Chapter 18
I have been out among you, eating and talking and walking and walking and walking, for hours without having to turn because of a wall in my way. The angel woke me this morning with a new set of clothes, strange to the feel but familiar to the sight (from television). Jeans, sweatshirt, and sneakers, as well as some socks and boxer shorts.
"Put these on. I'm taking you out for a walk," said Raziel.
"As if I were a dog," I said.
"Exactly as if you were a dog."
The angel was also wearing modern American garb, and although he was still strikingly handsome, he looked so uncomfortable that the clothes might have been held to his body with flaming spikes.
"Where are we going?"
"I told you, out."
"Where did you get the clothes?"
"I called down and Jesus brought them up. There is a clothing store in the hotel. Come now."
Raziel closed the door behind us and put the room key in his jeans pocket with the money. I wondered if he'd ever had pockets before. I wouldn't have thought to use them. I didn't say a word as we rode the elevator down to the lobby and made our way out the front doors. I didn't want to ruin it, to say something that would bring the angel to his senses. The noise in the street was glorious: the cars, the jackhammers, the insane people babbling to themselves. The light! The smells! I felt as if I must have been in shock when we first traveled here from Jerusalem. I didn't remember it being so vivid.
I started to skip down the street and the angel caught me by the shoulder; his fingers dug into my muscles like talons. "You know that you can't get away, that if you run I can catch you and snap your legs so you will never run again. You know that if you should escape even for a few minutes, you cannot hide from me. You know that I can find you, as I once found everyone of your kind? You know these things?"
"Yes, let go of me. Let's walk."
"I hate walking. Have you ever seen an eagle look at a pigeon? That's how I feel about you and your walking."
I should point out, I suppose, what Raziel was talking about when he said that he once found everyone of my kind. It seems that he did a stint, centuries ago, as the Angel of Death, but was relieved of his duties because he was not particularly good at them. He admits that he's a sucker for a hard-luck story (perhaps that explains his fascination with soap operas). Anyway, when you read in the Torah about Noah living to be nine hundred and Moses living to be a hundred and forty, well, guess who led the chorus line in the "Off This Mortal Coil" shuffle? That's where he got the black-winged aspect that I've talked about before. Even though they fired him, they let him keep the outfit. (Can you believe that Noah was able to postpone death for eight hundred years by telling the angel that he was behind in his paperwork? Would that Raziel could be that incompetent at his current task.)
"Look, Raziel! Pizza!" I pointed to a sign. "Buy us pizza!"
He took some money out of his pocket and handed it to me. "You do it. You can do it, right?"
"Yes, we had commerce in my time," I said sarcastically. "We didn't have pizza, but we had commerce."
"Good, can you use that machine?" He pointed to a box that held newspapers behind glass.
"If it doesn't open with that little handle, then no."
The angel looked perturbed. "How is it that you can receive the gift of tongues and suddenly understand all languages, and there is no gift that can tell you how things work in this time? Tell me that."
"Look, maybe if you didn't hog the remote all the time I would learn how to use these things." I meant that I could have learned more about the outside world from television, but Raziel thought I meant that I needed more practice pushing the channel buttons.
"Knowing how to use the television isn't enough. You have to know how everything in this world works." And with that the angel turned and stared through the window of the pizza place at the men tossing disks of dough into the air.
"Why, Raziel? Why do I need to know about how this world works? If anything, you've tried to keep me from learning anything."
"Not anymore. Let's go eat pizza."
"Raziel?"
He wouldn't explain any further, but for the rest of the day we wandered the city, spending money, talking to people, learning. In the late afternoon Raziel inquired of a bus driver as to where we might go to meet Spider-Man. I could have gone another two thousand years without seeing the kind of disappointment I saw on Raziel's face when the bus driver gave his answer. We returned here to the room where Raziel said, "I miss destroying cities full of humans."
"I know what you mean," I said, even though it was my best friend who had caused that sort of thing to go out of fashion, and not a moment too soon. But the angel needed to hear it. There's a difference between bearing false witness and saving someone's feelings. Even Joshua knew that.
"Joshua, you're scaring me," I said, talking to the disembodied voice that floated before me in the temple. "Where are you?"
"I am everywhere and nowhere," Joshua's voice said.
"How come your voice is in front of me then?" I didn't like this at all. Yes, my years with Joshua had jaded me in regard to supernatural experiences, but my meditation hadn't yet brought me to the place where I wouldn't react to my friend being invisible.
"I suppose it is the nature of a voice that it must come from somewhere, but only so that it may be let go."
Gaspar had been sitting in the temple and at the sound of our voices he rose and came over to me. He didn't appear to be angry, but then, he never did. "Why?" Gaspar said to me, meaning, Why are you talking and disturbing everyone's meditation with your infernal noise, you barbarian?
"Joshua has attained enlightenment," I said.
Gaspar said nothing, meaning, So? That's the idea, you unworthy spawn of a razor-burned yak. I could tell that's what he meant by the tone in his voice.
"So he's invisible."
"Mu," Joshua's voice said. Mu meaning nothing beyond nothingness in Chinese.
In an act of distinctly uncontrolled spontaneity, Gaspar screamed like a little girl and jumped four feet straight in the air. Monks stopped chanting and looked up. "What was that?"
"That's Joshua."
"I am free of self, free of ego," Joshua said. There was a little squeak and then a nasty stench infused us.
I looked at Gaspar and he shook his head. He looked at me and I shrugged.
"Was that you?" Gaspar asked Joshua.
"Me in the sense that I am part of all things, or me in the sense of I am the one who poofed the gefilte gas?" asked Josh.
"The latter," said Gaspar.
"No," said Josh.
"You lie," I said, as amazed at that as I was at the fact that I couldn't see my friend.
"I should stop talking now. Having a voice separates me from all that is." With that he was quiet, and Gaspar looked as if he were about to panic.
"Don't go away, Joshua," the abbot said. "Stay as you are if you must, but come to the tea chamber at dawn tomorrow." Gaspar looked to me. "You come too."
"I have to train on the poles in the morning," I said.
"You are excused," Gaspar said. "And if Joshua talks to you anymore tonight, try to persuade him to share our existence." Then he hurried off in a very unenlightened way.
That night I was falling asleep when I heard a squeak in the hall outside of my cell, then an incredibly foul odor jolted me awake.
"Joshua?" I crawled out of my cell into the hall. There were narrow slots high in the walls through which moonlight could sift, but I saw nothing but faint blue light on the stone. "Joshua, is that you?"
"How could you tell?" Joshua's disembodied voice said.
"Well, honestly, you stink, Josh."
"The last time we went to the village for alms, a woman gave Number Fourteen and me a thousand-year-old egg. It didn't sit well."
"Can't imagine why. I don't think you're supposed to eat an egg after, oh, two hundred years or so."
"They bury them, leave them there, then dig them up."
"Is that why I can't see you?"
"No, that's because of my meditation. I've let go of everything. I've achieved perfect freedom."
"You've been free ever since we left Galilee."
"It's not the same. That's what I came to tell you, that I can't free our people from the rule of Romans."
"Why not?"
"Because that's not true freedom. Any freedom that can be given can be taken away. Moses didn't need to ask Pharaoh to release our people, our people didn't need to be released from the Babylonians, and they don't need to be released from the Romans. I can't give them freedom. Freedom is in their hearts, they merely have to find it."
"So you're saying you're not the Messiah?"
"How can I be? How can a humble being presume to grant something that is not his to give?"
"If not you, who, Josh? Angels and miracles, your ability to heal and comfort? Who else is chosen if not you?"
"I don't know. I don't know anything. I wanted to say good-bye. I'll be with you, as part of all things, but you won't perceive me until you become enlightened. You can't imagine how this feels, Biff. You are everything, you love everything, you need nothing."
"Okay. You won't be needing your shoes then, right?"
"Possessions stand between you and freedom."
"Sounded like a yes to me. Do me one favor though, okay?"
"Of course."
"Listen to what Gaspar has to say to you tomorrow." And give me time to think up an intelligent answer to someone who's invisible and crazy, I thought to myself. Joshua was innocent, but he wasn't stupid. I had to come up with something to save the Messiah so he could save the rest of us.
"I'm going to the temple to sit. I'll see you in the morning."
"Not if I see you first."
"Funny," said Josh.
Gaspar looked especially old that morning when I met him in the tea room. His personal quarters consisted of a cell no bigger than my own, but it was located just off the tea room and had a door which he could close. It was cold in the morning in the monastery and I could see our breath as Gaspar boiled the water for tea. Soon I saw a third puff of breath coming from my side of the table, although there was no person there.
"Good morning, Joshua," Gaspar said. "Did you sleep, or are you free from that need?"
"No, I don't need sleep anymore," said Josh.
"You'll excuse Twenty-one and I, as we still require nourishment."
Gaspar poured us some tea and fetched two rice balls from a shelf where he kept the tea. He held one out for me and I took it.
"I don't have my bowl with me," I said, worried that Gaspar would be angry with me. How was I to know? The monks always ate breakfast together. This was out of order.
"Your hands are clean," said Gaspar. Then he sipped his tea and sat peacefully for a while, not saying a word. Soon the room heated up from the charcoal brazier that Gaspar had used to heat the tea and I was no longer able to see Joshua's breath. Evidently he'd also overcome the gastric distress of the thousand-year-old egg. I began to get nervous, aware that Number Three would be waiting for Joshua and me in the courtyard to start our exercises. I was about to say something when Gaspar held up a finger to mark silence.
"Joshua," Gaspar said, "do you know what a bodhisattva is?"
"No, master, I don't."
"Gautama Buddha was a bodhisattva. The twenty-seven patriarchs since Gautama Buddha were also bodhisattvas. Some say that I, myself, am a bodhisattva, but the claim is not mine."
"There are no Buddhas," said Joshua.
"Indeed," said Gaspar, "but when one reaches the place of Buddhahood and realizes that there is no Buddha because everything is Buddha, when one reaches enlightenment, but makes a decision that he will not evolve to nirvana until all sentient beings have preceded him there, then he is a bodhisattva. A savior. A bodhisattva, by making this decision, grasps the only thing that can ever be grasped: compassion for the suffering of his fellow humans. Do you understand?"
"I think so," said Joshua. "But the decision to become a bodhisattva sounds like an act of ego, a denial of enlightenment."
"Indeed it is, Joshua. It is an act of self-love."
"Are you asking me to become a bodhisattva?"
"If I were to say to you, love your neighbor as you love yourself, would I be telling you to be selfish?"
There was silence for a moment, and as I looked at the place where Joshua's voice was originating, he gradually started to become visible again. "No," said Joshua.
"Why?" asked Gaspar.
"Love thy neighbor as thou lovest thyself" - and here there was a long pause when I could imagine Joshua looking to the sky for an answer, as he so often did, then: "for he is thee, and thou art he, and everything that is ever worth loving is everything." Joshua solidified before our eyes, fully dressed, looking no worse for the wear.
Gaspar smiled and those extra years that he had been carrying on his face seemed to fade away. There was a peace in his aspect and for a moment he could have been as young as we were. "That is correct, Joshua. You are truly an enlightened being."
"I will be a bodhisattva to my people," Joshua said.
"Good, now go shave the yak," said Gaspar.
I dropped my rice ball. "What?"
"And you, find Number Three and commence your training on the posts."
"Let me shave the yak," I said. "I've done it before."
Joshua put his hand on my shoulder. "I'll be fine."
Gaspar said: "And on the next moon, after alms, you shall both go with the group into the mountains for a special meditation. Your training begins tonight. You shall receive no meals for two days and you must bring me your blankets before sundown.
"But I've already been enlightened," protested Josh.
"Good. Shave the yak," said the master.
I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when Joshua showed up the next day at the communal dining room with a bale of yak hair and not a scratch on him. The other monks didn't seem surprised in the least. In fact, they hardly looked up from their rice and tea. (In my years at Gaspar's monastery, I found it was astoundingly difficult to surprise a Buddhist monk, especially one who had been trained in kung fu. So alert were they to the moment that one had to become nearly invisible and completely silent to sneak up on a monk, and even then simply jumping out and shouting "boo" wasn't enough to shake their chakras. To get a real reaction, you pretty much had to poleax one of them with a fighting staff, and if he heard the staff whistling through the air, there was a good chance he'd catch it, take it away from you, and pound you into damp pulp with it. So, no, they weren't surprised when Joshua delivered the fuzz harvest unscathed.)
"How?" I asked, that being pretty much what I wanted to know.
"I told her what I was doing," said Joshua. "She stood perfectly still."
"You just told her what you were going to do?"
"Yes."
"She wasn't afraid, so she didn't resist. All fear comes from trying to see the future, Biff. If you know what is coming, you aren't afraid."
"That's not true. I knew what was coming - namely that you were going to get stomped by the yak and that I'm not nearly as good at healing as you are - and I was afraid."
"Oh, then I'm wrong. Sorry. She must just not like you."
"That's more like it," I said, vindicated. Joshua sat on the floor across from me. Like me, he wasn't permitted to eat anything, but we were allowed tea. "Hungry?"
"Yes, you?"
"Starving. How did you sleep last night, without your blanket, I mean?"
"It was cold, but I used the training and I was able to sleep."
"I tried, but I shivered all night long. It's not even winter yet, Josh. When the snow falls we'll freeze to death without a blanket. I hate the cold."
"You have to be the cold," said Joshua.
"I liked you better before you got enlightened," I said.
Now Gaspar started to oversee our training personally. He was there every second as we leapt from post to post, and he drilled us mercilessly through the complex hand and foot movements we practiced as part of our kung fu regimen. (I had a funny feeling that I'd seen the movements before as he taught them to us, then I remembered Joy doing her complex dances in Balthasar's fortress. Had Gaspar taught the wizard, or vice versa?) As we sat in meditation, sometimes all through the night, he stood behind us with his bamboo rod and periodically struck us on the back of the head for no reason I could discern.
"Why's he keep doing that? I didn't do anything," I complained to Joshua over tea.
"He's not hitting you to punish you, he's hitting you to keep you in the moment."
"Well, I'm in the moment now, and at the moment I'd like to beat the crap out of him."
"You don't mean that."
"Oh, what? I'm supposed to want to be the crap I beat out of him?"
"Yes, Biff," Joshua said somberly. "You must be the crap." But he couldn't keep a straight face and he started to snicker as he sipped his tea, finally spraying the hot liquid out his nostrils and collapsing into a fit of laughter. All of the other monks, who evidently had been listening in, started giggling as well. A couple of them rolled around on the floor holding their sides.
It's very difficult to stay angry when a room full of bald guys in orange robes start giggling. Buddhism.
Gaspar made us wait two months before taking us on the special meditation pilgrimage, so it was well into winter before we made that monumental trek. Snow fell so deep on the mountainside that we literally had to tunnel our way out to the courtyard every morning for exercise. Before we were allowed to begin, Joshua and I had to shovel all of the snow out of the courtyard, which meant that some days it was well past noon before we were able to start drilling. Other days the wind whipped down out of the mountains so viciously that we couldn't see more than a few inches past our faces, and Gaspar would devise exercises that we could practice inside.
Joshua and I were not given our blankets back, so I, for one, spent every night shivering myself to sleep. Although the high windows were shuttered and charcoal braziers were lit in the rooms that were occupied, there was never anything approaching physical comfort during the winter. To my relief, the other monks were not unaffected by the cold, and I noticed that the accepted posture for breakfast was to wrap your entire body around your steaming cup of tea, so not so much as a mote of precious heat might escape. Someone entering the dining hall, seeing us all balled up in our orange robes, might have thought he stumbled into a steaming patch of giant pumpkins. At least the others, including Joshua, seemed to find some relief from the chill during their meditations, having reached that state, I'm told, where they could, indeed, generate their own heat. I was still learning the discipline. Sometimes I considered climbing to the back of the temple where the cave became narrow and hundreds of fuzzy bats hibernated on the ceiling in a great seething mass of fur and sinew. The smell might have been horrid, but it would have been warm.
When the day finally came for us to take the pilgrimage, I was no closer to generating my own heat than I had been at the start, so I was relieved when Gaspar led five of us to a cabinet and issued yak-wool leggings and boots to each of us. "Life is suffering," said Gaspar as he handed Joshua his leggings, "but it is more expedient to go through it with one's legs intact." We left just after dawn on a crystal clear morning after a night of brutal wind that had blown much of the snow off the base of the mountain. Gaspar led five of us down the mountain to the village. Sometimes we trod in the snow up to our waists, other times we hopped across the tops of exposed stones, suddenly making our training on the tops of the posts seem much more practical than I had ever thought possible. On the mountainside, a slip from one of the stones might have sent us plunging into a powder-filled ravine to suffocate under fifty feet of snow.
The villagers received us with great celebration, coming out of their stone and sod houses to fill our bowls with rice and root vegetables, ringing small brass bells and blowing the yak horn in our honor before quickly retreating back to their fires and slamming their doors against the cold. It was festive, but it was brief. Gaspar led us to the home of the toothless old woman who Joshua and I had met so long ago and we all bedded down in the straw of her small barn amid her goats and a pair of yaks. (Her yaks were much smaller than the one we kept at the monastery, more the size of normal cattle. I found out later that ours was the progeny of the wild yaks that lived in the high plateaus, while hers were from stock that had been domesticated for a thousand years.)
After the others had gone to sleep, I snuck into the old woman's house in search of some food. It was a small stone house with two rooms. The front one was dimly lit by a single window covered with a tanned and stretched animal hide that transmitted the light of the full moon as a dull yellow glow. I could only make out shapes, not actual objects, but I felt my way around the room until I laid my hand on what had to be a bag of turnips. I dug one of the knobby vegetables from the bag, brushed the dirt from the surface with my palm, then sunk in my teeth and crunched away a mouthful of crisp, earthy bliss. I had never even cared for turnips up to that time, but I had just decided that I was going to sit there until I had transferred the entire contents of that bag to my stomach, when I heard a noise in the back room.
I stopped chewing and listened. Suddenly I could see someone standing in the doorway between the two rooms. I drew in my breath and held it. Then I heard the old woman's voice, speaking Chinese with her peculiar accent: "To take the life of a human or one like a human. To take a thing that is not given. To claim to have superhuman powers."
I was slow, but suddenly I realized that the old woman was reciting the rules for which a monk could be expelled from the monastery. As she came into the dim light from the window she said, "To have intercourse with anyone, even down to an animal." And at that second, I realized that the toothless old woman was completely naked. A mouthful of chewed turnip rolled out of my mouth and down the front of my robe. The old woman, close now, reached out, I thought to catch the mess, but instead she caught what was under my robe.
"Do you have superhuman powers?" the old woman said, pulling on my manhood, which, much to my amazement, nodded an answer.
I need to say here that it had been over two years since we had left Balthasar's fortress, and another six months before that since the demon had come and killed all of the girls but Joy - thus curtailing my regular supply of sexual companions. I want to go on record that I had been steadfast in adhering to the rules of the monastery, allowing only those nocturnal emissions as were expelled during dreams (although I had gotten pretty good in directing my dreams in that direction, so all that mental discipline and meditation wasn't completely useless). So, that said, I was in a weakened state of resistance when the old woman, leathery and toothless as she might have been, compelled me by threat and intimidation to share with her what the Chinese call the Forbidden Monkey Dance. Five times.
Imagine my chagrin when the man who would save the world found me in the morning with a twisted burl of Chinese crone-flesh orally affixed to my fleshy pagoda of expandable joy, even as I snored away in transcendent turnip-digesting oblivion.
"Ahhhhhhhhhhh!" said Joshua, turning to the wall and throwing his robe over his head.
"Ahhhhhhhhhhh!" I said, roused from my slumber by the disgusted exclamation of my friend.
"Ahhhhhhhhhh!" said the old woman, I think. (Her speech was generously obstructed, if I do say so myself.)
"Jeez, Biff," Joshua stuttered. "You can't...I mean...Lust is...Jeez, Biff!"
"What?" I said, like I didn't know what.
"You've ruined sex for me for all time," Joshua said. "Whenever I think of it, this picture will always come up in my mind."
"So," I said, pushing the old woman away and shooing her into the back room.
"So..." Joshua turned around and looked me in the eye, then grinned widely enough to threaten the integrity of his ears. "So thanks."
I stood and bowed. "I am here only to serve," I said, grinning back.
"Gaspar sent me to look for you. He's ready to leave."
"Okay, I'd better, you know, say good-bye." I gestured toward the back room.
Joshua shuddered. "No offense," he said to the old woman, who was out of sight in the other room. "I was just surprised."
"Want a turnip?" I said, holding up one of the knobby treats.
Joshua turned and started out the door. "Jeez, Biff," he was saying as he left.