Jake Fades

by David Guy

  What he looked like was a six-foot-two-inch child.

  He needed a man’s love. He needed Jake.

  “Does it come up when you sit? About your mother?”

  “I have the feeling I’d go nuts if it did. Really berserk.”

  “That would be bad?”

  “I don’t know. Going nuts in the zendo? Doesn’t sound like the best.”

  He smiled, sleepily. “I have the idea,” he said, “maybe it’s all wrong, that practice is away from that. Away from personal problems, moving toward something larger.”

  “You get to the larger thing through the problems.”

  “I don’t know. That’s the only way?”

  “There are ways of going berserk that don’t disrupt the zendo.”

  Jess could tell him about that. Maybe a good dose of Jess was what Kevin needed.

  She’d probably blow him away. She’d definitely blow him.

  “So your advice is what?” He smiled again. “I should go nuts?”

  “Don’t do anything. Just let things come up as they do. You can’t really stop them.” No matter how sleepy you get.

  “I guess.”

  “Don’t try to have a blissful experience. That was an accident.”

  It happened because he was holding things off. He couldn’t do that forever.

  He bowed to me, looking more puzzled than when he came in.

  Things seemed to be proceeding as they should. He seemed a long way from going nuts.

  Once again before the dharma talk, Jake offered the incense and did the floor bows. I’m not sure why, if he was just going to turn things over.

  “Yesterday we spoke about impermanence,” he said. “The first of the Four Noble Truths. One of the three marks of existence. Those are more a part of Theravada teaching than Zen, though they’re basic to any understanding of Buddhism.

  “The Buddha was a great list maker, at a time when all teaching was oral. He numbered everything so people could remember. Zen tends to do away with lists. And I think that if you understand impermanence, everything follows from that. You don’t need the other parts. Look at impermanence well, or look at suffering, the things he went off to examine when he left the palace.”

  Jake sat holding that stick in front of him, as if getting ready to shift into high. He seemed utterly relaxed.

  “In Zen we say the answer to death is to die now,” he said. “That’s our answer to the problem of impermanence. Anyway, that’s what Hank will talk about today. The question of impermanence, how the Buddha confronts it, what it means to die now.”

  I was starting to think the whole thing was a put-on. All the stuff about Jake’s spells, his problems with his memory. He had made that up so he could get me to give these talks, on subjects he picked. For two days I hadn’t seen a shred of evidence he was having trouble. He hadn’t missed a bow or stumbled over a word. He seemed fine.

  I sat there knowing he was going to toss the ball to me, feeling the anxiety crawl around in my stomach. I felt fine until he said the thing about dying now. That was one of those Zen slogans everybody said but no one understood. If I didn’t deal with it, I’d be doing the same thing as the day before. Pulling back before I attacked the question.

  “Dying now means coming to each moment fresh,” I said. “Seeing every person, even your partner, as if you’ve never met before. Hearing the birds as if you’ve never heard a chirp in your life. Our past is what we think of as our life, that whole life of thought and memory that we carry around all the time, but nothing actually repeats itself. Every moment is new, and you can’t live this moment until you die to the past one.”

  “That’s not what you said in dokusan. That’s the whole thing I’ve been trying to do. Except that, shit, I wasn’t supposed to talk now. I’m sorry.” Kevin sat red-faced, a few feet in front of me.

  At least he hadn’t fallen asleep.

  “Normally we let the teachers give the talk before we pin them to the wall,” Jake said.

  “I know. I know that. I spaced out,” Kevin said.

  “We didn’t have question-and-answer yesterday,” a woman in the back said. “That might be part of the confusion.”

  “Time was up,” Jake said. “Hank ended where he thought he should. Maybe we’ll have time for questions today.”

  I didn’t think any of this would be happening if Jake had been giving the talk.

  I also thought I had to answer Kevin, however much that would take the talk in a different direction. “Sometimes what you meet in this moment is something from the past,” I said. “That especially happens on retreat. The whole thing is a setup, primed to bring up what you want to avoid, to bring up your suffering. It’s also a chance to encounter and transform it.

  “When something from the past comes up, especially some difficult thing, it’s often because you haven’t assimilated it. The feeling around it. We tend to do that as human beings, not let feelings in. We block them with our bodies, by tightening. So what you do as you sit is let everything in. Soften to the whole experience. Then you won’t tighten.”

  As I said that, I noticed Jess sitting back in the crowd, two tears rolling down her cheeks. Her eyes looked even more tired and vulnerable than the day before.

  She could have told Kevin what he needed. She did it naturally.

  Again I waded into a familiar subject, again I faced a roomful of zombies doing zazen, but the experience was entirely different. I didn’t feel the vast space in the room, though it was still there. It was as if the room had shrunk way down, to the size of the dokusan room, and I was sitting there with just Kevin and Jess, one who needed to surrender to the process, one who needed to pull herself together.

  Those were the two characteristic responses to sesshin, fighting it or collapsing altogether. Almost everyone does one or the other, and practice is learning how to fine-tune that. But it was as if I were speaking to the two of them in a conversational voice. No one else was there. They had all disappeared.

  I hadn’t known what I would say when I began. Somehow, just by staying with that place of fear, that deep place in the pit of my stomach where all the anxiety crawled around, I came up with a talk.

  Jess wiped away her tears at the beginning. She still seemed deeply tired, moved around a lot. But she listened to every word, as did Kevin. They were my audience.

  Madeleine, I’d have to say, was not. She was the person I’d have tried not to look at if Jake hadn’t long ago told me to make eye contact all over the room. She was one person I thought was holding it up against the talk Jake would have given, seeing his as better (I did too). I knew she needed what I said as much as anyone. But I felt her as a judge, criticizing everything. That was the voice I didn’t want to hear.

  After all the fuss about a question-and-answer session, there wasn’t time anyway, and there were no questions. People were ready for lunch, was the feeling I had.

  The first person who came in for dokusan after work period—wouldn’t you know—was Madeleine, the cat who jumps into the lap of the one person who doesn’t like cats.

  Again her outfit was elegant, her demeanor impeccable, her bow to the altar perfect. She had superb posture as she sat in front of me.

  “I thought Jake would give dokusan today,” she said.

  “I did too. He told me this morning I should.”

  “He’s getting you ready.”

  That did seem to be the plan.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” she said. “Honestly. I’m ready to jump out of my skin.”

  Of all the people in the room, she was the last one I would have picked to say such a thing. The second day can be difficult, muscles sore, fatigue starting to set in. The end looks a long way away. Some people in the room looked jittery, some on the verge of collapse. Madeleine looked the soul of composure.

  She couldn’t let down. That was her problem.

  “This is unfair to you, I know,” she said. “But I was so hoping Jake would be in this room.” />
  I could have gotten him. I could have told her they could meet later. Somehow that didn’t seem what she needed.

  “Try to describe what you’re going through,” I said.

  “It’s going to sound crazy.”

  “Believe me, Madeleine. It can’t be crazier than things I’ve seen in myself.”

  “It’s this feeling of utter panic, like the walls are closing in. The room seems small. My place looks small. The people around me too close. The wall is right in front of me.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was all I could do yesterday afternoon not to run from the room and scream. Throw myself out the window. The weird thing is that this is my house. I’ve lived here for years. It never felt this way.”

  She had spent her whole life getting away from it. Going off to do business, visiting exotic places. She’d never really sat in it.

  “The only way I got through yesterday was thinking I’d see Jake today. Now I’m wondering if I’ll see him tomorrow. If I’ll see him at all. I had this retreat specifically to talk to him; I’ve spent the last eight weeks planning for it, and now I can’t see him.”

  She’d spent the last three days talking to him. How much did she want?

  “I wanted this to be the retreat I really sat, now that Jake had agreed to come and teach. But I don’t know if I can do that without him. Don’t know if I can stand it.”

  She was like me in that cabin on Mount Desert, the summer I met Jake. I might as well have been staying in a shoebox.

  The thing that’s small is your mind. That’s where you’re enclosing yourself.

  “Sometimes Jake teaches with his presence,” I said. “Sometimes his absence.”

  “I prefer presence.”

  Apparently.

  “But I’ve got to tell you, Madeleine. The fear you’re describing, exactly what you’ve told me about, is the whole thing Zen is set up to make you feel.”

  “That can’t be.”

  “That’s why it’s so claustrophobic. It leaves you at your place the whole time. In the old zendos they used to sleep there. Some places you couldn’t lie down.”

  “I’d have gone stark raving mad.”

  “There’s a whole world out there waiting for you to step into it, to step through the walls that are holding you back. They seem to be reinforced concrete. They’re actually tissue paper. Totally imaginary.”

  She stared at me. Didn’t seem to be buying.

  “The only way to get out there is to go through this fear. Completely experience it, until you’re done.”

  “I know what you’re saying is true.”

  “You’ll already be in that larger world. But you’ve got to feel this now. Keep coming back until you feel it. Until it’s commonplace, like any other feeling.”

  She groaned.

  “This isn’t your fear,” I said. “It isn’t mine, although I’ve felt it. It’s human fear. Part of being in the world.”

  I didn’t seem to have registered at all.

  “I appreciate this, Henry. You’ve been helpful.”

  “You’re actually quite brave, Madeleine. The bravest person in that room.”

  “You’re trying to encourage me.”

  “I mean it. Bravery isn’t when you don’t feel fear. It’s when you face it.”

  She bowed, tried to smile, stepped out.

  I meant what I’d said. She could only hear it from Jake.

  Late in the afternoon, Jess came in. She was wearing the same sweatshirt and pants, still had no makeup, but had an entirely different affect. She actually did the ritual, quite well: she did a floor bow to the altar, stepped over and bowed to me, bowed away, sat down and turned around, bowed again.

  “Was that it?” she asked.

  “Perfect. Where’d you learn?”

  “I asked that dyke again. Told her I’d forgotten. She went over the whole thing. Actually took me out in the hallway. It was sweet.”

  Helen had been with us for years, lived right there in Somerville. She ran a tight ship.

  “I’m not sure she’s a dyke,” Jess said.

  “She is.” Her partner lived with her, practiced with us also.

  “Anyway, I’m sorry about yesterday. I was a bitch.”

  “All right.”

  “I was trying to do so well. I couldn’t do anything.”

  “The harder you try, the worse you do. It’s hard to persuade people of that.”

  “I’m still not doing well. Still haven’t followed my first breath.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s the intention that’s important.”

  “I have an intention?”

  “Just the fact that you’ve come. You show up on the cushion.”

  “That’s enough?”

  “About 80 percent.”

  Her face had softened from the day before, still looked tired. Her eyes were soft and vulnerable. Not a bad thing.

  “Did you come early today?” I asked. “You look tired.”

  “Am I a total hag?”

  “You’re beautiful.” She was. Her face without all that hardware and paint, without that brittle quality, was lovely. “Your eyes just seem sleepy.”

  “I can’t sleep. Happened again today. I woke up early. Figured I might as well come in.”

  All kinds of things interrupted sleep on retreat. It wasn’t unusual.

  “Though I don’t know why,” she said. “I can’t meditate worth shit.”

  Her mouth twisted a little, and she looked down. Tears poured, just poured, from her eyes, and she started to sob.

  “I miss my mother,” she said.

  I had done dokusan a number of times, and tears were not uncommon, especially on retreat, when people got worn down. But I had never seen someone break down so thoroughly as this. She wasn’t loud, but her whole body shook. It went on and on.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, after a while.

  “Don’t be. You need to do this.”

  “You said that thing this morning. We block things with our body. That’s what I’ve been doing. I knew it before you said it. I got here and was just too tired, couldn’t block it anymore. I’ve been crying all day.”

  “That’s great.”

  “The pain is totally gone from my ass. My back is better. I’m still a total wreck. Sore muscles all over the place. But I’m not holding it back.”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “Doesn’t it disturb people?”

  “I haven’t heard a thing.”

  “I don’t sob loud. But my body moves. I’ve been blowing my nose.”

  “How does that compare with traffic sounds, or noise from the playground?” There was a school playground a block away, and we’d been hearing boom boxes, vociferous basketball. “It’s just sound. People deal with it.”

  “Crying’s different. It’s hard being around someone who’s upset.”

  “Your meditation mat is your castle. What happens there is your business. Nobody’s going to do anything.”

  “I’m not meditating.”

  “You’re being present with your experience, doing what you need to. I spent a whole retreat crying about my father, and that was thirty years after he died. This is what’s happening on your mat. Nobody’s going to touch you.”

  “I wish they would.”

  “But that’s the beauty of it. We’re together and completely alone. Both things at once. It’s the safest place imaginable.”

  “It’s so lonely.”

  “It can feel that way. But once you get through that loneliness, you’re connected to everyone. The loneliness connects you.”

  I was talking way past where Jess was. She might remember that years down the road. The important thing was that she cried.

  “My mother was always there for me. I was such a little bitch.”

  “You were doing what you had to at the time. She understood.”

  “She kept offering herself and I turned her down. I was a cunt.”

  “You were mak
ing yourself your own person. Had to separate from her.”

  I had no idea what I was talking about, basically. I didn’t even know her mother. At the same time, I was sure of everything I said. Retreats were like that.

  “How am I going to get through this?” she asked.

  “Just by doing it. You go on until it’s over.”

  “It seems endless.”

  “Nothing’s endless.”

  I could still remember the retreat where I’d cried for my father. Jake had been completely understanding, though I was talking about something that might as well have been in the dark ages. He made it completely natural.

  Jess kept sobbing. Her whole body collapsed, she was shaking, all kinds of tension coming out. Finally she exhausted herself, sat straight. She took out a handkerchief and blew her nose.

  “I’m a human snot machine,” she said. “Got a bucket?”

  “I have spare handkerchiefs.”

  “I brought three. Felt this coming on.”

  She wiped off her face with her hands, tried to straighten up.

  “I’m a mess. I’ve been a total fucking mess the whole time you’ve known me. How do you put up with it?”

  “I like it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just do.”

  She laughed again. “You’re totally nuts.” She put her hands together and bowed. “Is that what I do?”

  “It’s what everybody else does. I get tired of it, to be honest. We’re not Japanese.”

  She laughed. “Now what do I do?”

  “Continue.”

  “Go out there and cry?”

  “If that’s what happens. You’re doing what you should be. Just be with what’s going on.”

  “Maybe I’ll even meditate a little.”

  “It could happen.” Whatever meditation is.

  “This is a strange activity.”

  “It’s very strange, and very natural. People don’t do it, but it’s the most natural thing in the world. Also the sanest.”

  She bowed again, and I bowed back. “I’d like to kiss you,” she said.

  “You can kiss me when the retreat’s over. Right now I’m your teacher. Show some respect.”