Zen City (9 page)

Big Man hadn’t attained enlightenment. He hadn’t seen through, and therefore he hadn’t gotten through. No Mind, on the other hand, was the teacher of all the Econoline Vannies.
Zazen, zazen,
zazen!
Maybe the robes were right, maybe No Mind understood the thing that evaded Big Man:
sunyata,
emptiness. Angela must understand it too, damn her, just like Janus, the girl in the picture window, who could not, for all she might have wanted to, bore a little hole and pull him through. Big Man had taught her; now she was in the City, and he…

* * *

“You’re next, Big Man. They’re going to dyne me. I’ve passed! I’m through!”

“Wait! Let me kiss you. Let me touch you!”

“STEP ASIDE, PLEASE. OTHER PEOPLE ARE WAITING.”

“You’ll get through, Big Man. Just do zazen!”

* * *

“Bullshit,” Tenacity shot back, “That hole ain’t
sunyata.
That ain’t buddha nature. That’s a line of bull is what that is. Pick up your chin, Big Man, you dope. This guy is the hole we crawled out of. Somebody’s running him. Somebody’s reamed his brains and reupholstered.”

No Mind was calm and clear. “It is buddha nature. When a thief looks at a wise man, he only sees the wise man’s pocket.”

“Yeah, well, I may be a thief, all right, but you’re sure as hell no wise man.”

The whaddayagets had been slowly, quietly encircling Tenacity and the two men. They sat in concentric rings, an acropolis of hodags. They were passing around strange powders and squeeze bottles full of boiling fluids, which they poured noisily into orifices fore and aft. Some commented on the action. Others groomed, scratched, dozed.

“Hey, Big Man!” No Mind paused and inclined his head like a translator waiting for the end of a phrase. “Where’s your friend?

Where’s Pirate?”

Big Man whirled around, fuming. “That bastard. Him and Angela. I knew it.”

Pirate could tell them he had gone off to take a dump, or he could say he hadn’t wanted to play tag—no matter what he said, Big Man wouldn’t believe him. In truth, Pirate wanted to see what Angela did when she went off that way. Maybe there was something in it that would salvage his friendship with Big Man. Or maybe Big Man was right, and Pirate wanted to grab the wise, pretty girl with eyes like full moons, her head in his palms, her small shoulders inside the crook of his arms, and pull her lips against his lips.

Then again, maybe he was just curious, really curious, and there was nothing much else to give a damn about. Like it said on his belly, around the eight-spoked Wheel of the Dharma: “Party down!”

The slant passage was dry. Up ahead he saw green light feathering the edge stones of a turn in the oblique squeeze—Angela. He followed.

Pirate snaked between the slanting strata, moving gingerly where spar grazed his chest and arms. Up and down felt all wrong here, sandwiched between slanting sheets of rock. Sometimes a crystal—or Pirate’s own nails, teeth, or sweaty calves—would catch a scintilla of light from an unknown source farther up the passage. The unguent would black out. Then only that glimmer and the feel of the rock told Pirate where he was going. He would pull ahead, and when the angle changed, or when the glimmer was eclipsed by his own body, the green glow would return—until the next time.

Eventually—minutes? hours?—the lower slab angled down, and the passage widened into a man-tall tube with a genuine, horizontal walking surface.

Just at the point where Pirate could stand on his feet again, he saw the first mural, lit faintly by diffused daylight from far
above. There were little cream splotches on it: cumulus clouds. Schools of fish, rust-colored or iodine, swarmed above and below them. Cobalt-blue stick figures, vaguely human, were crossed by a tangle of scratches stained dark red.

A little farther down, there was a second mural. In its center Pirate saw a dark triangle of a man wearing a conical sorcerer’s hat and a sequined robe, shoulders to toes. All in all, he was the shape of a volcano, and his beard flowed down like lava. His eyes were owls’ eyes. He had the antlers of a stag, wolf ears, and the claws of a lion. The sorcerer stood above a Lilliputian skyline of buildings and towers, some half-hidden under the hem of his robe. In one upraised hand he held a
dorje,
a symbol of the City’s power; with the other he was pushing a small package into the opening of a cave the size of his hand. There was an aura of yellow light around the opening and tiny people prostrating or kneeling reverently with clasped hands.

The next mural showed the cave that received the sorcerer’s package. It was a perfect circle whose diameter was Pirate’s height. The view was from inside the cave. From this perspective, the sorcerer’s hand was gigantic, pushing the package in. In the foreground, a tiny man and woman with two small children were reaching out to receive the package. Their arms and hands, fingers spread wide, were like cilia sweeping in from the rim of the circle. The package, it could be seen here, was a woman swaddled like a baby. The swaddling might have been a winding cloth, but the woman was in foetal position, and her eyes were open, the face tinted pink and surrounded by a sunburst. Pirate began to feel that he recognized her.

He moved along the passage to the fourth mural, smaller than the rest, framed by twenty concentric squares. Each square was filled with crows in a tightly interlocking pattern, wing to beak, a plenum of crows. In the center square—domestic tranquility: the family seen in the previous mural, the tiny man and woman and their two children, were embracing and smiling. They all
had halos limned with sulfate crystals. They stood on a dais in the center of a plaza teeming with people. Behind them was a semicircular backdrop of Gothic towers. Goddesses hovering overhead showered flower petals on them.

What could be the meaning of the owl-eyed hierophant of the City? Who were his angelic beneficiaries? And who was that swaddled woman, the hierophant’s gift? Pirate leaned in to examine the tiny people—when the mural swung toward him. It was a hinged slab. An arm shot out and clutched Pirate’s hair. Another hand grabbed his hip and yanked him up and in. The slab slammed shut.

Someone was spinning him and winding rags around his arms and legs as if they were dressing a corpse for burial. As they did so, his light diminished. He saw them by the light from the unguent on his face and neck, then his face only—cloth winding upward—then his forehead, and at last his eyes were covered as well. It could be delirium, but they had looked like the family in the murals: a man and a woman, both of them skeletal now and covered with gaping sores, and their two small children covered with silt.

A low rasp: “He must have got lost behind them others.”

Then a child’s voice: “He ain’t with them others. He gots no clothes. He nekkid. He different. He don’t smell like he come from no bone pit neither. And he ain’t Jap’nese.”

“They wasn’t all Jap’nese. Not the female. And not the littl’un.”

By the scratchy falsetto, Pirate thought this must be the woman: “He followin’ Jello. He up to no good.”

The child again: “Jello ours, ain’t she? We brung her out.”

“Hush. You know we ain’t s’posta have nothin’ to do with her no more.”

The low rasp again: “All of yas shut up. Break’s over. Them others’ll be on the karst already. We’ll do our rounds, then figger out what to do with him.”

The woman: “Them others could be after Jello. We could warn her.”

“Shut up, I said. Gassho now. We gonna do our
suchamis
and sit zen.”

A bell rang. Four voices droned:

They said the whole thing three times, rang the bell twice more, and were silent. Nothing stirred for a long time. Terror lit Pirate’s mind like a road flare. He strained to regulate his breathing within the tightly wound cloth. He tried to let his panic subside.

Once in a while, a child sniffed or fidgeted, and the father machine gunned, “No movin’.”

Pirate twitched, and a bit of frayed cloth sagged down from one eye. He saw their faint green shadows. They were sitting cross-legged, facing the far wall of their tiny pit. They lived there like shit in a diverticulum, their own miniscule Dharma Cave. Why?

The tall, hairy one turned his head. “Fuck damn. Light leak. Keep sittin’.” He stood. Pirate, paralyzed, was leaning against a pit wall like a tipsy amphora. He watched the father’s figure loom larger till his face filled Pirate’s entire field of vision. The father’s eyes were like dried and shriveled milkweed pods. He snarled, squinting as he scratched into the threads around Pirate’s eye. “You so much as wrinkle and I’ll whup you. It gots to be dark, mind? We sittin’ zen here. We savin’ all beings. We gettin’ our asses into the City, like what we was promised. You sit still.” The fabric shifted, and Pirate was blind again.

“The City owes us for Jello, don’t it, Daddy?”

“No talkin’. No movin’.”

He could wiggle the fingers of his left hand, Pirate discovered. What if he poked through? What if his light shone out again?

The bell rang, a pure high sound, and they began chanting:

“Isn’t it s’posta be ‘some other
things
like that?’”—one of the children.

The mother’s voice: “Shush. Sometimes we say it one way, and sometimes another, mind?”

Pirate was pummeled by rough hands that felt him up and down through the ratty cloth. “We can’t kill him. If we killed him, it’d be lousy karma. It’d slow us down sure. ‘Course if he suffocate in them rags, it ain’t our fault.”

“Throw him back, Hon’.”

“Don’t be stoopit. We let them eight, nine, ten get by stinkin’ of bones the way they did. That was wrong. We was slow. City’ll know. I feel it.”

“I feel it too, Daddy.”

“Me too, Daddy.”

“City’ll know. It’ll be angry, won’t it? Jello down here again.
Them eight, nine, ten bums maybe wanna jump her. I don’t like it. At least this number eleven or what ain’t gonna hurt no Incarnation.”

“City gonna make us sit longer before we get in, Daddy?”

“Clam up, youse kids. Kin I git a word in edgewise? …Shit.” Someone grabbed Pirate’s thumb where he had forced it through the fabric. “Gah! Damn! How you s’posta concentrate your mind? Lookit that shit. He won’t keep the damn light in.”

Pirate felt a sharp blow to his hand. He keeled over onto his stomach.
Good. They’re not going to kill me. As long as I can keep things happening, it’s good. As long as I can mix it up.
He found that he could move his jaw. He stuck his tongue out and started licking the fabric. It became wet and sagged in slightly. He sucked. Then he could gnaw on it and work open the hole with his tongue and lips.

“Damn! He lightin’ up the damn floor. Don’t you got no consideration? We on a path here. We doin’ zazen. Damn!”

“Toss him out, Hon’. It’s time for next round now. We gots to sit.”

“You think so?”

“We wound him good. He gonna die before he be free. Not our fault, either. No bad karma. We gonna git back our tape when he dead—don’t worry about that.”

“Hmm!”—the father. Pirate snaked another few fingers out through the cloth. “Gah!” Then he heard the slab push out again. Eight hands pressed into his flank and rolled him toward the opening. He fell hard, then heard the wall close again just before the real pain hit.

* * *

They were wrong about Pirate. He wrenched at his winding cloth. He chewed and ripped. A patch between his feet had shredded against the cave wall; he pushed his legs apart and tore
it open.

His whole body ached. The pain in his head came in pulses like hammer strikes on an anvil, and nearly as bad was the instinctive flinching in-between, when he could feel the next beat coming. He burst the cloth as if he could break the pain that way. He pushed against it, and it gave in half a dozen places. One rip for the father, one rip for his wife, two rips for the bedeviled children—maybe Pirate could pry open that slab and tattoo “PARTY DOWN!” on their faces with his nails.

“You poor baby.”

“Angela?” She was there and she wasn’t there. She faded in and out like the image of the moon in a bay window, when a night wind swings it open and sucks it back, clacking and rattling.

“You poor baby.”

Pirate swept his hand through her pelvis. Nothing stopped it. “I must have really whacked my head.”

“My swaddling clothes!” She leaned over the brown, rotted tatters trailing from Pirate’s ankles. “They kept them all these years. Did they hurt you bad?”

“Bad enough to be see things, I guess.”

“You ain’t seein’ things, Pirate. I’m up ahead, listenin’ to the City. It happens to me like this. Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared. I’m crazy.”

“I get powers when I listen to the City. I go lotsa places at once, like a transcat almost. Don’t ask me what I am, Pirate—I dunno… Wait a minute.” The image—light without substance—waved and trembled like a reflection rippling in a pool. “Yes…” She wasn’t speaking to Pirate. “…Yes, I hear you. All right, I’ll take him.” She paused a moment, then began to sob. “Oh, do I have to die? Do I really have to? Can’t I ever have him back? I know that. I know. I will. Of course I will. But I’m so unhappy. I’m real unhappy now.”