E. Doctorow - Loon Lake

I thought I saw the first crack of light under the window shade. I got off the bed and rolled my clothes and shoes into a bundle. I grabbed the stack of bills from the bureau. I unlatched the door quietly and closed it behind me. There were no other guests at the Pine Grove Motor Court. A thin frost lay on the windshield of the Model A. The wind blew.

With all my might I reared back and threw the bills into the wind. I thought of them as the Fat Lady’s ashes.

I found a privy up the hill behind the cabins and next to it an outdoor shower. I stood in the shower of cold springwater and looked up at the swaying tops of the pine trees and watched the sky lighten and heard through the water and the toneless wind the sounds of the first birds waking.

I dried myself as best I could and put on my clothes in a tremble of stippled skin and turned my back on the cabins and struck off through the woods. I had no idea where I was going. It didn’t particularly matter. I ran to get warm. I ran into the woods as to another world.

At Kamakura he climbed the spiral stairs inside the largest Buddha in the world. In the head of the largest Buddha, on the ledge of its chin, sat a tiny Buddha facing in the opposite direction. Simple idolatry held no interest for him, but a religion that joked held genuine interest. He felt all at once the immense power of a communication that used no words. I acknowledge Warren’s lifelong commitment — cancel lifelong commitment — fatal attraction for any kind of communication whether from words, flags, pigeons or the touch of fingertips in hope of a common language, but we must remember how we are vulnerable to the repetition of our insights so that they tend to come to us not as confirmation of something we already know but as genuine discoveries each and every time. And so he descended, and by degrees over a period of several days, drifted south along the route of the old Tokaido. He saw thousands of Buddhas lined up in trays in the tourist shops or ranked in legions at the shrines, some in lead, some in wood, some carved in stone and dressed in little knitted caps and capes. He came to see in this ubiquitous phenomenon the Buddha’s godlike propensity for self-division, the endless fractioning of himself into every perceivable aspect, an allegory made by the people of Japan from the cellular process of life. Thus enlightened, he turned his eyes on the people in the streets and the narrow shopping arcades, old women in black slapping along on their sandals, black-haired children of incredible beauty staring at him with their thumbs stuck in their plump cheeks, giggling pairs of young women in brightly colored kimonos, old shopkeepers with wispy goatees bowing as he passed, thoughtful peddlers, and young men who stopped in their tracks to glare at him and bear themselves with brazen umbrage — they were all the Buddha too in his infinite aspect. Traveling down this avenue of thought lit only by stone lanterns filled with small stones in lieu of flames, he saw the true dereliction of the planet and realized anew that convictions of friendship, love, the assumption of culture, the certainty of calendars were fragile constructs of the imagination, and there was no place to live that was truly home, neither for him nor for the multitudinous islanders of Japan.

In this he-took-for-appropriate state of mind, Warren arrived one day at road’s end, Kyoto, the strange city whose chief industry was meditation. He wandered from one monastery to the next, there were whole neighborhoods of them, but where, where was the sign that one was for him? He was afflicted with a fluttering humility, not daring even to make inquiries, hovering at this gate or in that garden or touching down for just a moment of indecision before the small window with the visitor admission in yen painted in black calligraphy on white cardboard stuck into the grate as if he were looking for a movie to see. Late in the afternoon, weary and full of self-condemnation, he happened to stumble up the step of a wooden verandah overlooking one of these beautiful monastery gardens of raked gravel and moss and stone. Thus launched, his large Caucasian person hurtled through a rice-paper door, splintering its laths, and like an infant being born, he found himself with the back half of him still on the porch side of the door and the front half in a room, looking with wide, even horrified eyes at the benign polished wood Buddha sitting facing him with a little altar of flowers on either side and the sinuous smoke of incense appearing to squinch up its eyes. He had made a terrible thunderous racket but nobody came running, nobody came shouting, and after he crawled the rest of the way into the room he set about calmly picking up the pieces and preparing in his mind the self-demeaning speech by which he would beg the chance to make the most extended and profound restitution. As it happened, the monastery was empty; he was to learn it was the rare annual holiday of this particular establishment in which everyone was set free for twenty-four hours. Only after searching the grounds did Warren find an old caretaker willing to come look and see the awful thing he had done. This old caretaker was smoking a cigarette, which he held in his teeth. He took in smoke with each inhalation and with each exhalation smoke streamed out of his nostrils. He gazed at the carnage, the plumes of smoke from his nostrils indicating the depth and strength of each drawn breath, and it seemed to fascinate him that such a perfect and modest structure as a sliding paper door should have been turned into this. He was a very short, extremely bald old man, and he wore a torn ribbed undershirt and a pair of dirty white muslin knickers with flapping ties at the waist but the peculiar thing was that he was not unpleasant to look upon, it did not create feelings of pity or fear or other degrees of patronization to look upon him. He picked up a broken length of lath and looked at it and asked a question in unintelligible Japanese. I’ll pay for it, Warren said and removed from his pocket a wad of yen. He unfolded the bills and looked at the old man squinting at the money through the cigarette smoke. Warren peeled off one bill and put it in the man’s hand. Then another. Then another. He kept waiting for a sign that he’d met the cost. He hesitated. The old man looked at him and peremptorily slapped his arm with the lath. Warren was so astonished he dropped the whole wad of bills in the old man’s hand. The caretaker put the bills into the pockets of his voluminous knickers, looked up at the Caucasian and swatted him again with the flat of the stick, this time across the side of his face. Then he laughed, and in so doing released his cigarette, which fell from his teeth and lay on the wooden floor glowing. Immediately Warren, thinking the whole place would go up, stepped on the tobacco ember with his large shoe, only realizing in that moment the defacement he had committed by stepping with street shoes on the monastery floors.

But the caretaker had turned and headed back to his garden shed with its straw brooms and clay pots and small pyramids of gravel. Warren experienced the uncanny sense of a sharply learned lesson. He slept that night at a Western hotel in the downtown section of Kyoto and found in the nightstand drawer a volume in English that seemed to be the Buddhist equivalent of the Bible. Gautama was an Indian prince kept at home by his father so as not to see life in any aspect but its most luxurious. But one day he went out and saw a beggar, an old crippled man, a monk and a corpse. He was thus able to conclude despite his own royal existence that life was suffering. Why couldn’t he have figured that out without leaving the palace? Warren wondered. If death exists, life has to be suffering. Did his father hide death from Gautama? How was that done? The book said the cause of all suffering was desire, the desire to have the desire to be. Perhaps a prince would never experience the desire to have, but how could he avoid the desire to be? If desire by its nature is not gratified before it realizes itself, does it not exist in palaces too? Does it not exist especially in palaces? Nevertheless, he liked the story. He trusted Gautama Siddhartha and the simplicity of his reasoning. Not many people could get away with that sort of reasoning. He trusted the eightfold path for defeating desire and transcending suffering.