A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

  6.

  The storm passed in the night, and in the cold light of day, she stood at the kitchen counter, waiting for the tea water to boil. It was late, still technically morning but in fact closer to noon. Oliver had woken earlier and had gone out to see how many trees had blown down, and whether Pesto had returned, but now he was back in the kitchen, on his stool at the counter, where he normally sat with the cat on his lap. He was drinking tea and checking his email on his iPhone, while Ruth tried to tell him about her dream. The cat still seemed to be somewhat there with him, but only as an absence, a cat-shaped hole.

  “I couldn’t find her words,” she said. “I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find them. I came back empty-handed.” She spread her fingers and studied her ineffectual palms.

  “Well,” he said. “At least you tried.”

  The water boiled and she filled the teapot. “Actually, at one point I felt I had something, right there at my fingertips, but then I realized it was old Jiko’s story, not Nao’s, and so I let it go. I didn’t want to get distracted, you know?”

  Oliver nodded. He knew all about distraction. She heard the whoosh of an outgoing email, as he put down the phone and took a sip of cold tea.

  “The Friends of the Pleistocene are asking me when my monograph will be ready for submission,” he said, glumly. “I should have had it done by now. Why can’t I focus? Why are they in such a hurry?”

  The questions were rhetorical, so she didn’t bother to answer. She topped off his tea and poured a cup for herself. “The only other words I found were Haruki’s,” she said. “The ones in his secret French diary, but we’d already read those, so I left them behind.”

  “That’s the trouble with the Pleistocene,” he said. “It’s always rush rush rush. They want everything yesterday.”

  “I put it in the box of his remains right before I woke up. It seemed like the right thing to do.”

  “But it’s not their fault,” he said. “I know that. It’s mine. I just can’t concentrate without Pesto.”

  “Did you hear a word I was saying?”

  He looked up at her. “Of course I did. It sounds like quite a dream. Have you checked the diary?”

  She put down her tea. “Oh,” she said. “Do you think I should?”

  Part IV

  A book is like a large cemetery upon whose tombs one can no longer read the effaced names. On the other hand, sometimes one remembers well the name, without knowing if anything of the being, whose name it was, survives in these pages.

  —Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé

  Nao

  1.

  Are you still there?

  I wouldn’t blame you if you’d totally given up on me this time. I mean, I gave up on myself, right? So why should I expect you to stick around? But if you did, and if you are still there (and I really hope you are) then I want to thank you for not losing faith in me.

  So now where were we? Oh, right. I was sitting on the bench at the bus stop, waiting for the bus to take me to the temple so I could watch my old Jiko die, and there was an old guy in a jogging suit sweeping up the petals from the sidewalk, and a dirty white dog licking its balls, and the stationmaster was opening the doors to the station. The first commuters started to arrive, and then a train pulled in, and some passengers got off, just like you’d see at any small train station early in the morning. Nothing special, right? But after a few minutes, the stationmaster came back out again with some guy in a suit, and he looked around and caught sight of me and pointed. The guy who was with him bowed in thanks, and when he straightened up, I saw that it was my dad.

  I couldn’t believe it. I thought he was dead. Actually, I’d been trying not to think, because every time I did, I would picture him in a car in the woods somewhere with his suicide friends, suffocating and listening to Nick Drake.

  But he wasn’t. He was walking toward me, and so I quickly looked away and pretended I hadn’t seen him. When he got to my bench, he stood there while I watched the dog scratch its fleas. He knew I knew he was there, but we didn’t have much to say to each other, and the conversation, when it finally started, was pretty lame and went something like this:

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Have you been here long?”

  “Uh, yeah? Like all night?”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  “Whatever.”

  I scooched over to make room because I didn’t want to touch him. He sat down, and we watched the dog together until it finished scratching and walked away.

  “Did you come to see Obaachama?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Is she sick?”

  I nodded.

  “Is she dying?”

  I nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I laughed, but not like ha-ha. More like yeah, right, and what the fuck good would that have done?

  He understood my meaning and didn’t say anything.

  The bus came around the corner just then, and we both stood up. We were the only passengers, but we lined up politely anyway, me in front and my dad behind, like we were strangers. When the bus pulled to a stop, I said,

  “I thought you were dead.”

  It was like I was talking to the side of the bus, and I wasn’t sure if he’d even heard me. The words were in my head and they leaked out of my mouth before I could stop them. I really didn’t want to get into it with him, so when he didn’t answer, I felt relieved. The bus doors opened and we got on. Dad paid for our tickets, and I went to the very back of the bus and sat down, and he followed. He hesitated for a moment, but then he sat down next to me. He gave a big sigh, like we’d just accomplished something major, and then reached over and patted my hand.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not dead yet.”

  When we arrived at the temple, old Jiko was still alive but there were a lot of people waiting around for her to die. Some of the danka and a few nuns and priests and even some newspaper reporters had come on account of her being just a little bit famous for being so old.

  We were her family, so we got special VIP treatment and got to go right in to see her. Muji took us. Old Jiko was lying in her futon. She looked so tiny, like an ancient child. Her skin was almost transparent, and under it you could see the beautiful round bones of her cheeks. She was staring up at the ceiling, but when I knelt beside her and took her hand, she turned her head and looked at me through her milky blue flowers of emptiness.

  “Yokkata,” she whispered. “Ma ni atta ne.”152

  Her fingers were like thin, dry sticks, but hot. I thought I felt her squeeze my hand with her hot fingers. I couldn’t make any words come out of my mouth, because I was trying not to cry. What was there to say? She knew I loved her. Sometimes you don’t need words to say what’s in your heart.

  But she had something she wanted to tell us. I think she’d been waiting. She raised her arms and struggled to sit up. I tried to help her, but her body was just bones in a skin bag, and I was afraid to hurt her.

  “Muji,” she whispered.

  Muji was right there, and my dad was, too.

  “Sensei,” Muji pleaded. “Please lie down. You don’t have to . . .”

  But old Jiko insisted. She wanted to sit in seiza,153 so they had to lift her by the armpits onto her knees, and I honestly thought her arms would fall off or the effort would kill her. You could see how hard it was, but finally they got her balanced and upright. Muji straightened her collar. Old Jiko sat there for a while with her eyes closed, recovering, and then she raised her hand. Muji knew. She had a brush and ink standing ready on a small table, and she moved them over to Jiko’s futon and placed them carefully in front of her.

  In case you don’t know, it’s an old tradition among Zen masters to write a final poem on their deathbeds, so this whole business wasn’t as strange as it sounds, but it kind of freaked me out because one minute I swear she was about to take her last b
reath, and the next minute she’s sitting up in bed with a brush in her hand.

  She kept her eyes closed while Muji got everything ready, placing a clean white sheet of rice paper on the desk in front of her and then carefully grinding the ink against the inkstone. When she was done, she replaced the ink stick in its holder and bowed.

  “Hai, Sensei. Dozo . . .”154

  And then Jiko opened her eyes. She dipped her brush in the thick black ink, pressing and tapping it lightly against the inkstone like she had all the time in the world, which she did, because time slowed down to give her the moments she needed. In honor of her great effort and her supernatural ability to slow time, we all sat up straighter—me and my dad, kneeling in front of her, and Muji off to one side—and the room grew very still, except for the pressing and tapping. Then, when the point of her brush was just right, Jiko took a deep breath and held it over the white paper. Her hand was motionless. A drop of black ink began to swell at the brush’s tip, but before it fell, the brush swooped like a black bird cutting across a pale grey sky, and a moment later, five dark, bold slashes lay wetly across the page.

  It wasn’t a poem. It was a single character.

  Five strokes. Sei. Ikiru. To live.

  Still holding the brush, she looked at me and my dad.

  “For now,” she said to both of us. “For the time being.”

  A lot of Zen masters like to die sitting up in zazen, but old Jiko lay down. It’s no big deal. It doesn’t mean that she wasn’t a true Zen master. You can be a true Zen master and still lie down. The Buddha himself died lying down, and all that sitting-up business is just a big macho add-on. The way old Jiko died was perfectly fine. She put the brush carefully back onto the holder and then she keeled very slowly over onto her right side, just like old Shaka-sama. Her knees were still all folded up from seiza and she didn’t even bother to stretch them out. When her head touched the ground, she just put her hand under her cheek to cradle it and closed her eyes like she was getting ready to take a nap. She looked really comfortable. She took a long, rattling breath, and then another, and then the whole world exhaled with her. And then she stopped. Just like that. We waited, but nothing else happened. She was all gone.

  Muji knelt down next to her and wet her lips with matsugo-no-mizu,155 and then she made raihai bows in front of her, and me and my dad made some, too. Then they rolled her tiny body over onto her back and straightened out her knees, and Muji lit incense and put a white cloth over her face. She had already prepared the altar with fresh candles and incense and flowers, and now she went off to tell all the people who were waiting outside.

  I just sat there, trying to understand what had happened. I couldn’t believe old Jiko was really dead, and I kept wanting to peek underneath the white cloth. I was worried that she might be suffocating under there, but the cloth wasn’t moving or anything, so I knew she wasn’t breathing. The thin trickle of incense rose from the burning tip into the rafters, but nothing else moved.

  Time was still acting slow and strange, and I couldn’t tell if minutes or hours or days were passing. I could hear different things going on in other parts of the temple. The tatami mats were disappearing from the room. Eventually some men brought in a big wooden tub. Muji filled it with sakasamizu, starting with the cold water,156 because when a person dies, you have to do everything upside down and backward. When the tub was filled, she carefully undressed old Jiko’s body and then asked me if I wanted to help wash her. I could see my dad was worried about me, and he said I didn’t need to, but I told him of course I would. I mean, after all the baths Jiko and I had taken together and all the times I’d scrubbed her back, I knew how to do it, right? It was like I’d been practicing for this. I knew exactly how hard to rub, and it didn’t feel strange just because now she was dead. It felt pretty normal.

  Afterward, Muji and I dressed her in a special pure white kimono that Muji had sewn for her without making any knots in the sewing thread so old Jiko would not be tied to this world. We crossed her kimono right over left, which is backward from the way a living person wears it, and we laid her out so that her head faced north instead of south. Muji put a little knife on her chest to help cut her remaining ties to the world. Old Jiko lay like this for the whole next day, while the danka and other priests came to bow to her and pay their last respects. Then they put her in the coffin.

  I thought I knew something about Japanese funerals because of the one my classmates had for me, but Jiko’s funeral wasn’t anything like mine. It was very grand, and held in the main shrine room, and there were tons of people there from all over, and priests and nuns from the main temple headquarters. My mom finally showed up, all proper and dressed in black. She brought a black suit for my dad to wear, and a clean school uniform for me. The priests and nuns chanted lots of sutras, and everybody took turns going up and offering incense at the altar. I got to go up second, right after my dad, which made me feel nervous and important. After all the guests got a chance to offer incense and bow, we had to say goodbye to old Jiko before they nailed the coffin shut. We put flowers in with her and stuff that she might find useful in the afterlife, like her sutra books and slippers and reading glasses and the six coins she will need to get across the River of Three Crossings on Mount Fear. When no one was looking, I slipped some Melty Kisses into her hand, too. Zen masters don’t usually take chocolates with them to the Pure Land, since they’re supposed to be so unattached to things of this world, but I knew how much old Jiko loved her chocolates, and I figured it wouldn’t matter. When I touched her fingers, they were stiff and icy cold. She’d already changed so much since she died. The day before, when we were washing her, it felt like she was still there in her body, but now this body was empty. A sack. A skin bag. A cold thing. No Jiko at all.

  They closed the coffin and nailed it shut with a stone, and the whole time, the priests and nuns were chanting. Memories, like little waves, licked the edges of my mind. I remembered back to my own funeral, and Ugawa Sensei’s sad voice and the words he was chanting. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. It made sense to me now, because one moment old Jiko was form and the next moment she wasn’t. Then I remembered the karaoke party we had, when Jiko sang the “Impossible Dream” song. Somehow, I connected that song to her vow to save all beings, and as I watched her lying there, I felt sad for her because she had failed, and the world was still filled with creeps and hentai. But then something else occurred to me, that maybe her failure didn’t matter, because at least she’d been true to her impossible dream until the very end. I wondered if her heart was feeling peaceful and calm as she was laid to her rest, or if she was still worrying about stuff. I wondered if she was worrying about me. It’s selfish, but I kind of hoped she was. I mean, it’s one thing to fail to save all beings, but at least she could have waited for me. Her own great-granddaughter. But she hadn’t. She’d just gone ahead and gotten on the elevator anyway.

  Gone, gone,

  Gone beyond . . .

  We took her body off the mountain in a fancy hearse and down to the crematorium near the bigger temple in town. The nuns and priests did some more chanting as they put old Jiko’s coffin on the metal tray and then they slid her into the oven like a pizza. The oven doors shut, and suddenly I worried about the Melty Kisses melting all over her pure white kimono, but it was too late to do anything about it. We went outside to wait, and I could see the smoke rising into a cloudless blue sky. My dad came out and stood with me and held my hand, and I didn’t mind. We didn’t talk or anything. When it was done, we went back and they slid out the tray. There was no sign of the chocolate. All that was left of her was a tiny broken skeleton of warm white bones. She was so tiny I couldn’t believe it.

  The crematorium man took a little hammer and broke up the bigger bones, and then we all stood around the tray with wooden chopsticks, which we used to pick up the pieces. You do this with a partner, and each pair picks up a bone together and puts it in the funeral urn. You start with the feet bones and
move up to the head, because you don’t want her to be upside down for the rest of eternity. Me and my dad were one team, and we were both really careful, and as we did it, Muji explained what each bone was. Oh, that is her ankle. That is her thigh. That is her elbow. Oh, look, there’s her nodobotoke!

  Everyone was superhappy because finding the nodobotoke is a good sign. Muji said it’s the most important bone, the one we call an Adam’s apple in English, but in Japanese it’s called the Throat Buddha, because it’s triangular and looks a little bit like the shape of a person sitting zazen. If you can find the Throat Buddha, then the dead person will enter nirvana and return to the ocean of eternal tranquillity. The Throat Buddha is the last bone that goes in, and you put it on the very top, and then they close the urn.

  We didn’t need the big hearse for the ride back because now Jiko was so small she could sit on my lap, which is where I held her all the way back up the mountain. When we got home, we went into Jiko’s room and put her urn and her picture on the family altar, next to Haruki #1’s.

  Muji went and got Jiko’s from the main shrine room. Somebody had already brought it to be mounted on a scroll during the wake, and now Muji hung it by the family altar, next to old Jiko’s funeral portrait. The reporters had made a big deal about her final word, going around asking all the muckety-muck priests from the temple headquarters for their profound interpretations and explanations. Nobody could agree. Some of them said it was the start of a poem that she hadn’t been able to finish. Others said no, that it was a complete statement which showed she was still clinging to life, so that even after a hundred and four years, her understanding was still imperfect. And others disagreed, claiming that writing life at the moment of death meant that she understood that life and death were one, and so she was fully enlightened and freed from duality. But the fact is, nobody understood what she really meant except me and my dad, and we weren’t saying.