A Single Eye Read online

“Barry?”

  I don’t think he would have answered me anyway, but at that moment Rob walked over shaking an empty milk carton accusingly as he veered to the fridge for a replacement. The outside door opened and Maureen stumbled in wiping her eyes. My moment had passed and I took the Roshi’s tea and my coffee and lurched out in the blackness, not knowing what to make of Barry. I could only fear the worst, and hope the Roshi would tell me truths to clear this up.

  Rob Staverford glared at the empty milk urn. Already things were out of hand in this sesshin, and it was only the third day. You can’t run a sesshin for twenty-six people and have the cook up all night making chocolate, for commercial purposes yet. He’d told Roshi that Barry couldn’t handle his precious chocolate and his responsibilities as cook; and he was right, as he knew he’d be, as Roshi should have known. Dogen Zenji himself said in the Tenzo Kyukun, “Put your whole attention into the work, seeing just what the situation calls for. Do not be absent-minded.” If Dogen walked into this kitchen, the thirteenth-century master would be appalled. Do not be absent-minded, indeed. A mind could hardly be more absent than Barry’s.

  Students needed their days to start quietly; they shouldn’t be forced into chatter about absent milk. Sesshin was a precious opportunity, not to be spoiled by the cook’s personal preoccupation. Rob’s jaw was clamped so tight flesh bulged at either side. His shoulders clenched at the very sight of Barry blithely making tea while the milk urn sat empty.

  In the meantime, he poured milk into the container, checked the sugar and honey, and realized there was no bread put out for students who couldn’t make it two more hours till breakfast. He grabbed a loaf, and made himself stop and take a deep breath so he wouldn’t slam it down on the table. His practice was to do what needed to be done, not to condemn Barry or to remind Roshi that he, Rob, had been right, even though he certainly had, as any idiot could see.

  When he stood up, he spotted the jisha, Darcy, still here in the kitchen. He flung back the sleeve of his robe and checked his watch. Four-twenty-two. She ought to have that cocoa in Roshi’s hand by now. He always did. He’d really have to tell her—

  But then he spotted Maureen. She looked more out of it than the other two.

  Rob sighed and shook his head.

  Maureen Heaney ran a finger across her tight forehead to free the tendrils of blond hair that hung flaccid over her eyes. This morning she had made the mistake of failing to avoid the mirror that accented her ashen skin and the dark circles under her eyes. She squinted against the glaring light in the kitchen. She hadn’t slept at all, worrying about Roshi. She could barely focus. She had tried to act normal, especially with the new jisha, but that was yesterday. How was she ever going to get through the day today?

  She stared across the kitchen. Barry was tense, too, but of course he would be. The Cacao Royale was a huge deal for him. He hadn’t had his head more than six inches from his beans since they arrived; no wonder he wasn’t worrying about Roshi. And Rob? Busy pouring milk. If she hadn’t been so exhausted she’d have laughed. There was Rob pouring slowly so Barry had ample time to see his unvoiced censure. He could pour till Monday and Barry wouldn’t notice, not unless he was pouring it onto the beans.

  She didn’t laugh—couldn’t. Maybe Roshi had the flu, but always before she’d been the one he’d counted on. Now . . . what? What did this mean? What was he thinking? She filled her cup with coffee and gulped it black, even though she knew it would burn her tongue. All the coffee she’d drunk here—seventy-two months of coffee, coffee held in thick mugs to warm her fingers before she and Roshi walked to the office, or the garden or his cabin. Was Roshi making himself sick with indecision, with fear, with guilt? What ever possessed him to bring up Aeneas again? Hadn’t they suffered enough over him? How could he think he could resurrect Aeneas and then just walk off ? And what about this place, was he planning to turn the place over to Rob and his ayatollah version of Zen? Was Roshi saying the last years had been a lie?

  The cup bobbled in her hands. She just got it onto the table; the coffee splashed, scalding, on her hands. She shook it off, not bothering to see if it had stained her sleeves.

  If Roshi denounced the last six years, what did that say about her Zen practice? She had stayed for him, trusted him as her teacher. If he was a fraud, what did she have? She had nothing.

  She took another swallow of coffee, not tasting it, drinking it for the heat. She had to get in Roshi’s face and find out what was going on; she had to do it today.

  When I unlocked the Roshi’s door, he was sitting on his bed, with his shoes on.

  “Help me outside, Darcy. Quick, before people are out.”

  I pulled his parka over his back, grabbed a towel and hoisted him up. He was almost a dead weight. His ribs pressed sharp into my arm as I guided him down the three steps and around the side of the cabin so he could brace his arm against the wall and throw up. He did it just once. I wiped his face with the towel and then he said, “Bathhouse.”

  How we got there and how he got back out of there before the first student trudged in, I don’t know. Even with them still dead asleep in their bags until four-twenty, Leo and I had cut it close. But when I got him back to the cabin, I could see the toll it had taken on him. He crumbled on the bed, wet parka and all. I had to roll him over to get it off and then roll him back to deal with his boots before I could get him back under the covers.

  “I thought you’d prefer tea,” I said pouring him a cup. “Barry made this for you.”

  I watched his face, but exerting the energy of reaction seemed beyond him. He held the cup with both hands, letting the steam warm his chin, the cup warm his hands. It was only then that I saw how wan, sweaty, how fragile he looked. Small and thin as he was, he had no reserves to fall back on. I had been so sure last night that he’d be better today, walking around on his own, maybe stopping in the zendo. But he looked worse now than any time since yesterday morning, when I assumed he was dead.

  “Leo, you are a sick man. I’ve got to get you out of here.”

  “Can’t.”

  “What do you mean, can’t?”

  “Rain.” He sighed.

  “Barry said the road would hold till tomorrow.”

  “For him.”

  “It’s the same road for everyone!”

  “No, Darcy, it’s not.”

  “Leo!”

  “Roshi.”

  He lifted the cup to his mouth. The china clattered against his teeth. His fingers press against the round surface; I watched, alert to jump forward if they slipped. I was focusing on the cup to keep from seeing how panicked I was, and how sick Leo was. He was my teacher, but he was also a sick, stubborn man.

  “Leo—Roshi—my father had a heart attack when I was in high school. It was during the last Forty-niners game of the season, against the hated Rams. He’d eaten a lot of junk and he thought he had indigestion. He thought the pain in his arm was from hauling in the Christmas tree. The division championship was on the line and the score was tied. Dad was sure there was nothing the matter with him. He told my older brothers to leave him alone, he was their father and he knew his own body, dammit. He was still telling them he was their father, when Mike, my youngest brother, hauled him out of the chair and into his truck and to the emergency room, which is why Dad could tell that story later.”

  “Not your father . . .” Leo forced out in a voice barely audible. “. . . your teacher.”

  I stood where I was, halfway between the bed and the fireplace, just staring at his cup. It was the same cup he’d used for the cocoa. The cocoa that poisoned him, and the cocoa he poured onto the floor.

  Suddenly I knew what that meant, him pouring the cocoa onto the floor Monday night. I knew so certainly I didn’t have to ask him for corroboration. In the cup that luscious cocoa was cocoa. But when he poured that liquid onto the floor it was mess. The brown liquid was the same but utterly different. I looked up at him and I had the sense he could see the difference in me. What I knew
, and did not say to him, was that he was my teacher, but at some point he would shift into a sick man. He’d be the same but utterly different. And when that moment came, the relationship between us would be utterly different and I would be responsible for him, just as Mike had been with Dad. I hoped that moment wouldn’t come, but if it did I hoped I would recognize it. It hadn’t come yet.

  I turned and started on the fire-building. I didn’t ask him about the road. I knew what he meant about that, too. It wasn’t the same road for everyone. For Barry, tomorrow it would be a messy, jolting nine miles that would take him over an hour. For Barry, the ride would be cold because he’d want to keep the chocolate cold, and it would be tense. His mind would be half on that and half caught in worry about the rest of the drive south, the contest, his arrangements, and his friends. But for Leo, sick as he was, an hour’s drive in the front seat of an old pickup with a poor heater and miserable springs would be torture. He was right: his road had already washed out. Yesterday, I had promised him my silence for forty-eight hours. One more day could be eternity for him, literally. But it didn’t matter what shape he was in in twenty-four hours; he wouldn’t be going anywhere.

  When I finished the fire, Leo was sleeping fitfully. His face was blotchy and flushed and he was breathing like a locomotive on a too-steep incline.

  I wanted to stay with him. I knew he’d want me in the zendo, sitting the schedule, supporting the normalcy of sesshin. His snore caught; he gagged. I lunged toward his mat. But before I reached him he had relaxed and was breathing normally. But that gag was enough. He had shifted from Roshi to sick man and I couldn’t let this go on any longer. I’d send someone into town for the doctor whether Leo wanted one or not. If my decision was wrong, I’d just take the consequences

  I stepped outside and smacked right into Rob. He pointed to his watch, and when I looked blank, he snapped, “Incense.”

  I’d forgotten about offering him the incense before he made the morning bows in Leo’s stead.

  I followed, automatically, my mind on the road. Already the road was muddy and the truck would have to maneuver the ridges and gullies, chugging along slow enough that anyone familiar with the grounds could race through the woods, get to a spot on the road first, and sabotage the trip. If I was going to send the truck into town, I needed to get it out of here before dawn, before breakfast. And most importantly, I had to decide whom I could trust.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I held the smoking stick of incense before me and followed Rob from the Roshi’s door to the altar. Yesterday, I had held it for Leo. Since then the world had changed.

  Rob completed his circle back to the far end of the bowing mat and began his three full bows before the altar. I walked to my seat, bowed, and sat facing into the room for this first period.

  I should have used that first period to sit in the clear, fresh silence of the morning zendo. But the question of whom to trust was too urgent. Once I chose and handed over the keys to our one vehicle, that was it. If I guessed wrong Leo could die and we wouldn’t even have a way of telling the world he was dead. No word would go out or any person come in until the end of sesshin. Whom to trust? Amber? No way. Not driving an old unreliable truck like that over a swampy road.

  Did Rob and Maureen and Barry know she was Aeneas’s sister? None of them had made any overture to her, nor were they giving her wide berth. They hadn’t asked the basic questions about him. That meant that Roshi hadn’t told them . . . because? Because he was afraid to . . . because . . .? Because he couldn’t trust them.

  Not Amber, not Rob, not Maureen, not Barry. Shit.

  Gabe was sitting across from me. He looked as if he’d been there all along, his legs crossed in half lotus—right foot on left thigh, hands in mudra, left hand resting in right, thumbs together, and his head slightly bowed so that his dark curly hair hung like a thatched porch roof over his already stubble-darkened face. Even here in the zendo, his lips twitched as if he was just about to say something he shouldn’t. I liked Gabe, but only an idiot would call him trustworthy.

  Not Amber, not Maureen, not Rob, not Barry, not Gabe. Deep shit.

  The bell rang, ending zazen, beginning kinhin, walking meditation. On cushions, we bowed, untwisted legs, and stood to begin kinhin. I had been checking on Leo so much I’d hardly been in the kinhin line. But now I turned left and walked behind Marcus, a virtual wall of brown wool. My hands were folded over my solar plexus, my gaze lowered, feet moving half a foot-length every breath. The intent of kinhin is to allow movement while continuing meditation. But breath lengths and foot lengths vary and lines do not flow smoothly at times. Now the line was barely moving at all. My nose was an inch from Marcus’s bear of a jacket. Instead of moving half-steps forward I was swaying from foot to foot. As a meditative tool, it shouldn’t matter which direction the feet go, but this kind of line hold-up, created by one person setting his own standards, oblivious to the crunch behind him, drove me crazy. In the bank, the Grand Union, the post office, I had to wait, but in the zendo I was not about to!

  I stepped out of line, hell-bent for the miscreant.

  I spotted him—Justin—just inside the door. Justin! It hardly surprised me. The stoicism of Zen is appealing to a certain group of ascetic young men. They are the ones who yank their legs into full lotus—right foot on left thigh, left foot on right—long before their hip joints have stretched enough to allow for the torque. If their knees burn with pain, that’s their focus. If they can barely stand after each zazen period on feet gone numb, that demonstrates their ardor. If they require minutes before they are able to move forward in the kinhin line and others stack up behind them shuffling from foot to foot, they have no need to notice. And when, finally, they do move forward in the line they are scrupulous to move no more than the prescribed half foot-length per step.

  Justin. Of course.

  I tapped him and motioned him outside. He tottered out the door, hands still over his solar plexus. By the time he reached the far edge of the porch, he dropped his hands, and leaned down as if expecting to be given an important Zen task.

  I whispered. “Can you drive a stick shift?”

  He looked like I’d asked if he knew how to shave. “Yeah.”

  “Get your driver’s license.”

  “But there are two more periods of zazen!”

  “Meet me at the old yellow truck.”

  His face froze, then, as if the reality of the offer struck him, a grin spread across his cheeks.

  “Hurry!”

  I ran through the rain to the kitchen for a thermos of coffee. Barry was at the far end leaning over the side of his conching machine. If he noticed me at all, he must have assumed I was filling Leo’s thermos.

  As I hurried down to the truck I began having second thoughts. I was trusting Justin because I didn’t trust anyone else. What did I know about him, except that Leo let him to come to sesshin to make things easier for Amber? And Leo had been wrong about him. Still, he wasn’t an old-timer. He hadn’t been here at the opening. That made me breathe more easily.

  Justin was already behind the wheel when I arrived. I climbed in beside him and handed him the thermos. The overhead light blinked, turning Justin’s shaved head into a beige light bulb with deep-set eyes and long narrow nose that threw his mouth in shadow. The truck smelled of damp and of cacao beans and in the dark it seemed filled with Leo in his knit cap, talking about his plastic forks collected from truck stops all the way to Canada.

  In the driver’s seat Justin was pouring coffee. I had guessed black for the coffee—he was a no cream, no sugar guy if I ever saw one—and when he unscrewed the top he gave a brisk nod of approval. He poured a bit in the cup, handed it to me, and took a swallow from the thermos.

  I’d paid no more than cursory attention to him before, but now I surveyed him: Late twenties, average height, but short-waisted so that sitting he appeared smaller than he was. His lean body looked to be not the result of exercise or even heredity but of a predilecti
on for self-denial. His clothes, though, fit well and were not the second-hand garb of those who disdain Mammon. The anorak looked new, and too warm an item for the mild winters of San Francisco. But, although he’d obviously bought it for this fortnight, it was a mite snug. There would be no room under it for an extra sweater to insulate against the cold, no chance of his stoic form being overlooked. This type of garment always came in olive, khaki, and navy, but he had chosen a dark burnt orange that suited his Nordic skin and set off his blue eyes. Stoic on the outside; but what on the inside?

  I sipped the coffee he’d shared automatically. There was no one else to trust with our only vehicle and Leo’s health, and yet . . . What was he inside?

  “Justin, have you been here before?”

  “Not since the opening.”

  Oh, rats!

  “The opening? When the Japanese roshis came to open the monastery? You were there? But you weren’t in the picture.”

  “I took the pictures. Because I wasn’t a real Zen student.”

  After six years, his bitterness came through. I clutched the truck keys tighter. Who else was there to ask—

  “Someone had to drive Amber,” he was saying. “She wasn’t old enough, and her dad had just had heart surgery. I didn’t think they would let Amber come all this way with me—my wheels were even worse than this.” He nodded at the truck. “I thought if they agreed at all, they would make us take their Oldsmobile, regardless of what a goon I would have looked like behind the wheel. I mean, there is a reason those rolling couches were called Oldsmobiles. But they didn’t blink; they were so hot to see how Aeneas was doing up here, they would have let us come on a scooter.”

  “Because they were worried about Aeneas?” I repeated.

  The only people I knew up here I couldn’t trust. To find another driver I’d have to start plucking guys from the zendo on faith. Who looked like a car nut? Who was strong enough to push a truck in the mud? Who!