Enzan: The Far Mountain (24 page)

“Still coming down?” I was wondering whether the weather was breaking further south. It might mean help could get to us. Then again, it might mean someone else could get to us as well.

“Yah. You?”

“The same. We’re digging out a bit, but the roads haven’t been touched.”

“Yeah,” he said dismissively. “Enough with the weather report. What I’m doing is working the phones for you, you dope. Trying to get a sense of when the weather will clear. The storm will probably break tonight. But then the real fun begins. The word is that nobody should expect much until sometime late tomorrow at best,” Mickey said.

“And … so?”

“Charlie Wilcox and his guys are trying to keep the Koreans buttoned up. The good news for you is the surveillance shift got snowed in along with everyone else. They got nothing to do but keep an eye out.”

“So how do you think it’ll play out?”

My brother grunted. “We can probably slow them down a little, but if they have other assets we don’t know about …” he let the implication dangle.

“That’s what I’m wondering.”

“Yeah. And the highways will get cleared down here first. Means they can probably get to you sooner than you can get out of there.”

“You got any contacts up here?” It hurt me to ask; my brother has made a minor career out of bailing me out of jams and he never lets me forget it.

“Not in your area. Whatever juice I once had with the PD is starting to evaporate. I talked to some people, but no dice. Everyone’s got their hands full with first-level emergency response. Even if they could get to you, they got bigger fish to fry. It’s like the end of the world all along the Eastern Seaboard.”

I sighed. “Call me if the Koreans roll.”

“Will do.” Neither of us sounded particularly happy. Neither of us could figure what else to say and the silence on the phone stretched out.

I gazed out the window: snow, the black trunks of trees. The cloud cover was still dense, so there was no sunset, just a thickening of shadows as the light went blue and grey and seeped out of the world.

Eventually, Mickey’s voice called me back from wherever my mind was wandering. “Ya got a plan, Connor?” His voice was quiet and bled of hope.

“Survive ’til dawn,” I said.

Chapter 24

Sue the Kitchen Lady put a bowl down in front of me. I poked around in it. “Steak in here somewhere, right?”

She laughed and wagged a finger at me. “Vegetable stew, Connor. Compassion for all things …”

In all honesty, it was pretty good: hot, thick with potatoes, and filled with garlic. I wolfed it down. I should have been grateful for it, but was feeling ornery.
The Burke luck holds true to form: I’m here in tofu land while somewhere out there somebody had been snowed in at an Outback Steakhouse.

It had been a long day and even though there were other people outside with me at various points, nobody had much energy for talking. The bruises on my face were also turning all sorts of colors. Probably discouraged small talk from strangers. Except for Sue.

I didn’t mind. It gave me plenty of time to think, and I had come to some conclusions. Not about how I was going to solve this mess, but rather about my role in creating it. The roshi and Yamashita both had rebuked me. Just thinking about that fact made my ears burn. But if I have come to admire men like the two of them, I’ve also learned in the end they are just men. They were wise and accomplished. But fallible, like us all. I thought they were wrong.

I went to see the roshi. He called me in when I knocked on the door and I found Chie sitting with him.

She stood up, as if alarmed. “I’ll go,” she told the priest.

I held up a hand. “No need. I want you to hear this.” The roshi was back in his robes and he sat in a chair, fingering his
mala
beads, his eyes calm. “Please join us, Connor. Sit. Please.”

There was an empty chair, but I ignored it. “I wanted to let you know I’ve been thinking about things,” I began. The roshi’s face had a half-smile on it. He nodded encouragement. “You were right … I wasn’t thinking clearly about what I was doing.” Chie didn’t say anything, but the subdued snort she gave was eloquent commentary:
No shit.
I plowed on.

“At first, I’ll acknowledge, it was just a way to prove myself.” I shrugged. “Ya know, be as good as my teacher. Ito, the guy from the government … he played on my vanity. I see that …” I swallowed. I took a breath. Another. “But it’s more complicated than that now, isn’t it?” I looked for acknowledgement in the roshi’s eyes, but he held himself very still and I couldn’t read him.

I waved a hand. “The whole Miyazaki thing … the horrible old man in the wheelchair. The uptight father worried about his career.” I looked directly at Chie then. “And you. And Lim.” Another wave of my hand. “The whole situation. And then I read Mori’s journal and it got even crazier. I mean, the fact that you are Yamashita’s granddaughter.” Finally I sat down, leaning forward with my forearms resting on my knees.

“I had to do something,” I said. “For him. For you.” I looked up and she smirked at me.

“Sure,” she said. “Your motives are so pure.” She wiggled her bottom on the chair and arched her eyebrows. “Remember last night, Burke?”

I felt my face burn, but I sat up straight. “I never said I was pure.” My voice was cold. “I said some of my motives were good ones.” I looked imploringly at the roshi. “You were a shrink. Since when does anyone ever do things for one simple reason? Aren’t we all a ball of tangled-up emotions and ideas?”

“True,” he said. But the word came out reluctantly.

“OK. Well what I’m telling you …” I paused and looked at each of them. “What I’m telling both of you is I thought Chie at least deserved the chance to meet her real grandfather.”

“I wasn’t looking for a new family,” she said tightly.

“Like the one you got is winning any prizes,” I said and regretted it the instant the words tumbled out.
Still working on that keeping-my-mouth-shut skill
.

She sat forward, tense. “It’s none of your business, Burke!”

“Maybe so,” I admitted. “But I made it my business, and you know why?” I looked quickly from one to the other. “Cause your life is a fucking mess, Chie. And I thought you deserved to know there is something else out there. Something better. Another way.”

“I’m not looking for another way,” she hissed.

I stood up and felt tremendously weary. “I realize that now.” She said nothing, her face narrow and closed off. I tried one more time. “I thought you were worth the try, though. Still do.” The roshi watched Chie carefully, but made no sound. I hoped he would break in on the tense silence, but he sai
d
nothing. I started to turn away from them, but paused. “You know what the saddest thing in the world is, Chie? Not the people who don’t find themselves. It’s the ones who’ve stopped looking.” I glared at both of them, then shuffled out of the office and closed the door softly on the room.

“You are angry,” Yamashita observed when I joined him and gave him another version of the same speech. I shrugged, but said nothing, all the steam bled out of me. “I do not need you angry now, Burke,” he continued. “I need you focused.” He was in his room, kneeling in front of the French doors. We shovelers had cleared a path all the way to this spot and the small patio outside was gradually filling with snow again, the mounds of the drifts we made rising up along the trench to the woodpile, their tops softening with new snowfall. “Come sit beside me,” he said quietly.

“I’m trying to do the right thing here,” I told him.

He smiled then, a rare thing for Yamashita. “Of course you are, Burke. It is one of your most endearing qualities as a person.”

“So why is everyone giving me such grief?” I demanded. It just popped out, and I felt embarrassed.
Want some cheese with your whine?

“Why do you need other people’s approval if you are in the right?” he asked, his head tilted to one side, faintly amused in that infuriatingly dispassionate way he has.

Where do you begin with a question like that? The beginning, I guess. I’d been raised that way: the Catholic universe of hierarchy, of sin and grace, and the weird moral mathematics of confession every Saturday. The Irish American compulsion to obey the rules, the feverish hope in the possible that warred against the ancient Celtic voice deep within that whispered the deck is stacked against us all.

There are two schools of thought in Zen about coming to awareness. The Soto sect thinks it comes after long effort and discipline. The Rinzai sect thinks with the proper guidance enlightenment comes upon you like a sudden storm. I realized at that moment they were both right. I’d been moving toward answering Yamashita’s question all my life, but it was only now that a type of clarity rushed in on me.

I thought about Yamashita’s question and what he was getting at. I suppose I’ve been looking for approval every day of my life. I grew up in a home with lots of kids and not much in the way of resources. Every day was a scramble for my folks, and each of us had to scramble in turn for some small slice of their attention. I did it through toeing the line, with being good, with succeeding at school. And it was a hard habit to break. I grew up and when my parents’ hold on me as authority figures waned, I found new ones at graduate school. I put myself through the rigors of a Ph.D. program not just for the joy of learning. It was the emotional roller coaster of challenge and struggle, occasional success and the distant approval of my professors that I was really craving.

I sat there in the snowbound monastery and snorted in amusement at myself. If you had asked me earlier, I would have said the whole graduate school experience was a cerebral one. In reality, I saw now that all those years were ones laced with emotion, with the fear of failing and the need for approval.

I looked at Yamashita sitting next to me, silent yet forceful, his dark eyes watching me, judging me. The martial arts, the Way I had chosen, were simply an extension of the same childish urges: the need to prove myself; the emotional connection to a distant authority figure; the need for approval and a sense of belonging that only came with conformity.

But I also realized I struggled against conformity as well. If I was good at school, I nonetheless chose pathways that were slightly odd. My mother wanted me to become a lawyer. I completed a degree in Asian history with an obscure research specialization. If my brother Mickey proved himself through a stint in the Marines, I spent decades on the hardwood floors of martial arts dojo, pursuing arcane skills from another world. My father put a picture of Mickey in his dress blues on the living room wall. When I told him I had earned a black belt, he just shook his head and said “nice.”

Mickey had the same stubborn rebellious urges as I did, but he had managed to channel them into a career as a cop. I, however, charted a path with little likelihood of gainful employment, cobbling together a living as an adjunct professor, never fully a part of academia. Always a man apart.

So Yamashita’s question reverberated through my head. This was the life I had created. It was time to admit it, to accept it.
Time to grow up
.

I took a breath. “It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks,” I said as I stood up. “I thought it was important that the two of you should meet. She needed to see you … to know …”

Yamashita blinked, then nodded. “Chie has spent years creating a certain life for herself.” His voice thickened with sadness. “I wish it were otherwise, but I think a sudden conversion is not likely.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but he held up a hand. His palm was wide and his fingers thick from a lifetime of gripping a sword. “Please, Burke …” he said. He sighed. “You have read it. The journal.” I nodded and heard his voice tighten. He swallowed. “Years ago I walked away from someone … I will not do so again.” He smiled, but it was a melancholy expression. Then he bowed slightly at me. “Thank you for giving me this last opportunity to make amends, Burke.” I should have picked up on the subtext of what he was trying to say, but only remembered it in retrospect.

He looked up at me. “And do not be too disappointed with the roshi. He is a good man and very often wise. But truly, he is out of his element here. I think the fear of violence coming to the zendo clouds his understanding.” Yamashita’s next sentence was uttered as if to himself. “He is as fallible as any of us.” Yamashita looked out into the darkness where the lights from the room threw a circle of brightness across the stone patio. He squinted and I could see him come back into the here and now. “The snowfall is slowing.”

“’Bout time.” I was relieved for the mundane conversation.

“It means things will begin. And these are things only you and I can deal with, Burke.” He smiled tightly again. “The roshi envisions a world of compassion, but what would happen if people arrive to take Chie?”

“He would try to reason with them. Appeal to their better sides.”

“Yes. But extortionists are not renowned for their altruism. So what would happen?”

“They’d take her.”

“And how would he feel about that, the roshi?”

“Sad, I guess …”

“But?”

I sighed. “He’s one of those people. You know: ‘The moral arc of the universe is long, but it inclines toward justice.’” Yamashita looked at me flatly. “Martin Luther King,” I added.

“I am familiar with the quote.” Some asperity in the voice. “I would have preferred a shorter arc for King’s sake.”

“I guess that’s what we do,” I said. “We try to shorten the arc.”

Yamashita rose, and if the movement was not as smooth as it once was, there was still that sense of grace and control and latent power. He bowed slightly and I bowed back. “Truly, Burke,” he said, and the lesson was over.

My teacher looked around at the room, taking stock. “Now I need your help with rearranging the furniture.”

As night set in, people clustered around the fireplaces, huddling together from deep instinct, faces crinkling in the fire’s heat and backs turned toward the cold and scary dark. Everyone was weary: weary with labor, weary of the storm. The wind had gone and the deep snowdrifts muffled all sound. You’d think the end of the storm’s battering would have been a relief, but the silence was complete and unnerving.

The roshi brought Chie to Yamashita’s suite, asking her to stay there for the next few nights. She looked at me with an expression of surly triumph:
Enjoy the night alone, Burke
. Maybe she thought that the roshi wanted to keep us apart in the interest of purity, that the carnal seed of doubt she had tried to plant had taken root in someone’s mind. I shrugged it off. I knew this change of her location was Yamashita’s doing. If we were expecting visitors, and we both thought there would be more than one, it would be best to know exactly where she was. We would have enough to do without having to find her too.

As the night wore on, the knots of people around the fires drifted off to bed. I could feel the drop in temperature outside. The cold seeped in through windows and was carried along the hallways by drafts. I brought more wood in for the fires, pausing outside to gaze into a night sky gone suddenly clear, the wash of stars astoundingly dense and bright.

Chie went to bed. Yamashita and I talked quietly, taking inventory, discussing possibilities. He had spent the day rooting around, scoping out hiding places, and looking for weapons. He had a good idea where he could stash Chie to make her hard to find while we dealt with any intruders. To do that, our arsenal included two knives, an old ax handle, some rope, a rusty ball-peen hammer, and a wardrobe mirror on a floor stand.

My teacher sat in a chair for once, his back against the wall to one side of the double glass doors that led onto the patio. There was a small reading lamp on a table at his side, throwing yellow light across him. It made him look old. He sat very still, and the shadows made it hard to tell if his eyes were open or closed.

I sat for a while, then got up to pace when I started to feel drowsy. Finally I sank to the floor in seiza and began the series of exercises he had taught me years ago on another night when we were expecting danger.

My hands flowed through the sequence of gestures, the cadence of my breathing linked with the silent words that sounded in my head. I felt myself simultaneously rising and falling. My eyes grew wide and I felt the press of sound and stillness all around me.