Zen City by Eliot Fintushel Read Free Book Online Page A

keyhole and faced about to see what kind of beast was tailing me. I squinted across the grotto to where the corkscrew squeeze opened into it. Imagine my pleasure at seeing No Mind pinched in that hole.
    “Doing zazen, are we?” I couldn’t help myself. The tight-assed bastard stuck out, wiggling head and neck like a sardine in a cat’s maw. Or, for that shaved head of his, he could have been a baby, nasty with meconium. When he lifted it, all bloody, I saw the thick tuft of hair on his Adam’s apple—fake whiskers that had been scraped down his neck. So the bald, bearded vanny at the stalagmite pissoir had been No Mind. Lord, I had to laugh.
    “Help me out.”
    I grabbed his chin and yanked. I heard his neck pop, and he yowled, afraid something had broken. I eased his chin up with two fingers, the way you’d coax a virgin’s kiss, and I knelt down in the grit and putty, eyeball to eyeball with No Mind. “Gee, you’re not making it through,” I said. “Too much ego, must be. Sorry, Jack. See,
to enter the City, you have to get rid of the idea of self-gain.
Not you. Toodle-loo.” I stood up again, squeegeed muck and drip off my knees, and started to walk away, taking my light with me.
    “Big Man, wait, please.”
    I didn’t. “It’ll rain crows before I lift a finger to help you, No Mind—a Bodhi-fuckin’-sattva like you.”
    “God, it’s dark.” Tears yet.
    Reminded me of Alice on my beeohtees, where she cries up a flood, then floats away in it. The muck underfoot was starting to puddle and splash. There was a breeze at my back. In front of me, down the tube, Pirate was squirming on his belly out of the keyhole. He jimmied himself out and steadied himself spread-eagle against the roof and walls the way you would in a funhouse barrel. Then he stumbled toward me, hand over hand along the stalactites, a row of thin, slanted dripstones, till he was in my face.
    “Done screwing Angela?” I said.
    “You never quit. What’s happening back there?”
    “It’s No Mind. Forget it. Let’s just go.”
    “No Mind? What’s he doing in this shit hole?”
    “Why don’t you go ask him, Pirate? Let me through.”
    Shouting past me, right in my ears, damn him: “Hey, No Mind!”
    No Mind stopped blubbering for a second. “Help me! Someone help me!”
    Pirate started in on me in his adult-to-adult voice. “Listen, buddy, I’m none too partial to that dude either, but we can’t let him rot there.”
    “Why?”
    “Fuck it. You want to get into the City? How you going to get into the City with an attitude like that? What the hell is your goddam City about anyway, if the zens can carry around a mind like that?”
    “I’m calm as can be, Pirate.” The hulk of him just about corked the passage in front of me. I figured I could take him pretty easy if it came to that. The man’s an ape.
    “You sonuvabitch, you’d let someone die?”
    “Life and death are illusions, loverboy. Get out of my way.”
    “What’s happened to you, Big Man? Is this what zazen’s done for you?”
    I hadn’t heard her coming, but Angela was peeking around Pirate’s shoulder. “He followed us from up by the candle room, didn’t he? I toldjas I heard somebody. What’s goin’ on?”
    Pirate kept looking straight at me, and I kept looking right back. “It’s No Mind. He’s jammed. Big Man says let him die there.”
    Angela poked her head under Pirate’s arm to see me better. She reached her little hand through and tried to turn my head so I’d look at her. I did it, but I burned her with these eyes, I can tell you—my samadhi power is strong, and when I send out likethat, nothing can come in, nothing can touch me.
    “Shame on you, Big Man”—stroking my forehead, my cheek, my lips—“you don’t wanna be that way. Let’s go back and git him.”
    We were all in a clump, the knot of us in that stone throat. I caught Pirate’s eye again. “You go to hell, mister,” I said. I turned around and led them back. The