Zen City (7 page)

Virya took it all in stride, reciting her personal version of the
Vihara Hrdaya Sutra
and bowing frequently:

“Let’s go back, Virya. I hate the goddam suburb. I never wanted to follow the grims in the first place. I know where there’s a stash of Circenses back by the Blue Mazda Motel. I want to go home.”

“Be quiet, Charles, and eat your supper.”

“Who said that?”

“
Who said that?
”

Suds regrouped. “Were you talking to me?”

Virya stopped bowing and turned to where she thought Suds was standing. She opened her mouth to speak—someone filled it with wet clothes, slammed it shut, dropped three coins in a slot, and walked away. There was a whirring and slapping sensation above her tongue. She took another step toward Suds, and her mouth was her own again, although one knee was snoring loudly, and she could see the backs of her eyeballs. “Bear with it, Suds. I know they’re headed for the City. If we get to be Cityzens,
what does anything matter? Just keep your eyes on ‘em.”

Suds’s shoulder beeped. He leaned his ear into it—white noise, then a ratchet voice:
“Stop it.”

“Sorry—stop what?”

“You’re licking my lip again. Stop it.”

“Sorry.” He wasn’t licking any lips. Suds turned to where Virya would be if there were still such a thing as adjacency. “Virya, what am I supposed to do here? My shoulder’s giving me a hard time.”

“Just move a little, Sudsy. It’s like in basketball—zones. Wherever you are, that’s who you’re covering. Look.” Virya waved her hand. It was as if it passed across the beam of a film projector. But the images were not patterns of light falling on Virya’s hand; rather, Virya’s hand was the things themselves, whatever “occupied” that space—and the occupants were changing. The middle joint of her forefinger was sunlit dust, the stubble on an old man’s chin, part of a star chart, heat lightning, a jingle for a new brand of sunblock, the rest of the old man’s face, then Virya’s uvula glistening, and then a finger joint again. “This is the suburb, Suds. Didn’t the old guys ever tell you?”

He still didn’t like it. “Who listens?”

“Duck! There’s Clara. She’ll punch you out, boy.”

Suds hissed. “If I duck, I feel like shit and soup bones. What if I turn into somebody’s asshole?”

“You’re you. You’re you. This isn’t the City, Suds. Whatever you are, you’re still you. Now, duck.”

They saw Clara coming through a window of the living room in which they had found themselves on entering the suburb. Whether you were on an open hill above Route 90, or outside a high barbed-wire enclosure filled with conical ceramic insulators and humming coils of colored wire, or in the clouds, or nowhere, on a vast featureless desert, or in this living room for crissakes, depended on which direction you looked. Tailing the grims, Suds and Virya had just ducked under a torn fence, and there was this
ottoman, this thirty-two-inch TV screen, this mug of steaming cocoa—and clumps of dogs’ hair.

Clara opened the door carefully. It was hollow core, and the neighbor’s water heater was inside it, as Suds,
mirabile dictu,
could clearly see
with someone else’s mind.
If she slammed it, it might rupture the cold water inlet at the bottom hinge; that would flood the hallway, which was also a parking garage and the dentist/landlord’s waiting room, when it wasn’t part of a cow.

Suds sensed Clara’s feelings as if they were flavors of gum in his mouth. In fact, when he smacked his lips, Clara winced and wiped his saliva off her forehead; she mistook it for sweat.

Bobo Shin was close behind. “Please do not stop suddenly. I do not want to collide with you. I dislike having other people inside me—even you, rice cake… Are we there?”

“Yes, of course, Roshi,” said Clara,
as Suds had known she would, since he had felt her form the words in her mind.
“Of course we’re there. This must be No Mind’s home. It’s a question of which way to look so that we align with it.”

Bobo Shin shrieked, and the six monks who had tramped right on inside his buttocks and thighs backed off, penetrating Mukan—sweet-faced, younger than the rest—who carried Rinzai on his shoulders. There was no physical shock, but Mukan fell, and Rinzai fell on top of him. They fell into an old news report, a loop continuously available for reference by suburbanites. Parts of Rinzai were the announcer’s low tones. Mukan’s intestines provided visual images and acted as a tweeter.

Suds, in spite of himself, felt everything Bobo Shin was thinking. Bobo Shin didn’t want to look behind him to see what had happened. He was afraid to move his eyes; he had just begun to get used to the puppy wagging his esophagus. “Each of you, turn your back toward me and look out.” Bobo Shin made no effort to project his voice; it was everywhere. “Scan up and down along your own radius from me. Look for No Mind.”

“Don’t budge, Suds,” Virya whispered, crouching low—or high, or flush to the wall. “You’re safe there. You’re just shit and soup bones as far as they can see.”

“This drives me crazy,” said Suds through an orifice somewhere, he no longer knew how. “You’re Thursdays! Can you believe it? You’re Thursdays from the neck up.”

“No. Look at the note my hip is. Thursdays fall on Wednesday mornings here. There’s not enough time for Thursday to have a separate day all to itself. It makes perfect sense, Sudsy. Think about it.”

“No.”

Mukan and Rinzai lined up with the others, a circle facing out, like the Seven Samurai. One by one, they dropped to their haunches, nauseated by what they saw and by what they became, seeing it. Suds, feeling all their emotions plus his own disgust, struck on the tactic of reciting his entire repertoire of obscenities, A to Z, in order to keep his equilibrium.

Suds felt: Rinzai alone was unaffected. (
“…Vaginal douche bag, Wombat piss, Bloody fuckin’ Xyster…”
) Rinzai
knew
that No Mind wasn’t there, and so he didn’t look. (
“…pus-dripping Yoni, wimpy prick Zarf, Asshole…”
) Rinzai let everything pass through him, like a swallet sucking down a lost river, letting it stream and dribble through gypsum and calcite, stratum after broken stratum, till it broke the surface of a deep pool under a waterfall, and broke it, and broke it, rippling outward, until he was staring up at Angela’s droplet-shattered face staring down at him, through twigs and pebbles and dirt.

(
“…Bastard, Cunt, Dildo brain…”
) Bobo Shin hit Rinzai over the head with a hardwood crosier he found in his sleeve. “Well, what about you? Wake up, boy. Do you see anything, you worthless
pustule?” Suds felt: Bobo Shin Roshi was in a hurry to settle matters before his disorientation exploded up his puppy dog’s tail in all the colors of breakfast. (
“…Elephant shit, Fuckhead, Gut hag…”
)

“Nope. I didn’t look.”

“What?”

“It’s a waste of time, Roshi. No Mind is in the Cave of the Dharma.”

“How in the City do you know that?”

“Just before he disappeared, I told No Mind how Big Man and Pirate were trying to get into the City a back way. Some hicks told me. I figure, he must have followed them.”

“Jizo! Shit! Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

(“Damn me, Virya,” Suds hissed, “why didn’t you figure that out? We could have skipped this hellhole and picked them up down by the Dharma Cave.”)

“You didn’t ask me, Roshi,” said Rinzai.

“Stop laughing, you insufferable turd. Stop it. What are you laughing at?” But Rinzai could no longer be found. Rinzai was all over the room, on the television, underfoot, and in the pussy cat’s teeth. “Let’s get out of here. This is completely unacceptable in every way. Don’t bow. Don’t say anything. Just go. Someone help me up, for Amitabha’s sake. I am your teacher, you ingrates.”

Suds felt: it took all the grims’ will power and concentration, their
joriki,
to locate their own limbs and propel themselves out of the suburb, helping Bobo Shin along as he leaned against Clara, moaning, his head lolling against her bosom. Bobo Shin was sweating profusely, and as the sweat dripped down, he couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t a lost river flowing down someone’s swallet, down, down, flowing and pooling, then reflecting.

Suds felt Rinzai watch Bobo Shin, Clara, and the monks leave the suburb. Mukan looked back before he melted out of Rinzai’s view into a blinding haze of white light. Moving mere inches this way and that, Rinzai wandered about the living room, in and out
of epochs and lives like currents of cool water in a spring pond. He felt something lying on the floor under his left foot, and he picked it up to examine it.

Suds whined. “My nose!”

Rinzai didn’t hear that. It looked to him like a crystal set. No Mind’s
chop,
his personal insignia, was stamped on the spool in red ink. So No Mind had a crystal set, his own secret crystal set. Rinzai put the plug in his ear and grounded the wire on a water pipe.

“Ouch!” Virya took the wire into her mouth. She let Rinzai twine it around one incisor.

Suds felt: the Voice filled Rinzai’s mind.
“You will not have to wear this receiver again.”
Rinzai’s brain felt like iron molecules, magnetized, aligning to the Voice, the City’s Voice.
“If you wish to wear it as a sign of rank, if it will help you to do the City’s work, then wear it. No Mind will have no further need of it.”

Suds stopped his ears, then his navel, then his nose, then someone else’s nose, an animal’s nose, a small, sick animal’s nose, a rabbit’s, in fact, wet and quivering, but he still heard the Voice in Rinzai’s head. The Voice was drying up the lost river, steaming away the pool and with it, Angela’s image in the pool. “I
am your spine now, your buddha nature, your True Self. I will tell you where to go, Rinzai. I will tell you what to do.
”

Rinzai pried out the ear plug and dropped the crystal set where he had found it. He crawled from the suburb into the white haze of the outside world. Suds felt: ghosts hobbled and tormented Rinzai. Rain poured from the steel sky in sheets. Rinzai ran after Bobo Shin, slipping in the mud, scrambling to his feet and slipping again, until he was abreast of the monks, lowering his gaze, prostrating on every twenty-seventh step, stumbling toward the Cave of the Dharma.

Then Suds was free of him. Rinzai’s thoughts were gone. The monks’ thoughts were gone. Suds couldn’t get out of there fast enough. “That kid stuck my nose in his ear.”

Virya was massaging her gums. “Come on, Suds. Get your hands off me and let’s go. It’s all one in the City.”

Tenacity enthroned himself on the bowl of a stalagmite; it had been cratered on top by a century’s slow drip. Whaddayagets crowded round him, holding appendages up to his green glow. The shadows of thoughts pulsed inside their translucent skins—they oohed. The whaddayas’ sounds were like gas in a dead man’s belly, whooshing and blaating, soughing and creaking.

Tenacity held forth. “City’s no good. Chuck it. It’s a stink hole. What does anybody want to get in for, that’s what I want to know?”

“That’s what
I
want to know.” Pirate shook water from one foot, then the other, then the first again, when it got cold.

“You don’t know diddlysquat, hick. The City is rotting, is what I’m talking about. Everybody here knows it. Chunks fall off it.
Here
is where it’s at.”

Big Man loosened his grip on No Mind—the winged whaddayas tightened theirs—and he leaned in toward Tenacity. “Chunks? What do you mean?”

“Chunks, hick. Bundles. Ooze. Rot. The City’s got leprosy or something.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Ooh, the hick wants to be a zen. Stay with us, hick. We’re growing all the time. We’re fertile as hell. We’re healthy, aren’t we, whaddayas?” The whaddayagets cheered. Big Man and Pirate covered their ears. No Mind tried, but the birds still pinioned his elbows. It didn’t help anyway. The noise rattled from their own bowels, from the humans’ as well as the whaddayagets’.