THE GHOSTS

I had expected that when I stopped trying, the mind would finally go quiet.

It did. For about a day.

Then, like a pond whose surface has stopped moving, it began to show me what was at the bottom.

The first time, it was only a sound. During the second period of the morning sitting, somewhere between one breath and the next, I heard the soft, heavy thud of brass meeting bone. It was so clear that I opened my eyes and looked around the zendo, certain that someone had dropped something.

No one had moved. The candle burned straight. Tenzin sat across from me like a stone in a river.

I closed my eyes again, and Norman Ross fell to the floor of his office.

After that, he came every day.

Not as a ghost in a white sheet. Nothing so theatrical. He came the way the past always comes, in pieces, out of order, without permission. The glow of his computer screen. The smell of his aftershave. The way his eyes had moved, at the very last moment, from the monitor to me, and the small, puzzled frown that had crossed his face, as if I had interrupted him in the middle of something important.

And the scales. Always the scales. The brass weight of them in my hand, the cool edge of the base, the sound.

Justice comes to all of us sooner or later.

In Boston, I had told myself that Ross deserved it. That he was the go-between for a hired killer, that he had blood on his hands long before I ever touched him. As a lawyer, I could have argued it before any jury in the Commonwealth. Self-defense. Provocation. Necessity.

On the cushion, there was no jury. There was only a man sitting in the dark, and the sound.

I tried to do what Deshan had taught me. I noticed the thought, named it, and let it go. Remembering. Remembering. Then I came back to the breath.

Ross fell again.

Rachel came later, and she was worse.

Ross I could at least be angry with. Rachel had done nothing but believe me.

She came back as she had been that January, under the crystal chandelier of the club she had fought two years to get us into, the string quintet playing somewhere behind her. Green eyes. Short dark hair. A glass of Haut-Brion in her hand, and that fire in her voice.

She came back, too, as she had been the very first time, on a hot summer afternoon outside a new theater, smiling and saying nothing while her friend told me who she was. I had been holding a glass of red wine I never got to drink.

I want to go national, love. All I need is a big story.

I had given her one. The biggest story of her life.

She had not always been sweet, my sweetheart, and she had not always had much of a heart. But she had loved me in her own fierce, impatient way, and I had loved her.

I had begged her to run it. I had told her it would save my life.

On the cushion, I watched myself say it, again and again, and every time I wanted to reach across the years and shut my own mouth.

The voice on the car radio in western Massachusetts came back too, flat and professional, reading her name. Then the silence after I turned it off.

Some mornings I sat through all three periods with tears running down my face and into the collar of my robe. No one said anything. At Dharma Mountain, it was not unusual. I learned later that almost everyone who stayed long enough wept in the zendo sooner or later. It was considered, if anything, a good sign.

It did not feel like a good sign.

I brought it to Deshan, because I did not know what else to do.

This time I did not build a case. I did not prepare. I sat down on the cushion across from him and, before he could ask me anything, I told him the truth: that every time I sat, I saw a man I had struck down and a woman I had sent to her death, and that I could not make them leave.

Deshan listened without moving.

“Who is it,” he asked at last, “that sees them?”

I stared at him. For a moment, I hated him.

“That’s not an answer,” I said. “That’s the koan again.”

“It is always the koan.”

“I killed a man, Roshi.”

It was the first time I had said it out loud without leaving myself room for doubt. The words hung in the cold air of the little room, and I waited for something to happen. For him to recoil. For him to tell me to leave the mountain. For the walls to fall in.

Nothing happened. The candle burned. Outside, very faintly, I could hear Tenzin’s broom on the stones.

“Yes,” Deshan said. “And now you are here.”

“That doesn’t change what I did.”

“No. Nothing will change what you did.” He leaned forward slightly. “Do not sit to make it go away, Xavier. It will not go away. Sit to see who is carrying it.”

He rang the bell.

I could not do it.

That was the truth of the next two weeks. I understood what Deshan had said, or thought I did, and I could not do it. Every time I sat down to look at Ross and Rachel without flinching, I flinched. Every time I tried to see who was carrying them, I found only the weight.

And the pressure at my temples was no longer faint.

It came most mornings now, a dull band of tightness that began during the second period and lingered through breakfast. It sat, I noticed with a kind of grim amusement, almost exactly where I had struck Ross. I told myself it was guilt finding a way into the body. I had read about that sort of thing, too.

I did not mention it to anyone.

On the morning of the sesshin, the week-long silent retreat that Dharma Mountain held each spring, when a dozen or so lay students drove up from Sacramento and the Bay Area and filled every cushion in the hall, I sat down in the zendo at four o’clock with the headache already there, and with something else I had not felt since the night I tried to leave: panic.

Seven days. Fourteen hours a day on the cushion. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Nothing but Ross falling and Rachel lifting her glass under the chandelier, over and over, for seven days.

I lasted until the afternoon of the third day.

It happened in the middle of the fourth period.

The zendo was utterly silent. Snow had been falling since dawn, muffling everything, and the only sounds were the tick of the woodstove and the breathing of nineteen people. I was sitting with my eyes half open, the way Deshan had taught me, staring at the floorboards a few feet in front of the cushion.

And I saw blood on them.

I knew it was not real. Some part of my mind, the lawyer’s part, sat back and calmly observed that I was exhausted, that I had not slept more than four hours a night in weeks, that sensory deprivation produced hallucinations in perfectly sane people. The rest of me did not care. The blood spread slowly across the wood toward my knees, dark and glossy in the candlelight, and with it came the sound, the thud, louder than it had ever been, and the light from Ross’s computer screen, and Rachel’s voice saying all I need is a big story.

I stood up.

In the middle of a period, during sesshin, in total silence, it was the one thing you did not do. Eighteen heads did not turn, but I felt every one of them not turning.

I walked out of the zendo. Then I ran.

I did not get far. There was nowhere to go. The road down the mountain was buried under a foot and a half of snow, and I was wearing a robe and straw sandals.

I ended up behind the woodshop, where Walt and I had split logs a few weeks before, and I sat down on the chopping block in the falling snow and put my head in my hands.

I had failed. Not the koan; I had been failing the koan for weeks. I had failed at the one thing I had promised myself I would do, which was to stop running.

The pain at my temples was a hammer now.

I do not know how long I sat there. Long enough for the snow to settle on my shoulders and in my hair. Long enough to think, quite clearly and without any drama, that I would leave in the morning. Walk down the mountain when the road was clear. Go to the police in Redding and tell them everything. At least that would be an ending.

When I looked up, Tenzin was standing a few feet away, holding a blanket.

He should not have been there. He should have been in the zendo; everyone should have been in the zendo. He had walked out of sesshin too, for me, and he would have to answer to Deshan for it.

He put the blanket around my shoulders. Then he sat down in the snow beside the chopping block, crossed his legs, straightened his back, and closed his eyes.

He did not say anything. He did not need to.

After a long time, I got down off the block and sat beside him.

The snow kept falling. The pain kept pounding. Ross fell, and Rachel spoke, and the blood was there on the white ground in front of me if I wanted to see it.

I let it be there.

I did not push it away, and I did not chase it. For the first time, I simply sat with all of it: the man, the woman, the scales, the sound, the cold, the boy beside me, and the one who was sitting in the middle of it all, whoever that was.

We stayed until the bell rang for evening service.

When we stood, Tenzin brushed the snow off my shoulders the way he brushed the walkways, slowly and with great care, as if it mattered.

I did not leave in the morning.