The Sea Bed

by Marele Day

Through the wide glass of his window the monk saw people waiting at railway crossings, farmers working in fields. Mainly they were rice fields, so intensely verdant that they seemed to be the source of greenness itself, the surrounding countryside watered-down in comparison.

  In villages, fat squat onions hung under the eaves of houses. Washing dried on lines—small boys’ pants, men’s shirts, brightly coloured socks, pink or lime green, hanging from brightly coloured pegs.

  As the train rose to the mountains, it travelled through pockets of forest, pines with light grey trunks in the darkness of the foliage. They f licked by so fast it almost hurt to look.

  Faint drifts of conversation from fellow passengers came to the monk on the steady whoosh of the train. He heard plastic bags and lunch boxes being opened, smelled the food inside. The aromas stayed in the air-conditioned space of the carriage, and all the passengers shared them—soy sauce, pickled ginger, smoked eel, potato crisps, hard-boiled eggs. It made the monk feel hungry, and though he did not have to respond to hunger by eating, he took out a rice ball—his lunch—and held it in his mouth for a moment, breathing in so that the rice took on all the f lavours in the air.

  The little boy across the aisle was watching him. The monk swallowed the rest of the rice ball but still the child continued staring. Eventually his grandfather noticed and diverted the boy by lifting him up to the window. The soles of the boy’s shoes were clean and white, with small ridges on them shaped like coils of rope.

  Behind the man and his grandson was a well-fed businessman working on a computer balanced on the tray table that slid out of the armrest. He was sitting in a relaxed, assured position, scrolling through information, some kind of chart, like a feudal lord surveying his lands.

  Further along, four garrulous women had turned the seats around so that they were facing each other, two by two. In their conversations were the names of people they all knew, who needed no introduction or prefacing.

  At the monastery the community of monks also enjoyed such amicable familiarity but with much less need for conversation. There was nothing one did that the others did not know about. At night, all rolled up in their individual quilts with only faces exposed, they became part of the rhythm of each other’s sleep breath. The monk even wondered if his dreams were entirely his own, whether they circulated freely and were shared, the way the outward breath of one monk diffused into the air and was breathed in by another.

  He turned his attention back to the countryside, wondered what it was like to be the train driver, the first to see the bridge, the town, mountains, the green fields and vegetable patches, the only one who could clearly see the track ahead. How comforting to have the way marked out for you.

  The boy was staring again. It didn’t matter if the monk turned to look out the window, picked a f leck of dust off his robes or sat completely still, the boy continued gazing. He was only a child but it made the monk uneasy. When the monk gave him a smile he became shy and hid under Grandfather’s arm.

  Grandfather shrugged an apology to the monk then opened the boy’s little backpack. He took out a book and a set of felt-tip pens, inviting the boy to colour in. The monk relaxed, closed his eyes and imagined what else the boy’s backpack might contain—a soft toy, an electronic game, toothbrush, change of underwear?

  He brought into his mind the rest of the luggage in the carriage—the businessman’s briefcase, the women’s shopping bags, all the suitcases and backpacks. He wondered if, like his, any of them contained human remains.

  3

  Temple lodgings

  The monk moved along in the pocket of air provided by his umbrella, only minimally better than nothing at all with the rain dripping and splashing off its perimeter. His robes clung to his legs, the footpath was slippery in places and he had to tread carefully. The walk from the station was taking so long that the monk thought he might be lost, but the wet weather meant that there was no-one around from whom he might seek directions. The map the station attendant had drawn was blurred with rain, the ink drizzling down the page like a watercolour.

  He was relieved when he finally came to a sign pointing to the temple, on a steep knoll overlooking the village.

  The door was opened by a priest in white socks, a tall man in his mid-thirties, not much older than the monk himself. His face was not calm. The monk mentioned his telephone booking. ‘Ah yes,’ said the priest. ‘Please come in.’ The monk placed his wet sandals beside the other shoes in the vestibule, footwear that was modest, neatly arranged. ‘If you don’t mind, please wait in the office. Very busy today. A funeral. Family and friends are now eating lunch.’

  The monk sat on a chair with horsehair stuffing coming out of it. He could feel hard circles, probably springs. This was nothing like the pristine neat office of the monastery where the abbot carried out his administrative duties.

  There was a computer on the desk but it had a cover over it as if it hadn’t been used for a long time. It was the most up-to-date item in the office, and seemed anachronistic. Beside it was a ledger with handwriting in it, dates down one column. There was a solid old-fashioned black telephone with a dial, and a cradle on top for the handpiece. In bundles secured by elastic bands were tourist brochures of the local area. The monk saw photos of Sea Breeze Shopping Plaza, Married Rocks, Frog Shrine.

  The priest came to and from the office, walking quickly enough to create a breeze which lifted the hems of his robes. He was often followed by an older woman badgering him and giving him instructions. His mother. As the priest slid the screens of the hall open and closed, the monk caught a glimpse of the funeral party and their noisy feasting.

  The monk recalled the funeral so recently held at the monastery. He saw the white lilies and chrysanthemums surrounding the coffin, Soshin’s body inside. Beside the body was Soshin’s beloved baseball bat, and on his chest was a small prayer bag with a star and cross-hatching embroidered on it. The monks chanted, one continuous sound, each monk listening to the others, taking care that pauses for breath did not leave gaps. Afterwards, they all shouted to Soshin that he was dead now and must leave. When his charred bones were returned to the monastery they came in two urns.

  The phone started ringing very loudly. It rang for a long time before the harried priest came to answer it. He used the pen attached to the ledger to write something down. When the priest replaced the receiver he looked at the monk, as if only now remembering that he’d been left waiting. ‘Come,’ said the priest.

  The monk followed the priest past the hall, down a long corridor that seemed to wave up and down like a mountain path, following some natural topography. ‘Your room,’ said the priest, then promptly returned to his funeral party.

  The room opened onto an interior garden, overgrown and lush. It had once been tended, structured, but now grew wild. A makeshift clothesline was rigged up to form the hypotenuse of a triangle with a corner of the building. A spider had webbed a home for itself in the triangle. The web too looked abandoned. At one end of the line, under the eaves, dangled a lone sock, the same dark grey as the timbers. It was cocooned in cobwebs, soggy with rain. Decay and the passing of time hung in a delicate balance.

  As the monk settled in he wondered whether the priest was happy in his position here. It was no doubt a temple inherited from his father, the family business. Perhaps it would have suited him more to be a scholar studying the scriptures the monk had seen high on a shelf in the office, but the priest had been born into the world of the temple with its parish duties. He could not easily sever himself from his situation.

  The monk listened to the drip and trickle of rain, his eyes focused on a single leaf. Occasionally, but not every time, a raindrop hit it directly. The leaf bowed, let the rain slide off, then regained its shape. This individual drop would have made a sound but in the water symphony was indistinguishable. Some drops formed on the tips of leaves and lingered there.

  The monk went along one corridor and the next looking for the bathroom, opening doors on
ly to find cupboards full of bedding, boxes, old ledgers. He closed such doors gently, as if in a nursing home, so that the draught of fresh air he brought with him wasn’t too much of a shock to the twilight inhabitants.

  Behind another door were belongings in similar disarray to those in his room at the Blue House. A pair of frayed jeans lying on the f loor, a checked shirt crumpled on one of the mattresses, towels, a couple of backpacks, camping gear, bike magazines and helmets. The monk wondered where the occupants of the room were. Perhaps they were already bathing. He closed the door and moved on, looking forward to the company of fellow travellers.

  Eventually he found the bathroom, in an alcove off a secondary corridor. He left his clothes neatly folded up on a shelf in the changing room and stepped naked onto the tiled f loor of the bathing area. Though it was a communal bathroom, the monk had it to himself. Perhaps he’d come at the wrong time. He sat on one of the little stools and filled a basin with water. How strange to be bathing alone. It gave him the odd feeling that he was being watched.

  He found his fellow guests—two young men—in the kitchen watching the baseball, commenting on the players, urging them on, calling out, punching their fists into the air. When the monk came in to prepare his evening meal, they went quiet. One of them picked up the remote control and turned the volume down. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Please continue,’ the monk replied. He hadn’t meant it to sound like he was giving permission. The baseball channel was a favourite at the monastery. The monks also made comments, shouted encouragement and approval.

  The monk watched the pitcher prepare himself, tip the shield of his cap with his index finger.

  The camera pulled away for the long shot as the pitcher lifted his leg and finally threw the ball. The batter then started running. A sound of exultation rose from the onlookers like a great bird taking to the sky. ‘A home run!’ the monk observed. He expected his companions to be overjoyed but they merely smiled politely. When the quarter came to an end and the ads started, they bowed and left the room. They hadn’t even waited for the final score.

  The monk turned the volume up to entice the young men back, and looked for a saucepan in which to cook his rice. He found an urn, cups, saucers, bowls, but no cooking pots or utensils. The funeral party food must have been brought in from outside.

  He would not be eating rice tonight. At the monastery it was the staple; each meal began with setting aside a small portion for hungry ghosts. The monk opened the kitchen window and scattered a few grains outside. It wouldn’t go to waste. If there were no ghosts here birds would eat them.

  He made do with a cup of hot water from the urn, and sat in the abandoned kitchen listening to the clock tick. At one-minute intervals the hand would spurt forward to the next position. The three, six, nine and twelve were Roman numerals and the rest of the hours lozenge-shaped, all joined up by a circle of minutes—double lines with divisions across them like a set of railway tracks. When the hands pointed to nine thirty, the regular bedtime at the monastery, the monk walked back along the wavy corridor to his room.

  The rain had abated. He could hear crickets outside—not a whole chorus, just one or two late-nighters. The temple lodgings were quiet. He wondered whether his fellow guests had gone to bed yet. Perhaps he could find their room again. Let them know how the game ended.

  He had not been sent into the world to seek out companions or discuss baseball. Already the monk’s mind was wandering from his task.

  The monk sat meditating. He sent out loving kindness to his fellow guests, to the priest and his mother, to the funeral party. Then he projected it further, to the people in the village, to the f lowers and trees in the temple grounds, the budding plums, to the fish in the unseen sea, molluscs, krill, plankton, everything that was alive, as far as his imagination took him. He finished his meditation by bringing his loving kindness back to Soshin.

  The monk took out the urn, fondly touched the black cloth it was wrapped in, and the white cord which tied it. When he had entered the monastery as a little boy, it was Soshin who looked after him, told him stories, pulled funny faces and made him laugh. If the monk became drowsy during meditation, Soshin was the one who came along and struck him on the back. The old man had been at the monastery for as long as anyone could remember, a grandfather to them all.

  The monk could barely recall his own grandfather, a man in an old-fashioned suit that smelled of camphor and dust. He wore it the day he brought the monk to the monastery. He seemed uncomfortable in it and walked in an odd way, as if the suit impeded his movements.

  Sometimes during meditation, especially in the monk’s early years, this man appeared like a ghost made of mist. He was a farmer, there were fresh green shoots of rice in a large square pond. The rice shoots were arranged in rows, and the dark evening light cast shadows of rice on the water. There were shadows of shadows, each a paler version of itself, exuberant ref lections striking the water. Here the man wore gumboots and light grey farm clothes, trousers of a sturdy material.

  There were women in the fields too, bending over, in big sunhats made from bamboo, and padded leggings. The old women remained bent like this even when they weren’t tending the rice. When young they were straight as trees but the wind of their lives had blown them over.

  Dragonf lies hovered or took short journeys across the pond. The monk also saw the insects called water boatmen breast-stroking across the surface. Occasionally a perched crane would lift its great wings and take to the air. The monk and the crane saw fat carp greedily munching at water-plant roots, heard the sound, saw their orange, white or black bodies, greedy mouths coming up and sucking at the dryness of air, testing all possible sources of food.

  The monk let the images dissolve. Soshin became his grandfather, the monastery his family.

  He gently placed the urn beside his mattress. While the larger urn was ceremoniously consigned to the monastery burial ground this one remained. The abbot announced to the assembly of monks that Soshin had asked that part of his remains be cast into the sea.

  The next morning, after breakfast, came the second announcement. Yugen would be the one to carry out Soshin’s last request.

  Yugen. So rarely did the monk hear his own name, he’d almost forgotten he had one.

  4

  A sortie

  While Yugen felt honoured to be the one to carry out Soshin’s last request, the abbot had not told him why he had been chosen. He’d never even seen the sea, had little experience of the world outside the monastery. Perhaps it was a kind of test. Monks had koans to ponder: the goose in the bottle, or what did your face look like before your father was born. Perhaps this task was a koan in action.

  Yugen hoped that the choice had been made by Soshin himself.

  He headed seawards, in the direction the priest had indicated, along the grassy edge of a road through the fields, thinking about how to proceed. The abbot had given no theSeaBed specific instructions. Yugen didn’t know whether he should cast the remains into the water from the shore, or hire a boat to take them into the deep.

  By the time he reached the highway, the early-morning sunlight had disappeared behind a bank of cloud. Yugen waited for a break in the traffic, then crossed to the large building blocking the view of the sea. welcome to sea breeze shopping plaza proclaimed the sign on the arched entrance. In the car park tourists were piling out of a bus, looking around, blinking, as if they’d just been released from a long time in a dark cavern.

  Yugen skirted the plaza and followed the sign pointing to the Married Rocks and Frog Shrine. When he climbed the steps up to the path he had his first uninterrupted view of the sea.

  The monk had imagined blue, with ripples of refracted luminosity, as it was in the brochures at the temple. Or huge curved waves in restless undulation. He did not expect this mute greyness. How small it was, no bigger than a lake, f lattened by the weight of an oceanic sky. Why did Soshin want this to be his last resting place? Yugen could not recall him mentioning any special con
nection to the sea.

  He continued along the path, skirting the side of a mountain separating the highway from the sea. The swish of traffic dissipated and was replaced by intermittent voices. Yugen turned to see the tourists in clumps behind him.

  He was closer to the sea now, could see its small oscillations, the movement passing through it. The next curve of the path brought him directly to the water’s edge. And to the Married Rocks. He was able to identify them, one slightly larger than the other, by the plait of sacred straw which joined them.

  Yugen stood gazing at the pair of rocks; again, much smaller than he had imagined. In the brochures they seemed to have the magnitude of islands, but the wife would barely have her head above water at high tide. Neither were they alone—there was a whole family of little rocks scattered around them, the water covering most of them, enhancing their colours, rich brown, green.

  The tourists crowded in, jostling, vying for the best vantage points. They stood in front of the Married Rocks and had their photos taken, barely giving the sacred couple a second glance. Yugen moved on to the relative sanctuary of the Frog Shrine.

  When he closed his eyes, the water pumping out of the frogs’ mouths became the natural cascades of the mountains. Yugen saw the chutes of white water that gushed after rain, imagined it pounding down on him as he sat in the waterfall pool. That water was icy, crispened his skin while his insides melted with the spread of warmth which emanated from the core of his body in response to the surface coldness.

  Specks of rain were falling. A few of them landed directly on the monk’s eyelids, not hard and sharp as if they had come a great distance from the sky but shyly, soothingly, as if someone was holding a cloth close to his forehead and squeezing it out.

  He opened his eyes and saw a large red umbrella coming along the path. As the umbrella approached, beneath it two young women took shape—pure white jackets and full skirts the rich colour of sun-ripened tomatoes. Shrine maidens. They seemed to be gliding along, on the few centimetres of space between their voluminous skirts and the ground. A slight breeze tilted the rain and the maidens adjusted their umbrellas accordingly. Now the monk could see their perfect faces, with lips the colour of their skirts, as if kiss-shaped pieces of the fabric had detached themselves and come to rest on their mouths.