Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (23 page)

I look at Chris and he looks at me. He says nothing.

We spend the morning sitting at first on a park bench marked SENIOR CITIZENS ONLY, then get food and at a filling station change the tire and replace the chain adjuster link. The link has to be remachined to fit and so we wait and walk for a while, back away from the main street. We come to a church and sit down on the lawn in front of it. Chris lies back on the grass and covers his eyes with his jacket.

``You tired?'' I ask him.

``No.''

Between here and the edge of the mountains to the north, heat waves shimmer the air. A transparent-winged bug sets down from the heat on a stalk of grass by Chris's foot. I watch it flex its wings, feeling lazier every minute. I lie back to go to sleep, but don't. Instead a restless feeling hits. I get up.

``Let's walk for a while,'' I say.

``Where?''

``Toward the school.''

``All right.''

We walk under shady trees on very neat sidewalks past neat houses. The avenues provide many small surprises of recognition. Heavy recall. He's walked through these streets many times. Lectures. He prepared his lectures in the peripatetic manner, using these streets as his academy.

The subject he'd been brought here to teach was rhetoric, writing, the second of the three R's. He was to teach some advanced courses in technical writing and some sections of freshman English.

``Do you remember this street?'' I ask Chris.

He looks around and says, ``We used to ride in the car to look for you.'' He points across the street. ``I remember that house with the funny roof -- .Whoever saw you first would get a nickel. And then we'd stop and let you in the back of the car and you wouldn't even talk to us.''

``I was thinking hard then.''

``That's what Mom said.''

He was thinking hard. The crushing teaching load was bad enough, but what for him was far worse was that he understood in his precise analytic way that the subject he was teaching was undoubtedly the most unprecise, unanalytic, amorphous area in the entire Church of Reason. That's why he was thinking so hard. To a methodical, laboratory-trained mind, rhetoric is just completely hopeless. It's like a huge Sargasso Sea of stagnated logic.

What you're supposed to do in most freshman-rhetoric courses is to read a little essay or short story, discuss how the writer has done certain little things to achieve certain little effects, and then have the students write an imitative little essay or short story to see if they can do the same little things. He tried this over and over again but it never jelled. The students seldom achieved anything, as a result of this calculated mimicry, that was remotely close to the models he'd given them. More often their writing got worse. It seemed as though every rule he honestly tried to discover with them and learn with them was so full of exceptions and contradictions and qualifications and confusions that he wished he'd never come across the rule in the first place.

A student would always ask how the rule would apply in a certain special circumstance. Phædrus would then have the choice of trying to fake through a made-up explanation of how it worked, or follow the selfless route and say what he really thought. And what he really thought was that the rule was pasted on to the writing after the writing was all done. It was post hoc, after the fact, instead of prior to the fact. And he became convinced that all the writers the students were supposed to mimic wrote without rules, putting down whatever sounded right, then going back to see if it still sounded right and changing it if it didn't. There were some who apparently wrote with calculating premeditation because that's the way their product looked. But that seemed to him to be a very poor way to look. It had a certain syrup, as Gertrude Stein once said, but it didn't pour. But how're you to teach something that isn't premeditated? It was a seemingly impossible requirement. He just took the text and commented on it in an unpremeditated way and hoped the students would get something from that. It wasn't satisfactory.

There it is up ahead. Tension hits, the same stomach feeling, as we walk toward it.

``Do you remember that building?''

``That's where you used to teach -- why are we going here?''

``I don't know. I just wanted to see it.''

Not many people seem to be around. There wouldn't be, of course. Summer session is on now. Huge and strange gables over old dark-brown brick. A beautiful building, really. The only one that really seems to belong here. Old stone stairway up to the doors. Stairs cupped by wear from millions of footsteps.

``Why are we going inside?''

``Shh. Just don't say anything now.''

I open the great heavy outside door and enter. Inside are more stairs, worn and wooden. They creak underfoot and smell of a hundred years of sweeping and waxing. Halfway up I stop and listen. There's no sound at all.

Chris whispers, ``Why are we here?''

I just shake my head. I hear a car go by outside.

Chris whispers, ``I don't like it here. It's scary in here.''

``Go outside then,'' I say.

``You come too.''

``Later.''

``No, now.'' He looks at me and sees I'm staying. His look is so frightened I'm about to change my mind, but then suddenly his expression breaks and he turns and runs down the stairs and out the door before I can follow him.

The big heavy door closes down below, and I'm all alone here now. I listen for some sound -- .Of whom? -- Of him? -- I listen for a long time -- .

The floorboards have an eerie creek as I move down the corridor and they are accompanied by an eerie thought that it is him. In this place he is the reality and I am the ghost. On one of the classroom doorknobs I see his hand rest for a moment, then slowly turn the knob, then push the door open.

The room inside is waiting, exactly as remembered, as if he were here now. He is here now. He's aware of everything I see. Everything jumps forth and vibrates with recall.

The long dark-green chalkboards on either side are flaked and in need of repair, just as they were. The chalk, never any chalk except little stubs in the trough, is still here. Beyond the blackboard are the windows and through them are the mountains he watched, meditatively, on days when the students were writing. He would sit by the radiator with a stub of chalk in one hand and stare out the window at the mountains, interrupted, occasionally, by a student who asked, ``Do we have to do -- ?'' And he would turn and answer whatever thing it was and there was a oneness he had never known before. This was a place where he was received...as himself. Not as what he could be or should be but as himself. A place all receptive...listening. He gave everything to it. This wasn't one room, this was a thousand rooms, changing each day with the storms and snows and patterns of clouds on the mountains, with each class, and even with each student. No two hours were ever alike, and it was always a mystery to him what the next one would bring -- .

My sense of time has been lost when I hear a creaking of steps in the hall. It becomes louder, then stops at the entrance to this classroom. The knob turns. The door opens. A woman looks in.

She has an aggressive face, as if she intended to catch someone here. She appears to be in her late twenties, is not very pretty. ``I thought I saw someone,'' she says. ``I thought -- '' She looks puzzled.

She comes inside the room and walks toward me. She looks at me more closely. Now the aggressive look vanishes, slowly changing to wonder. She looks astonished.

``Oh, my God,'' she says. ``Is it you?''

I don't recognize her at all. Nothing.

She calls my name and I nod, Yes, it's me.

``You've come back.''

I shake my head. ``Just for these few minutes.''

She continues to look until it becomes embarrassing. Now she becomes aware of this herself, and asks, ``May I sit down for a moment?'' The timid way she asks this indicates she may have been a student of his.

She sits down on one of the front-row chairs. Her hand, which bears no wedding ring, is trembling. I really am a ghost.

Now she becomes embarrassed herself. ``How long are you staying? -- No, I asked you that -- ''

I fill in, ``I'm staying with Bob DeWeese for a few days and then heading West. I had some time to spend in town and thought I'd see how the college looked.''

``Oh,'' she says, ``I'm glad you did -- . It's changed -- we've all changed -- so much since you left -- .''

There's another embarrassing pause.

``We heard you were in the hospital -- .''

``Yes,'' I say.

There is more embarrassed silence. That she doesn't pursue it means she probably knows why. She hesitates some more, searches for something to say. This is getting hard to bear.

``Where are you teaching?'' she finally asks.

``I'm not teaching anymore,'' I say. ``I've stopped.''

She looks incredulous. ``You've stopped?'' She frowns and looks at me again, as if to verify that she is really talking to the right person. ``You can't do that.''

``Yes, you can.''

She shakes her head in disbelief. ``Not you!''

``Yes.''

``Why?''

``That's all over for me now. I'm doing other things.''

I keep wondering who she is, and her expression looks equally baffled. ``But that's just -- '' The sentence drops off. She tries again. ``You're just being completely -- '' but this sentence fails too.

The next word is ``crazy.'' But she has caught herself both times. She realizes something, bites her lip and looks mortified I'd say something if I could, but there's no place to start. I'm about to tell her I don't know her but she stands up and says, ``I must go now.'' I think she sees I don't know her. She goes to the door, says good-bye quickly and perfunctorily, and as it closes her footsteps go quickly, almost at a run, down the hall.

The outer door of the building closes and the classroom is as silent as before, except for a kind of psychic eddy current she has left behind. The room is completely modified by it. Now it contains only the backwash of her presence, and what it was I came here to see has vanished.

Good, I think, standing up again, I'm glad to have visited this room but I don't think I'll ever want to see it again. I'd rather fix motorcycles, and one's waiting.

On the way out I open one more door, compulsively. There on the wall I see something which sends a spine-tingling feeling along my neck.

It's a painting. I've had no recollection of it but now I know he bought it and put it there. And suddenly I know it's not a painting, it's a print of a painting he ordered from New York and which DeWeese had frowned at because it was a print and prints are of art and not art themselves, a distinction he didn't recognize at the time. But the print, Feininger's ``Church of the Minorites,'' had an appeal to him that was irrelevant to the art in that its subject, a kind of Gothic cathedral, created from semiabstract lines and planes and colors and shades, seemed to reflect his mind's vision of the Church of Reason and that was why he'd put it here. All this comes back now. This was his office. A find. This is the room I am looking for!

I step inside and an avalanche of memory, loosened by the jolt of the print, begins to come down. The light on the print comes from a miserable cramped window in the adjacent wall through which he looked out onto and across the valley onto the Madison Range and watched the storms come in and while watching this valley before me now through this window here, now -- started the whole thing, the whole madness, right here! This is the exact spot!

And that door leads to Sarah's office. Sarah! Now it comes down! She came trotting by with her watering pot between those two doors, going from the corridor to her office, and she said, ``I hope you are teaching Quality to your students.'' This in a la-de-da, singsong voice of a lady in her final year before retirement about to water her plants. That was the moment it all started. That was the seed crystal.

Seed crystal. A powerful fragment of memory comes back now. The laboratory. Organic chemistry. He was working with an extremely supersaturated solution when something similar had happened.

A supersaturated solution is one in which the saturation point, at which no more material will dissolve, has been exceeded. This can occur because the saturation point becomes higher as the temperature of the solution is increased. When you dissolve the material at a high temperature and then cool the solution, the material sometimes doesn't crystallize out because the molecules don't know how. They require something to get them started, a seed crystal, or a grain of dust or even a sudden scratch or tap on the surrounding glass.

He walked to the water tap to cool the solution but never got there. Before his eyes, as he walked, he saw a star of crystalline material in the solution appear and then grow suddenly and radiantly until it filled the entire vessel. He saw it grow. Where before was only clear liquid there was now a mass so solid he could turn the vessel upside down and nothing would come out.

The one sentence ``I hope you are teaching Quality to your students'' was said to him, and within a matter of a few months, growing so fast you could almost see it grow, came an enormous, intricate, highly structured mass of thought, formed as if by magic.

I don't know what he replied to her when she said this. Probably nothing. She would be back and forth behind his chair many times each day to get to and from her office. Sometimes she stopped with a word or two of apology about the interruption, sometimes with a fragment of news, and he was accustomed to this as a part of office life. I know that she came by a second time and asked, ``Are you really teaching Quality this quarter?'' and he nodded and looked back from his chair for a second and said, ``Definitely!'' and she trotted on. He was working on lecture notes at the time and was in a state of complete depression about them.

What was depressing was that the text was one of the most rational texts available on the subject of rhetoric and it still didn't seem right. Moreover he had access to the authors, who were members of the department. He had asked and listened and talked and agreed with their answers in a rational way but somehow still wasn't satisfied with them.