Rings of Fire

by Gregory Shepherd

  After the debacle in Serbia, when Patrick had accidentally shot the Serbian boy, he returned to Kamakura and embarked on a long alcoholic binge in a vain attempt to expunge the memory that kept percolating to the surface of his consciousness like a weighted corpse rising from the depths of a swamp. The memories subsided only when he took up Zen meditation at a temple near the center of the coastal town. One day a young artist in her early thirties came to the temple to practice zazen as well. She was a practitioner of traditional Japanese calligraphy and sumi-e ink-brush painting which had been Patrick’s major at the university. As she entered the kitchen where Patrick sat chatting with the abbot of the temple, she stopped and stared. Patrick stared back at her with his lips parted. The rest of the world fell away. The very air around her took on an incandescent glow. Her thick, lustrous hair was full of lights that burned holes in his heart. In no time they had fallen in love, despite widely divergent sensibilities.

  They weren’t the type of couple whose temperaments chimed perfectly at all hours of the day and night, but when things were just right between them, they were a seamless meshing of body, mind, and spirit, a mysterious fusion, like Einstein’s space-time. Lying in listless bliss after making love for the first time, he spoke to her softly just to make sure she was real, and she answered for the same reason. But it was as if they were one being, with no “I” or “you.” Just oneness calling and answering itself: I love you/I love you too.

  “Let’s stay here forever,” Patrick whispered in her ear.

  “We can’t just make the rest of the world go away,” Yumi chided him gently.

  “We can try.”

  But things were not always right between them, and their personalities often jabbed against each other like sharp rocks in a burlap sack. Their life together was a never-ending back-and-forth between the two extremes. Usually it was his long silences that would precipitate the oscillation from bliss to rancor. At first she read his unwillingness to talk as disinterest or even disaffection with her. But along with his black Irish penchant for depression and brooding, he had been cursed with a technicolor visual memory, and the image of the boy he had shot in Serbia was never far from his mind. In time the memories receded in inverse proportion to his love for her. Now, all these years later, Yumi had accomplished the impossible: she had guided his solitary and turbulent soul into a stable love. He couldn’t be more content on one hand, but part of him still yearned for the thrill of the hunt. The thrill of the kill.

  Once outside his house he mulled over whether to take his Harley Road King or the old Toyota Stout light truck he had restored, and opted for the Stout. He didn’t want the throaty engine of the 1500cc hog to explode into life right next to the house and frighten Dae-ho at this time of the evening which had gotten even more oppressively humid. Patrick wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand before putting the Stout into gear.

  Along his route to Yasuhara Roshi’s temple he picked out the parts of Kamakura that had meant so much to him growing up, including the famous Great Buddha dating back to the thirteenth century. He had been fascinated as a young boy when his father told him that the oxidization they saw blackening its interior was the preserved exhalations of pilgrims who had been dead for more than seven hundred years. A smaller, less famous temple two blocks away known as the Hase Kannon, however, had always impressed him even more deeply. Something about the heavy-lidded eyes of one of the statues as it reclined in royal ease in the half-lit sanctuary room affected him with a sense of unfathomable mystery, as if he were being afforded a glimpse into the very heart of the universe. The sense of ancientness was such that he half expected to see twelfth-century monks rounding a corner on their way to the meditation hall. It was the deep peace he felt there that first led him to Zen.

  It took him fifteen minutes to reach Eiwa-ji (Temple of Eternal Peace). When he got out of the truck, he paused on the short access road to the temple and just stood there, letting the susurration of the bamboo in the evening breeze wash over him. Something between a heavy mist and a light drizzle softened the air. A few minutes later he walked to the front door and opened it a crack. “Gomen kudasai,” he called out softly, apologizing in advance for any disturbance.

  “Hai,” an old voice called out from a back room. His teacher was over ninety, but despite cheeks clawed by age and a scholar’s hump from all the reading he had done over the years, he was as energetic as a fifty-year-old, fully recovered from a serious illness several years back. Even as he moved briskly along the polished hardwood floor, he had about him an inner stillness that Patrick hoped to find in his own heart someday.

  “You’re back,” Yasuhara Roshi said with a wide smile, and invited Patrick into his small private apartment where he insisted on preparing large bowls of matcha, the brew used in a traditional tea ceremony. Patrick usually stayed away from the thick, bitter tea at night because of its high caffeine content, but he welcomed the roshi’s idea with manufactured enthusiasm and an inner sigh. He would be up late tonight. As he picked up his tea bowl, he admired how the craquerie of its lacquer picked up light that a more perfect bowl would have merely reflected. The bowl must have been at least a hundred years old.

  The roshi saw him admiring it and said, “Wabi and sabi.”

  Patrick nodded. Wabi and sabi were Japanese concepts that elevated imperfection into an aesthetic ideal. The world and all its objects were perfect in their imperfections, not despite them. In order to remain sane in this world and appreciate the beauty it has to offer, one has to be an imperfectionist.

  “The older I get, the more I appreciate those two words,” Patrick said wistfully. Yasuhara Roshi laughed. “You’re still a young man. Me, on the other hand…” He left the thought unfinished. As they sipped the matcha, they chatted amiably, and the teacher asked after Dae-ho.

  “He’s doing okay,” Patrick replied, looking into his tea.

  “Just okay. That doesn’t sound promising. I’ll be sure to include him in our morning sutra service tomorrow morning, although only a few of the old timers come around anymore.”

  “Thank you, Roshi, I would appreciate that.”

  The old teacher took another sip of his tea. “I’ve come to believe that Buddhism in Japan is more and more like a dead cicada. It looks no different than a live cicada, but there’s just the body left, no life.” He sighed. “I don’t know how much more time I have either. But I’m no different from anyone else. ‘Life and death is the Great Matter,’” he said, quoting one of the main tenets of his faith. “‘All things pass quickly away.’”

  “I’m sure you’ll be around a while longer, Roshi,” Patrick said in a teasing tone. “Didn’t Bodhidharma live to be one hundred and fifty?”

  “Oh, spare me that. Can you imagine what kind of life that was for him? And that was fifteen hundred years ago before they invented air conditioning. I have a hard enough time at ninety-two. Still, I’m surprised at how quickly it happened.”

  “How quickly what happened?”

  “Getting old. It didn’t sneak up on me at all. One day I was sixty, then all of a sudden, I’m ninety-two. I don’t know where all that time went.”

  “Have you heard of John Lennon?”

  “Of course.”

  “He said that life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”

  Yasuhara Roshi laughed. “That’s good. And true. You’re still young, but it will happen to you, too, you know. Make sure you have things in your life that are deeply important to you, not just work.”

  Patrick thought of Yumi and Dae-ho. Then he thought of the two men who were shot on either side of him at the Olympic stadium that morning.

  “Do you fear death, Roshi?”

  The old teacher set down his bowl. “When you reach my age, you think about getting old and dying every day. There’s a haiku by Basho. ‘This autumn why am I growing old? Bird disappearing among clouds.’
”

  Patrick looked intently at his teacher. Yasuhara Roshi continued.

  “I think I have a serenity now that wouldn’t have been possible to me even ten years ago, let alone when I was your age. Plus, my mind is very quiet now. I think it’s from letting go. It’s as if all the years behind me are now preparing me for the end. Believe it or not, old age has its own blessings that aren’t available to the young.” He stared into his tea.

  “I watch the children in the neighborhood play, and I see them growing from week to week. And when I compare myself to how strong I was when I was your age? I even feel a sense of quiet satisfaction about that. ‘Was I really that strong?’ I think to myself. And then I laugh to see how much weaker I am now. But now, unlike before, I have a long lifetime of memories to enjoy at odd times. Young people can’t do this. For one thing, they don’t have all that many memories. For another, they don’t give themselves the time to appreciate the moments they have now. They go looking for things outside themselves. But if they had all the money in the world, a beautiful house and famous friends, deep down they’d still be thinking, ‘Is this it?’”

  Patrick loved when his teacher talked like this. His mind ran along the same lines, and this was the only opportunity he had to share similar thoughts with someone who wouldn’t dismiss him as morbid. The roshi continued.

  “This life is just so beautiful and just so meaningless. And the strange thing is, the meaninglessness makes it even more beautiful. It’s untethered to any need to mean anything. It just floats, changes, and is gone, like a cloud that you imagine is a flower, and then a mountain, and on and on.” He turned to a bookshelf behind him, took down a thin volume, and began paging through it with white, corded hands. When he found what he was looking for, he looked up at Patrick.

  “I read something not long ago by this man. Do you know him? The Russian author Solzhenitsyn.” He held up the cover for Patrick to see.

  “Solzhenitsyn said, ‘Growing old serenely is not a downhill path, but an ascent.’ I like that. An ascent. So to answer your question, no, I don’t fear death.” He paused and looked at Patrick. “How about you?”

  Patrick looked into his tea bowl. “I think I’ve had enough near-death experiences that I don’t really fear it the same way I did when death was an abstraction. I guess what I fear most is being separated from the people I love. And I fear that they would be sad if I weren’t around. I don’t want to cause that kind of sadness.”

  Yasuhara Roshi laughed softly. “Always so serious. You’ve been this way your whole life, I think. You should live more lightly. But I know why you’re talking like this. I heard about your new job. And these days terrorism seems to be all around us. Be careful, alright?”

  Patrick smiled. “Maybe I’ll lighten up after the Olympics,” he said. Then his tone became more serious. “I think I’ve taken on too much with this job.”

  “I’m sure you’re perfect for it. Just remember to relax your fingers.” Patrick smiled again. Yasuhara Roshi was a calligraphy master, and he had always admonished Patrick to relax his fingers when he was gripping the ink brush too tightly. The advice was transferable to gripping a gun or a rifle. They chatted in a lighter vein for a while longer until Patrick saw his teacher stifle a yawn. How the old man was able to put back gallons of matcha throughout the day and have no trouble sleeping was beyond him. He rose from his zabuton cushion.

  “I’ll be back before too long. And one of these days I’ll come to early morning meditation, if only to keep you company. But it has to be on a morning after I haven’t had so much matcha the night before.” They both laughed and then bowed to each other.

  “Stay well, Patrick.”

  “And you too, Roshi.”

  CHAPTER 8

  After his visit to the temple, Patrick took the long way home in hopes of burning off some of the caffeine in his system. He drove along the road fronting the Kamakura shoreline and thought back to his youth, when he would crank his old but well-maintained Indian motorcycle to life in the middle of the night and speed down this same road at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour, reveling in the utter ecstasy of no barriers. Sometimes he would go further inland, even as far as the Mount Fuji area seventy miles away, and engage the local motorcycle punks in bloodcurdling contests of nerves along hairpin mountain passes. As he smiled at his youthful foolishness, a motorcyclist roared past him, waving to Patrick as he did. Patrick recognized the man’s bike and gave chase. The pursuit was all in fun, though, because the young man was a friend whom Patrick had helped turn away from a gang of bosozoku, motorcycle thugs who deal in drugs and prostitution and act as enforcers for yakuza families.

  On his rambling motorcycle rides through the surrounding countryside years earlier, Patrick had an encounter with the boy’s gang as they were busy turning donuts on Kamakura’s shore road at night, intentionally bringing the traffic to a halt and generally making nuisances of themselves. As Patrick attempted to go around them on the side of the road, one of the gang members, a scrawny-looking punk in an outsized leather jacket, tried to cut him off. Since the traffic was stopped in both directions, Patrick was able to reach out and grab the kid with a powerful hand by his jacket and pull him off his bike, which then crashed to the ground. The other gang members hooted at their mate’s bad luck in being confronted by someone who actually had the courage to fight back. They roared off still laughing, abandoning their hapless buddy to this vaguely Italian-looking gaijin.

  The kid was terrified, and he began apologizing profusely, saying that the other gang members had ordered him to do it, since he was still just a pledge. Patrick could easily see that he was a typical confused delinquent whose antisocial behavior masked a frightened heart and a desperate desire to belong. He brushed the kid’s jacket off and told him his punishment was to follow him to the rest stop across the highway. The kid regarded him suspiciously, not sure what Patrick’s intentions were, but he dutifully followed. Patrick bought them each a soda and proceeded to read him the riot act. At the end of their little chat, he got the boy to promise to stop associating with morons who wouldn’t even back him up against the guy who stood up to them.

  “You’re right, they’re all baka (idiots),” the boy said hanging his head.

  As it turned out, the kid lived not that far from Patrick, and they would wave to each other while out on their bike runs. Eventually, they started meeting up for more of Patrick’s little sermons on the proper way to live, especially since Patrick always paid for lunch. Soon they were friends, albeit separated in age by a good fifteen years.

  Back in his gang days, the young man had kept his hair long and styled into a ridiculous pompadour, but these days it was lopped down to a buzz cut. He was an ethnic Korean named Yi Beom-su, but he now self-mockingly dubbed himself Bozu, the Japanese term for a shaved-headed monk. Patrick thought it a bit too close to Bozo as a nickname, but he didn’t mention it to the boy. One of Bozu’s motivations in taking a nickname was so as not to call attention to his Korean-ness in homogeneous Japan.

  Though his life as a gang member was behind him, one thing Bozu would never give up was his beloved 1200cc Suzuki Bandit, and on this night of too much caffeine after his visit with Yasuhara Roshi, Patrick invited Bozu to meet him at a late-night bar called Seedless along Kamakura’s shore road. As Bozu got off his bike and Patrick out of his truck a short ride later, they came over to each other and embraced. When Patrick was growing up in Kamakura, it was almost unheard of for young men to hug each other, but years of Western movies and internet images had made displays of affection more prevalent in the more urban areas.

  Once inside the bar’s tower-like upper level, Bozu ordered coffee and Patrick ordered Calpis, a cloyingly sweetened fermented milk drink that one either loves or loathes at first taste. Neither dared to order anything alcoholic since Japan’s drunk driving laws are some of the strictest in the world. Their common language was Japanese,
although Patrick’s Korean was quite fluent, even more fluent than Bozu’s, who had turned his back on his native heritage to better blend into Japan’s often cruelly homogeneous society. He had learned the hard way the Japanese adage, “The nail that sticks out will be hammered down.” There had always been a lot of people with hammers in Bozu’s life.

  As they sipped their drinks and looked out upon the ocean, they chatted about their recent lives while thunder rolled in the distance. The long white curtains inside their section of the restaurant billowed and snapped like mainsails in the rising wind. Patrick told Bozu of his travels to North Korea, leaving out his role in helping to instigate the uprising that had toppled the Kim regime.

  “North Korea?” Bozu asked with raised eyebrows. “Why the hell would anyone want to go there? I’ve met some North Koreans. They made my old friends in the gang look like school kids.” He then went uncharacteristically silent except to light a cigarette. Patrick waited several minutes for him to open up with what appeared to be bothering him.

  “Patrick, do you believe in patriotism?”

  This was not what Patrick was expecting. “Patriotism? You mean like those idiots who want to restore the Emperor as a god?”

  “No, not like that. I mean like owing something to your country.”

  “I suppose I do, if it doesn’t involve anything too crazy.”

  “And if you knew that someone was trying to harm your country, would you kill them?”

  “Hang on, Bozu, are you talking about Korea?”

  “No, I’m talking about Japan. Even though I was born in Korea, I was raised here.”

  “So you’re talking about patriotism toward Japan. Let me guess, someone’s been giving you shit because you’re Korean.”

  Bozu waved his hand dismissively. “That always happens. Japanese can be really racist, but if it hadn’t been for this country, my family would probably be digging cabbages back where we came from. I’m just wondering what you think about owing a debt to the country where you were raised.”