Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (60 page)

“Go on.”

“It's not that simple. Do you know what it is to have no memory, absolutely none, to be standing in a place and not know who you are or how you got there? It's the most terrifying experience I have ever known—even worse than the fear I felt when I stepped into that damn machine.”

“Could you read, write, speak?” Greenberg asked.

“Yes, I could read and write. I could speak.”

“Different centers of the brain,” said Goldman.

“What did you do?”

“I put down the valise and paced back and forth. I was shaking—the way I am shaking now. It took a little while. I had a rotten headache, but after a few minutes the pain eased. Then I took out my wallet.”

“You knew what it was? You knew it was a wallet?”

“I knew that. I knew I was a man. I knew I was wearing shoes. I knew those things. As a matter of fact, I knew a great deal. I hadn't become an imbecile. I was simply without memory. I was alive and aware of today, but there was no yesterday. So I took out the wallet and went through it. I learned my name. Not my own name, but the name you gave me for the journey. I read the instructions, the timetable, the minute directions you wrote out for my journey, the warning that I must return to the exact spot in the warehouse at a specific time. And the strange thing was that never for a moment did I doubt the instructions. Somehow I accepted the necessity, and I knew that I must do the things that were written down for me to do.”

“And you did them?” Greenberg asked.

“Yes.”

“With no troubles—no interferences?”

“No. You see, I knew no other time than eighteen ninety-seven. There I was. Everything was perfectly natural. I could remember no other time, no other place. I walked to the railroad station, and believe me, Norwalk Station was an elegant place in those times. The station-master sold me a ticket on the parlor car. Can you imagine a parlor car on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad? And for less than two dollars.”

“How did you know where to walk?” Zvi demanded.

“He asked directions,” said Goldman.

“Yes, I asked directions. I had no memory, but I was all right, I was at home there. I booked first-class passage on the ship to Hamburg—I spent a few hours wandering around New York.” I closed my eyes and remembered it. “Wonderful, wonderful place.”

“And you could function like that?” Greenberg asked. “It did not upset you that you had no memory?”

“After a while—no. I simply took it for granted. You see; I didn't know what memory was. A color-blind man doesn't know what color is. A deaf man doesn't know what sound is. I didn't know what memory was. Yes, people spoke about it and that was somewhat bothersome—where did I go to school, where was I born, questions like that I avoided because my instructions were to be private. There were some questions—well, I ignored them. It was a good-sized ship, very well appointed. I could be by myself.”

“Hamburg,” Greenberg reminded me.

“Yes. There were no incidents that are important now. If you want me to tell you how it was then, how places were, how people were?”

“Later. There will be time for that later. You took the train for Vienna?”

“Within hours. I followed my instructions and left the train at Linz, but there was an error there. It was midnight, and I had to wait until nine the following morning to catch the train to Braunau. I was at Braunau four hours later.”

“And then?”

I looked from face to face, three tired, aging Jews whose memories were filled with the pain and suffering of the ages, who had spent seven years and six million dollars to enter the mind of God and change it.

“And then my instructions ended. You know what I suffered and what my wife suffered at the hands of the Nazis. But you had not written down that I was to seek out an eight-year-old boy whose name was Adolf Hitler and that I was to cut his throat with the razor-sharp blade of my pearl-handled knife. You trusted me to remember what was the purpose of our whole task—and I had no memory of what you had suffered or what I had suffered, no memory of why I was there in Braunau. I spent a day there, and then I returned.”

There was a long silence after that. Even Zvi was silent, standing with his eyes closed, his fists clenched. Then Goldman said gently:

“We have not thanked Scott. I thank you for all of us.”

Still silence.

“Because we should have known,” Goldman said. “Do you remember God's promise—that no man should look into the future and know the time of his own death? When we sent Scott back, the future closed to him, and all his memories were in the future. How could he remember what had not yet been?”

“We could try again,” Zvi whispered.

“And we would fail again.” Goldman nodded. “We are children pecking at the unknown. Because whatever has been has been. I will show you. Scott,” he asked me, “do you remember where you dropped the valise?”

“Yes—yes. It was only a moment ago.”

“It was seventy-five years ago. How far from here?”

“At the edge of the road at the bottom of the hill.”

Goldman picked up a coal shovel that stood by an old coal stove in the corner of the warehouse and he led the way outside. We knew what he was about and we followed him, through the door and down the hill. It was late afternoon now, the spring sun setting across the Connecticut hills, the air cool and clean.

“Where, Scott?”

I found the spot easily enough, took the coal shovel from the frail man, and began to dig. Six or seven inches of dead leaves, then the soft loam, then the dirt, and finally the rotting edge of the valise. It came out in pieces, disintegrating leather, a few shreds of shirts and underwear, rotten and crumbling under my fingers.

“It happened,” Goldman said. “The mind of God? We don't even know our own minds. There is nothing in the past we can change. In the future? Perhaps we can change the future—a little.”

28
The Mohawk

W
hen Clyde Lightfeather walked up the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, he was wearing an old raincoat of sorts; and then he took it off and sat down cross-legged in front of the great doors. Underneath he was dressed just like the bang-bang man in an old Indian medicine show—that is, he wore soft doeskin leggings, woods moccasins, and nothing at all from the waist up. His hair was cut in the traditional central brush style of the scalp lock, with one white feather through the little braid at the back of his neck. He was altogether a very well-built and prepossessing young full-blooded Mohawk Indian.

A crowd gathered because it doesn't take anything very much to gather a crowd in New York, and Father Michael O'Conner came out of the cathedral and Officer Patrick Muldoon came up from the street, and the gentle June sun shone down upon everyone.

“Now just what the hell are you up to?” Officer Muldoon asked Clyde Lightfeather. There was a querulous note in Officer Muldoon's voice, for he was sick and tired of freaks, hard-core hippies, acid-heads, pot-heads, love children and flower children, black power folk, SDS, sit-ins and demonstrations-out; and while he was fond of saying that he had seen everything, he had never before seen a Mohawk Indian sitting crosslegged in front of St. Patrick's.

“God and God's grace, I suppose,” Clyde Lightfeather answered.

“Now don't you know,” said Muldoon, his voice taking that tired, descending path of patience and veiled threat, “that this is private property and that you cannot put a feather in your hair and just sit yourself down and attract a crowd and make difficulties for honest worshipers?”

“Why not? This isn't private property. This is God's property, and since you don't work for God, why don't you take your big, fat blue ass out of here and leave me alone?”

Officer Muldoon began to make the proper response to such talk, Mohawk Indian or not—with the crowd grinning and half disposed toward the Indian—when Father O'Conner intervened and pointed out to Officer Muldoon that the Indian was absolutely right. This was not private property but God's property.

“The devil you say!” Officer Muldoon exclaimed. “You're going to let that heathen sit there?”

Up until that moment Father O'Conner had been of a mind to say a few reasonable words that would be persuasive enough to move the Indian away. Now he abruptly changed his position.

“Maybe I will,” he declared.

“Thank you,” Lightfeather said.

“Providing you give me one good reason why I should.”

“Because I am here to meditate.”

“And you consider this a proper place for meditation, Mr.—?”

“Lightfeather.”

“Mr. Lightfeather.”

“The best. Do you deny that?” he demanded pugnaciously.

“What is meditation to you, Mr. Lightfeather?”

“Prayer—God—being.”

“Then how can I deny it?” the priest asked.

“And you're going to let him stay there?” Muldoon demanded. “I think so.”

“Now look,” Muldoon said, “I was raised a Catholic, and maybe I don't know much, but I know one thing—a cathedral is made for worship on the inside, not on the outside!”

Nevertheless, the Indian remained there, and within a few hours the television cameras and the newspapermen were there and Father O'Conner was facing no less exalted a person than the Cardinal himself. The research facilities at the various networks were concentrated upon the letter
m
—
m
for meditation as well as Mohawk. Chet Huntley informed millions not only that meditation was a significant, inwardly directed spiritual exercise, an inner concentration upon some thought of deep religious significance, but that the Mohawk Indians had been great in their time, the organizing force of the mighty Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. The peace of the forests was the Mohawk peace, even as the law was the Mohawk law, codified in ancient times by that gentle and wise man, Hiawatha. From the St. Lawrence River in the north to the Hudson River in the south, the Mohawk peace and the Mohawk law prevailed before the white man's coming.

Less historically oriented, the CBS commentators wondered whether this was not simply another bit of hooliganism inflicted by college youth upon a patient public. They had researched Lightfeather himself, learning that, after Harvard, he took his Ph.D. at Columbia—his doctoral paper being a study of the use of various hallucinogenic plants in American Indian religions. “It is discouraging,” said Walter Cronkite, “to find a young American Indian of such brilliance engaging in such tiresome antics.”

His Eminence, the Cardinal, took another tack entirely. It was not his to unravel a Mohawk Indian. Instead, he coldly asked Father O'Conner just what he proposed.

“Well, sir, Your Eminence, I mean he's not doing any harm, is he?”

“Really carried away by the notion that God owns the property—am I right, Father?”

“Well—he put it so naturally and directly, Your Eminence.”

“Did it ever occur to you that God's property rights extend even farther than St. Patrick's? You know He owns Wall Street and the White House and Protestant churches and quite a few synagogues and the Soviet Union and even Red China, not to mention a galaxy or two out there. So if I were you, Father O'Conner, I would suggest some more suitable place than the porch of St. Patrick's for meditation. I would say that you should persuade him to leave by morning.”

“Yes, Your Eminence.”

“Peacefully.”

“Yes, Your Eminence.” “We have still not had a sit-down in St. Patrick's.”

“I understand perfectly, Your Eminence.”

But Father O'Conner's plan of action was a little less than perfect. It was about five o'clock in the afternoon now, and the streets were filled with people hurrying home. As little as it takes to make a crowd in New York, it Jakes less to dispel it; and by now the Indian was wholly taken for granted. Father O'Conner stood next to Lightfeather for a while, brooding as creatively as he could, and then asked politely whether the Indian heard him.

“Why not? Meditation is a condition of alertness, not of sleep.”

“You were very still.”

“Inside, Father, I am still.”

“Why did you come here?” Father O'Conner asked.

“I told you why. To meditate.”

“Why here?”

“Because the vibes are good here.”

“Vibes?”

“Vibrations.”

“Oh.”

“It's a question of belief. This place if filled with belief. That's why I picked it. I need belief.”

“For what?” Father O'Conner asked curiously.

“So I can believe.”

“What do you want to believe?”

“That God is sane.”

“I assure you—He is,” Father O'Conner said with conviction.

“How the hell do you know?”

“It's a matter of my own belief.”

“Not if you were a Mohawk Indian.”

“I don't know. I have never been a Mohawk Indian.”

“I have.”

Father O'Conner thought about it for a moment or two, and in all fairness he could not deny that a Mohawk Indian might have quite a different point of view.

“His Eminence, the Cardinal, is provoked at me,” he said finally. “He wants me to persuade you to leave.”

“So you're bringing back the fuzz.”

“No, peacefully.”

“Before you were with me on this being God's pad. Has His Eminence talked you out of that?”

“He pointed out that the Almighty has equal claim to the Soviet Union. I suppose wherever it is, the tenants make the rules.”

“All right. Spell it out.”

“I hate to be a top sergeant about it,” Father O'Conner said. “How long were you planning to stay?”

“Until God answers me.”

“That can be a long time,” Father O'Conner said unhappily.