Hungry Ghosts Read online

  But it was Leo, Garson-roshi, my Zen teacher, who rounded the gate from the street. He stood in the dim light, smiling. “Where have you been, Darcy? When you jumped off that turret—”

  “You came to the shoot?” The shoot seemed ages ago. “You told me you couldn’t bear to watch.”

  “I can’t. But I did, anyway. The guy beside me—he was lugging some equipment—almost slapped a hand over my mouth when you jumped. Good move, too. I groaned so loud you’ll hear it on the soundtrack.”

  “I wasn’t in any danger. I know what I’m doing.”

  “But I don’t.” He had a habit of almost winking that conveyed a meaning, often a joke beneath the obvious, one that was shared with his listener. I wondered if he had any sense of what an intimate gesture it was, and how much more was suggested by it than he intended. He was a gentle man who could spark fury in others. No one seeing him for the first time would have called him handsome. His features were too large for his face, his ears a bit pointed, which, with his shaved head, gave him a slightly extraterrestrial air. His thin form under his jacket hid the musculature honed during six years of country monastery life. That toughness was obvious only in his gnarled hands. The effect of it all was that no one hesitated to approach him about their problems; they just didn’t quite believe he’d have an answer.

  I couldn’t help thinking he seemed so out of place in the city, like an actor who’d walked onto the wrong set. I’d known him only a few months, been with him only two weeks at a monastery retreat in the country. Part of that time he’d been too sick to talk, and the rest, well, at the most normal of times—which that wasn’t—Zen retreats don’t encourage conversation. Leo had seemed suited to life in the country. But he’d lived in the city here before. Did he have friends here? A lover, even? Zen priests are not celibate. He could have accepted a day job. Priests have worked as secretaries, teachers, therapists, musicians, or cabdrivers. The precepts instruct us to adhere to “right livelihood”—work that does not harm others—but livelihood, nevertheless. It struck me how little I knew about Leo Garson.

  I wanted to ask why he’d changed his mind about watching my stunt. He had been so clear on finding no pleasure in simulated danger when I invited him that I could imagine the gaffer clapping a hand over his open mouth. And yet he had dragged himself out of bed before dawn to stand in the cold in unwelcome fear.

  But before I had the chance, he got in a question of his own, “So, what do you think of our fine digs?” It wasn’t merely a pleasantry; he seemed to seriously want to know.

  I considered my response. “Like you said in your letter, ‘Too good to be true! . . . Our neighbors are big-time lawyers, architects, and gallery owners who pay a bundle for their spaces. We’re on the edge of the Financial District, in one of the few brick buildings that survived the earthquake, a place with a sexy history, and a courtyard! Prime property! It’d rent for thousands a month. And the landlord is letting us have it for free. Things like that don’t happen in real life. Why give it to us?’”

  “Curious, isn’t it,” he said. “Wait till you see the inside.” He turned toward the great red madrone double doors. A dagger of sunlight cut through the fog and vanished. It struck the brass knobs on the door, making them shine like fire. As if even the heavens were saying this place was too good to be true. The sun was as narrow as a spotlight, echoing the one that had shown me Mike on the roof.

  “Roshi,” I said, “I saw this building from my start point when I was getting ready for my gag. There was a man with curly red hair. Walking on the roof!”

  Leo nodded.

  “You know?” I said, amazed.

  “Yes.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Eamon Lafferty.”

  Eamon? Lafferty? Had Mike ever used those names? He’d once sent me drafts of stories for a creative writing class he’d taken his sophomore year. Had he used that name for one of his characters? Had he ever known someone with a name even remotely like that? Was there any resonance, in any way? Eamon. I’d have remembered Mike using a name like that. “Eamon Lafferty? Who’s he?”

  “He’s our landlord.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “LEO, ARE YOU SAYING this Eamon Lafferty owns our building? He’s the one leasing us this space for free?”

  “The same.” Even in his traditional black Japanese jacket and loose black pants, he looked like an amused elf masquerading as a Zen priest. His hazel eyes were wide apart, intense, his mouth crooking into a grin. Zen practice is about being alive in the moment, after all, and downright delighted with this moment is how Leo appeared.

  But not me. Maybe it was my years in the movie business that made me automatically suspicious, or, more likely, one could say the business and I had been a good fit in that department. In my mind, too good to be true wasn’t a windfall but a warning. I glanced around the oh-so-desirable courtyard, with its huge pots sporting mature Japanese maples, at the freshly scrubbed brick walls, and those very impressive doors. “Eamon Lafferty has spent money—a lot of it from the looks of things—to redecorate this place from whatever was here. A cabdriver just told me about its reputation for eerie sounds, and snakes! He called it a ‘bad vibes building.’”

  Leo laughed. “‘Bad vibes.’ I haven’t heard that term in years. Whatever, we’ve got a great place here; you’re right, Eamon really got it in shape for us.”

  Leo’s enthusiasm made me all the more wary. “You’re telling me he went to some amount of trouble, and no small expense, to take this choice property off the market, forgo an outrageous rent from some law firm or boutique, in order to offer it to you for free? What is he, a Zen fanatic?”

  “Don’t think he’d know Zen from sushi. Can’t swear to that. When I gave him a zafu to sit on he cantilevered himself down like he was lowering a grand piano out a window. Like he’d think twice before trying it again. Not that he complained; all he talked about was the lease.”

  “The lease? What’s in the lease?”

  “Nothing. No prohibitions, no rent for six months.”

  “And then?”

  “Then we discuss it. That’s all. Don’t be so suspicious, Darcy. If the rent is too high, we’ll pick up the Buddha and move. We don’t have anything invested in this location. In six months we’ll have a sangha of people who’ll help us find another place if we need it. If they have to come sit in a storefront, they’ll be ready to do it then. It’s a no-lose situation.”

  I shook my head slowly. “Oh, Leo, you so tempt the fates.”

  He laughed again, but there was a little nod at the end of it telling me he recognized I wasn’t entirely wrong. This Eamon Lafferty might be well intentioned, but Leo still was a fate tempter. Had he been the abbot of a Japanese monastery five hundred years ago, he would have been in his element parsing the Heart Sutra: Form is no different than emptiness, emptiness no different than form, and seeing the essential emptiness of all things. But in twenty-first-century San Francisco, expounding on emptiness while crossing Broadway would likely get him splattered all over the intersection.

  Tempting fate had gotten Leo in trouble before. I knew of three instances, and I’d met him only a few months ago. But here I was, his assistant, and the job of the roshi’s assistant is to take care of him. It was good he had in me a skeptical one. “Eamon Lafferty? Where is he now?”

  “Gone, I’d guess.”

  “Gone?”

  Leo laughed. “Not gate, gate, paragate.”

  “Not gone, gone, gone beyond, huh?” I said, roughly translating from the Heart Sutra.

  “No gah-tays. He’ll be back tonight. That’s one reason I’m glad you’re here now. He’s organized a reception for the Zen Center.”

  “A reception? Like for a gallery?”

  He nodded.

  Stranger yet, this guy who was not Mike. “It’s not like you’ve got a cluster of waiting students here. Who are we going to receive?”

  “Everyone on the block for a start. Maybe everyone in town. Eam
on put a welcome notice in one of the free papers.”

  “So it really is a wine and cheese event—”

  “Tea and sweets. But essentially the same. It’s kind of him to do this, to announce the opening of the zendo in a way we could never afford to do.” The other side of Leo’s fate tempting was the quality of statements like this, the way his years of meditation had shown him how to step back and look objectively before he spoke. He’d made pronouncements before that I’d definitely disagreed with. I’d even once barreled over him when he was too sick to do anything about it. But this assessment of his was different. It was the only time I had ever heard him speak as if he was trying to convince himself.

  I stared at the zendo, this suspiciously desirable building. For an instant I could almost see those snakes slithering out under the doors.

  Leo had sunk into silence. Suddenly, as if he’d come to a decision, he spoke more directly. “We’re here to be available to workers in the Financial district and the Barbary Coast, plus all the people who live around here in North Beach, on the Embarcadero, in Chinatown. It’s not like crowds of them will stumble into this courtyard and spot our sign, right?” He nodded at the little black plaque next to the doors.

  “Even if they’re looking for it.”

  “The reception is a gift.”

  It was the kind of gift Mike would think of. When I was in sixth grade, in the throes of middle school and miserable about an eighth grade boy who couldn’t be bothered about me, Mike, a big high school sophomore, had staged a birthday party for me in Golden Gate Park with two of his friends’ bands. One of them wrote a song for me. Everybody came from my class, plus the vaunted eighth graders, and enough of Mike’s friends to make the affair seem very adult to us. Ever after I was “the girl who threw that really cool party.”

  But this reception, it wasn’t Mike’s doing. Because no matter how much I wanted Eamon Lafferty to magically turn out to be Mike, that wasn’t going to happen. But it made me think better of Eamon Lafferty. “When is this reception?”

  “Five to seven.”

  “Tonight?”

  “You can see why I’m so glad you arrived early.” Leo turned toward the double doors, then paused and looked at me. “Eamon Lafferty, is he one of your family’s redheads?”

  There’s a bond between a student and her teacher. When I’d moved to New York to study with Yamana-roshi, I had made the decision that I would be up-front about everything. When I was passed over for a gig, I admitted wishing for pins and voodoo. When I dumped a boyfriend without warning or decent reason, I ’fessed up in front of Yamana in a way I’d never done with the guy. When I came home from a set with the gift of Duffy, now my Scottie, his first walk was to the zendo. But I had never told Yamana-roshi that when I was sixteen, Mike walked out of the house one Thursday night a few weeks after my cable car leap and vanished.

  Two or three times I had headed to the zendo, intending, finally, to reveal this overriding issue of my life, but when it came down to it, I just couldn’t. Zen teaches that thoughts are merely thoughts, to see them, feel the bodily sensation, and let them go. But there were thoughts I couldn’t bear to face, and memories I couldn’t bear to give up.

  Leo was my teacher now. I had moved back to San Francisco because he needed an assistant at his new zendo and because I wanted to study with him. Yet though I had already trusted Leo with life and death, I didn’t tell him about Mike, either. Nothing more than a passing mention. “No, there’s no Eamon Lafferty in my family. My oldest brother, John, is a cop, Gary’s a lawyer, my sisters Katy and Janice are married, but not to Laffertys. And Grace, the one nearest to me, is married to being a doctor. So, no, no Laffertys. But I’m anxious to see this guy at the reception,” I said, in the understatement of the century. But still I didn’t tell him why. Instead I followed him through the doors into the zendo.

  Beyond the vestibule, Leo’s footsteps paused, like the catch in a hiccup, then resumed. Inside, I saw why. The zendo was a beautiful room: high beamed ceiling, weathered red-brick walls, the wood floor polished to a high gloss. On it lay four round black cushions—zafus—on rectangular black mats—zabutons. Near the back window, a small teak table held the statue of the Buddha.

  I thought for a moment that we would sit zazen. Instead Leo turned to me. “I watched you this morning do something that most people would be too frightened to do.”

  I was about to protest—my training, all my experience—but he held up a palm and went on. “Then the director said something and you looked terrified. You remember. What happened?”

  I started, just as I had when Robin Sparto confronted me. If Leo hadn’t asked me directly, I’d never have mentioned it; maybe if he’d broached it somewhere other than in the zendo, I’d have avoided it. But now, here, I understood how I kept my hopes and memories of Mike to myself. “He made a crack about my cable car leap.”

  “You’re doing another stunt?”

  “No, it was my first stunt when I was sixteen. It’s a long story.”

  He laughed. “Then we’d better sit down.”

  I followed him up the stairs to his room and settled on a cushion while he sat cross-legged on his futon.

  “So?” he prompted.

  “It was a Sunday in February, in that one week when suddenly it’s like summer, you know? Warm, sunny, suddenly not raining like it has been for the past month. I had to wait weeks for the weather to clear, so I remember well. If I do say so, it was a classy gag: the cable car leap! I’ve never seen anyone else do it, not before, not since,” I said, suddenly back in the thrill of a sixteen-year-old’s planning. “Here’s the setup: one cable car is going uphill, the other’s coming down. Powell’s steep there, but at the cross streets it’s flat. So you jump onto the roof of the uphill car just as it starts to move off the cross street. Because the brakeman is busy letting out the brake, he doesn’t notice till it’s too late. By that time I was onto the downhill car. When I touched down on its roof, the momentum carried me across the intersection with the car and gave me enough to jump, catch a tree limb at the corner, swing, and disappear before anyone could react.”

  “Just like that? All that fell into place for you?” Leo was leaning forward, staring at me.

  “Not hardly. The gag looked like three easy steps. But it took me months to plan. I had to check the schedules to see where the cars passed each other. Then find the right intersection. I got a friend to park his dad’s truck at the corner. I dented the hood and the roof on my run. Luckily, it had a few nicks already. I spent one entire day timing the streetcars: how long it took from the moment the car came over the rise into the cross street till it stopped; how many seconds it sat if there were no passengers getting off, before it started up again. How long it would take me to run onto the pickup and jump to the cable car, and then where the car would have to be when I started my run. And where the downhill car had to be. The whole thing was a timing gag. Cable car trips can vary a lot. Cars break down, brakes fail, bunches of tourists get on or off and throw the car off schedule, my schedule. The day I did the gag I waited so long it was almost dark before everything meshed right. My friend with the video camera had said he was leaving three times by then. Half the people I’d told about it had already left. But I couldn’t rush it. Everything had to be perfect. I knew I’d only get one shot at it.”

  “And you could have fallen under the cars and been sawed in three pieces!”

  “Well, that, too,” I said, brushing off his comment just as I would have Mom’s, had she found out before finding out didn’t matter anymore. “But I was sixteen, and personal injury wasn’t a possibility. It could have been bad, I realized later, but it wasn’t. Nothing bad happened. It did go perfectly. It looked effortless. It was like flying. Like winning the gold. Like, you know, you dream so long about how something will be, and then it not only turns out that way, but better, much better. It changed my life, showed me and my friends that I could do whatever I set my mind to, and, not incidentally,
hooked me on stunt work.

  “See, it wasn’t just about jumping from car to car and down; the key was to make it look easy—that’s what stunt work is. It’s what made me a star. Well, sort of . . .” I mumbled, suddenly embarrassed by my boastfulness.

  Leo was still staring. His expression hovered between shock and distress. He sat there, unmoving.

  “Leo, I knew what I was doing. I wanted to impress the guy with the camera and, well, show my favorite brother, who’d gotten awed by a school friend of mine, that I was big-time, too. These days, I would have had the video all over the web, but then I had to make do with letting word slip to the kids who’d do the spreading for me.”

  “What happened after?” His voice was so flat it hardly sounded like him.

  “Nothing.” Maybe that was the truth. I could never be sure it wasn’t the truth. How could I know?

  “Nothing? Really? No consequences?”

  “My parents didn’t find out till so much later that other things overshadowed it. One of the kids was sure that the cable car company would get me, but the last thing they wanted was to publicize car jumping. The kids were impressed, and I used the video to talk my way into my first stunt job.”

  He didn’t move. Then he repeated, “No consequences?”

  All acts have consequences. That’s the law of karma. Maybe he meant just that. There was no way he could know anything more. I flushed with humiliation. I felt like my chest was caving in. Leo looked like Dad might have looked, if he had found out before Mike’s disappearance erased everything else.

  What he said was, “I’m planning to have the ceremony of feeding the Hungry Ghosts.” He didn’t ask if I saw the connection. “Usually, it coincides with Halloween, and kids—and adults—come in costumes. The priest walks in, accompanied by attendants who shout to get the attention of the ghosts. The kids love that. But, of course, that’s not the point. You know what the hungry ghosts look like?”

  “Creatures with huge bellies and tiny necks.”