by Susan Dunlap
“What about sesshin? What do you want me to tell people?”
“Fever.”
“What about your lunch? I’ll ask Barry to make you some broth.”
“No!”
“Isn’t there someone in sesshin who’s a doctor or nurse? Maybe they could—”
“No!”
That clearly meant: Don’t ask anyone about me.
“You know, Leo, stubbornness is an unattractive quality in the sick.”
He didn’t answer.
I hadn’t been able to watch his face from this vantage point, but when I tucked his other foot under the covers, I could see he was sweaty again. His eyes were closed, either in sleep or in an effort to silence me. I had the unreasonable urge to shake him awake again, not to ask him anything but because the act of talking to him staved off the fear that he was sicker than he was letting on and that I was colluding in making things worse. Things that are no big deal in the city can be deadly in the woods.
I didn’t want to leave him alone, and I didn’t want him sick in this freezing cabin. I sat on the edge of his futon listening to his labored breathing and made myself a list of what needed to be done, so I could make only one trip out.
1) Get some kind of light food from the kitchen.
2) Get wood to make a fire.
3) Tell Rob there’d be no lecture today.
I wiped Leo’s brow again, put on my raincoat and was almost out the door when I remembered his cocoa thermos. His cup was about a third full, just as he’d left it before five A.M. The cocoa was cold, of course, but I had skipped lunch to rush over here, and as long as Leo wasn’t going to drink it anyway—I lifted the cup to my mouth.
“No!”
I stopped, embarrassed, furious, and then dead scared. The aroma of the cocoa was strong enough that I wouldn’t have noticed the slight smell of burnt almonds—cyanide—not till I’d drained the cup.
My fingers went stiff. The cup slid slowly through them and smashed on the floor. Brown liquid bounced over the floorboards, onto my shoes as I stood paralyzed, watching.
I croaked out, “Roshi, this is poisoned. I’ve got to get you to a hospital. Medevac, there’s got to be a helicopter service. They can alert the hospital and—”
“No!”
“This is poison. You’re going to die!”
“Am not,” he said, sounding like a toddler, a very weak toddler. “Four hours. Book: you live four hours, you’re okay. I’m okay.”
“What book?”
He didn’t answer. This time there was no question that he was faking sleep. His eyes were twitching closed, his breathing was shallow and ragged, and then suddenly he’d lunge for breath and then start the cycle over again. I had the feeling he had saved his last little bit of energy to watch over me and the cocoa and now even that little bit was gone.
“Oh, Leo,” I murmured with such a shock of gratitude.
There are different characters of roshis; some are intellectual pointers and prodders, some are quiet men—and now women—who teach by example, but the best ones are the ones who care so much that everything about their lives is a teaching.
But that didn’t cut my panic. He was so sick. How could I not call the paramedics? If you live four hours! It had been almost five hours by now. Clearly, Leo had researched this. He didn’t seem to be getting worse. It defied common sense, but I had to trust him. Sort of.
I bent down and scrubbed up the cocoa once again. This close, the bitter almond smell of cyanide cut through the chocolate. I thought I could catch other smells—whatever was in this cup could as easily have been a potpourri of poisons as straight cyanide. Fortunately there had been less than two inches of liquid in the cup. I stood up, opened the door, and washed the rag in the water dripping off the entryway roof, rung it out, and gave the floor another wipe.
I had stood right here and watched as he filled the cup and drank two thirds. Surely he’d smelled the cyanide? I would have smelled it as soon as I’d swallowed the first mouthful. I probably would have noticed the taste. And Leo, who was familiar with this cocoa, definitely would have spotted the difference. He should have noticed it before he took the first sip. Of course, he knew the cocoa was poisoned.
“You knew you were being poisoned,” I said to his sleeping form, “and you drank it anyway. Are you crazy?”
Crazy is a term that has been used for roshis over the years. Crazy in the sense of not following standard logic. But what would make him do a thing so crazy as drinking poison?
“Leo!”
He didn’t even shift. I stood staring as anger, frustration, and just plain bafflement fought for control of me.
Two things were obvious: Number one, no one dribbles cyanide into cocoa by mistake. Leo was poisoned intentionally; and number two, the monastery wasn’t located where a killer could drop in, do a little poisoning, and catch a cab on home. It was just us Zen students here, and one of us was willing to spend two weeks facing the wall, sitting with a hatred so great that he had tried to kill the roshi.
Right now that student was sitting in the zendo, cross-legged on the cushion, his hands together in front of a gut so roiling with anger that he could scream, except he couldn’t scream. He couldn’t escape. All he could do was sit there period after period, day after day, tasting his bile and worrying about being discovered.
“Like he won’t try to kill you again.” I stared down at Leo’s gaunt shoulders sticking out from beneath the blankets. “And next time he’ll learn by his mistake. He’s got half a month. Did you consider that, Leo, when you decided to drink down his cocoa and make yourself sick? What were you thinking?” My voice was cracking. I didn’t know whether I was more angry or panicked. “Are you letting him play out his resentment, his fury, his self-absorption, whatever it is—play it out in your body? Or have you just been facing a blank wall too long?”
I don’t think he registered my words, but if he did, he chose to give no sign. He just lay there as the most appalling connection of all came clear to me.
“Leo,” I said, my throat suddenly so dry I could barely speak, “Aeneas was murdered, wasn’t he?”
Leo slept on. There was no need to wake him.
Aeneas created a disturbance at the opening ceremony six years ago. Right after that, he disappeared. Recently, Leo had discovered Aeneas had never left with the Japanese contingent after the opening, and Leo immediately planned this sesshin in honor of Aeneas. Now Leo had been poisoned.
Speaking of Aeneas, Yamana-roshi had said, “Could be dead.”
Had to be dead.
This sesshin in honor of Aeneas was what Yamana-roshi warned Leo against. Leo ignored the warning and he had been poisoned.
My throat was so tight I had difficulty breathing. I inhaled slowly, willing calm, failing. I needed to call—but there was no phone here. I needed to send for the sheriff- and tell him what? My conclusion about Aeneas? The sheriff would remind me there are a hundred places to die of exposure in the woods.
I started another long, slow breath, and gave up halfway, gasping. No wonder Maureen and Rob were on tenterhooks. But Barry, in the kitchen where—suddenly, I felt so cold I didn’t even shiver—the kitchen where the poisoned cocoa came from. How could I be sure it wasn’t Barry who—
“Of course, it wasn’t Barry,” I muttered, talking to myself now. I remembered his surprised, grateful smile when he’d realized I had carted his beans up the hill for Roshi. “If I told Barry what happened he’d turn over heaven and earth to find whoever did this to his Roshi.”
A numb iciness took hold. I didn’t shiver, nothing that positive. I felt utterly alone. Much as I longed to trust sweet Barry, or even puppyish Amber, I couldn’t trust anyone, not with Leo’s life.
There was an extra zafu here in the cabin and I sat on it, letting the shock settle into reality. Killed. Poisoned. The cold seeped through the floor, up my spine. Leo lay on his side, nothing moving but his heaving chest. He was breathing through his mouth like his nose wa
s clogged and his throat was stuffed with cotton. I don’t know how long I watched him, ten minutes, half an hour? He didn’t change and I took some tiny comfort that he wasn’t getting worse.
A book lay open to the story of the Sixth Patriarch. I picked it up, but was too jittery to concentrate. I knew the story, though. The Fifth Patriarch asked his students to write a poem so he could judge who was qualified to succeed him as head of the monastery. His long-term best student wrote four lines beginning with a reference to the tree under which the Buddha sat in meditation and was enlightened:
The body is the bodhi-tree
The mind a clear mirror on a stand
Polish the mirror continually
So not a speck of dust distorts it.
But an illiterate monk saw the error in the poem and had someone write for him:
There is no bodhi tree
No mirror or stand
Fundamentally nothing exists
No place for dust to land.
And so the young monk became the successor, the Sixth Patriarch.
The tale seemed so “Leo,” with the in-your-face young monk saying: Wrong, wrong, wrong, so there! But I was a novice, mine was the most superficial of readings. What had Leo been pondering when he reread the poems? Last night he had been talking about the illusion of time. Was he thinking here of the illusion of mind? Or was he remembering the end of the story, that after the success of his poem the young monk was sent into hiding lest the best student’s supporters kill him?
I studied Leo, but all his sleeping body relayed was that he was shivering. I grabbed my raincoat, stepped outside, and locked the door.
“What are you doing?”
I started. From the bottom of the two steps Rob glared. We stood frozen, me in my panic about Leo; he, I couldn’t guess why. With his chiseled features and startlingly French blue eyes he should have made my stomach go queasy, mine and every other woman here. Another time, with another personality, perhaps he would have. He stretched out a hand for Leo’s door key.
“You were supposed to meet me this morning.”
I just stared. Rob and his demand for clandestine conference seemed so trivial now.
“And you’ve got no business gossiping with Gabe Luzotta. This is sesshin. You’re the jisha; you’re supposed to be setting an example, not wallowing in chatter.”
Chatting with Gabe Luzotta had been a lifetime ago. Had Rob been watching? Listening? That was the least of my problems. I took a deep breath and another, this time with more success at forcing calm. I focused on what needed to be done. Not only could I not trust Rob, I had to deceive him big time. If I was to have any chance of protecting Leo, I had to convince Rob that Roshi was merely a bit under the weather, but still in charge. To everyone here, it had to seem that I, the jisha, was relaying the roshi’s instructions. It was an impossible task—I didn’t know the dharma well, and as for Leo, I barely knew him at all. I’d be making things up as I went along, trying to think like a Zen master, to guess Leo’s quirks, and marry the two; I’d be grasping for black straws in the dark. And my first audience was the resident Zen scholar, the guy who had been Roshi’s student and friend for six years. I fell back on asking questions, starting with the all-purpose one to cover the fact I’d been so distracted I’d forgotten what Rob had asked. “What are you doing here by Le—Roshi’s—porch?”
“Since you are unwilling to confer with me, I need to talk to him. Give me the key.”
“His door is locked for a reason, Rob.”
“No one locks his door here.”
Open access? How was I ever going to protect Leo?
“Darcy, I need to confer with Roshi about the lecture. Now.”
“About the lecture. Yes.” Leo hadn’t lied to me. He had avoided questions and stretched the truth about his fever, but lie? No. I would try to maintain that same level of honesty and not undermine the sesshin. “There’ll be no lecture today. Students need the first day just to settle in. As to tomorrow’s lecture”—I almost asked, but caught myself and declared—“you’ll do it.”
“Of course.”
I could have drooped with relief.
“What’s the topic for this sesshin?”
Oh, shit. What would Leo have chosen for two weeks of lectures? The only topic I had heard was his poison oak! But there was the Sixth Patriarch.
“Lecture on the Sixth Patriarch.”
It wasn’t until I saw the sudden hunching of his shoulders and the tightening of his jaw that could have been from either worry or from fury that I realized I had chosen the single story most likely to put a long-term senior student on guard. I wondered if that had been Leo’s intention.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I stood on Leo’s porch, watching the couple who had kissed before the start of sesshin last night and the man who rushed back into his cabin for something essential to take with him into the zendo as they walked across the quad now. I felt like the stranger walking into town among the unsuspectingly happy villagers in the first reel of a horror flick. They had no idea Aeneas had been murdered, or that the person they passed on the path could have poisoned Leo. When they went back into the zendo, bowed, and sat on their cushions, it could be next to the killer stewing in his own pressure cooker of emotions.
I needed to get them out of here, before the killer lost control. But there was no way. The van was gone; it wouldn’t be back for two weeks. There was no phone. We were stuck, all of us here together. And Leo? Leo was sleeping the deep uneasy sleep of the sick. When he woke, we’d talk. In the meantime, the sesshin schedule went on.
In quarter of an hour the clappers would sound for work meeting, where work period jobs would be assigned. These jobs and the attitude students brought to doing them was the crossover between seated-silent-still meditation and the hassle of regular life. Some teachers called work period the most important time in sesshin. No one was exempt from the meeting, not even the roshi’s assistant, who needed to find wood and figure out how to build a fire in the roshi’s freezing cabin. I hadn’t built a fire—ever. Growing up there had always been brothers jostling each other with wood and techniques, until the chimney collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake and Dad replaced the fireplace with a television nook. Now I could hardly ask anyone to help, not and have them see what awful condition Leo was in.
I ran for the shed. The macadam path was slippery; my inadequate running shoes hydroplaned and just keeping my balance required all my attention. At the shed door I skidded, caught the knob to stop myself and swung inside. Gray stripes of light slipped between the wall boards. A woodpile half filled the space—plenty to keep Leo warm till Christmas. There were a few bucketsful of twigs that would pass for kindling, but no lighter fluid. No lighter. Only matches. Matches might work for a Boy Scout, but not for a fire-novice. I checked the cans on the top shelf, and the middle, and behind them. I never did find lighter fluid; what I came across on the bottom shelf in the dark corner hidden behind a can of shellac was weed poison. Weed poison containing cyanide. I snatched the bottle, and reached for the door. I could empty it in the woods; I could brave the woods that long.
But wait! How many other garden or household poisons were here? This shed could be a bastion for skull and crossbones. Dealing with the poisoner was like guarding against terrorists; the ingredients of death were everywhere. No way to protect against them. All I could do was watch over Leo and flush out the person—his student—who was trying to kill him.
Knowledge of Roshi’s cocoa habit and that poison would be waiting in this shed, both pointed to a long-time student, someone who had nurtured his grievance in this isolated place. Of course, anyone could have carried the poison in with him. But that still indicated an old-timer. New students don’t pack cyanide along with their long johns just in case something might irritate them.
“Crazy,” I heard myself saying. And then I remembered the last time I’d said that, to Leo himself. It was crazy, but the intensity of silence and isolation in a p
lace like this can cut both ways. Zen isn’t magic, particularly for someone who doesn’t want it to be.
Behind me, hinges whined, wood scraped against wood. The door snapped open. I grabbed for the spade, and just caught myself before hoisting it weapon-style. My face flushed, and I was lucky the darkness of the place protected me. Gabe Luzotta was inside the door before he saw me. He started. His body outlines said “caught,” but it was too dark for me to be positive. I wasn’t sure till I heard the emphasis in his question.
“What are you doing here?”
“And you?”
“Never mind.” Gabe Luzotta shrugged. “I know what you’re going to say, you’re the roshi’s assistant.”
“And you?” I repeated.
“And I’m not.”
Another time I would have laughed, a time I wasn’t in a shed with poison and a stranger.
“Okay, okay, Assistant. I’m hiding out. Look, I asked Rob to let me start sesshin tomorrow. ‘No exceptions,’ says His Assholeness. You’d think he was getting a cut of the gate here. ‘Everyone else got here on time,’ he whines. Shit!”
Gabe threw up his hands. His utter outrage drew me to him. The enemy of my enemy and all. Besides, Gabe Luzotta was exactly the kind of wink-and-break-rule guy I liked. It had taken me years to leash in my penchant for the scoff-rule set, at least when I was doing gags with them.
“So,” Gabe went on, “when the mid-morning sittings started, I climbed on my cushion and I sat. The first period I nodded and jerked awake, nodded, jerked awake, and kept doing it till my head banged into the wall. The second period I sat as close to the wall as I could and just let my head rest.”
“So you slept right through the last two periods of zazen?”
“No.”
“Did Rob wake you?”
“No, my snoring did. I’m not gonna win Mr. Popularity with the guy next to me in there. If he hadn’t kept poking me I’d have entertained you all.”
But none of that explained why he had made a bee-line to the place the poison was stored.