by Susan Dunlap
The clappers—
No, it was the door. It banged open. The photo slapped onto the desk. For a moment I couldn’t fathom the woman in the doorway. Unable to stop myself, I did the worst thing possible: I stared at Maureen standing rain-bedraggled and rushed in the office doorway, then back at the picture of her six years earlier. My mouth was actually hanging open. I knew, in that way you can see screens of truths lined up like computer windows, that my shock was not for the reason she would assume, and that I would never be able to convince her of that and she would always think I was horrified at the aging of the startling beauty in the photo.
I wasn’t. The girl in the photo was a white bud just beginning to open and the woman in the doorway, dripping and draped in an old brown anorak was the open rose. Maureen’s face was still thin, her cheekbones clear, but her skin had a firmness to it. The spidery lines around her dark eyes suggested life lived, not merely hoped for, and the set of her mouth evidence of opinions developed. Her skin was no longer alabaster but the not-quite-faded tan of the outdoors woman. Her hands were not out to be held, but out pointing to the pictures. It was only then that I realized she had spoken.
When I looked up blankly, she repeated, “What are you doing with those?’
I must have blushed three shades of purple, as if she’d caught me going through her e-mail. I opted for truth, of a sort.
“I’m taking them to Roshi.” And before she could ask why, I held the photo out to her and asked, as innocently as I might had Roshi sent me for the photos of the opening, “Who’s who here?”
Her eyes did not widen in surprise nor cloud with sadness as they might have on seeing long forgotten pictures, but there was no way to tell whether she had glanced at them yesterday, or studied them a year ago. She ran her finger across the figures, naming names unfamiliar to me. The only ones I recognized were Leo, Rob, Barry, and Gabe, looking even brattier at that earlier age. I wouldn’t have recognized Amber under one of the worst permanents in hair history, a huge, dry, blond bush. She was staring at the Japanese teacher diagonally in front of her, the roshi who was staring possessively at Maureen.
Pointing to the bald figure in front of Amber, Maureen said, “Aeneas.”
“That’s Aeneas?” I said, shocked.
The Japanese roshi wasn’t Japanese or a roshi. Shaven-headed, round-faced with eyes half-closed, Aeneas blended in with the Asian roshis rather than with the Americans. From appearance he was the last person in the world to lose it after the ceremony they’d all been planning for months. I peered closer and could see that the similarity was not so much of features, but of stance, of expression, of entitlement. Now that I knew he wasn’t a roshi, I assessed him differently and thought there was something of a junior high school eagerness to the way he looked at Maureen. He could have been about to raise his fingers behind her head to make devil horns, or, as easily, use those fingers to grope her.
Then I realized the mistake I had made—one any fresh viewer would. It wasn’t Maureen at all who was the center of attention. It was, standing close beside her, Aeneas. Barry was eyeing him quizzically as if unsure what his motivation was. Rob was keeping watch out of the corner of his eye as if he knew only too well what Aeneas was up to. Aeneas was definitely leaning toward Maureen, but now I could see her shifting away. And Leo? Damn. I couldn’t read him any better in that frozen moment than I could now. Still, whatever their individual fears, they were all focused on Aeneas.
“Maureen,” I said, “you remember this picture being taken, right?”
“Yes.”
“In a group photo the photographer is usually shouting, ‘Bunch together, so we can get everyone in.’ But you’re leaning away from Aeneas—”
She leaned away from me and if expressions could lean away hers would have now. In the distance the clappers struck, or perhaps it was a branch creaking in the wind and rain.
“Maureen? What was it about Aeneas?”
“. . . devil.” Her voice was almost a whisper.
“Devil?” Surely I had misheard.
“You know the story of the man who buys a devil in a cage.”
She jolted back again, this time from her own words. And then she was gone.
The man is in the bazaar, in Japan maybe. Long ago. A stranger is selling a devil in a cage, cheap. The man haggles a bit, but the devil is a very good buy. Smugly he pays and takes the cage, ready to leave. But the seller stops him and says, “This is a very fine devil; he’s smart; he will work sunrise to sunset and never need to rest; no job is too menial for him, none too difficult. But there is one thing you need to remember: each morning when you let him out of the cage you must give him a list of tasks that will keep him busy all day long till you put him back in his cage at night. He must never have free time. He is a fine worker, and a very good devil, but he is a devil, after all.”
The buyer nods perfunctorily and carries the devil home in the cage.
The next morning, the man gives the devil a list that covers an entire page: scrub the walls in every room, clean the bathrooms, prepare all meals, rake the yard, scrub out the iron pots. And the devil works steadily from dawn to dusk.
On the second day, the man gives the devil an equally long list of jobs and the devil works equally hard.
And so it goes, day after day, month after month. The man is very pleased with his devil and thinks how lucky he was to have come across him so fortuitously in the bazaar.
But one afternoon the man runs into an old friend in a bar, and the two of them get to talking of old times and drinking sake: they have dinner, toast each other, go on drinking and talking hour after hour. Night passes, and the sun rises before the man stumbles home. As he nears his house, he smells smoke. Suddenly, he remembers the devil, and the warning the seller in the bazaar gave: You must give him a list of tasks that will keep him busy all day long till you put him back in his cage at night. He must never have free time; he is a devil, after all.
The man quickens his pace, stumbling into a run, fearful for his house and what his uncaged devil has done. The smoke is thicker. He rounds the corner onto his street.
But his house sits where it had always been, fine and unharmed.
Sweating with relief, the man walks through his house, out into the back yard. There he finds the source of the smoke. The devil is standing by a fire, roasting the neighbor children on a spit.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Maureen Heaney ran stumbling up the quad. Rain lashed her face. If only she could run full out, keep running, never stop. How could she have let those words out? To this stranger? The danger Aeneas had always been. And that she was the one Leo counted on to keep the devil in his cage?
The panic was back! Panic like she hadn’t felt in six years, not since she’d come here. This place had been her sanctuary. Now the panic was going to smother her again.
Ahead on the path a man bent to tie a bootlace. He hunched over his foot, all lumps and jagged lines of inefficiency. There was no arc of release as he stood, no rounding down to check the other boot, no music to his movement. She stopped dead. It was like she was still a dancer, like the last six years never existed, like she was still in the ballet company. She was seeing him as she had back then, when bodies were instruments and movement was all. When her life was dance. Everything she did—what she ate and didn’t eat, who she talked to, watched, what classes she took, how many hours she could get to practice—all for that one hour in one performance when she could be under the lights on the stage, dancing. Everything for that magical time, the flying jetes, the perfect adagios.
But then pressures crowded her out: shin splints kept her from training; there were the new pieces she couldn’t practice, the new girl with better body lines, the new artistic director, the jobs she needed in the off-season. Solos that should have been hers—snatched away. A broken tarsal bone. The new girl in her role. Dancers avoiding her. Classes she couldn’t afford. And the director, always him. No chance to dance. Flat-footed, all of life lead-footed
, foggy, hopeless.
But here, in the zendo, in the garden she’d found focus again.
Until now, with the new girl with the better jisha lines . . . and now, again, Aeneas. No, she couldn’t think about him again, not now.
Her arms enwrapped her so tightly her hands grabbed not elbows but the back of her ribs. Her breath barely moved. The fog was floating around her.
She could not let herself fall apart, not again. She stamped her feet to feel the uneven macadam under them. She had to hold herself together, remember what she had learned here, and what she had to do now.
The cage was open; the devil was free now, and Leo . . . Leo was on the spit.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Maureen dashed into the work meeting even later than I. All I could think of was the devil story, and wonder who Aeneas had roasted on a spit. Maureen looked sweaty and distracted, but no one else seemed to notice. And when I tried to catch her eye, she looked anywhere but at me.
As for everyone else, they were standing, half-asleep from having been roused out of bed so early. Some were clutching coffee cups without hope. Work period is a shock to most new Zen students . It’s where the rubber of meditation practice meets the road of slights and rudeness and work beneath one’s station.
Everyone is expected to attend work meeting even if he is in the middle of another sesshin job. Dishwashers wiping soapy hands on aprons stand in the circle while their pots soak in the sink. The cook, already chopping cauliflower for the next meal, puts down his knife. It’s not uncommon for the teacher to stop work on his next talk for the ten minutes of the meeting, or to pitch in all work period lifting rocks, sawing wood, or pulling weeds.
Because of the rain, today’s meeting was inside, in the one place twenty-six people thick with sweaters, sweatshirts, and waterproof parkas could fit—the kitchen. Barry’s winnowing machine had separated all the nibs from cacao bean husks and its rattling had ceased. But the washing machine-like melangeur was grinding away, and Barry was peering into the tub like a washerwoman who’d dropped her glass eye. The smell of cacao wafted alluringly through the room, and more than one person inhaled deeply and smiled.
Maureen sounded the clappers once and we all bowed together. Then she began assigning people to crews. The three women friends who had been wrapping shawls around their shoulders as they headed to the first sitting period last night made up the cooking crew: Barry was to be in charge of it. The zendo cleaners, headed by Rob, were Amber, Justin, Gabe, and the man who looked seventy years old. Afraid to find Gabe conspicuously absent, napping away under the blanket excuse I’d given him, I made a quick, nervous survey of the group. But he was standing next to Amber. Right next to her, poking her playfully as Maureen corrected a mistaken assignment she’d just made. Seeing Gabe made me yearn anew for my letter he’d left on my bed.
“Frank Appley, chiden,” she announced, assigning care for the altar the tall sandy-haired guy who had whispered so urgently to his wife or girlfriend and then kissed her ear before they both walked nervously up the zendo steps. The two lucky bathroom cleaners, who would get to spend the next hour in a warm place, were the recipient of that kiss and a bushy-haired man whom I remembered running back to the dorm as if he’d forgotten something irreplaceable. A plump woman with blue-tinted glasses would be washing windows inside the zendo. Everyone else was assigned to a catchall “facilities crew,” which would sweep out the dorms and cabins, and do whatever ground or building work was possible in this weather. They were to report to Maureen. As for me, I was assigned to “Roshi duties,” which was good because I hadn’t started his fire. We’d all be at it for an hour and a half, after which we’d wash the onion or mud off our hands, change back to zendo clothes and take our seats to be served a cup of hot tea. In some zendos—fine zendos—“tea” included fruit or a cookie. As the group bowed before disbursing, I wondered, again, what seeds had been planted in that similar group in the photo six years ago, to flourish so viciously now.
Rob whipped out the door. Amber trailed after, dragging her feet and scowling.
“Housework!” she grumbled as I came up beside her. “Two weeks of cleaning the damn floor. Just what I’m dying to do.”
I nodded. “Amber, did you see a letter on my bed? The guy you were just talking to dropped off a letter for me.”
“You got a letter!” she said, suddenly all eagerness.
“Yeah.”
“Already?”
“Presumably so.”
“Who’s it from?”
“Amber, how would I know that? Gabe just left it on my bed; he didn’t read the letter. Did you see it?” “No.”
“Are you sure?”
“There wasn’t any letter. It’s not like we’re sharing the bridal suite. I could spot a white envelope on a blue sleeping bag. I mean it wasn’t like a tiny black ‘we’re so sorry’ from the Big Buddha Bakery. Trust me, there was no letter.”
“Rats,” I snapped.
I had vital responsibilities here protecting Leo. My missing letter was trivial, my reaction petty. I grabbed two bowls from the cupboard, plunked them down harder than was good for ceramic ware, ladled out soup from a vat cooling on the stove, and grabbed four slices of bread. Tomorrow I would look back on my pique as foolishness. Today wasn’t tomorrow. I knew this was sesshin-overreaction. I’d been enraged about trivial things in other sesshins, as if the general deprivation made even the shabbiest trinket golden. It was an integral feature of sesshin, this chance to see one’s attachments in all their grasping glory. But now, as then, I didn’t care. I just wanted my letter!
I hurried across to Leo’s cabin. I had only been gone fifteen or twenty minutes, total, but as I stepped inside I realized I was holding my breath, lest . . . But Leo didn’t look dead. For the eight hundredth time today I wished I had insisted on getting him to a doctor. I couldn’t judge his symptoms. He was wheezing like a city bus, like his pipes—his nose—had become too small for the job. His skin was sweaty and off-white, as if the tan had been sucked out of it. The color had leeched from his wide lips, and his high cheekbones seemed to have sunk into his face. I wanted to roll him onto his side so he’d breathe better but I was afraid to wake him. You don’t wake a sick person, right? But if they just go on sleeping—This was like choosing between door number one and door number two.
Leo continued to wheeze. The soup continued to cool. I busied myself bringing in wood and attempting to start the fire, concentrating on leaving air space underneath. It took me nearly every bit of newspaper in the room to get the logs to catch. I had the impression Leo opened his eyes once and made a soft appalled sound but I couldn’t be sure. When I turned around his eyes were closed but he was facing me. I suspected I, too, had been making soft grumpy noises. But when the logs began to burn and I could actually feel the fire cut through the chill in the room I was flying high.
“If only we had marshmallows,” I said aloud.
Leo’s eyes flickered open. I took that as a good sign. “I’ve brought you soup from lunch. It’s lukewarm. I could put it in your teakettle and heat it over the fire.”
Leo groaned. It was the same sound as before, only louder. “Kettle’s for tea.”
“Okay, then let’s eat it as is. You feel well enough to sit up?”
He nodded slowly. I don’t know whether I was more surprised or elated. I knelt behind him and pushed him up. He was solid for a little guy. Sitting, he automatically crossed his legs, and I tucked the top blanket around him.
He asked, “How long have I—”
“—been asleep? It’s work period. Afternoon tea will be in about an hour.”
“You go, then.”
“We’ll see.”
“Go,” he said in his roshi voice.
I nodded, figuring I’d decide later. Now that he was upright, he looked weaker, paler. I was afraid he’d drop the soup bowl and sodden lumps of cauliflower onto his blankets.
He must have had a similar thought. He said, “Just broth.�
��
I poured, and we consumed, he sipping tentatively, me watching him between big gobbled mouthfuls. I ate my soup, his rejected vegetables, and three slices of bread and had hope of a cookie at the end of work period. He sipped as if checking his innards after each swallow to make sure of the next bite’s welcome. He was eating, but he wasn’t talking.
I wanted to say, “What the hell is going on in this place? What do you think happened to Aeneas? Maureen called him the devil. What did Aeneas do when you took your eye off him? What were you all hiding? Not only that but what about the purloined Buddha that reappeared? And why did you leave the altar empty during the opening ceremony? And the biggie: Why did one of your own students poison you?” But shaky and stubborn as Leo looked I’d be lucky to get one answer out of him, and, I was guessing, it wouldn’t be to any of those pointed questions. I waited till Leo put down his bowl.
“Roshi, you said I should be your eyes. There’s a lot going on here. For instance, you’ve been poisoned. So, who should I be watching?”
“Watch yourself.”
“Roshi, I’m not asking a Zen question, I need practical advice!”
He caught my eye and said nothing. His silence said: Zen is life as it is; what can be more practical than that? But I didn’t have time to deal with that, not now.
Before I could adjust my question, he said, “You’re upset. Why?”
I stared at him as if he was crazy. “You’ve—been—poisoned!”
“No. Something else. Something personal to you. What?”
I flushed; I could feel my face flame as red as my hair. Was my pique that obvious?
“Gabe said he brought me a letter, left it on my bed. But Amber said there was no letter. If she had seen a letter she would have tracked me down and demanded I read it aloud to her. Gabe must have put it in the wrong cabin. Now I won’t get it till dinner.”
“What does it say?”
I stared, shaking my head. I might as well have Amber for a teacher! “Who’s it from?”