by Susan Dunlap
“Grinding. Stones are solid granite. Best surface in the world for creating a smooth paste. Aztecs used them.”
I nodded, but he didn’t look up. He was nearly talking to himself.
“. . . got to conch and temper and set the chocolate in molds. There’s barely time. If the road holds out. So little time. If anything goes wrong . . .”
The last thing Barry needed was me here.
“Oh. Sorry,” I muttered and started for the door.
“Hook.”
“Hook?”
“On the left.”
On the hook on the left there hung one of those parkas like you see in pictures of Arctic explorers, not as heavy, and without the fur all around the face—we are Buddhists after all—but with a hood that was virtually a front porch. It stuck out so far it shielded my coffee when I drank. The coat hung halfway down my shins and even with rolling the sleeves I couldn’t get my hands entirely free.
“It’s your coat,” I said out loud. I felt like I was inside a bear, and it felt real good.
Barry nodded, then looked away quickly as if he might be embarrassed by the effusion of thanks I was on the verge of offering. It was his only coat as far as I could see, and a huge gift to a stranger. If I tripped and tore it, he’d be soaked every time he went outside.
I swallowed hard and was almost glad that his preoccupation kept me from finding the right words of thanks. I gave him a quick squeeze on the shoulder and stepped outside.
Even in the parka the cold was a shock after the toasty kitchen. I made my way across the parking area toward the road, rain drumming on my roof and as thick as a plastic shower curtain in front of me, turning the trees into a dark green blur. I walked cozy, like a kid in a snug and secret hiding spot. It wasn’t till I’d reached the road and turned right that the drawback of the parka struck me. It blocked out sounds and any hope of peripheral vision. Bears and cougars along the path could fight over my tastier parts and I would hear nothing.
The road was muddy. Those deep ruts that had kept Leo’s truck from bouncing over the edge were now puddles. But the ridge between them was surprisingly wide and firm. The green blur of trees along the sides made a wind break, and the great branches I didn’t want to start thinking about held off the rain as long as they could and then dropped their load on my head. I walked stiffly, tensed up, waiting for the next deluge, hunched against the sight of the bridge and the red Japanese maple that would signal the path into the woods. The great coat shifted with each step and I realized the weight was only on one shoulder.
Not weight. A claw! I let out a scream. I’d forgotten about the rendezvous with Rob.
But it wasn’t Rob; it was a stranger, a small, soaked stranger, with a lopsided grin. “Hey, hold it down, woman. I’m not Dracula.”
“You could have fooled me.” I spun around on the narrow ridge and ended up grabbing the guy’s arms to keep from falling.
“Nice. Real nice!”
He was about Leo’s height, with a mat of dark curly hair. The guy looked like a cat who’d fallen in a vat overnight, a grumpy cat ready to spring. And yet, even under all that water, he seemed “pet quality”—not the cat who’d curl up on your lap, but the one who leaps from floor to top shelf, knocks off a bowl in the process, and then stares down at you knowing his cuteness will save him.
“Who are you?” I said.
“Who’s asking?”
I pulled myself together and announced, “The roshi’s assistant,” as if I had held the job for years instead of hours.
“You got a name, Assistant?”
“You going to answer my question?”
I was smiling now. The man, whatever his name was, was stockier than Leo, and younger, and . . . a New Yorker, no doubt about it. He had one of those accents that instantly endear him to other displaced New Yorkers. He sounded born-and-bred enough to tell Bronx from Brooklyn from Queens.
He must have taken my musing for pressure. He shrugged. “Okay, okay, Assistant. Gabe Luzotta here.”
“From where in New York?”
Now he smiled. “Bronx originally, Upper West Side now. You? You live in the city?”
I nodded.
“Who do you sit with?”
“Yamana-roshi.”
“Lucky you. I sat with him a while, but I don’t recall you there.”
“I’ve only been in New York two years. I flew in for sesshins with him before, but I couldn’t make it to them all.”
He nodded, agreeing with himself. “Okay, then. I was before your time.”
“Sesshin’s already started,” I said, sure I hadn’t seen him in the zendo.
“No diff. I’m going to sleep through the first three days. I’ve gotta be the most worn-out Zen student in a fifty-mile radius. First my plane gets held up in La Guardia. Then I miss the connection in O’Hare and have to wait six hours and thirty-seven minutes, keeping watch over all my stuff, so I can’t even hit the john. So I get to SFO, and would you believe, the damned rent-a-car place has lost my reservation and it takes another hour to straighten that out.”
I started to speak, but he was on a roll.
“So I snag the car and head out on the freeway and all of a sudden I’m heading over a bridge, going east! Would it kill the great state of California to mark its roads so you can get where you’re going? I had to hunt up another bridge to get back to my road—all this in a monsoon yet—and when I finally get here and turn onto this road, I can see I need pontoons. So, Assistant, I drive so slow I’m like some guy’s granny. And even with that the car sinks—like slurp!—halfway in. So what’m I gonna do, right? I gotta hike. That or wait for spring. But I figure I’m over halfway, so there’s like three miles to go. Three miles. Sixty blocks, right? That’s nothing. Chelsea to the Museum of Natural History, right? Do you know how long that took me? The whole fucking night! Mud and rain. You wouldn’t believe it! You ever been in a pool where they got those water walkers? Well, I’ll tell you, I got a lot more sympathy for them now.”
“Maybe Rob will give you a day off.”
“Rob? Rob Staverford? Is that uptight asshole still here? Oh, great, and by now the asshole’s in charge, huh? What is he, sesshin director?”
“Yup.” Giving up any attempt at restraint, I said, “So you’ve been here before?”
“Oh, yeah. On and off since the beginning. Whenever I can get free.”
“From?”
“Deadlines. I’m a writer. But don’t tell everyone. It makes people nervous; they always think I’m writing about them.”
“Are you?”
“Not hardly. Writing about a bunch of silent guys in the woods doing nothing but sitting in front of a blank wall? Like there’s a big market for that! Nah, I do magazine pieces. Like for the New Yorker.”
“Really?” I said, impressed. “Politics? Medical? Food?” Considering where we were meeting, I added, “Religion?”
He winced. It was a small wince, and he covered almost immediately. A person who wasn’t used to watching nervous actors for telltale winces might have missed this one. Don’t ask me if I’m afraid of heights. Oh, god, I should never have let on! I want to do my own stunts, without a double! those winces said. Don’t ask. . . .
He was grinning now, looking like the cat caught over the broken bowl. “Well, one piece for the New Yorker. But I keep hoping, so when you come up with hot topics, call me. In fact”—he stretched back up to his full height, which was a couple inches more than mine—“call me anyway when we both get home. We’ll go out for a cappuccino after evening zazen.”
Quite the smooth shift. But I didn’t say no. I wriggled as if to reclaim my balance as I tried to grasp the tail of memory of that story. There had been some New Yorker story years back before I came to Manhattan; something to do with religion but not religion itself. Some problem with it.
“So, Assistant, what are you doing standing out here like the doorman?”
I gave him a salute, as if I’d been focusing on him. Bu
t the two of us standing here reminded me that it should have been Rob here with me. It had been odd enough that he’d insisted on a rendezvous this morning, and odder yet that he apparently blew it off. But here was Gabe, the one person not averse to speaking ill of his fellow Zen students.
“Gabe,” I said, and smiled, “what do you know about Aeneas? You were here when he was, right?” I was guessing if he hadn’t met Aeneas, he’d have made a point of finding out about him.
“Why do you ask?”
“Roshi’s talk last night. He said Aeneas vanished and was never heard from again.”
“Really. What else did he say?”
“Nothing. And I was asking you the questions. What do you know about Aeneas vanishing? I mean, why wasn’t it a big deal back then? How many Americans do Japanese teachers lure off without the courtesy of a mention to the local teacher? Leo said he didn’t write to them, but why didn’t he—”
“Because, Assistant, Aeneas’s departure wasn’t the embarrassment, even him running through the grounds wearing Leo’s robe and waving a gin bottle wasn’t it.”
Waving a gin bottle didn’t sound like the obsessive Aeneas. “What then?”
“The Buddha.”
I waited, half expecting him to quote some familiar koan.
“The statute of the Buddha. The Japanese teachers brought an antique Buddha as a gift for the opening of the monastery. Someone stole it.”
“Someone stole the Buddha?” I couldn’t restrain a laugh. “I mean, how tacky is that?”
“Well, yeah.” He was grinning. “Later, Roshi said there’s nothing that can’t be replaced, well, except for something someone didn’t want to admit to begin with.” He shrugged as if to say he had digressed. “But lemme tell you, Assistant, no one was laughing at the time. It was a huge giganto embarrassment. Garson-roshi had a spotty past; he’d been on the sauce in Japan and here. The Zen establishment had gone to a heap of trouble to find a place for him and then to get the Japanese masters over here, to give the monastery their blessing. For something so, like you said, tacky, to undermine it was unthinkable.”
Gabe yawned, a movement of rolling shoulders, face scrunched in all directions, mouth open so wide it dwarfed his face. “Listen, Assistant, I’m dying here. I got to get something to eat before I hit the zendo.”
He started to maneuver around me, avoiding the soggy vehicle tracks, then stopped as if he’d forgotten something. He focused on me and his eyes narrowed. I had the sense he was rubbing the possibilities of me between his fingers. The last thing I wanted was him gnawing on why the roshi’s assistant was standing around at the edge of the woods.
“Gabe, you’ve got like no time at all to stash your stuff, tell Rob you’re here, plus snarf something from the kitchen. Go!”
He hesitated, but stomach triumphed. He gave my shoulder a friendly nudge and trotted off.
I had qualms about Gabe, but he was the bratty kind of guy I like. I’d lied to him about the time, but he’d forget that. Like me, he’d be pleased to have a new buddy. We come to sesshin to be alone with our own practice. We do it in a group because we’d never make ourselves follow a 5:00 A.M. to 9:00 P.M. schedule alone at home. But as soon as we get here we start making friends to protect ourselves from the terror of being really alone. Amber had done it with me, and I with her, Barry, Maureen, Leo, and now Gabe.
With Gabe gone the forest took form before me, and in this protected area under the branches I could make out thick trunks of redwood, swaying branches of live oak above and fronds of fern below. Quickly I looked down. Walk! Step forward! Just a step onto the path, into the woods! I had to do this; it was my job; it was my practice; more to the point, it was my life.
Beneath the bridge, water was already running fast, though low in the trench back toward the zendo grounds. The bed was much deeper than I’d assumed, the banks littered with boulders. I didn’t want to consider how full that stream would get if the rain kept up or how easy it would be to crack your skull if your truck skidded off the bridge. I jerked my gaze back up to the bridge, to the thick stone wall that formed a low railing, wide enough to sit on. Stones protruded irregularly, like a ledge in Muir Woods. My eyes blurred; sweat coated my face and neck and stuck my sweater to the sides of my chest. I crossed the bridge carefully, as if the stone railing would suddenly collapse and pull the bridge and me down with it. Once over it I spotted the red Japanese maple Leo had nearly hit and the path beyond.
I turned toward the path, but I couldn’t—I just couldn’t make myself put a foot on it. I walked back and forth on the road, up to the red Japanese maple and back from it. I goaded, I threatened. I thought of Yamana-roshi, of the stunt coordinating I would never be able to do with this paralysis of fear, of all the years of protecting my secret, of telling it to Amber, the last person to keep it. I heard Kelly Rustin screaming from the bottom of the canyon. Tears mixed with the sweat on my cheeks. I stared, not at the trees but at the water tumbling white under the bridge, then slowly rotated my gaze upward. I tried to feel, and lost the feeling in both my feet. I just couldn’t walk into those woods.
My face was flushed under the hood, my body spiking from sickly hot to icy chill and back. My right leg ached in the three places it had been broken. For years I had gone after the highest high falls, the most dangerous car explosion gags, the scariest of the scary. I thought I had learned to rein in fear. But here, all that was useless; I was helpless.
When I checked my watch, forty minutes had passed since I left the kitchen. I was still standing by the red maple. I could have cried. I’d let down Leo, and Yamana-roshi, too. In a few minutes, break would be over and we’d be back in the zendo again. How would I tell Leo, or would I tell him? I could just say the weather was too bad for flying and his paper hadn’t come. That was probably the truth anyway. It wasn’t as if he needed a newspaper to keep himself occupied now; he’d be in his cabin preparing his lecture. The paper could wait till tomorrow; I could get someone else to go tomorrow.
Confess? Lie? I couldn’t decide. In the end I stumbled back into the zendo and sat facing the wall, feeling the turmoil in my stomach, listening to the degrading thoughts that heckled me. Feeling like shit.
Amber sat beside me, her crossed legs twitching, her hands moving when they weren’t supposed to. But to me she was a comfort.
It took me all three periods of sitting to see what I’d known all along: I had to go to Roshi’s cabin and admit the truth. Roshi would replace me as jisha; but I more than deserved that.
When the bell rang, I lifted myself off the cushion slowly, bowed to it, bowed to the room, walked out as slowly as if I was still pushing that hundred-thirty-pound bag of cacao beans up the hill. After my confession, I would still see the roshi, of course. I’d see him in the distance at the altar, talk to him as roshi in dokusan. But he’d never grin at me, talk about tines, never be Leo. God, I would miss Leo.
I pulled on my boots, walked through the pelting rain to the roshi’s cabin. I didn’t even bother to knock, just pushed open his door and stepped in.
“I’m sorry, but I—”
Leo lay dead still on top of his comforter. There are a lot of things I should have noticed, but what sticks in my mind is his bare feet—blue and stiff—sticking out of his brown robe.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Leo!” I screamed. “Leo! Omigod, Leo!” He looked so small, so gray, so dead. I was shaking him by the shoulders, by his cold shoulders. His head wagged like a string mop. “Oh, Leo, if only I’d come straight here instead of going back to the zendo. Leo, don’t be dead. Leo!” I screamed.
“Shh.”
His hazel eyes opened only a slit and he looked as if he was spending all his strength accomplishing that.
“I’ll get you a doctor. Do we have a doctor here? We can drive the truck to town, to a hospital—”
“No!” he forced out in a voice that was more air than sound.
I put my hand on his forehead. It was clammy. That comforted me, not
that I know anything about medicine. When you grow up the youngest, your goal is never to let on you’re sick, lest you be drowned with advice.
“Leo, I’m useless. I’ve got to get you help.”
“No!”
“What’s the matter? Is it your heart? Chest pains?”
“Fever.”
“Fever! You were fine this morning.”
“Fever.”
“I have to do—”
“Do nothing.”
“Leo!”
“Roshi!”
His eyes opened slowly, deliberately, as if he was cranking the lids. But his gaze seemed to flow from his intent, not from his frail body. He didn’t repeat the word, the gaze did it for him, embodying the first moment he insisted I call him Sensei or Roshi, the moment he poured the cocoa on the floor, and this moment.
I was crouching awkwardly next to him, one knee on his futon, the other somewhere in the air. Common sense said: You know Leo doesn’t merely have a fever; get this man to a hospital. Zen tradition said: Roshi is in charge and you are his assistant. Later I would look back on this moment and know that no matter which decision I made, I would regret it.
He didn’t move. His breath was ragged, his clammy face gray as if he’d thrown up.
“Roshi,” I repeated.
He gave the slightest of nods. He looked so small lying there, like a scrawny old dog, barely able to snap at the hands trying to help him. I wiped the sweat from his forehead, asked if he wanted another blanket, spread it over him. Only then did I remember those blue feet of his, still sticking out into the icy air. I clasped one between my hands. The sole was stiff with cold, the skin lank between the bones. I pressed the sole against my stomach for warmth and rubbed the other side. When it finally had a vague pink tinge, I pulled the blankets down around it.
He murmured something. It had the sound of profundity. I leaned closer. “What, Roshi?”
“Other foot.”
I almost laughed with relief. Then I set about massaging that foot. I’m sure I rubbed it longer than necessary, from thanks and the joy of being here with one manageable thing to do.