe creatures do that too. Maybe as the yeti needs to live where it is warmer he loses his fur. Or as the monkeys need to, I don’t know, run cattle and sheep, they become bigger. Not all at once, but through many incarnations. Maybe creatures evolve the way Gaspar believes the soul evolves. What do you think?”
Joshua stroked his chin for a moment and stared at me as if he was deep in thought, while at the same time I thought he might burst out laughing any second. I’d spent a whole week thinking about this. This theory had vexed me through all of my training, all of my meditations since we’d made the pilgrimage to the yeti’s valley. I wanted some sort of acknowledgment from Joshua for my effort, if nothing else.
“Biff,” he said, “that may be the dumbest idea you’ve ever had.”
“So you don’t think it’s possible?”
“Why would the Lord create a creature only to have it die out? Why would the Lord allow that?” Joshua said.
“What about the flood? All but Noah and his family were killed.”
“But that was because people had become wicked. The yeti isn’t wicked. If anything, his kind have died out because they have no capacity for wickedness.”
“So, you’re the Son of God, you explain it to me.”
“It is God’s will,” said Joshua, “that the yeti disappear.”
“Because they had no trace of wickedness?” I said sarcastically. “If the yeti isn’t a man, then he’s not a sinner either. He’s innocent.”
Joshua nodded, staring into his now-empty bowl. “Yes. He’s innocent.” He stood and bowed to me, which was something he almost never did unless we were training. “I’m tired now, Biff. I have to sleep and pray.”
“Sorry, Josh, I didn’t mean to make you sad. I thought it was an interesting theory.”
He smiled weakly at me, then bowed his head and shuffled off to his cell.
Over the next few years Joshua spent at least a week out of every month in the mountains with the yeti, going up not only with every group after alms, but often going up into the mountains by himself for days or, in the summer, weeks at a time. He never talked about what he did while in the mountains, except, he told me, that the yeti had taken him to the cave where he lived and had shown him the bones of his people. My friend had found something with the yeti, and although I didn’t have the courage to ask him, I suspect the bond he shared with the snowman was the knowledge that they were both unique creatures, nothing like either of them walked the face of the earth, and regardless of the connection each might feel with God and the universe, at that time, in that place, but for each other, they were utterly alone.
Gaspar didn’t forbid Joshua’s pilgrimages, and indeed, he went out of his way to act as if he didn’t notice when Twenty-Two Monk was gone, yet I could tell there was some unease in the abbot whenever Joshua was away.
We both continued to drill on the posts, and after two years of leaping and balancing, dancing and the use of weapons were added to our routine. Joshua refused to take up any of the weapons; in fact, he refused to practice any art that would bring harm to another being. He wouldn’t even mimic the action of fighting with swords and spears with a bamboo substitute. At first Gaspar bristled at Joshua’s refusal, and threatened to banish him from the monastery, but when I took the abbot aside and told him the story of the archer Joshua had blinded on the way to Balthasar’s fortress, the abbot relented. He and two of the older monks who had been soldiers devised for Joshua a regimen of weaponless fighting that involved no offense or striking at all, but instead channeled the energy of an attacker away from oneself. Since the new art was practiced only by Joshua (and sometimes myself), the monks called it
Jew-dô,
meaning
the way of the Jew
.
In addition to learning kung fu and Jew-dô, Gaspar set us to learning to speak and write Sanskrit. Most of the holy books of Buddhism had been written in that language and had yet to be translated into Chinese, which Joshua and I had become fluent in.
“This is the language of my boyhood,” Gaspar said before beginning our lessons. “You need to know this to learn the words of Gautama Buddha, but you will also need this language when you follow your dharma to your next destination.”
Joshua and I looked at each other. It had been a long time since we had talked about leaving the monastery and the mention of it put us on edge. Routine feeds the illusion of safety, and if nothing else, there was routine at the monastery.
“When will we leave, master?” I asked.
“When it is time,” said Gaspar.
“And how will we know it is time to leave?”
“When the time for staying has come to an end.”
“And we will know this because you will finally give us a straight and concrete answer to a question instead of being obtuse and spooky?” I asked.
“Does the unhatched tadpole know the universe of the full-grown frog?”
“Evidently not,” Joshua said.
“Correct,” said the master. “Meditate upon it.”
As Joshua and I entered the temple to begin our meditation I said, “When the time comes, and we know that the time has come for us to leave, I am going to lump up his shiny little head with a fighting staff.”
“Meditate upon it,” said Josh.
“I mean it. He’s going to be sorry he taught me how to fight,” I said.
“I’m sure of it. I’m sorry already.”
“You know, he doesn’t have to be the only one bopped in the noggin when noggin-boppin’ time rolls around,” I said.
Joshua looked at me as if I’d just awakened him from a nap. “All the time we spend meditating, what are you really doing, Biff?”
“I’m meditating—sometimes—listening to the sound of the universe and stuff.”
“But mostly you’re just sitting there.”
“I’ve learned to sleep with my eyes open.”
“That won’t help your enlightenment.”
“Look, when I get to nirvana I want to be well rested.”
“Don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it.”
“Hey, I have discipline. Through practice I’ve learned to cause spontaneous nocturnal emissions.”
“That’s an accomplishment,” the Messiah said sarcastically.
“Okay, you can be snotty if you want to, but when we get back to Galilee, you walk around trying to sell your ‘love your neighbor because he is you’ claptrap, and I’ll offer the ‘wet dreams at will’ program and we’ll see who gets more followers.”
Joshua grinned: “I think we’ll both do better than my cousin John and his ‘hold them underwater until they agree with you’ sermon.”
“I haven’t thought about him in years. Do you think he’s still doing that?”
Just then, Number Two Monk, looking very stern and unenlightened, stood and started across the temple toward us, his bamboo rod in hand.
“Sorry, Josh, I’m going no-mind.” I dropped to the lotus position, formed the mudra of the compassionate Buddha with my fingers, and lickity-split was on the sitting-still road to oneness with allthatness.
Despite Gaspar’s veiled warning about our moving on, we again settled
into a routine, this one including learning to read and write the sutras in Sanskrit, but also Joshua’s time with the yeti. I had gotten so proficient in the martial arts that I could break a flagstone as thick as my hand with my head, and I could sneak up on even the most wary of the other monks, flick him on the ear, and be back in lotus position before he could spin to snatch the still-beating heart from my chest. (Actually, no one was really sure if anyone could do that. Every day Number Three Monk would declare it time for the “snatching the still-beating heart from the chest” drill, and every day he would ask for volunteers. After a brief wait, when no one volunteered, we’d move onto the next drill, usually the “maiming a guy with a fan” drill. Everyone wondered if Number Three could really do it, but no one wanted to ask. We knew how Buddhist monks liked to teach. One minute you’re curious, the next a bald guy is holding a bloody piece of pulsating meat in your face and you’re wondering why the sudden draft in the thorax area of your robe. No thanks, we didn’t need to know that badly.)
Meanwhile, Joshua became so adept at avoiding blows that it was as if he’d become invisible again. Even the best fighting monks, of whom I was not one, had trouble laying a hand on my friend, and often they ended up flat on their backs on the flagstones for their trouble. Joshua seemed his happiest during these exercises, often laughing out loud as he narrowly dodged the thrust of a sword that would have taken his eye. Sometimes he would take the spear away from Number Three, only to bow and present it to him with a grin, as if the grizzled old soldier had dropped it instead of having it finessed from his grip. When Gaspar witnessed these displays he would leave the courtyard shaking his head and mumbling something about ego, leaving the rest of us to collapse into paroxysms of laughter at the abbot’s expense. Even Numbers Two and Three, who were normally the strict disciplinarians, managed to mine a few smiles from their ever-so furrowed brows. It was a good time for Joshua. Meditation, prayer, exercise, and time with the yeti seemed to have helped him to let go of the colossal burden he’d been given to carry. For the first time he seemed truly happy, so I was stunned the day my friend entered the courtyard with tears streaming down his cheeks. I dropped the spear I was drilling with and ran to him.
“Joshua?”
“He’s dead,” Joshua said.
I embraced him and he collapsed into my arms sobbing. He was wearing wool leggings and boots, so I knew immediately that he’d just returned from one of his visits into the mountains.
“A piece of ice fell from over his cave. I found him under it. Crushed. He was frozen solid.”
“So you couldn’t…”
Joshua pushed me back and held me by the shoulders. “That’s just it. I wasn’t there in time. I not only couldn’t save him, I wasn’t even there to comfort him.”
“Yes you were,” I said.
Joshua dug his fingers into my shoulders and shook me as if I was hysterical and he was trying to get my attention, then suddenly he let go of me and shrugged. “I’m going to the temple to pray.”
“I’ll join you soon. Fifteen and I have three more movements to practice.” My sparring partner waited patiently at the edge of the courtyard, spear in hand, watching.
Joshua got almost to the doors before he turned. “Do you know the difference between praying and meditating, Biff?”
I shook my head.
“Praying is talking to God. Meditating is listening. I’ve spent most of these last six years listening. Do you know what I’ve heard?”
Again I said nothing.
“Not a single thing, Biff. Now I have some things I want to say.”
“I’m sorry about your friend,” I said.
“I know.” He turned and started inside.
“Josh,” I called. He paused and looked over his shoulder at me.
“I won’t let that happen to you, you know that, right?”
“I know,” he said, then he went inside to give his father a divine ass-chewing.
The next morning Gaspar summoned us to the tea room. The abbot looked as if he had not slept in days and whatever his age, he was carrying a century of misery in his eyes.
“Sit,” he said, and we did. “The old man of the mountain is dead.”
“Who?”
“That’s what I called the yeti, the old man of the mountain. He has passed on to his next life and it is time for you to go.”