Nothing on My Mind

by Erik Storlie

  But such things we don’t say to each other, don’t need to say. It is enough that we sit together again this week in the rough-sawn oak zendo, sit through sunrises, mornings, noons, afternoons, sundowns, evenings, day after day—seven days punctuated with bell and han, gong and drum.

  Now, on this afternoon of the seventh day, together again, we sit in the great silence for long minutes, remembering, forgiving, forgetting each other’s idiocies, the stubborn, implacable struggles we had with each other. Japanese silence, Scots-Norwegian prairie silence. We don’t have to say much to know things are all right again.

  Silence, silence, the deep zen silence. I feel a great peace flow out of our hearts, out through the windows and doors, flowing like waters between the trees and through buildings, carrying sounds of the zendo bell and the distant clattering of kitchen pots down through the river breaks to little Winnebago Creek, down ten miles into the Mississippi to be lost in the Gulf of Mexico, inundating coastlines, lapping the round globe itself.

  The afternoon wanes. The incense stick has burned out on Roshi’s small altar in this small cabin on the edge of oak and maple forest. It will soon be time for afternoon service and dinner.

  I raise my hands and press the palms together. Roshi takes up his stick and holds it between his palms. Still seated, we slowly bow to each other.

  I say, “Roshi, I thank you very much for all your teaching and for all these years. Thank you very much.”

  And he says simply, in his husky whisper, “Thank you very much.”

  It’s over a year later. I’m visiting Roshi in the hospital. He’s been very sick for months, but seems now on the mend. Tomoe-san has almost lived at the hospital.

  This afternoon he gingerly eases himself out of the bed and carefully walks across the room to sit erect, upright, on the edge of a hospital easy chair.

  I say, “Tomoe tells me that the doctor thinks you may have been fighting a tuberculosis infection. Is that something you might have gotten last year during your stay in Japan?”

  “Oh, I think it is possible. Maybe so.”

  “Is it a problem in the monasteries?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says grimly. “It is a big problem. They are famous for it.”

  It’s one of two times I hear him say something critical of his Soto zen sect.

  “It looked really bad,” I say. “We thought you were going to die. How about you? Did you think so too?”

  “Oh, yes,” he says, nodding, smiling. “I was worried.”

  It’s early spring in 1989. Tomoe-san calls and asks if I can give Roshi an occasional cup of tea in my home. As soon as the snow is off the sidewalks, she wants him to build his strength by taking walks. I’m only a few blocks from the Zen Center, a convenient stopping place.

  “Of course, Tomoe, I’d be delighted. So how is Roshi feeling?”

  “Oh,” she says, “he’s still weak. But he’s getting stronger. And I think walking will help him very much.”

  The appointed day is clear and warm, the last drifts of snow quickly melting. I get home from teaching a little early to clean up the living room. I wish the kids would be back from school so he could see them, too, but they go till late in the afternoon. I set the pot boiling, get some cookies and English tea ready in the kitchen, and clear off the coffee table. Then I sit down to wait.

  My living room bay window faces west, and beams of late afternoon sun slant in from the southwest, touching the room with an orange-pink glow. “Ah,” I remember, “just like the sunset bouncing off the December lake into the Calhoun House that first day I saw it with Roshi and the Pirsigs.”

  Soon there’s a knock on the door. Roshi wears mittens, a wool stocking cap to keep his shaved head warm, and a black cape Tomoe made to go over his priest’s robes. I open the door. He’s thin and appears tired, but his eyes still sparkle. We’re both a little hesitant.

  “Ah, Roshi, thank you very much for coming to tea,” I say, ushering him into the living room.

  “Oh, thank you very much, Erik. This is a very good place for me to stop in my walk.”

  I bring things in from the kitchen. He sits on the couch, his legs curled to one side, leaning against the armrest. He seems smaller, not much bigger than a child. We sit for a time quietly sipping tea and munching cookies.

  “How are your boys?” I ask.

  “Oh, very good,” he says, and laughs. “Ejyo is away at college now. He studies very hard. And Yasuhiko is working. His wife has had her baby. Oh, the baby is very active, very strong.” I listen, delighted in his pride in the accomplishments of these men I first met as small children in Monterey.

  “And how is the Zen Center?”

  “Oh,” he says, not so cheerfully, “there is always some problem. There are many questions about how to develop buildings at Hokyoji. I think the Soto sect will give us some money.”

  “They’ve been pretty generous,” I say.

  “Yes, that is good. They really want to help us. How are Katie and Scott?”

  “Oh, they’re really good,” I say. “I wish they were here today for you to see. They’re so big!”

  And we talk on, two fathers, two friends.

  It’s a year later in February. I’m spending the night again with Roshi and Tomoe. He’s exhausted, in terrible pain. Someone must stay over every night now to help. I’m sure it’s a death watch, but Tomoe struggles to be hopeful, taking me to the kitchen to show me how to brew a traditional remedy recommended by an herbal doctor in Japan. I’m to set an alarm and give it to him at four in the morning. This will allow Tomoe a little extra sleep. “The doctor scolds me for not giving him this medicine sooner,” she says. “He thinks this can help him very much.”

  Downstairs a sesshin is in progress. We hear the occasional tinkle of the bell, signaling the beginnings and endings of zazen and kinhin. “Oh, Tomoe-san!” I say to myself. “You had hoped one day to live with your family separate from the zendo so the boys didn’t have to be so quiet during meditation. Now they are grown up.”

  Roshi is sitting up on the couch in the living room. He watches a taped Japanese feature film depicting an arctic dogsled expedition. I sit next to him in an easy chair. Tomoe clears up supper dishes.

  The men on the screen are in trouble. There is snow blowing, and vast vacant spaces through which they urgently mush their dogs, shouting excitedly in Japanese.

  Roshi takes morphine for pain. He struggles to sit upright on the edge of the couch, to attend to his guest, to be present here in the human world once more before the drug wears off and, again, pain and darkness close in. Watching the show, I talk little, try simply to be here for him.

  Soon he wants to return to bed. But first he needs to visit the bathroom. I assist him in. In a few minutes, he calls me back. The morphine is fading, his pain so severe he can’t walk further.

  Tomoe goes downstairs and brings up Henry from the sesshin. Henry and I carry him gently in our arms from the bathroom to his bed.

  We lay him carefully down. His eyes close and he quickly falls asleep. I say goodnight to Tomoe and go back to one of the boy’s rooms. He’s off at college, and the unused room echoes vacantly. Sadly, I throw a sleeping bag out on the floor and crawl in.

  A few hours later, somewhere after midnight, Tomoe wakes me. Roshi is in agony. She’s not sure how much more morphine he can have. She has called Cary, another old student, who has already come to the apartment. I follow them into his room. He looks tiny—a child. Lying on his back, he moans gently and moves his arms fitfully, searching for some position that can relieve the fierce pain. Tomoe decides he must go back to the hospital.

  Cary tells me that a neighbor’s car blocks one end of the long alley. The ambulance can drive forward up to the back gate, but will have to back out a hundred feet through crusty, rutted snow. She asks me to try to wake someone to move the car out of the way.

  I walk out into the night, a light winter wind blowing cold across the frozen lake. In shirtsleeves, hunched against
the wind, I hammer repeatedly on the neighbor’s back door. A light burns dimly from somewhere inside the house, but no one answers.

  Then the ambulance is here, already pulling slowly up the alley, wheels spinning, lurching into the deeper ruts. Two men hurry upstairs, and Roshi, strapped to a stretcher, is carried down and slid into the back. Tomoe and Cary, bundled up in winter coats, hurry to climb in after him. Then the ambulance is creeping backwards, red backup lights glowing on the snow, and suddenly, before I know it, he’s gone.

  Shivering, I slowly walk back upstairs to the empty apartment. Aimless, unable to sleep, I prowl the rooms where fifteen years ago, full of fresh dreams, so many of us rebuilt, replastered, repainted.

  I enter Roshi’s study and kneel at his altar. The candle is out and no incense burns in the bowl. Here is his roshi’s stick—it thwacked my shoulders again and again when he caught me drowsing before sunrise in the zendo. Here a little Buddha statue, here pictures of his teachers and friends. Here little Japanese decorative items, Buddhist play pretties, that remind me of knickknacks kept by elderly aunts on their mantels.

  And here his dream—an altar raised up in the heartland of America, where states are bigger than the whole of Japan, an altar from which the Buddha’s peace would radiate forever.

  We struggled together, Japanese water, American fire. Struggled with the bullying, brutal mind that begs you to quit, give up, roll over and hug the pillow, have just one more hour of sleep, one more, oh, one more, oh, please, just one more!

  I rise and cross the room. For the first time in my life, I sit on the zafu behind his desk. So many times he sat here, me on the other side, discussing car batteries, his kids’ schools, the Zen Center budget, a translation for his next lecture.

  I pick up his wristwatch. It’s still set an hour ahead for last summer’s daylight savings time—the time before he got so terribly sick.

  I see books everywhere. The bookcase across the room is covered with cloth so book titles and authors don’t distract students who have come for dokusan. No student will see him in dokusan again.

  Behind me in the bookshelf, bound in red leather, is the first corporate minute book of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center. I take it down and open it. Turning the pages, I see minutes of our first meetings set down in black ink. It’s a record of discussions, debates, decisions, all written out at length, first in my hand, then in others’. Ah, so much of our lives was given to this enterprise.

  And Roshi, here on the desk is your own book, Returning to Silence. What troubles you had with your English—and how few years to enjoy this sweet triumph of your own English in print. With a pang, I think, “I didn’t even ask you to sign a copy. Was it really that hard, Erik, to pull down anger and ancient pride—to be simply a friend?”

  This building I helped break and rebuild, these carpets I’ve sat upon for hours, this room where we’ve tested each other, sometimes angry, sometimes laughing. Did I this night really hold you in my arms, your hands clutched with the deadly pain, your arms writhing, searching for relief—now a little old man, now a wrinkled child? Did I really see you just now carried down the stairs and away, as Tomoe, so steady, so scared, looked on? Oh, Tomoe, how I miss the Christmas sesshins—and your cactus, overflowing in a waterfall of silent red blossom.

  How the two of you must have wondered at times, waking up in the morning with your two little boys in a distant, foreign town in the unimaginable North American heartland. Did you remember how we were the enemy when you were teenagers? Was loneliness softened at sundown, when your white-plastered rooms filled with golden light reflecting up from the lovely, mile-wide lake?

  I shiver again and look over to the casement windows on the south and east walls. They still leak, breathing icy night air onto my feet and ankles. Years ago I had a plan to improve their seal against the northwest winds, but the old house always had some more pressing need. Slowly, lingering, my eye travels around the room. The altar and its Buddha shed quiet radiance, yet everywhere paint peels, plaster cracks, and makeshift brick-and-board bookshelves warp under the weight of ink and paper. “Oh, Roshi,” I think, “even now, after seventeen years, your study is poised between beauty and shabbiness. Was there not time to take root here by these shores?

  “Now it all ends in stubborn battle, a battle to sit on the couch with your spine upright for one more hour, mind whirling—one more hour escaping the pain—just one more hour remembering how it was to be a healthy man, relaxing, quietly watching an hour of television with an old student. Two zen masters taken by cancer, each twenty years before his time. You and Suzuki helped bring the dharma east. Is this the price you paid? Were you caught between America and Japan, fire and water, ground between the tectonic plates of East and West?”

  I hear a muffled snoring from the zendo below me. In a few short hours, just before five, the zen students will wake. They’ll sit again. They’ll sit all day.

  I rest my palm on Roshi’s book, whispering, “You didn’t fail, Roshi.” Tears start in my eyes, a lump swells in my throat. “You didn’t fail. Never think it.”

  He brought a gift of silence. And I owe a debt I can’t repay except, in each moment, to teach more silence.

  Rubbing my eyes on my sleeves, I murmur, “I’ll repay it, Roshi. I swear, I’ll repay it.”

  I touch fingertips to his worn tabletop. The grain in the wood flows and flows. Just so.

  It’s a week later. Warm afternoon sunshine thaws the late winter snow. I glance out my living room window. Katie and Scott and the girls next door play in the front yard after school, running, jumping, squishing mud, then splashing it off their boots in sidewalk puddles. I sink back onto the couch to watch, curling up against the armrest. Angling sunlight streams in the bay windows, warming my feet and hands.

  The phone rings. It’s Tyrone, another old student of Roshi’s. “I knew you’d want to know that Roshi died last night,” he says.

  We talk quietly about Roshi and the long illness. “Toward the end,” Tyrone says, “Roshi motioned Tomoe to come close and gently puckered his lips for a final kiss. We were so moved. It was an utterly simple act.”

  My throat catches, and I grip the phone, both of us silent.

  Finally Tyrone says, “I know you remember his sailor’s cap.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” I say.

  “In the morning, some of us were there, and Tomoe brought it down and put it in the coffin.”

  The cap! His alter ego, his mischief, a mask for the little boy shy about being a strange bald Japanese in Minnesota, a boy lost somewhere before World War II in the Japanese Army and in the grim postwar monasteries.

  Out in the yard, it’s getting dark. Katie and Scott, ages ten and eight, come in, flinging off wet boots and mittens and jackets. They sit down on the couch next to me, one on each side. I tell them what’s happened, then cover my eyes and sob.

  “Why are you so sad?” Scott asks.

  “He was my friend,” I say. “I’ll miss him.”

  Scott is concerned, wondering at my tears. He snuggles close, pats my shoulder, and takes my hand, just like I do when he cries. Katie, on my other side, puts her arms around me, hugs me, and gives me a kiss on my wet cheek.

  The next morning I join others in the zendo who have come to sit with the body. Cold air flows over the floor through the half-opened casement windows. Meltwater from the snowy roof rattles down the downspouts. I stand, offer incense to the body, and bow.

  Waves of peace, great ocean rollers, flow out and out from the coffin, out from that small motionless form. The melt from the roof falls, pattering, pattering, in puddles outside the half-opened windows. It flows down through the early spring puddles, broadening out on the land, gathering itself into the edges of the mile-wide frozen lake.

  I leave the zendo and walk. Warm days and frosty nights have pulled up the maple sap. It drips from the ends of broken twigs, leaving dark, wet patches on the maple trunks. I leave the sidewalk and press the tip of my tongue
onto cold, wet maple bark—so rough, oh, so sweet!

  On the next Christmas Eve I bring Tomoe a gift. I’ve done this every year since the Katagiris arrived in Minneapolis. First I brought things to delight children, then gifts for grownups, and last year a colorful fish for a first grandchild.

  Now, her first Christmas without Roshi, she is in the upstairs apartment alone. When she sees the little cheerfully wrapped package, she catches her breath and looks down and away. The tears rise to my eyes, and there’s a lump in my throat.

  Then, quickly looking up with a smile, she accepts the gift, saying, “Please wait.” She runs inside.

  She returns a few minutes later with a little package. “Please, this is for the children.”

  “Oh, Tomoe,” I say, “it’s been such a hard year.”

  “Yes,” she says. “It has been a very hard year. But now he can rest.”

  13

  Wash Your Cup

  THE RAVEN SQUAWKS AGAIN, BRINGING ME BACK to the Crag. I look over at him. Still nonchalant, unconcerned, he stares out over the trees, his ragged feathers trembling in the wind. Beyond him, to the north above distant foothills, I see the hawks. Two specks soar into one, then apart, drifting lazily. The sun, reddening to blood, leans on a peak to the west. A joyful fatigue steals through my whole body.

  So I sit. I sit here on the Crag, a stone on a stony outcrop, mind marking memories as they rise and fall. Waiting for nothing, watching for nothing, I wait, I watch. Time flows endlessly, buoys up the dusty world, pools in the expanse of my belly moving with each slow breath, in and out, in and out.

  The mountains teach this in sparkling snowmelt waters that move, move without ceasing, polishing to a marbled enameling the fractured, ice-shattered rock of the basins. The mind in zazen learns that polish, a smooth softness from the eternal cut and wash of time.

  Everything is mine, and nothing—this delicate, strange body I protect and cherish, the scraped skin that with an ancient wisdom of the blood now heals itself, this mind that rolls through all things. Right now I’d take a death, leave a carcass on the Crag—meat for the coyotes, pearl bones they’d gnaw and scatter while punctuating the mountain night with yips and yaps and yowls.