Zen City (14 page)

“…Gaaaa!” I charged Pirate from behind.

“Go,” No Mind yelled. He ran along—to back me up, I figured. I had to hand it to him. He wasn’t a big guy. He wasn’t a scrapper. But, unlike Pirate, he was there for me. And when he got that look in his eyes—whether it was buddha mind or devils, I don’t care—he had enough
joriki,
enough inner electricity, to rush a garrison.

From behind, I pulled Pirate’s shoulder back with my right hand. The rock he’d been wielding jerked from his grasp and hit the ground. I’ve never seen a human being look so surprised. I was about to put him to sleep with my left, when something yanked my arms back.

It was No Mind. He had jumped up on my back and was locking my arms for all he was worth. The monks circled the three of us, me immobile, Pirate so buffaloed he didn’t know which end was up, and No Mind grunting to hang onto me—a losing bet. I pumped my arms and he fell away like rotted plaster. Then he dropped back: to join the monks. Suddenly Pirate and I were on the same side, defending our lives against Bobo Shin’s crew.

They were all around us and closing in. Clara’s path to Angela was clear. The vanny brat Rinzai looked on like a salt pillar, paralyzed; only his eyes moved. Bobo Shin was so happy now, he just pretzeled his legs, took on the dark look, and did zazen.

Pirate crouched low, his arms stretched out threateningly toward the monks. He menaced them, feinting and lunging. They scored his hands with their knives; he dripped blood but hardly noticed. “Do you see it now, Big Man?”

I pressed my back against Pirate’s and turned with him, keeping them at bay. “I don’t see anything.”

“Then look over there.” He whirled, to face me toward Angela. I could see her with Tenacity, past the little monks. Clara stood over her, holding the knife almost playfully now. Pirate pressed the back of his head against mine, and his voice hummed
through me: “This is what you did, Big Man, while I was trying to hold them back. You cut me off, and the vanny chick got through. You’ve killed Angela, you poor jerk.”

* * *

“Kill! Kill!”
Rinzai could not block his voice out any longer.
“Hear the Voice of the City. Kill, Rinzai. Kill Angela.”

He picked up a fallen knife. Clara’s arm and torso were pumping up and down like a piston. With each thrust, her gimlet came up redder. Angela still fought. Guarding Tenacity, she held onto Clara’s robe and gradually pulled her down.

Rinzai moved toward them.

* * *

Pirate gave an ear to Big Man’s whimper: “Why are they doing this, Pirate?” As
if I knew.
Pirate thought.
Kick now: hyahh!
“We gotta get to her,” Big Man told him. “We gotta get to Angela.”
A little bit late, wasn’t it?
“Maybe we can work over that way. Just keep circling, see, inching left. Stay with me, Pirate. Stay with me. Is she bleeding…? Watch out.”
Hyahh!

It was a plan: keep circling, inching left. The monks wouldn’t rush them. The monks were just waiting for Clara to slaughter Angela, so she could come over and help them murder Big Man and Pirate. The two men could stall them, but they couldn’t do much damage.

Pirate didn’t dare look in Angela’s direction too long, or they might close in. He had to use his eyes like bayonets, poking and threatening. Now and then a kick—
Hyahh!
—like that one.

Keep circling, inching left.
Pirate kept his eyes moving, his head bobbing, holding the monks at bay. The adrenalin rush of combat so wakened him that it was as if his mind had pushed out an extra chamber where thoughts echoed despite the crush of activity.

What was he worth?
Nothing
, came the thought. He didn’t even belong to himself. Nothing he did came from him. He was like a butt when a person squats to shit: it just went through him. If the transcat shimmied, he shook. Even this thought was some transcat’s jazz. He was worth about a handful of couch-grass chaff.

Hyahh!
That little guy wouldn’t stop to fix his robes again.

When Pirate felt Big Man’s sweaty shoulders pressed against his, was it the transcat feeling it, really? If that was true—and Pirate thought it was—then death would be interesting. The transcat would keep right on feeling, without the lie of Pirate inbetween, just as when you tore off a man’s finger, there were

plenty more things he could make do with.
I’m less important to

my transcat than a finger is to a man.

Hyahh! Hyahh!
Keep circling, inching left. The monks were backing off a little—a new tactic. They had finally figured out that there was no hurry; time was on their side.

Hyahh!
That one was just to blow off steam.
Look at the cowards sag back.
Pirate could see Angela clearly now, holding onto Clara’s calves. She was a mess of blood.

What was Big Man blubbering about this time? “…Of course I love her. I love her, Pirate. Somewhere inside me, I always knew she was hooked up with Janus. Don’t you see, that’s why I couldn’t let her near me. It hurt too much. And then there’s the holes. What do you do with the holes…?”

Big Man,
Pirate thought,
I sympathize, but is this the moment…? Never mind—there probably won’t be another one.

“…Holes in your memory, holes in your feelings where something’s supposed to be—what do you do with them?”
Hyahh!

Shut up, Big Man. I don’t want to talk about my holes.

“I’m some jazz the City trashed, Pirate. It rings true. I always felt like half a man.”

Keep circling, inching left.
They were practically there. Why
couldn’t Big Man shut up? It was working.
Swing left. Hyahh! Hyahh!
Clara was before them. If they could just push through
right now…

Help me, Big Man. I’m cut. No Mind cut me, damn him. I’m cut.

* * *

Bobo Shin had uncrossed his legs and was coming to cinch the matter for Clara. A strategic kick to Angela’s head, he thought, would do the trick. Carefully skirting the deadly circle around Pirate and Big Man, Bobo Shin came alongside Rinzai. “You’re a good boy. Stay close to me. Protect your Roshi. Careful of the witch.”

Rinzai bit him.

“You little shit-sucking devil, what do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know it’s breaking a cardinal precept to even give a priest a mean look? You might as well bite the arse of Shakyamuni Buddha himself.” Rinzai kicked Bobo Shin’s knee. The Roshi danced and fell.

Rinzai’s head throbbed:
“Kill Angela. Kill the icchantika.”

“No!” Rinzai dived into Clara from behind. He grabbed her legs and pushed at the hamstrings. She collapsed straight down. Her knees hit; then the heels of her hands slammed down, as she reached back to break her fall. Rinzai scooted out of the way. Blinking blood out of her right eye—her slashed forehead oozed thick, dark blood—Angela grabbed the gimlet and held it against Clara’s throat. Close by, a hubbub: Big Man and Pirate had managed to work nearer—a desperate plan, as likely to hurt as to help—and they were trying to break out.

“Help me, Big Man. I’m cut. No Mind cut me, damn him. I’m cut.”

Angela turned to look. Clara dropped to one elbow, falling away from the knife, and with her freed hand she clutched Angela’s wrist and pushed it away. Angela pressed the knife
toward Clara. It hovered between them.

Rinzai rolled on the ground, holding his ears and pinching his eyes shut. The vengeance of his Voice was terrific. His mind could not hold its thunder.

In the circle of knives, Big Man turned and knelt to protect Pirate. One of the monks attacked him from behind. The monk looped his
obi,
a broad black sash, around Big Man’s neck, and twisted. Big Man yelped and gurgled. When he tried to fight back, half a dozen knives cut into him.

Big Man and Pirate neutralized, No Mind stepped behind Angela and took her head in the crook of his arm. She made a piteous sound, soon muffled. The knife was Clara’s again.

For the first time since before the suburb, Bobo Shin heard the crystal-set Voice. He was flooded with a feeling of profound gratitude. He would have done one hundred and eight prostrations had the situation seemed less tense. He performed three or four anyway, then did what the Voice asked him to. He called Mukan away from the circle.

Mukan came running. He stopped twenty or thirty feet from Bobo Shin and performed his obeisance. “Master!”

“The boy Rinzai is
icchantika,
oh monk. He impedes the work of the City. He does not exist in reality. Kill him.”

Mukan looked over at Rinzai writhing on the ground, screaming without sound. He regarded his knife. “How has this tool fallen to me?” Mukan thought—the old testing question. Then he threw it. It struck Bobo Shin in his neck, just above the carotid artery. Bobo Shin lowered his chin to feel what small thing could have struck him there—a pebble set flying, perhaps, or else a horsefly? The knife sliced down—and he fell dead almost instantly, collapsing like a magician’s sheet, the dove underneath it vanished.

Before anyone but he could understand what had happened, Mukan returned to the circle; with three or four strategic blows to his astonished brother monks, Mukan freed Big Man. Big Man
struck Clara hard in the back of the neck. She fell senseless. No Mind let go Angela and ran.

Big Man started to pursue him, when Angela rasped, “Pirate!” Turning, he saw the monks drag Pirate away over Mukan’s prone body. Mukan’s arms and legs splayed out in ugly angles. He was not moving.

One of the monks followed behind the others, walking backwards, facing Big Man and brandishing his knife. “Come at us, and we’ll butcher him. Life and death are illusions to us.” His voice cracked. A few monks wheezed hysterically, half-sobbing, as they dragged Pirate along. His wrists were bound behind his back now.

“Your teacher’s dead,” Big Man trumpeted. “Where do you think you’ll take my man? What are you going to do with him? Why don’t you give it up?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” The monk clutched the gimlet and so tightened the muscles in his arm that it shivered up and down like a jack hammer.

The monks stopped. When Pirate tried to speak; one of them pulled a
zagu
from his sleeve—a cloth he threw down for prostrations, and he stuffed part of it in Pirate’s mouth. Another monk bound it shut and held Pirate’s chin back, exposing the stubbly, soft skin underneath…

Suddenly, the air seemed to darken and gel. The slaughterhouse stench was swept away by a rush of ozone. It was cold. From the mouth of the cave hodags streamed, stampeded, thundered, flew.

They were everywhere at once. A gelatinous willy engulfed No Mind and slithered toward Angela, with No Mind gooed inside. When a whaddayaget’s tail knotted one monk’s wrists like a tangling vine, the others fled. Twenty nightmares pursued them across the karst. ‘Scope rode the spined birds, shouting directions from the air.

Fine shadows as of acacia or hemlock leaves—and the
sensation of vague hope mixed with dim, unnamable understanding—fell across Angela, and her bleeding stopped. “That’ll be Foxhole,” Tenacity croaked. He clanked to his plated feet, wobbled a little, then shook off some rust. “It’s about time.” He rolled backward to stop Angela from kissing him on his baby cheeks—“Wait.”

“Tenacity, what is it, ya sweetheart?”

“Transcat.”

Then she felt it too.

Suds’s teeth chattered. Virya mumbled pidgin Sanskrit and chewed her lip all bloody.

It looked like a quarter-mile-high cube of flesh, cavernous, as if worm-eaten, riddled with flashing pin lights, whole sections glowing or dimming, glistening with moisture, then drying and becoming dull as juice slicked a different section, electric to the touch, pulsing erratically with accumulations of tiny, erratic bursts, waves of sound like swept rain, like radio static, scanning for a station. Occasionally, as Suds and Virya stood gazing, they were teased by a transient, nearly identifiable impression: a whiff of ether, a burning sensation and the taste of fennel, someone else’s memory, an urgent, indecipherable plea, the heat of a look from some unknown source, words forming and fading like rain sizzling on a hot engine, like spring snow, like sunlight in a jar, like the smell of gasoline, like the shadow of a passing cloud, a half-remembered name, another life, the telephone number of a childhood address, a phrase from a song in a foreign language heard from a passing train—though one feels that one understands—and like all things one lacks the stamina to comprehend or the swiftness to run alongside.

Suds touched the City here and there as he walked its perimeter, and images streamed into him like blood through an IV: corpses in drawers, a clump of worms in a bait can, maggot-infested droppings, one’s own feces found teeming and tunneled with gleaming worms, ghoulish horrors, and, at the same time, interloping visions of a gone century: businessmen’s lunch at a buzzing Manhattan diner, commuter trains to Tokyo replacing red blood cells in a sleeper’s arteries, the heart a roundhouse for the intercity locals, caffeine, caffeine, television roulette, a big City welfare building
cum
VD clinic
cum
stock exchange, wildmen leaping like popcorn from sizzling oil to bid on penny
stocks knocking against the steamy Pyrex pot lid, leaving drippy grease marks—you take it off the burner, remove the lid, and a dozen more kernels explode across the room.

Shivering and grabbing at the air, Suds skidded backwards on his buttocks. “Amitabha, this heap is the City? It smells like manure. It looks like a big hemorrhoid.”

“That’s your worldly eye, Suds.” Virya threw up—just once, everything. She wiped sweat from her forehead and took a deep breath. “That’s better. That’s a lot better. That’s all my impurities gone now.”

“Screw that. We’ve been lied to. This place is a dump. This is what they’ve been bleeding us for? This is what they do zazen for?”