Book of Numbers: A Novel (54 page)

We rolled out of the BART station at Powell Street and through the Tenderloin, from Market, to Turk, to Laguna, and Bush Street. We did not know what we were doing, but then we did not know what D-Unit had been doing either, praying with the Hasidics, or praying to the Hasidics, driving the 20 minutes, 40 minutes in traffic, each way, just to make a minyan. He did not believe in anything. But he believed in showing up.

It was a grand old slammed to shit synagogue, littered, tagged, bird shit and bird nests around the decalogue windows. We knocked until a Fujian janitor was at the door telling us to come back at no time we comprehended, and so we coasted around until dusk or so, the momentary jolt of passing under lamps and having them flash on.

The far curb was all comppeople peers of peer age with incomplete facial hair, chip earrings, 3D glasses type glasses. They hung apart from the hippie men bald but with gray ponytails, hippie women gray to the knees. We crowded between them into a foyer smogged with incense. The signage was Sinitic. Half the people might have been half Jewish. This had definitely stopped being a synagogue.

There were bins by the inner door, and the hippies took pillows and bowed to sit, and then with all the pillows taken sat on mats, and then with the mats gone, the floor. The way they bowed, we would never be that flexible, the way they realigned their spines, we would never have that posture, how they stretched and rolled around. The comppeople stayed by the walls. Deployed the meld effect.

We rolled to brake against a pillar posted with reiki ads and bulk offers on rhizomes and herbs. We have tried to impart this, how receptive we were, how divestable.

This was not the state in which to meet the Master Classman.

Tetsugen Kenneth Classman, the Master, Zen roshi to the Valley. Something had brought us to him, and whatever that something was we would venerate it. He was born in the Bronx, 1946. His parents were unionists, tailors, Jews, in that order. They were Left, very Left, though
we have never been sure of the Trotskyist distinctions. He went to U of Chicago. Philosophy. But the war or the antiwar movement was already escalating, and he got involved with SDS. That he dropped out is clear, not so what forced him underground with the Yippies in San Francisco, with trips above to study at the SF Zenter with Shunryu Suzuki, from whom he received Dharma transmission in 1970, just before or after they called his draft number. He stowed away on a ship to Japan, to resume his studies at Sōji-ji, and Eihei-ji, a Sōtō summit brought him to China, from which he hiked across the border to Laos, Cambodia, smuggled US military defectors across the border from Vietnam and resettled them in Bangkok. We have been told he was caught and turned informant, or that he had worked for the MI Corps in another unspecified capacity and was pardoned. We have been told he was never even caught. Bottomline. He repatriated and established a vet soup kitchen, 74, vagrant bakery, 76, the inevitable gentrification of the Haight. Possession of LSD for personal use, 1980. Multiple counts of unlawful assembly and obstruction, for organizing nonpermit marches protesting CDC apathy toward HIV/AIDS, 1984.

Founded Zend0, 2002, now the #2 Buddhist nonprofit according to do-n-donor.com. Transcendental Unlocking, a potential cultivation method extremely popular in Hollywood, ongoing. Dynastatic Shikantaza, or ScreenSits, the focal training intensives that became serious industry schmoozles, ongoing. Four books of koan,
Selfhelp for the Helplessly Selfless
I–IV. Two cookbooks. Cowritten. All. A bikram fitness regime, Chakra Till You Dropa. Udderly Yummy, his organic dairy collective. 2010 revenue $18.2 million. Not quite Zen activites. We are shaky only on the arrest dates and Nam, the rest is kosher.

Physically, we never remembered if he had a beard. Or if he did, which one. He worked all the angles onstage, but it was as like he dwelt in stillness and the stage instead moved for him. Nothing disturbed his wraps, which were not black monastic capes, rather papal dictator satin and Thinsulate polar fleece.

He kept saying the group would do a guided meditation but then kept talking through it.

“Unplug yourself, and boot belief. Let faith fail, and blankness.”

“Concess nothing, process all. You become the deadline.”

His devotees, true to the school, laughed, as like they were practicing laughing. This alone was going to have to suffice as like both meditation and guidance.

The Master Classman beamed, and his beams were for us, rather we realized that everyone else was claiming them too, for serious reaching out their hands and clapping down around the experience, everyone was clapping onehanded.

“Zen is mystic Buddhism,” he said, basically. “Zen is the elite, it influences the current, and sets trends in the wind.”

“Now you have become the teachers. But it is not just one student who is telling you this, today everyone is a student and is telling. Our wisdom has always been dependent on the wisdom of our teachers, but now, everything depends. We are not in the Valley, and yet you are the Valley. We are just Buddhists. You are the Zen of Zen.”

“The world of email is the world of attachment, the world of sites is the world of design, the speaker is speaking, the monitor is monitoring, screens impede and cannot be lifted.”

“A peasant, out plowing the field with his ox, died, and was born again, but online. That was his world. He did not know anything else, or have any memories of any existences prior. But this is the world in which all the peasants around you live currently. They are living online, but they think it is offline. They will wander unsettled until they are taken offline again. But even this will be just another design, or attachment.”

Then, just to our side, we noticed Rolf Schadborg. He was working for Treap then, who were no competition, but was about to breakaway and found Quineisha.com, which would resolve the crosscultural timelag by bringing urban street fashions out to white suburban sprawl while still at the peak of their freshness.

He was surrounded by other Treapsters, terminal jockeys from Go, from Flooz, who would not have jobs in another month or so, or week, or day, or their mobilephones were about to ring with the news, the market flux, the dotcom snap and crackle. Or maybe they did not have jobs already and that was how they were able to be here, the 200 million vicepresidents of Pets.com, which was about to lose $200 million.

Techs, dejected, susceptible, who, whatever they were up to then, went later into bitcoins, their investment and exchange, anticounterfeit bots combating minting. Startups as like Urrgency, Eastern Union.

Any one of them might have introduced us to the Master Classman. Reintroduced us. Because he must have been prepped for us. Because neither of us would have recalled the last time we met, in our prior incarnations as like ginkgo trees or leaves or beetles.

The Master Classman finished. Rather he had been dramatizing the precept of mandative inertia and the techs had interpreted that lull for his finishing, and they mobbed him, pressed around him as like magnetized. He had this stickiness to him, this retention.

We bladed circles around their glomerate.

The Master Classman bowed to them and blessed them, bent again to Schadborg, light whispers, heavy guruing.

It was out grinding curbside that he appeared to us. Appeared. From nothingness into flesh. Not kitschy as like flickering from a cheap desaturated color Obi Wan transported to the Starship Enterprise effect, but manifestation. We had been crying. He had that ability to out of nothing cry along. He said that we were sick and our sickness was of knowing. Also of not knowing. Ignorance was making us ill. Our willful disregard. He told us to sit and we sat. This was at a fundraiser in Menlo Park. He told us to stand and we stood. This was at another fundraiser in Los Gatos. He introduced us to his acolytes, including the rabbi of the Bush Street congregation, which after the retirement of its Jews rented its facility to the Master Classman. The rabbi offered a parable about a forest getting lost in itself, and then an anecdote about D-Unit.

We were with the Master Classman all the way, even to Noto. We went to Noto, no away msg.

[You just packed up and left?]

First trip. First trip out of the country.

[But where to exactly?]

Noto Peninsula. Ishikawa Prefecture. Honshū. Japan.

[When?]

Spring 2000. April, do not quote us, or do, but we stayed through the summer, September.

[A monastery or what?]

Zen. Sōtō. Order of the rice sorters. Sect of the jeweled mirror in which all substances and images merge.

[That’s why you went, to count the grains?]

We are going to barf. Pass the bowl.

[Wait, which?]

Pass.

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[So you can’t tell me what made you drop it all and go monastic? And you won’t tell me what’s up with your health, the vomiting, the Doc Huxtable injectables?]

Balk not.

[Thor Balk again—what does he have to do with you finding religion? Or with the Master Classman?]

What the windbroken pineneedle has to do with the earthworm halved by a hoe. What the dragon howling in the wasted cedar has to do with the grains that fill a kalpa. Nothing. Gibber. The Master Classman was full of that on our arrival. He was very proud of the nature too, but that was fair, we had not expected the nature. We will try for local scenics. It was a monastery. A kakuchi. Pagodas with tiers all stacked, pagoda atop pagoda atop pagoda. Mountains we were told not to wonder which. Waters we were told not to wonder whether the bay or sea or ocean. The nearest neighbors were just jungle and beach. Closer to the beach was a decommissioned nuclearplant. For two months or so we went unrecognized. For 10 weeks we donned a diaper robe to toddle around behind the diaper robes and bibs of vivider colors. Sandals, timekeepers. Clickclack as like keys. The Master Classman was in and out, being driven to and from the airport in Komatsu. Approx two hours away, though not in sandals.

We were allotted our own eight mat hut. It was weatherized and had electric. We took a vow of silence, which was pointless, we took a vow of celibacy, pointless. We were never very capable at being a novice. It required a backengineer, a reversal. This might have bothered the Master Classman, but he was off pursuing abandonment.

Neglect the monk who seeks approval, true approval is neglect. Just a basic Western psych thing, not a koan.

All the monks who supervised our zazen and cooked and served and cleaned up from our meals lived two to each four mat cell, two cells in each hut. They had no electricity, no doubleglazed windows or vents, certainly no private tile bathrooms. They worked, not prepping for rice season or raising livestock, or making indigenous handicrafts, lacquerwork, halite pottery, but readying the guest facilities surrounding ours, doing repairs, vacuuming. We would sit for zazen in the zendo, and then the jikijitsu, who supervised our training, would bash the gong with the butt of his drill and go away to fix sinks and toilets and outlets.

The snows melted, the river thawed and flooded. The grounds were muddy, and even the monster trucks stuck.

Execs showed, from Vitol, Glencore, Trafigura, Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, just in time for the sakura. They were unavoidable, they were chatty, quadlingually chatty. The Master Classman took over zazen, two sesshin a day. He taught “greedy breathing.” He taught a technique called “median digit lust mudra.” But we would skip one or both or the sesshin, to kinhin along the river to the top of a hill and just sit there lotused and yet even there one of the newbies panting and thornpricked and searching for phone reception would inevitably solicit up to us as like we were the shike, asking us if we were going to Burning Man, or Davos, asking us how this experience comptrasted with Burning Man, or Davos, wondering if we would recommend a regression ashram or matha or yeshiva, seeking advice on a pesky archival digitalization issue, seeking advice on synching emails across multiple devices. They would request our presence on philanthropy boards dedicated to eradicating autism. They would make confessions about having autistic children, estranged wives, about how they had come out here to forge closer relationships to family they had left back home, or to recover from mysterious diseases, affluenza. They were men, and under the direction of the Master Classman they did manly bonding things to also get closer to one another, carrying bronze keman and umpan and even gravemarkers extreme distances, samurai fights with rubber katana, sumo fights in rubber fatsuits, waterfall trustfalls. At night girls tramped in full geisha regalia from
kimonos to whiteface would be jeeped in from Suzu and Wajima, and we would be awake and out early enough in the morning on kinhin to catch them leaving, and half of them were boys. We refused the ones that came to us, and then an oshō, a priest, showed up at our screen with one or two and an emoticon frown insisting we were getting him in trouble by refusing. We let them stay, the boy and girl, and so as like not to get them fired we performed sexually, but incompletely. So much for our celibacy. So much for our silence.

The oshō kept visiting, having taken notice of our conflict. Anything we say now is flattery, but he recognized us for pure, for attending-intending-to-pure. He took us under his instruction, explaining the writings, the Shōbōgenzō of Dōgen, and even the sutras by which Damo had explained India to Asia, the Prajnaparamita, the Avatamsaka, the Lankavatara. He explicated the Sanskrit, which he could only partially read, but in this language, which he could only partially speak. A child of his had suffered worse than we had and the writings had spared him, had spared the oshō. He got that we were not here for recharging, or hermitage pampering. He confided in us, his ricecloth-wiping-mirror-retaining-reflection. Our essence was communicated, he said, not just by our sexual tact, but by the fact that though we experienced shame we never stopped anyone from their duties, from laundering our koromo, from beating our mats of dust. We understood. Tipping would only insult.

The oshō, who had served at this or another kakuchi before the loss of his child had him joining the Master Classman, snuck to our cell for tutorials. We sat, no zafu, no zabuton, sat smack in our center and zoned. It was as like programming, but deprogramming. Our heads were monitors, our arms extended to hands extended to fingers, our legs and feet and toes were power. If any code inputted on our upper display, the middle converted it to output, which the lower expelled. The ultimate result was not clarity, kensho, or revelation, satori, but just the flinchless acceptance of a thwack, open palm, back of palm, rod of cypress.