THE WALL

Wanting to sit, I discovered, was not the same as being able to.

For the first few days after the night in the kitchen, I carried my new resolve into the zendo like a man carrying a lantern into a cave. I sat straighter than anyone. I counted my breaths with the care of a bookkeeper. One on the inhale, two on the exhale, up to ten, then back to one. Deshan had said it was the simplest practice in the world.

By the fourth day I had not once reached ten.

I would get to three, sometimes four, and then I would be somewhere else entirely: in a deposition room on State Street, in the back seat of a car on Storrow Drive, in a courtroom where a jury foreman was rising slowly to his feet. I would come back to myself minutes later, still breathing, still upright, and realize I had no idea what number I was on. Or whether I had been counting at all.

Back to one.

The knees went next. In the first weeks, pain had been something I could resent, and resentment had kept me warm. Now that I had chosen to be there, I had no one to blame for it. By the second period of each morning sitting, a hot wire ran from my left hip to my ankle. By the third, my right foot had gone so completely dead that when the bell rang and we rose for walking meditation, I stumbled into the monk beside me.

It was Walt, the heavyset former trucker who ran the kitchen. He caught my elbow without looking at me and kept walking, as if this happened every day. Perhaps it did.

At the end of my first week back on the cushion, Deshan called me to the interview room.

The room was small and nearly bare: two cushions facing each other across a strip of worn tatami, a single candle, a brass bell. Deshan sat with his back to the window. In the gray light before dawn he looked older than he did in the hall, and somehow larger.

I bowed, sat, and waited.

“Counting breath,” he said. “How is it?”

“I can’t get to ten.”

He nodded, as if I had told him something pleasant. “Good. Now you know your mind.”

“That’s good?”

“Most people never find out.” He looked at me for a long moment. “You are ready for a question.”

I felt something in my chest sharpen, the old feeling from law school when a professor called on me and I knew the answer. A question. Finally, something I could work with.

“Who am I?” Deshan said. “Not your name. Not your work. Not your story. Before all of that. Who is the one who is breathing? Who is the one who cannot get to ten?”

He rang the bell. The interview was over.

I went at the question the only way I knew how. I built a case.

I was not my name. Fine. Names were labels. I had changed enough clients’ names in confidential filings to know that. I was not my career. I had left that behind in Boston, along with my office and my reputation. I was not my body. I’d read somewhere that you got a whole new body every seven years, and I was proud of remembering it.

So who was left?

The mind, obviously. The one doing the asking.

I brought this to Deshan three mornings later, laid out in order like a closing argument. I had rehearsed it on the cushion for two full days.

He listened to the whole thing without moving. When I finished, he picked up the bell and rang it.

“Very clever,” he said. “Go back.”

The next time, I argued the opposite. There was no self at all; the question was a trap; the answer was that there was no one to answer. I had found that idea in a book in the monastery library, and I quoted it nearly word for word.

Deshan rang the bell before I had finished.

“Book,” he said. “Go back.”

The third time, I tried silence. I bowed, sat, and said nothing, letting the stillness speak for itself, the way I imagined a real Zen student would.

Deshan waited a long time. Then he leaned forward and said, quite gently, “You are performing for a jury, Xavier. There is no jury here.”

He rang the bell.

The sheriff’s deputy came on a Tuesday.

I heard the engine before I saw the car. It was a sound I had not heard in weeks, grinding up the last switchback in low gear. I was at the woodpile outside the gate with Walt, loading the cart, when a tan cruiser with a light bar rolled onto the plateau and stopped beside the Taurus.

The Taurus had not moved since the evening I arrived. It sat where I had left it, coated in dust and pine needles, with a Boston rental sticker in the corner of its windshield.

Every muscle in my body told me to run. Walt put a split log in my arms, which made it difficult.

“Keep stacking,” he said, without moving his lips.

The deputy was young and sunburned and polite. He walked around the Taurus twice, wrote down the plate, and looked through the driver’s window. By then Deshan had come out through the gate, unhurried, wiping his hands on a rag.

“Morning, Roshi.”

“Good morning, Tom.”

“This vehicle belong to one of your people?”

“It came to our gate some weeks ago,” Deshan said. “A man drove it up from Redding. The tank was empty by the time he got here.”

“Rental outfit in Boston reported it overdue. There’s a note on the wire, too. Boston PD would like a word with the fellow who signed for it. A lawyer. Something to do with that insurance mess that was all over the news.” The deputy pushed back his hat. “Name of Armand. You know where I could find him?”

I had stopped breathing. I was standing twenty feet from them in a gray work robe, with a month’s beard and my hair cropped to the scalp, holding a piece of pine.

Deshan considered the question with great seriousness.

“The man who drove that car sat outside this gate for forty hours,” he said. “Without food. Without water. I have not seen him since.”

“He just walked off?”

“I could not tell you where he went. I can tell you that he is not here.”

The deputy looked at the wall, and the woodpile, and at Walt, and at me. His eyes rested on my face for perhaps a second. Then they moved on.

“Well,” he said. “If he turns up.”

“You will be the first to know, Tom.”

A tow truck came that afternoon and took the Taurus away. I watched from the top of the wall as the car that had carried me out of Boston went down the mountain on a hook.

I found Deshan in the garden, weeding.

“You lied for me,” I said.

He did not look up. “Did I?”

“You told him I wasn’t here.”

“I told him the man who drove that car is not here.” He pulled a weed and shook the dirt from its roots. “Is he?”

I started to answer and found, to my irritation, that I could not.

“That is your koan, Xavier. I only lent it to the deputy for a moment.” He handed me the weed. “Do not mistake it for a favor. A man the police cannot find still has to find himself. It is the harder search, and no one will tow anything away for you.”

I could not have said exactly when I began watching Tenzin.

He was barely twenty, the youngest person at Dharma Mountain by ten years at least, and he had almost no English. He swept the walkways each morning before the first sitting, and again after the noon meal, and again before evening service, though as far as I could tell the walkways were never dirty. He worked in the kitchen. He rang the wake-up bell when the monk who usually did it was ill. He did not appear to have any particular rank or any particular ambition.

And he sat like a mountain.

In the zendo, I would steal glances at him during the long second period, when my knees were screaming and my mind was arguing with Deshan in the interview room that existed only in my head. Tenzin never moved. Not a shift of weight, not a scratch, not a sigh. His face was neither strained nor blissful. It was simply there, the way the morning light on the floorboards was there.

One afternoon I found him sweeping the long path between the dormitory and the woodshop, and I stopped him.

“How do you do it?” I asked. “Sitting. How do you sit so still?”

He looked at me, then at the broom, then back at me. I saw him reach for words he did not have.

Finally he held up the broom and swept, once, a long, slow stroke across the clean stones.

“Only this,” he said.

Then he went back to sweeping, and I stood there feeling, absurdly, as if I had just lost an argument to a boy of twenty with a vocabulary of forty words.

A late spring snowstorm came in the middle of the night, and by morning the mountain had disappeared behind a white wall of cloud. The zendo was unheated except for a single woodstove at the far end, and in the hour before dawn our breath hung in front of us in the candlelight.

I had now been sitting with the question for nearly four weeks. Deshan had rung me out of the interview room so many times that I had stopped counting. I had stopped rehearsing answers, too, not out of wisdom but out of exhaustion. I simply did not have any left.

What I had instead was a kind of low, constant fury.

It was not aimed at Deshan, not exactly. It was aimed at the question itself, at its smugness, its refusal to be solved. In ten years of practice I had never met a problem I could not take apart if I worked hard enough. I had cross-examined surgeons and engineers and a Nobel laureate in chemistry, and I had found the hole in every one of their stories. And now I was being beaten, morning after morning, by three words.

Who am I?

One morning, during the third period, I realized I had been clenching my jaw so hard my teeth ached. I unclenched it. A minute later I found it clenched again.

That was the morning I first noticed the pressure.

It was nothing, really. A faint tightness at the temples, the kind of thing I had felt a thousand times at the end of a long trial day. I put it down to the cold and the poor sleep and the anger, and by the time the bell rang for breakfast it was gone.

It was Walt, of all people, who finally told me what was happening to me.

We were splitting firewood behind the woodshop, the axe ringing in the frozen air, when he stopped, leaned on the handle and looked at me with the patient expression of a man about to explain something obvious.

“You’ve hit the wall,” he said.

“What wall?”

“Everybody hits it. Some people at two weeks. Some at two years.” He set another log on the block. “It’s when you finally run out of things to try. All your tricks stop working, and you realize you can’t think your way through.”

“And then what happens?”

Walt shrugged and swung the axe. The log split cleanly in two.

“Then you either leave,” he said, “or you stop trying to get over it.”

“That’s it? Stop trying?”

“Not stop sitting. Stop trying.” He smiled for the first time since I had known him. “Took me four years to figure out the difference. Maybe you’re faster.”

That night, I lay awake in the dormitory listening to the wind push against the windows, and for the first time since I had arrived at Dharma Mountain, I did not rehearse anything for the morning. I did not prepare an answer. I did not plan a strategy.

I just lay there, a man who did not know who he was, in the dark.

It was the most frightening thing I had ever done.

And somewhere underneath the fear, so faint I almost missed it, was something that felt almost like relief.