(An excerpt from FUJIRAMA)
The day of the big one started out pretty much like any other day, with the sun rising over Pacific mists and the great city of Tokyo trembling with uncoiled energy as its inhabitants hit the streets to face the daily grind. The city throbbed with the frenetic activity of fifty million souls navigating winding alleyways and straight-edged canyons of concrete and steel. Most of those lost inside the urban labyrinth were in too much of a rush and too absorbed in the business of their busy lives to cast a glance at the strange cloud formations forming on the western horizon, even after the ground first trembled gently underfoot.
Even then, Tokyo was up and on the go, too busy to stop the wheels of commerce for a minor tremble, what with shoppers shopping, trucks trucking, preachers preaching and trains straining with end-of-the-year madness. The earth shivered again, but life went on. There were crows crowing, kids kidding, watchmen watching and squatters squatting. There were plotters plotting, teachers teaching, re-writers re-writing, pundits pontificating, taxis idling, helicopters hovering and cashiers counting coin.
Far from the whirl of action in the world’s largest metropolis, nestled away deep in the verdant fold of hills overlooking Mount Fuji, life at Yamaha Temple was also getting underway, marked by the muted sounds of meditation, the gentle splashes of morning ablutions and the squawk and cry of birds darting through the trees. The wind whispered through the forest, a pristine stream gurgled its way downhill, the temple dog barked as it chased its shadow in the early morning sun, and jumping carp slapped the surface of the pond.
Alert and awake at first light, Jianhong had been up most of the night, having again slept with difficulty. Collin couldn’t do much to help her, but she didn’t mind having him so near. The soar rawness was mostly gone, and her leg was well on the mend, but the immobility imposed by the splint vexed her.
Between the trauma of being plucked off the mountain and the medicated discomfort of the healing regimen, she was out of sorts. Add to that the rash series of micro tremors that had unsettled her during the night and it was only natural that she should face the day grumpier and jumpier than usual.
What made things better, and worse, was being with Collin all the time, separated only by an invisible wall of decorum. They’d never been closer, yet he was keeping his distance. Why was he so quiet? Why did he fall asleep so fast at night? Why was there never anyone to talk to when the ground started give?
…Ah, the Zen of it all! During meditation hour, Collin sat squat-legged on the floor of a drafty, unlit hall, mimicking the motions of the monks, pretending to be at one with the nothingness, but there was a fine line between nothingness and boredom. No one paid him much heed; sometimes it seemed like they didn’t see him at all. His participation was strictly “voluntary” which, as he quickly inferred, was Zen for “obligatory,” leaving him little choice, unless he chose to eat nothing. The contractions in his stomach reminded him that lunch hour was near, but the task at hand, trying to empty his mind on an empty stomach while sustaining an uncomfortable sitting position had his aching legs in knots.
Shin jitsu fu ko ko setsu han nya ha ra mi ta shu soku setsu shu watsu...
The mantra might as well have been nonsense, it was pure mumbo-jumbo to his ears, not that the metronomic chant didn’t have a hypnotic appeal in some sly, subliminal sort of way. Resist it as he might, he soon found his mind drifting languidly in the steaming word stew.
The rigors of temple life were not the worst of it, what really riled him was losing Jianhong just when he felt he had finally found her.
He didn’t like the prospect of rising with the sun, doing menial chores, and teaching English wasn’t his thing either. He didn’t like the isolation, and he didn’t like the way the abbot lorded over Yamaba, enforcing his tyranny with pithy quips and corny koans, but it would all be more bearable if there were someone special to share it with.
The food was simple and lacking in flavor, mostly unidentifiable vegetables, and when it wasn’t entirely lacking in flavor it was most often bitter. Mountain cuisine was one of those acquired tastes, like bitter leaves, that left him hungry and dissatisfied.
Tempted as he was to slip away and slink back to his room to nap, he knew there was no bed to crawl back to. The cozy coverlets and soft futon mattresses were punctually put away at sun up and wouldn’t make another appearance till after sundown.
Shin jitsu fu ko ko setsu han nya ha ra mi ta shu soku setsu shu watsu...
Hmm. Nice background ambiance. In a paradoxical way, going through the motions with the chanters gave him quality time with his own thoughts. It reminded him of church in a way, the kind of lockstep pattern of soft mumbling that prompted his mind to stray and wander. There were worse ways of killing time than sitting around humming hymns. As a kid he’d while away the first half of the communion service looking forward to the tiny sip of wine and the tasteless wafer, the second half of the service he could look ahead to coffee hour, where a cornucopia of cookies and crumb cakes awaited delectation.
He could shut out the kaleidoscopic color of the world by keeping his eyes closed, but he had no defense against the hypnotic drone drilling in his ear. In a way, the routine was sufficiently mindless and boring to help him grasp the essence of nothingness. But, by the same logic, wasn’t having sex a way to grasp the essence of sex? By vigorously pursuing his vices with visceral exertion, had he not been on the tail of some deep Buddhist truth all along?
And yet, then again, there was something liberating and reinvigorating about not having one’s visual field overwhelmed with eye candy every which way you looked, in every last nook and cranny. The prospect of a trim-free existence was a far cry from his dashing knight-errant days in Tokyo, but hey, he was alive and well and not behind bars, so it behooved him to count small blessings.
The metronome drone of the monks chanting in tempo put him at ease even as his mind continued to wander. A late morning breeze rustled through the pine boughs and groves of bamboo while bird twitter tickled the air.
Rise and fall, rise and fall, like ripples in pond. Like the groans of hunger in his belly, like the moans of love hunger in the small hours of the night, like his unending ache for material things in a material world…
The subtly fragrant aroma of rice being steamed in the kitchen out back wafted through the meditation hall, and though rice gruel was not much to look forward to, at least it was something to look forward to.
During a lull in chanting, the abbot quietly lumbered over.
Oh, no. What now?
“You need man-tora,” the holy man announced in a mild, meddling kind of way.
“Say what? I need what?”
“For you, foreign man, foreign man-tora.”
“What am I supposed to say, thanks?”
“Peace and mossy.”
“What’s that?”
“Your man-tora.”
“Peace and mossy? That’s my mantra?”
“Repeat and repeat,” The abbot instructed. He hovered over his newest acolyte, repeating his inane instructions, over and over, until the call of karma called him elsewhere.
Peace and mossy, Peace and mossy, Peace and mossy.
What a raw deal! Why, a half-baked potato was better than a mantra like that! It was a truly nutty example of cultures in collision, one of those hardy Zen gems, a hijacked haiku, of sorts, or so it seemed until Collin suddenly got it. The monk didn’t mean to say “mossy” he probably meant to say “mercy.”
“Peace and mercy, peace and mercy,” Collin incanted over and over, faster and faster, as if trying to self-hypnotize or perhaps self-abnegate if not self-destruct.
A custom-designed mantra, did it get better than this? The monotonous incantation was as good as an invitation to nap.
“Peace and mercy, peace and mossy, piss and mossy…”
He did his Boy Scout best to stick to the script, to sit Buddha-legged for the duration, though his pained limbs demanded shifting to a more casual pose, feet forward on the mat, leaning back on his palms. After a while, the sheer flatness of the floor was almost enough to make him miss the comfort of office furniture, even the creaky, wobbly swivel chair at his old workstation.
When he wasn’t fighting pins and needles he was surprised to discover he could grasp bits and pieces of what the abbot was saying, no doubt bolstered by the holy man’s showy knack for knocking about polysyllabic English words out of context. Thinking of each utterance as a word puzzle, he could piece the ‘peace and mossy’ together by playfully filling in the blanks.
He sat there, legs aching, squinting with eyes half-open, peeping not at the esoteric Buddha image secreted away on a shelf deep inside the temple but at the reflections of the sky on the surface of a glass-encased s calligraphic scroll. By adjusting the position where he sat, the glass neatly picked up the reflection of a sublime diagonal slope that loomed in the distance directly behind their backs.
He amused himself by toying with the reflection, alternately winking his eyes left and right to make the mountain jump back and forth. Fuji’s symmetry held up pretty well in reverse, but for its odd-looking hat. A lopsided lens cloud was hanging off to one side.
All sounds start to die the minute they are born…
Yawn. Ho-hum. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Circles of life widen, ever widen, widen even as the center weakens…
Yawn. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Long after we are dead and gone, the things we have set into motion will be in motion still…
Yawn. Yippie yay, yippie yi, yippie yo! yo! yo!
Lapping the shore of a future we can never know...
Oh no, no, no, no!!!
Unseen stratospheric winds left Fuji barebacked and exposed but for a curious veil of wind-chiseled condensate mist hovering directly above the peak. It was one of those rare days when the mountain was all but stripped of clouds and fog, whipped clean of cover but for the feathery lens cloud crowning its cap.
Shin jitsu fu ko ko setsu han nya ha ra mi ta shu soku setsu shu watsu
Just then, the ground shook violently. Roosters and chickens clucked, startled crows cawed and the temple dogs barked wildly. The abbot, unperturbed, went on chanting as before, but he was virtually alone in his odd serenity. Eyes popped open, fists clenched, heads cowered among his apprehensive flock. The meditation-induced aura of calm was broken by worried glances and fitful whispers.
“Ji-shin?”
“Ji-shin da!”
An earthquake!
A short sharp jolt shook the temple. Sudden and sharp, it caused everything that wasn’t nailed down to shift, jump or tumble, and then it sprang back the other way. It was as if the planet had abruptly changed gears, making an adjustment to its normal rotation. Without warning or an audible rumble, everything underfoot started to undulate.
Startled, Collin leapt up and rushed outside, resisting the rolling thrust as best he could. Stumbling as the ground shook sideways, he clambered out of the prayer hall. By the time he got to the bottom of the steps to fish for his shoes amidst the footwear, the ground shook again. He kept his balance, but just barely; he felt like a straphanger on rush hour train that had just slammed on the brakes to avoid a suicide, only there were no straps to hang on to.
Fuck the shoes. He darted across the gravel paved grounds in his bare socks, then cut sharply through the moss garden, peace and mossy, peace and mossy, to get where he wanted to go. The spongy surface of the garden wiggled from the same subterranean swing, but it offered a better surface to fall on.
Dizzy but determined he plowed ahead, running all the way to Jianhong.
He found her shaking under a shaking tree. Alone, and immobile, she was apoplectic with fright; crumpled up into a ball on the ground. Shuddering in distress, she clawed and clutched at the trunk of a creaky cherry tree as if clinging to the mast of a rocking boat in a stormy sea.
Staggering towards her, he dropped to the ground to kneel at her side, covering her protectively with his large frame, as if to assuage her fear of being flung overboard.
A precipitate series of aftershocks drummed the earth, pulsing upward from some deep mysterious place under the surface. The bamboo grove vibrated almost musically, stalks and leaves rustling as if tickled by the wind; only there was no wind.
Everything shook and rippled. It was big, and wasn’t over yet. Could it be the big one? Bing, bang, bong!
Bonnnggg!!!
The temple bell clanged sharply. There was nobody anywhere near the bell tower; the phantom bell had rung of its own accord. The guilty clapper was still swaying back and forth, continuing to absorb the oblique thrust of the quake. The clapper clanked and clanged as the shocks were carried up from the ground right into the recesses of the wobbly wooden tower. The upright wooden beam absorbed and amplified the unearthly blows, causing the pendulous cast iron bell to swing and ring in synch with the tremor underneath.
“Con-ling!” Jianhong cried shakily.
“Oh, babe…”
“Hold me.”
“Hey, I, I love you!”
They hugged.
With each aftershock that followed, she clung more tightly to him, the press of his bristly whiskers against her smooth cheeks a balm to her fear of being alone. Shortly the ground settled again, what tremors were left were echoes of the earlier disruption.
The ground continued to tremble lightly, the shock waves roiling back and forth at widening intervals, and then it went still, only to lift lightly again. Like a planetary orgasm, the quake had set something in motion that needed release and once released, took time to subside.
Jianhong held on tight, flinching at every little shift.
The silent, violent tossing of the earth was both familiar and strange, it was like the sum of all the little earthquakes that had come before, strung together, compacted and released at once. It had come out of nowhere, like the night tremor of a restless leg and it ceased, giving way to peacefulness, without warning as well. But in that short interim, it had rendered the day-to-day solidity of the world as insubstantial as a nightmare.
As the faint contractions played out, they gave way to imperceptible shudders followed by a sweet tranquility.
Fuji loomed in the distance, snow-capped and serene and as aloof as ever.
They clung to one another as if the end of the world had come and in a way it had. A brave new future was being born in the gyre, obliterating all rival destinies.
After an almost unbearable stillness, the forest came alive again, erupting in song. A chorus of chirps, caws and bird call filled the void, followed by the squawk of pent-up hens and the predatory cries of prowling hawks and soaring eagles. There were thrush and warblers, terns and ptarmigans and thunderbirds, too. The hills were alive again, joyously.
“Whoa! Whew!” Collin exclaimed, getting up to survey the damage. “Man, like wow! That was really something!”
A stone lantern had toppled; otherwise their small corner of the garden looked pretty much as it had just minutes before.
“The big one?” ventured Jianhong, her moist hand still violently squeezing his.
“Dunno. Y’okay?”
“Okay.”
“I think it’s over.”
“Con-ling?”
“What is it, Jian-jian?”
“Nothing…”
“Con-ling?”
“Yeah?”
“Um. When we were in Tokyo, you know, and whenever there was earthquake, I was so scared.”
“Yeah, I remember you telling me, in the office.”
“And it always made me, made me want to be with you.”
“With me?”
“With you.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” he answered, reaching out, pulling her close. “You might just get it!”
“Get what?”
“Oh, Jian-jian, jian-jian jian.”
They hugged for a short eternity.
