Zen City (6 page)

“It’s No Mind. Forget it. Let’s just go.”

“No Mind? What’s he doing in this shit hole?”

“Why don’t you go ask him, Pirate? Let me through.”

Shouting past me, right in my ears, damn him: “Hey, No Mind!”

No Mind stopped blubbering for a second. “Help me! Someone help me!”

Pirate started in on me in his adult-to-adult voice. “Listen, buddy, I’m none too partial to that dude either, but we can’t let him rot there.”

“Why?”

“Fuck it. You want to get into the City? How you going to get into the City with an attitude like that? What the hell is your goddam City about anyway, if the zens can carry around a mind like that?”

“I’m calm as can be, Pirate.” The hulk of him just about corked the passage in front of me. I figured I could take him pretty easy if it came to that. The man’s an ape.

“You sonuvabitch, you’d let someone die?”

“Life and death are illusions, loverboy. Get out of my way.”

“What’s happened to you, Big Man? Is this what zazen’s done for you?”

I hadn’t heard her coming, but Angela was peeking around Pirate’s shoulder. “He followed us from up by the candle room, didn’t he? I toldjas I heard somebody. What’s goin’ on?”

Pirate kept looking straight at me, and I kept looking right back. “It’s No Mind. He’s jammed. Big Man says let him die there.”

Angela poked her head under Pirate’s arm to see me better. She reached her little hand through and tried to turn my head so I’d look at her. I did it, but I burned her with these eyes, I can tell you—my samadhi power is strong, and when I send out like
that, nothing can come in, nothing can touch me.

“Shame on you, Big Man”—stroking my forehead, my cheek, my lips—“you don’t wanna be that way. Let’s go back and git him.”

We were all in a clump, the knot of us in that stone throat. I caught Pirate’s eye again. “You go to hell, mister,” I said. I turned around and led them back. The passage widened to a domed void where No Mind’s hole ran in.

“Lookit them stone straws.” Angela groped along behind. “They all slant back one way—that’s how it must blow in here. But now the breeze is hittin’ us the other way. Didjas notice that?”

“So what?” I said. Angela being smart again.

“So it’s gettin’ awful wet. I think maybe we’re in trouble. It’s floodin’ in somewheres. Must be a storm up above. The pool under that little waterfall we come by was foamin’ up with twigs and pebbles and dirt. It’s drippin’ in through there…” We reached No Mind, coughing and whimpering in his squeeze. He was straining to keep his chin high—muddy water gushed out under him. A wind stinking of rotten victuals sprayed it into a pretty cataract. “…And through there too.”

Pirate worked past me to where No Mind choked and spat. He found a purchase with his fingers, in behind No Mind’s shoulders. He twisted, eased, shimmied, and yanked. No Mind groaned, “I am not separate from all beings.” His head bobbed as he gurgled and watched angels.

“I can’t budge him. He’s in tight.”

“Let him drown,” I said. “He’s not separate from all beings.”

No Mind rambled, “I am like air. When a leaf flutters, I flutter. When a bird falls, I am there…” Suddenly he stiffened. His face was red. He pushed and squeezed as if he were trying to shit himself out of his own sphincter.

“Push hard, man.” Pirate held No Mind’s head away from the stream.

“This ain’t gonna work. You can’t get through that way.”
Angela cut in front of me and sidled up against Pirate. Pretty woman, naked as a skinned bean. “He’s gonna drown like that.”

“…I yield where life presses. I press where life yields”—grinding out the syllables.

Those same little hands she’d laid on my arms, Angela put them on Pirate’s bare shoulders. He looked round at her, and she said, “Slap his face, Pirate, and then get out of the way.”

“What?”

“Do it.”

He whacked No Mind across the cheeks—“Owww!”—and scrambled out of Angela’s way.

“Now wake up.” Angela leaned close to the hole. The stream flowing under No Mind sprayed into her face and ran down her sides, trickling over her hips, down her thighs… “Listen up, No Mind. You got to wake yourself. Relax now. Relax. Feel that water against your belly?”

“Uh huh.”

Angela lifted No Mind’s head to stare him awake. “Attention, No Mind.” She peered right into his eyes. His lids unclenched and lifted.

Suddenly, Angela gasped. She was still as dripstone.

I leaned in. “What is it?”

She kept her eyes fixed on No Mind’s, but she acted as if nothing had happened. I knew better. I’d had her in bed, dammit. I’d been inside her.

“Relax, No Mind. Feel where your skin touches the rock. Just breathe. Let go now. Breathe out,” she said.

No Mind sagged and loosened. He sighed, and suddenly he shot out of the hole like an artillery shell, knocking Angela to the ground. There was a rush of water and bad air. Pirate tumbled back against me, and I fell, knocking my head so hard it stunned me. When I hauled my butt out of the soak and silt, I saw blood through the tatters of No Mind’s girded robes. His back was lacerated from dogtooth spar. Angela was struggling on the floor
of the cave underneath No Mind’s prone hulk. His hands gripped her throat.
He was strangling her.

I scrambled over Pirate’s carcass while he tried to scramble up over me. He hadn’t seen No Mind grab Angela’s throat. Reaching for No Mind, I didn’t care if my knee crossed Pirate’s face, but he sure as hell did, and he threw me back over before he realized what was going on. We were all over each other—and No Mind was grinding Angela into the muck.

I tried to muscle past Pirate. “No!”

All at once, the whaddayagets clanged and scrabbled down the passage. Before I saw them, I felt them coming, like blood tingling back into a pinched limb. They sloshed. Some squirmed. Some flew. Some arrived suddenly by devices that have nothing to do with travel through space—they were just there. The dropsical, spined birds swooped onto No Mind’s back and clawed blood from his shoulders. Memories of snakes coiled around his legs and began to swell, pinching up flesh in scarlet ridges.

Tenacity himself clambered up to No Mind’s face, wailing like a spanked baby. When the man lifted his head, Tenacity squeezed in between him and Angela. He snugged between their necks like a braced bit. His baby face swelled and reddened. Then there was a loud report—backfire—and No Mind’s torso hinged up like a jack-in-the-box, flailing in a puff of brown smoke. The face-rats pinched his elbows in their dimples to make sure he didn’t spring down. Angela rolled out from under.

Tenacity reared up to balance, vertical, on the point of his armadillo tail. He bellowed and spun. The chamber, chockablock with the strangest critters I’d ever seen, heard, smelled, or thought of, shook with laughter deep as a cracking glacier and high as a spine’s hum. Pirate and I just stood there the best way we could, our four arms dangling at our sides. Angela looked ready to smile, only it was too much trouble just breathing.

“You dears! You sweeties!” she croaked at last. The
whaddayagets seemed to pour toward her like oil down a funnel, all rainbows, spiraling into her lap, perching on her forearms, slithering, subliming, caking around her shoulders, catching like smoke wisps in her brown hair. The heavier ones tramped or rolled along the floor, some of them underwater.

“Save it, bitch,” Tenacity growled. “We just spied you running back across our hole, and we figured we’d get some light this time, that’s all. So how about it?”

“That’s how come you saved my life, huh?”

“That’s how come.”

The whaddayas laughed: japes and wisecracks circled like sparks. I kept twitching my nose to smell what they said. I had funny dreams. I felt fat. We were outside in a downpour. I had an odd number of every body part. Pirate was my mom’s nose ring. Then they settled down.

“Aw shut up, you mongrels,” Tenacity said, a second after they’d quieted down.

“Let me go.” No Mind twisted in the face-rats’ cheeks. They sucked his head into a nostril.
“Lmmgg! Lmmgg!”

Pirate found his voice. “What are you dudes? Angela, what are they?”

I just watched. I wanted to see what kind of a fool they’d make of Pirate.

Angela chucked a little blue astigmatism under the chin. She was cuddling four or five indescribables and kissing a few tinies—they smelled like stale Circenses. They looked like glowing cigar ash. A bunch of others waited in line. I say “a bunch”—I could swear they were fifty thousand, but the cave wasn’t big enough for ten. Angela seemed to know all of them. “Tell them what you guys are, Tenacity.”

“Depends. Do we get the light?”

“You saved me. I guess I owe youse everything.”

“Say yes or say no, you liar.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Tenacity swung round to face Pirate. “Whaddayaget if you cross a mare and a donkey?”

Pirate looked at me. I shrugged. “A mule,” he said.

“I figured you’d know that, you dumb hick. How about love and hate?”

“What do you mean?”

“Hypostat ‘em. Make ’em into things. Mix ’em together. Then hypodyne ’em back to ideers. So whaddayaget?”

“I dunno. Ambivalence, I guess.”

Tenacity pounded himself in the middle—a hollow clang. “That’s one for the hick. Ambivalence, come round here, buddy.”

It was Ambivalence… I think. A big guy, sort of. He danced over to Tenacity’s side and took a theatrical bow, or else he stayed where he was. Pirate shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

“Sure you do. You’re doin’ great, hick. Now tell me, whaddayaget if you cross
Veltschmerz,
quicksilver, and aversion to light with genital crabs, death by water, and compassion?” Tenacity shot a mean look at me and warned, “You shut up, you big beefsteak. You know this one.”

“I give up,” Pirate said. “Whaddayaget?”

“Me.” He spat used motor oil in Pirate’s face and led the others laughing.

“You’re those things. Are you those things? I heard about you. You’re
whaddayas.
”

“I got one more, whiz kid, when the mestizos here put a lid on it.” The laughter, like sausages twisting in their skins, like the smell of the ocean, like grippe, like nostalgia, like two-and-a-half feet, then a bus or a flat stone, stopped. “Whaddayaget if you cross a man with an asshole, hick?”

“Okay—what?”

“Haw! Just another asshole, Jack. Just another asshole.”

“They’re whaddayagets, all right.” Angela was laughing right along with them. “Them old engineers, the ones ‘at dreamed up the City, the ones ‘at was around when the first transcats hit, they
come up with these fellers.”

“With our mommas and poppas, y’mean,” Tenacity bellowed.

“With their mommas and poppas, I mean. They were just figurin’ out how to build the City—you know—from pieces of people all put together in one body, pieces of hearts, pieces of minds, and guts and gizmos too. All that. These guys were the first stats and dynes.”

“Our mommas and poppas were, you mean.”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean. I’m sorry, Tenacity. Do you want me to give you the light now?”

He bowed his baby head, and Angela rubbed him all over while the other whaddayagets cooed and gossiped—and all. Angela greased him like a newborn. I was starting to warm toward her, watching that, but I didn’t fall for it. She said, “It’ll only work when it’s pitch dark, ‘City.”

“The big dope told me that. Now what do you want us to do with the jerk up Countenance’s nose?”

I said, “Blow it.” Tenacity smiled. He gave the face-rats a nod, and they snorted No Mind out into the soup on the cave floor.

He was a mess. “What happened?”

Tenacity readied to blast the booger, but Angela shook her head. “Don’t you know what you did, No Mind?”

“I was stuck back there. You helped me out. Then… no. What happened? What did I do?”

I couldn’t tell if No Mind was being straight with us.

“No Mind, you almost killed me,” Angela said.

“I what??”

“You don’t remember?”

“I must have been half-crazy. I was stuck there for a long time. I must have lost my mind.”

Pirate said, “He was wet, cold, scared as hell. Maybe he’s telling the truth.”

Tenacity rolled his eyes. “Haw!”

But it was hard not to believe No Mind, pathetic as he was. He
didn’t look to have the guts you need to be a good liar: “I must have been holding onto you the same way I held onto the rocks, Angela. Honestly, I was in such a state, crushed and half-drowned, I guess I didn’t know your neck from a chockstone. I just want to get into the City. That’s all I ever wanted. I heard you were helping Big Man and Pirate in, so I followed. That’s the truth. Let me go with you. I’m sorry I hurt you. Please let me come along.”

Angela straightened her back and took a deep breath, as if she were starting to sit zen. She was still rubbing her throat. She lowered her eyes, then suddenly raised them again and shook her head. It was just as if she’d tried to think of something but drawn a blank. She tried again, and the same thing happened.

“Please, Angela…”

“I dunno,” she said finally. “Look. I don’t like the way it’s streamin’ in here. It’s maybe flooded, up the way we first come. Them squeezes fill up quick if it’s rainin’ hard; I don’t wanna send you back into that. But I dunno, No Mind. You scrunched my tubes good. I gotta go think this over a little while. All youse stick here, Okay? Tenacity, you’ll be a good host, huh? Show ’em your whaddayaget stuff. I’ll be back in a little while. No Mind ain’t gonna do nobody no harm with these hodags around for coppers.”

Tenacity was dancing around the chamber, shining on other whaddayagets, pleased to bursting with his own light. “Hey, maybe they’ll all be dead when you get back, Jello—or maybe not. Who knows? Things are just like that down here.”

Jello—I mean, Angela—left us. I watched her make her way down the passage and belly into the slant. That corkscrew song drifted back to me: “I’M NOT YOU-OOH! I’M NOT YOU-OOH!” Some songs stain your mind so, they’re hard to wash out.

Suds didn’t like it. He would open a cabinet door and there would be a big mouth in there screaming at him to shut it. Sometimes a floor board would chew him out for stepping on it—it was somebody’s rib or spine, it would say.