Zen City (4 page)

“Go for what?”

“For a night-light, for the love of Pete. You’re stupid, you know that? We just want some good light, that’s all, and in case you hadn’t noticed, you glow.”

“You wanted to use me for a lamp?”

“Are you going to put me down?”

“What were you going to do, kill me?”

“Would you still glow like that even if you were dead?”

“None of your goddam business,” I said. “Hey, how do you know who Angela is, anyway?”

“Put me down and I’ll tell you.”

“Okay. Talk.”

“Put me down first.”

I could catch him again. He was no bigger than my shin. I could bear-hug the lot of them to pus and rust. Sure, I put him down.

Tenacity shook the dignity back into his shoulders, a rim like a tin can’s, just below his chin and ears. He pursed his baby lips, like someone who has too good a joke in mind, trying to stop the spread of a smile that had begun at the corners of his eyes. “Everybody knows Angela,” he said, and he leapt up, turning a hundred-eighty degrees in midair, the way a rabbit will, to disappear into the hole again.

I stuck my head in after him, but I could hardly see a thing. There must have been a little light down there from some source I didn’t know about, because my face was not glowing. “Hey, Tenacity,” I said. “See? It wouldn’t have worked anyway. I only glow when it’s pitch dark. I’m no good to you.” I heard a huffing sound, and suddenly there were twenty dream-creatures staring back at me from clumps in niches and ruts in the floor, walls and ceiling of Tenacity’s hole.

I pulled my head out in a hurry, and stumbled away from there, but I still had the afterimage: Tenacity standing in the center holding a sharp, pointed dripstone like a lance. Huddled around him were creatures shaped and colored like thoughts and feelings, or so I imagined, and like garbage-bin paraphernalia. I saw: a red snake whose flared nostrils seemed to open into my own guts; two spined birds dripping corrosive brown fluid but whose wings were so sensuously curved that I began to have a
hard-on; a rat that was all face, a human face, so that its every twitch and step formed a new expression; a large beetle with folded wings of lapis lazuli and hammered gold, whose hissing filled me with ideas for which I have no words—ways of flying inside things and of bearing children before one’s own birth; a distributor cap with a grooved tongue that seemed to be licking my intuition, whether that makes sense or not… Then everything faded to the blue blotches and red capillary fuzz of my own eyelids inside.

Opening my eyes, I saw the junction room again, with the keyhole opening before me, the wide, slanted passage on one side, and the whaddayagets’ hole on the other, still too close to my feet. I stepped farther back.

“Everybody’s good for something,” Tenacity shouted. “That’s what the City’s all about, hick. Everybody uses everybody.”

“What do you know about it?” I said.

“Ask Angela.”

Up ahead, Pirate was calling, “Come on, Big Man!” He was probably done screwing Angela. I ducked in through the keyhole and started down the passage, shattering gypsum flowers against my shoulders and back as I pushed along. There was somebody scrambling in the tube way behind. It was not a whaddayaget. It was a human or a large animal. I could hear it clawing and panting.

It was twilight on the broken plateau of the Old On Ramp. A dull gibbous moon, like a shell seen in a tide pool, brightened as the twilight dwindled. A breeze was picking up—the faint smell of pine—and the parched grass stuttered in its cracks. The chrome doorhandles of the Blue Plymouth Hotel were no longer hot to the touch.

“Are you sure he’s gone this time?” the woman said. “I didn’t like it when he bounced us, Suds. And you weren’t a lot of protection.” She was pretty in a hard, wind-burned, Okie sort of way. She was wearing a mechanic’s jumpsuit with the top half bunched down, exposing small, tan breasts, tight as muscles; her shoulder straps were tucked into the legs.

Her hair was not so business-like. She took care to preserve its light curls, curls to the left, like Buddha’s, one of the thirty-two holy signs. She had never taken to zazen, but she had that. That and her Sanskrit name—Virya.
Perseverance.

“Sure he’s gone—trying to backdoor the City, the jerk. Pirate went with him. Open the door and let’s get in.” Suds was all whiskers, black and unkempt, hiding big lips and a chinless jaw and doing nothing for his watery eyes. He was wearing only a loincloth made of car upholstery, but over one arm he carried a pelt big enough to blanket them both. They climbed into the back seat and immediately rolled down the windows; it was still warm inside, though they knew the night would be cold. The car seat crunched under their buttocks—it was stuffed with dried chaff from Pirate’s couch-grass experiment.

“I could take Big Man, you know,” Suds said.

“Sure,” said Virya, “when the crows come.”

Suds leaned against her, pressing her down onto the seat. His chest expanded against her breasts, and they heaved there, forearm to forearm, clasping hands, lips locking, when his foot
kicked against something under the seat, and someone started talking down there: “
Abject
—humiliating, wretched, despicable, contemptible.
Abject
is a power word that can boost your verbal mileage in a multitude of situations.” The voice was oddly cheerful.

Virya pushed Suds away. “What’s that?”

Suds reached down to pick up the voice. “In
abject
silence, the lad sat facing the corner.” It was a black, plastic cassette-tape recorder/radio, an old Sears Panasonic. “
Coup de grace
—deathblow, a capping gesture. He pinned his writhing victim against the wall and then delivered the
coup de grace.
” He silenced it with a random punch.

Suds whistled and shook his head. “That Big Man. Busy, busy.”

“It doesn’t get him in, though,” Virya said.

“Smarts aren’t worth shit. When I get in, it’ll be because I lost myself making it with you, baby.”

“You’re sweet. I’m going to start doing regular zazen. That’s what I’m going to do”—rubbing her nose against one shoulder—“unless I can find a shortcut. I’ve got some karma to work out.”

“Yeah, karma. Where were we?” He took her thigh into his hand.

“Wait a minute.” She clamped her hand around his wrist and pushed it away. “What else has he got there? Stick a few in and see, will you?”

Suds glared at her; he fished up a few beeohtees from the pile below the back seat, clumsily, to punish her for pushing him away. The pictures on the cases conveyed nothing to either of them, and the words were too long to struggle through. Suds removed
Ten Days to Greater Word Power,
and slapped in something else. The new one said:

“Boring.” Suds punched a button to silence and eject it, then found another tape.

They listened to Hesse’s
Siddhartha
awhile, then to a little of Kapleau’s
Three Pillars of Zen,
about how “Doubt Mass” gets you enlightened, and to a little more of a novel, Hilton’s
Lost Horizon,
about a man freezing to death as he wandered about looking for a way into the City, sounded like. Those were the three on top. The next one,
Great Bible Stories
read by someone who introduced himself by the unlikely name of “Charlton Heston,” had them longing for a couple of Circenses. Suds opened the Panasonic, threw that cassette out the window, put back the first one,
Ten Days to Greater Word
Power—“Considerate of you,” Virya said—and slammed the lid down, inadvertently pushing the ON switch at the same time.

“The plural of
coup de grace
is
coups de grace.
” There was a crackling noise, and then the voice changed. Suds started to switch it off.

“Wait a minute. What’s that?”

“It’s just the battery running down, Virya.”

“No, it’s not. I know who that is.”

“No you don’t.”

“Shush. Gimme.”

Suds shrugged and handed her the tape recorder. Virya turned it off, waited a few seconds, and turned it on again; sometimes that seemed to bring the juice back. It worked—a little. The deep, slow voice, like a storm door on rusted hinges, picked up a little:

A boy was leaning in through the window. “Hey, that’s Angela,” he said. Virya shut off the machine. Suds took a swipe at the boy and managed to cuff him on the ear as he pulled his head out.

“Who invited you, you vanny brat?”

He was about fourteen and smelled of sandalwood, the incense of choice at the ’69 Ford Econoline Center. He had shaved his head—an affectation; it was not required of neophytes at the Econoline. He was not quite bringing off the austerity to which he aspired: he was densely freckled and had cheeks the color of apricots. The robe he wore was old, grease-stained from top to bottom, and much too large for him. “Jeez, I just came to tell you about the grims. That was Angela, wasn’t it? Is she on a beeohtee?”

“What grims?” Suds barked.

“Japanese, lots of them, maybe a hundred, coming down Highway 90. They’ll be here by morning. Was that Angela or what?”

“They’ll be heading for the City,” Suds said. “If they think they can hang out on the Old On Ramp, there’s gonna be trouble.”

“We always like the Jap grims at the Econoline. They got a lot to teach you.”

“
We!
” Suds howled. “Listen to the kid. Now it’s
we.
He’s been there—what, a month?”

“Five weeks.”

“How’s your hypostat, Rinzai? Flat yet?”

The boy, Rinzai, didn’t answer.

“How did you hear about the grims?” Virya asked him.

“No Mind told us.”

“Hail to the chief,” Suds snickered. “How did your precious No Mind find out about it?”

“TV.”

“I forgot he lives in the suburb.”

“No Mind said they were marching and singing,” Rinzai said. Then he started to sing what the Japanese grims were singing. He lifted his knees high as if he were marching in a military parade:

“I love the grims,” Suds laughed. “They come, and all your vannies throw away the dead crystal sets they’ve been showing off—they’d be embarrassed in front of somebody with the real article. Hey, I scoop them up and make jewelry out of ‘em, don’t I, Virya?” Suds rolled up the window in Rinzai’s face.

Rinzai ran over to Virya’s window. “Play some more beeohtee. I like Angela. What did she mean, she’s done all she’s supposed to?”

“Shouldn’t you be sitting zen over at the van, honey?” Virya asked him.

“It’s break. Come on.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to talk or look up.”

“Come on. Play it. I’ll get into the City.”

Suds laughed, “He’ll get in—like Big Man and Pirate, through
the back door.”

“Back door?” Rinzai cocked his head.

“Leave the kid alone,” said Virya.

“Play some more beeohtee, Suds,” said Rinzai. “I like Angela. What did she mean, she’s nothing but jazz?”

“He thinks Angela is his mother,” Suds cracked.

“Shut up, Suds.” Virya elbowed him.

“And some Jap grim is his dad.” Suds elbowed her back.

“Break’s over, Rinzai.” All at once, No Mind himself was standing behind him, outside the Blue Plymouth Hotel. He had a skeletal face, thin dry lips, eyes as pale as a timber wolf’s.

Rinzai stood erect so suddenly that he forgot where he was and banged his head against the window casing. Neither Virya nor Suds said a word.

No Mind stood like a mountain, his feet planted shoulder-width apart, hands clasped below his navel. The square sleeves of his starched brown robe hung neatly from his forearms like cabinet doors.

“Big Man and Pirate are getting into the City a back way.” Rinzai
gasshoed
to No Mind—palms pressed together, bowing from the waist. Maybe the information would excuse him.

“A back way into the City?” No Mind’s eyes narrowed. “They were going to the Cave of the Dharma…” No Mind stopped as if he had suddenly become aware that he was not alone. He relaxed his face into a vanny half-smile. “Return to your seat, Rinzai. Face the wall. When the Japanese grims come, we want them to see what good sitters we are.”

“Yes, teacher.” Rinzai ran toward the van, where a score of brown-robed sitters were settling onto their denim cushions. They had spread tarps and rugs over the asphalt beside the van to do their meditation on.

Virya stared at No Mind. He lingered a moment: deep samadhi. Then he spied Virya looking at him, and he blinked. He shook his sleeves and walked back to the van.

* * *

No Mind threw open the back door and climbed in. “Get out, all of you.” The five disciples huddled inside had been examining a seating chart for the current crop of aspirants at the Econoline Center. “I want to be alone.” They filed out, heads down, and shut the doors behind them.

No Mind took his encouragement stick from the altar on the dash. He had carved it slowly in the days before he’d had any followers, before he had entered the suburb, when he was still living by himself among the trees beyond the rest area up Route 90. He held the stick close to his face to smell the linseed oil again. He sat cross-legged near the panel door and ran his fingers over the smooth grain.