Motherless Brooklyn

“Okay, but I get off in half an hour.”

“Well, just keep it in mind.” I was running out of patience with Walter. I freed myself to tap his shoulder farewell. The dull young man looked down at my hand, then went back inside.

I paced the block to the corner and back, flirting with the Zendo, seeking my nerve. The site aroused reverence and a kind of magical fear in me already, as though I were approaching a shrine-the martyrdom of Saint Minna. I wanted to rewrite their plaque to tell the story. Instead I rang the doorbell once. No answer. Then four more times, for a total of five, and I stopped, startled by a sense of completeness.

I’d shrugged off my tired old friend six.

I wondered if it was in some way commemorative-my counting tic moving down a list, subtracting a digit for Frank.

Somebody is hunting Minna Men, I thought again. But I couldn’t be afraid. I wasn’t game but hunter this morning. Anyway, the count was off-four Minna Men plus Frank made five. So if I was counting heads, I should be at four. I had an extra aboard, but who? Maybe it was Bailey. Or Irving.

A long minute passed before the girl with the short black hair and glasses opened the door and squinted at me against the morning sun. She wore a T-shirt, jeans, had bare feet, and held a broom. Her smile was slight, involuntary, and crooked. And sweet.

“Yes?”

“Could I ask you a few questions?”

“Questions? &m”›

“If it’s not too early,” I said gently.

“No, no. I’ve been up. I’ve been sweeping.” She showed me the broom.

“They make you clean?”

“It’s a privilege. Cleaning is treasured in Zen practice. It’s like the highest possible act. Usually Roshi wants to do the sweeping himself.”

“No vacuum cleaner?” I said.

“Too noisy,” she said, and frowned as if it should be obvious. A city bus roared past in the distance, damaging her point. I let it go.

Her eyes adjusted to the brightness, and she looked past me, to the street, examining it as though astonished to discover that the door opened onto a cityscape. I wondered if she’d been out of the building since I saw her enter the evening before. I wondered if she ate and slept there, whether she was the only one who did or whether there were dozens, foot soldiers of Zen.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “What were you saying?”

“Questions.”

“Oh, yes.”

“About the Zendo, what you do here.”

She looked me over now. “Do you want to come inside? It’s cold.”

“I’d like that very much.”

It was the truth. I didn’t feel unsafe following her into the dark temple, the Deathstar. I would gather information from within the Trojan Horse of her Zen grace. And I was conscious of my ticlessness, didn’t want to break the rhythm of the conversation.

The foyer and stairwell were plain, with unadorned white walls and a wooden banister, looking as if it had been clean before she began sweeping, clean forever. We bypassed a door on the ground floor and went up the stairs, she carrying the broom ahead of her, turning her back to me trustingly. Her walk had a gentle jerkiness to it, a quickness like her replies.

“Here,” she said, pointing to a rack with rows of shoes on it.

“I’m fine,” I said, thinking I was supposed to select from among the motley footgear.

“No, take yours off,” she whispered.

I did as she told me, removed my shoes and pushed them into an orderly place at the end of one of the racks. A chill went through me when I recalled that Minna had removed his shoes the evening before, presumably at this same landing.

Now in my socks, I followed her as the banister wrapped around through a corridor, past two sealed doors and one that opened onto a bare, dark room with rows of short cloth mats laid out across a parquet floor and a smell ocandles or incense, not a morning smell at all. I wanted to peer inside but she hurried us along, up another flight.

On the third landing she led me to a small kitchen where a wooden table and three chairs were arranged around a thwarted back window, through which an emaciated shaft of sunlight negotiated a maze of brick. If the massive buildings on either side had existed when this room was built they might not have bothered with a window. The table, chairs and cabinets of the kitchen were as undistinguished and homely as a museum diorama of Cree or Shaker life, but the teapot she set out was Japanese, and its hand-painted calligraphic designs were the only stretch, the only note of ostentation.

I seated myself with my back to the wall, facing the door, thinking of Minna and the conversation I’d heard through the wire. She took water off a low flame and filled the pot, then put a tiny mug without a handle in front of me and filled it with an unstrained swirling confetti of tea. I warmed my chapped hands around it gratefully.

“I’m Kimmery.”

“Lionel.” I felt Kissdog rising in me and fought it back.

“You’re interested in Buddhism?”

“You could say that.”

“I’m not really who you should talk to but I can tell you what they’ll say. It’s not about getting centered, or, you know, stress reduction. A lot of people-Americans, I mean-have that idea. But it’s really a religious discipline, and not easy at all. Do you know about zazen?”

“Tell me.”

“It’ll make your back hurt a lot. That’s one thing.” She rolled her eyes at me, already commiserating.

“You mean meditation.”

“Zazen, it’s called. Or sitting. It sounds like nothing, but it’s the heart of Zen practice. I’m not very good at it.”

I recalled the Quakers who’d adopted Tony, and their brick meetinghouse across eight lanes of traffic from St. Vincent’s. Sunday mornings we could look through their tall windows and see them gathered in silence on hard benches. “What’s to be good at?” I said.

“You have no idea. Breathing, for starters. And thinking, except it’s not supposed to be thinking.”

“Thinking about not thinking?”

“Not thinking about it. One Mind, they call it. Like realizing that everything has Buddha nature, the flag and the wind are the same thing, that sort of stuff.”

I wasn’t exactly following her, but One Mind seemed an honorable goal, albeit positively chimerical. “Could we-could I sit with you sometime? Or is it done alone?”

“Both. But here at the Zendo there?s regular sessions.” She lifted her cup of tea with both hands, steaming her glasses instantly. “Anyone can come. And you’re really lucky if you stick around today. Some important monks from Japan are in town to see the Zendo, and one of them is going to talk this evening, after zazen.”

Important monks, imported rugs, unimportant ducks-jabber was building up in the ocean of my brain like flotsam, and soon a wave would toss it ashore. “So it’s run out of Japan,” I said. “And now they’re checking up on you-like the Pope coming in from Rome.”

“Not exactly. Roshi set the Zendo up on his own. Zen isn’t centralized. There are different teachers, and sometimes they move around.”

“But Roshi did come here from Japan.” From the name I pictured a wizened old man, a little bigger than Yoda in Return of the Jedi.