A Single Eye (10 page)

He motioned me off the path behind a bench. Before now, I hadn't taken in quite how tall he was. I was staring at his chest. I looked up and caught him glaring at my copper curls the way strangers had at Mom's red frizz, like it made the head beneath incapable of linear thought.

“You had something to say?” My sharp tone must have startled him. It startled
me
.

He cleared his throat, then covered his mouth with a hand. “As the sesshin director,” he said, “I need to know Roshi's plans. You can meet with me each morning after breakfast. Come to where I caught the truck this afternoon.”

Where you
pulled me out of
the truck this afternoon, I thought. “A meeting half a mile down the road? What are we, spies?”

He breathed in through his teeth. “We don't want to disturb people.”

The clappers struck again.

“I'll take it up with Leo.”

He hunched toward me and for an instant I thought he was going to grab my shoulders like he did in the truck. Then he straightened to almost military erectness and ordered, “Go ahead, ask Roshi. He'll tell you to meet with the sesshin director.”

He was right, and what really got to me was that it wasn't for the reasons he assumed. I'd have bet my cocoa and Amber's that if I went to Leo to complain about meeting
anyone
on the road to the woods, Leo would just laugh. There was no way I'd let Rob see me cringe at the sight of trees. But there was no way out.

“Right then,” Rob said smugly. “Tomorrow at the beginning of work period.”

I could have laughed. “Sorry. Can't. I have to get Leo—
Roshi's
—newspaper from the meadow then.”

“No problem. We can talk on the way.” He turned and strode across the knoll toward the zendo, black robes flying out behind him as if he were a pirate ship in full sail.

Monasteries have buildings; sesshin directors have use of rooms. Teachers meet with sesshin directors. A sesshin director doesn't set up a rendezvous with an underling to find out the topic of the next day's lecture and the dokusan schedule. Not unless he knows the teacher is making a point of not letting him know. And that would be stranger yet. In all the sesshins I had sat, nothing like that had ever happened. It would be like the president planning a summit and not telling his chief of staff.

Whatever Rob was going to ask me or tell me was something I could not afford to miss. I had thought the last thing I wanted to do was walk through the woods to get Leo's newspaper. I'd been wrong. The last thing was to head in among the trees to meet the guy whose job I had usurped. And that was just what I had to do—somehow.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

T
he clappers sounded again, wood on wood but cutting like a bell through the thick wet air. No longer the three preliminary hits that meant there was ten minutes to get to the zendo. Now the roll-down had begun, with strikes frustratingly slow to begin with but picking up speed steadily.
Move toward the zendo. Sesshin's about to begin
.

Cabin doors opened. Two women with blue umbrellas hurried across the path. A man in a dark green slicker came out of the men's dorm, stopped dead and rushed back inside, as if an item left behind now would be lost forever. On the path a tall man put his arm around a woman's shoulder and whispered urgently, then he kissed her ear and both of them smiled nervously. Three women passed by, wrapping thick shawls around their own shoulders. They ambled across the grass, one grabbed the others, stopped, and all three laughed softly in the rain before they moved on. The knoll filled with people, some college-aged to some fiftyish and one man who looked almost seventy. The clappers sounded again, an odd melodic ring of expectation. I felt the draw of silence, of clarity—and an excitement. It was the same thrill—chill—as stepping into the funhouse where anything could happen, anything could change. And yet the roiling in my stomach was deeper than it had ever been when I handed my ticket to the arcade master. I never began a sesshin without this terror, never knew precisely what I was afraid would pop up. A clear mind is like still water; would I see down to the murky bottom of memories, find more than I wanted to know? Would Leo and Aeneas and Rob crowd out those memories? Would I be able to figure out what was going on here in time to save Leo from whatever he planned, whatever Yamana-roshi had warned him not to do? Or maybe, just maybe, would I actually give up thinking for long enough to just sit zazen?

The clappers stopped. Silence resounded. The smush of rubber soles on wet grass created a background beat. The rustle of sleeves against windbreakers sliced through. Then the clappers began again, oh so slowly, strike after strike calling:
Come. . . . come. . . . come now!
I started up the hill as the clacks came quicker, echoing in my chest like a heartbeat. Around me people moved faster in the deepening dark. We walked, mostly silently, but with a whisper here and there, up the knoll to the zendo, up the five wide wooden steps to the covered porch outside the round shingled building.

On the porch, people slid off shoes and stowed them on the shoe rack, a bookcase for footwear. Still in the running shoes I'd flown out in, I balanced on one foot and yanked at my shoe, reversed the process, then placed the pair on the rack. The cold from the wooden porch spread through my socks as I moved into the line of entering students. Outside the door I paused, my stomach tightened, then I took a deep breath, bowed, and walked inside, into sesshin.

The zendo was a dome. The black cushions,
zafus
, were in the center of two-foot by three-foot black mats,
zabutons
, lined up on
tans
, twenty-inch high platforms, that nestled against the curved wall. When we all turned around and sat facing the wall, as we would do most of the time, it would be slanting inward toward our heads. But for now, this first period, we faced the center of the room, making an incomplete circle along the wall, the inner edges of our mats almost touching.

In the open end of the circle stood the altar, a highly-polished teak block about three feet high, topped by a statue of a Buddha. The dim glow of oil lamps on either side threw odd shadows across it.
Light and darkness are a pair
, says the eighth-century Chinese poem, the
Sandokai
. One does not exist independently of the other. On one side of the altar, a candle flickered seductively, sending swaying shadowy arms from the flowers over the statue of the Buddha onto the walls beyond. The sweet, woody smell of incense drifted and disappeared.

I found my seat, halfway between the door and the altar along the right wall. I bowed to the cushion, turned and bowed to the room and the community of people here, about to undertake this hard half month, each of us moving in the cocoon of our own fears and fantasies, yet with a calmness of purpose. Normally, the serenity of this communal beginning comforts me, but now, here, it served only to highlight Maureen's edginess and Rob's extreme demands. Why were the two people who should have been most settled going into sesshin the most unnerved?

That moment passed, and on the far side of the altar the roshi's entrance door creaked. In his formal brown robes, Leo stepped into the oil-lit room. Rob followed, holding a smoking stick of incense. His step was sure; his black robes barely swayed. He paused before the altar and bowed slightly, extending the incense. The flickering light of the oil lamps reflected off his polished skull and sharpened his chiseled nose and cheekbones. Next to tall, elegant Rob, Leo looked like a gnome.

Leo—
Roshi
—accepted the proffered incense and placed it in the middle of a bowl of compacted ash that sat in the center of the altar. He bowed before the altar and walked to his seat beside it. A soft, sweet bell rang. Despite his unsteady steps and unprepossessing shape, there was a dignity in his demeanor. I caught myself looking right at Leo and smiling proudly like a parent at a school play. I felt ridiculous. But for an instant when he looked around the room his gaze paused at me.

With all his robes inside robes, a priest's settling onto his zafu is always a long process of yanking cloth and tucking cloth and general robe-futzing. But Leo was so brittle it took him a good half minute just to cantilever himself onto the cushion. It was too painful to watch. I was glad anew I'd hauled the cacao beans up the hill for him.

Now that the bells had rung, the first period of
zazen
—meditation—had officially begun. The time for watching was over. Hands were to come together in a
mudra
—palms upward, left resting on right, thumbs lightly touching—eyes were to be open, gaze turned downward, attention on the flow of the breath. Nothing else was to be moving. Stillness in body leads to stillness in mind.

I breathed in slowly, felt the breath flow out, smelled the incense and the wet wool, heard the clatter of rain beginning on the dome, felt the wisps of exhaled air that connected me to my seatmates. There was something so lush about the first minutes in the zendo when everything and everybody was fresh and eager and glad to be together. Pain, exhaustion, frustration, and anger would follow, but right now the novelty connected us all. I had lived in ten different places in sixteen years and the only place I felt at home was in the zendo.

The forty-minute period was half over when Leo cleared his throat and began to speak. “I'm going to tell you about Aeneas, and why I didn't do this sooner.” He cleared his throat. “Someone said to Suzuki-roshi, who brought Zen from Japan to San Francisco, ‘Define Zen.' Suzuki-roshi answered, ‘Things change.'”

Leo took a breath and though it was hard to tell in that half-light from the oil lamp, I could have sworn he had a hint of a smile on his wide mouth when he repeated, “Things change.” Then he sat silent so long I wondered if I had hallucinated his words. To my left, Amber recrossed her legs in a flourish more indicative of impatience than pain. I glanced up at Rob, Maureen, and Barry, across from me and took in their still, calm postures. As senior students, monastery residents, they were assigned the seats closest to their roshi. Rain tapped on the curved roof; the oil lamps barely flickered. I was about to let my eyes close when Leo went on.

“We hear,
Things change
, and we immediately assume that refers to cosmic things.
E
equals
MC
squared. Solids become liquid; matter becomes energy; life becomes death. We can accept that; tuck it in a corner of our minds to be pondered sometime later. Life becomes death: well, that's not so comfortable, but it's not a real problem, at least not for years. Ice becomes water isn't so bad, either—unless it's summer.”

He grinned, but none of us reacted. The new people were probably too nervous, and those of us who had heard other teachers give talks understood that this offer of humor was a ruse before he dug into his real point. We didn't want to be suckered.

“But we don't like change,” he continued. “Change around us reminds us that
we
change, that we are not the solid substance we like to believe we are. We are nothing but stuff that changes. Maybe not even stuff, but just change. We like to come to sesshin and settle into the solid, reliable rules that make us feel safe, secure, unchanging, right?” He looked at Rob, Maureen, and Barry. “Right?”

He laughed. They smiled. And I was glad to let their aplomb reassure me. “Nothing but change” was not a way I wanted to see myself, not at all.

“I've been here a long time,” he went on. “Six years. When I came, there was only land and trees”—he shot a smile at Rob—“and poison oak. When Rob first got here he thought he'd stumbled into the asylum with a lunatic in charge. Poor Rob. He was about to abandon a flourishing law firm in San Francisco to study with a teacher of great promise. What he got was a guy consumed with his skin. All I could do was try not to scratch . . . and scratch. I had poison oak so often I felt undressed without it.”

People did smile at that, though I suspect a good proportion of us were hoping he'd say he had gone on a tear to rid the place of every leaf and stem.

“Of course there was no way to avoid it. You do what you can—take this pill, use that ointment—but when you have to clear the land and the land's full of it, it gets you in the end. And everywhere else.” He waited a beat. “I had taken the hardships in Japan as a challenge and an honor of sorts. They were foreign, exotic hardships and I knew they weren't going to last forever. Then I came home and screwed up big. And this place was my exile. So here I was out in the woods with my life turned upside down and, to add insult, with poison oak.” He started to scratch his arm, looked down at it and shrugged. “I have never hated anything or any place so much. If there had been any possibility of anything else—But I'd already burned every bridge and I was stuck. I knew if I left here I would be leaving my Zen practice. I knew—” He paused to look slowly around the room. There was no hint of a smile. Those oversized features on his face made him seem larger than life. “I knew if I left here I would die.”