MONKEY MIND

The stillness lasted eleven days.

On the twelfth, my strength came back, and with it came everything else.

It arrived at four in the morning, in the shape of a bell. A monk I had not yet met walked the length of the dormitory striking a small brass bell with a wooden mallet, three strokes, then three more, and I sat up in the dark with my heart pounding and my hand reaching for a nightstand that was not there. For one disoriented second I was back in my penthouse, and the bell was my phone, and Ross was calling to tell me the deposition had moved.

Then the cold reached me. The dormitory had no heat. My breath hung in front of my face.

I was not in my penthouse. I was a fugitive in a borrowed robe, on a mountain in Northern California, and Norman Ross would never call anyone again.

I lay back down.

The bell came back, closer this time, and stopped directly over my head.

“Zendo,” said the monk. He was a heavyset man in his fifties, with a gray beard and the forearms of someone who had spent most of his life lifting things. “Five minutes.”

“I’m not feeling well,” I said.

“Nobody is,” he said, and walked on.

The zendo was a long wooden hall with a polished floor and a row of black cushions on each side. Five students sat on them, facing the wall. A sixth cushion waited at the end of the row.

Mine.

I had seen people meditate in movies. It looked restful. I folded my legs the way the others had, rested my hands in my lap, and faced the bare plank wall a foot from my nose.

Within ten minutes my knees were on fire.

Within twenty, the fire had spread to my hips and the small of my back, and my right foot had gone numb, and I had begun to understand that this was not going to be restful at all.

At the far end of the hall, Roshi Deshan sat facing the room, motionless. I could not see him without turning my head, but I could feel him there, the way you can feel a judge watching you from the bench even while you are reading your notes.

Follow the breath, he had told me the night before. Only that. When the mind wanders, come back.

I followed it for perhaps three breaths.

Then I was in Boston.

I was in Ross’s office, kneeling beside his body, and I was building my defense. Self-defense was weak; there was no weapon. Accident was better. A man with a heart condition, an argument, a fall. Who had seen me go down that corridor? The receptionist. The cleaning crew, maybe. Were there cameras on our floor? I could not remember, and the not remembering sent a jolt of panic through my chest so sharp I almost stood up.

I came back to the breath.

One breath. Two.

The Taurus. The rental agreement was in my name. My real name. Every police department in Massachusetts would have it by now. How long before someone traced it to Redding? How long before a sheriff’s deputy drove up that dirt road and found the car parked outside the gate?

I came back to the breath.

The bell rang. Forty minutes had passed. I had followed my breath for perhaps a minute of it, in total. The rest of the time I had been in court, arguing a case I could not win, in front of a jury that was not there.

We stood and walked slowly around the hall in a single line, and then we sat again.

It was not yet five in the morning.

By the end of the first week, I had a name for what was happening inside my head. The Buddhists had beaten me to it by about two thousand years.

Monkey mind, Deshan called it, smiling, when I described it to him in our first private interview. The mind that swings from branch to branch, never resting, chattering the whole time.

“Mine isn’t a monkey,” I said. “It’s a trial lawyer.”

“Same animal,” he said. “Better suit.”

I did not laugh. I was not ready to laugh at anything. I sat across from him in the small interview room, on another cushion that hurt, and I looked at him the way I had looked at hundreds of witnesses across a deposition table.

He was small and lean, somewhere past sixty, with a shaved head and very clear eyes. He did not fidget. He did not fill silences. In my experience, people who did not fill silences were either very honest or very well rehearsed.

I had not yet decided which he was.

So I did what I knew how to do. I investigated.

There were five of them besides me, and I studied each one the way Mickey, our firm’s investigator, would have, looking for the angle. Everyone has one. Ten years of law had taught me that much. The pious ones most of all.

The heavyset monk with the bell was Walt. He had driven long-haul trucks for twenty-two years, and now he ran the kitchen, and he chopped vegetables with a speed and silence that unnerved me. A woman named Hannah, maybe thirty, had been a nurse in Sacramento. Two brothers, Caleb and Sam, had come out from Ohio together. And there was Tenzin, a young monk from China, barely twenty, who spoke almost no English and seemed to spend every spare moment sweeping things that were already clean. He was the only one I never bothered to investigate. A boy with a broom, I decided, had no angle worth finding.

I looked for the money first. There had to be money. Somebody owned this land. Somebody paid for the rice and the timber and the fuel for the generator. I asked questions at meals, casually, the way I would have opened a cross-examination, until Walt set down his bowl and reminded me that meals were eaten in silence.

I looked for the sex next, and the power. A charismatic older man, a handful of devoted followers, an isolated compound behind a thirty-foot wall. I had read enough newspapers to know how that story usually ended.

I found nothing.

The books, which Hannah kept in a ledger in the kitchen, showed donations from a few dozen people scattered across California, most of them former students. Most entries were for less than fifty dollars. Deshan slept in a room smaller than mine. He ate less than anyone. He scrubbed the latrines on Thursdays.

It made me furious.

I could not have told you why at the time. Now I think it was because a con would have made sense to me. A con would have meant the world still worked the way I had always believed it did, that everyone was working an angle, and that the only difference between Michael Brown and me was that I had been better at hiding mine.

If these people were exactly what they seemed to be, then I had no excuse at all.

In the third week, I started planning my escape.

I did it at night, lying on my thin mattress in the freezing dormitory, listening to Walt snore three beds down. It was the only time my mind felt clear, because it was doing the only work it had ever been trained to do.

I had three hundred and twelve dollars left. I had counted the bills twice in the latrine and tucked them back in my wallet. The monks had returned it to me along with my clothes, washed and folded, the morning after they carried me in. Folded behind the bills was the cashier’s check from the bank, a little under three hundred thousand dollars, made out in my name. It was the most money I had ever held in my hand, and it was worth nothing at all. The moment I tried to cash it, every police department in the country would know exactly where to find me.

The Taurus was useless; the tank was empty, and it was a beacon besides. But Walt drove the monastery’s old pickup down to Redding every other Saturday for supplies. From Redding there were buses. From the buses there was Sacramento, and from Sacramento there was anywhere. Mexico, maybe. I spoke decent Spanish. A man with a little cash and no past could disappear in Baja for years.

I told myself I was only staying until the heat died down.

I told myself that every night.

During the day, I went through the motions. I rose at the bell. I sat facing the wall and argued my case. I raked the gravel paths and chopped wood and scrubbed pots, and I did all of it badly and resentfully, and I knew that every one of them could see it.

Nobody said a word.

That was the worst part. At the firm, resentment was a currency. You spent it, you traded it, you used it to make people flinch. Here, it bought nothing. I would slam a pot down in the sink and Walt would simply hand me the next one.

Only once did Deshan comment on it. We were walking back from the woodpile, and I was carrying an armload of split pine and complaining, under my breath, about the cold.

“You carry a great deal,” he said.

“It’s firewood,” I said. “That’s the job.”

He glanced at the logs in my arms, and then at my face.

“I was not talking about the wood.”

The silence did the rest.

I had always thought of silence as an absence. Up there, I learned that it was a pressure, like deep water. The longer you stayed in it, the harder it pressed, and sooner or later everything you had buried began to float up toward the surface.

Ross came first. I had expected that. More than once on that cushion I saw him fall, and each time I pushed him back down into the dark and went back to arguing my case.

Rachel I did not let in at all. Whenever her face began to rise toward the surface, I found something else to think about: the money, the pickup, the road to Mexico.

I was getting good at it. I did not yet know that the silence was patient, and that it could wait.

When the bell rang, I stood up with the others and walked the slow circle around the hall, and I did not look at anyone.

That night, I decided it was time to go.

I waited until Walt’s snoring had settled into its deepest rhythm. Then I dressed in my own clothes, which felt stiff and foreign after three weeks in a robe, and I put the wallet in my pocket and carried my shoes in my hand.

The dormitory door made no sound. I had oiled the hinge myself that afternoon with a rag from the kitchen. Old habits.

Outside, the cold was ferocious. The sky over the plateau was the clearest I had ever seen, so thick with stars it seemed less like a sky than a spill of salt across black stone, and the great white shoulder of Shasta glowed in the moonlight above the wall.

The gate was barred from the inside with a single timber beam. I had watched Walt lift it a dozen times. I could lift it myself.

The pickup’s keys hung on a nail inside the kitchen door. I had watched that too.

I crossed the courtyard in my socks, put on my shoes at the kitchen step, and reached for the door.

There was a light on inside.

I stopped. Through the small window, I could see the long kitchen table, and a single candle burning on it, and, sitting at the far end with a cup of tea between his hands, Tenzin.

I had never once seen him in his bed. I had assumed he rose before the rest of us. Now I wondered whether he slept at all. He looked up, and through the glass his eyes met mine, and he took in the street clothes and the shoes and the hand that was reaching for the door.

I waited for him to stand up. To call out. To ring the bell and bring Deshan and the others.

He did none of those things.

Instead, he reached across the table, picked up a second cup, and filled it from the pot.

Then he pushed it, very gently, toward the empty chair across from him.

I stood in the cold for a long time.

I could see the nail by the door from where I stood. I could see the keys hanging from it. Ten seconds, and they would be in my hand. Tenzin was slight and barely twenty, and he would not try to stop me. I was suddenly certain of that. By the time anyone else woke up, I would be halfway down the mountain.

On the table, the steam rose from the second cup and curled away into nothing.

I thought about Baja. About a room in a town where no one knew my name, and the bottle I would buy to help me forget it. About Ross, and Rachel, following me down that road and across the border and into every room I would ever sleep in, because there was no bus in the world fast enough to leave them behind.

I thought about the gate, and the forty hours, and the hand on my shoulder.

You have started to look past the mirror.

I opened the kitchen door.

The warmth inside was like a held breath let go. Tenzin did not say anything. He had almost no English to say it with, and I understood, sitting down, that he did not need any. He did not look at my clothes again. He waited until I had sat down across from him, and then he nodded once toward the cup.

I picked it up. My hands were shaking so badly that the tea spilled over the rim and burned my fingers.

We sat there together until the candle burned down, a disgraced Boston lawyer and a boy who swept clean floors, at a kitchen table in the middle of the night, saying nothing at all.

At four o’clock, the bell rang.

Tenzin stood up, rinsed both cups, and set them upside down on the rack to dry.

“Zendo,” he said, in his careful English, and for the first time since I had known him, he smiled. “Five minutes.”

I went back to the dormitory, took off my street clothes, folded them, and put on the robe.

And for the first time since I had come through the gate, I walked to the hall because I wanted to.