The Train to Lo Wu (6 page)

Mr. Chen, she says. Are you still angry with me?

Not angry. Maybe sad.

I am also sad, she says. I hoped you would feel better, now that it’s over. Now that it’s out there.

Out there?

Out in the world. Your story. Now other people can read it and know about you.

At that moment he feels as if he’s standing outside on the sidewalk, and the late afternoon sun is warming his neck, his bald scalp. He lifts his hands and smiles in her direction. Not me, he says. Not about me. Only you.

No, she says. I’m only the observer. It’s not my experience.

This your problem. You only look with your eyes.

I don’t understand.

Oklahoma, he says loudly, as if it were a charm for making things disappear. Maybe you go back there. Maybe you already there, no need to go.

She is silent for so long he wonders if the charm has worked.

I meant well, she says. I came to apologize. You don’t have to be cruel.

Cruel? What means cruel? Spy on old man, make notes, is this cruel?

All right, she says. If that’s the way you want it. She turns toward the door; he feels a breath of scented air across his face. I’m leaving for Beijing in a month, she says. I didn’t want it to end this way. I wanted you to be proud.

He turns away from the sound of her voice and grips the edge of the sink. Proud of what, he wants to ask her. Of these useless bits of meat?

Is that all you have to say? she asks. Is it over?

Over? he thinks. How can it be over?

Yes, he says. It is. Yes. Now please go.

It is true spring, the last days before the air grows thick and oppressive; back in his room, he leans his face out the window and takes long breaths. Old head, you should take walks, he thinks. Like you used to. Take a taxi and go to the Services for the Blind again. He feels absurdly happy, light-headed; as if there was a towel around my mouth, he thinks, and I was breathing through it but didn’t know. And now it’s gone.

The book lies open on the bed next to him. Every once in a while he turns a page and passes his hand over a line, careful never to read two in sequence.
Typical adjustment procedure,
Taylor (1987) indicates that, Evidence of earlier trauma, Manifestedin such behaviors as.
It has been years since he has read Braille, but it comes back to him easily. Words, only words, he thinks, they come and go so swiftly. What is the use of them, after all?
Subsequent visits indicated an increased level of
. He laughs, letting his head fall back to the pillow. As if it means something, he thinks. As if I am in there somewhere, waiting to get out.

Now that she’s gone, what will you do? he wonders. Will you go on dreaming?

No. I won’t walk through that door again.

Lao Jiang’s granddaughter will talk to me, he decides. Soon she will become bored with dried salamanders. She needs some stories in her life. Like this one: how a book can become a bird. He reaches for the report, closes it, turns and flings it out the window; pages snap and flutter as it falls.
Zhu ni zhunyi gaofei,
he thinks. Take life. Now it is time to fly.

For You

January, the depths of winter: nights longer than the days.

Rising at four, the students bow to the Buddha one hundred and eight times, and sit meditation for an hour before breakfast, heads rolling into sleep and jerking awake. At the end of the working period the sun rises, a clear, distant light over Su Dok Mountain; they put aside brooms and wheelbarrows and return to the meditation hall. When it sets, at four in the afternoon, it seems only a few hours have passed. An apprentice monk climbs the drum tower and beats a steady rhythm as he falls into shadow.

Darkness. Seoul appears in the distance, a wedge of glittering lights where two ridges meet.

Sitting on the temple steps, hunched in the parka he wears over his robe, Lewis closes his eyes and repeats to himself,
my
name is Lewis Morgan. My address is 354 Chater Gardens, Central,
Hong Kong. My wife’s name is Melinda.
He tries to see her face again, the way it appears sometimes in his dreams, and usually he can’t.

On Monday evenings he accompanies Hae Wol Sunim down the mountain to the local outdoor market. While the monk buys the main provisions of the temple—barrels of kimchi, hundred-pound sacks of rice—Lewis goes to the Super Shop for the extras the international students need. Vitamin supplements. Vegetable oil. Peanut butter. Milk powder. Nescafé. When the old woman at the register sees him, bundled in his gray robe and stocking cap, she puts her hands together in
hapchang
and addresses him as
sunim,
monk, and he has to resist the urge to shake his head and try to correct her. It’s all the same to her, Hae Wol reminds him. Remember, she’s not bowing to
you.

Before Hae Wol became a monk he was Joseph Hung, an accountant at Standard Chartered Bank and the secretary of the Hong Kong Shim Gye Zen Center. Lewis met him for the first time two years ago, when a Zen master from Korea came to give a public talk at Hong Kong University; Joseph was the English translator, and afterward, Lewis walked up to him and asked,
can
you help me?
For months they met every Friday for coffee at the Fringe Club in Central, and after Joseph left for Korea they kept in touch, using the temple’s e-mail account, until he finally told Lewis,
You have to try it for yourself.
He repeated the instructions for sitting Zen, and wrote,
No more letters for six months, OK?

How are your legs? Hae Wol asks as they load shopping bags into the back of the temple van.

Do you really have to ask? Lewis says. They hurt like hell.

Hae Wol laughs hoarsely. Good answer, he says. One hundred percent. And how does your heart feel?

Worried. Still worried.

Too much thinking. What are you worried about?

I’m afraid I’ll forget why I’m here. Lewis puts his hands on his hips and bends over backward, trying to work the kinks out of his spine. But I don’t want to dwell on it, either.

So why
are
you here?

He glares at Hae Wol. The small matter of a divorce, he says. That’s all.

Wrong answer. The monk folds his arms and grins at him. You’re supposed to say,
to save all beings from suffering.

I’m supposed to lie?

You’re supposed to let it go. If you’ve already made up your mind, not even the bodhisattva of compassion herself can save you.

But I’m not supposed to want to be saved, am I?

Here, Hae Wol says. Try me. Ask me the question.

I hate these games,
Lewis thinks. All right, he says. Why are you here?

The monk puts his hands together and gives him a deep, elaborate bow. Two young girls passing by burst into loud giggles, covering their mouths.

For you, he says.

The retreat was Melinda’s idea, and that was what made him take it seriously. She’d always been suspicious of Eastern religion—her father had left her family for two years, in the late seventies, to live on a commune that practiced Transcendental Meditation—and she mocked him pitilessly when he brought home
Buddhism Without Beliefs
and
Taking the Path of Zen.
Then, during their second year in Hong Kong—when the fighting never seemed to end, only ebb and flow—she bought him a cushion and refused to talk to him in the evening until he’d sat for half an hour. This is for my own good, she told him. I don’t know what it does for you, and I don’t really care. I just need the
quiet,
understand?

He didn’t understand: that was the first and last of it. Hong Kong was supposed to be a temporary posting for her, a two-year stint at PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Asian headquarters, with option to renew, and now it seemed that every month her staff was expanded and her division given a new contract. In Boston she had been a star analyst, famous for her uncanny ability to find errors and gaps in a quarterly report; more than once she’d spotted a looming disaster months before it emerged in the market. But the word was that the American executives were afraid of her because she wasn’t enough of a
team player
. Expert exile, it was called. If she stayed in Hong Kong, and played her cards right, she finally told him, she would be a division head in five years, and then could transfer herself anywhere—back to Boston, or to New York, London, even Paris. If not, she would have a year of severance pay, and would have to start again at the bottom.

But I can’t work, Lewis said, staring into a plate of pad thai. They were sitting on plastic chairs at an outdoor Thai restaurant downstairs from her office. No one hires American photographers here. In five years my career will be over.

And if I quit now in
zero
years my career will be.

And in six months our marriage will be.

You’re being stubborn, she said. She lit a cigarette—a habit she’d picked up again in Hong Kong, after quitting six years before —and stared at him, her eyes darting from his forehead to his jaw to his sweater. How many other couples like us live here? she said. Why is it so difficult for you? What’s wrong with not working for a little while?

He sat back in his chair and looked up into the glowing haze that hung over the city, blotting out the sky. If I said that to you, he said, you’d call me a sexist bastard.

That’s not fair, she said. Being a freelancer is different. You’ll always have slow patches.

This isn’t a
slow patch,
he said, more loudly than he’d intended; an old woman with a basket of hibiscus flowers, who had been approaching their table, turned and hurried away. Haven’t you been listening? If I don’t work, not at all, what good am I to anyone? It isn’t about the money. I don’t want to wake up one of these days and realize I’ve turned into a hobbyist.

So, she said, I guess this is what they call an impasse.

Is it Hong Kong,
he wondered,
or is it what we’ve known all
along, that we’re too different, that our lives will never really match?
She had lost weight, even in the last few weeks; in the dim light he could see the faint blue paths of veins along her wrists, and the dark half-moons under her eyes that always reappeared in the evening, no matter how much concealer she used.
Things will
be all right,
he wanted to say, but he couldn’t see how they possibly would be, and there wasn’t any point in lying.

No one could say they hadn’t been warned. An office workday ran from seven until eight, and Saturdays were workdays; an
affordableapartment
meant living in a series of walk-in closets; the summers were furnacelike, the winters endlessly dreary; there was no such thing as having a social life. And listen, an Australian woman instructed them at a cocktail party, on her third glass of chardonnay, forget this
international city
claptrap. Hong Kong is one hundred and ten percent Chinese. They may be the richest Chinese in the world, but they still throw their garbage out the window and kill chickens in the bathroom. And you have to accommodate them because, after all, it’s their home, isn’t it? It belongs to them now.

We’re not like her, Melinda said to him, in the taxi, heading back to their hotel. Are we? It’s different if you come here because you
want
to. We can explore—we’ll make Chinese friends, won’t we? And you’ll study Cantonese.

Right. Of course.

And you can do amazing work. She rested her head against the window and stared up at the Bank of China passing above them, silhouetted against the night sky like the blade of a giant X-Acto knife. I mean, my god, this is the most photogenic city in the world, isn’t it?

I shot fifty rolls yesterday, he said. You should have seen it.

He had wandered the backstreets of Kowloon for hours, a side of the city he’d never imagined: streets like narrow crevasses, the signs stacked one over another overhead, blotting out the sun. Old women bent almost double with age, wearing black pajamas, their fingers dripping with gold. This was what he loved about her, he thought, her absolute certainly about these things, the way she moved instinctively, always knowing that logic would follow.

Now he thinks,
I was young. I was so, so young.

The pain is always with him: prickling in his ankles, needles in his knees, a fiery throbbing in the muscles around the groin. In every forty-minute session he waits for the moment when sweat beads on his forehead and his teeth begin to chatter, and then rises and stands behind his cushion until the clapper strikes. Walking, climbing the stairs, squatting on the Korean toilet—a dull ache in his knees registers every effort. He sleeps in its afterglow. Make friends with pain, Hae Wol advised him, then you’ll never be lonely. And he realizes now that he feels a kind of gratitude for it, late in the evening sitting, when it is the only thing that keeps him awake.

Whole days pass in reverie, in waking dreams. A camping trip when he was twelve, along the banks of the Pee Dee River in South Carolina. Clay and sand underfoot. Campfire smoke. The rancid smell of clothes soaked in river water and dried stiff in the sun. His best friend, Will Peterson, who insisted on stopping to hunt for some kind of fossil wherever the bank crumbled away. Again he feels the heat of annoyance: the sweat stinging in his eyes, the clouds of mosquitoes that surround them whenever they stop moving.
I haven’t changed at all,
he thinks,
I haven’t
grown: it’s all an illusion. Twelve or thirty, it doesn’t make any difference. So what hope is there for me now?

Filling his mug with weak barley tea, he turns to the window, and his eyes become reflecting pools; the blank, paper-white sky, the warm porcelain cradled in his hands.

Twice a week, during afternoon sitting, he descends the stairs and joins a line of students kneeling on mats outside the teacher’s room, waiting for interviews. The hallway is not heated; he draws his robe tightly about him and tries to focus on his breathing, ignoring the murmur of voices through the wall, the slap of an open palm against the floor.

When the bell rings Lewis opens the door, bows three times, and arranges himself on a cushion in front of the teacher, trying not to wince as he twists his knees into the proper position. The teacher watches him silently, sipping from a cup of tea. He is an American monk, a New Yorker, dark-skinned, with watery green eyes and a boxer’s nose, twisted slightly to one side. According to Hae Wol he’s lived in Korea for twenty years, longer than any other foreigner in the monastery, but he still speaks with traces of a Bronx accent.

Do you have any questions? he asks.

Not exactly.

But there’s something you want to say.

I think I may need to leave, Lewis says. I don’t think any of this is helping me.

The teacher stares straight into his eyes for so long he stiffens his head to keep from looking away.

Your karma’s got a tight hold on you, the teacher says. Like this. He makes a fist and holds it up to the light from the window. Each finger is your situation. Your parents. Your wife. Your job. Your friends. Things that happened to you, things you’ve done. This is how we travel through life, all of us. He punches the air. Karma is your shell.