Zen City (8 page)

When the shouts died down, No Mind was still screaming, “Let me go.”

Tenacity smiled. “Let killer go? I tell you what, while Jello’s off thinking, we’re going to play a little game…”

“I told you it was an accident,” No Mind shouted.

“…a whaddayaget game. Right, nightmares?”

Again, the roar. This time a particular word skipped through the pandemonium: “Tag! Play tag!” The spined birds screeched it. They flexed their gorgeous wings and pulled No Mind into the air, dumping him onto a calcite shelf, a tiny balcony projecting off the chamber wall. It cracked where they dropped him, and his buttocks broke through. He perched there, terrified, exactly as if he were on a toilet. “Rules! Rules!”

Tenacity puffed blue smoke. “Sure. Rules. Okay, hicks, here’s how it is. In hick tag, terra tag, dumbo, monochrome, one-note, two-D tag, the tag you’re probably used to, when you touch someone, you know it; and she knows it, at the place where the two of you touch, finger to a shoulder or a butt or a heel. Same with us, only lots of us got no fingers, got no shoulders, butts or heels. What we’re made of, what we’re statted out of, hick, is ideers—thoughts and feelings and attitudes—get me?”

“Yeah,” said Big Man.

“Okay,” Pirate mumbled. Something squirmed from under his heel. Things rushed and flitted behind him. He was walking very slowly and deliberately backwards while Big Man and the whaddayagets riveted their attention on the little green god.

“Yeah. Okay.” Tenacity squeezed as if his whole body were a wrinkling forehead. “Hey, beefsteak, do you feel this?”

Big Man flinched. It was as if, in a dream, his heart broke.

“Hoo boy, that must have been some love affair, huh? Still not quite over it, are we?”

“How did you do that?”

“That’s what we’re made of down here. We see right through you 2-D dudes just like you was tracing paper. We’re stats ourselves, don’t forget. So we know what feelings look like when they’re flesh. Something about the way you stand, a wee tilt down at the neck bone, huh? A little quiver when you breathe a certain way. It was a tight spot in your chest. We know all about
it. We see what you are as good as you see us. Even though you one-notes like to think you’re sticks and mud, you’re just ideers, like us.”

“So?”

“So, let’s play tag. If the killer can stay clean, if he don’t get tagged, we’ll spring him… till the crows come.”

Big Man took a deep breath, massaging the adhesion in his chest, and he felt Tenacity gently disengage from the hurt inside him. Then Big Man tagged him: “You’re not as mean as you pretend to be.”

“
Ouch!
This bum catches on quick. I’m It.”

They scattered. Pirate waded farther away down the passage, his green glow obscured from Tenacity and Big Man by scores of scrambling bodies. They were paisleys, astigmatisms, monsters and figments. To see one was to think something.

The snake that had wrapped itself around No Mind’s leg slithered out of its own skin, and the skin was a voice, and the voice called: “Lust! Black lust! Blinding lust! Is that you, Sorrow?”

A small fish leapt from the gathering stream. Silvery green, horned, teeth larger than its tail, Sorrow protested, “Nobody knew that. Nobody ever saw that in me. I hate this game.”

“You’re It,” Tenacity shrilled.

“You didn’t tag me. She did.”

“I don’t give a damn.”

The creatures fled. Sorrow splashed and flailed after them. “Worrying about something. No, nervous about women, about me, about me catching you, about whether God loves you, for the love of Mike—I can’t play this damn game.” He dived into the soup and disappeared.

“I’ll be It,” Big Man hollered.

Tenacity clanked, delighted. “Go.”

Big Man grabbed the mangy arse of a flying dog. It yelped and showed its teeth—summer concerts in the park, a hundred
and one strings, red wine in paper cups… “Sleepy hope. Looking for love. Am I right?”

“Are you right!” Tenacity howled. “Look at him blush. How’d you get that eye, beefsteak?”

“Zazen.”

From the balcony No Mind shouted, “Wet dreams about the karst.” Big Man peered up at him. No Mind had extricated himself from the hole and then stuck his head down through it to watch. “Reveries about the City glowing on its karst. Look how he holds himself—as if he were hanging from his heart.”

The whaddayagets waited for Tenacity’s judgment. Water rushed, wind pressed. “Smart move, hit man. The best defense is a good offense, and no tag-backs. Big Man’s still It.” Then to Big Man, in a whisper—“How can you dream that? You never seen the karst…”

Big Man kicked mud. “He wasn’t even It when he tagged me.”

“Who cares? Go,” Tenacity bellowed. He sucked his head into his torso and then telescoped down to the size of a tin can top. The whaddayagets dived into the muck, flew to the ceiling, curled and squeezed behind speleothems and one another.

Big Man whirled after them, feeling his way behind their skins. Then he looked up at No Mind. There was nothing there.

Wait, no, there was something…

* * *

Big Man was back with the old guys, back at the On Ramp, listening to the old guys joke and prattle, showing off their artificials, swapping memories, and swilling Circenses. One geezer with a celastic chin had been on the last Mercury-based scanner probe, in the Caloris Basin. “Top that. We were scanning for transcats. The tech was good. The food ate shit. Some of the guys went forty-ten-A when we seen them things up close.

“Turns out, a guy’s foot would be part of one, or their brains even,
or just the way they feel about their wife sometimes—it would be a transcat’s belly. You know how them things go. That’s why they call them transcategoricals. Hell, the whole mission, well, all but three days of it, was a transcat’s head cold. No, I’m telling you the Buddha’s truth.

“The commander, one day, somebody sets the scan on him, just for a damn lark, and there’s not a damn thing there. I mean nothing. He ain’t himself. No, he ain’t a transcat either, exactly. I’ll give you the rest of my beer if you can tell me what he was.

“No… No… No… No… Shut up then and I’ll tell you. He was a transcat’s turd—part—and part a diastema of another one. That’s the space between a transcat’s teeth. Well, that ain’t a transcat, no it’s not, because it’s a space. You shut up. I just about went forty-ten-A. Everybody just about went forty-ten-A. That commander had to be relieved of duty. I mean, there was nobody there.”

* * *

There was something in No Mind, but it wasn’t him. No Mind was a moon reflecting light or a lens focusing it. Whose light was it? Who was doing No Mind? Suddenly, Big Man’s stomach burned and tightened. He was about to speak…

“Suspicion. Curiosity. Paranoia,” No Mind blurted out.

Sorrow leapt from the muck. “He’s not playing fair. He just tagged. He can’t tag again. Hell, I could win that way. Anybody could, if you can do that. This stinks, Tenacity. You let everybody get away with everything, and you don’t let me get away with squat zip.”

Tenacity popped from his can lid and glared at No Mind. “You’re warned, killer. Are you just shooting to cover? Don’t tag again till you’re It.” He was a can lid again, gyring and clattering into the bowl of his stalagmite.

Who was doing No Mind?
Big Man looked up and saw No Mind staring at him. Big Man burned in.
What had Angela seen in
No Mind’s eyes?

From the can lid—“Play the game, oaf.”

“Humble friendship,” Big Man said without turning around. He had felt it through the back of his head, in Tenacity’s voice.

“What?”

“You left that out, you little
bugger—Veltschmerz,
quicksilver, aversion to light, genital crabs, death by water, compassion (just a tad of that, right?), and humble friendship. That’s your recipe…”

The whaddayagets’ laughter was an emotional stroboscope. For one second each, Big Man experienced every feeling he was capable of. Small rock slides curtained the cave walls. No Mind fell through his hole and dangled below, hanging on by his forearms.

“Stuff it, you bloody heart murmurs.” When they were still, only hiccoughs of laughter echoing from odd places, Tenacity sprang out to his full height and turned on Big Man. “You sonuvabitch, you’re a ringer. Only now I’ll tag you: Lost love. Wormwood. Burned your hand, now you’re shy of the flame.”

“Go to hell.” Big Man rushed to cauterize his memory, to stem the images Tenacity had provoked, but he could not…

* * *

Forget Control’s hypodyne. Forget how it chewed Janus’s mind from his as a cat chews its kitten from a bloody placenta—“You will lose your small self and your name now, Janus, but you will gain the City.” Think: before that! Before the last queue, where her screen had been smooth as a stone rolled by glaciers. Think: before all that, and before zazen, zazen, zazen…

Why had she left him? She was the only woman he ever called darling. Why, as they leaned toward the big picture window and Big Man kissed her neck, her breasts, her belly, had she let the moon they sighed for turn cold and black? He would forever think of that picture
window when he thought of Janus. Remember the smile that sprang like a sudden flower from her lips every time he touched her, his picture-window girl.

She had left him for the City. She hadn’t cared that he was from the ramps. Social barriers had dissolved when the Enclosure Acts cut nape from pate and bed from headboard fourteen years before. Ironic, that it was Big Man who had to explain all that to Janus:

“It’s for the City, darling. It’s all for the City. Nothing else is worth a damn. The enlightened mind sees things a whole different way from you or me. The way you and me cut things up is personal. When we say a thing stops here—‘That’s one thing, and over there is something else’—why, that’s just our little minds making fences to keep mine from yours, don’t you see?

“Even your body there—Mmmmm!—it’s really full of holes. Things go in and out of us all the time: cosmic rays, germs, water, heat. Air comes in and air goes out. Food comes in and shit comes out. I go in…”—hugging her, pulling her mouth to his.

“…Not now.”

“Right.”

“I want you to tell me more.”

He love-pecked her forehead, then each closed eye. He always smelled of gasoline, but she smelled of bath oils and wisteria. Once she told him: “Now I feel all ticklish inside whenever I smell gas.”

“Sure, I’ll tell you more. It’s all for the City, Janus,” he taught her. “For the enlightened mind, for a Cityzen, none of those boundaries exist. Do you think you’d see you and me as two people if you were a realized zen? No way.”

“So why do they have to cut things up at all?” said Janus. “Why the Enclosure Acts? Why Control?”

“They see the way things really are, darling. They see the real lines between things, and that’s where they put them. It looks crazy to you and me when families are split up, when towns are sectored so that three walls zigzag through your bathtub and there’s a gap of sixty miles between two neighborhoods supposed to be in the same burg. Or when
somebody gets paid for somebody else’s job, for Amitabha’s sakes. Or when all the dates change around, and you’re assigned a new father. All that stuff is training, darling. It’s training us to be zens, not to be attached, to give up the idea of self-gain.”

“I just love the way you can say that.”

“Why don’t you come down to the Old Ramp with me and listen to a few beeohtees?”

“Are you sure that’s what you want to do with me?”

They made love like thunderclaps when they weren’t doing zazen.

* * *

“Salvo. Lost love. Wormwood. Direct hit. Game’s over. I’m the champion. Everybody cheer.”

In the privacy of the uproar, Big Man edged close to Tenacity. “Tag No Mind. What do you see, Tenacity?”

“He has Voices. I can’t tell if they’re good or bad. Only, something’s running him.”

“Was he lying? Did he really try to kill Angela?”

“Who knows? Somebody’s running
her
too.”

“Running Angela?” Big Man cupped his ear to shut out the pandemonium. It was not sufficient—their “noise” was not just sound—but that was all he knew how to cup.

“Who cares? We love her down here. Don’t you?”

“That’s a one way street.”

“Boy, did I tag you good,” Tenacity laughed.

“How do you guys know Angela?”

“We met her when she first come out.”

“First come out?”

“You know—‘YOU’RE NOT ME!’… Shut up now, I gotta declare.” Tenacity pinched one nostril and trumpeted steam and burnt oil out the other. “Listen up. Nobody tagged the killer. Nausea, Wizened, let him down.” The spined birds ascended. No Mind could not help resisting the things, even though they meant
to free him; it was instinctual—they were fierce and ugly. Nausea and Wizened overpowered him. They carried him, thrashing and biting, down to the cave floor. Then they screed off to a high ledge.

“Tantra!” A rush of airborne cinders, or of dew spiriting off a mountainside, or a dragon’s breath, or rocket thrust, responded to Tenacity’s call, jetting the perimeter of the domed chamber and arriving beside Big Man and Tenacity. “Fix this guy, you old hodag.” Tantra wrapped himself around No Mind.

Tenacity whispered to Big Man, “Tantra’s three parts Yoga of the Body Heat.”

When Tantra peeled away, No Mind was seen to have been licked clean. Scabs had formed on all the lesions. The muck was gone. He was warm and dry, down to his calves at least, where the stream was still slowly rising. “Thank you, all of you,” No Mind said.

“Who are you, No Mind?” Big Man skewered him. “Tenacity and me both tagged you…”

“You didn’t call it,” Sorrow whined.

“…and all we saw was a hole. Who’s in it?”

Ramrod straight, No Mind stared right back at Big Man. “All we are is a hole, Big Man, Tenacity—
sunyata,
buddha nature. Rightly seen, our true nature is emptiness.”

It stopped him. That sort of talk always stopped Big Man. He looked away. It was something he knew he couldn’t understand. Too much ego.