Motherless Brooklyn

Irving. When are you coming home, Irving? Your family misses you.

The joke nagged at me, but I couldn’t put it to work. Was that Roshi’s original name, his American name: Irving? Was Roshi-Irving the voice on the wire?

If so, why? What linked Minna to this place?

They settled into quietude up front. I stared at the row of bald heads, the six monks and Roshi, but discerned nothing. Even Pinched and Indistinct were meditating serenely. Minutes crept past and I was the only set of open eyes. Someone coughed and I faked a cough in imitation. If I kept one eye on Kimmery I was mostly calm, though. It was like having a bag of White Castles beside me on the car seat. I wondered how deep her influence over my syndrome could run if given the chance, how much of that influence I could hope to import. How close I could get. I shut my eyes, trusting Pinched and Indistinct to stay planted obliviously on their cushions, and drifted into some pleasant thoughts about bodies, about Kimmery’s body, her nervous elegant limbs. Perhaps this was the key to Zen, then. We don’t exactly have God, she’d said. We just sit and try to stay awake. Well, I wasn’t having any trouble staying awake. And as my penis stiffened it occurred to me I’d found my One Mind.

I was jostled from my reverie by a sound at the door. I opened my eyes and turned to see the Polish giant standing in the entrance to the sitting room, filling the doorway with his square shoulders, holding in his fist a plastic produce bag full of kumquats and gazing at the roomful of Zen practitioners with an expression of absolute and utter serenity. He wasn’t in a robe, but he might have been Buddha himself for the benignity of his gaze.

Before I could figure a plan or response there came a commotion at the front of the room. A commotion by the local standards anyway: One of the Japanese monks stood and bowed to Roshi, then to the other monks in his party, then to the room at large. You still would have heard a pin drop, but the rustling of his robe was signal enough, and eyes opened everywhere. The giant stepped into the room, still clutching his kumquats like a bag of live goldfish, and took a mat-a couple actually-on the other side of Kimmery, between us and the door. I reminded myself that the giant hadn’t seen me, at least not yesterday. He certainly wasn’t giving me any special notice-or anyonese for that matter. Instead he settled into his spot, looking ready for the monk’s lecture. Quite a gathering we made now, the various mugs and lugs attending to the wise little men from the East. Pinched and Indistinct might be real Zen students playing at thuggishness, but Pierogi Monster was undoubtedly the opposite. The kumquats, I was pretty sure, were a giveaway-weren’t they a Chinese fruit, not Japanese at all? I wanted to hug Kimmery toward me, away from the killer’s reach, but then I wanted to do a lot of things-I always do.

The monk bowed to us again, searched our faces briefly, then began speaking, so abruptly and casually it was as if he were resuming a talk he’d been having with himself.

“Daily life, I fly on an airplane, I take a taxicab to visit Yorkville Zendo”-this came out Yolkville-ah-“I feel excitement, thoughts, anticipations, what will my friend Jerry-Roshi show me? Will I go to a very good Manhattan restaurant, sleep on a very good bed in New York City hotel?” He stomped his sandaled foot as though testing out a mattress.

I vant to go to Tibet! The joke insisted itself upon me again. My calm was under pressure from all sides, the goons everywhere, my echolalia provoked by the monk’s speech. But I couldn’t turn and gaze and refresh my dose of Kimmery without also taking in Minna’s titanic killer-he was so big that his outline framed her on all sides despite his being farther away, an optical trick I couldn’t afford to find fascinating.

“All these moods, impulses, this daily life, nothing wrong with them. But daily life, island, dinner, airplane, cocktail, daily life is not Zen. In zazen practice all that matters is the sitting, the practice. American, Japan, doesn’t matter. Only sitting.”

I vant to speak to the Lama! The American monk, Roshi, had half turned in his spot to better contemplate the master from across the ocean. The profile below Roshi’s gleaming dome stirred me unexpectedly. I recognized some terrible force of authority and charisma in his features.

Jerry-Roshi?

Meanwhile the giant sat disrespectfully pinching the skin of a kumquat, pressing it to his monstrous lips, sucking its juice.

“It is easy practice zazen in its external form, sit on the cushion and waste time on the cushion. So many forms of nothing-Zen, meaningless Zen, only one form of true Zen: actual making contact with own Buddha-self.”

The High Lama will grant you an audience.