A Tale for the Time Being (56 page)

Nao’s words came back to her just then, or were they Jiko’s?
To study the Way is to study the self.
No, it was Haruki who’d written that. He’d been quoting
D
ō
gen and talking about zazen. It made some kind of sense. From what Ruth could tell, zazen seemed like a kind of moment-by-moment observation of the self that
apparently led to enlightenment. But what did that even mean?

To study the self is to forget the self
. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could
just hang out happily as part of of an open-ended quantum array.

To forget the self is to be enlightened by all myriad things
. Mountains and rivers, grasses and trees, crows and cats and wolves and jellyfishes. That would be nice.

Had D
ō
gen figured all this out? He’d written these words many centuries before quantum mechanics, before Schrödinger put his enigmatic cat into his
metaphorical box. By the time Hugh Everett came up with the math to support a theory of multiple worlds, D
ō
gen was dead, and had been for almost eight hundred
years.

Or was he?

“So you see,” Oliver was saying, “we’re now in a world where Pesto is alive, but there’s another world where he was killed and eaten by those
dastardly coons, who, by the way, I’m going to trap and drown, thereby splitting the world yet again into one with dead coons and another with live ones.”

“My head hurts,” Ruth said.

“Mine, too,” Oliver said. “Don’t worry about it too much.”

“I don’t think you should kill the raccoons,” she said. “Not in this world, at least.”

“I probably won’t, but that won’t stop the world from splitting. Every time the possibility arises, it happens.”

“Ouch.” She thought about this. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. In other worlds, she had finished her memoir. The memoir, and perhaps even a novel or two. The thought cheered her. If
she’d been able to be so productive in other worlds, maybe she could just try a little harder in this one. Maybe it was time to get back to work. But instead she continued to sit there.

“Do you really believe this?” she asked. “That there are other worlds where Haruki Number One didn’t die in a wave, because World War Two didn’t happen? Where no
one died in the earthquake and tsunami? Where Nao is alive and well, and maybe finishing her book of Jiko’s life, and you and I are living in New York, and I’m finishing my next novel?
Where there are no leaking nuclear reactors or garbage patches in the sea . . .”

“There’s no way of knowing,” Oliver said. “But if World War Two hadn’t happened, then you and I would never have met.”

“Hm. That would be sad.”

5.

Not knowing is hard. In the earthquake and the tsunami, 15,854 people died, but thousands more simply vanished, buried alive or sucked back out to sea by the outflow of the
wave. Their bodies were never found. Nobody would ever know what happened to them. This was the harsh reality of this world, at least.

“Do you think Nao is alive?” Ruth asked.

“Hard to say. Is death even possible in a universe of many worlds? Is suicide? For every world in which you kill yourself, there’ll be another in which you don’t, in which you
go on living. Many worlds seems to guarantee a kind of immortality . . .”

She grew impatient then. “I don’t care about other worlds. I care about this one. I care whether she’s dead or alive in this world. And I want to know how her diary and the
rest of the stuff washed up here, on this island.” She held out her arm and pointed to the sky soldier watch. “This watch is real. Listen. It’s ticking. It’s telling me the
time. So how did it get here?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I really thought I would know by now,” she said, getting to her feet. “I thought if I finished the diary, the answers would be there or I could figure it out, but they
weren’t, and I can’t. It’s really frustrating.”

But there was nothing she could do about it, and it was time to go upstairs and get back to work. As she reached into the cone to scratch Pesto’s head, a thought occurred to her.
“That cat of Schrödinger’s,” she said. “It reminds me of you. What quantum state were you in when you were hiding in the box in the basement?”

“Oh,” he said. “That. Definitely smeared. Half-dead and half-alive. But if you’d found me, I would have died, for sure.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t go looking for you.”

He laughed. “Really? You mean that?”

“Of course. What do you think? That I want you dead?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes I think you’d have been better off without me. You could have married a captain of industry and had a nice life in New York City. Instead you’re stuck
with me on this godforsaken island with a bad cat. A bald bad cat.”

“Now you’re the one practicing revisionist history,” she said. “Is there any evidence to support this?”

“Yes. There’s plenty of evidence to prove the cat is very bad. And very bald.”

“I’m talking about me being better off without you.”

“I don’t know. I guess not.”

“Well, then, you should wear the Cone of Shame for even suggesting it. Because now you’ve gone and sentenced me to another life in another world in New York, with some boorish
corporate oligarch of a husband. Thanks a lot.” She gave the cat a final pat on the nose.

“Well, don’t worry,” he said. “You’ve already forgotten all about me.”

He was joking, of course, but his words hurt her feelings. She withdrew her hand. “I have not.”

He reached across the counter and took her wrist. “I was just kidding,” he said, and then he held on a little longer so she couldn’t pull away. “Are you happy?” he
asked. “Here? In this world?”

Surprised, she stood there and thought about his question. “Yes, I suppose I am. At least for now.”

The answer seemed to satisfy him. He gave her wrist a squeeze and then let go. “Okay,” he said, returning to his
New Yorker
. “That’s good enough.”

You wonder about me.

I wonder about you.

Who are you and what are you doing?

I picture you now, a young woman of . . . wait, let me do the math . . . twenty-six? Twenty-seven? Something like that. Maybe in Tokyo. Maybe in Paris in a real French café, looking up
from your page while you search for a word, watching the people go by. I don’t think you are dead.

Wherever you are, I know you are writing. You couldn’t give that up. I can see you clutching your pen. Are you still using purple ink or have you outgrown that? Do you still bite your
nails?

I don’t see you doing a company job, but I don’t think you’re a freeter, either. I suspect you might be in graduate school, studying history, writing your dissertation on women
anarchists in the Taish
ō
Democracy, or the Instability of the Female “I.” (For one crazy moment, I thought that monograph I found online might even be
yours, but it vanished before I could discover who wrote it.) At any rate, I hope you’ve finished your book about your old Jiko’s life. I’d like to read that sometime. I’d
like to read old Jiko’s I-novel, too.

I don’t really know why I’m writing this. I know I can’t find you if you don’t want to be found. And I know you’ll be found if you want to be.

In your diary, you quoted old Jiko saying something about not-knowing, how not-knowing is the most intimate way, or did I just dream that? Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and
I think maybe it’s true, even though I don’t really like uncertainty. I’d much rather
know
, but then again, not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the
worlds alive.

But having said this, I also just want to say that if you ever change your mind and decide you would like to be found, I’ll be waiting. Because I really would like to meet you sometime.
You’re my kind of time being, too.

Yours,

Ruth

P.S. I do have a cat, and he’s sitting on my lap, and his forehead smells like cedar trees and fresh sweet air. How did you know?

The Zen nun Jiko Yasutani once told me in a dream that you can’t understand what it means to be alive on this earth until you understand the time being, and in order to
understand the time being, she said, you have to understand what a moment is.

In my dream, I asked her,
What on earth is a moment?

A moment is a very small particle of time. It is so small that one day is made of 6,400,099,980 moments.

When I looked it up afterward, I discovered that this was the exact number cited by Zen Master D
ō
gen in his masterwork, the
Sh
ō
b
ō
genz
ō
(
The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye
).

Numerals resist the eye, so let me spell it out in words: six billion, four hundred million, ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty. That’s how many moments Zen Master D
ō
gen posited are in one day, and after she rattled off the number, old Jiko snapped her fingers. Her fingers were crazily bent and twisted with arthritis, so she wasn’t
very good at snapping, but somehow she got her point across.

Please try it
, she said.
Did you snap? Because if you did, that snap equals sixty-five moments.

The granularity of the Zen view of time becomes clear if you do the math,
¹⁶³
or you can just take Jiko’s word for it. She leaned forward,
adjusting her black-framed glasses on her nose and peering through the thick, murky lenses, and then she spoke once more.

If you start snapping your fingers now and continue snapping 98,463,077 times without stopping, the sun will rise and the sun will set, and the sky will grow dark and the night will deepen,
and everyone will sleep while you are still snapping, until finally, sometime after daybreak, when you finish up your 98,463,077th snap, you will experience the truly intimate awareness of knowing
exactly how you spent every single moment of a single day of your life.

She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the
same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.

That’s what it means to be a time being
, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again.

And just like that, you die.

Quantum mechanics is time being, but so is classical physics. Both describe the interactions of matter and energy as they move through time and space. The difference is one of
scale. At the smallest scales and atomic increments, energy and matter start to play by different rules, which classical physics can’t account for. So quantum mechanics attempts to explain
these quirks by positing a new set of principles that apply to atomic and subatomic particles, among which are:

If Zen Master D
ō
gen had been a physicist, I think he might have liked quantum mechanics. He would have naturally grasped the all-inclusive nature
of superposition and intuited the interconnectedness of entanglement. As a contemplative who was also a man of action, he would have been intrigued by the notion that attention might have the power
to alter reality, while at the same time understanding that human consciousness is neither more nor less than the clouds and water, or the hundreds of grasses. He would have appreciated the
unbounded nature of not knowing.

—Yosano Akiko

These are the first lines from Yosano Akiko’s longer poem
Sozorogoto
(Rambling Thoughts), which were first published in the inaugural issue of the feminist
magazine
Seit
ō
(Bluestocking), in September 1911.

After doing some research on Japanese temple nomenclature, I realized that
Jigenji
was the name of the temple, and
Hiyuzan
was the so-called mountain name, or
sang
ō
(
). According to early Chinese tradition, Zen masters would retreat to a distant
mountaintop, far away from the distractions of towns and urban centers, where they would build a solitary meditation hut and devote themselves to practice. As word of their spiritual
accomplishments spread, disciples would climb the mountain to seek them out, and before long communities sprang up, roads were built, and vast temple complexes were constructed, bearing the name of
the formerly remote mountain. (How did word spread? How did these viral networks and reputation economies develop before the Internet?)