by Brian Short
The girl was trouble.
But it wasn’t really Vivianne. I knew that, or I knew that it wasn’t just Vivianne, because the trouble was in me to begin with, and nobody felt this ruinous hunger now but myself. And the ghosts. I could just about see them swarming the Buddha Hall, encircling the statue like a flock of maddened swallows, screaming and seething and burning, tearing at themselves and each other. I knew that a pile of eclairs, however proud I was of them, wasn’t going to fix this.
When for the conclusion of the ceremony the whole procession of us moved outside to the rectangular fire pit and the square that encompassed it, we, monks and laity alike, stood in a concentricity around the blaze (set burning earlier by the Reverend Destabile), and we dropped our scraps of paper into the fire with their written offerings on them, I tried not to, but I failed, and couldn’t keep my eyes from seeking her out surreptitiously through the flames between us, tracking the small changes on her face, the sadness I could see that she felt – for what, I couldn’t know – and noticed with satisfaction the subtle warning signs she gave to the pastel guy, who’d been inching nearer though now backed a little away, visibly shrunken, and when her look jumped across the fire to meet mine my heart skipped. It hadn’t yet occurred to me to look away as I normally might, and there was that open thing again, for me it seemed and me only, a look of utter and uncluttered innocence, wide-eyed and unafraid. Our eyes locked and they stayed that way. I think it was she who first finally looked down, again toward the fire, and I don’t know after how long. But in that measureless time there was no fear between us and no shame, only an understanding, and an acknowledged longing, and I didn’t just want her then, but knew that I needed to find a way to reach her, that I couldn’t rest, that I couldn’t stand another moment without her, and also just how impossible that was.
The evening meditation practice that followed was torturous. I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t find a moment’s peace. Worst of all, I couldn’t find Mosquito. My thoughts were too agitated to reach anywhere near the depth where Mosquito lived. In the essential practice of sitting zazen, the object is to let thoughts come and go as they will, neither clinging to them nor pushing them away. But my thoughts weren’t thoughts; they were sheer erotic force, and they didn’t come or go. They thrashed at me. They had me by the throat and they were killing me. They were a tornado, they picked me up and slammed me hard against whatever thing was nearest and broke me. It was only so much worse that Vivianne was in the same room, sitting placidly before her own fabric screen, where it seemed that I could feel a subtle connection of our sex through the space of the room, across the presence of the others. It may have been only my imagination, but it seemed there was a similar restlessness all throughout the Buddha Hall, an agitation that everyone felt, a hunger that pervaded and charged the room. I could hear it in the restless sounds the others made as they sat, breathing, sighing, and struggling with their own problems, with whatever troubles their own minds had presented them. I worried that this agitation came from me, though more likely mine only added to the charged atmosphere. In any case, I wasn’t helping.
The next afternoon, after a morning meditation (in which I floundered and waited, again, and unsurprisingly, with no sign of Mosquito, for the time to pass) then breakfast in silence and later a polite reception in the guesthouse (in which I avoided Vivianne), when it was time for our lay visitors taking the train back home to go, I asked Reverend Quinn to drive them to the station instead of me. I didn’t try to make any excuse for it, but just said that I couldn’t. He seemed to understand, at least enough to make no protest, especially when I told him I would clean the toilets and the guest rooms in his stead while he was gone. Still, I had to see Vivianne once more, face to face, to give her back her contraband guitar.
Alone in the office together, though with the door open to the hallway beyond, I handed over the black case, covered in a patchwork of stickers. “Safe and sound,” I said, smiling as gently and with as much neutrality as I could manage. “I hope that you’ve found your time here with us to be helpful,” I added, “on your journey…” and realized as I spoke these words how utterly inane they sounded coming from my mouth, when at any other time they would have suited just fine.
“It’s been insightful,” she said, “yes, very.” She shot me a sly look, hesitating, then asked, “For how long, Reverend Proteus, have you been here?”
“It’s not ‘Reverend’,” I corrected her, “just Proteus. How long have I been a monk, you mean? For nine years now, but I’m still the baby of the place.”
“…I admire you. It can’t be easy.”
“No,” I said. “You’re right. There’s nothing easy about it. But it seems necessary, for me at least.”
She stood, hefting the guitar case, arranging the straps of the backpack over her shoulders, and on her way out the door turned and said in parting, “I’d love it if you could tell me what you mean by that, but I suppose this isn’t the time, is it. Thank you for having me. If you’re ever in Seattle, I hope you’ll look me up.”
I watched her as she left, troubled by the vague and anxious sense that something had irrevocably turned down the wrong street and was lost.
I went about the remainder of the day distractedly, unmindful of what I did or where I was, fiercely annoyed by every small delay or minor thing gone awry. The others could sense my state of mind, I think – it was likely obvious enough, with my angry face and muttered curses – and for the time chose to keep their distance and let me work the matter out for myself, whatever it was. For my part, I didn’t say anything to anyone about what was eating me. I avoided saying anything to anyone at all. I didn’t yet know how to talk about this, or if I even wanted to. There was always a bit of a hole left after guests had departed, but this was something else entirely.
When it came time for evening meditation, I’d calmed somewhat. Yet I dreaded another session of zazen in which I only wanted to scream and throw furniture across the room. That however turned out to not be the case. Instead I found, much to my surprise, that I was able to sit straight down and remain quite still and untroubled throughout what seemed a remarkably quick three quarters of an hour. The time passed easily, effortlessly, and though my mind flitted this way and that, as it did, there was the notable lack of one thing: Mosquito was not there. As it had been the night and this morning earlier, but now under rather different circumstances, Mosquito had not appeared. Not in the usual way. Not at all. It was as it had been, at least as it had seemed, all that time ago, before I’d discovered its presence – only myself and my mind, sitting there, facing the wall; a nice pair, the two of us, for sure. Yet there was that difference. Earlier, I’d simply not been able to reach Mosquito, or so I’d thought. There was too much in the way. But now it was just gone, gone, gone. More than if it had never been there.
•
With nothing but my mind left to me, left to face me, leaving myself only to face into my mind with, I found, first, only blank spaces, the immediacy of the room, then next, also, my mind. There seemed little to do but allow it. There was no self, after all. Of course, these spaces weren’t really blank. Nothing was blank. There was nothing that was nothing but blank space; which is to say, what was there was not nothing. It was blankness. More than that, it was emptiness. And in the emptiness…
I opened my “eyes” and looked around. I was in the sea. The sea! Of course that only made sense. I was, after all, a sea creature. This was where I lived. All the fish and the eels and the seals and the barnacles and fish… little specks of floating gunk that flowed with the currents and moved with the surges of the waves up above. Anemone waved their tongue-like feelers out, feeling for these specks, feeling for food, for stuff, then sucking them straight back in once they’d touched something. I was home. This was my element; not what I was looking for, but the thing, the place, where I was. Up above was above; that was not my concern, not down here. What was my concern were, for instance, the turtles that flapped their
flippers and moved like floating rocks, with their funny beaks and squinty little eyes, pushing through the slow resistance of water. Manta rays like flat-leaf people, or people who were only wings with mouths and stinger-tails. Or the shafts of light beams that flickered vivid from the surface, reaching, refracted, to some depth, that lost their way and fizzled, never reaching so far as the weirdest of the deep creatures – those that made their own mean light, or the eyeless ones, who could do without light altogether – those in the ultimate fathoms. And more to my concern also were those schools of mindless things that flocked and spun and turned their bellies and flashed their flanks all silver-shimmery in the nearest shallows, their tails livid, where the sun could still find and tell them things with storied light, where their one shared mind formed its schools toward the learning of blob-like and shifting shapes, toroidal, teeming; my kin, though I may not like it. But I could shift my shape too, if I had to.
It was neither the practice of zazen to grasp or dismiss any of the mind’s occurrences, so I let the environment linger for as long as it was going to. I was, after all, emptiness, and so were all things, including the ocean. Nor did I allow or discourage it when two of the dumb fish-people splintered away from the greater hoard to float over and stare at me with their gaping, flat eyes, their fins twitching and mouths gulping vacantly. They stared at me; I stared at them. We stayed that way: being, devoid of the mind or the self or attainment.
“Well here’s a silly sorta fish, whatcha think,” said one. “Whatsit want?”
“Dunno,” said the other. “Dumb-lookin’, innit?”
“We gots a ways ta make it speak?”
“Don’ wanna speak if it don’ wanna. Wanna make it.”
“Wha’s inside it?”
“Mebbe goo, mebbe brains. Mebbe it gots ma-sheen-er-y.”
“Oo!”
“Oo.”
“Likes ma-sheen-ry, I do, I do. Makes a little clicks an’ skitters an’ pops. Sometimes.”
“Or make a boom boom.”
“Boom boom.”
“Ya think it gots brains inside it?”
“Don’ think it do.”
“Wants ta see! Wanna make speak!”
“Wanna.”
“Let’s get inna head.”
“How we get inna head?”
“Crank open mouth an’ eyes.”
“Mouth make ’em speak. Eyes make ’em see. It got mouth ’n eyes?”
“Kinda. Mebbe. Weird lookin’ fish.”
•
Walking in the cloister one cold morning, before the sun had risen, before anyone else – I thought – was awake, I came suddenly upon another robed figure, someone much taller than myself (though I was not so very tall), their head enshrouded in their cowl (as mine was), their face in shadow. I couldn’t tell who it was, or if a man or a woman even. We stopped, facing one another. I bowed in gassho; the other did too. And we stayed like that, neither of us moving, neither straightening again; yet neither were we waiting for the other to straighten or walk on. We stood there, bent, silent, the wind blowing the bald trees and the dead things all around us.
•
I became so highly abstracted that I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror when I looked. My face was unlikely; it was in fact something not possible. It could have been not a face at all, just some mismatched collection of lines and shades and shapes that didn’t relate – not to one another, and least of all to the whole. My eyes were two blimps, roving in the sunlight, floating over the Earth, lit up and idiotically charged, caught by the sky. They were not eyes. No, no…
It was while chopping the firewood that the Reverend Master Eno approached and asked me to come talk with him. “That’s okay, Proteus, you can set that down for a moment. Please.” My arm in mid-swing with the axe held ready above my head, about to come down, I stopped to look at him, surprised, suspended, my breath heavy in my chest. Splintered fragments of pinewood were scattered far, radially from the chopping block.
“I…” I said, “I…” and followed him into the confusion of shadows through the pathway.
We took the office in the guesthouse, which now was entirely empty, the monastery for the month of January traditionally closed to visitors. He shut the door. Dappled sunlight shone weakly through the windows over the walls and floor, the afternoon light already diminishing.
“Proteus.”
“I…”
His robes, his kesa over the shoulder, purple, golden. A bird skittered about near the window outside.
I felt the changes moving across my face, but couldn’t know what they were. “If I… These things, if I saw them, even once you see, and it wasn’t all that long ago, I might have been… smaller then. Even smaller than I am now. You might not think that’s possible, but those were other days, they were earlier days than these. You’ve seen them too, haven’t you? That’s okay. You don’t need to answer me.”
He thought for a moment with that inward-looking tilt to his head. “We’ve noticed,” he said at last, “and the others have expressed their concern. I am also concerned. Something is different.”
“Something? Reverend, the shapes have expressed what they’ve always expressed. In their changing. It was always this way. I’m no different. Yes, I think I have changed. But that sort of thing is inevitable. Always within a confined space.”
“Everyone goes through this, or something like this. It depends, of course, on the person. But there is the matter of violence.”
“Violence? Reverend?”
“Frankly, you’re scaring some of us.”
“Yet you understand that violence is also language, don’t you? It is… articulation, beauty, how the inward eye sees. To look at anything is violence, at the essence of a thing. But now you seem confused, and I’m afraid that I’m not helping you.”
“There are limits to what can be tolerated. There are also limits to what our community can do for you. It is, at some point, more appropriate if you find the right kind of help, though I don’t know that we’ve crossed that bridge just yet. I am, at this point, simply expressing my concern.”
“Isn’t that what they said at the beginning? That there is safety in emptiness, and that people are emptiness also? Is there no safety here? Because I’ve not emptied myself enough!”
But in time, if I’d been able to push aside my thoughts about Vivianne, I could not forget Mosquito so easily. Now that it was gone, it was everything. If I’d been muttering as I’d walked the cloister, from one moment’s assignment to the next, or if my face held some expression, though I’d felt for certain blank, or if the others, in their concern, however expressed, vaguely, at best, or from some distrustful distance, watched after me closely though said nothing – silence being the rule, and I had lost their trust – it was the shape of Mosquito at the center of it, of all this, nowhere, and everywhere, all at once. Yes, the flat eye of concern held me pinned. I could not understand what they were afraid of, though I was afraid also, and of the same thing. I felt sure of it.
The Reverend Hiko Eisen, bald as anybody ever was, carried a long stick for balance when in the wintertime his knee felt unsteady from the cold.
“The damage,” I said, “to the hand, the marks across the body, as if chewed by some animal, the same as the work done to the nose or the changes in the eye.”
The Reverend Hiko Eisen nodded his head in slow assent while we stood beside the large, black bell, awaiting the moment to make the signal. He checked his watch, which struck me as ironically anachronous beneath the sleeves of his robe, against the pale flesh and wiry hairs of his forearm. By early March the air had warmed considerably, though traces of snow still stuck in wet, solid clumps and patches to the grounds, to the interstices of trees and earth, in the corners of the plaza, and to the sides of the mountain beyond us, where it would in time creep slowly up, diminishing, so that only the cap should remain entirely white.
“But the only thing really any different,” I continued, “is the sens
e of quiet that comes, that visits in the hour when I’m most awake. Wouldn’t you say? Yes. I know that I have that, if nothing else. When the sunlight lays like that, when the sun lays itself down, and the brown earth is striped and stippled in it. And I weep for every moment that I’ve lost since then.”
His knee had been shot out in the war, but I didn’t know which one, which war.
The hour turned, he pulled back the Shu-moku, a heavy beam hung by two lengths of chain, and swung and struck the bell, which sounded, first in sharp attack, though it seemed delayed in the briefest of intervals between the striking and the sounding, and which I felt as if my own skull had been struck, though really the sound was centered in my chest and sternum, and sustained in resonant stillness, prolonged before dying delicately away, the throbbing of my heart resolved in its diminishing. The Reverend Hiko Eisen picked up his walking stick again. It was time for the next task.
I followed after him, stumbling on the hem of my robe.
“Reverend?” I called to him, quietly, so as not to injure the silence, so as not to invite further censure, “Reverend? Will you help me, as I promise to help you, when the time comes for us to die?” He did not look back at me. “Reverend! Have we died and died already? Reverend?”
