THE SEARCH

Dr. Xu Yun had been looking for his teacher for eleven weeks.

He had started in the obvious places. The hospitals first: Massachusetts General, Beth Israel, Brigham and Women’s, Boston Medical Center, every emergency room and psychiatric intake desk in the city, with a photograph and a story that sounded, he knew, like the beginning of a bad joke. A Zen abbot from California. Nearly fifty. Shaved head, or it was when he left. He may not know who he is.

No one had seen him.

Then the shelters. The Pine Street Inn. St. Francis House. The Salvation Army on Massachusetts Avenue. Then the police, who were polite and took a report and looked at him the way the police in every country look at a foreigner reporting a missing grown man.

Eleven weeks, and nothing.

It should never have come to this.

Xavier had left the mountain in early winter, after two months alone in the cave, with his eyes too bright and his hands too warm and a promise to keep. To whom, he would not say. Yun had argued against it. He had argued against the cave, against the length of the retreat, against the strange, focused hunger he had seen growing in his friend for weeks. He had shown him the EEGs. He had shown him the numbers.

Your temporal lobes are running at a level no human brain was built to sustain. You are not charging a battery, Roshi. You are overloading a circuit.

Xavier had only smiled and put his hands on Yun’s shoulders, the way he did, and Yun had felt the current go through him like warm water.

Then you will have something new to write about, Doctor.

Xavier had flown out of Redding on a Tuesday. He had called from Logan Airport that evening, sounding tired and happy. He had never called again.

A week went by. Then two. Xavier had told him the city. He had never told him the name, or the street, or whose life he had decided was worth his own.

After that, Yun had packed one bag and gone to Boston himself.

At the end of the eleventh week, Claire found him a lead.

She had been searching too, from the other end, through the network of safe houses Xavier had founded. Her people worked the streets. They knew the soup kitchens and the church basements and the steam grates where men slept in January. And one of them, a woman who ran a free-meal program out of a parish hall in the South End, had seen a man who matched the photograph.

“He comes in most days,” Claire told Yun on the telephone. Her voice was shaking. “He wears a suit. A filthy old suit. He talks like he’s late for court. He told one of the volunteers he was a partner at Lancy, Berger, and Williams.”

Yun closed his eyes.

Lancy, Berger, and Williams had not existed for fourteen years.

He saw Xavier for the first time on a gray morning in the Public Garden.

He was walking fast along the path by the pond, in the remains of a dark suit that someone must have given him, or that he had found. His shoes were split. His face was bearded and gaunt. He carried a cheap plastic briefcase under his arm the way he had once carried a Louis Vuitton, and he moved through the crowd with the hard, impatient stride of a man who was billing by the hour.

Yun’s first impulse, as a friend, was to run to him.

His second, as a neurologist, stopped him dead.

He stood very still by the bridge and watched his teacher pass within ten feet of him without a flicker of recognition, and he made himself think.

Retrograde amnesia, almost certainly. A dissociative fugue, perhaps, laid over a physical injury: a temporal lobe pushed so far past its limits that something had given way. The mind had protected itself the way minds do. It had gone back to the last place it felt safe and in control, and it had closed the door behind it. In Xavier’s mind, it was 1995. He was thirty-five. He was a lawyer. Nothing after that had happened.

And if a stranger in a monk’s robe ran up to him now, calling him Roshi, telling him he was nearly fifty and the abbot of a monastery three thousand miles away?

Yun had seen what happened to fugue patients who were confronted too quickly. Panic. Flight. Sometimes something worse. A mind that had fled once could flee again, farther, and not come back.

No. Xavier could not be told.

He would have to be led.

It took Yun three days to prepare.

He let his beard grow. He bought clothes at a thrift store on Washington Street and slept in them for two nights so that they would look as though he had lived in them for months. He found a bench along the path where Xavier passed every morning, at almost exactly the same time, on his way to a courthouse that would not recognize him.

And before dawn on the fourth day, he did one last thing.

In his bag, wrapped in a handkerchief, was a small bottle he had brought from the mountain without quite knowing why. One of the young monks had pressed it into his hands at the gate. Oil, distilled from the magnolias in the little private garden outside the abbot’s quarters, the garden Xavier had planted with his own hands. Xavier had loved that smell more than any other. He had told Yun once that it was the scent of the walled yard of his childhood in Ecuador, the one place he had ever felt completely safe.

The olfactory bulb, Yun knew, connects directly to the amygdala and the hippocampus. It is the oldest road into memory in the human brain, older than language and older than reason. A smell can reach places a word cannot.

He touched a few drops of the oil to his wrists and his collar.

Then he lay down on the bench, pulled a layer of old newspapers over himself against the cold, and waited.

Xavier came at twenty past eight.

Yun watched him through a gap in the newspapers. He watched him slow, and glance over, and look away with the particular disgust of a successful man for a vagrant. He watched him walk on.

Then he watched him stop.

Yun smiled. Not the polite smile of a beggar, but the one he had given his friend across a thousand cups of tea. He let it be as wide and as bright as it wanted to be, and he held Xavier’s eyes with it, and he did not look away.

After a long moment, Xavier turned around and came back.

As he drew near, Yun sat up and threw off the newspapers, and he saw it happen: the faint frown, the hesitation, the slight lift of the head as the scent reached him. Xavier did not know what it was. But some part of him, the oldest part, did.

He stopped in front of the bench, puzzled and wary, and looked down.

Yun had rehearsed a hundred things to say. In the end, he said almost none of them. He let his friend take his measure, and call him what his old Ecuadorian pride needed to call him, and he laughed with real delight when he heard it.

El Cholo.

It was perfect. It was exactly the kind of name Xavier would have given him, before. Proof that the old man was still in there, arrogance and all.

And somewhere beneath the arrogance, the teacher.

They sat together in silence. Yun felt Xavier’s breathing slow, felt him settle, felt the restless lawyer’s energy beside him go quiet for a moment, the way it did on the cushion. A sparrow crossed the sky. A squirrel climbed a tree.

Now, Yun thought. While the door is open.

He reached out and gripped his friend’s arm, and looked straight into his eyes, and asked him the only question that mattered.

“Do you know what’s happened to you, Francis Xavier?”