Zen City (5 page)

Then his fingers found the row of tiny lines he had notched on the edge of the handle. “That’s the time I almost got in, but I was trying too hard; the screen clouded up and they sent me back… That time someone from the On Ramp almost saw me, and I had to leave my place in the queue… That was last week—Control’s mistake. I was ready then; he just didn’t like something about me. He should have let me through…”

…A back way…

Then the Voice came, the inner Voice that used No Mind’s body/mind for its tongue, the Voice that had startled and shaken him in the days of the trees off Route 90, the Voice that always seemed to presage enlightenment, but enlightenment never came. The Voice had taught No Mind the charter equations of the City and the modes of practice that would bring him into accord with them. It had shown him the names and forms and rituals to teach to others. It had promised him future glories.

Bobo Shin could come with his entourage of boot-licking Japanese shave-pates. He could boss No Mind around as if he held a franchise for Bobo Shin’s business. But No Mind’s allegiance was to the Voice, his True Nature, his Buddha Mind—that’s
how No Mind thought of it. “It is time to enter the City,” the Voice said. No Mind’s head jerked backward, his jaw dropped open, and he fell to the floor, writhing and drooling. “There is no one more worthy than you. To dwell in the suburb is a dead end, Noble One. Do what you must, but enter the City.”

No Mind’s brain filled with static, as it always did afterwards. He rose. He clenched the stick in his right hand. He tore open the panel door and stormed out among the sitters. “This is no Sunday picnic. This is the Great Matter of Birth and Death. If you don’t settle it now, when will you? The only thing between you and the City is you.” He whirled among them, striking their shoulders and encouraging each one with a shout. No Mind’s disciples fell in behind him to do the same.

* * *

Suds reached over to roll up Virya’s window and then relaxed on top of her. “The only thing between you and the City is you,” he laughed, mocking them.

“You’re bad.” She nuzzled him and bucked his pelvis on the saddle of her hips. “I’m going to get in, Sudsy. I mean it. You want it too, don’t you? Don’t you, Sudsy?”

A few of the beeohtees cracked under his heel as he pressed into her. Virya laughed at his clumsiness and pulled him even closer, then guided him in. “In the City, it’s got to be like this all the time, Sudsy…”

Night was falling. They kissed long and hard, twining and stroking, pulsing and dancing the old dance until they had forgotten which breath belonged to whom and whether they were beginning or ending.

After the night of the gibbous moon, when the grims arrived, No Mind was gone. His disciples made up some excuse, but nobody knew where he was. He had disappeared before dawn and never shown up again, not for the three rounds of zazen before the morning meal nor for the talk he usually gave after the work period.

Bobo Shin Roshi, the pilgrims’ leader, was extremely upset. He was an unusually tall Japanese monk with ears like soup bowls. “Who is greeting us?” he kept demanding. “This is very unusual. I do not think this is acceptable.”

Bobo Shin kept adjusting the earplug of his crystal set, trying to call attention to it. Once or twice he furrowed his brow and squinted as if to listen in, as if it were actually grounded. It irritated him to distraction that most of these hicks didn’t seem to know what it was and what his wearing it meant about him, that he was in direct communication with the City.

His seven companions stirred about the van grounds in eddies of nervosity, repeating, “This is not acceptable.” The Econoline sitters stayed far away, as if the visitors were charged particles of the wrong sign.

Clara, red hair and freckles, the vanny spokesman, tried making them nettle tea. “Not acceptable,” Bobo Shin said. “We must speak to No Mind. The City is at peril. This is no ordinary grimage. We have been sent from above.”

Bobo Shin was perplexed at the laxity of the On Ramp. Some of the girls at the Chevelle House had propositioned his monks. He himself had been offered something called a Circenses by a malodorous individual who popped a can in his face and sprayed him with fermented hops. Human fecal matter littered the On Ramp, and stinking puddles of urine seeped from under deflated tires where feral children giggled.

Clara prostrated herself before Bobo Shin Roshi, and No Mind’s other disciples did the same. “Get up,” he said. “This is no longer sufficient. I am not just speaking about your City. All the Cities are at peril. Is there no one I can talk to?”

Clara thought this was the prelude to a
mondo,
the sort of verbal test that used to be administered to City applicants by Control before the hypostatic scanners came into use. She responded accordingly: “No one hears Your Eminence, thou of the shaved head and the crystal set. Your Eminence speaks from Emptiness. Only those hear who have gone beyond and are at rest in the City.”

When Bobo Shin yelled and slapped the heel of his hand against his forehead, Clara took it for a sign of approval. The vannies nearby nodded and smiled at one another mystically. Bobo Shin said, “You are all idiots.” He addressed Clara directly: “Come inside this thing with me. You are a complete fool, but I have to give my news to someone.” Pleased by the insult, which she took for praise, Clara led him into the van by the back doors. She shut them in, alone, together.

Bobo Shin sat down and crossed his legs into full lotus posture without using his hands—the first time Clara had ever seen anyone do that. He motioned for her to sit down nearby, and she settled onto her calves as gracefully as a dancer and with equal delight. Bobo Shin lowered his eyes and took a slow, deep breath, then let it out in a thin stream.

He looked up at Clara. “I am not asking you a testing question. I am not talking City talk. My butt is on the floor, my nose is between my eyes, and I am trying not to be distracted by your feminine qualities. On the other hand, I may throw up any minute from the smell of this place. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No.”

“Is that supposed to be a zen answer?”

“No. What about my feminine qualities?”

“Never mind. Just listen. Your City has asked me through the holy crystal set to intervene in order to prevent a great catastrophe. Someone is worming into your City, someone who couldn’t pass Control in an
asamkhya
of
kalpas.
”

“A long time?”

“Correct. He is underground. He is inside the mountain. He is being helped by a renegade called Angela.”

“Angela?!”

“You know her?”

“Only a little. She was with Big Man, but he dumped her.”

“He ceased having sexual intercourse with her,” Bobo Shin translated.

“Correct.”

“Who is Big Man? You must bring Big Man here to talk with me.”

“He’s gone,” said Clara.

“What?”

“Big Man left about a week ago.”

“He went to the Cave of the Dharma,” Bobo Shin conjectured.

“How did you know? He may have gotten into the City by now.”

“Not possible.”

“There was somebody else with him. A guy name of Pirate. ‘Party down.’”

“I beg your pardon?”

“‘Party down!’ That’s what it says on his stomach.”

“On his stomach?”

“It’s a tattoo.”

“You are a complete fool. You should not have been given a position of responsibility. You will never enter the City. I need to speak to No Mind. Where is he? Is he in the suburb? He has a home there, has he not?”

“What’s going on, Roshi?”

“If Big Man arrives at the City, if Angela lets him or anyone
else within breathing distance of the City without going through Control, without stat or dyne, you can kiss your feminine qualities good-bye.”

“My breasts? You’re talking about my breasts?”

Bobo Shin uncrossed his legs and swung himself into the passenger seat. “I will not let myself be distracted,” he said. “This is too important.”

“Are you saying that you want me, Roshi?”

He was staring at No Mind’s little altar on the dash, the incense pot, the statuette of Shakyamuni twirling a flower. “If your City is destroyed, all the Cities will be destroyed. The interurban ecology is very delicate, Clara. That is why it is so well protected.”

“Do you actually find me attractive?”

He would not look away from the altar. “Yes.”

She climbed into his lap and reached inside his robe.

“Wait,” he said. He found the string that released the windshield shade. It unrolled from above the sun visors, where the rod was jerry-rigged, and clacked against the dash.

“I love the Japanese,” Clara said, caressing the insides of his thighs. “You invented the City.”

He was sitting bolt upright, as in zazen. “We understood it first,” he said. “We had to. So many of us on so small an island. So much energy. So much intelligence. So many empty bellies. Please don’t stop.”

“I am honored.”

“We should not be doing this now,” Bobo Shin said. “What would any of us do without the Cities? What would there be to live for? We would all become swine, warring swine, prostitutes and trash like the shit bags outside this place. Please don’t stop. I am a bad priest.”

“No, you’re not. You are a great teacher. You’re tired. You’ve been walking down Route 90 all night. After you’ve rested, we can look for No Mind in the suburb. Then we can all go and save
the City.”

“Yes. Rest. Then the suburb. Then the City.”

“Do you really like me?”

“Yes. I’m going to make you a teacher. You will have your own ramp, your own van… Please don’t stop.” He was at last starting to relax his back, curving down, tucking his pelvis up to meet her cheek as she laid her head in his lap and encircled his waist with her arms.

The Earth slowly swallowed the sun again. The moon, past first quarter, brilliant in the empty sky, shone on the West Coast mirror and glinted in over the side window shade; Clara, vacant, contented, caught it. Bobo Shin had dozed off, and Clara, blissfully at home in the Roshi’s lap, had just lolled there and let him. What a long, hot walk it must have been, two days and a night down Route 90 from The City of The Million Buddhas, prostrating at every twenty-seventh step.

She hardly noticed Rinzai knocking at the door. Sotto voce: “Hey, Clara, aren’t you ever coming out? The monks are scared even to ask. Jeez, Clara, what are you guys doing in there?”

“Shh,” she said. “Shh.”

The full moon above, beyond his seeing, No Mind had squirreled through red silt into the lava tubes beneath the karst, mind aglow with terror. He felt lost, soaked into siphons and swallets, into dark boxwork chambers with flutes and corkscrews where eyeless beetles inched through grey-white meltwater. His senses stained and permeated them—was this death, to lose one’s own body for the Earth? Gypsum and calcite, blank eyes and chitinous bellies became his skin. He bristled with mole crickets and itched with pale slugs masticating earthworms. A blind, white fish, anus frontwise behind the gills, slithered through his senses like a vagrant thought.

Then, stuck in the tube, his little human body announced itself again, separate and mortal. The Voice tried to help him.
“Push, No Mind. If you can’t go forward, go back. Don’t let that witch Angela get hold of you now.”

“Yes, Lord Buddha! Though my skin shrivel and turn to dust…”

“That’s it, oh Noble One. Forget not your ancient vow. You must enter the City. You must follow the witch. She is icchantika, without buddha nature. The others are also icchantika. Kill them if you need to.”

“Kill?”

“
Their lives are like smoke, like dust, like flowers in the air. Snuff them out. Enter the City. Push, damn you!
”

Behind him No Mind felt the water rising, pushing, trickling through. Ahead, there was movement—someone coming.

“Push, push, No Mind.”
His Voice merged with the puddles’ drip and trickle. “
But if the icchantikas find you, be shrewd, Noble One. Be shrewd. Kill them all.
”

* * *

If I was going to get eaten, I’d rather it started with my fists than my buns. I backed out through the keyhole and faced about to see what kind of beast was tailing me. I squinted across the grotto to where the corkscrew squeeze opened into it. Imagine my pleasure at seeing No Mind pinched in that hole.

“Doing zazen, are we?” I couldn’t help myself. The tight-assed bastard stuck out, wiggling head and neck like a sardine in a cat’s maw. Or, for that shaved head of his, he could have been a baby, nasty with meconium. When he lifted it, all bloody, I saw the thick tuft of hair on his Adam’s apple—fake whiskers that had been scraped down his neck. So the bald, bearded vanny at the stalagmite pissoir had been No Mind. Lord, I had to laugh.

“Help me out.”

I grabbed his chin and yanked. I heard his neck pop, and he yowled, afraid something had broken. I eased his chin up with two fingers, the way you’d coax a virgin’s kiss, and I knelt down in the grit and putty, eyeball to eyeball with No Mind. “Gee, you’re not making it through,” I said. “Too much ego, must be. Sorry, Jack. See,
to enter the City, you have to get rid of the idea of self-gain.
Not you. Toodle-loo.” I stood up again, squeegeed muck and drip off my knees, and started to walk away, taking my light with me.

“Big Man, wait, please.”

I didn’t. “It’ll rain crows before I lift a finger to help you, No Mind—a Bodhi-fuckin’-sattva like you.”

“God, it’s dark.” Tears yet.

Reminded me of Alice on my beeohtees, where she cries up a flood, then floats away in it. The muck underfoot was starting to puddle and splash. There was a breeze at my back. In front of me, down the tube, Pirate was squirming on his belly out of the keyhole. He jimmied himself out and steadied himself spread-eagle against the roof and walls the way you would in a funhouse barrel. Then he stumbled toward me, hand over hand along the stalactites, a row of thin, slanted dripstones, till he was in my face.

“Done screwing Angela?” I said.

“You never quit. What’s happening back there?”