Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  “It’s not a memory exactly.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s like something stepped out of a nightmare.”

  “Something terrible.”

  “Something frightening, anyway.”

  “A feeling?”

  “A person. In pain.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman.”

  “Who?”

  “I think it’s my mother. And I’m supposed to help her. And I don’t know how! I don’t know how!” To my horror, I was crying. He drew me closer to him and held me, but only a part of me was able to calm down. Now everything smelled like incense.

  “You must remember, Rumi,” he said softly. “You must remember everything. Then I will help you.”

  Late at night, when everyone was asleep, I went back into the secret room by myself with a flashlight. I aimed this at the seams in the walls, searching for a crack. I tapped the walls, listening for a change in depth where a second secret room might be located. I’d seen plenty of puzzle boxes. I knew how my father thought, and I ought to be able to find whatever was hidden in this room. Try as I might, though, the walls yielded nothing.

  In frustration I paced the floor, and the boards heaved and groaned. Heaved and groaned. I stopped and pointed the flashlight at the floor. One of the boards didn’t match the others. I hadn’t noticed it before; the floor had never been all that interesting to me compared to the objects in this room. Now it occurred to me that the grain of wood on one of the panels had a different rhythm than all the others. I knelt down and tapped one end of the board, and then the other. Abruptly it flipped up, forming a kind of handle. I pulled this up, and a portion of the floor came free. Underneath was a compartment several feet long, occupied by a wooden box. A secret room within a secret room. I took off the lid, removed a thin layer of tissue, and looked inside.

  She was a thousand-armed kannon, a Buddhist goddess so named not because she actually had a thousand arms (she only had about forty), but because each arm was said to reach the beings of twenty-five worlds. Multiply the number of arms times the number of worlds, and the kannon had the power of a thousand hands. Each of her hands carried a different object: a tower, a mirror, a rope. All were instruments that she, the goddess of mercy, would use to rescue beings in pain.

  I pulled her out of the box and set her on the floor. Then I focused on her movements and her voice. The room took on the smell of wood and rain. I tried to listen to her, the way I had always listened to antiques. I waited to hear how her robes moved, or how her hair fell across her shoulders. But she was still.

  I examined her face. Her broad, intelligent forehead bore a crown of eleven smaller heads on top of her hair. Her eyes were squinting as eyes do when you smile, but her mouth was only slightly puckered. Her head was bent at the neck, as though she were about to add her comments to a conversation while preparing to shift her weight and stand up. She was small, perhaps only two feet high, so beautiful I sensed at once that she must have been carved by a master—maybe even the Kamakura genius Unkei.

  As I was thinking this to myself, the shadows of the kannon’s face abruptly deepened. The corners of her mouth drew up, and her lips lengthened. “I’ve never seen anything like you before,” I said.

  “I would like to go home,” she said politely.

  “Well.” I smiled. “You live here now.”

  Her eyes crinkled again. “I want to go home.”

  “This is your home,” I said.

  “No it’s not,” she insisted. “I want you to take me home.”

  A light shone in her eyes and she smiled. Then a white shadow gathered around her body, drew up into a muscular fist, and, like a bird taking flight, flew up and away.

  I sat there for a long time, thinking over what I had seen. Though I tried to talk to the statue, she would not speak to me again.

  In the morning, I took the statue downstairs into the shop. François was already there alone, dusting the shelves and the glass countertops. He gave a start when he saw me holding the kannon. It took him a moment to recover his composure. Then he asked, “What do you have there?”

  “Something is wrong with this statue.”

  “Another copy?” he asked glibly.

  “Not that kind of problem.” I set the kannon down on a cabinet. “She was under the floorboards of the secret room.”

  I watched him pour himself a cup of coffee. His hands did not tremble. “What an odd hiding place.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “Some junk sale, I think. I don’t remember.” He walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. “However did you find her?”

  “I heard her. The way I hear everything.”

  He gave me a rueful look. “Now, really, Rumi.”

  “It’s the truth. I heard her and found her last night.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it’s time to put her up for sale then. It’s been long enough.” He took a sip of his coffee, watching me carefully to see what I would do next.

  “You said that you don’t remember exactly where she came from. But you remember when you bought her?”

  “Not exactly. I just assume I hid her to let enough time pass. You know we do that with other pieces.”

  “Why isn’t she in the catalog?”

  He shrugged. “I’d forgotten about her.”

  “But you think she came from a junk sale.”

  “I assume.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “You know that sometimes I have to keep things hidden from public view.”

  “But why would you hide something from me?”

  “For the simple fact,” he said smoothly, “that I’d forgotten all about it.”

  “But you remember how long you’ve had her.”

  He exhaled, long and deep. “Rumi. What is this all about?”

  I felt that anything I said now might lead me into a trap. But I couldn’t stop myself from talking. “I don’t understand why you never told me about the statue. I think you’ve been lying to me. We both know you can be a very good liar.”

  Now he was angry. At last I felt the full brunt of his self-righteousness. “You!” He pointed at me. “I have given you more than most parents give their children. You will never know what it is to not have a job or a skill! And you act as though I have done all these things for you out of some secret plan to lie to you!”

  “You just did.”

  “This isn’t you, Rumi. Who put these ideas in your head? Tell me. What is going on! Who has spoken to you?”

  I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I began to cry. “It’s not … I don’t …”

  “You knew when you told me that you wanted to do inventory that you were looking for something, didn’t you? How did you know you were looking for something? Who told you to look for this?” His rage was a physical thing, his voice thrusting across the table. I shook, as if an earthquake had gripped the floor beneath my feet.

  I told him everything that I could remember, starting with the party in Napa Valley, my strange dream, the voices, the ghost. Everything. I felt agitated when I was done talking, but he looked surprisingly at ease.

  In an increasingly calm voice, he asked me questions, which I answered, often repeating parts he claimed not to undestand.

  “What did Snowden-roshi say to you about your mother?”

  “That he loved her.”

  “And tell me again about the Nō play.”

  “The woman was a ghost with a broken heart.”

  “And that night you had a bad dream in which you saw a ghost.”

  “Yes.”

  “My dear, you know how high-strung you are.” Now he smiled at me and drummed a countertop lightly with his fingertips. “Don’t you see,” he said, “what has happened?”

  I did not.

  “Snowden-roshi is a very charismatic man, Rumi. He’s very, very good at getting people to see what he wants them to. How else does a man convert so many people to Buddhism?”
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  “He was so nice to me, François. But it made me nervous.”

  He sighed. “It was wrong of me to send you off to the party. I can see now that this was a mistake. I am very sorry to have put you in such a vulnerable situation. I know how sensitive and imaginative you are.”

  Because he’d known the priest before he’d become such a fixture among the wealthy and powerful, François was immune to Snowden-roshi’s charisma and could therefore help me recognize what had happened. I with my tendency to befriend objects and imbue them with a story had simply let the power of suggestion carry me away. The drama at the vineyard had planted the idea of a ghostly woman, my mother, in my mind, and I’d gone about conjuring her up. Could I see that now?

  “But I found this statue.”

  “So? You may well have seen me hide it when you were a child.” He went on to say that I should not be ashamed of a weak moment. Plenty of people would allow someone else to think for them. He would take care of me now as he always had. The statue would be sold, and my contact with Snowden-roshi limited. Our days would once again be calm and ordered.

  For a time, things did seem to go back to the way they had been. Snowden-roshi completed his move from Los Angeles, and moved into his new quarters at the Stillness Center. The statue disappeared and when I checked the floorboards in the secret room, I found it empty. The kannon was gone and I wondered if we could go back to the way things had been before.

  Then one night a few months later, I had my answer. I woke up drenched in sweat from a nightmare whose details I did not completely remember. Moonlight sliced the curtains and struck my bedroom floor at acute angles. In the night, the colors of my room had been stripped down to shades of black, white, and blue. Silver objects pierced through the dull navy glow—a doorknob, a pair of earrings, the glint of a tin picture frame. Shadows blossomed in the corners, a meadow of tiny black-and-white fists ripe for harvest.

  The air grew thick and cold, as though I had been wrapped in a chilled velvet blanket. I heard the brush of footsteps. I sat up, my body suspended by invisible arms. “Rumi,” a voice whispered near my ear. “Rumi,” it said again. It was a woman’s voice, accented and absent of diphthongs. The first syllable came out past the top of her palate, with the r a cross between an r and an l. The second syllable echoed through the apartment. “Rumi-mi.” The sounds collided and chased each other away.

  It was the sound I had waited to hear all my life.

  “Mother?” I asked.

  The invisible arms directed me out of the bed and I began to follow the footsteps out into the hallway. The same force that had churned the air into such a thick consistency had also coaxed the threads of the hallway carpet to grow. They were now knee-high, and I staggered through this swamp a step at a time. Instinctively, I put my hand out against the wall to push my body along. The surface was icy and slick like the frozen flesh of a melon. My fingers yielded to the cold and grew stiff, and soon I could no longer feel the wall at all.

  “Rumi-mi-mi,” the voiced bounced around me. “Me me me.”

  “I’m coming.” My breath collected into silver halos.

  Even as my feet stuck to the cold floorboards in the living room, I felt a heat of pride blossom in my stomach and stretch out into my limbs. I knew that the cold could not hurt me. I would be triumphant.

  A chandelier of sharp stars illuminated the living room. “Rumi,” the voice called from behind. I turned my head.

  “Where are you?”

  The two candles on the altar flared.

  “Haaaaa.” Cold air exhaled against the back of my neck.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” Wind circled through the room, disturbing the candles. They fluttered violently, butterflies trapped in a place.

  Then there was something wrong with the candles. There was too much smoke and it was all thick and black. I could not control it. My eyes watered. Corners of objects blurred.

  New sounds pierced the wind. Reeds whistled high and sharp. Drums throbbed through the floorboards as though the very room I stood in was the chamber of a heart. And soaring above these sounds, the crisp, metallic cry of crickets and birds. A sound just this side of music. The reedy, nasal twang of the animals swelled, as though their lungs had expanded, and suddenly the sound became a chorus of pipes hugging the shifting contours of a tune. The shape of the music twisted through the room, running like a brook, wrapping around my ankles, upsetting my balance.

  “Wait. Please slow down,” I said.

  The music ran and ran through the room, and the shapes on the altar blurred and shifted, like high-speed film. The Buddha became a living man, then a woman, then a figure with three heads, then a man again. The gong became a light, a cluster of fireflies, a tree in blossom. The walls of the living room dissolved.

  I was sweating. No, I was dancing. Spinning and jumping.

  Something lay against my neck. Something solid, and coiled, like a rope. I looked at my right shoulder. A long black plait of hair hung over my collarbone and dangled against my breast. Then the plait moved, retreating like a snake across my neck and down my back.

  The music stopped. I turned around. It was so quiet. Peaceful and cold. I was on a hill. No—a tiny planet. Darkness dripped over my head and down past my feet. And then, just above my line of vision, I saw the pale, luminescent ripple of a sail. I looked up.

  A woman contemplated me, head tilted to the side. Her feet were hidden inside the folds of a long white kimono whose thin edges flapped frantically like a moth trapped against the walls of a tin box. I could see her hands desperately clutching the frayed edges of her sleeves and collar. I had the impression that if she did not hold the robe in place, it would fly away and the rest of her would disappear as well, as though this white garment was the only thing anchoring her to one spot.

  Her dark, unruly hair spewed out in all directions like black ink run amok on a piece of white paper. In the first few seconds when we looked at each other, I saw her eyes flicker with curiosity. She leaned forward and peered at me with the cold dignity of a satellite sent down to inspect the earth. She was beautiful, with a small, round face, a tiny mouth, and tiny, delicate teeth. I began to weep. When my eyes were free of tears, I saw that she had grown older—more gaunt and haggard—as though those few seconds of expressing her personality had exhausted her. Would I, too, look like this one day? One of her hands loosened its grip from the folds of her kimono. The tissue trembled and parted, revealing the sharp point of her collarbone. She reached out to me, then her hand drifted off to the side, palm open.

  She swayed overhead, and I heard a sound like wood creaking. I swiveled around, keeping the ghost in view, even as she moved around in a circle. She seemed to be enjoying the entertainment, having fun leading me around like this. I remained as focused as I could, watching her. After a while, she drifted down to my level, perhaps only a few feet away. And I began to find that I wasn’t scared of her. Not exactly. In awe perhaps, but not afraid.

  “Come on,” I whispered. “What do you have to show me?”

  She seemed to understand, and her face took on a look of deep sorrow. She drifted through the house. I followed her to the front door, where she disappeared.

  I cursed, mashed my feet into a pair of slippers, and went outside. For a moment, I couldn’t see. It was so dark outside. Then my eyes adjusted.

  I saw the ghost, half a block away, blending into the moss of an oak tree. I ran after her.

  It was a serene time to be awake. The clubs and nighttime partiers had gone home. The homeless people in Golden Gate Park were starting to retreat to the trees to sleep. The only roar coming from the city streets was that of the ocean, kneading away at the beaches and embankments. Far off in the distance I could hear the foghorn warning boats off shallow ground, and the sound fused with another tone, a version of the high, reedy music I’d heard in the living room.

  The ghost flew ahead of me, like a sail on a ship. I was so focused on her, I barely noticed the eff
ort it took to climb up and down the angled streets. It was as though I, too, were flying with her. I swept by cars parked like dominoes ready for toppling, side by side and at a tilt. The bodegas in the Mission were shuttered, though occasionally I passed an open window rasping the refrain of a Mexican song, desperate in its longing for home. In these quiet and silver hours, the Victorians were less colorful, their plumage muted, as though, like electric birds in some imaginary tropical forest, they had toned down their feathers while they slept.

  Every now and then a vehicle—a taxi or a cop car—glided along. But no one stopped to talk to me. I had the sense that the city was sleeping, all the bodies breathing in and out in the same pace, just like the ocean pulsing evenly from far across the Pacific till it met the land. A great feeling of peace came over me as I scaled the hills, first up, then down, then up again.

  At last the ghost stopped moving. I realized that I had entered the Sunset District. We were closer to the ocean here, and already I could see the horizon begin to lighten, the first feathers of light sprouting in patches of pink and coral on the eastern hills.

  The ghost was hovering over a brick building that looked very much out of place against the modest rows of two-story Victorians that were so common in this part of the city. As the sun rose, it caught the corner of a brass plate tacked beside a door.

  “The San Francisco Stillness Zen Center.”

  I shot a look back up at the ghost. She seemed to smile at me, and then she melted into the roof of the structure. The sun was really rising now, heating up the particles in the air, turning the brick building from gray to bronze. As if on cue, I heard the sound of men and women chanting. Still dressed in my nightgown, I pushed open the door and went inside.

  I knew something of the history of the Stillness Center from neighborhood gossip and news programs. A group of Japanese Americans had bought the four-story brick structure in the thirties. It had originally been built to serve as an institutional facility for single Jewish women, and this accounted for its many dorm rooms, the kitchen, inner courtyard, and assembly hall; the latter was now used by Buddhist students as a meditation center.