TWO

Beyond the World

[1994 – 2004]

I’d found my place in the Abbey, where I could exist as a monastic, most importantly where I could face my own mind. I was almost even happy, if the word applies. My first years were the hardest. As a postulant, as anywhere, I suppose, much of the work was to try and fit in, to fit myself to this new way of life: to follow the schedule – the days, all so thoroughly structured, from eyes-open before dawn to eyes-shut in the evening – and we were to learn the doctrines, to memorize the liturgies and ceremonies, to sleep on a mat on the floor, with a drawer and a bowl and a robe, nothing else. Unlike how it had been for our monastery’s founder, back in the day, who’d studied in Japan, there was no one here who made it hard for me. No one felt the need to. They knew the worst of it came from myself; that I was, as I always had been, the greatest source of my greatest difficulty; that my desires and attachments were the basis of my sufferings, and these were what had driven me to seek refuge in the first place. As a young man entering into this life – one better suited perhaps to those older than myself – I was terrifically restless, and I burned inside with anger and bitter disappointment. But at the same time I’d tasted enough of life in the world to understand how the world and I were basically incompatible, and I felt, in time, almost no regret for having left it behind.

In February, soft snow covers the Abbey grounds, and in the morning darkness it is so quiet that I could hear each flake ping the trees and touch the ground. I would, on a morning like this, shuffle outside into the cold, find my shoes on the rack near the door, and slip them on with difficulty, as they were cold and frozen. The corrugated metal roof that covered the pathways of the cloister kept the falling snow off the walk, and my sneakers treaded softly over the cold cement. If I met another member of the sangha on my way to the kitchen, we would bow to one another quickly and in silence (and so often a robed figure, in darkness and in shadow, would look much the same as any other, and I could not tell who it was) and then each carry on our separate ways. Since I was the one who assisted the head cook with the baking, it was my job to pull the dough for the breakfast rolls, mixed the day before, from the walk-in refrigerator, and quickly divide and shape them into fist-sized balls, then cover these and leave them to proof before scuttling across to the Buddha Hall for morning meditation. Every morning began this same way, but in wintertime I would also need to kindle the fire of the kitchen heater and make sure it was burning before I left, setting the sheet-trays of dough near enough to benefit from its heat. Otherwise the rolls would never warm and proof up properly before baking.

Outside the Buddha Hall, I again removed my shoes and set them into a box near the door. Inside, it was dark and silent, but with my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could see the shapes of the others now gathering – monks, as well as some laity who were staying as guests, or had come to share in meditation. They settled themselves down to their small benches or pillows or, for the older ones, proper chairs, facing toward the walls. If crowded, square screens in standing frames were arranged over the center of the large room, and people could sit facing those. I usually found my own place near a wall, arranged myself onto a small bench, and sat.

It was on such a morning, following upon early meditation and breakfast – and when talking was again allowed – that I finally thought to ask, in my third February spent this way, the Reverend Master Eno, whom I ran across along the path back to the guesthouse, why he had never given me a koan to worry over, one of those unsolvable and logic-defeating puzzles of mental jiujitsu meant to break my small mind wide open. I’d expected that should be, well, what one did.

He smiled gently, a frequent response to such questions. Everything about him was gentle. Everything utterly unthreatening. I was quietly terrified of him. After a moment with his head downturned, while he searched inside himself, he looked up again at me and finally said, “Why would I do that? There’s no need. The koan arises from your daily life. It comes from inside, do you see?” He then added, by way of an afterthought, “…And from outside.”

Sensing that he had answered my question as much as he was ever going to, I put my hands together over my heart and bowed respectfully in gassho, as he did also to me, and then I scurried on to my next work assignment, ghost-pale, shivering inside.

•

Mosquito, as I’ve said, is a thing that requires explaining. Mosquito, whom I’d come to think of as a friend, was the thing that sent me packing, that drove me from the cloister and put me out on the streets, like the Reagan administration did for my fellow sea-creatures. It is not a person, not quite. It is not really a mosquito either. Rather, it is these things, but so much more – it might in fact be everything, or at least look a good deal like it, if it wants – but it is also all the while only itself, singular, absolute, so absolutely distant, and silent as only it can be silent. At the same time, it is no more distant nor silent than the sky, and no more so than my own mind, where I found it, although these things – which may also be the same things, and which also may be the same as Mosquito – are as silent and as distant as anything, and just as immediate, and as intimate too. But they are as loud and alien and as impossible as people are to one another, and as they are, most directly, to themselves.

I speak from experience. Listen:

I found Mosquito inside my mind.

This is what happens when you spend ten years facing a wall, for hours each day, just sitting. Or wait, no, I can’t say that. It is the sort of thing, exactly the sort of thing, that happens to me, that I find. I don’t know what anybody else may get as a result. They might get presents. They might get candy. I don’t know. Mosquito is what I got.

It takes a while to become properly acquainted with your own mind. It has for me, and I can’t say that I’ve really done so yet. I feel as if I’ve only gotten started. But with practice there comes a certain familiarity with the terrain and with the objects that dot its horizon. Its features become familiar, as does the atmosphere, and there is, after a time, a certain time when one says to oneself, “This is my mind and I know it.” There is a flavor and a color of the self, and the dots and features and winds and troubles that blow through are all things that one recognizes. And though I am only a beginner at this, facing the soft substance of my mind, when something enters that is not my mind, I know it. I can be pretty certain. I know that there is something distinctly different about this other thing – in character or in contour, and that its voice, if it has one, is not one of my own, and when it speaks, if it speaks, it is not in my words.

Mosquito was like that: a thing, there, that was not-me.

I’m not sure exactly when I first became aware of it. This didn’t happen all at once. It was a gradual process. But when I did see the thing clearly and for what it was, there seemed little mistaking it for anything else, and I felt quite sure that it wasn’t a part of me.

Now the self, as I’ve come to know it, is hardly any one thing, so to say too much about what it definitely is and isn’t seems a little presumptuous, I know. It is a conundrum. But as one recognizes the face of a friend, and as one knows one’s own face in the mirror, and sees the two as different, yet both familiar, one can say much the same about the mind, and what belongs to the self and what doesn’t. Mosquito didn’t – not to me – yet it was there in my mind, all the same, and it seemed that it always had been. It was as familiar as the inside of my eyelids. Which introduces a whole other level of paradox concerning who or what belongs to which, and what doesn’t, but there is one thing I can say with unequivocal certainty:

Mosquito was old. Very old. Mosquito was a very, very old thing. This was something that I knew.

Mosquito had been in my mind, I think, for longer than my mind had been there, for longer than this thing I called “I” had even existed. It doesn’t seem as if that should be possible, but it is, because the mind is a place of paradox if nothing else. That made me the alien in this subtle terrain.

How did I know all this? It was necessary to look at the thing itself. I had to study it, to see its form, to get to really know what I could about it. Such scrutiny is not properly what meditation is for, not in Soto Zen practice, but when a thing presents itself, as Mosquito did, and it doesn’t go away – not yet, not yet – but simply sits there front and center, then to sit with it is the proper practice, and so I lingered. I was there; it was there. We abided in mutual being. Really, it couldn’t be avoided. It rested in a self-stamped indent in the soft ground of my mind and occupied space. Round, solid – it looked to be made of metal, rough and gray – it was a perfect, dull, metallic sphere. I couldn’t tell its size because size, in a place like that, is awfully difficult to judge. It may have been large or it may have been wee-teeny-tiny; both could appear much the same because the mind plays tricks. Its matte surface, though not so shiny, still reflected much of the light that, as such, was cast upon it, and though it didn’t move, not at all in fact, it did – how can I put this? – it did seem to vibrate really fast. It had a quality of oscillation, yet so fast and so slight that it couldn’t be seen doing this. Yet I knew all the same that it was. I could feel it, and that was one thing about it.

I realize that in presenting these various and illogical and contradictory qualities, it may seem as if I’m only presenting fantasies and imaginings of the mind. This is so. It is true. But the things of the mind are also things, insofar as the mind is a thing, and the mind, ultimately, may be the only thing that I or anyone has. But Mosquito was – and this I’m well certain of – not native to my mind, though it was there and had been for a very long time. So that was one other thing about it.

But the most troubling thing about Mosquito, though it was in my mind, while not strictly of it – much as I had once dwelt (and would dwell again) in this wide-open world of events, things and people, though no more a part of that – was that it was there, while different from it, being itself not my mind, but then, later, and far worse, it was not there anymore, and then there was thereafter only my mind, and nothing else, and that was what destroyed me.

•

In near-dark I found the orb. It took only a few minutes to reach it, or until it had reached me, vividly present, sharp in its outline, spherical and massive while at the same time content to rest lightly at one side, as if sitting next to me along the perimeter. I wanted to laugh, but settled instead for shifting just a little on my small bench, rustling my body to try to work the agitation out. It often did that, often struck me as funny, though to be honest, its jokes were always so entirely over my head, and the closer that I got to it, the closer that I looked at it, the more warped and disturbed and unreal I felt, as if I were suddenly at the bottom of a bucket, looking up at everything through a fisheye lens.

The others around me, likewise in silence, worked at their minds as they faced sections of wall in the still-cold Buddha Hall; shapes at the peripheries, insofar as I saw them through the corners of my eyes, if at all, approximating stillness in varied degrees. Oftentimes I might feel them too, their similar presence, a slight tickling, though I perhaps only imagined it. But today I felt I was alone; among the others, sure, but to myself and enclosed, if edgeless. This was neither better nor worse, in itself, just a condition. There were always… conditions. I found, as usual, that the vibrant morning dark of the hall was entirely unlike the cold inward light that reflected off Mosquito’s surface – imaginary, yes, but still… – curving over from a single specular highlight out of one focused point near the top, then grading back over gently, over its brushed metal, roundly expanding, silver to dim to near-black, and then to black underneath. It rested in black, though I’d long ago come to recognize the color of my own mind as a deep, rich brown, as warm as this shade was cold and arid.

And will you touch it? Yes then, I will try. I would first put out my hand. But the approach is not so simple. There are distortions. My head feels as though inflated if I grow close, and the closer I get, the more inflated, and the more bent everything becomes from the pressure inside, and I feel the burning. Yes, the burning. I might be weightless, but I am at least on fire. There are, from what I understand, these tiny pinpoints of light? Some are swirling. That’s from… because it’s… getting closer. It knows my mind quite well, but I can’t seem to… it’s… Touching us. That’s right. From the inside. Heaven is on the inside, right? Touching us from the inside. The inside bodies, the golden bodies, the tear or crack, and look, it’s full of numbers, it’s full of words and numbers, the – cracking open, bone or skin, the burn of skin or hair, the smell of burning hair, the meat-smell of singeing mindstuff look you are open mindstuff look look – inside or in front of – heaven is what burns the inward golden body look I know I can’t contain this look look, eyes pop open, mouth pops open, there is nothing left inside us so there is nothing left to burn, look look… Bring me this one. Which one? This one. He seems struck dumb. Yes then that’s the one I want. But isn’t this one…? Yes, the Golden Body. You won’t look twice at that, because he is invisible. The mouth and eyes burst open when the head oh if only the violence to the head would be one day soon ceasing because the mind yes inside yes was singed. Why does he look at us like that? Eyes popped open, mouth drooped open, the face loose, the skin lined, cheeks turned to jowls. See, he’s old now, very very old now. He knows no better. He knows nothing in fact. There is violence and freedom in fact in nothing. Good persons are these, all at once, all us, all inside the Golden Body as one.

•

My name is not Proteus, but that is what I call myself. I am a sea creature. I am adept at assigning names.

I gave Mosquito its name by a means not dissimilar, though also not the same, as how I received my own. I saw the thing for what it was. And though Mosquito is just as surely not its real name any more than Proteus is my own, the name fits. It is the right name. It describes something essential.

As gradual as my discovery of Mosquito had been – like a steel submarine rising imperceptibly from the deep; you can only just see it, there, vague and uncertain, a shape through the waves from the dark, and by degrees it gains in definition, it pulls itself together, a surprising clarity of shape, edge, and angle, until it cracks at last through the surface with undeniable violence – its disappearance was just as sudden, certain, and cruel.

In late October, rains, chill, and dark skies mark the change in the air, the gradual slide towards winter. The ground is wet but not frozen. Wind rattles loose the remaining leaves from skeletal trees in rust-colored swirls, while tall pines spike toward the mottling cloud cover above, their tapered peaks hidden within their own numbers. From the window of the dining room, the mountain beyond the nearby freeway slopes gently forward to a snow-softened cap and, though distant, its edges are clear and sharp, a knife-cut through the clear air, and it seems somehow more present to the room and firmly dominant in it than the U-shaped arrangement of tables and chairs that it contains or the black iron heat-stove by the door. The feast to be set for the Feeding of the Hungry Ghosts was yet in preparation in the kitchen – bread rolls and small cakes and cream puffs, these we made ourselves, I and the head cook, the Reverend Destabile, also gifts from the community, no meat, nothing with garlic – all to be set in a great pile in the temple. We the living would eat regular meals until after the ceremony, once the ghosts had done with their share with these, their gifts. The dead typically didn’t take much, however, and we could expect a good dessert, or at least afternoon tea.

Visitors from the lay community outside came and filled the guesthouse, in the case of this month’s retreat nearly to capacity, which amounted to a dozen bodies, two to a room. It was by now my ninth year at the Abbey, and in my current role as guestmaster (only for certain occasions filling in with the baking any longer, having become the de facto pastry specialist) I’d reviewed each visitor’s application and knew for instance that Vivianne, a slender and dark-haired woman near to my own age, had come, with her battered suitcase, large fabric purse (if something so patchwork and shapeless could be called a purse) and her guitar case, which presumably also contained a guitar, from Seattle, my own home city. I knew that she did not consider herself a Buddhist, Soto Zen or any other sort, though she’d practiced meditation, off and on, for years. I knew that she had some history, perhaps even professionally, with the Tarot. I couldn’t hold that against her, though it was the sort of thing that might raise red flags in the application process. I knew – at least, she had claimed – that she was not currently taking any medications or illegal drugs.

I picked her and two others up from the nearby town where the train stopped, where I found them each standing, separate and expectant and individual islands of anxious uncertainty, unaware yet of their allegiances to one another or that they all waited for the same thing, near to the wooden shack beside the rails, which was the extent of the Dunsmuir station. Helping Vivianne and the others – as there was also a small and spritely man with a well-trimmed beard and pastel-colored cotton pants, and another woman, older, whose sandy hair and face at first I couldn’t get a fix on, but which I came to think of later as kind – to get their luggage into the hatchback of the ancient Subaru, I decided to not say anything yet about the guitar, not in front of these other two, but to take it up with her later at the house when I could get her alone.

We drove the seven miles of back road to the Abbey, Vivianne in the front seat beside me. The other two, quite naturally it seemed, had gravitated into the back. When I asked her, making awkward small conversation, what she did, she smiled winningly, apparently amused. Row after row of sodden brown pine trunks zipped past beyond her, framed within the oblong of the passenger window. “What do I do?” she said, laughing, “Ah, yes, that…” and it was from her that I first learned about the privatized mental-health housing system and Republic Mental Health Residential Agency of Seattle, where she worked. I asked similar questions of my passengers in back, though to be honest, I can’t remember what either of them had to say, though I found myself quickly and inexplicably annoyed by the man in the pastel colors, and tried not to show it.

Back at the guesthouse, there was a brief check-in procedure for each guest that I conducted from my office, and this was when I brought up the issue of the guitar. “I’m sorry if it wasn’t clear in the application, but you won’t be able to play that here.” I pointed toward the case beside her. “I can keep it for you in the office, if you’d like.”

“Why not?” She shifted crossly in her chair.

I slipped into officialdom, as was necessary oftentimes. “The monastery is a place for quiet retreat and reflection. Any evenings and times not scheduled for specific activity are quiet periods, and that means silence. No music, no conversations or other distractions. We ask that our guests not have any radios, personal stereos, no phones, computers, games, or – sorry – guitars or other musical instruments. It’s not that we don’t like your playing –”

“You haven’t heard my playing.”

“– but this isn’t the time or the place for it. It’s not personal at all, but this is our policy, and we insist on it.”

I’d seen any number of responses to this or similar dilemmas before. It was amazing what people came to a monastery expecting – to find, to do, to get away with. But Vivianne’s reaction surprised me.

“Alright then.” And whatever attitude I’d seen begin to develop over her face was immediately replaced by a look of innocent wonder. She seemed not a woman in her early thirties any longer, but a girl of five, who’d come to the beach and just now seen the ocean for the first time. She stood and leaned across the edge of the desk, beside where I sat, handing the guitar case over to me with complete trust. As she did, her shirt, buttoned only halfway up, fell open just enough to reveal the slope of one small breast, held in its pale blue brassiere, its extrusion of firm nipple in the fabric, through the open V of her neckline. My breath caught in my chest. I could feel the heat from her body against my face, so close. And though I looked directly into her eyes, both wide and dark – green, I noticed, a shade darker than my own – both she and I knew where my attention had fixed. “You keep it, then,” she said, “but I want for you to hear me play sometime, so you’ll know what you’re missing.”

•

The time I’d spent with Mosquito – consciously, that is, in meditation with this inner presence, which spoke more vividly and more forcefully than any regular person I’d ever known – could be counted in years; though their numbers with the fingers of a single hand, sure, still, it had by then, by the ceremony of the Feeding of the Hungry Ghosts in late October of 2003, been years.

I could not look directly at him. Or it. Or them, whatever. I couldn’t look at Mosquito at all, strictly speaking. But if I tried to approach its spherical idea by too direct an avenue, it burned out my mental eye; it was too much. I had to keep myself a little to the side of it, to not pay too close attention, and simply know and feel and understand that it was there. Mosquito, for all of its apparent banality, being essentially a hyper-aware and super-intelligent ball bearing, was also a sentient being, not only developed well beyond myself, but so far beyond what I could psychically endure that trying to approach it too closely threatened to tear me to pieces. It was cold, and impossible, and unutterably dense, and as far as I could tell cared nothing for my safety. Yet the risk seemed worthwhile (unavoidable in fact) as meditating with it promised a form of training I could scarcely imagine, and I found that if I approached it cautiously and came as close as I could, and set myself respectfully beside it, so to speak, Mosquito could share with me a perspective as vast and unimaginable as an exploding star. If I’d come into this sequestered life of the monastery to find anything – anything, that is, beyond refuge from the ill-fit and failed life I’d known previous – it was this. Though I don’t think this relationship could be mistaken for “enlightenment.”

But it was something.

I’d kept my mouth shut regarding Mosquito, though I couldn’t say exactly why. No doubt the right, or at least the expected, thing would’ve been to take it up with the Reverend Master in one of my sessions with him. No one in the monastery had ever approached to tell me what exactly I could expect from this prolonged and exhaustive practice of meditation, this life of training away from the daily concerns of the world. For that matter, I hadn’t asked. Of course the popular notion of what we’re here for is Enlightenment, we were looking for Enlightenment, but we didn’t talk about that here. We talked about practice and training, about being awake and mindful and fully present, right exactly there, in the place where we were. The literature was full enough of allusions to attainment, the sorts of things that are clear only after you’ve crossed whatever line there is to look back on them: the Master, the Mountain, the Sea. But not this. This? It was instinct for self-protection above all, I suppose, that kept me quiet on the matter. Because maybe if I talked about it, the matter would be explained away. Mosquito would turn to dust in my mind, assuming it was a product of my mind. And if it didn’t, maybe I would be shipped to the nearest state hospital for evaluation. Besides, nobody else spoke of anything like this. This was mine. Mosquito was my special friend, deep inside, and no one else needed to know about it.

Of course, having a secret like this did something to me. It set me subtly apart from my fellows of the sangha. It made me aware, the way that something or another always had, that I was not like everyone else. This wasn’t good, and I knew it, but I knew at the same time that I needed to keep my silence, that this was too important.

On the night of the ceremony itself, a Sunday night, the last of the retreat, I again found Vivianne. She stood among the others, beside the man she’d arrived with on the same train, who by now I was thoroughly annoyed with. He wore his spirituality like a pimp’s fur-lined jacket, dripping with ego. He was a show-off, and this whole get-up of his was an act to get laid, but the worst of it was he had Vivianne’s attention. Of course, I wasn’t blind to what was happening in myself. I was screaming with jealousy. I wanted her. As a monk, I’d taken my vow of celibacy – as aware as I could be at the time of exactly what I was giving up – but I was still human, an animal, unavoidably, and I wanted her. Even if I knew that I couldn’t have her, still, I didn’t want this creep to get with Vivianne instead.

The presentation of pastries that we’d made and other delectables were piled high at the altar. It made a good display. The ghosts were formally invited to come and have their fill. The terrible irony is that hungry ghosts can’t eat, but then that’s what the ceremony is for, to get some food into their growling bellies despite this desperate and impossible condition. Zen people love nothing if not paradox, and the Feeding of the Hungry Ghosts had always been my favorite of our celebrations. I had appetites of my own that I struggled with – Vivianne was hardly the first to walk through the gate and awaken my desires, but it troubled me that I’d not stopped thinking of her once since her arrival four days earlier. It wasn’t just that she’d aroused me, but that she’d known just how to do it, how to get around all my defenses, and so apparently without guile. It was that little-girl smile of such complete wonder. Not that I was anything so impressive to evoke this, but maybe she saw something about me – I don’t know, maybe something standing behind me – that woke that innocence in her. That had completely disarmed me, and she’d moved in, and now I was crazy with it.

The girl was trouble.

But it wasn’t really Vivianne. I knew that, or I knew that it wasn’t just Vivianne, because the trouble was in me to begin with, and nobody felt this ruinous hunger now but myself. And the ghosts. I could just about see them swarming the Buddha Hall, encircling the statue like a flock of maddened swallows, screaming and seething and burning, tearing at themselves and each other. I knew that a pile of eclairs, however proud I was of them, wasn’t going to fix this.

When for the conclusion of the ceremony the whole procession of us moved outside to the rectangular fire pit and the square that encompassed it, we, monks and laity alike, stood in a concentricity around the blaze (set burning earlier by the Reverend Destabile), and we dropped our scraps of paper into the fire with their written offerings on them, I tried not to, but I failed, and couldn’t keep my eyes from seeking her out surreptitiously through the flames between us, tracking the small changes on her face, the sadness I could see that she felt – for what, I couldn’t know – and noticed with satisfaction the subtle warning signs she gave to the pastel guy, who’d been inching nearer though now backed a little away, visibly shrunken, and when her look jumped across the fire to meet mine my heart skipped. It hadn’t yet occurred to me to look away as I normally might, and there was that open thing again, for me it seemed and me only, a look of utter and uncluttered innocence, wide-eyed and unafraid. Our eyes locked and they stayed that way. I think it was she who first finally looked down, again toward the fire, and I don’t know after how long. But in that measureless time there was no fear between us and no shame, only an understanding, and an acknowledged longing, and I didn’t just want her then, but knew that I needed to find a way to reach her, that I couldn’t rest, that I couldn’t stand another moment without her, and also just how impossible that was.

The evening meditation practice that followed was torturous. I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t find a moment’s peace. Worst of all, I couldn’t find Mosquito. My thoughts were too agitated to reach anywhere near the depth where Mosquito lived. In the essential practice of sitting zazen, the object is to let thoughts come and go as they will, neither clinging to them nor pushing them away. But my thoughts weren’t thoughts; they were sheer erotic force, and they didn’t come or go. They thrashed at me. They had me by the throat and they were killing me. They were a tornado, they picked me up and slammed me hard against whatever thing was nearest and broke me. It was only so much worse that Vivianne was in the same room, sitting placidly before her own fabric screen, where it seemed that I could feel a subtle connection of our sex through the space of the room, across the presence of the others. It may have been only my imagination, but it seemed there was a similar restlessness all throughout the Buddha Hall, an agitation that everyone felt, a hunger that pervaded and charged the room. I could hear it in the restless sounds the others made as they sat, breathing, sighing, and struggling with their own problems, with whatever troubles their own minds had presented them. I worried that this agitation came from me, though more likely mine only added to the charged atmosphere. In any case, I wasn’t helping.

The next afternoon, after a morning meditation (in which I floundered and waited, again, and unsurprisingly, with no sign of Mosquito, for the time to pass) then breakfast in silence and later a polite reception in the guesthouse (in which I avoided Vivianne), when it was time for our lay visitors taking the train back home to go, I asked Reverend Quinn to drive them to the station instead of me. I didn’t try to make any excuse for it, but just said that I couldn’t. He seemed to understand, at least enough to make no protest, especially when I told him I would clean the toilets and the guest rooms in his stead while he was gone. Still, I had to see Vivianne once more, face to face, to give her back her contraband guitar.

Alone in the office together, though with the door open to the hallway beyond, I handed over the black case, covered in a patchwork of stickers. “Safe and sound,” I said, smiling as gently and with as much neutrality as I could manage. “I hope that you’ve found your time here with us to be helpful,” I added, “on your journey…” and realized as I spoke these words how utterly inane they sounded coming from my mouth, when at any other time they would have suited just fine.

“It’s been insightful,” she said, “yes, very.” She shot me a sly look, hesitating, then asked, “For how long, Reverend Proteus, have you been here?”

“It’s not ‘Reverend’,” I corrected her, “just Proteus. How long have I been a monk, you mean? For nine years now, but I’m still the baby of the place.”

“…I admire you. It can’t be easy.”

“No,” I said. “You’re right. There’s nothing easy about it. But it seems necessary, for me at least.”

She stood, hefting the guitar case, arranging the straps of the backpack over her shoulders, and on her way out the door turned and said in parting, “I’d love it if you could tell me what you mean by that, but I suppose this isn’t the time, is it. Thank you for having me. If you’re ever in Seattle, I hope you’ll look me up.”

I watched her as she left, troubled by the vague and anxious sense that something had irrevocably turned down the wrong street and was lost.

I went about the remainder of the day distractedly, unmindful of what I did or where I was, fiercely annoyed by every small delay or minor thing gone awry. The others could sense my state of mind, I think – it was likely obvious enough, with my angry face and muttered curses – and for the time chose to keep their distance and let me work the matter out for myself, whatever it was. For my part, I didn’t say anything to anyone about what was eating me. I avoided saying anything to anyone at all. I didn’t yet know how to talk about this, or if I even wanted to. There was always a bit of a hole left after guests had departed, but this was something else entirely.

When it came time for evening meditation, I’d calmed somewhat. Yet I dreaded another session of zazen in which I only wanted to scream and throw furniture across the room. That however turned out to not be the case. Instead I found, much to my surprise, that I was able to sit straight down and remain quite still and untroubled throughout what seemed a remarkably quick three quarters of an hour. The time passed easily, effortlessly, and though my mind flitted this way and that, as it did, there was the notable lack of one thing: Mosquito was not there. As it had been the night and this morning earlier, but now under rather different circumstances, Mosquito had not appeared. Not in the usual way. Not at all. It was as it had been, at least as it had seemed, all that time ago, before I’d discovered its presence – only myself and my mind, sitting there, facing the wall; a nice pair, the two of us, for sure. Yet there was that difference. Earlier, I’d simply not been able to reach Mosquito, or so I’d thought. There was too much in the way. But now it was just gone, gone, gone. More than if it had never been there.

•

With nothing but my mind left to me, left to face me, leaving myself only to face into my mind with, I found, first, only blank spaces, the immediacy of the room, then next, also, my mind. There seemed little to do but allow it. There was no self, after all. Of course, these spaces weren’t really blank. Nothing was blank. There was nothing that was nothing but blank space; which is to say, what was there was not nothing. It was blankness. More than that, it was emptiness. And in the emptiness…

I opened my “eyes” and looked around. I was in the sea. The sea! Of course that only made sense. I was, after all, a sea creature. This was where I lived. All the fish and the eels and the seals and the barnacles and fish… little specks of floating gunk that flowed with the currents and moved with the surges of the waves up above. Anemone waved their tongue-like feelers out, feeling for these specks, feeling for food, for stuff, then sucking them straight back in once they’d touched something. I was home. This was my element; not what I was looking for, but the thing, the place, where I was. Up above was above; that was not my concern, not down here. What was my concern were, for instance, the turtles that flapped their flippers and moved like floating rocks, with their funny beaks and squinty little eyes, pushing through the slow resistance of water. Manta rays like flat-leaf people, or people who were only wings with mouths and stinger-tails. Or the shafts of light beams that flickered vivid from the surface, reaching, refracted, to some depth, that lost their way and fizzled, never reaching so far as the weirdest of the deep creatures – those that made their own mean light, or the eyeless ones, who could do without light altogether – those in the ultimate fathoms. And more to my concern also were those schools of mindless things that flocked and spun and turned their bellies and flashed their flanks all silver-shimmery in the nearest shallows, their tails livid, where the sun could still find and tell them things with storied light, where their one shared mind formed its schools toward the learning of blob-like and shifting shapes, toroidal, teeming; my kin, though I may not like it. But I could shift my shape too, if I had to.

It was neither the practice of zazen to grasp or dismiss any of the mind’s occurrences, so I let the environment linger for as long as it was going to. I was, after all, emptiness, and so were all things, including the ocean. Nor did I allow or discourage it when two of the dumb fish-people splintered away from the greater hoard to float over and stare at me with their gaping, flat eyes, their fins twitching and mouths gulping vacantly. They stared at me; I stared at them. We stayed that way: being, devoid of the mind or the self or attainment.

“Well here’s a silly sorta fish, whatcha think,” said one. “Whatsit want?”

“Dunno,” said the other. “Dumb-lookin’, innit?”

“We gots a ways ta make it speak?”

“Don’ wanna speak if it don’ wanna. Wanna make it.”

“Wha’s inside it?”

“Mebbe goo, mebbe brains. Mebbe it gots ma-sheen-er-y.”

“Oo!”

“Oo.”

“Likes ma-sheen-ry, I do, I do. Makes a little clicks an’ skitters an’ pops. Sometimes.”

“Or make a boom boom.”

“Boom boom.”

“Ya think it gots brains inside it?”

“Don’ think it do.”

“Wants ta see! Wanna make speak!”

“Wanna.”

“Let’s get inna head.”

“How we get inna head?”

“Crank open mouth an’ eyes.”

“Mouth make ’em speak. Eyes make ’em see. It got mouth ’n eyes?”

“Kinda. Mebbe. Weird lookin’ fish.”

•

Walking in the cloister one cold morning, before the sun had risen, before anyone else – I thought – was awake, I came suddenly upon another robed figure, someone much taller than myself (though I was not so very tall), their head enshrouded in their cowl (as mine was), their face in shadow. I couldn’t tell who it was, or if a man or a woman even. We stopped, facing one another. I bowed in gassho; the other did too. And we stayed like that, neither of us moving, neither straightening again; yet neither were we waiting for the other to straighten or walk on. We stood there, bent, silent, the wind blowing the bald trees and the dead things all around us.

•

I became so highly abstracted that I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror when I looked. My face was unlikely; it was in fact something not possible. It could have been not a face at all, just some mismatched collection of lines and shades and shapes that didn’t relate – not to one another, and least of all to the whole. My eyes were two blimps, roving in the sunlight, floating over the Earth, lit up and idiotically charged, caught by the sky. They were not eyes. No, no…

It was while chopping the firewood that the Reverend Master Eno approached and asked me to come talk with him. “That’s okay, Proteus, you can set that down for a moment. Please.” My arm in mid-swing with the axe held ready above my head, about to come down, I stopped to look at him, surprised, suspended, my breath heavy in my chest. Splintered fragments of pinewood were scattered far, radially from the chopping block.

“I…” I said, “I…” and followed him into the confusion of shadows through the pathway.

We took the office in the guesthouse, which now was entirely empty, the monastery for the month of January traditionally closed to visitors. He shut the door. Dappled sunlight shone weakly through the windows over the walls and floor, the afternoon light already diminishing.

“Proteus.”

“I…”

His robes, his kesa over the shoulder, purple, golden. A bird skittered about near the window outside.

I felt the changes moving across my face, but couldn’t know what they were. “If I… These things, if I saw them, even once you see, and it wasn’t all that long ago, I might have been… smaller then. Even smaller than I am now. You might not think that’s possible, but those were other days, they were earlier days than these. You’ve seen them too, haven’t you? That’s okay. You don’t need to answer me.”

He thought for a moment with that inward-looking tilt to his head. “We’ve noticed,” he said at last, “and the others have expressed their concern. I am also concerned. Something is different.”

“Something? Reverend, the shapes have expressed what they’ve always expressed. In their changing. It was always this way. I’m no different. Yes, I think I have changed. But that sort of thing is inevitable. Always within a confined space.”

“Everyone goes through this, or something like this. It depends, of course, on the person. But there is the matter of violence.”

“Violence? Reverend?”

“Frankly, you’re scaring some of us.”

“Yet you understand that violence is also language, don’t you? It is… articulation, beauty, how the inward eye sees. To look at anything is violence, at the essence of a thing. But now you seem confused, and I’m afraid that I’m not helping you.”

“There are limits to what can be tolerated. There are also limits to what our community can do for you. It is, at some point, more appropriate if you find the right kind of help, though I don’t know that we’ve crossed that bridge just yet. I am, at this point, simply expressing my concern.”

“Isn’t that what they said at the beginning? That there is safety in emptiness, and that people are emptiness also? Is there no safety here? Because I’ve not emptied myself enough!”

But in time, if I’d been able to push aside my thoughts about Vivianne, I could not forget Mosquito so easily. Now that it was gone, it was everything. If I’d been muttering as I’d walked the cloister, from one moment’s assignment to the next, or if my face held some expression, though I’d felt for certain blank, or if the others, in their concern, however expressed, vaguely, at best, or from some distrustful distance, watched after me closely though said nothing – silence being the rule, and I had lost their trust – it was the shape of Mosquito at the center of it, of all this, nowhere, and everywhere, all at once. Yes, the flat eye of concern held me pinned. I could not understand what they were afraid of, though I was afraid also, and of the same thing. I felt sure of it.

The Reverend Hiko Eisen, bald as anybody ever was, carried a long stick for balance when in the wintertime his knee felt unsteady from the cold.

“The damage,” I said, “to the hand, the marks across the body, as if chewed by some animal, the same as the work done to the nose or the changes in the eye.”

The Reverend Hiko Eisen nodded his head in slow assent while we stood beside the large, black bell, awaiting the moment to make the signal. He checked his watch, which struck me as ironically anachronous beneath the sleeves of his robe, against the pale flesh and wiry hairs of his forearm. By early March the air had warmed considerably, though traces of snow still stuck in wet, solid clumps and patches to the grounds, to the interstices of trees and earth, in the corners of the plaza, and to the sides of the mountain beyond us, where it would in time creep slowly up, diminishing, so that only the cap should remain entirely white.

“But the only thing really any different,” I continued, “is the sense of quiet that comes, that visits in the hour when I’m most awake. Wouldn’t you say? Yes. I know that I have that, if nothing else. When the sunlight lays like that, when the sun lays itself down, and the brown earth is striped and stippled in it. And I weep for every moment that I’ve lost since then.”

His knee had been shot out in the war, but I didn’t know which one, which war.

The hour turned, he pulled back the Shu-moku, a heavy beam hung by two lengths of chain, and swung and struck the bell, which sounded, first in sharp attack, though it seemed delayed in the briefest of intervals between the striking and the sounding, and which I felt as if my own skull had been struck, though really the sound was centered in my chest and sternum, and sustained in resonant stillness, prolonged before dying delicately away, the throbbing of my heart resolved in its diminishing. The Reverend Hiko Eisen picked up his walking stick again. It was time for the next task.

I followed after him, stumbling on the hem of my robe.

“Reverend?” I called to him, quietly, so as not to injure the silence, so as not to invite further censure, “Reverend? Will you help me, as I promise to help you, when the time comes for us to die?” He did not look back at me. “Reverend! Have we died and died already? Reverend?”

April. May. The wind.

“Yes, I understand,” I said, my hand pressed against the rough wood of the gate. “This is the same. The same thing as it was. The thing I’m looking for, what I need, I’ll never find it, will I?” The moonlight answered with the hooting of owls near and distant. Stars glimmered above through the trees. I pressed my face against the gate and felt its dry, roughened grain to my cheek, and was careful not to move one way or another, afraid of splinters. “Not here. You told me that, didn’t you? That I wouldn’t find it here. And so I won’t. I could only thank you, again and again and again. Wasn’t that the way of it?” I rolled my head forward, my lips against the wood, nose bent to one side, and then rolled back. “That I should be seen through, that was why I came here, so I could be… transparent. And we did that. Or did we? It took the dead to show me what hunger really was. They’ve done that much for me. For us. I will thank them also.”

The gate was eight feet high and difficult to climb, more difficult for wearing robes. There was a latch I could have easily opened it with; it wasn’t locked, and I knew that. But still, I climbed, and fell. Then climbed again, this time hauling myself over the top, then fell to the other side with a thump. It knocked the wind from me and I lay gasping for breath. Nearby something clattered and snapped a small twig, perhaps running off. When I could get to my feet again, I followed.

•

Dunsmuir. The train heading north came in early morning, before the sun had risen.