Zen City (10 page)

“Angela, who are you talking to?”

“I don’t know. The City. You know I came from there, don’tcha, Pirate? Ain’t that why you snuck after me?”

“Is it you in the murals?”

“It must be. I think they painted ’em there to show the Catchers what they was s’posta do. First they got ’em down here with dreams. They couldn’t rig ’em up with no crystal sets. They’re too stupid. They used dreams, even though it’s not as good. Then them pictures. Now the Catchers just go on like before, poor things, in the dark, underground. They’re too dumb too leave.”

“Jesus fuck damn! I’m a lunatic. Angela honey, I just want to crack a few Circenses and boil couch-grass seeds. I think I got it down now. I think if I grease ’em up and stir fry ’em after, then they’ll be okay. Flavor ’em kind of nutty, you know? Ow, my head! I never gave a toot about the damn City, either, so how come I’m sitting up God’s asshole talking to a wind egg?”

“You used to sit, Pirate.”

“I never did.”

“You used to sit day and night, like the Catchers practically. I know. You had enough
joriki
to light Interstate 90 to the Illinois border.”

“Don’t give me that.”

“Then you made Suds and them guys cut words onto your belly and pour ink in ‘em.”

“That’s right—
PARTY DOWN!
”

“And you stopped sittin’ zen. How come, Pirate? What did you see?”

“I got tired of it, that’s all. Period. Full stop. End of story. Tired of it. Who’s asking me, anyway? Is it you, Angela, or is it whoever’s using you?”

“I dunno. I dunno.” Like a double image coming into focus, Angela walked into her own body. Pirate touched her hand, a real hand. “Go back, Pirate.”

“That bastard doesn’t deserve you.”

“Big Man’s your friend. You come here for him, ’cause you love him, Pirate. I love him too.”

“I know you do, Angela. But you should stop.”

“I can’t. Some people been through hell and back for a lover. Me, I been through heaven and back, Pirate, and it’s worse.”

The waves of pain were dwindling. Pirate straightened himself and took Angela’s other hand. He moved toward her until he felt her nipples graze his chest. He said, “This is the City.”

“Yes,” she said, and they were making love. He had not intended it—he had figured that she would push him away; in fact, he had been relying on it. His black curls fell like a cataract between their cheeks. Her hands found his shoulder blades, she pulled him to her, and then she leaned against him and danced him back against a sheer wall. She held tight and scissored him with her legs and took him inside her. Now Pirate was a passenger on a ghost train, barred down, buckled in, nothing to do but undulate and feel. She wept as they swelled and exploded into each other. When they were done, she moved away and gradually made herself stop weeping.

“Go back. The whaddayas got a way of fixing you. You’re all cut up. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

“Wait a minute. What…?”

“Go, Pirate. Go now. I’ll be there in a jiffy. Pirate, don’t be mad at me. It won’t be long before you understand everything.”

“Mad at you? Why did we do that? Tell me what you were talking about with the City.”

“Don’t be mad, Pirate. Tell No Mind I said he could come.”

“Are you crazy? He hates us. Bastard’ll kill us first chance he gets.”

“He’s s’posta come—go now, Pirate, please.”

“Did we just make love because the City wants you to?”

“Go. I’m beggin’ you, Pirate.”

Pirate swung round and made his way back to the oblique squeeze.

* * *

On the broken highway under a moonless sky in a black year past, they’re so drunk that their limbs feel like liquid. Pirate keeps grabbing and squeezing things or knocking his head into them, just to feel solid. Everything is spinning. For a while, they amuse themselves by jumping from car-top to car-top all along 90 from the On Ramp to the Rest Stop. There they collapse, clothes and skin covered with rust, laughing and shouting ancient obscenities. All through the Jam, windows roll up.

“Do it, Suds.”

“No. Hell. You don’t want me to do that, Pirate, man. Your belly is a fuck damn work of art. Looka dem spokes, huh? Eight spokes, like the Eightfold Fuck Damn Noble Path.”

“Write it, you icchantika meat sucker.”

Virya lowers herself halfway onto Pirate, then falls the rest of the way. “No. You’re gonna get in before any of us, Pirate… Amitabha, I think I’m gonna be sick… You don’t wanna do this.”

“Don’t tell me nothing.” He can’t locate Virya well enough to push her off him. “I understand everything. I’ve seen it now, man. I’m complete. I’ve got kensho. I could whiz by Control tomorrow.”

“Well, why the fuckeroo don’t you?”—Virya’s mouth on his nose.

“’cause I seen what I am, man. I understand everything.”

Suds shoves Virya aside and stares at Pirate unsteadily while Pirate blubbers. Suds asks: “What do you understand, man? What have you seen?”

“I’m part of a transcat, man. I saw it. I was in deep, samadhi below samadhi, right to the Tushita Heaven, man. And I could see clear past the whole world to where everything ties together. I saw the bottoms of all the things my life is just the tops of. This brain”—clawing at his head—“these eyes, they don’t belong to me. Something else is running me, man. I don’t want to look any more.” By sheer luck, he manages to grab Suds’s arm and pull him into his own face. “Do it. ‘Party down!’”

Suddenly cold sober—“You got a knife?”

No Mind caught Big Man’s eye and held it. “Is there something between Pirate and Angela?”

“Back off, will you?”

“You don’t know who your friends are, Big Man.”

No Mind could see the wheels turning. Big Man’s lower lip trembled, like a child’s before crying. His hands clenched and unclenched. “Maybe you’re right,” Big Man said.

Enough for now, No Mind’s Voice told him.
You do well, Noble One. You must divide friend from friend and join them to you. It is an upaya, a skillful means for the enlightenment of all beings. Remember the City. Remember…

“Divide what from who?” A bird like a bicycle horn flattened its round, rubbery proboscis against No Mind’s chest. No Mind instinctively swiped it away.

“Hey, killer,” Tenacity warned, “mind my hodags. You don’t touch a whimsy or a feather spine, hear, or we’ll eat you up.”

“The thing bumped him, Tenacity,” Big Man said.

“You ain’t really jealous, you big fart, that’s the thing that gets me. But I can’t see what it’s covering up.” Tenacity puffed out his little cheeks and squinted, then slapped the air out.

The bicycle-horn bird was hovering for another pry at No Mind’s thoughts, when there was a sudden disturbance. Every creature hushed. They leaned. They listened. Just as suddenly, they whooped and funneled, screaming, into their hole. Only Tenacity and one ancient whaddaya remained in the junction room with Big Man and No Mind.

Tenacity scowled and shook his head. “Transcat.”

“Here?” Big Man asked him.

“Here. So what, that’s what I say. But they give most of us cave hoots the willies. Just sit tight. It’ll pass.”

“I don’t feel a thing,” Big Man said.

“I do,” No Mind said. “It’s like tentacles.”

“It’s not. Shut up.” Tenacity sat on his lower rim and squeezed as if to take a dump. His face reddened. “Come close and dry off. You skins die quick if you stay cold.” No Mind and Big Man came near. Tenacity was radiating heat. His green glow became a shade lighter. The men warmed their hands and turned round to dry their backsides.

“Where is it, Tenacity?” Big Man asked him.

But one of the others answered, “She’s all over you.” The old whaddayaget was all wrinkles, and nothing wrinkling. “She’s in you and out of you like cosmic rays. She’s using your body like a swinging door. I’d be all pins and needles if it were me. Are you feeling kind of… nostalgic?”

Big Man tilted his head sideways and looked at the ceiling. “There was this woman. We used to sit together. Not Angela. No, I mean, a while ago. Lord, she lived in one of the last real houses up over Route 90…”

“That’s the transcat’s belly, that mood of yours. Not the whole thing. Part of it. I see some of the rest of it twitching through a black void on the cold side of Pluto, five or six years from now.” The wrinkles shifted, bunched, and reshuffled into a tent-like configuration. “Don’t distress yourself. It’ll pass. It’s not you.”

Tenacity was cooling down. “Old wrinkly feels everything all over the universe practically. We call him, ‘Scope. Wanna guess what he’s made of?”

No Mind flicked some dried mud off Big Man’s shoulder. “Who was she, Big Man?”

“Come on, guess, Big Man.” Tenacity pushed No Man aside.

Big Man shook off the cobwebs and looked straight at ‘Scope. “Melancholy. Clarity. Detachment. Information. Elasticity. Beeohtees. I don’t know the proportions. And a little girl in there, something like a little girl—was that a mistake when they statted you?”

“Hoo! That’s my skinbag. Don’t he have the eye.” Tenacity
kissed Big Man on the lips and backfired. An anxious murmur rose from the whaddayagets’ pit. “Pipe down, you yellows—it was me.”

‘Scope started pulsing out words, deep and clear. His wrinkles undulated like oscilloscope lines. “It was a mistake. I was a trial run. There’s a number like me they use in the City, only without the little girl bred in. Mind you, it’s only the sugar and spice parts I got—no Miss Prissy, no Miss Bossy—so there.”

Tenacity rolled onto his side. “Tell these lubbers all about it, ‘Scope. We got nothing to do till the transcat’s gone.”

“I was gonna. They made me early on, but that’s not how come I’m old. I was born old. They had to do me that way. It was just after the Mercury Anomaly, the second one, the big one, when the transcategoricals shimmered in, and Descartes and Newton and Einstein and Hume and everybody in the whole history of Western Civilization who ever mentioned a point or a line or a frame of reference or a sequence of one thing after another—they were all quite suddenly vestigial… I bet you wish you knew half of what I do.”

‘Scope covered his “mouth” as if he had hiccoughed, and then went on. “Everybody Earthside had always thought the world was built up out of particles of one kind or another—sensations or quarks or souls. Well, now they saw that that idea was upside-down: the world is built down from one big, undifferentiated whole, down into particles. And the particles are provisional. The borders between things are unreal, like pocks on a putty ball: squoosh! and they’re all rearranged. Nobody had ever thought that big since the Upanishads or the Mahayana Sutras. That’s where Buddhism started to come into favor.

“But who were these transcats? You know what I mean? That’s what people were saying. How can we get rid of them? That’s what everybody wanted, right off, as if that was ever an option. It would be like trying to gnaw off your brains and heart. We’re laced through with transcats like brine with salt. I was supposed
to be a kind of search-and-destroy machine, but all I want to do is dress up Betsy McCall.”

“It’s gone now, isn’t it?” No Mind said.

“No.” Old ‘Scope pursed his wrinkles to wet them. “Sit tight—that’s the best thing. This one’s just passing through. It won’t be long.

“It’s ironic when you think about it. The tech they used to make me, the skinbags got it all from transcats—from watching them, and from being watched by them, the funny way that works. As if water could taste you because you swallow it. They had to rewrite all the science books and stop thinking of skins as skins. Mind you, they’d always known they were permeable to air and moisture and thoughts and feelings, but people wanted to hold onto the idea that everybody was something apart. The transcats made that hard.

“The Planners made me to scan the universe for transcats, to log every border between one thing and another, every way you could define it, cross-referencing each phenomenon for fifteen-billion light years in every direction. I was supposed to be a sieve. They were going to use me to pan the universe for transcats. They figured that then they could get rid of them somehow, or at least get out of their way… It’s leaving now… but, you know, you can’t.

“The Planners focused down their big n-dimensional hypostat guns on fragments of twenty or thirty cosmology mavens and astrographers, along with a tightrope walker I believe, for his particular concentration. They also hypostatted a number of ephemerides, yes, a bunch of technical beeohtees, and a part of Tycho Brahe, which they picked up in the dyne pool where the transcats like to feed.

“But they didn’t have their tech down, did they, all that non-dual transcat-think being so new to them? Any hypostat beam cuts back and forth through time and zigzags through space like a spastic’s backstitch. Some little girl in what’s left of Kenya, a
seven year old snoozing, spooned against her mama’s belly in their cool thatch hut, was smack in the path of the hypostatic ray. And pow zingo! When you hear that nya-nya-nya nya-nya in my voice, why, it’s her.

“You can all relax now. The thing is gone.”

“It didn’t work then?” Big Man said.

“Naw. It was all wrong from jump. The transcats are in this soup so tight, the second you try to scan them, you hit a self-reference jam. They’re a part of your scanner, turns out, or your eye, or your discursive thinking. All you get is the little glimpses like what we just had here—a shimmy and a fast exit. Like quanta, you can never get the whole picture, because the measurement changes the data. I want my mommy.”

Tenacity’s tinny baby laugh stopped them. “Should we sound the all-clear?”

‘Scope shook rock dust off his lower waves. “Wait. I got a beeohtee in me. Listen up.” ‘Scope flexed himself into a perfect rectangle with narrow, horizontal stripes. In a moment, the stripes started pulsing, and the pulses were accompanied by sound:

* * *

ON THE LESSONS OF THE TRANSCATEGORICALS

(Being Chair Elect Wexler’s Installation Address

to City Planning,

In Plenary Session, November 30, 04 Post Transcat)