Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (16 page)

The life within the seed and the structure of that life gave it a special relationship to the floodlight and energy that poured out of the star. It absorbed the radiation and turned it into food, and with food it grew. For thousands and thousands of years the seed circled the star and drank in its endless flood of radiation, and for thousands and thousands of years the seed grew. The seed became a fruit, a plant, a being, an animal, an entity, or perhaps simply a fruit—since all of these words are descriptive of things vastly different from the thing that grew out of the seed.

The professor sighed and shook his head. “If you tell me that a belief in angels has not been shattered, then you remind me of the man who grew wolfsbane to keep vampires off his place. He was eminently successful.”

“That's hitting pretty low, for a man of science.”

“My dear fellow, you can still maintain the faith of St. Augustine because it requires neither experiment, observation, nor a catalogue of results.”

“I think it does,” the priest said, almost apologetically.

“Such experiments perhaps as walking in this lovely twilight and feeling faith renewed?”

“Perhaps. But tell me—is medicine, that is, the practice of medicine, empirical?”

“Far less so than once.”

“And a hundred years ago? Was medicine empirical then?”

“Of course, when you talk of medicine,” the professor said, “and label it empirical, the word becomes almost synonymous with quackery. Obviously because human lives are at stake.”

“Obviously. And when you fellows experiment with atomic bombs and plasma and one or two other delicacies, no human lives are at stake.”

“We are even. Touché.”

“But a hundred years ago, the physician would be just as certain of his craft and cures as the physician today. Who was that chap who removed the large intestine from half a hundred of his patients because he was convinced that it was the cause of aging?”

“Of course science progresses.”

“If you call it progress,” the priest said. “But you chaps build your castles of knowledge on very wet sand indeed. I can't help thinking that my faith rests on a firmer foundation.”

“What foundation?”

The shape of the thing that the seed became was a sphere, an enormous sphere, twenty-five thousand miles in circumference, in human terms; but a very significant sphere in terms of the universe. It was the third mass of matter, counting out from the star, and in shape not unlike the others. It lived, it grew, it became conscious of itself, not quite as we know consciousness, but nevertheless conscious of itself. In the course of the aeons that it existed, tiny cultures appeared upon its skin, just as tiny organisms thrive upon the skin of man. A wispy aura of oxygen and nitrogen surrounded it and protected its skin from the pinpricks of meteors, but the thing that grew from the seed was indifferent, unaware of the cultures that appeared on and disappeared from its skin. For years eternal, it swam through space, circling the star that fed it and nourished it.

“The wisdom and the love of God,” the priest replied. “That's a pretty firm foundation. At least it is not subject to alteration every decade or so. Here you fellows were with your Newtonian physics, absolutely certain that you had solved all the secrets of the universe, and then along came Einstein and Fermi and Jeans and the others, and poof—out of the window with all of your certainties.”

“Not quite with all of them.”

“What remains when light can be both a particle and a wave, when the universe can be both bounded and boundless, and when matter has its mirror image, antimatter?”

“At least we learn we deal with realities—”

“Realities? Come now.”

“Oh, yes. The reality changes, our vision is broadened, we do push ahead.”

“In the hope that at least your vision will match my faith?” the priest asked, smiling.

The thousands of years became millions and the millions billions, and still the thing that was the seed circled the sun. But now it was ripe and bursting with its fullness. It knew that its time was coming to an end, but it did not resist or protest the eternal cycle of life. Vaguely it knew that its own beginning seed had been flung out of the ripened fruit, and it knew that what had been must occur again in the endless cycle of eternity—that its purpose was to propagate itself: to what end, it neither knew nor speculated. Full to bursting, it let be what must be.

The day was ending. The sun, low on the horizon now, had taken refuge behind a lacework of red and purple and orange clouds, and against this the golden leaves of the trees put to mock the art of the best jewelers. A cool evening wind made a proper finish for a perfect day.

No other words. “What a perfect day,” the priest said.

“Now that's odd.”

They had come to the edge of the campus, where the mowed, leaf-covered lawns gave way to a cornfield.

“Now that's odd,” said the professor, pointing to the cornfield.

“What is odd?”

“That crack over there. I don't remember seeing it yesterday.”

The priest's eyes followed the pointing hand of the professor, and sure enough, there was a crack about a yard wide running through the cornfield.

“Quite odd,” the priest agreed.

“Evidently an earth fault. I didn't know there were any here.”

“It's getting wider, you know,” the priest said.

And then it got wider and wider and wider and wider.

10
The Trap

Bath, England
October 12, 1945

Mrs. Jean Arbalaid
Washington, D.C.

My dear Sister:

I admit to lethargy and perhaps to a degree of indifference—although it is not indifference in your terms, not in the sense of ceasing to care. I care for you very much and think about you a good deal. After all, we have only each other, and apart from the two of us, our branch of the Feltons has ceased to exist. So in my failure to reply to three separate letters, there was no more than a sort of inadequacy. I had nothing to say because there was nothing that I wanted to say.

You knew where I was, and I asked Sister Dorcas to write you a postcard or something to the effect that I had mended physically even if my brain was nothing to shout about. I have been rather depressed for the past two months—the doctors here call it melancholia, with their British propensity for Victorian nomenclature—but they tell me that I am now on the mend in that department as well. Apparently, the overt sign of increasing mental health is an interest in things. My writing to you, for example, and also the walks I have taken around the city. Bath is a fascinating town, and I am rather pleased that the rest home they sent me to is located here.

They were terribly short of hospitals with all the bombing and with the casualties sent back here after the Normandy landing, but they have a great talent for making do. Here they took several of the great houses of the Beau Nash period and turned them into rest homes—and managed to make things very comfortable. Ours has a garden, and when a British garden is good, it has no equal anywhere else in the world. In fact, it spurred me to make some rather mawkish advances to Sister Dorcas one sunny day, and she absolutely destroyed my budding sexual desires with her damned understanding and patience. There is nothing as effective in cutting down a clean-cut American lad as a tall, peach-skinned, beautiful and competent British lady who is doubling as a nurse and has a high-bridged nose in the bargain.

I have been ambulant lately, pottering around Bath and poking my nose into each and every comer. The doctor encourages me to walk for the circulation and final healing of my legs, and since Bath is built up and down, I take a good deal of exercise. I go to the old Roman baths frequently, being absolutely fascinated by them and by the whole complex that is built around the Pump Room—where Nash and his pals held forth. So much of Bath is a Georgian city, perhaps more perfect architecturally than any other town in England. But there are also the baths, the old baths of the Middle Ages, and then the Roman baths which date back before that. In fact, the doctors here have insisted that I and other circulatory-problem cases take the baths. I can't see how it differs from an ordinary hot bath, but British physicians still believe in natural healing virtues and so forth.

Why am I a circulatory problem, you are asking yourself; and just what is left of old Harry Felton and what has been shot away and how much of his brain is soggy as a bowl of farina? Yes indeed—I do know you, my sister. May I say immediately that in my meanderings around the town, I am permitted to be alone; so apparently I am not considered to be the type of nut one locks away for the good of each and everyone.

Oh, there are occasions when I will join up with some convalescent British serviceman for an amble, and sometimes I will have a chat with the locals in one of the pubs, and on three or four occasions I have wheedled Sister Dorcas into coming along and letting me hold her hand and make a sort of pass, just so I don't forget how; but by and large, I am alone. You will remember that old Harry was always a sort of loner—so apparently the head is moderately dependable.

It is now the next day, old Jean. October 13. I put the letter away for a day. Anyway, it is becoming a sort of epistle, isn't it? The thing is that I funked it—notice the way I absorb the local slang—when it came down to being descriptive about myself, and I had a talk with Sister Dorcas, and she sent me to the psychiatrist for a listen. He listens and I talk. Then he pontificates.

“Of course,” he said to me, after I had talked for a while, “this unwillingness to discuss one's honors is sometimes worn like a bit of romantic ribbon. You know, old chap—a decoration.”

“I find you irritating,” I said to him.

“Of course you do. I am trying to irritate you.”

“Why?”

“I suppose because you are an American and I have a snobbish dislike for Americans.”

“Now you're being tactful.”

The psychiatrist laughed appreciatively and congratulated me on a sense of humor. He is a nice fellow, the psychiatrist, about forty, skinny, as so many British professionals are, long head, big nose, very-civilized. To me, Jean, that is the very nice thing about the English—the sense of civilization you feel.

“But I don't want you to lose your irritation,” he said.

“No danger.”

“I mean if we get to liking and enjoying each other, we'll simply cover things up. I want to root up a thing or two. You're well enough to take it—and you're a strong type, Felton. No schizoid tendencies—never did show any. Your state of depression was more of a reaction to your fear that you would never walk again, but you're walking quite well now, aren't you? Yet Sister Dorcas tells me you will not write a word to your family about what happened to you. Why not?”

“My family is my sister. I don't want to worry her, and Sister Dorcas has a big mouth.”

“I'll tell her that.”

“And I'll kill you.”

“And as far as worrying your sister—my dear fellow, we all know who your sister is. She is a great scientist and a woman of courage and character. Nothing you can tell her would worry her, but your silence does.”

“She thinks I've lost my marbles?”

“You Americans are delightful when you talk the way you imagine we think you talk. No, she doesn't think you're dotty. Also, I wrote to her a good many months ago, telling her that you had been raked by machine-gun fire across both legs and describing the nature of your injuries.”

“Then there it is.”

“Of course not. It is very important for you to be able to discuss what happened to you. You suffered trauma and great pain. So did many of us.”

“I choose not to talk about it,” I said. “Also, you are beginning to bore me.”

“Good. Irritation and boredom. What else?”

“You are a goddamn nosey Limey, aren't you?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Never take No for an answer.”

“I try not to.”

“All right, doc—it is as simple as this. I do not choose to talk about what happened to me because I have come to dislike my race.”

“Race? How do you mean, Felton—Americans? White race? or what?”

“The human race,” I said to him.

“Oh, really? Why?”

“Because they exist only to kill.”

“Come on now—we do take a breather now and then.”

“Intervals. The main purpose is killing.”

“You know, you are simply feeding me
non sequiturs
. I ask you why you will not discuss the incident of your being wounded, and you reply that you have come to dislike the human race. Now and then I myself have found the human race a little less than overwhelmingly attractive, but that's surely beside the point.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

“Why don't you tell me what happened?”

“Why don't you drop dead?” I asked him.

“Or why don't you and I occupy ourselves with a small pamphlet on Americanisms—if only to enlighten poor devils like myself who have to treat the ill among you who inhabit our rest homes?”

“The trouble is,” I said, “that you have become so bloody civilized that you have lost the ability to be properly nasty.”

“Oh, come off it, Felton, and stop asking for attention like a seven-year-old. Why don't you just tell me what happened—because you know, it's you who are becoming the bore.”

“All right,” I agreed. “Good. We're getting to be honest with each other. I will tell you—properly and dramatically and then will you take your stinking psychiatric ass off my back?”

“If you wish.”

“Good. Not that it's any great hotshot story for the books—it simply is what it is to me. I had a good solid infantry company, New York boys mostly; some Jews, some Negroes, five Puerto Ricans, a nice set of Italians and Irish, and the rest white Protestants of English, Scotch, North of Ireland and German descent. I specify, because we were all on the holy mission of killing our fellow man. The boys were well trained and they did their best, and we worked our way into Germany with no more casualties or stupidities than the next company; and then one of those gross and inevitable stupidities occurred. We came under enemy fire and we called our planes for support, and they bombed and strafed the hell out of us.”