Zen City (2 page)

Angela jumped to the fore. “To the true practitioner, noise and silence are the same,” she said. I did a double take—I did that a lot with Angela. She was always coming up with things that sounded like aphorisms from the ancient sages, but they weren’t. They just bubbled out of her ad lib. How did she do it? The drummers all laughed. Pirate nodded and stuck his tongue out at the vannies.

“Look,” the van woman said. “Everybody wants to get into the City. You’re the same. We’re the same. We need to work together, don’t we?”

“Then come on and dance,” one of our folks shouted.

“This year,” the vanny said, “eight people have left the ’69 Ford Econoline Center and been accepted directly into the City. Six more entered the City after less than a month in the Cave of the Dharma. How many of your people have gotten through?” She set her jaw and swaggered toward Angela, ready to tumble.

Another vanny woman grabbed her elbow. “Don’t give way to anger, Clara. Remember what No Mind said.”

“How come No Mind lives in the suburb and not in the City itself?” Pirate taunted. “How come No Mind’s not a Cityzen?”

“No Mind can get in whenever he wants to,” said Clara. “He’s a Bodhisattva. He’s been in the City and come out again. He only stays here to shepherd us through.”

“Sure.”

Angela said, “The true City ain’t a special place. The true City is anywheres a clear heart is.”

Everybody cheered. Even the drummers stopped for a moment to shout, “Yes!” I could have killed Angela, I felt so small next to her. I scowled at her and then marched straight back to the Blue Plymouth Hotel. There was a couple making out in my back seat, a hairy ape and a tough girl in overalls. “Get out,” I said. “I’m back.” I yanked the guy out and the girlfriend followed.

The guy kept saying, “No problem. No problem.”

The girl said, “Sorry, Big Man.”

I climbed in, slammed the door shut, locked it, snapped the sunshades over the windows and lay down for a snooze, but Angela came over. “Let me in, Big Man,” she said. I didn’t say a word. I just concentrated on my breathing. “Come on,” she said. “Let me in, Big Man.” I could do that. I could shut out the sound. I could breathe in and breathe out for hours, for days maybe, without anything intruding at all. “I love you, Big Man. Why do you do shit like that? Why did you run off like that? Why don’t you let me in?” She started to cry. “Don’t you know I’m only here for you? I guess I shouldn’t say that, huh? I guess I should just do what I’m s’posta and not feel nothing, right? Well, I can’t do it, Big Man.”

“Shut up and go to sleep, Angela,” I said.

I reached under the seat for my beeohtee. I shoved the earplug in and turned on whatever was in the player. The voice was slowing down a little, but there was still some juice in the batteries; if it ran down while Angela was hanging around I could just pretend to be listening anyway. The beeohtee that happened to be on was
Ten Days to Greater Word Power,
the last thing I’d been listening to before I split for Control. The new words were “stultify” and “harbinger.” I listened to every beeohtee I could get my hands on. I traveled three days once to a battery stash I’d heard about. Before
Ten Days,
it had been
The Doors of Perception
by Aldous Huxley,
The Natural Way to Draw
by Nicolaides, and St. Augustine’s
City of God.
Before that, a Zane
Gray, I think.

The passenger-side front door opened up and Pirate’s tattooed belly shoved in. “Excuse me, Angela,” he said sweetly. He sidled in past her, shut the door in her face, and locked it again. “I’ve had it,” Pirate said, settling down on his side in fetal position with his head behind the steering wheel. “I’m done with today. That’s enough. I bloodied those little fuckers, Big Man. I thought it would feel good, but it doesn’t. It feels like shit. I’m going to sleep. Do you hear me, Big Man? I said, I’m going to sleep.”

“I hear you, Pirate,” I said at last. Angela had finally gone away. I put the beeohtee back under the seat. “You know what? I’m getting into the goddam City, Pirate. I’m getting in, and you’re going to help me.”

“Dream on,” he said. “Hey, what the hell is it with you and Angela, anyway? She’s a prize, man.”

“Yeah, she’s a prize. I’m not.”

“What the hell are you talking about, a guy like you? You’re buff, you’re smart, you know the road, and you read all the books.”

I shouldn’t have said what I said then. I was tired, and Pirate was laying me open like a mother’s kiss, making me feel like spilling it all. “I read them,” I said, “but I’m still on the wrong side of the City line, Pirate. Nobody out here is worth shit.”

“Me included, I suppose.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Angela’s out here too, Big Man.”

“She doesn’t have to be.”

“What?”

“Something’s going on with her, Pirate. She understands too much. She’s too quick.”

“She talks like a guttersnipe.”

“It’s an act.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Where did she used to go when she left my bed at night? How stupid does she think I am, tell me that? Were you the one messing around with her?”

“Number One,” said Pirate, “you’re not mad about me taking Angela—which, by the way, I’m not. That’s a cover. What your real beef is, I wish I knew.”

“Right. Fuck you. What’s Number Two?”

Pirate shook out his black mane and yawned. “Did I have a Number Two?”

“Why else have Number One?”

“OK, Number Two: I’m going to sleep.” In a minute, he was snoring.

* * *

When you can’t get in through the front door, you try the back.

The moon had been waning, a thin crescent, when I entered the Cave of the Dharma, coaxing Pirate along. Now it was nearly full: I dared to peek up now and then during ritual processions near the mouth of the cave.

During zazen, my back was straight, my eyes half-closed. My legs were crossed tight, right foot on the left thigh, left foot on the right thigh—perfect full lotus and nothing but. My thumbs touched lightly at the level of my navel, my palms one on the other a hand’s span below. Guys to the right and left of me, some of them Econoline grads, scratched and wheezed and whimpered—not me though. My samadhi, my zazen concentration, can’t be beat. My only problem was the zendors. Like hooded snakes in their cauls and black robes, a couple were gunning for me with big “encouragement sticks” as I sat with the other City applicants, facing the wall.

They didn’t use hypostat scanners at the Cave of the Dharma; everything was up to the zendors. If a zendor thought you needed a whack to get you going or to slow you down, there was
no court of appeals. You took it because you knew it was the only way you’d ever get into the City. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be there in the first place. Of course, the same thing goes for the zendors themselves; you understand, they weren’t in the City yet either.

…That’s what we chanted every day, as the zendors carted off the three classes of the incapacitated: the dead, the ill, and the enlightened. Only the enlightened got to enter the City; they were revived and bused over to Control. The dead, the starved, and those struck too hard, too often, or in the wrong place by zealous zendors, or squeezed to death by their own frantic aspiration, were carried to the bone yard. They were heaped into pits full of skeletons and rotted clean under their boulder lids. I don’t know where the sick ones went.

I’m big, but I bleed easily. My robe was already stiff with blood around the shoulders and neck where the stick had landed. Every time a zendor rounded the corner, moving away from us into the next aisle of sitters, Pirate leaned over a little and whispered something nasty. Here’s a grab bag of Pirate’s observations on the zendors, the “teeth and talons” of the Cave of the Dharma, the City’s purgatory, set in the mountain rim of the City, on the far side of the circle of mountains from Control’s entry terminal:

“Yes, you do want it,” I whispered. “You know as well as I do that nobody’s really alive outside the City. The best of us is a zed to them. We can’t do what the Cityzens do. We drag thoughts like seaweed on a sinker. In the City, man, they’ve got no self, no sinker. They’re free.”

WHACK, WHACK! WHACK, WHACK!

“Fuck ’em.”

We worked meal time just the way I planned. When the zendors came round with their buckets of grits and weak tea, Pirate and I begged off in the ritual manner by inverting our nested wooden bowls. We raised our shoulders to be excused to pee.

Beyond the stalagmites separating the latrine from the sitting area, Pirate and I were alone. Nobody else, zendors included, would skip a meal when there was so little else to amuse one.

“Make it quick,” Pirate snarled. “I can’t keep up a flow for long.”

“Nobody’s listening,” I said. “Have you seen anything?”

“Yeah, Big Man. The wall.”

“There’s a way in, Pirate. I know there is. There’s a secret way from the Cave of the Dharma.”

“How do you know that, Big Man?”

“Angela. When we were doing it, back when, she said it once.
She knows things, Pirate. Maybe she’s slept with a zendor.”

“So how come she isn’t here instead of me?”

“I don’t want Angela,” I said.

“Say, even if there was a back door, what good would it do you if you weren’t hypodyned? Don’t you know, man, the City is a soup? My man wants to strut in with his pecs and his quads, his bones and his blues, and his bedroll on his back, but nobody in the City takes up a square inch. Nobody’s got his own liver, Big Man. Nobody’s got a name. They all get hypodyned at the Control door, and then they’re purely jazz.”

I said, “You’re wrong, that’s all.”

“Well,” he said, “I didn’t see any secret door. You can piss here till the crows come. I’m done.” He walked back to the rows of sitting cushions to catch the last scoop of grits.

The Cave of the Dharma was old. It had been used for thousands of years. Long before the City, pilgrims had come to sit zazen in these dim recesses. The niches in the rock that now held electric lights on rheostats once contained kerosene lamps, and before that, candles, and before that, rags soaked in meat drippings. Way back then, people were starting to conceive of the City; they knew they had to be alone to damp out the mind waves and get rid of the idea of self-gain—like I couldn’t do.

I squatted and made a face to buy time in case any zendor was looking. Another City applicant, a bald Econo guy, a late-comer with whiskers so thick they almost looked like a false beard, had joined me in the pissoir but was standing far away and paying no attention. For the jillionth time, I flooded all my samadhi power into the rock walls of the cave, scouring the surface with my mind, feeling all the jags and crevices: nothing.

Well, one thing. Useless, on a broad stalagmite, above a cracked pool of urine crystals, there was an inscription contrived to look like an ecstatic piece of zen graffiti; actually, it was an officially sanctioned pep talk excerpted from an old text of the Western Canon—“Epitome of The Gimlet of True Cityzen
Practice, A Universal Recommendation to Sit Zen.” The writing spiraled around the stalagmite. I knew what it said; Angela knew the whole “Gimlet” and used to recite it to me:

The guy who first wrote that, I could have arm-wrestled him right through the table. I could have out-thought, out-felt, and out-sat him. But he was probably a Cityzen now, and I was still a hick. Discretely, eyes down, hands folded together in front of my solar plexus, I made my way to the stalagmite. Maybe it was hinged. Maybe it was loaded. Maybe it opened or slid, rose up or drilled down—“…
fall into the wondrous City!
”—carrying a person with it. I sneaked behind the stalagmite, out of the stick men’s line of sight. I hugged the hard, damp thing, pushing, pulling, lifting, jamming: nothing.

Nose and forehead on cold rock, I could see, barely in focus, the piece of inscription in front of my face:
“…fall into the wondrous City!”
I was an idiot. There was no goddam back door. I had to do zazen.

I gritted my teeth and charged back to the sitting line. The
bearded Econo fell in behind me. The meal had just ended and a horsewhip was being snapped to begin the next round of sitting. “Go home,” I whispered to Pirate before the zendor came around. “I don’t need you. I’m gonna
sit
my way in.”

“Suit yourself, asshole.” He started to get up, but the zendor was there.
WHACK, WHACK! WHACK, WHACK!
I heard the stick slam down on Pirate’s shoulders—“Shit.”—then the zendor’s footsteps closing in behind me, and the stick:

TAP, TAP! TAP
…
tap?