Plow the Bones

by Douglas F. Warrick

  §

  They like this memory. It is typical, vintage human behavior. Delicious in its predictability. They’ve tasted it before, and they note its flavor, write a few lines on the similarities it holds to other memories like it.

  — Poor baby was an angry teenager. We weep for you, Gordon.

  — Is he an atheist? He doesn’t burn like an atheist.

  — More! There must be more!

  After the fear, the thing that was Gordon Dratch feels intense, awful, cold regret. He feels it freeze inside him, even through the slow fire that burns and bursts him over and over again. They observe the change with joy, watching a favorite play, coming to a well–remembered and well–beloved scene. He weeps until his eyes are gone, and then weeps some more once they are rewound back into his head. They watch the realization work its way across his soul, spreading through his veins like a blood–sickness. He made the wrong decision. Faced with a million spiritual doors, he opened the wrong one. There was such a thing as a wrong door! All of those red–faced old men with their fists bound up into tight, sausage–fingered slabs on the pulpit, those men who had raged against the follies of a Godless world, those men had been RIGHT! Oh, God. Oh, God, forgive me now.

  They applaud. Their favorite line. No man enters the kingdom, and all that.

  And then they dig deeper. So much to learn about this perfect, typical number of the damned. So many beautiful, repetitive layers to wonder at.

  §

  Witness Gordon Dratch in fast–motion, the high school years, filled to bursting with parking lot fights, stolen liquor, three–day suspensions, detentions, Saturday schools, cigarettes, CDs from Scandinavian metal bands with face–paint and leather gauntlets who wore upside–down crosses and sang songs about the devil. Witness the first few years of college whiz by, time–lapse photography of Gordon becoming a sullen young man, the kid whose every relationship would ultimately be scuttled by daddy issues and a latent anger toward a God he claims he does not believe in. All so fast that you can see the bones in his face shift, change shape. A series of patchy beards grown and then shaved off, a dozen pairs of glasses becoming scratched or broken at the bow and then replaced, a thousand T–shirts and a thousand pairs of jeans, recycled over and over again. Spend a single second watching Gordon shout black–metal lyrics in the face of the street–preacher on the quad, both of them red–faced, both of them with veins standing up in their necks.

  Now stop.

  Did you miss it? The moment of his awakening? It is easy to do when you fly through a life. But look at him now, sitting at a desk with his notebook in front of him, scribbling with intense concentration. He loves this class. It is very possibly the only class he has ever taken that he has ever enjoyed. He is twenty–one years old. The heading he has scrawled at the top of the perforated standard–rule page says, ZEN NOTES. Behind it are fifteen pages with the same heading, filled with simple, perfect discoveries excavated from a history he never knew existed, quotes from men who became historical footnotes thousands of years before Gordon Dratch was born, revelations of a life that could be lived without anger or fear.

  Gordon Dratch is joyful.

  Speed forward again, just a few months, and Gordon Dratch is standing at a bar with a beer in his hand, smiling and talking to a stranger in a T–shirt that says, “Jesus died for his own sins, not mine.” He is saying, “Zen and atheism are totally compatible philosophies.” He takes a drink, feels the alcohol going to work on him, making him feel smiley and fuzzy. “Or at least,” he says, “that’s a good place to start.” The words sound funny to him, like they don’t make quite enough sense, and he decides he’s done drinking for the night. He’s proud of himself, sort of. His dad could have never done that. Then he says, “Let me tell you a story.”

  The story he tells is a story the Buddha told when asked to explain what happens to a man after he dies. Gordon says, “There is a war. During that war, a man is shot in the arm with an arrow, and is taken to a medic. The medic takes the man aside and attempts to remove the arrow, but the man is agitated. He won’t sit still, he’s freaking the fuck out, right? He keeps saying, who shot me? Was it someone on the other side or was it one of my own kinsmen, mistaking me for the enemy? Where was the archer when he shot me? I want to know about the trajectory of the arrow. What type of bow was used? What type of wood is the arrow made out of? What will happen now to the archer? What was he thinking when he shot me?”

  The stranger laughs, and Gordon knows he’s doing this right, acting out all the right parts, holding his shoulder and glancing around wide–eyed, selling the comedy. “The medic stops him, calms him down. Then he says, ‘the answers to those questions will not remove the arrow from your arm.’ ”

  The stranger says, “Nice, dude. Nice.”

  Gordon shrugs. “It’s a good story. Basically, Buddha was saying that what happens when we die is inconsequential. We die.”

  The stranger points his beer bottle at Gordon, narrows his eyes, “Yeah, but that proves my point. Even you worship somebody. Buddha is your Jesus.”

  Gordon thinks about it, shakes his head. “No, I don’t think so. For me, Buddha was nothing that I can’t be. It’s weird. You can’t rank somebody as any higher or lower than you. That’s the point. Nobody is my Jesus, because there is no essential duality between entities. Bodhi Dharma… he’s another of those pre–Zen guys who kinda set the stage for Zen… he said, if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.” He smiles wide. “Everything is temporary. Even the Buddha. He’s dead now. He doesn’t exist anymore. When I die, I won’t either. It’s sort of liberating, if you can accept it.”

  The stranger shakes his head, sighs, runs a hand over his scalp. “So, if there’s no risk of punishment or reward after death, why bother with this shit in the first place?”

  Gordon’s eyebrows scrunch up in the middle. He glances away. “I guess I don’t know. Because… I guess, because it’s good for us? It cleanses us. Maybe.” He opens his mouth, works his jaw back and forth. “It makes my life happier, I guess. It makes me a friendlier person. So it can’t be all bad, can it?”

  §

  Oh, delicious, wonderful, stupid, damned Gordon! They breathe the memory in, memorize it, repeat the good parts amongst themselves.

  — No risk of punishment or reward! Ha!

  — It can’t be all bad! It can’t be all bad!

  — Zen burns so long! It burns so hot! Delightful! Delightful!

  After the regret, there is the anger. Gordon would clench his fists if he had them, and when the suffering begins again and his hands rematerialize over his blackened bones, he does. He thrashes about the burning chamber, colliding with walls, falling to the grated floor, howling until his lungs and his voice are gone, and then simply scratching angry patterns in the layer of ash that covers everything. God, the bastard! God, the petulant child who throws His toys to the fire if they fail to please Him! That is the monster who made the world! How dare He? What right does He have?

  They laugh at this. There is so much brilliant anger in him that they become drunk upon it, wheeling around his brain clutching one another for balance, and howling back at his apoplexy. These black, mean, torturous thoughts! He would make a fine member of their race, if that transition were possible. And oh, the names he comes up with! Faggot Christ! God of vomit! Jehovah the Blind Old Rapist, that’s who He is! Creation–Devil! Old–Testament Fascist! Jesus died for his own sins, not mine! Fuck Him! Fuck Him!

  — Aw, look, gentlemen. How adorable.

  — He should have written lyrics for his beloved little black–metal bands.

  — Can you imagine? Little Gordon the Satanic Rock Star. It’s positively quaint.

  They enjoy it while they can. The “Fuck God” stage is the briefest of all. And the one that transitions, finally, inevitably, back into hopeless, haunted, never–ending grief. Grief for what was lost: the illusion of impermanence, the lie of transcendence. Grief for what was never lost, could never b
e lost: Gordon Dratch, a thing with a soul that lasts forever and ever and ever.

  Quick now, before he can lose that choice flavor of rage, they must find another memory to play with.

  §

  Witness Gordon Dratch learning that life is suffering. Drunk, like his dad used to get drunk, that sort of single–minded, locked–on–target drunk, precise in its purpose, determined beyond all distraction. He snorts. Sneers.

  She’s gone. Gone for good.

  He calls his sister, Annie. Her voicemail clicks in, says, “Hey, it’s Annie. We all know how these things work, right? Beep, message, I call you back. If you don’t get it by now, you’ve got bigger problems than not being able to get a hold of me.”

  He says, “You know that everr–body… everybody… always thought she was a bitch, right? Nobody wanted to… say anything, but you all should have. Fuck her. And fuck you too, Annie. Cunt.” And he hangs up the phone.

  Liz has left him, and all the Zen proverbs in the world mean precisely less than shit now. So fuck Liz, and fuck Linji, and fuck Dogen, and fuck the Buddha. If he saw him on the road, Gordon would run his fat ass over.

  What she said was, “You think you get it. You think you have an academic understanding of how to end your own suffering. Well, congratulations. Let me know how that works out.” And before she shut the door on him, leaving him out there beneath the orange porch light, surrounded by light–junkie moths and blood–junkie mosquitoes and all manner of junkies for all manner of substances out in the awful, addicted world, she said, smiling, “Gordon. I hope you find out how to be happy someday.”

  What he said to that was, “Lizzer. I love you.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think you do. I think you are… attached to me. Just come over tomorrow. We’ll pack up your stuff together. Okay?”

  Yada yada yada, shit happened, money crossed hands, and now Gordon is parked in front of a Speedway with a bottle and a half of Red Dog already killed and two more that he’ll almost certainly never finish nestled up against each other in the passenger seat like ostrich eggs. And he is thinking about Linji. Or Rinzai. Or Lin–Chi. Or whoever–the–fuck. Does it matter? The guy with the fly–whisk, who woke his students to their own Buddha–nature by hitting them repeatedly, or shouting nonsense into their faces, who advocated for the True Man of No Rank. Who said, “Whether you’re facing inward or facing outward, whatever you meet up with, just kill it!” Who probably thought of Bodhi Dharma, called to mind his hard eyes and sneering mouth, took from him the wisdom he needed, and allowed the rest of him to fade into the dead past where he belonged, and said, “If you meet a Buddha, kill the Buddha. If you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch. If you meet an arhat, kill the arhat. If you meet your parents, kill your parents. If you meet your kinfolk, kill your kinfolk. Then for the first time you will gain emancipation, will not be entangled with things, will pass freely anywhere you wish to go.”

  There are lights behind him. The sounds of car doors opening and closing.

  Gordon says, “What a shitty ass–wiper,” and he laughs. Linji, with his shouting and slapping and devotion to the beatific joy of random action, his perfect refusal to bow to the tyrannical dualism of logical discourse. In his head, Gordon sees him, sitting among his students, fly–whisk in hand, listening as a student asks him to describe his True Man of No Rank.

  In Gordon’s head, Linji leaps at his student, wraps his fingers in the man’s lapels, screams into his face, spewing wet spit into his eyes, “Speak! Speak!”

  And in his head, the student cannot speak.

  And in his head, Linji drops the student to the floor. He is disgusted. Failure. Don’t these people know? Can’t they understand that they are all the True Man? That if they would simply stop searching, they would find him? He sneers. Spits. He says, “This True Man of No Rank…” and sighs. “What a shitty ass–wiper.”

  To the cop shining a flashlight through his open window, Gordon says, “I’ve got an academic understanding of how to end my own suffering.”

  Someone asks him for his ID. The door is opened. Gordon is led to the back of the squad car. He says, “See, I can tell you anything you want about Zen. I just can’t put it into practice.”

  The engine turns over. Someone is asking him how much he’s had tonight. Someone says something into a walkie–talkie. The walkie–talkie says something back.

  Gordon says, “I’m not… real good at Zen.”

  The streets blur. The lights bleed into one another, neon and halogen and green and red and yellow and white, become one light. He is going somewhere. He says, “I am a shitty ass–wiper.” He passes out in the back of the squad car.

  §

  During the third era, the fires burn out. The embers fade. The flesh steams and slides away in patches, oozes a thousand brilliant multi–colored fluids that never lived beneath it in life, and the thing that is left there, the eternal thing that is, was, always will be Gordon Dratch, is left alone to scab over, to scar. He becomes a blackened thing, his muscles uncovered, his intestines hanging out, a thing to which physical pain has become a sort of distant nostalgia. He mourns the passing of fairness. He mourns the death of compassion. He mourns his own eternity. And they are outside of him again, leaving him alone in his tiny cell with the grated floor. They have sobered. This stage is not one to be enjoyed drunk. There are subtleties to savor here, intricacies of sorrow that are too minute for all that. This isn’t a party game anymore, after all.

  Sometimes, they whisper to him. They quote Linji and Dogen and Milton and the Buddha and the God–Boy. They leave him like that while the human race rots in the world above, while they destroy themselves and rebuild themselves a thousand times over. Sometimes they turn the fires back on and scribble notes about how quietly he whimpers when it consumes him, how he twitches and stirs and murmurs when he is rebuilt. Sometimes they pluck memories from his head. The good memories, mostly. Gordon in his little house, alone, happy to be alone. They replay the time when Gordon, on the phone with Liz some three years after their break–up, said, “I don’t think I’ll ever be in love again, Lizzer. I think that’s okay, too. I think I’m really happy this way,” (they laugh at that, in a quiet, meditative way. Because when he said it, he meant it). And the fall from the ladder, Gordon up there with his toes on the top rung, feeling physical and alive and happy and simple as he threw handfuls of dead leaves from the gutters into a garbage bag. Falling. Hitting the ground, feeling his head split open in the back, the electric stab that was not really pain at all, the trickle of blood from his nostrils and out from beneath his eyes, Gordon thought, Oh. Okay. That’s it for me. And now Gordon aches. Had he thought he was ever that close to enlightenment? Had he really believed in such a thing?

  They do not realize that something is wrong for many thousands of years. They are busy with others. It can’t be helped. Heaven is so exclusive, and the alternative so indiscriminate. But something is wrong. Because the thing that is Gordon Dratch is no longer curled up in a fetal position against the grate, cradling its intestines in its skeletal arms, whimpering through its ruined mouth. The thing that was Gordon Dratch is sitting upright. Breathing. Slowly.

  When they find him like this, they taunt him. They mimic a thousand voices from his past and sharpen them and use them to cut out his eyes and his tongue and his liver, and then use the same sharpened remembered voices to sew them back in again.

  — You have an academic understanding of your own suffering.

  — We all know how these things work, right?

  — Jesus died for his own sins, not mine.

  They turn the fire back on, and watch him sit in silence. Breathing. Slowly. As he is disintegrated.

  — Speak! Speak!

  — Kill your parents! Kill your kinsmen!

  — What a shitty ass–wiper!

  They climb inside his brain, and search for his memories. They are becoming nervous, shaking, their notes forgotten somewhere in the midnight dark of this plac
e. Something is wrong! Gordon Dratch does not burn! Even as his flesh is slashed and blackened and his mind is picked apart, Gordon Dratch does not burn!

  They seek help. And help comes.

  §

  Witness Gordon Dratch in Hell. Opening his flame–hardened eyelids. His posture is perfect. His hands, their skin gone, his skeleton fingers sticking from the globs of cooked meat at the ends of his wrists, resting on his knees. He sees the Other in the room with him, and for a moment he is surprised, and the pain and the fear and the sadness sweep into him again. He accepts them, becomes them, and does not move.

  The Other is beautiful, and her eyes are full of bitter hurt. She is naked and her skin is wet and pale. Her fingers brush at her labia, bored, not so much masturbation as the iconography of masturbation. She has no mouth. She says, “You know who I am.”

  Gordon Dratch nods. “I think so.”

  “I fought against Him too, once. I stood at His throne with a sword in my hand and I thrust it into His guts and as His blood trickled down through the ground of My Father’s House and found the place where it would pool and become my own kingdom, He only smiled at me and told me that He knew I would fail from the beginning. And then He cast me down. And I was not like you. Angel was my station. Spirit was my form. And still he made me into a slave. You can hope for far less compassion than I received.”

  Gordon smiles. “I’m not fighting anyone.”

  It’s quiet in there. Water drips from somewhere up high and taps against the grate. It splatters onto Gordon’s knees, and he shivers.

  The Other flicks at her clitoris. It’s an idle gesture without any purpose. She may as well be twiddling her thumbs, chewing on a strand of her hair. She says, “What are you trying to do?”