A Single Eye (11 page)

A shiver shot through me. I had to control the urge to reach out to him.

“So I stayed and led sesshins like this and cleared the land and built the cabins you sleep in and this zendo you're sitting in and the kitchens and the bathhouse and tried not to scratch and did scratch, and tried to sit here on the cushion and see my thoughts and just let them go and sit without thought and I didn't succeed with that. And it all went on for years. When I had a bottle of scotch or sake I'd escape into it. If there'd been a steady supply I'd have escaped constantly. But there was never enough of anything here, even escape. Right?”

He glanced in the direction of the senior students, but none of them managed a full nod in return.

“People came to study. I never asked anyone why. No one's reasons could be less lofty than my own. Or more desperate. Anyone who chooses this demanding practice has his reasons. So we cleared and built and sat. Last year it rained every day all winter long. The road flooded out in October and stayed flooded and by February we were boiling ferns and rationing oatmeal. Then, finally, the sun came out and everything burst into bloom. Everything, including the poison oak, and, alas, me.” He actually winked at Rob and now Rob did manage a watery smile that seemed unsuited to his regal face.

“Now I itched so much that I knew if I scratched I wouldn't have any skin left. The road was still out. So there was nothing to do but sit and think about scratching. I kept wishing to be that statue of Shiva with the hundred hands, you know?”

He flung his hands so fast in so many directions he did look Shiva-like.

“And I knew all about poison oak. Each time I got it I grasped at a new hope—that this time it would be different, a milder case, that I'd developed an immunity, a tolerance, a thick skin, that my practice would give me a serenity enhanced by B vitamins and I wouldn't itch so much. But I knew the truth: poison oak doesn't let up for weeks. I had no reason to hope for anything better. And suddenly at this worst of all moments, with every inch of my skin itching, my mind went blank. No thoughts. For the first time in all the years I'd sat. No thoughts. Just itch. But not even itch, just sensation. Itch and not-itch. Just this moment, not the beginning of three miserable weeks. You get what I mean here?” The candle shimmied and tossed out a shadow that landed momentarily on his brow. “I wanted to let go but I couldn't. Not till the gift of the poison oak. The great gift.”

He looked around the room, but no one returned his gaze. It was too expensive a gift.

“Facing change in your skin is easy. Even in your body, hard as that would seem if you lost a leg, still that's easy. Easy compared to the notion of finding your mind different, your ideas new, and the very way you think altered—of ‘you' changing. We devote our lives to protecting ourselves from change. But one way we change is by facing facts. Being honest with people and with ourselves.” Pointedly, he looked at me, as if to say,
You wanted it. Here it is
. “I'm about to be honest.”

My breath caught. Beside me Amber stirred. I had the sense she had been on the verge of dozing, but she was wide awake now.

Leo said, “This sesshin is in remembrance of a student, Aeneas, who disappeared. For years I wanted to believe that nothing was any different than before. But the truth is: that incident changed everything. One of the changes was that I chose to believe nothing changed, because I was so intent on protecting this place and protecting myself.”

He leaned forward almost intimately.

“Now I'm going to tell you what happened. There were eight of us here then: Rob, Maureen, and Barry,”—he nodded toward them. They returned his nod, but stiffly. “There was a woman; Anna, I think her name was. And three men: Dusty, Max, and Aeneas. It's Aeneas I have to talk about. He was twenty-four then, a sweet man who could sit every period in an entire sesshin and never move, who would do any job and never complain. It was a rough winter, and people got on each other's nerves, but Aeneas never argued with anyone. It poured for weeks, people got fed up and went home, but Aeneas stayed and worked on whatever there was to do. If there wasn't work, he listened to the tapes of the Japanese chants. By spring he was pitch-perfect in every one. He was the Zen poster boy.”

Leo closed his eyes and sat silent. But there was an uneasy unstillness about him that seemed to vibrate through the room. Rob and Maureen were no longer merely listening but staring at him, as were the people down the row from them. And Amber, next to me, had stopped squirming and was dead still.

“If Aeneas had an impairment in his ability to judge, well, it wasn't a problem—that's what I thought then. It's what I wanted to think.”

Leo let his gaze lower. The zendo was electric with tension. Leo inhaled slowly, and when he spoke it was to the middle of the room where no one was sitting.

“Then Aeneas up and left. I heard he had gone to Japan to study with Ogata-roshi or Fujimoto-roshi, the Japanese teachers who came to the official opening here. I was hurt he hadn't told me, but I didn't want to think about that. I wanted to sit zazen.

“Aeneas never wrote me to explain, nor did the roshis in Japan. I assumed that showed what disgrace I had brought to Zen in America and, reflectively, in Japan. For years I thought Aeneas and Ogata-roshi and Fujimoto-roshi were ignoring me, but I couldn't write to them because I couldn't bear to have them snub me—because, you see, that would have forced me to have to change. I didn't want to change; I wanted to sulk—in a dignified manner, of course. I wanted to sit zazen, not to become aware but to escape. Understand? Pretend-zazen.”

A gust of wind flickered the oil-lamp light and I couldn't tell whether the hollow look on Leo's face was a reflection of the six years of hurt or just the play of shadows. He looked around the room and I should have followed his gaze, but I couldn't bear to come upon a damning face. Leo took a deep breath and exhaled open-mouthed.

“I know, you expect better of a teacher. I can't offer you better; I can only tell you what is. A month ago, after my last bout of poison oak taught me about change, I screwed up my courage and wrote to the Ogata-roshi in Japan. Here's what I found out: Every one of the ideas I had held as truth for the last six years was fantasy. Every single one. Got that? No truth. Aeneas had never been in Japan at all. All I know is that Aeneas vanished when the visitors left.” He put up a hand as if to stop questions. “All else is speculation. Fantasy, theorizing. But don't worry or make up your own fantasies. There's nothing to suggest either that Aeneas left or that he did not leave. All we know is that we don't know. That is reality.”

The air crackled with the tension. The senior students couldn't hide their shock. Rob sat, hands in mudra, eyes lowered, but his shoulders were hunched halfway to his ears. Barry, the bald chocolate cook, was staring at Leo with the intensity that I was staring at him. And Maureen looked like she was about to be sick. Even Amber was learning forward, as if this place had suddenly gotten way more interesting than she could have hoped. Justin, Amber's boyfriend, was staring intently at Leo. I couldn't assess that reaction, though; he'd been staring as intently at the vegetables in the kitchen an hour ago.

But the tension stopped there. On the far side of the room, the three women in shawls were nodding, and the man in his seventies showed no reaction at all, as if the disappearance of some guy a half dozen years ago was ancient history. I glanced around quickly. None of the people I had seen hoisting suitcases off the van looked stunned or panicked. One man was visually examining his skin, his attention still caught in the danger of poison oak. It was like parallel universes here, one unmoved, one of which had had the mats pulled out from under it.

Was this what Yamana-roshi had warned Leo not to do?
Tell him I know what he is planning and he must not do that
. I stared at Leo, willing him to return my gaze.

When he looked up, it was to acknowledge each student, as his gaze moved slowly around the circle. I waited for my turn, but his contact was closer to a pat on the head than a meeting of the minds.

He took a breath and said to the group, “You had a right to know. And you have a right to leave if that's your decision. The van that brought you is still here and the driver will take you back to town right now if you choose. Do what is right for yourself. Make your decision now. Once the van leaves it won't be back for two weeks.

“But if you stay here don't waste your time entertaining yourself with fantasies about Aeneas. We've got two weeks of intensive sitting to do. We each have our own demons in our past. Don't search for them.” Now he did glance over at me. “The issue isn't in the woods; it's within ourselves. Just sit zazen. Things change every moment; be aware. Whatever is important will come up. Don't turn away. Do not let yourself escape.”

A bolt shot through me: anger, hope, fear, trust, outrage? I couldn't name it, couldn't even ballpark it. The only thing that was clear was that Yamana or not, Garson-roshi had a plan and he was dead set on seeing it through to the end.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

I
t's amazing how quickly a zendo empties out after the last bell, as people's attention shifts from noticing their breaths to wanting to get into the bathhouse before there's a line, into bed before someone blows out the oil lamp. Small comforts swell into great needs. No one had accepted Leo's offer of leaving sesshin.

Traditionally, in Japan, the monks sleep on the zabutons they sit on during the day. But Americans are too big to curl up on their mats. So only some students sleep in the zendo, and those sprawl over three mats. But whoever was assigned to sleep in here tonight wouldn't be spreading out his sleeping bag for a few more minutes.

The altar candle had been extinguished, but the sweet smell of incense endured. I felt almost weighted to the floor. There is something wonderful about being in the zendo alone, like standing at the nave of Chartres watching the sunlight pour down through the great rose window. Well, on a smaller scale. But the oil lamps still shone their own subdued suns on the Buddha. I paused in front of the altar where the roshi had bowed. I bowed to the Buddha—life as it is in this moment—and felt the silence of the room, the air brushing my face and hands, the connection between the Buddha, the bow, and me. And I felt just the tiniest bit a fraud. Skepticism was what had lured me to Zen to begin with. I couldn't imagine ever being without it. I bowed again, but now the movement seemed entirely fake, and I headed silently to the door.

My hand was on the latch before I noticed the voices outside, whispering. Leo had postponed the normal rule of silence; they didn't have to whisper. I hesitated. One voice was a man's but I couldn't guess whose, the other a woman's.

“Aeneas!” she said. “Why couldn't Roshi just let him go?” Her voice was fuzzy, but panic sharpened her last words.

“Aeneas!” Disgust flooded the man's muted voice. “Leo has no idea what he's opening up. He could destroy this place.”

“He could
be
destroyed.”

I stood frozen, hand still on the latch. The woman was Maureen. I recognized the timbre she'd had when she asked me if I was okay this afternoon, only now it was much lower, flowing up from the depths of dread. I leaned toward the edge of the door, desperate to hear the man contradict her. The floor creaked. I jolted back. But it was too late. Shoes slapped fast down the porch steps.

I yanked open the door, jammed my feet into my running shoes, and nearly skied down the steps. I did slide halfway across the mud-slicked path. But Maureen and the man were gone. The rain was coming thicker, turning people into dark blobs, drumming on my jacket, covering all other noise. I felt like I'd gotten up in the middle of the night in a strange room where I couldn't find the light and my ears were plugged up. People passed by me like ghosts wafting toward the bathhouse, drawn by the pale yellow light. It was only by dint of flailing arms that I kept myself right end up long enough to make the turn outside the bathhouse toward Garson-roshi's cabin. Was he thumbing his nose at the danger, or did he not even know?

I skidded past two tall men waiting under the overhang for the toothbrush and toilet crowd to thin. My foot caught on something, anchoring me.

“. . . snore,” one of them was saying.

“Yeah, and you're not the only one. You can count on that,” the other guy whispered, with volume enhanced by irritation. “I went to a sesshin in San Diego. There they've got a snore room.”