Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (5 page)

“The notion is certainly ingenious.”

“And from that you conclude that madmen are ingenious. Let me go on with my premise, and since you have assured me that I am not schizophrenic, you can ponder over the precise quality of my madness.”

“By all means,” Blausman agreed.

“They could attack the earth, but that would mean grave losses and even the possibility of defeat—no matter how small that possibility is. So some time ago, they hit upon another plan. They would train men for a particular profession, train them very well indeed, and then they would bring these men to earth, put them into positions of great power, and then induce a conditioned amnesia. Thus, these men would know what they had to do, what they were trained to do, yet be without the knowledge of why they do what they must do.”

“Absolutely fascinating,” Blausman said. “And in your case, the amnesia broke.”

“I think it is a limited thing in every case. A time comes when we remember, but more clearly than I remembered. We know our profession, and in time we remember why we have been trained to this profession.”

“And your profession?” Blausman asked.

“Of course, we are exterminators. I thought you understood that from the dream. So, Doctor, you would say I am cured, would you not?”

“Ah—there you have me,” Blausman smiled.

“You don't believe me? You really don't believe me?”

“I don't know. What are your intentions, General? Are you going to kill me?”

“Why on earth should I kill you?”

“You defined your profession.”

“One small, overweight New York psychiatrist? Come, come, Dr. Blausman—you have your own delusions of grandeur. I am an exterminator, not a murderer.”

“But since you have told me what you are—”

Now it was the General's turn to smile. “My dear Dr. Blausman, what will you do? Will you take my story to the mayor, the governor, the President—the FBI, the press? How long would you maintain your professional status? Would you tell a story about little green men, about flying saucers? No, there is no need to kill you, Doctor. How inconvenient, how embarrassing that would be!” He rose to leave.

“This does not negate your bill,” Blausman said. He could think of nothing else to say.

“Of course not. Send it to me in Washington.”

“And just for my own parting shot, I don't believe one damn word you've said.”

“Precisely, Doctor.”

The General left and the doctor pulled himself together before he strode into the outer office and snapped at Miss Kanter: “Get his history and put it in the files. He won't come back.”

“Really? Evelyn Bender just called and said she can have the survey by Wednesday.”

“Tell her to tear it up, and send her a check. Cancel the rest of my appointments today. I'm going home.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“No, Miss Kanter—not one damn thing. Everything is precisely the way it has always been.”

4
Echinomastus Contentii

P
rofessor Timothy Melrick loved cacti. He also grew cacti and felt, as many others do, that there was no plant quite as intriguing. That was his avocation. He earned a modest living as a Professor of Chinese Philosophy at a small California college, where he could share his adoration of Chuang Tzu with the handful of students who were interested enough in Chinese Philosophy to maintain his tenure. He was also, somewhat apologetically, a Zen Buddhist.

His wife, Barbara, who was inclined to blame Zen for his lack of ambition, frequently took him to task on this score.

“I happen to be a Presbyterian,” she would say to him. “I don't apologize when someone asks me why I am a Presbyterian.”

“Well, you can explain that, you know,” he would reply gently. “Your mother and father were Presbyterians.”

“Yours were certainly not Zen Buddhists.”

“No, they weren't.”

“And what you are you can't even explain to me.”

“It's not very easy to explain you know. Old Tozan said, ‘When I am hungry I eat, when I am thirsty I drink, and when I am tired, I sleep.'”

“Who was Tozan?” Barbara asked.

“He was an old Zen monk who lived long ago.”

“He sounds like some kind of wino. You are probably the lowest-paid full professor in all California, and I know one thing.”

“Yes?”

. “I'll never own a Mercedes, not even a used one. So much for you and what you call contentment!”

Professor Melrick loved his wife. He thought of this as he retreated to his garden, where he was trying to cross two very improbable cousins,
Echinomastus macdowellii
with
Echinopsis longispina
, both of which resembled sick and confused porcupines until they came into flower. Their flowers were beautiful indeed. He hardly blamed his wife, and while the reference to the Mercedes—a very high priced automobile made in Germany—might have seemed a non sequitur to an outsider, it was quite understandable to the professor. Of course, he lived in Glendale, which is only a short distance from Beverly Hills, and, as the Mercedes Company knows full well, there are more Mercedes per capita in Beverly Hills than in any city in the world except Bel Air, which flanks Beverly Hills to the west, and which has an even higher per-capita income.

It was not simply proximity or envy that had reduced Barbara to a perpetual state of bitterness and frustration. It was her brother, recently deceased. Her brother was the Gordon Tymon of Interlock Industries. He had owned an eleven-acre estate in Bel Air, and he was rich beyond probability. Soon after the explosion of the first atom bombs toward the end of World War II, Gordon Tymon determined that his was not to go the way of all flesh—whereupon he undertook the ultimate in atom bomb shelters at his Bel Air estate.

For twenty-five years an army of contractors labored on this project in an out-of-the-way corner of the estate. It did no good for Professor Melrick to warn him that the Santa Monica Mountains, threaded as they were with earthquake faults, were an unlikely place for an atom bomb shelter, or to propose a philosophical attitude toward man's future; in fact, as Barbara often pointed out to her husband, he so alienated the tycoon that Gordon cast off his sister, even as a recipient of small gifts.

Year after year, more and more of the atom bomb shelter emerged—or did not emerge, since shelters are sheltered—and a great cavern grew in the ground. Airlocks, elevators, generators, hidden tanks of oil and gasoline, vitamins by the thousands, dehydrated food, film-projectors, films for amusement, water tanks—only name it and rest assured that it was there. Meanwhile, Gordon's wife, Zelda, played tennis. Whatever else she did was. unseen; the tennis was public. Between his financial interests and the atom bomb shelter, he had little time for her. He had become a fanatical pioneer for survival, one of that handful of fortunate beings in America who would survive a direct hit.

In March of 1970, Gordon was on his way from his thirty-two room mansion to the bomb shelter. He often took the little path that led from the one to the other, that he might look upon his recently completed work and find it good. Halfway there, one of those tremendous rainstorms that douse Southern California in March exploded upon him. He quickened his pace, slipped, fell, fractured his skull, and died. They found him there the following day.

Two weeks after the funeral, after the reading of the will which left everything to her and not one penny to Barbara, Zelda married the tennis pro at her club. The happy couple then took off for the south of France, where for years Gordon had maintained a splendid villa which he never had time to visit. And since anything and everything grows like mad in Southern California, the bomb shelter was soon covered by a heavy blanket of Moorish Ivy—forgotten of the world and especially of Zelda, who had never given the atom bomb a second thought.

All this Professor Melrick reflected upon as he made his way from the house to the garden, where he grew his cacti. There were, perhaps, elements of cosmic justice in Gordon's fate, if one desires to believe in so silly a business as cosmic justice—which, Timothy Melrick, for one, did not—but the bitter nut of the matter was that three elegant Mercedes had been standing idle in Gordon's—now Zelda's—garage for five years. How could he blame Barbara for bitterness, frustration, anger? He had never even been able to afford a Buick and, even worse, had never even desired a Buick—the trouble with being a Zen person in a very non-Zen environment.

He turned with a sigh to that marvelous diversion, the cacti. He, for one, had never accepted the theory that the cactus was a primitive plant—a holdover from the early time of life on earth. Quite otherwise; he saw the cacti as plants faced with that same threat of extinction that the environmentalists forecast for all of mankind these days. An earth once wet and rich now dried up; where once were seas, deserts appeared, and where once were cloudy skies and cool winds, there was a burning sun, never shaded. The plants were faced with the imperative of life. Adapt—or perish. In musing over this, he thought of a story told recently in the faculty dining room. It would seem—according to this little tale—that the Russians had exploded a very large atom bomb at the North Pole. The Polar ice cap began to melt at a rate that would raise the seas above all the land masses of the earth. One by one, the heads of nations informed their people that human life was doomed, that they must prepare to perish—that is with the exception of the Prime Minister of Israel. She said to her handful of people: “Fellow Jews—we have three months to learn to breathe under water.”

Not so different from what the plants faced, the professor mused, when the land turned into desert. Their life-giving leaves shriveled under the burning sun, whereupon they shed their leaves, abandoned their dry stems and trunks, and instead grew stems of green, rich in chlorophyl. When the sun attacked these new receptacles of life, the plants thickened their skin until it resisted the worst the sun could do. When animals found these thick, juicy stems very much to their taste, the plants proceeded to grow long, sharp spines, and when the insects they needed so desperately for cross pollination began to avoid the hot desert, the plants developed flowers of such beauty and color as the world had not seen before. Not at all a bad recommendation for the power and resourcefulness of life, the professor decided, looking with affection at his garden of strange shapes, needle-like spikes and gorgeous blooms; not at all. And looking at them, he felt that his affection was being returned, that these marvelous plants knew his feelings and reciprocated them.

And then something new caught his eye. His strange new cactus, the result of his crossing
Echinomastus macdowellii
with
Echinopsis longispina
, had suddenly flowered with one great, lovely bloom: white petals that yellowed at the tips, with a heart that contained a few brilliant pink pistils in a mass of white stamens so heavily crowned with a yellow pollen that they could barely stand erect. For moments that grew into minutes, he stood there regarding it, with pleasure, love and deep aesthetic appreciation. Then, after sufficient homage, he did a very curious thing, moved by something he found difficult to account for later; he wet his finger, reached out and touched the pollen, and then put it to his lips. As his tongue licked it, the reaction was immediate and wonderful. He experienced what Zen people call
satori
, or, as others say, enlightenment.

He knew it, because one always does. He could not explain it or describe it, because one never can. He looked at the world around him with understanding and joy and compassion. It was all right. It would be all right.

Now the professor had a cat. He had the cat, not out of his choice but out of the cat's choice. It was a mean cat. It was a plain old gray and white alley cat that in its lifetime had suffered such a succession of indignities and hurts that it could only display hate and suspicion.

It was a nasty cat, a hate-filled, wretched angry cat. And at this moment, the cat was watching the professor with interest, suspicion, and hunger. The cat had been absent for two days, catting around as cats do, which accounted for the hunger.

Again, the professor wet his finger and picked up a bit of the yellow pollen, which he rubbed off into the center of his palm. Then he bent down and offered his hand to the cat.

Slowly, dubiously, watchfully, the cat advanced. The professor was patient; the cat was suspicious. The professor had fed the cat for a full two years, and still the cat was suspicious. But the cat was also hungry, and step by step he approached the professor's hand. He was at the hand. He sniffed. He looked at the professor, and then he sniffed again. And then he licked the yellow pollen out of the professor's palm.

And then he looked at the professor—as once in a while, very rarely, a cat will look at a man. Then he mewed.

The professor reached down and picked up the cat in his hands and then nestled him in his arms. The cat licked the professor's face and mewed. After a minute or so, the professor put down the cat and went into the house. The cat followed him. The professor went into the kitchen and opened a can of cat food. Purring with pleasure, the cat ate it.

“What on earth are you doing in the kitchen?” his wife called to him.

“Feeding the cat.”

“Why you don't get rid of that ugly, wretched cat, I will never know.”

“I'm rather fond of him,” the professor replied.

Then he went into his study and meditated for a while, sitting cross-legged on a small cushion. He had quite a problem facing him, and while meditation offered no solution for such problems, it did at least allow him to stop thinking about it. He had been meditating for some ten minutes or so when his wife came into the room, looked at him, and said:

“Oh.” She had a way of saying it, a remarkable way. “You do look ridiculous when you sit like that. I mean, a grown man.”