Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (61 page)

“Or an instant. I am meditating on time.”

“Time?”

I always think of time when I think of God,” the Indian said. “He has His time. We have ours. I want Him to open His time to me. What in hell am I doing here on Fifth Avenue? I'm a Mohawk Indian. Right?”

Father O'Conner nodded.

“I don't know,” the Indian said. “We'll give it the old school try, and then you can call the fuzz. How about it? Until morning?”

“Until morning,” Father O'Conner said.

“I'll do as much for you sometime,” the Indian said, and those were the last words he was heard to say. The newspaper reporters came down and the television crowd made a second visit, but the Indian was through talking.

The Indian was meditating. He allowed thought to leave his mind and he watched his breath go in and out and he became a sort of universe unto himself. He considered God's time and he considered man's time—but without thought. There are no thoughts known to man that are capable of dealing even with man's time, much less God's time; but the Indian was not so far from his ancestors as to be trapped in thought. His ancestors had known the secret of the
great time
, which all white men have forgotten.

The Indian was photographed and televised until even the networks had enough of him, and Father O'Conner remained there to see that the Indian's meditation was not interrupted. The priest felt a great kinship with the Indian, but being a priest, he also knew how many had asked and how few had been answered.

By midnight the press had gone and even the few passersby ignored the Indian. Father O'Conner was amazed at how long he had remained there, motionless, in what is called the lotus position, but he had always heard that Indians were stoical and enduring of pain and desire and he supposed that this Indian was no different. The priest was gratified that the June night was so warm and pleasant; at least the Indian would not suffer from cold.

Before the priest fell asleep that night, he prayed that some sort of grace might be bestowed upon the Indian. What kind of grace he wasn't at all sure, nor was he ready to plead that the Indian should have a taste of God's time. The notion of God's time was just a bit terrifying to Father O'Conner.

He slept well but not for long, and he was up and dressed with the first gray presence of dawn. The priest walked to the porch of the cathedral, and there was the Indian exactly as the priest had left him. So erect, so unmoving was his body that, were it not for the slight motion of his bare stomach, the priest might have thought him dead.

As for the Indian, Clyde Lightfeather, he was alert and within himself, and his mind was clear and open. Eyes closed, he felt the breezes of dawn on his cheek, the scent of morning in his nostril. He had no need for prayer; his whole being was a gentle reminder; and that way he heard a bird singing.

He allowed the sound to pass through him; he experienced it but did not detain it. And then he heard the leaping, gurgling passage of a brook. That too he heard without detention. And then he smelled the smell of the earth in June, the wonderful wet, sweet, thick smell of life coming and life going, and this smell he clung to, for he knew that his meditation was finished and that he had been granted a moment of God's time.

He opened his eyes, and instead of the great masses of Rockefeller Center, he saw an ancient stand of tulip trees, each of them fifteen feet across the base and reaching so high up that only the birds knew where they topped out. Thin fingers of the dawn laced through the tulips, and out of the great knowledge that comes with the great time, the Indian knew that there would be birch-bark canoes on the shore of the Hudson, carefully sheltered for the day they would be needed, and that the Hudson was the road to the Mohawk Valley where the longhouses stood. He waited no longer but leaped to his feet and raced through the tulip trees.

The priest had turned for a moment to regard the soaring majesty of St. Patrick's; when he looked again, the Indian was gone. Instead of being pleased that he had accomplished what the Cardinal desired, the priest felt a sense of loss.

A few hours later the Cardinal sent for Father O'Conner, and the priest told him that the Indian had left very early in the morning.

“There was no unpleasantness, I trust?”

“No, Your Eminence.”

“No police?”

“No, sir—only myself.” Father O'Conner hesitated, swallowed, and instead of departing, coughed.

“Yes?” the Cardinal asked.

“If I may ask you a question, Your Eminence?”

“Go ahead.”

“What is God's time, Your Eminence?”

The Cardinal smiled, but not with amusement. The smile was a turning inward, as if he were remembering things that had happened long, long ago.

“Was that the Indian's notion?”

Father O'Conner nodded with embarrassment.

“Did you ask him?”

“No, I did not.”

“Then when he returns,” the Cardinal said, “I suggest that you do.”

29
The Mouse

O
nly the mouse watched the flying saucer descend to earth. The mouse crouched apprehensively in a mole's hole, its tiny nose twitching, its every nerve quivering in fear and attention as the beautiful golden thing made a landing.

The flying saucer—or circular spaceship, shaped roughly like a flattened, wide-brimmed hat—slid past the roof of the split-level suburban house, swam across the back yard, and then settled into a tangle of ramblers, nestling down among the branches and leaves so that it was covered entirely. And since the flying saucer was only about thirty inches in diameter and no more than seven inches in height, the camouflage was accomplished rather easily.

It was just past three o'clock in the morning. The inhabitants of this house and of all the other houses in this particular suburban development slept or tossed in their beds and struggled with insomnia. The passage of the flying saucer was soundless and without odor, so no dog barked; only the mouse watched—and he watched without comprehension, even as he always watched, even as his existence was—without comprehension.

What had just happened became vague and meaningless in the memory of the mouse—for he hardly had a memory at all. It might never have happened. Time went by, seconds, minutes, almost an hour, and then a light appeared in the tangle of briars and leaves where the saucer lay. The mouse fixed on the light, and then he saw two men appear, stepping out of the light, which was an opening into the saucer, and onto the ground.

Or at least they appeared to be vaguely like creatures the mouse had seen that actually were men—except that they were only three inches tall and enclosed in spacesuits. If the mouse could have distinguished between the suit and what it contained and if the mouse's vision had been selective, he might have seen that under the transparent covering the men from the saucer differed only in size from the men on earth—at least in general appearance. Yet in other ways they differed a great deal. They did not speak vocally, nor did their suits contain any sort of radio equipment; they were telepaths, and after they had stood in silence for about five minutes they exchanged thoughts.

“The thing to keep in mind,” said the first man, “is that while our weight is so much less here than at home, we are still very, very heavy. And this ground is not very dense.”

“No, it isn't, is it? Are they all asleep?”

The first reached out. His mind became an electronic network that touched the minds of every living creature within a mile or so.

“Almost all of the people are asleep. Most of the animals appear to be nocturnal.”

“Curious.”

“No—not really. Most of the animals are undomesticated—small, wild creatures. Great fear—hunger and fear.”

“Poor things.”

“Yes—poor things, yet they manage to survive. That's quite a feat, under the noses of the people. Interesting people. Probe a bit.”

The second man reached out with his mind and probed. His reaction might be translated as “Ugh!”

“Yes—yes, indeed. They think some horrible thoughts, don't they? I'm afraid I prefer the animals. There's one right up ahead of us. Wide awake and with nothing else in that tiny brain of his but fear. In fact, fear and hunger seem to add up to his total mental baggage. Not hate, no aggression.”

“He's also quite small as things go on this planet,” the second spaceman observed. “No larger than we are. You know, he might just do for us.”

“He might,” the first agreed.

With that, the two tiny men approached the mouse, who still crouched defensively in the mole hole, only the tip of its whiskered nose showing. The two men moved very slowly and carefully, choosing their steps with great deliberation. One of them suddenly sank almost up to his knees in a little bit of earth, and after that they attempted to find footing on stones, pebbles, bits of wood. Evidentally their great weight made the hard, dry earth too soft for safety. Meanwhile the mouse watched them, and when their direction became evident, the mouse attempted the convulsive action of escape.

But his muscles would not respond, and as panic seared his small brain, the first spaceman reached into the mouse's mind, soothing him, finding the far center and blocking it off with his own thoughts and then electronically shifting the mouse's neuron paths to the pleasure centers of the tiny animal's brain. All this the spaceman did effortlessly and almost instantaneously, and the mouse relaxed, made squeaks of joy, and gave up any attempt to escape. The second spaceman then broke the dirt away from the tunnel mouth, lifted the mouse with ease, holding him in his arms, and carried him back to the saucer. And the mouse lay there, relaxed and cooing with delight.

Two others, both women, were waiting in the saucer as the men came through the air lock, carrying the mouse. The women—evidently in tune with the men's thoughts—did not have to be told what had happened. They had prepared what could only be an operating table, a flat panel of bright light overhead and a board of instruments alongside. The light made a square of brilliance in the darkened interior of the spaceship.

“I am sterile,” the first woman informed the men, holding up hands encased in thin, transparent gloves, “so we can proceed immediately.”

Like the men, the women's skin was yellow, the hair rich orange. Out of the spacesuits, they would all be dressed more or less alike, barefoot and in shorts in the warm interior of the ship; nor did the women cover their well-formed breasts.

“I reached out,” the second woman told them. “They're all asleep, but their minds!”

“We know,” the men agreed.

“I rooted around—like a journey through a sewer. But I picked up a good deal. The animal is called a mouse. It is symbolically the smallest and most harmless of creatures, vegetarian, and hunted by practically everything else on this curious planet. Only its size accounts for its survival, and its only skill is in concealment.”

Meanwhile the two men had laid the mouse on the operating table, where it sprawled relaxed and squeaking contentment. While the men went to change out of their spacesuits, the second woman filled a hypodermic instrument, inserted the needle near the base of the mouse's tail, and gently forced the fluid in. The mouse relaxed and became unconscious. Then the two women changed the mouse's position, handling the—to them huge—animal with ease and dispatch, as if it had almost no weight; and actually in terms of the gravitation they were built to contend with, it had almost no weight at all.

When the two men returned, they were dressed as were the women, in shorts, and barefoot, with the same transparent gloves. The four of them then began to work together, quickly, expertly—evidently a team who had worked in this manner many times in the past. The mouse now lay upon its stomach, its feet spread. One man put a cone-shaped mask over its head and began the feeding of oxygen. The other man shaved the top of its head with an electric razor, while the two women began an operation which would remove the entire top of the mouse's skull. Working with great speed and skill, they incised the skin, and then using trephines that were armed with a sort of laser beam rather than a saw, they cut through the top of the skull, removed it, and handed it to one of the men who placed it in a pan that was filled with a glowing solution. The brain of the mouse was thus exposed.

The two women then wheeled over a machine with a turret top on a universal joint, lowered the top close to the exposed brain, and pressed a button. About a hundred tiny wires emerged from the turret top, and very fast, the women began to attach these wires to parts of the mouse's brain. The man who had been controlling the oxygen flow now brought over another machine, drew tubes out of it, and began a process of feeding fluid into the mouse's circulatory system, while the second man began to work on the skull section that was in the glowing solution.

The four of them worked steadily and apparently without fatigue. Outside, the night ended and the sun rose, and still the four space people worked on. At about noon they finished the first part of their work and stood back from the table to observe and admire what they had done. The tiny brain of the mouse had been increased fivefold in size, and in shape and folds resembled a miniature human brain. Each of the four shared a feeling of great accomplishment, and they then proceeded to complete the operation. The shape of the skull section that had been removed was now compatible with the changed brain, and when they replaced it on the mouse's head, the only noticeable difference in the creature's appearance was a strange, high lump above his eyes. They sealed the breaks and joined the flesh with some sort of plastic, removed the tubes, inserted new tubes, and changed the deep unconsciousness of the mouse to a deep sleep.

For the next five days the mouse slept—but from motionless sleep, its condition changed gradually, until on the fifth day it began to stir and move restlessly, and then on the sixth day it awakened. During these five days it was fed intravenously, massaged constantly, and probed constantly and telepathically. The four space people took turns at entering its mind and feeding it information, and neuron by neuron, section by section, they programmed its newly enlarged brain. They were very skilled at this. They gave the mouse background knowledge, understanding, language, and self-comprehension. They fed it a vast amount of information, balanced the information with a philosophical comprehension of the universe and its meaning, left it as it had been emotionally, without aggression or hostility, but also without fear. When the mouse finally awakened, it knew what it was and how it had become what it was. It still remained a mouse, but in the enchanted wonder and majesty of its mind, it was like no other mouse that had ever lived on the planet Earth.