Two Zen Monks

by Barry Rachin

  “The deranged fellow you saw in Copley Square…,” Sarah interjected.

  Rob nodded. “Somewhere between Brandeis and downtown Boston, Lars Nilsson sailed his perishable dinghy a tad too far from shore and fell off the edge of the known world.”

  “And you’re telling me this now because…”

  “Maybe you should brace yourself in advance of what awaits in Unity.”

  “You think my friend’s gone bonkers?”

  “Not necessarily,” Rob backed away from the damning prospect. “Perhaps a bit eccentric.” “Regardless,” he cautioned, “you best keep an open mind. The Midge Parker hunkered down in the backwoods of Maine may not even remotely resemble the urbane creature from your college days.”

  Finished with the sharpening, Rob began stropping the edge by pulling the blade backwards. Every so many pulls, he reversed direction honing the opposite surface. Satisfied with the look of things, he held a strip of paper between a thumb and index finger and lowered the knife until it made contact with the sheet. The blade glided through the paper effortlessly. “It’s just a weird scenario… the way Midge chucked all her worldly attachments and is travelling incognito… flying under the radar.”

  “You think I haven’t considered that?” When reminiscing about her friend, the image of Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, floated across Sarah’s mind. In later years the author of the Tao had vanished, gone off in seclusion to seek nirvana, contemplate his navel and pursue whatever it was that blissed-out, otherworldly types did in their twilight years. But Midge Parker was an inveterate, suburban housefrau, a woman who shopped the local mall and visited the hair salon at least once a month. And then, there was that unsettling remark about Moby Dick, when they were sprawled in the surf at Horseneck beach. Was it an ominous metaphor, a subtle hint of impending psychic upheaval?

  Rob ran the water in the sink, rinsed the stones clean and patted them dry with a paper towel. “Let’s get some rest. We got a long trip in the morning.”

  * * * * *

  Traffic north was minimal. Forty-five minutes into the trip north, they spotted a Paneras and pulled off the highway. Approaching the entrance to the restaurant, Rob lagged far behind. Sarah noticed that her husband of forty years walked considerably slower these days. Where only a few years earlier the man was still quite limber, now he dawdled along with a shuffling, herky-jerky gait.

  Ordering a spinach soufflé, Sarah glanced about the restaurant. Those diners who weren’t preoccupied with their breakfast were fiddling with cell phones, laptops or IPods. Everyone seemed caught up in their insular universe. “Are you familiar with the parable of the two monks?” In recent months Sarah had developed a fondness for tidbits of Eastern thought – Zen koans, Sufi sayings, haiku, and Persian aphorisms.

  Her husband’s features dissolved in a closed-lipped smile. “Never heard of it.”

  She recounted the story, sipped at her tepid coffee then added. “There’s a hidden message, but I’ll be damned if I can wrapped my brain around it.”

  “We all carry a ton of excess baggage,” Rob ventured. “Trick is figuring what to do with it.”

  “Yes, that sounds about right.” Eating in silence, they were back on the road in twenty minutes.

  As they sped north the landscape altered, maples and oaks replaced by hawthorne, elm, and occasional bitternut willow. A mile outside of Augusta they pulled into a rest area. Sarah noted that the trash barrels were covered with heavy steel lids; a notice tacked to a pine tree warned visitors against leaving food unattended. There was no mention of bears, but the underlying message was unmistakable. The country had grown desolate. A solitary farm gave way to five miles of empty space, a scraggily, rock-strewn riverbed and forested ravines. Every so often a ‘Moose Crossing’ highway sign appeared. They sped past a dozen or more signs but never a solitary moose.

  Leaving the interstate, they cruised east on a narrow road. The traffic petered away to nothing. The road zigzagged in a roundabout manner so that they had no idea what direction they were actually heading. Thirty minutes later a small sign on a faded, wooden placard plaintively announced ‘Unity five miles’.

  * * * * *

  “The rooming house where Midge lives is just up the street.” Sarah was pulling on her walking shoes. They had checked into the bed and breakfast and hauled their luggage into the room. “I thought I might pay her a brief visit before we settle in for the night.”

  Her husband was staring out the window at a main street no more than three blocks long before fading off into wooded fields. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

  After the tedious, drawn-out journey Sarah felt bad abandoning her spouse, but the trip was neither vacation nor personal lark. Without further discussion she left the room, cracked the front door and stepped out into the sultry autumn afternoon.

  Sarah crossed the street, veered sharply to the left and struck out down the pebbly sidewalk. A group of young girls dressed in cotton skirts that stretched far down to their ankles and sleeves that buttoned at the wrist passed on the far side of the street. Sarah had heard about Amish farms and settlements in the region. She slowed in front of a dilapidated, three-story wooden structure. The slate blue paint was peeling profusely. Checking the tenant directory, Midge Parker’s name was prominently displayed three rows down. A wave of weariness bordering on panic shook the legs out from under her. Sarah blew out her cheeks sharply and sat down on the topmost step.

  What if, what if, what if…

  What if Midge Parker had experienced some belated midlife crisis and morphed into Lars Nilsson, a drooling, glassy-eyed android who barely recognized her former friend? Sarah waited a few moments until her breathing became steadier, rose and climbed the rickety stairs to the third floor.

  “Can I help you?” A massive black woman with a silver ring embedded in her left nostril was staring back at Sarah.

  It took her a moment to collect her scattered wits. “I’m looking for Midge Parker.”

  “She ain’t lived here for six months.” The woman replied tersely and made a motion to shut the door.

  “But her name’s on the directory downstairs.”

  “Landlord never bothered to remove it,” the black woman muttered. “He don’t do much of anything around here.”

  “She’s an old friend and I travelled quite a distance to find her.”

  “Well, you’re out of luck, cause she’s gone.”

  Her weary brain in freefall, Sarah felt the blood throbbing in her ears. “Gone where?”

  “Don’t hardly know. You’re the second person come looking for Ms. Parker.” The black woman, whose stony expression never wavered, slipped out into the dimly lit hallway. “About a year ago Midge’s daughter come for a visit, but that was a bust.”

  “How so?”

  “Seems like the daughter was experiencing major cash flow problems.” The woman sniggered wickedly. “What a mooch!”

  “What happened?”

  “The woman started a ruckus… using foul language and threatening the mother, but Midge held her ground and after a while the bitchy daughter went off in a snit.” The black woman seemed to derive great pleasure recounting the story. “The daughter… she never come back.”

  “You don’t know where Midge moved?”

  “Cleared her stuff out over a snowy weekend in late February and I ain’t seen her since.” The black woman rubbed her fleshy nose with a taut index finger causing the silver hoop to bob up and down. “Felt sorry for your friend… a rickety old lady living alone with hardly no friends and an ungrateful, loud-mouth daughter who come around only looking for a free meal.”

  “Midge wasn’t that old.”

  “That so?”

  “She’s only in her early seventies.”

  The black woman scrunched her face as though enjoying a private joke. “My grandmother just turned sixty-two so your buddy ain’t no spring chicken.” She stared at her pudgy fingers. “Last winter before I moved her
e I was living down the hallway and took sick with the flu. Couldn’t attend any of my classes over at the college. Midge Parker brought me soup and sandwiches every day until I was well enough to fend for myself.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Conservation Law. Be getting my degree in June.”

  “Well that’s nice!” Sarah tried to imagine the burly black woman with the slangy speech gussied up in a park ranger’s uniform, a broad-brimmed hat tilted at a jaunty angle over the squat nose. Would they allow her the luxury of the nose ring or would the exotic jewelry be deemed politically incorrect?

  “Midge come by every day around noon,” The black woman continued, “with hot food. Wouldn’t take a freakin’ cent for the groceries. Sometimes that old woman talked in circles… all manner of silly-ass gobbledygook that didn’t hardly make no sense. But then… I dunno.

  “What did you talk about, when she came to visit?”

  “Nothin’ special. Mostly she talked books.”

  “Books?”

  “Moby Dick… she liked that one the best.”

  “So she told you about the whale.”

  “No, she hardly never mentioned the whale but once or twice. She told me how Queequeg took sick after going down in the hold to find the oil leak. The harpooner feared dying at sea so he had the ship’s carpenter build a coffin, but then the fever broke and he got well. When the whale smashed the boat all to pieces, Queequeg drowned but Ishmael climbed into the coffin and floated away to safety.”

  The black woman smiled and nodded a nappy head peppered with cornrow braids emphatically. “Midge Parker sure was nice,” she reminisced.

  Midge Parker certainly was a benevolent if somewhat cryptic creature, and when Sarah’s odyssey was over, she would have travelled eight hundred desultory miles round trip to learn that unremarkable truth. She made a motion to turn away, but the black woman suddenly grabbed her wrist with both hands. Her fleshy lips screwed up in an attitude of intense deliberation. “Just remembered somethin’.”

  * * * * *

  “So, tell me,” Rob insisted, “how you finally hunted Midge Parker down?” They were travelling south on the Route 95 interstate just north of the New Hampshire state line.

  “As I was leaving the rooming house, the black woman remembered that Midge volunteered at the Unity Public Library.” Up ahead a bridge spanning the Piscataqua River connecting Portsmouth with Kittery came into view. “The reference librarian had taken her mother in to live with them when the older woman took sick with a stroke. The mother hung on a couple of years in failing health. After the funeral the family was looking to rent out the in-law apartment. Because Midge seemed such a dependable sort, they offered it to her.”

  “It’s just a single room with bathroom and shower, but Midge has kitchen privileges so she can cook and store food.” “Not,” Sarah added as a giddy afterthought, “that she would ever take advantage. The woman always ate like a bird.”

  Rob shook his head and smiled wistfully. “If the black girl hadn’t remembered that Midge volunteered at the library, the trip would have been for not.” “She still drive that Volvo?”

  Sarah shook her head. “Sold it and bought a three-speed bike with a straw basket strapped to the handlebars.” They passed a meadow overgrown with white trillium. “She had a falling out with her daughter. Elsa wanted a cash advance on her inheritance, but Midge told the ingrate to wait until her name appeared in the obituaries.”

  The End