"We took some cake down to the doorman and Pete got kind of friendly in the elevator on the way back up."
Aihwa just stared at her from enormous dark eyes. She pushed back her bangs, holding them to her temple for a moment.
"What do you mean, 'friendly'?"
Dina smirked, licked her finger, and shook curry powder into the dip.
"Oh, nothing. But you really ought to keep that boy on a tighter leash."
In the bathroom Peter gazed speculatively at the spattered porcelain bowl, steadying himself for the attempt to rise from his knees. He was a bit surprised to find himself here, in this supplicatory posture, even though he had started off the evening energetically with a hearty dose of margaritas.
Particularly disturbing was that he could not make the connection in his memory between the moment, which seemed hours ago, when he'd been in the elevator with Dina, and his present undignified circumstances. He stood up slowly, gingerly.
Not that he had been all that dignified in the elevator, he recalled with a groan. Dina was one of Aihwa's best friends, and he knew he'd find himself trying to answer some awkward questions presently.
But for the moment he felt much better. He rinsed his mouth repeatedly, and squeezed some toothpaste onto his fingers to swab his gums. After splashing a little water into his face he felt ready to rejoin the party, perhaps even to enjoy himself in spite of his false start.
The seminar room was a depressing place, with high cold ceilings and paint flecking from the heating pipe in the corner. The stiff wooden chairs seemed mute survivors from another more horrible era. Peter frequently had the sensation that the room itself was unstuck in time, shuttling back and forth between the present and the year 1930, or perhaps 1931. The Seminar in Japanese Buddhism attracted a decidedly mixed assortment of the more Bohemian graduate students, and was presided over by the chief eccentric, a Japanese priest by the name of Hakeda. He was a highly revered monk in the most esoteric of Japan's Buddhist sects, the Shingon, who had come to this country originally to do a doctorate in Sanskrit at Yale. Hakeda was believed by a few devotees among the students to be a Bodhisattva who had arrived with the mission of spreading the dharma in a benighted land.
"Today," intoned Dr. Hakeda, "the pilgrimage to eighty-eight temples in Shikoku. Kobo Daishi's tomb is at Koyasan, but his birthplace is on this island. Why eighty-eight? Why this pilgrimage?"
Nelson Rader was, as usual, ready.
"Well of course, " he drawled, "a pilgrimage is a means of orienting oneself in sacred space. Thus journeying to the holy place is a voyage to the center of the cosmos."
With his long bony nose, close-set eyes and habitual snort, Nelson looked and sounded very much like a cross-eyed horse.
"In the case of a pilgrimage with multiple sites, like the Stations of the Cross, or the Shikoku pilgrimage, there is simply a more complex restructuring of the Center - in essence, the whole journey takes place within the Center."
"But that ignores the whole function of the in-between spaces, the 'ma', the insterstices of the pilgrimage!" protested Alice Exum. "The movement from profane space into sacred space and out again constitutes the dynamic, as you move from temple to temple. But you're quite right-the whole journey is a circle. It really doesn't go anywhere."
Alice was an exquisitely plump woman ten year's Peter's senior who favored extravagant plumed hats and diaphanous blouses. She looked outrageously out of place in the bleak seminar room. Unlike the others, largely religion and philosophy majors, she was in literature. It seemed to Peter that she deliberately cultivated an air of world-weariness, of narcissistic melancholy like that which pervaded the atmosphere of the Tale of Genji. She had the jazzy reputation of having been the lover of one or two of the more flamboyant faculty, who apparently used her as a pawn in the incomprehensible professorial power games, gambits which raged beneath the surface, erupting every now and then in a vicious or scandalous incident for the amusement of the students.
Peter found it impossible not to meditate on her well-fleshed upper arms, imagining himself kneading them slowly, murmuring to them.
"It resonates!" cried Ralph Strand, a T'ang dynasty historian and the most excitable of the group. "It's like wave motion between each set of points, between temples. The emptiness resonates! It reverberates!"
"It's rhythmic," ventured Peter.
"That's right," beamed Hakeda. "It's rhythmic!"
The park was long and narrow, squeezed between the cliffs and the river. Over the years Peter had beaten a track through the remnant forest along the Hudson, had, walking or running, evolved a recurrent trail around the park into which, as into a well-worn groove, he could fall mechanically, almost unconsciously, and which seemed to propel him of itself.
To the north the terminus was Grant's Tomb, an immense stone stupa, and to the south the Soldiers and Sailors monument. In the east was the enormous bronze statue of Shinran, the medieval Japanese saint, standing ponderously in broad, conical hat before the Buddhist Academy and gazing into the west at the baleful cliffs of New Jersey and, on evenings of spectacular sunset, at the Western Pure Land beyond.
Around and around this course Peter would plod or gallop, and when he was lucky an ecstasy would begin to surge within him, and on particularly auspicious evenings he would burst from his regular circuit as if hurled by a cyclotron, and race to the north along Riverside Drive, transfixed by the sight of Washington Heights like a city set on a hill, illuminated by the sunset and electricity in the gathering twilight - the Holy City let down from heaven, Holy Mount Zion.
In the winter bits of the river froze, and the noise of the miniature ice floes rushing past each other, colliding, scraping, was like the sound of ice cubes tinkling in a million mixed drinks. Now, in early April, the ice was gone. Peter sniffed the air as they ambled along beside the water and tasted the salt of the incoming tide, the promise of the beyond washed in by the ocean.
Aihwa, beside him, concluded sourly: "Anyway, I think you should have the decency to leave my friends alone, even when you're drunk."
"You know I'm not interested in your American friends," said Peter. "Not seriously."
"Sometimes," replied Aihwa, "that worries me. To you I'm an exotic bird. You're just attracted to the strange and extraordinary."
"Well, you are somewhat extraordinary," Peter rejoined. They walked on along the river to where the seagulls circled and wheeled down to fish for sewage in the water.
She was in fact an exotic bird, Peter reflected, although her personal exoticism had little to do with his own esoteric and mystical quest. Her grandfather had made his way to Manila from Swatow in the twenties and with her father had built up a modest commercial empire. They traded in an assortment of commodities of which Peter was only dimly cognizant. Actually he knew very little of the family, other than it was prosperous enough to have dispatched Aihwa, a sister, and two brothers to university in America. Aihwa herself was far from a mystic, applying herself with great vigor to the study of feminist anthropology and struggling to come to terms with her class background, whatever precisely it was.
He had met her in April two years before while she was still an undergrad, when her art history class was on a tour of the Metropolitan Museum's Asian collection. She was standing in front of a lacquer screen with four panels depicting the seasons, and with uncharacteristic bravado Peter had stepped up and recited from the Pillow Book: "In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful."
She had at first just stared at him with her round, wide-eyed gaze. But Peter thought he detected some encouragement beneath the Oriental mask, and in the following weeks he began to pursue her with an almost obsessive energy. This she found quite amusing and, she later revealed to him, was fodder for a good deal of merriment among her Barnard friends. He supposed he had finally worn her out with his importunity. He judged she had become fairly fondly attached to him since.
Yet at times he felt she was so distant in temperament that she might as well have been on the moon. And he felt himself cocooned in a sort of permeable bubble, detached, close, and yet millions of miles away. Not only Aihwa, but the rest of the human specimens who hove into view or swam past his bubble appeared often as insubstantial caricatures. Some of them were pleasant enough, but none of them seemed to possess the capacity to penetrate into his heart of hearts where his private and mystic desire for transcendence, escape, ascent, a glimpse of the flower burning in the day, throbbed and ached relentlessly.
"Gachirin-kan," intoned Dr. Hakeda, "contemplation of the full moon. The monk meditates on the painting of the full moon, Gachirin-kan Honzon. What do you think?"
"The full moon represents absolute truth, enlightenment," declared Nelson, "but it also symbolizes the mind, both its conscious and unconscious contents. In a sense, the moon is the mind."
"But the moon is not always full," commented Alice. "It's always in a cyclical process. Why is it a symbol for enlightenment, which presumably is changeless?"
Ralph Strand was wriggling with excitement. He had an odd habit of crossing his right leg over the left, then slipping his right foot under his left ankle. Peter had tried to duplicate this pose, but his legs were too stocky or bowed, and he found it impossible. Perhaps this was some tantric contortion, but it seemed an exceedingly pointless one. Strand was almost tying himself into knots today, and his intensity made Peter nervous.
"Don't forget the Pure Land imagery!" he exclaimed. "There's a poem which likens the moon, hiding itself behind a mountain, to the mind going west into the Pure Land paradise."
That's a very nice poem, mused Peter. He wished that he could remember some nice poems, but he felt oddly distracted today. He glanced around the seminar room, feeling strangely distant from the rest. The sight of the peeling yellow paint made him faintly nauseous. Alice looked old today, brittle, almost fossilized, sweat frozen among the tiny hairs on her upper lip.
Peter hurried out of the seminar as soon as it was completed and set out on his customary afternoon walk, hoping to calm his mind. Sometimes he would sit quietly under the dome of the cathedral before going down into the park. Into the giant maw of the cathedral, thought Peter, into the stone tomb, the heart of the mountain. He loved this cathedral almost religiously, for its tremendous proportions, its cool, cavernous interior.
But the liturgy, the few times he'd attended services, held no mystery for him. Only the processional caught his imagination, the straggling peregrination of robed bishop and altar boys across sacred space, and the odor of incense it diffused. The scent was tantalizing. It materialized for an instant, musty and tart, and then dispelled. He loved the cathedral for its weird contradictions - the huge ceramic vases beside the high altar donated by the pagan Japanese emperor, himself a manifest god; the lavishness of the edifice itself juxtaposed against the stark squalor of Harlem. In fact it perched on a cliff overlooking one of the most devastated corners of the ghetto.
Occasionally he walked below, amid burned out and abandoned apartment houses, some sporadically occupied by junkies. Gazing up at the stone cathedral soaring over the sordidness, Peter felt a welter of mixed emotion at this stark conjunction of first and third worlds.
Inside, the dome was unfinished. The raw rock pillars were ordinarily a source of comfort, of stolid peace, but today they looked ragged and sore. Peter tried to sit, to absorb the peace which this massive space usually instilled in him. But today the rock did not speak to him at all. If anything it seemed vaguely menacing, as if accusing him of some sort of betrayal.
He walked down the broad cathedral steps and west toward the park, uneasily avoiding people's eyes. Those he chanced to glance at wore an expression of intense anxiety, or appeared distorted with fear. He descended the steep stone steps to the park, holding his breath to avoid the everyday stench of urine, which today stank, overpowering.
There were high rocky places in the park, and Peter clambered up the side of a massive stone pile, then began leaping from rock to rock, imagining himself a Castanedan brujo. He tried to sit, perched on his haunches, but his restlessness drove him back to the path. A woman approached, walking a poodle. Peter was aware of an enormous gasping, rasping noise, a vast labored breathing. It contracted and expanded and drew his own breath in with it. When he inhaled the trees shivered. When he exhaled they relaxed. Peter realized with a start that the sound was the dog's panting. The woman walked by with a rustling clatter like an enormous snake in dead, dry grass.
Terrified, he began to run. The leaves on the trees shriveled, curling and turning brown before his eyes. Poisonous gases swirled out of the rocks. His jeans burst into flame, and he rolled on the ground to smother the fire, then pulled them off. His shirt clawed at him like a living creature. He tripped on a rock and cut his shoulder.
Peter struggled to his feet. There, striding down the path, coming to judge him, was his professor of Chinese history on his daily constitutional, now fearfully manifested as Emma-O, Yamaraja, the King of Hell.
In the hospital Peter awoke on a mattress on the floor. The room was empty, dark except for the light streaking through a small window in the door. He felt relieved, his muscles relaxed, as though he had slept a thousand years and now awakened, yawning. He stared up at the ceiling, not trying to move. He remembered now that he had been in the mountain, been in the womb of the mountain, been born from the mountain. Elated, he sat up in bed, then felt a tinge of fright.
Why then was he still flying? He glanced about the room, at the tiled floor, the green foam slippers beside the mattress. This must be the interstellar vessel, and of course he was part of the crew. He began to regain his confidence. The ship is powered by friction, he decided, putting on the slippers. He began to slide slowly around the room, carefully rubbing the soles of his foam boots against the tile to provide the maximum amount of friction, so vital to this mission of navigating to the moon.
After about a week Peter was allowed visitors, and he was ready for them. He had quickly tired of the company of his fellow inmates. Among them were three named Fred, and this coincidence was an endless source of hilarity to one of them, but Peter and the rest no longer found it funny. Another of the Freds was a tall, thin, lugubrious man in his forties who explained that sometimes he just needed to get away from his wife and children to concentrate on his writing, and the hospital was as good a place as any. Another was a bearded giant who, during square dance time, would stomp and swing like a dervish, performing intricate moves to invisible music.
There was an elderly woman who could, and did, recite the whole Megilla by memory, in Hebrew and in English. There was a teenager who had jumped out a window and broken both ankles, who would hobble up to Peter and demand with great intensity whether Peter believed in group mind, and whether it was possible to think and grow rich. It turned out that the latter question derived from the title of a book the boy was reading, but in Peter's mind it took on the fearsome proportions of a Zen koan.
Aihwa was the first visitor to arrive, and she brought him a purple iris in a tall slender vase.
"Poor baby, poor baby," she murmured, hugging him. Peter felt stiff and distant. Part of it was the thorazine. What could he say to this woman?
"It's very exotic here. My doctor is Rumanian and half the nurses are Filipinas."
Aihwa had tears in her eyes. "You know I love you just the way you are."
What did she mean by that? It sounded maudlin. Peter was embarrassed. He wished she would leave. Now she was crying.
That night it was difficult for him to sleep. He awoke in the semi-darkness and sat up in bed. They had moved him out of isolation to a double room down the hall. Through the window he could see the full moon, a dazzling white, with wisps of cloud blowing past. The movement of the clouds made it seem as if the moon were hurtling through the sky.
On the second day they had asked him "Do you know where you are?" Peter, partly because it seemed to mollify his psychiatrist, had tentatively produced the appropriate response - "in St. Luke's Hospital" - at least as a working hypothesis.
Beside the hospital was the cathedral. St. Luke was a healer. What was St. John? A visionary? Chiseled into the cathedral's stone façade were four saints depicted as monstrous winged creatures with bestial faces. Which one was St. John?
The questions were making Peter restless and anxious. He stood up and walked to the window. There, to the right, was the shadowy bulk of the cathedral. Below him, in the moonlight, stood Gabriel with wings outstretched, blowing a long narrow trumpet out over Harlem.
Peter stood entranced, the hospital window framing in fearful juxtaposition the full moon and the angel. Peter saw the moon in its perpetual and infinite cosmic cycle, being born, devoured by nothingness, being born again, empty in its fullness, void in its splendor. And he saw, fixed and immovable, the Angel, heralding hope and destruction, liberation and judgment, trumpeting into the abyss the truth that time must have a stop.
Several months later Peter ran into Alice Exum on campus.
"I'm sorry I didn't visit you, but I couldn't. Because I was up there myself two years ago. They won't let you go back to visit."
"Oh," said Peter uncomfortably.
"I see a doctor in Brooklyn now, and I'm much better. It was depression."
"Uh-huh," Peter said. He knew he should feel some bond of sympathy with this woman. She was being kind to him, and making herself vulnerable in this revelation. But he just felt embarrassed. What could he say?
"That's a shame, Alice. I mean, what happened to you. It really is."
They walked to the East Asian library together in silence. They took the antiquated elevator down into the stacks. She got out at the third level, Literature, and he rode down to the fourth, Religion.
He pushed open the metal gate, then walked out into the corridor and stopped, daunted by the sight of the ranks of books, golden Chinese characters imprinted on the spines. Volumes of sutras and countless volumes of obscure commentaries lay stacked in the half-light in this cramped repository of archaic wisdom. Most of them had not been opened for decades. Peter started down the aisle, peering at the call numbers in the dimness, searching meticulously.
--Ross Bender