Zen City (3 page)

I swung around on my cushion. “Angela!”

“Shush,” she said. “Face the wall.” I faced the wall. Angela laid her hands on my shoulders, as zendors sometimes did to gauge physical tension, to steady an overly ardent zen, or to make the stick wounds hurt more. “I love you, Big Man,” she whispered, “whether you believe me or not. I’m gonna get you to the City.”

“Hey, Angela,” Pirate said, “how’d that stick fall into your hand?” It was part of an old joke, a straight line from kerosene-lamp days when one sitter tested another’s progress in getting rid of ego.

Angela whacked Pirate again—that was the correct punch line.

“Ouch!” Not bad either.

I heard another zendor stomping down the aisle, a hefty one from the grunts he made as he stalked us, and from the sickening thud of his stick. Angela whispered to me, “Put your head down in your lap.”

Then I heard her say to the big guy, “This one’s ill. I’m taking him out for a while.”

“Okay,” the man said. “Is there anything you want me to do?”

“No,” said Angela. “This other one is gonna help me move him.” From the corner of my eye, I saw Angela lay a hand on Pirate’s head.

“Okay,” the big guy said. “Whatever you say.” I heard him move away down the row—
WHACK, WHACK! WHACK, WHACK! WHACK, WHACK! WHACK, WHACK!
—and I heard all the sitters bending their screams of pain into pious outbursts: “No self! No gain! Naaaaaah!”

“Get up,” Angela told Pirate. “Help me carry Big Man over to the old candle room. Big Man, you just hang your arms round our shoulders and breathe slow.”

“She loves you all right,” Pirate told me. “Damn me, but I
must love you too.”

“Hush.”

“Fuck, I didn’t think I did, but here I am forty miles from the Blue Plymouth Hotel, letting my couch grass rot and doing what skinny Angela tells me. I can’t believe it.”

“Hush, you,” Angela said, “please.”

She and Pirate lifted me up by the armpits and walked me to the perfect, cubical chamber hewn into the mountainside in ancient days from the main passage of the cave. The room housed candles, censers, wrought-iron snuffers with Buddha figures on the handles, the abbot’s pyx, the sexton’s staves, scrolls and ornaments for special holidays, and other ritual implements—along with wash rags and buckets.

“How’d you get a black robe, Angela?” Pirate wanted to know. “What did you do, sleep with Control?”

“Yeah”—pulling back her caul—“I sleep with Control. Just sit tight for a minute.”

“What are you doing this for, Angela?” I said. “You don’t love me.”

“Give it a rest, Big Man,” Pirate said. “She wants to help you. What is it with you, anyway?”

Angela ignored us. Soundlessly, she opened an ancient red-lacquered cabinet and pulled out nine small, green jars, all of them the same, and laid them side by side on a smooth stone counter. Then she carefully closed the cabinet, turning the knob slightly as it came flush with the casement, so that it made no sound at all.

Angela handed us each three of the jars and kept three for herself. “Take off your robes,” she said. “Smear this all over you. Please don’t waste any time.”

Pirate couldn’t help flashing his tattoo at me, the eight-spoked Wheel of the Dharma, the symbol of the City, around his navel. He could make it shimmy and wave by undulating his stomach. I think he had put it there when he was fourteen and a zealot;
then, a dozen years later—I don’t know why—he’d turned around. He had gotten some drunk with a knife and ink to add these words around the circumference: “PARTY DOWN.”

“Let me do you,” Pirate said to Angela as she slipped off her black robe. I jabbed him with my elbow. “What’s the beef?” he said.
“She doesn’t love you.”

It smelled like eucalyptus. “The zendors use it for their sore stick hands,” Angela said. “But it’ll work as a lubricant, see? Use a lot. Don’t be skimpy. We gotta squeeze through some tight places.”

I peeled and slathered. I had to work carefully around the raw bruises on my shoulders and neck. When I winced, Angela gave me one of her concerned looks. She was about to help me, but I stopped her. “So you really do know a way in,” I said. “I gotta hand it to you, Angela. You’ve got your finger in a lot of pies. So how come you’re not a Cityzen?”

“Don’t make a mess,” she said, looking away. Suddenly Angela paused, still as a stalagmite or a startled deer. “Someone’s nearby.” We stopped moving. I didn’t hear anything.

“It’s okay,” she said after a minute had passed. “It don’t matter. It’s not a zendor, and there’s nothin’ we can do about it without gettin’ ourselves nabbed. Finish up.” She slipped out of the chamber and stood outside to hurry us along.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “We’ll need a lamp.”

“Come on, Big Man,” Pirate said, falling in after Angela.

“How we gonna see?” I said. “She’s nuts, Pirate. I don’t know what she’s trying to prove.”

We followed her along the smooth flowstone leading back into the cavern. We stayed close to the wall. The stone underfoot was scalloped, and the scallops were filled with mud, and the mud hid pebbles and gravel that stuck between our toes. I had to hop to keep up while I pulled bits of shell out of my instep.

“Steady, Big Man,” Pirate cracked. “It’s good for your zazen.”

When I tried to swipe him, I fell. Angela stopped while I got
to my feet. I was covered with cave now, and stinking of guano. When she saw I was alive, she started moving again.

The guano got thicker underfoot. Lifting our legs out of it, step by step—and flicking off millipedes—became a serious project, until the pitch sloped down sharply and we were knee-deep in reeking, soupy water. It was alive with tiny white worms.

I had checked this way out before. I had been wearing boots then, and traversing a dry, narrow ledge along one wall that was not navigable by bare, tender feet. There was nothing at the end but a dripstone curtain, waves of columns thin as straw, fused together. There were gaps big enough for pale beetles, bloodsucking flies, worms and slugs to slime through, but not a human being. When Pirate and I reached it, Angela was gone.

Clusters of tiny grey bats hung from the rock dome at the edge of the light, a living ceiling of eyes, teeth, tongues, and folded, furry leather that rained urine down on us along with mites and feces. Is that how it would be when the crows came? “Come on. I’m going back,” I said. “I know how to sit. I don’t need this.”

“Go by yourself,” Pirate said. “She’s got me interested. I’m sticking with the lady.” Most of the time, you don’t really see your friends, the real ones, the fast buddies who’ve held you while you shake and cry. They’re like your own body—you don’t have to look, just answer grip for grip, a hand up or a shoulder to their shoulder. That’s what it was for me with Pirate until he said that. Dark as it was, I looked at the man. I had never noticed what an ugly mouth he had; I could hardly believe I’d ever trusted that mouth.

I heard a ghost splashing toward us on the far side of the stone drapery, but I couldn’t see a thing. Then Angela’s voice: “Hurry up. Duck under.” Pirate laughed and dived in. A minute later I heard him surface on the other side. He stuck his forefinger through a chink in the curtain and curled it to call me along.

I thought of the City, of the purity and rest and goodness of the City, of the innocence of its zens, the elect, the completed, those with nothing further to accomplish. And I dived into the teeming pool of shit. Worms and water filled my ears, dark, grainy, brown water, quiet except for the rumble of my own blood and the humming of my own spine. I felt an opening underneath, like a row of broken teeth, and I wriggled through, emerging beside Pirate, who kissed me loudly on the mouth. On the other side of the curtain, the side we’d come from, bats fell into the dark air, thickening and swirling, or else my eyes were closed, and it was me.

Somewhere up ahead Angela whispered, “C’mon. Keep movin’,” and I felt as if I were in her throat, the way her voice came up at me from the water and the walls. We sloshed forward, naked, into the dark. The unguent held to our skin, and as the water receded, the eucalyptus smell took over from the ammonia of the bats’ piss and the stink of decaying guano and mite-infested silt.

“Someone’s following us,” Pirate said. “I hear him. Angela was right.” But I couldn’t tell what sound came from where.

My sense is sight, and it was nearly pitch dark. The passage rose away from the slime and narrowed until I could stretch my arms to support myself all around and above. It was still smooth flowstone, slick as a whale’s throat. What light there was diminished steadily as the cave narrowed, farther from the zendo. It was hard to imagine that there was a full moon outside.

Then the passage took an abrupt turn, and we were bathed in soft, greenish light. Angela was right there. I bumped into Pirate when he bumped into her. “Brush yourself off if you want to see good,” she said. The light was coming from us, from the unguent. “It only shines when it’s real dark. If there’s even a little twinkle, it don’t work. The zendors don’t even know it.” I didn’t bother to ask her how she knew.

We pushed on, stooping more as the tube narrowed. We
crouched, then crawled, then squirmed on our sides and bellies as the passage corkscrewed down. I reached a squeeze that I could only make by twisting onto my back and shimmying down head-first. I lay there for a minute to catch my breath, my legs up high, my head below.

There were fragile, twisted rock noodles above my head—helictites—like loose handwriting scrawled on the air. Some had been broken off by Angela or Pirate or by me when I’d twisted over, if not by someone before us. There was a bubble, an enlargement in the cavity around my shoulders, so I could bend my arms and lace my fingers under my head for a pillow.

I was resting, looking up at the strings of stone in the dull green light of the unguent, when I saw something Angela and Pirate must have missed, because, being smaller than I, they would never have bothered to twist onto their backs to get through. It was a line of writing on the stone overhead, the letters made up of little, straight scratches. They were upside-down to the way I was headed and must have been scratched there by someone going in the other direction:

The words played in my mind like a children’s rag: “I’M NOT YOU-OOH! I’M NOT YOU-OOH! I’M NOT YOU-OOH!” until my head ached and I had to get away from there, as if I were squirming away from a place in my mind. Incredibly, it worked; I wormed forward, leaving the song behind to haunt that empty niche.

In another twenty feet the tube connected with a grotto the size of a railway station. The floor was four feet below the hole I was coming out of, so that I was standing on my hands for a moment before I tumbled into the room, and the full light of me,
glowing green with unguent, illumined the grotto. On one side, the grotto pinched down through a sort of barrel into a keyhole-shaped opening. The keyhole led out into a passage large enough to belly through; there were gypsum needles carpeting the opening and petals of it curling out from the wall, some of them a foot long and shaped like dried, burst milkweed pods. On the other side, the grotto connected to a wide crawl space between two collapsed strata of limestone, laid out like a slant tent roof with the canvas fly just above it; only this fly was thick with dogtooth spar.

There was a third junction that I didn’t see until my leg was swallowed into it, yanked by the calf down into a hole near the floor. My zazen came through—I wasn’t ruffled. I grabbed hold of a bulbous projection at the edge of the opening I had just come from, and I pulled up for all I was worth. Whatever was pulling me down had a dozen hands, or else there were lots of the critters gripping my leg and foot. In a minute, the muscles in my arms would be torched, and they’d be all over me. So I tried a different tack.

I kicked. Immediately, there were cries and confusion below. Some of the little hands fell away, and I was able to pull my leg out. Two small creatures were still clinging to it. They looked like rusted mufflers with the legs of an armadillo and the head of a human infant. When I grabbed one up, the other fled.

“Let go of me, hick,” the one in my hand shouted. You could say I was surprised.

“You’re a whaddayaget, aren’t you?” I had never actually seen one before.

“Aw, why don’t you hie back to the Park’n’Ride, you stupid hayseed?” It had a voice like a bullfrog choking on emery cloth. It was flailing its appendages, the pointed, armored tail curling this way and that, trying to find a balance point. I pinched the back of its scaled neck and watched it dangle.

“What are you?” I said.

“I’m not you, you asshole. That’s for sure.”

“Are you the one that wrote that?”

“Wrote what?”

“What are you?”

“Are you gonna let me go, or do I have to take you apart?”

“I’ll put you down if you tell me what you are.”

It stopped struggling and angled its little bald head at me, sizing me up, squinting me up and down. “Okay, Glowbug, I’m a whaddayaget, second generation. Satisfied?”

“No. Tell me what you’re made of.”

“You son of a bitch! Tell me what
you’re
made of.”

“You know what I mean.”

I heard Pirate’s voice echoing from up ahead. He had missed me. He was worried about me. Or maybe he just wanted me to think so. “I’m okay,” I shouted. “I’ll catch up.” I lifted the little muffler guy so his face was a few inches from mine.

“Okay, here’s the scoop,” he said. “They hypostatted my mother from
Veltschmerz,
quicksilver, and aversion to light. My father was made of hypodyned genital crabs and death by water—and a touch of compassion, can’t you tell? They call me Tenacity. Are you going to let me go now?”

“What is this, a nest of you guys? You live down here?”

“Naw, we just spend our summer vacations here. Are you going to put me down or what?”

“Were you trying to eat me?”

“Eat you? Don’t make me sick. When Angela went by with the other guy, we were too slow to add it all up. We thought we missed our chance, you know? But then you come along, and we figure we better go for it.”