Zen City (12 page)

Pirate was looking down at me, his head at about my one o’clock. He was twitching all over and panting. Whenever he moved his head his black curls would brush against my cheek or shoulder. His sweat rained on me. “I just want to talk to you, Big Man.”

If I laughed, I would die. I wouldn’t get to enter the City. I wouldn’t get to straighten out Pirate. “Talk.”

“I can’t stay like this till the crows come, Big Man.”

“Talk fast.”

Angela and Tenacity had reached the chute. I saw their dim shadows edge into view on either side of Pirate’s head. “Open your eye, Beefsteak,” Tenacity yelled.

Angela whimpered, “Avalokita, dear, sweet Lord Avalokita, don’t let them get hurt down there.”

“Let’s get down to it, Big Man. What’s really eating you?”

“You know what’s eating me.”

“I know what it’s not. I know it’s not me and Angela. You push her away every time she comes close. Why, Big Man? Why?”

Tenacity yelled down, “Come on, you oaf. Where’s that zazen of yours? You can’t see when you’re pumping hate. Open your eye and tag the man. He’s leveling with you.”

“Shut up, up there.” I was getting confused. “She doesn’t want me. She says she wants me, but she disappears. She’s playing me for a sucker. We plan together. We make love together. We sit together. I teach her how, damn it. Then she gets into the City, and I’m still here, on the dark side, on the dumb side, on the hick side, all alone, cracking Circenses and getting turned back.
‘Not you. Too much ego. Step aside.’
”

“Who the hell are you talking about? Not Angela. She’s not in the City. She’s right here, Big Man. When you went to Control, she stayed behind to wait for you. What are you talking about? Who do you mean, Big Man? You don’t mean…?”

“Janus.”

It was quiet down there. All I could hear was our breath, mine and Pirate’s, and the slow trickle of water seeping over the rim. My mind was quiet, too—for the first time since Janus had been hypodyned into the City. Now I saw it—her ghost infested every part of me, everything I said and did. For a moment, one knot of pain at the center of my mind sucked away all the petty beefs, and my heart cleared. Janus.

* * *

…Remember: I stood there that day, holding up the line. The guards prodded me with their karuna rods. I hardly felt them. Janus was going,
the picture-window girl. “Zazen, Big Man. Zazen. You can do it too. Zazen.” After all, it’s what we had always wanted, wasn’t it? And then the “sardine” shuttle, the On Ramp, the long walk up Route 90, alone, to her father’s house, and the rock through that big picture window. I hadn’t known glass shattered that way, falling straight down, all at once, like a sheet of water. I had thought it would explode somehow, dramatically, and not just fall…

* * *

“Amitabha,
it’s still risin’. It’s flowin’ up through the keyhole”—Angela, far above.

“Janus is a Cityzen, a saint,” I said.

“Yes, she made it through, and you didn’t.”

“Yes.”

“Big Man, Angela’s not Janus.”

It wasn’t a safe thing to do, but I began to cry. A thin stream of water was washing down the sides of the chute, lessening the friction that held us fifty feet above a hard landing. And somebody was inching down toward us. It wasn’t Angela or Tenacity—I could hear them bellow from the top of the shaft, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Then I saw No Mind’s face at my eleven o’clock. I stopped crying. Pirate’s fist shot out at me. I dodged and nearly lost my hold. No Mind’s arm wrapped around Pirate’s face. “Move down. Move down. I’ve got him, Big Man. He won’t hurt you now.”

On the karst the monks found a crack where a lost river surfaced. They tarried there to wash off the grue and stink of the bone pit they had climbed through. “It’s the fastest way to the karst,” Bobo Shin had told them. “Anyone who shudders is no zen man.”

Rinzai had a headache.

“I’ll massage you. I’m good.” Mukan’s hands slid down like cool water over Rinzai’s small, shaven head.

It soothed him. His eyes closed. He sighed. There was plenty of sun here, inside the ring of mountains. The sun warmed him. It dried him. It never rained here. All the rain was milked from the clouds when they were blown up the outsides of the mountains. That’s why the City Planners had moved them there, hypodyned the entire area from parts of Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, changed them into transcat jazz and statted them down again a few miles off Route 90. Ahh…

Then the Voice in his head thundered again, and he had to squeeze his mind shut with all the muscles in his head and neck, to make it stop. No Mind’s crystal set had lashed a sore in Rinzai, like the sore that trainers lash in circus animals, then merely touch to make them obey.

“All phenomena are transient.” Mukan dug his fingers into the knots. “Relax, little man… Why have you stayed on with us?”

“Where would I go? Angela is gone.”

“Your mother?”

Rinzai tensed so hard, he felt like a fireball from the shoulders up, and from there down—nothing. It worked a little. It muted the echoes in his head.
“Your mother?”
The words cut in, plied nerve from nerve, muscle from rigid muscle, and in the fissures, tears welled.
“Your mother?”
The Voice planned to kill her. Bobo Shin wanted it too, and Clara.
“Your mother?”
Why not? He
remembered no other. Only sleep. Sleep was his mother, on an empty belly in a safe place, a ditch maybe, off Interstate 90, or under a rusted chassis on the ridgepole of some gerrymandered ghost town. Sleep held him and rocked him, stroked his hair and lullabied—or was that his own hand, his own voice fading into drowsiness, into the warm salt sea of sleep?
“Your mother?”

“Yes.”

“Ah!” Mukan shook his head sadly. Only a little older than Rinzai, he kissed the boy’s head and delicately removed his hands. It was useless. “Ah! Bobo Shin Roshi is my dad. It doesn’t matter. He treats me like any monk. It is the spiritual lineage that counts, not the biological.”

Then Rinzai had to close again, his ears, his muscles, his thoughts. He had said exactly what he always wanted to say—
Yes, Angela is my mother.
The tears streamed out of him like water from Moses’s rock. But with their soft flow came the Voice again.
“Kill Angela. Kill her. She is icchantika. Kill.”

Bobo Shin strutted by, shot Rinzai and Mukan a suspicious glance, and walked on. He fiddled conspicuously with his earphone. After he had passed them, he said without turning back or slowing down, “Mukan! Rinzai! Get up. Stand up. No sitting down.”

* * *

Bobo Shin reviewed his troops. The monks threw one another onto the ground, practicing holds, breaking holds, flipping, punching, growling. They were not very good at it. The bindings on their voluminous sleeves often gave way; the cloth trailed out, tripping some, blinding others, getting in people’s mouths.

The monks seemed hopeless until Bobo Shin directed them to use their gimlets. Each monk had one of the sharp, little knives in his sleeve. If anything, they were more awkward now, more inept-looking, because more hideously overcautious. But
Bobo Shin saw that none of that mattered a damn. They didn’t have to be great fighters. There were a good number of them, and they were armed.

“You stink of the bone pit,” Bobo Shin thundered. “We have climbed down through hell. We have rolled in skulls still half-packed with meat. We have climbed down through viscera and gore. We have smelled the eight kinds of death and the forty-two sorts of dissolution and decay of the human body. You are blood-drinking, hell-breathing demons. Pay attention, you devils. Nothing can stop you.

“The precepts of the realized zens tell us to refrain from killing sentient beings. Now you devils must perfect a deeper understanding of this precept. Sometimes, to kill is to refrain from killing. Killing the dharma is real killing. Killing human beings is illusory. What is there to die?
Sunyata—nothing.
You are all demons. You are all invincible gods.”

The monks roared and brandished their gimlets. Some were actually cut, and Bobo Shin had to restrain their assailants. When Clara emerged from a small, natural basin in which she had been relieving herself, Bobo Shin confessed to her, “I hate this. I don’t mean a word of it. They are all idiots. You can’t get good zen students these days. You can’t hit them hard enough to make them understand.”

“Why don’t you give them bigger weapons?”

“It would frighten them too much. They would run away from me.”

“Are you trying to get them to do this?” Clara planted her feet at shoulder’s width. She placed her hands on her hips, bent her knees slightly to find a firm center, and exhaled with a slow hiss that Rinzai could hear from twenty yards away. In one brisk movement, lizard-like, her hand arrowed high, holding the gimlet. Bobo Shin, startled, looked up at it.

Clara undulated slowly. She lowered the gimlet, then threw it from hand to hand. Rinzai did not see her throw it. He only saw
the gimlet appear first in one hand, then in the other.

Suddenly, she whirled. The gimlet flashed out. Her fist pressed against Bobo Shin’s heart. He shrieked involuntarily. He sank to his knees. Clara followed him down, pressing the gimlet against the same spot. Bobo Shin looked up at her in agonized disbelief.

Then he saw the blade jutting out of Clara’s hold, pointing back toward herself. It was the handle she pressed against the Master’s rib. “I’m so sorry,” she said, pulling back the gimlet. “I didn’t mean to surprise you that way, Roshi.”

“Not at all.” He rose slowly, assisting himself along Clara’s calves, thighs, loins. “You are magnificent. You are my everything. Where were you just now? Can we go there?”

* * *

“You stink. Move away.” Suds shuddered. He was still combing mites and filth out of his whiskers, then looking for something to clean his hands on. There was only Virya and the hard ground.

“You stink too. Hands off.”

“I don’t like death, Virya. I like life.” When he looked at Virya now, he saw her bones, the skull behind her face, her silly breasts jutting out like mud piles from the real Virya—ribs and gristle. So, too, his prick, their buns, and everything they used to think of as themselves.

Back in the bone pit, everything had stuck to them—gristle, bugs, and rot. Sliding in, they had still been drenched from the downpour outside. The lower they went, the easier it got, because the hulks down there had rotted more. The half-gone stiffs were worst, the ones that still had a look you almost had to return; they were at the top. Virya made Suds keep going. It was a shortcut to the City, she said. Bobo Shin’s guys went just this way, she said. Keep down, be quiet, she said, don’t jostle those bones, and can’t you hear the monks—they’re close below.

Then the awful lava tube, dark, cold, claustrophobic, inclining up onto the karst. It was impossible to get rid of the stink. Suds yanked at a knot in his beard until he yelped. “I’m going to cut it off.”

“Suds, look. What are they doing?”

“Shaking off goo, looks like.”

“No, they’re fighting.”

“Not fighting—war games. Zen wars. Let’s go back. How’d they stay so clean? But let’s not go back through the bone pit, Virya. Let’s go another way.”

“You don’t mean that. We’re practically at the City. Look. It’s there.”

“Looks like a dump. I don’t like it.”

“You’re
icchantika,
Suds. I give up on you. And stay low.”

I inched down until I could spring onto the wet incline below. Above me, No Mind and Pirate, limbs entwined, crept down like a crippled spider. Near the bottom, No Mind dropped him. Pirate fell hard onto his chest and yowled. I kicked him. No Mind jumped down and scrambled out of the way. His legs and arms were so torched that he could barely stand straight. He caught his breath at a safe distance from Pirate.

Angela was climbing down, sure-footed and steady. Somehow she managed to find holds even in the smooth rock toward the bottom of the chute. She never had to spread-eagle across the gap as we had. She just hugged the rock, kept her weight over her feet, and found all the right holds as if by magnetism. The witch had Tao by the balls—and Tenacity on her shoulder.

“Pirate!” She lowered herself onto the rock where Pirate was groaning and clutching the ribs I’d kicked. She glared at No Mind and me.

I glared back. “He tried to kill me. If No Mind hadn’t helped me out, I’d be ground beef.”

Pirate labored to his knees, then to his feet. “Big Man, he pushed my hand out. I wasn’t trying to punch you. You don’t know who your friends are.”

“That’s what I told him, Pirate.” No Mind worked his way around to my side. “Only when I said it, it was true, wasn’t it Big Man?”

“Looks like it,” I said.

Angela held Pirate as if she were his. She worried over his bruises and looked into his eyes to feel his hurt with him. She held him close. “Can you do somethin’ about this, Tenacity?”

“Naw, I’m useless at this kind of thing. Them hodags up by our place could fix him easy, especially the wingbacks. Not me. I’m strictly a philosopher and leader of men.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s a straight shot up onto the karst now, isn’t it? Thanks for the goo, Angela. Thanks for everything. I guess No Mind and I can stumble up without any more help. You too, Pirate—thank you. You’ve been a real buddy. You can stick here with your lover or do whatever the hell makes you happy.”

Pirate had the nerve to say, “I love you, Big Man, even with all your crap.” No Mind snickered, but Pirate didn’t mind him. “Didn’t you hear yourself up there? You pull the snake up out of the slime, and then you let it slither down again just like you never saw a thing.”

“Shut up.”

“What’s goin’ on?” Angela said.

“He thinks you’re some chick named Janus.”

Angela gasped. She seemed faint. She sat down on the wet rock.

“I don’t,” I said.

“You act like it, damn it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I looked at Angela. She was talking to herself. “What in hell is wrong with you?”

“I’m not you! I’m not you!”
She was staring into space.