Zen City (15 page)

“When a pickpocket meets a holy man, he only sees the holy man’s wallet. This thing is Nirvana. Let’s push in, Sudsy. I bet we melt right into it. I bet it just takes away all your troubles, just like that.”

“It bounced me back like a high power line.”

“Just press on through, honey. Hold my hand. We’ll do it together. Don’t be afraid to die. I know it, I feel it—if we brave that barrier, it’s just like passing Control. That’s the last ego barrier, Sudsy. We’ve got to prove our trust in Buddha Amitabha, and then we’ll be free. Come on.”

Suds gritted his teeth—and held Virya’s hand. His shoulders were up to his ears. He squeezed his whiskered face up like a prune. His stomach knotted, his toes bunched into the balls of his feet as if they were strapped into bindings. Suds closed his eyes. Slowly, he moved forward with Virya, she resolute, he using every remaining second to complete his tally of grievances against her and life generally.

His skin tingled. The follicles of all his bodily hair prickled, as when the charged skin of a balloon passed over it. Suds and Virya moved slowly enough this time to sense each gradation: the tingle, the prickle, the buzz as of a limb un-numbed, and then
the pain, like walking into an iron maiden and shutting the door from inside.

* * *

The whaddayas scooped the fleeing monks into their claws, pockets, teeth, anuses, mouths—and memories the shape and toughness of cattle cars. They crowed victory as they paraded their captives back toward the caves. En route, they collected No Mind, jelloed, and Clara, woozy, into their main column. Then they felt the transcategorical buckling the ether between their bones.

The transcategorical whipped its great tail. The On Ramp rippled and split. It stopped raining. It started raining.

In the sudden stillness, Pirate sighed. His wrists were still tied behind his back, his mouth stuffed and bound shut. He lay on the ground where the monks had dropped him. He was staring up at the sky. Parts of Big Man occluded his sky for a moment—Big Man’s head, his shoulder, his hand on Pirate’s cheek. There was a troubled look in Big Man’s eyes. Big Man’s mouth was moving, and Pirate heard sounds coming out, but he didn’t know what they meant. For the moment, he had forgotten that the sounds were supposed to refer to something.

He was not on the karst. He was in a basin on Mercury, many years hence—there and elsewhere past naming. The thing on the karst was dead skin. It was what he had seen the day Suds had tattooed “Party down!” around his navel and Pirate had ceased to do zazen. Only now he saw it without bitterness. He had no ego to grate against the transcat’s ego. Falling, bleeding, dragging—somewhere, it had dropped away. Everything was simply factual. Pirate was dead skin.

The transcat shivered through the space-time of the karst, the City, the century, and was gone.

“Pirate? Pirate? Can you hear me, buddy?”

“Mmmffggghh!”

“What?” Big Man ungagged him.

Pirate spat out the bunched cloth. “I said, go take care of Angela, you ugly sonuvabitch. I’m fine. Just untie me first… Don’t you ever brush your teeth?”

Big Man kissed him loudly on the mouth and ran to Angela.

“Hey, my wrists!” But Pirate didn’t really care. The sky was clear, as it always was above the karst. The sun was setting slowly into the ring of mountains. He didn’t know which one he was—the sun, the sky, the mountains, the plain, or one of the mammalian bipeds lying on the earth, two of them dead. Maybe he was one of the live ones scurrying about, or just their sound, or all or none of them. It didn’t seem important. He was sweetly tired, and it felt good just to breathe.

Big Man took Angela’s hands. “You’re all right.”

Tenacity hopped to Angela’s shoulder and skewered Big Man with a squint. “Tag!” he said. “You’re all right too, beefsteak. The madness has lifted. The heart has cleared. God’s in his heaven. Is that what all this bullshit was for?”

Angela said, “That’s what all this bullshit was for. I love you, Big Man.”

“I know it, darling,” said Big Man.

“I’m gonna puke now,” Tenacity said. “Don’t let it distract you. Humans just do that to me sometimes. Excuse me.” He jetted to the parade of whaddayagets. “Give me one of them monks, you astigmatisms. I want someone to vomit on.”

Tenacity vomited. “There’s an eloquent upchuck for you,” he gasped between heaves, wiping chunks of syllables from something like a mouth.

The monk he was clutching had nearly made it out of his robes. Covered in Tenacity’s horrifying vomitus, he screamed and scrambled, face stretched like an exploding gum wad. Tenacity told him, “Nowadays, they call it ‘the City.’ It’s using us all to whip up
joriki
. It’s using us one against the other, like pairs of muscles, see? Agonist, antagonist: that’s how you get things done. The City makes Angela leave and come back with the oaf here—excuse me while I wipe—makes No Mind try to sow distrust, makes your roshi try to kill Angela or Rinzai, everybody ganging up…”

“Anybody got some coke syrup? Dramamine? I can’t keep throwing up like this. Big Man, you’re a firecracker in a trashcan, and the City is lighting you and clapping on the lid. It’s all to make you blow and blow big, to blow you inside the City.” He burped loudly, and the monk at last shook loose and ran away. Tenacity staggered back toward Big Man. “Consider yourself tagged.”

Big Man stared into Angela’s eyes. “You’re hurting,” he said.

“It’s Janus in me. We gotta enter the City, Big Man. Tenacity is right. It’s what I saw in No Mind’s eyes back there in the cave. That’s what it’s all for. We’re bendin’ for it. We’re pushin’ for it. We’re what quickens it all again. You still wanna, don’tcha?”

“You’re talking to a piece of the goddam City, darling. I’ve got Doubt Mass like a black hole. I’ve got
joriki
like a supernova. Show me the City, Angela.”

* * *

Rinzai rode on Angela’s back. Vacantly, he watched the City loom larger as they approached it. He hadn’t spoken since seeing Mukan’s corpse. Rinzai’s face was white, and there was a hollow look in his eyes. When Tenacity japed, he didn’t laugh. When Pirate chucked him under the chin, he neither smiled nor frowned.

“Yeah, the City reamed him between the ears,” was Tenacity’s tag. “Listen, I could hot rod him back to the whaddayas. They could fix him quick, once them monks is cooked and eaten.”

“Just wait till we get in,” Angela said, “back in, I mean.”

They advanced toward the City. The volcanic earth was hard and hot. They skirted sinkholes and sudden pits but the swells and barrows they marched straight over, eyes magnetized to the dark mound. It loomed larger and larger before them against the dwindling, rosy light. Venus was already pricking through. Jupiter appeared between the saw teeth of the hills.

Big Man led them. His pace quickened as the edges of the City came into focus. “It’s a place,” he said. “That’s what I can’t get over. It’s an actual place.”

Angela shifted Rinzai on her back—dead weight. “Don’t think that way, Big Man. That thing is just how it looks from here.”

“No. That’s the City. Come on.” He leapt forward, still holding Angela’s hand. Their arms pulled taut, like a stretched
cord, and Angela’s hand fell away. Big Man vaulted across a small swallet and broke toward the City. He galloped straight ahead, enjoying the wind of his own movement, then slowed and came to a stop a hundred yards before the thing.

The smell of it stopped him—sickly sweet, rotting. Daylight was disappearing, and the moon, just past full, had not yet risen above the mountains, but he thought he saw maggots swarming on the City’s surface. Dreams swelled out at him, bad dreams, chaotic stories with broken logic. They badgered and sucked till his mind, like the City, teemed with maggots.

Angela was holding his hand again. She had put Rinzai down. Pirate stood behind, shushing Tenacity. “Do you hear it, Big Man?” Angela said.

“This is the City?”

“It was. You gotta go in. It changes now. You’re the only one who can turn it around, see? You’re the brick the maker threw away, the thing that’s needed in the end. Make the rot into fertilizer, Big Man. Grow flowers.”

“Why couldn’t I come in through Control?”

“You can eat stuff through your mouth and gut. You can make your food into a part of you the same as all the other parts. But if you need something really new, a new heart, a new brain, you have to open up the chest, the skull. You have to cut. You have to hurt and bleed.”

“This isn’t enlightenment,” Big Man said. “This isn’t the buddha dharma. This isn’t what I’ve been doing zazen for.”

“Yes, it is. This is the perfect City the old guys made. Only thing is, as soon as you stat it, it changes. There’s always somethin’ missin’. And you’re the missin’ thing, Big Man.”

“It smells bad.”

“In a minute it won’t.”

“You’re still my picture-window girl, aren’t you, Janus?”

Tenacity bit Big Man’s heel. “Punch in, you dumb beefsteak. You came this far. Don’t say good-bye either. I’ll see you in the
funny papers.”

“Good-bye, Tenacity,” he said.

Pirate and Tenacity watched them walk toward the City. At last Rinzai looked up—“Angela!” She didn’t hear him. Big Man and Angela were very close to the City now, their bodies aglow with strange electricity. Rinzai broke forward, but Pirate held him.

Rinzai began to cry. “They’re flowing in—just like water.”

“Yeah, that’s it.” Tenacity nuzzled him, then jetted back. “They’re home now, kiddo.”

Rinzai wrapped his arms around Pirate and held on tight. “Pirate—take care of me?”

For a brief moment the sky brightened—zodiacal light—then darkness fell.

* * *

“Climb down, Virya. Climb down, damn it all to hell. I said, climb down.” The hole down to the bone-pit passage was only one-person wide. They were tired from running over each other, yank and leapfrog, from the City. Their skin was seared, their nerves shattered.

“Wait a minute, Suds. What was that?”

“Amitabha! A busted muffler just shot by.”

“A what?”

“It just shot by and went back up into the caves, so help me God… Will you climb down?”

Virya chinned up out of the hole. “Something’s going on.”

Suds swore and stamped his foot, but something was going on. A stiff wind blew against them from the City. They squinted and huddled against it. Like tumbleweed and road debris, dreams grazed them, smacked them, stuck in their cuffs, tangled into Suds’s beard, and made Virya’s eyes tear.

“Is it a transcat?” Suds asked.

“Uh uh. It’s the City. Something’s going on.”

“I don’t like it.”

Bent low to avoid the push of the wind, Pirate was walking toward them, out of the darkness, from the direction of the City. Rinzai hopped and scuttled along.

“Hey!” Virya called. “Hey! Hey! Pirate, did they get in?”

“Yeah.” Pirate didn’t slow down. He was walking on past them.

“Wait up. Why didn’t you go in?” said Virya.

“Why didn’t
you
?”

Virya shouted against the wind, “We could’ve, Pirate. We almost did. We will, too, only not now. We gotta train more. More zazen. What about you?”

“I’m where I belong… Come on, Rinzai. Stay close to me. I’ll teach you how to cook couch grass. I got it all worked out.”

Suds was grumbling again. The wind was cold. A stray crow winged and squawked, unequal to the dark, lost among dripstone columns, colliding into them, losing feathers. “Let’s climb down, Virya, for Amitabha’s sakes.”

She started climbing in, then stopped halfway and called to Pirate, “Hey, if you’re going back through the Dharma Cave, we got a shortcut here, Pirate.”

He didn’t look back. He hugged Rinzai as they walked toward the mouth of the cave, then down the incline to the chute, where the cataract had dwindled to a thin stream. There was no wind here, but they were up to their knees in water, and there was a hard climb up.

END

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