Loon Lake

by E. L. Doctorow

  I found myself on my knees, behind the crowd. I was wet. Blood streamed in my eye. But the ceremony continued. There were men drooling there. There were onanists. There were gamblers betting on the moment of death. Later there were men leaping on her, on each other, squatting on her head, crawling over her, falling on her, shoving bottles in her. There were gallants calling for order, for some law of decency if all pleasure was not to be lost. And Fanny giving up a human appearance by degrees, trumpeting her ecstasies to the killing passion of the rubes.

  From one only was there absolute quiet in this mayhem. I looked at him. His face was hidden in the shadow of his hat brim. You wouldn’t know his connection with these spermy rites except for the indolence of his stance as he leaned against the bleacher supports with his bony arms folded and his ankles crossed. And I could swear I heard, through the hoarse cries and shouts and shrieking and orgiastic death, the thoughtful and preoccupied sucking of Sim Hearn’s tongue on his teeth.

  Riding over the mountain in the Model A, Joe became aware of where he was. She accelerated, the headlights brightened; she braked, the headlights dimmed. The bones of his legs sounded the ground pitch of the engine. Mrs. Hearn’s face luminous in the night, she urged the car forward with her chin, her furrowed brow, her shoulders putting english on the turns. At the bottom of a hill she gunned it, halfway up plunged with her left leg, shifted to second, she came over the tops of the hills with her horn blowing, headlights making a quick stab at the night sky.

  “Of course they never live long, such creatures—the heart won’t beat for them … All summer Sim Hearn watches—he watches and then he sees the signs—she doesn’t take breath as she should—from the bed she cannot lift herself … The people know Hearn—he gives something special at end of summer, a grand finale … The word goes through the mountains… Look where we are—we make time better than I hoped.”

  In the early hours of the morning she judged us safely away and turned into a motor court and paid for a cabin in the pines farthest from the road. Wedged into the rumble seat was my broken-down valise with everything I possessed in the world. She had packed it for me. I carried it and her frayed black Gladstone into the room. She locked the car and locked the cabin door behind us and pulled the shades and then pulled the light cord.

  The bed had a khaki blanket but no sheets. Two lumpy gray pillows. Magda Hearn rummaged in her bag for a white cotton face towel. She spread the towel on top of the bureau. The room had the shit smell of old untreated wood. She removed from her purse a manila envelope and from the envelope removed a stack of greenbacks which she placed on the cotton towel.

  “Sim knows to get the money out before the fun starts,” she said. “To Albany to the bank he thinks I am going.”

  She wet her thumb on her lower lip and stood at the bureau counting the money. I sat down on the bed and took off my shoes and socks. She wet her thumb on the inside of her lower lip, pulling it down so that for a moment her teeth showed her expression went slack. She was a while counting.

  “Fifteen hundred and eighty-four dollars!”

  She dug in her purse and extracted a wallet and from this withdrew another wad of bills.

  “And plus salary which he never paid!” she said in a tone of vengeful triumph. The thumb applied to the red inside of her lip. She counted aloud this time. “Two hundred I squeeze from you, you bastard!”

  She opened her Gladstone, interrupting herself to press her lips strongly on my mouth.

  She pulled the string tie of a small canvas coin sack and spilled a stream of coins on the bed.

  She lay on the bed making separate piles of nickels and dimes and quarters and halves, the little piles collapsed and came together because she was shaking the bed with her guttural glee. She started over, she was keen on pennies, too—if there had been coins of smaller denominations, she would have counted them, too. She was ready to count coins forever and to bitterly calculate the suffering she had done for each one.

  “Joe Joe Joe! Tomorrow we trade his car and its license and buy new. We drive to California you and me. We are in our new car on way to California before even he thinks is something wrong!”

  She gave up the count and lay on her back in the coins. She lifted her arms. “Come to me, come to Magda. You know what?” Kissing me, running hands on me, opening one by one the buttons on my fly. “To Hollywood we are going. I have read the magazines, I understand the movie business. I sell my life story. A film of my life! Everyone will know who Magda is.” She unbuckled my belt, she opened the buttons of my shirt. She kissed my chest and pulled the shirt down off my shoulders. “And who knows who knows, with your looks, my Joseph, with your body, why you cannot be movie star? And we will love each other and have great sooccess. Shall we?” Laughing, going down on me. “Shall we?”

  She had no idea I had actually caught evil as one catches a fever, she didn’t understand this, she thought my passion matched hers. I wanted to do to her what had been done to the Fat Lady, I wanted the force of a hundred men in unholy fellowship, I went at her like a murderous drunkard.

  I fucked past her joy into her first alarm, I saw on her face under the weak glare of the hanging bulb the dilated eye. I was enraged by the flaws of her, the unnatural cleft of her left hip, one buttock was actually atrophied, the raised veins behind the knees, the hanging breasts like deflated balloons, the yellowed face with loosened folds of skin at the neck rising in parallel rows as she turned her head from me this stinking Hungarian hag this thieving crone bitch with the gall to think she had me for her toy boy her lover chuffing now like a fucking steam engine I brought the tears to her eyes she would acknowledge nothing she resisted and then the voice did come, and then the voice louder and more insistent, and finally she seemed to be urging me along as if we were together, the lying cunt in the Pine Grove Motor Court, our music mingling with the night wind in the pines the tree trunks creaking the million crickets. I ended and began again. We wrestled. She begged me to stop. Tears of mourning came from my eyes. I let her fall asleep. I woke her, made her moan. At one point the coins sticking to the wet ass, the wet belly, I invented a use of Magda Hearn so unendurable to her that with the same cry that must have come from her the day she fell twisting from the trapeze, she flung herself off the bed—a moment’s silence, then the sickening shaming sound of bone and flesh slamming into the floor, a grunt. I lay on my back on the bed not daring to look, I heard a small soprano cry, a deeper moan, a whispered curse. I lay still. After a while I realized I was listening to the snores of an exhausted human being.

  I thought I saw the first crack of light under the window shade. I got off the bed and rolled my clothes and shoes into a bundle. I grabbed the stack of bills from the bureau. I unlatched the door quietly and closed it behind me. There were no other guests at the Pine Grove Motor Court. A thin frost lay on the windshield of the Model A. The wind blew.

  With all my might I reared back and threw the bills into the wind. I thought of them as the Fat Lady’s ashes.

  I found a privy up the hill behind the cabins and next to it an outdoor shower. I stood in the shower of cold springwater and looked up at the swaying tops of the pine trees and watched the sky lighten and heard through the water and the toneless wind the sounds of the first birds waking.

  I dried myself as best I could and put on my clothes in a tremble of stippled skin and turned my back on the cabins and struck off through the woods. I had no idea where I was going. It didn’t particularly matter. I ran to get warm. I ran into the woods as to another world.

  At Kamakura he climbed the spiral stairs inside the largest Buddha in the world. In the head of the largest Buddha, on the ledge of its chin, sat a tiny Buddha facing in the opposite direction. Simple idolatry held no interest for him, but a religion that joked held genuine interest. He felt all at once the immense power of a communication that used no words. I acknowledge Warren’s lifelong commitment—cancel lifelong commitment—fatal attraction for any kind of communication whet
her from words, flags, pigeons or the touch of fingertips in hope of a common language, but we must remember how we are vulnerable to the repetition of our insights so that they tend to come to us not as confirmation of something we already know but as genuine discoveries each and every time. And so he descended, and by degrees over a period of several days, drifted south along the route of the old Tokaido. He saw thousands of Buddhas lined up in trays in the tourist shops or ranked in legions at the shrines, some in lead, some in wood, some carved in stone and dressed in little knitted caps and capes. He came to see in this ubiquitous phenomenon the Buddha’s godlike propensity for self-division, the endless fractioning of himself into every perceivable aspect, an allegory made by the people of Japan from the cellular process of life. Thus enlightened, he turned his eyes on the people in the streets and the narrow shopping arcades, old women in black slapping along on their sandals, black-haired children of incredible beauty staring at him with their thumbs stuck in their plump cheeks, giggling pairs of young women in brightly colored kimonos, old shopkeepers with wispy goatees bowing as he passed, thoughtful peddlers, and young men who stopped in their tracks to glare at him and bear themselves with brazen umbrage—they were all the Buddha too in his infinite aspect. Traveling down this avenue of thought lit only by stone lanterns filled with small stones in lieu of flames, he saw the true dereliction of the planet and realized anew that convictions of friendship, love, the assumption of culture, the certainty of calendars were fragile constructs of the imagination, and there was no place to live that was truly home, neither for him nor for the multitudinous islanders of Japan.

  In this he-took-for-appropriate state of mind, Warren arrived one day at road’s end, Kyoto, the strange city whose chief industry was meditation. He wandered from one monastery to the next, there were whole neighborhoods of them, but where, where was the sign that one was for him? He was afflicted with a fluttering humility, not daring even to make inquiries, hovering at this gate or in that garden or touching down for just a moment of indecision before the small window with the visitor admission in yen painted in black calligraphy on white cardboard stuck into the grate as if he were looking for a movie to see. Late in the afternoon, weary and full of self-condemnation, he happened to stumble up the step of a wooden verandah overlooking one of these beautiful monastery gardens of raked gravel and moss and stone. Thus launched, his large Caucasian person hurtled through a rice-paper door, splintering its laths, and like an infant being born, he found himself with the back half of him still on the porch side of the door and the front half in a room, looking with wide, even horrified eyes at the benign polished wood Buddha sitting facing him with a little altar of flowers on either side and the sinuous smoke of incense appearing to squinch up its eyes. He had made a terrible thunderous racket but nobody came running, nobody came shouting, and after he crawled the rest of the way into the room he set about calmly picking up the pieces and preparing in his mind the self-demeaning speech by which he would beg the chance to make the most extended and profound restitution. As it happened, the monastery was empty; he was to learn it was the rare annual holiday of this particular establishment in which everyone was set free for twenty-four hours. Only after searching the grounds did Warren find an old caretaker willing to come look and see the awful thing he had done. This old caretaker was smoking a cigarette, which he held in his teeth. He took in smoke with each inhalation and with each exhalation smoke streamed out of his nostrils. He gazed at the carnage, the plumes of smoke from his nostrils indicating the depth and strength of each drawn breath, and it seemed to fascinate him that such a perfect and modest structure as a sliding paper door should have been turned into this. He was a very short, extremely bald old man, and he wore a torn ribbed undershirt and a pair of dirty white muslin knickers with flapping ties at the waist but the peculiar thing was that he was not unpleasant to look upon, it did not create feelings of pity or fear or other degrees of patronization to look upon him. He picked up a broken length of lath and looked at it and asked a question in unintelligible Japanese. I’ll pay for it, Warren said and removed from his pocket a wad of yen. He unfolded the bills and looked at the old man squinting at the money through the cigarette smoke. Warren peeled off one bill and put it in the man’s hand. Then another. Then another. He kept waiting for a sign that he’d met the cost. He hesitated. The old man looked at him and peremptorily slapped his arm with the lath. Warren was so astonished he dropped the whole wad of bills in the old man’s hand. The caretaker put the bills into the pockets of his voluminous knickers, looked up at the Caucasian and swatted him again with the flat of the stick, this time across the side of his face. Then he laughed, and in so doing released his cigarette, which fell from his teeth and lay on the wooden floor glowing. Immediately Warren, thinking the whole place would go up, stepped on the tobacco ember with his large shoe, only realizing in that moment the defacement he had committed by stepping with street shoes on the monastery floors.

  But the caretaker had turned and headed back to his garden shed with its straw brooms and clay pots and small pyramids of gravel. Warren experienced the uncanny sense of a sharply learned lesson. He slept that night at a Western hotel in the downtown section of Kyoto and found in the nightstand drawer a volume in English that seemed to be the Buddhist equivalent of the Bible. Gautama was an Indian prince kept at home by his father so as not to see life in any aspect but its most luxurious. But one day he went out and saw a beggar, an old crippled man, a monk and a corpse. He was thus able to conclude despite his own royal existence that life was suffering. Why couldn’t he have figured that out without leaving the palace? Warren wondered. If death exists, life has to be suffering. Did his father hide death from Gautama? How was that done? The book said the cause of all suffering was desire, the desire to have the desire to be. Perhaps a prince would never experience the desire to have, but how could he avoid the desire to be? If desire by its nature is not gratified before it realizes itself, does it not exist in palaces too? Does it not exist especially in palaces? Nevertheless, he liked the story. He trusted Gautama Siddhartha and the simplicity of his reasoning. Not many people could get away with that sort of reasoning. He trusted the eightfold path for defeating desire and transcending suffering.

  Early the next morning Warren went back to the monastery. The place was a shambles. Doors and shoji walls were splintered and torn everywhere. There were recumbent bodies on the verandah, and in the garden a monk lay in a pool of vomit. All the walls were torn and hanging, bodies lay about as if dead. There was even a body lying across the crest of the tile roof. The monastery looked as if it had been bombed. But even as he gazed at this dismal scene he heard the sound of small tinkling bells coming from somewhere in the main monastery building, and though the bells were soft and delicate they had the astonishing effect of rousing the Zen Buddhists from their drunken stupor. One by one they groaned, rose to their feet and staggered off.

  And then around the corner came a man in white holding a staff of temple bells. His head was shaved, he was stout, the folds of his neck were like ruffles of a collar. He walked right up to Warren and inquired in heavily accented English if he could be of help. I want to discuss with someone the possibility of enrolling here for Zen training, Warren said. Of course, the monk said. If you don’t mind waiting more than two moments but less than six, I will approach the Master for you.

  More than two but less than six, Warren thought as he waited in an anteroom beside the front gate. That’s a few. Shortly thereafter he was escorted by the monk to a small room with a beautiful Bodhisattva pratima and a vase of flowers and straw mats and cushions, and without having to be told, even by himself, he dropped to his knees and bowed to the resident Master, who was seated and facing him with a face of genial amusement. It was the old caretaker. On the one day off of the year for all his followers and monks, he, in perfect realization, had stayed where he was. The Master was smoking a cigarette. Another monk came by and listened. He was laughing and telli
ng the monk, in Japanese, about his first meeting with Warren. Gusts of smoke came out of him. As the story was elaborated, the Master rose and began to act it out, and there to Warren’s astonishment was a perfect imitation of himself, the way he carried himself, his walk, the tone of his voice, the shock on his face as the lath slapped his cheek. The Japanese laughed till there were tears in their eyes. Soon Warren began to smile and then he too exploded into laughter. He would come to understand in the months to follow that the Master so perfectly realized whatever he chose to do, that a kind of magnetic field was formed in which whoever was in his presence drew on its power. That is why interviews with the Master were so highly prized. His perfection was an impersonal force that you could feel and hope someday to manifest from yourself on a continuous basis. If he laughed, it was perfect laughter, and you had to laugh too. If he chose to cry, everyone around him would have to weep. But where did it come from, how did it happen? All Warren could work out was that the Master lived totally to the fullness of his being each and every moment of his existence. He was completely of the moment, then and there, in which you found him. Nothing of him was deadened by the suffering of his past life and there was no striving or fear in him for his future.

  Would the Master feel a need to write poems?

  No, because poems are the expression of longing and despair. Yes, because if the Master is one in every instant with what he sees and hears and feels, the poem is not the Master’s written need but the world singing in the Master.