Zen City by Eliot Fintushel Read Free Book Online

That is why it is so well protected.”
    “Do you actually find me attractive?”
    He would not look away from the altar. “Yes.”
    She climbed into his lap and reached inside his robe.
    “Wait,” he said. He found the string that released the windshield shade. It unrolled from above the sun visors, where the rod was jerry-rigged, and clacked against the dash.
    “I love the Japanese,” Clara said, caressing the insides of his thighs. “You invented the City.”
    He was sitting bolt upright, as in zazen. “We understood it first,” he said. “We had to. So many of us on so small an island. So much energy. So much intelligence. So many empty bellies. Please don’t stop.”
    “I am honored.”
    “We should not be doing this now,” Bobo Shin said. “What would any of us do without the Cities? What would there be to live for? We would all become swine, warring swine, prostitutes and trash like the shit bags outside this place. Please don’t stop. I am a bad priest.”
    “No, you’re not. You are a great teacher. You’re tired. You’ve been walking down Route 90 all night. After you’ve rested, we can look for No Mind in the suburb. Then we can all go and savethe City.”
    “Yes. Rest. Then the suburb. Then the City.”
    “Do you really like me?”
    “Yes. I’m going to make you a teacher. You will have your own ramp, your own van… Please don’t stop.” He was at last starting to relax his back, curving down, tucking his pelvis up to meet her cheek as she laid her head in his lap and encircled his waist with her arms.
    The Earth slowly swallowed the sun again. The moon, past first quarter, brilliant in the empty sky, shone on the West Coast mirror and glinted in over the side window shade; Clara, vacant, contented, caught it. Bobo Shin had dozed off, and Clara, blissfully at home in the Roshi’s lap, had just lolled there and let him. What a long, hot walk it must have been, two days and a night down Route 90 from The City of The Million Buddhas, prostrating at every twenty-seventh step.
    She hardly noticed Rinzai knocking at the door. Sotto voce: “Hey, Clara, aren’t you ever coming out? The monks are scared even to ask. Jeez, Clara, what are you guys doing in there?”
    “Shh,” she said. “Shh.”

Chapter Five
    The full moon above, beyond his seeing, No Mind had squirreled through red silt into the lava tubes beneath the karst, mind aglow with terror. He felt lost, soaked into siphons and swallets, into dark boxwork chambers with flutes and corkscrews where eyeless beetles inched through grey-white meltwater. His senses stained and permeated them—was this death, to lose one’s own body for the Earth? Gypsum and calcite, blank eyes and chitinous bellies became his skin. He bristled with mole crickets and itched with pale slugs masticating earthworms. A blind, white fish, anus frontwise behind the gills, slithered through his senses like a vagrant thought.
    Then, stuck in the tube, his little human body announced itself again, separate and mortal. The Voice tried to help him.
“Push, No Mind. If you can’t go forward, go back. Don’t let that witch Angela get hold of you now.”
    “Yes, Lord Buddha! Though my skin shrivel and turn to dust…”
    “That’s it, oh Noble One. Forget not your ancient vow. You must enter the City. You must follow the witch. She is icchantika, without buddha nature. The others are also icchantika. Kill them if you need to.”
    “Kill?”
    “
Their lives are like smoke, like dust, like flowers in the air. Snuff them out. Enter the City. Push, damn you!
”
    Behind him No Mind felt the water rising, pushing, trickling through. Ahead, there was movement—someone coming.
    “Push, push, No Mind.”
His Voice merged with the puddles’ drip and trickle. “
But if the icchantikas find you, be shrewd, Noble One. Be shrewd. Kill them all.
”
    * * *
    If I was going to get eaten, I’d rather it started with my fists than my buns. I backed out through the