by Oisín Curran
She doesn’t look back at the people behind her, but when she spreads out her hands and moves them down, the rifles go down too. Then she turns her hands over and holds them out to me.
Here you are at last, she says.
Never use this poison, muttered Willard, snorting nasal spray from his cushion, where he sat in full lotus, each foot lapped over a knee, as did we all, since we were children and still supple and had been trained to do so since our earliest years.
It’s addictive, continued Willard, referring to the spray. But, of course I addict to everything. Anyway, he continued, squinting at the fine print on the back of the bottle, You’re all too young for it. So if you get a cold, just blow your nose and stay away from chemicals.
He uncapped the bottle and absently took another snort.
Where was I?
Where? I’d no idea. I’d been underground. Seated next to her blond twin Rinzai, Soto raised her hand to say we’d been talking about the Heart Sutra. That made sense since we began every Zenday School session by reciting it.
Iris hadn’t wanted me to keep coming to Willard’s house on Sunday mornings after what had happened on Halloween and at the Gathering before that, but I defied her wishes and snuck out of the house to attend. There were two reasons.
Despite all the strangeness, I still liked Willard. All the kids did (even Artemis, who wanted to kill him) because he provoked and intrigued us into liking him every Zenday. It wasn’t that we were oblivious to our parents’ struggles with Willard, it’s just that we had our own friendship with him and it was going well. We were still under his spell, and the other business was grown-up stuff.
Athena would be there and I’d become attached to the strange dizziness I always felt in her presence.
And also, I liked learning how to bake bread, which is what we spent the bulk of our sessions doing, since we were too young to work the sawmill. Willard believed in teaching through action. He had created two enterprises: a sawmill and a bakery. He ran the bakery out of his kitchen, to which we would shortly adjourn. But we started out each Zenday morning with a short meditation session on cushions on tatami mats on the floor of Willard’s sunny living room, which was permanently infused with the smells of incense and baking bread. He sat facing us. And when he rang the bell to end the meditation, we recited the Heart Sutra. And then Willard chose a line to expound upon. That was his word for it. I’m going to expound now, listen up. We thought the self-mockery was hilarious. We thought it meant what we were supposed to think it meant.
The Heart Sutra, he began, Says, all things are the primal void, they are not born nor destroyed, nor do they wax or wane. So what the fuck does that mean? said Willard, It means your boogers won’t stay boogers (laughter). Soon they’ll turn into dust and join the dirt. That dirt will grow the plants that give you oxygen and the food you eat. That food becomes your bones and liver and lungs and also your shit and farts (appreciative snorts). That shit goes into the ground and those farts disperse in the atmosphere and feed the plants, which give you oxygen and food and so on. And so on. Ad shiteum, ad farteum (guffaws). It means there is no chaos and no order, only change and other stuff grown-ups cry about (louder guffaws). Change is the only constant. It also means there is no past, no present, no future, no world or time out there but what the mind makes. Reality is an illusion, a shared illusion, a real illusion, but still just a fart from the depths of your soul. That’s because all of existence is really a primal void, a soup of particles that could do anything, anytime, anywhere. It is our mind that decides where and when everything goes. Just like we take flour, water, oil, salt, yeast, sugar, and make them into bread, so our mind takes the ingredients of life and bakes what we call reality. Speaking of bread, let’s make some. Enough talk. Talking gets you nowhere, kneading dough gets you food.
We rose from our cushions and moved to the kitchen, which was outfitted with a big wood-fired oven. Since it was a tiny old farmhouse kitchen, there was barely any room leftover, but we squeezed together at the narrow counters, pouring flour, adding water and yeast and oil, mixing, kneading, shaping, baking.
Yes, change is the only constant, Willard continued as he moved among us, adding calibrated doses of instruction and suggestion, teasing and encouragement.
And because everything changes, we need to let go of stuff as it changes. We can’t hold on to it. If we do, we’ll just end up feeling shitty. We have to let go of everything, even Zen. Because what is Zen? Zen is bullshit (titters). No, it is. It’s bullshit. I know it, you know it, your parents know it. Sitting on a cushion for hours at a time, following your breath, reciting sutras, asking yourself these stupid fucking riddles called koans, like does a dog have Buddha-nature? Does a dog have Buddha-nature? Who cares? Who gives a shit (shocked laughter)?
He stopped behind Athena, who was kneading dough.
We don’t want any hairs getting in the bread, he said, gently pulling her long, tea-coloured hair back from her slender neck and tying it with a ribbon. She looked back at him and smiled, and the smile had a strange look to it. Or did I imagine it? A strange secret smile that I couldn’t understand. And Willard smiled back, the same smile.
I was suddenly drowning in jealousy and mentally joined ranks with Artemis and Pierce in desiring Willard’s death, even though I still loved and admired him. Because I loved and admired him, but above all because he loved and admired Athena, who loved him back. I began to understand the rage of Artemis, who had, in this instance at least, seen nothing as she was too busy pummelling her dough.
I don’t think we’re doing it right, I said suddenly. This isn’t the way my mother makes bread.
Iris baked bread on the weekend, two loaves for us and eight more loaves for a restaurant in Frothingham. It was one of the several ways she made some extra cash for groceries. Willard knew all about it—he knew everything that happened at New Pond, and he viewed Iris’s side business as competition with the New Pond bakery. But since she wasn’t officially one of his students, there was little he could do about it.
Is that right, he said acidly. And how does Iris make her bread?
She uses more water, I said, And less yeast, and she lets it rise longer before punching it down.
A different recipe, said Willard, his voice mild but his eyes narrow. There are many kinds of bread. And anyway, recipes are bullshit, just like Zen. Because change is the only constant. So all things change, even bread recipes, even Zen, which is why we can’t get bogged down by shit that was said in the past. Breathe your breaths, that’s all you can do. And bake your bread. Light the fire in your belly and follow where it takes you...
He trailed off as he stooped to peer at a book sticking out of Apollo’s jacket, which hung with all the others near the door.
What’s this crap you’re reading? he muttered, pulling the volume out and leafing through it. The Hobbit? You fill your brain with this escapist bullshit? Dragons and elfs and blablabla?
Elves, said Apollo quietly, Not elfs.
You make my point for me, snorted Willard, Arguing the name of a non-existent species. How is that going to help you understand how to live? How to be here, on this earth, in this life?
Uncapping and snorting some more nasal spray, he leafed through the book.
Wizards, dwarves, hobbits. What the hell is a hobbit, anyhow?
It’s a small person, Apollo began, Who—
Bullshit, snapped Willard, stuffing the book back into Apollo’s coat.
Apollo likes it, Athena protested gently, slowly, smiling her sweet, tranquil smile, the smile of a divinity intervening with indifferent, celestial warmth in the affairs of mortals.
Hmm, said Willard returning her smile, mollified. Yes, but should he?
The sun came around the corner of the house and suddenly shot into the kitchen. A giant patch of rainbow light appeared on the wall.
Now, there’s a true
wonder, said Willard. Where’s it coming from?
The rainbow flew around, disappearing and reappearing as we twisted and turned, trying to pinpoint its source.
Freeze! said Willard. We froze. The rainbow hovered on the sink, trembling, pulsing colour. Willard walked to it and waved his hand around, until a shadow-hand appeared, obscuring purple and red. Then he turned and asked where an imaginary line from the rainbow through his hand would lead. Our eyes swivelled across the kitchen, until they met something flashing in the sun. A ring on Soto’s hand.
If I may, said Willard, gently removing it from her dough-encrusted finger. He brought it to the window and held it up to the sun. Shards of rainbow scattered across the room as he turned it.
Cut glass, he said. A prism. Isaac Newton used one of these to figure out that white light is actually a combination of all colours. All things change, right? When sunlight shines through a prism, it refracts, it bends, it changes, it breaks up into a rainbow. And you don’t need a prism. Look through a glass of water and what do you see? Bent colours, that’s right, Soto. What Newton saw became part of the beginning of modern science. That’s what happens when you look, really look, at what’s around you, what’s right in front of you, instead of dreaming about dragons.
Maybe, I thought, but maybe a dragon is a refracted dinosaur. Maybe quiet country people went through Tolkien’s mind and shape-shifted into hobbits on their way out onto his page. Maybe Aristotle was wrong and art is a prism, not a mirror held to nature. Or maybe the mind is the prism and the refraction is the art that emerges on the other side. And if so, good thing, because without art’s prismatic effect, dragons and their kin would be homeless. Where would the fantastical live if it weren’t for books and drawings, sculptures, movies, and the brains of daydreaming schoolchildren?
Willard had a talent for getting under my skin like a splinter and forcing me to dig him out with a mental needle. For his part, he’d clearly grown bored of Zenday and did what he always did when bored. He wandered over to his piccolo, where it waited on its stand, picked it up, and began to play. As always, we groaned and yelled and covered our ears.
Dexter Gordon! shouted Willard, pausing briefly. Open your ears! Here’s a koan for you—how did ex-slaves invent the greatest music of the modern world?
Jazz is bullshit! I said.
There was a pause—everybody stared at me. Then Willard laughed.
Now you’re catching on! he said, and went back to playing.
We groaned louder and clamped our hands more vehemently in place. All children hate bebop.
Myles and Iris were slumped over coffee at the kitchen table. It was a cold, grey later-November day, but that was just the backdrop to their mood. They couldn’t believe Ronald Reagan had been elected. It was unthinkable. The polls claimed a tight race, and my parents and all their friends scoffed at the idea that a no-talent actor turned right-wing ideologue could possibly win the White House. But Carter lost in a landslide.
Who elected this clown? demanded Myles, his face scrunching with cognitive pain. They’re like lambs being led to the slaughter. And they’re taking the rest of us with them. He’s the Pied bloody Piper! How could this happen? It’s morning in America—what horseshit! People just want somebody who will tell them what they need to hear. It’s some kind of suicidal game of follow-the-leader.
Are you so different? murmured Iris. Sticking with Willard despite everything?
What are you talking about? There’s no connection at all. Willard’s pursuing spiritual insight. Reagan was a pitchman for GE, for christ’s sake. He’s nothing but a salesman.
Willard’s a salesman too. He just wears a costume you prefer and sells a product you want to buy.
I don’t understand what you’re saying, Myles said bitterly, putting on his coat and hat. I’m going to get water.
Iris sent me to help.
Outside, Myles and I stood on the frozen surface of our well. I held the bucket while he chopped a hole in the ice with the big axe. But just as he was enlarging it with an angry swing, the handle slipped through his fingers and vanished from sight into the dark water. Myles said Fuck for the first and last time in my childhood memory and sank to his knees on the ice. He crouched there for a long time, his head in his hands. The well was a hand-dug hole no more than five feet in diameter, ten in depth, but there was no question of retrieving the axe until the following August, when the water would dry up.
But an axe we must have, for the sake of the wood that must be chopped and fed into the rusty stove, a relic whose difficulty burning the sap-laden young trees that we fed it now was the source of the curses and complaints that my parents directed at it. Myles searched his bedlam shed and found an old, rusty axe head, then matched it with the handle that had come loose from a pickaxe. The combination was ill-fitting but serviceable.
In the meantime, I hauled in the white plastic bucket that was flooded to the brim with cold, blue water. Chunks of ice rattled on the surface, miniature bergs in a portable arctic sea. From the bucket Iris ladled a kettle full and placed it on the stove to heat for Myles’s shaving water, because tonight was his first night of teaching a continuing education course at my school and I was to accompany him for moral support.
Myles wasn’t used to public speaking, and his disquiet grew and radiated from him all along the rutted, twisting length of Middle Pond Road as he nervously anticipated lecturing, even if it were to an appreciative and uncritical small crowd of retirees eager to hear about Buddhism from a genuine practitioner here in the backwoods of Maine.
The room deep within the snowbound building was too bright, and I could see the sheen of sweat on Myles’s suddenly red face as he anxiously, haltingly introduced himself and me, and began rapidly laying out the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the five moral precepts, and the five skandhas. But before his bewildered audience could get in any questions, Myles launched into an account of a young Indian prince named Siddhartha who lived a coddled, isolated lifestyle on the grounds of his ancestral palace, until one day circumstances exposed him to the three unavoidable horrors of humanity: old age, sickness, and death.
I knew the story by heart from bedside reading of Buddhist storybooks, from the famed Jataka tales and from Indian comic books. I remembered how Siddhartha promptly dropped everything and set off to find a tree he could sit under and try to come to terms with the sad, grubby shittiness of life on earth. How it took years of ascetic practice, but one day he woke up. Really woke up right inside his waking life, to the true reality of all things, achieving a transcendent serenity called nirvana. And having burnished that serenity to perfection, he got down to the business of teaching others how to wake up too.
Having warmed somewhat to his task, and choking only a little on the homemade cookies that one of his students had proffered to the group, Myles was saying, But how did this Indian prince achieve nirvana?
Yes, I wondered. How? Was it by unveiling the four noble truths and following the eightfold path while adhering to the five precepts that he was able to pierce the five skandhas and dissolve their hold on him? Yes, Buddhist math is weird, because four plus eight plus five minus five is said to equal not twelve but the zero point of enlightenment.
Still, that’s not the whole story, because the Jataka tales maintain Siddhartha had a leg up on other seekers, of whom there was, and remains, no shortage in India. This advantage had to do with his personal karma, a kind of bank record of past actions. He’d accumulated some truly excellent karma, the very best, so they say, due to the nobility of his actions in past lives.
I narrowed back in on Myles’s lecture, only to realize I’d been thinking in tandem with him, and I wondered, for neither the first nor last time, whether my mind was little more than an extension of his preoccupations.
Past lives, Myles was saying, Yes. American Buddhists don’t really like talking about reincarnation much—it’s
too awkwardly metaphysical for secular skeptics who just want to sit on a cushion and find nirvana at the end of a breath. But that’s like saying you like Christianity, just not the Resurrection. It’s all of a piece. Some Buddhist traditions go into detail about it, saying, for instance, that after death, the spirit enters an intermediate state called antarabhava (a.k.a. the bardo in Tibetan), where it experiences a powerful flash of pure understanding, only to have the rug ripped out from under it by a series of truly ghastly hallucinations generated by its karmic actions in previous lives. Finally, after enduring these terrifying visions, the soul gets housed in a womb from which it will be reborn. For the practitioner, this intermediate state can be a moment of great opportunity in which to truly wake into a state of liberation, but for those with shoddy karma it can be a perilous experience from which they can topple into a terrible reincarnation as, say, a slug or a serial killer.
Myles paused briefly, took another cookie, and accepted a mug of coffee poured from a thermos likewise provided by a student, and said that one of his teachers told him reincarnation is not necessarily limited to earth. There’s nothing to stop the soul from travelling to and from distant worlds…
I needed to pee. Slipping out as quietly as possible, I wandered the dim and empty halls until I found a bathroom.
On my way back, the spookiness of the place began to worry me. It was a creaky old building with high, water-stained ceilings and walls gone wavy from a century of standing still. A strange muffled banging was coming from somewhere in the shadows up ahead. I turned a corner and saw a dim glow from under a doorway. The bangs were banging from the same place. I eased open the door. It was an empty classroom. The noise was louder here—not just banging, but crashing, explosive, mad. The room itself was dark, but from under another door in the far wall there glowed an awful red-orange light. I crossed the musty carpet and received a shock from the door handle as I gripped it and slowly opened it to find, instead of a broom closet, a quiet, spare room with an open window overlooking a city in a vacuum. A city on the brink. I slammed the door shut and returned to Myles’s class, where I sat not listening, but worrying about my story, which seemed to be invading. That night I tried not to sleep, for fear of underground dreams. And in the end, the dreams didn’t come, or if they did I don’t remember.