by Susan Dunlap
“Leo—Roshi—if I’m going to be any help to you I need to know what’s going on now. What is it you’re trusting me to keep an eye out for? Is it Rob?”
He nodded, and for a moment, I really thought he was going to explain. What he said was, “These first few days of sesshin will be dead simple. I want everyone in the zendo all the time. I won’t give dokusan interviews till later.”
I’d been around Zen long enough to understand his tacit answer to my question: Don’t presume. I am not the old guy in the truck now. I’m the teacher. I set the rules. I’ll tell you what I want you to know when I want you to know it.
I was almost sorry now I’d had that ride with him and formed that picture of a nice old guy with a quirky sense of humor, the kind of guy I’d share a glance with when things got too-too in the zendo. Leo would have told me his worries and suspicions straight out. But a master of Zen teachings, a roshi, was different. Do not seek after enlightenment, merely cease to cherish opinions, the teachings say. A roshi does not utter an offhand opinion, much less a mere suspicion.
I was impressed, but, dammit, I was also frustrated. Still, I’ve had a lot of experience swallowing frustration. In stunts I create the illusion of near-death; I’m not about to let it become reality. I may postpone, but I don’t give up.
I looked at Leo and postponed.
He was all Zen master now in his formal brown robes. “When we approach the altar in the zendo, do you know how to handle the incense, Darcy?”
“I think so.”
“Rob will be my jisha tonight. Just watch him.”
I nodded.
“Okay, then. Tomorrow morning we sit zazen—three periods like I told you—do the service, and eat breakfast. After lunch we have work period. Your job is to get me my newspaper.”
I laughed.
He didn’t.
“I’m serious. I’m the boss; cocoa isn’t my only perk. One of my students pilots a helicopter for the fire watch. He knows how attached I am to my newspaper”—he nodded, acknowledging his un-Buddhalike attachment—“and it’s his gift to drop it in the meadow, almost every day. On the days he doesn’t, disappointment is his gift. I accept either.”
We hadn’t passed any meadow. A chill shot down my back. Did he mean I’d have to walk through the woods to this meadow of his? This had to be a hoax, the kind of thing that would amuse Leo, the guy in the pickup truck. But nothing about him looked amused now.
“But—a newspaper? Dropped from what, a hundred yards? It’d be in shreds.”
“No, Darcy, it would be in a padded container, a red one, like the pizza deliveries use, only this one’s a tube. I have another student who owns a mailing service.” He sipped his cocoa.
“It’s already starting to rain. No one’s going to be flying around here.”
“Rain might stop. You don’t know. Don’t assume. Either way, it will be good for you to learn the path before the weather gets any worse. You go back along the road we came on till you pass the bridge, and that red Japanese maple that juts out into the road, the one you were so sure I was going to plow into, right?’
He’d paid that much attention to me, even when he was driving. He wasn’t the kind of man who would blithely send me into the woods. Was this a test? Didn’t Leo understand?
“Then you take a left. The path is right along the river. It’s about a mile long.”
“A mile! In the woods! In this weather?” Horror rang from my voice. I should have told him about my fear. Could he know somehow? Was this a test? Yamana-roshi must have told him about me. Didn’t Leo understand? The answer to my fears wasn’t as simple as telling me to walk through the woods. I tried to think. My head was in chaos. I had to swallow twice so my tongue didn’t stick to my palate. “Yamana-roshi must have told you about my—”
“He didn’t tell me anything. He sent a message.”
“A message?”
“Darcy, we don’t have a phone here. You’re lucky I was in town yesterday to pick up messages at all.” He started to sip his cocoa, reconsidered, and checked his watch. “His message said: ‘I am sending my cherished student. Pay attention to her.’”
The muddle in my head was worse. The woods; I couldn’t—His cherished student! How could I disgrace him? But the woods, I couldn’t—I could tell from Leo’s brusque sigh as he considered and again rejected his cocoa that he was through humoring me.
There was no time for me to explain the depth and reality of my fear; anything I blurted out would sound superficial, and hysterical, or just plain untrue. I needed to see through the Roshi and recapture my buddy in the truck. Desperately, I tried a line that had worked for me on a weekend visit with friends near Lake George.
“I’m a city girl; I know the woods are full of dangers. Walking in alone, it’s like asking for a separate canoe in Deliverance. Anything could happen. Crazed survivalists. Bears, cougars . . .”
“Cougars wait all year for a tasty New Yorker.”
“No, listen, I’m not kidding. I don’t do woods.”
He was laughing.
“Leo! You’ll just have to find someone else to—”
He lifted his cup and poured the cocoa on the floor.
I stared, stunned into silence.
He refilled his cup from his thermos and sipped as if nothing had happened. He sat there in his robes, his gaze downward: 0% Leo; 100% Roshi.
I was so shocked I just stared. I looked at him with fury, but I was damned if I was going to give him the satisfaction of seeing my panic. It took all my restraint, but I waited, forcing him to make the next move.
A full minute passed. The aroma of cocoa, wasted cocoa, filled the room like thick, noxious smog. Finally he pointed to a corner cabinet. “The cleaning supplies are in there.”
I said nothing. I did not bang the door open, or slap the rag on top of the brown puddle as I started to mop it up. I didn’t dig my fury into the floorboards with each push, not did I bang or even leave open his outside door when I took the sodden rag out to rinse in the rain spitting off the gutter.
I am no stranger to choking back anger. Movie sets are aflame with egos, and the first in Me first is never the stunt double. But even considering the provocation now, it was frightening how furious this man made me.
“One thing to watch out for,” he said.
One thing? Just one? But I didn’t say that.
“Once you leave the road, the path forks in half a mile. And you remember, I know my forks.” He paused, watching me till, in spite of everything, I almost smiled at the thought of his collection of plastic utensils and the two of us laughing about them. Then he flashed a grin. “The right tine goes uphill to the fire-watch tower.” He paused, looked me square in the eye and said, “It would be a mistake to take that.”
I started to speak, but he put out a hand. “After tonight’s zazen, Darcy, give me about ten minutes—I like to get in the bathhouse before the late-night rush—then meet me back here and we’ll talk about tomorrow.”
He didn’t say don’t bang the door on the way out, not quite. He certainly didn’t say he’d reconsider about the walk in the woods, but that door seemed open. After all, he had mentioned the paper not arriving some days and the gift of disappointment. Still, I hated the thought that gift would be coming from me.
As I walked down his steps into the thick gray of evening, it shocked me how quickly the light had vanished. In the dusk the valley seemed narrow and deep. I pulled my jacket tighter around me against the cold rain. My feet splatted with each step. I almost didn’t hear the sobs as I passed another cabin.
Maybe I shouldn’t have stopped. In sesshin we face our own problems alone. We don’t speak, don’t make eye contact, don’t give encouraging pats on the shoulder, don’t offer distractions. The support we give one another is that we, too, are facing ourselves silently moment after moment, day after day. But sesshin hadn’t quite started and I did stop long enough to see the girl who had been hauling individual cauliflowers in the ki
tchen. She was sitting on the steps under the porch roof. Her long honey-colored hair was wet, her face was blotched red. “I can’t—” she muttered. “I just can’t.”
I sat down next to her on the step and said nothing. Two weeks is a long frightening time.
She wasn’t looking at me. It didn’t matter who I was. She was already alone with her fear. “I hate it here. And Justin, he’s so fucking gung ho. He won’t even talk to me. And I just know I’ll never ever be able to do this. I can’t—” she turned to me, tried to swallow and ended up coughing. She blurted out, “I’m so damned scared.”
I put my arm around her shoulder and could almost feel her fear flowing into me. For a moment I just felt sick. “I’ve come to sesshins for years. I’ve never started one without being scared. We’re here to find out what’s real and to see through what isn’t. We could come out fundamentally changed. It’s scary, real scary—”
“But it’s different, for me. No one’s as scared—”
“Sure they are.”
“Are you?” she asked pleadingly.
All I had told her about sesshin would be a lie if I lied. “Yes.”
There was a little crinkle by the corner of her nose as if she couldn’t decide whether to pout or laugh.
In for a lamb in for a sheep, or whatever livestock. I was leaving myself no choice but to face my fear. I forced a grin. “I’ll bet you the first cup of cocoa we get, winner take both. And you can be the judge. But I have to warn you you’re on very slippery ground here. You on?”
I freed her shoulder and shifted right, leaving a little space between us.
She ran a finger over the rough denim of her jeans, back and forth, as if moving from her fears to mine. Her pouty mouth said she knew no one could be as terrified as she was. But was she sure enough to deny herself the one special treat we’d get?
I was just about to take pity on her when she surprised me. “I’m afraid I’ll go stir crazy in the zendo. I’ll start screaming. I’ll make a fool of myself, the roshi will scream ‘Amber, get out of my zendo,’ and my boyfriend will be so disgusted he’ll dump me. And that’ll just be tomorrow.”
I let out a laugh. “Amber, the contest is over. You win. None of that will happen. But you still win.”
“Huh?” She looked almost disappointed by her easy victory. “But what was yours?”
I shrugged.
“Tell me,” she said, sounding like a pleading little sister. Then she dared me. “Double or nothing if you give in to it.”
I could tell, she, too, wouldn’t give up; she’d postpone. “Okay. It’s the woods. Here I am in the middle of the forest and I’m terrified of the woods.”
She stared. Then she snorted. I had intended to cheer her up—I’d revealed my deepest secret, or at least the most damning part of it—and here she was laughing so hard she could barely sit up. It was almost insulting. Still, it was nice to have a buddy at sesshin. Amber wasn’t Leo, but she’d do. By the end of sesshin, I’d find a way to assure her discretion; I’d have to.
I almost missed the sound cutting under the bubbling of her laughs. The clappers. Wood hitting wood, and again, and again. The timekeeper had been standing on the zendo steps striking together polished blocks the size of blackboard erasers. By now he’d be walking toward us, or toward the kitchen, or the parking lot, ready to hit the clappers again, to signal students at the farthest corner of the property.
“The clappers,” I said to Amber. “Ten minutes till sesshin starts. You’re already closer to that extra cocoa.”
Her lips quivered in what I took as an attempt at a smile. “Yeah. If I survive the zendo and the trees don’t grab you.”
I had meant to comfort Amber, but oddly that little interchange lightened my own steps and made me feel a part of the place. I walked more easily toward the zendo and when I passed the regal Rob, the jerk who had pulled rank in the truck and then sat in the cab wagging his finger at Leo, I even smiled. After all he wasn’t the roshi, not even the jisha anymore.
He motioned me off the path behind a bench. Before now, I hadn’t taken in quite how tall he was. I was staring at his chest. I looked up and caught him glaring at my copper curls the way strangers had at Mom’s red frizz, like it made the head beneath incapable of linear thought.
“You had something to say?” My sharp tone must have startled him. It startled me.
He cleared his throat, then covered his mouth with a hand. “As the sesshin director,” he said, “I need to know Roshi’s plans. You can meet with me each morning after breakfast. Come to where I caught the truck this afternoon.”
Where you pulled me out of the truck this afternoon, I thought. “A meeting half a mile down the road? What are we, spies?”
He breathed in through his teeth. “We don’t want to disturb people.”
The clappers struck again.
“I’ll take it up with Leo.”
He hunched toward me and for an instant I thought he was going to grab my shoulders like he did in the truck. Then he straightened to almost military erectness and ordered, “Go ahead, ask Roshi. He’ll tell you to meet with the sesshin director.”
He was right, and what really got to me was that it wasn’t for the reasons he assumed. I’d have bet my cocoa and Amber’s that if I went to Leo to complain about meeting anyone on the road to the woods, Leo would just laugh. There was no way I’d let Rob see me cringe at the sight of trees. But there was no way out.
“Right then,” Rob said smugly. “Tomorrow at the beginning of work period.”
I could have laughed. “Sorry. Can’t. I have to get Leo—Roshi’s—newspaper from the meadow then.”
“No problem. We can talk on the way.” He turned and strode across the knoll toward the zendo, black robes flying out behind him as if he were a pirate ship in full sail.
Monasteries have buildings; sesshin directors have use of rooms. Teachers meet with sesshin directors. A sesshin director doesn’t set up a rendezvous with an underling to find out the topic of the next day’s lecture and the dokusan schedule. Not unless he knows the teacher is making a point of not letting him know. And that would be stranger yet. In all the sesshins I had sat, nothing like that had ever happened. It would be like the president planning a summit and not telling his chief of staff.
Whatever Rob was going to ask me or tell me was something I could not afford to miss. I had thought the last thing I wanted to do was walk through the woods to get Leo’s newspaper. I’d been wrong. The last thing was to head in among the trees to meet the guy whose job I had usurped. And that was just what I had to do—somehow.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The clappers sounded again, wood on wood but cutting like a bell through the thick wet air. No longer the three preliminary hits that meant there was ten minutes to get to the zendo. Now the roll-down had begun, with strikes frustratingly slow to begin with but picking up speed steadily. Move toward the zendo. Sesshin’s about to begin.
Cabin doors opened. Two women with blue umbrellas hurried across the path. A man in a dark green slicker came out of the men’s dorm, stopped dead and rushed back inside, as if an item left behind now would be lost forever. On the path a tall man put his arm around a woman’s shoulder and whispered urgently, then he kissed her ear and both of them smiled nervously. Three women passed by, wrapping thick shawls around their own shoulders. They ambled across the grass, one grabbed the others, stopped, and all three laughed softly in the rain before they moved on. The knoll filled with people, some college-aged to some fiftyish and one man who looked almost seventy. The clappers sounded again, an odd melodic ring of expectation. I felt the draw of silence, of clarity—and an excitement. It was the same thrill—chill—as stepping into the funhouse where anything could happen, anything could change. And yet the roiling in my stomach was deeper than it had ever been when I handed my ticket to the arcade master. I never began a sesshin without this terror, never knew precisely what I was afraid would pop up. A clear mind is like still water;
would I see down to the murky bottom of memories, find more than I wanted to know? Would Leo and Aeneas and Rob crowd out those memories? Would I be able to figure out what was going on here in time to save Leo from whatever he planned, whatever Yamana-roshi had warned him not to do? Or maybe, just maybe, would I actually give up thinking for long enough to just sit zazen?
The clappers stopped. Silence resounded. The smush of rubber soles on wet grass created a background beat. The rustle of sleeves against windbreakers sliced through. Then the clappers began again, oh so slowly, strike after strike calling: Come. . . . come. . . . come now! I started up the hill as the clacks came quicker, echoing in my chest like a heartbeat. Around me people moved faster in the deepening dark. We walked, mostly silently, but with a whisper here and there, up the knoll to the zendo, up the five wide wooden steps to the covered porch outside the round shingled building.
On the porch, people slid off shoes and stowed them on the shoe rack, a bookcase for footwear. Still in the running shoes I’d flown out in, I balanced on one foot and yanked at my shoe, reversed the process, then placed the pair on the rack. The cold from the wooden porch spread through my socks as I moved into the line of entering students. Outside the door I paused, my stomach tightened, then I took a deep breath, bowed, and walked inside, into sesshin.
The zendo was a dome. The black cushions, zafus, were in the center of two-foot by three-foot black mats, zabutons, lined up on tans, twenty-inch high platforms, that nestled against the curved wall. When we all turned around and sat facing the wall, as we would do most of the time, it would be slanting inward toward our heads. But for now, this first period, we faced the center of the room, making an incomplete circle along the wall, the inner edges of our mats almost touching.