THE GATE

By October, Yun had put me on a ration.

Three a day. No more. He had set the number after the morning I laid hands on eleven people between breakfast and noon and woke two days later on the cot in his cell, with electrodes glued to my scalp. Each healing took something out of me, he said, and he did not yet know whether it grew back.

So every morning, after the second sitting, I walked down to the gate with Tenzin on one side and Walt on the other, and I chose three.

I had defended insurance companies. I knew what it was to decide who got paid and who did not. Nothing in that work had prepared me for the road outside Dharma Mountain.

They lined it for half a mile. Tents. Station wagons with the seats folded down. Wheelchairs, oxygen bottles, children asleep on coolers. When the gate opened, the sound that went up was not a cheer. It was lower than that, and it never entirely stopped: hundreds of people saying please.

I had learned not to look at all of them. If I looked at all of them, I could not move. I looked at the ground, and then at one face, and then at the next.

That morning, the first was a logger with a crushed hand. The second was a grandmother whose eyes had clouded over. The third was a girl of six or seven with no hair, who patted my cheek while I knelt in front of her and asked whether it tickled.

When I stood up, the pain was already building at my temples, and the road was tilting. Walt had my elbow. Tenzin was turning me toward the gate.

“Mr. Armand!”

Nobody on that road called me that. To them I was the healer, the monk, the man from the television. I kept walking.

“Mr. Armand. Please. Just look at it.”

A hand thrust something in front of me. A photograph, creased down the middle. I saw it for perhaps a second: a hospital bed, a woman with a tube taped to her mouth, a child’s drawing pinned to the wall above her head.

The hand holding it belonged to a tall, thin boy of nineteen or twenty with red hair. He had pushed through from the back, and he was out of breath.

“She can’t come here,” he said. “She’s in Boston. They can’t move her. You’d have to come to her. I’ve got bus fare for both of us, I’ve got—”

Boston.

The word went through me like cold water. Boston was Ross under a desk. Boston was a detective I had never met and a question I could not answer. In six months on the mountain, I had not once let myself imagine going back.

“I can’t leave the mountain,” I said. It was what I told everyone who asked me to travel. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t understand. You know her. You—”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. Walt moved between us, large and gentle, the way he did forty times a day, and the gate was three steps away, and I took them.

Behind me, the boy’s voice cracked across the crowd.

“You don’t even remember her name, do you?”

I stopped.

I turned around. But the gate was already swinging shut, and the crowd had closed over him like water over a stone. I saw a flash of red hair, far back, and then not even that.

“What name?” I asked Tenzin.

He did not have the English. He only looked at me, with that small crease of worry between his eyes.

I told myself the boy had mistaken me for someone else. Then I told myself that everyone on that road believed I knew them, that it was a thing desperation did to people. Then I went to the zendo and sat down facing the wall, and for the first time since the morning with the broom, I could not follow a single breath.

I never saw him at the gate again.

I did not ask Walt whether he had left a name. I did not send anyone down the road to look. I had three more to choose in the morning, and three the morning after that, and it is astonishing how much good a man can do while he is avoiding one thing.

More than twelve years would pass before I learned whose photograph he’d held up to me.

By then, the boy with the red hair was a grown man.