THE LAST ASSASSIN

We were still lying in each other’s arms when someone began hammering on the door.

“He’s here!” It was Yun, and he was close to shouting. “Roshi, the killer is here!”

I was on my feet and dressing before he had finished. Claire scrambled for her clothes. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely manage the buttons, and then she was sobbing.

“They’re going to kill you. We have to run. Please, we have to run!”

I took her face in my hands.

“No one out there is going to kill anyone,” I said.

Then I opened the door.

Yun stood just outside it, and he was not alone. A tall, thin man held him from behind, one long arm locked across his chest. In his other hand was a revolver, old and heavy and black, its muzzle pressed into the soft place beneath Yun’s jaw. The man had red hair cut short and standing up in spikes, and he was looking past Yun, straight into my eyes.

The man from the Boston street. The man from the bus in Dubuque. The man from the motel in Winnemucca.

I met his gaze.

“Randy,” I said. “Let Dr. Yun go. I’m on my way back to Boston now. I’m going to do what I promised.”

Behind me, I heard Claire’s breath catch.

“You know this man?” she whispered.

“Yes.” I did not take my eyes off his. “His name is Randy O’Brian.”

“Don’t.” Randy’s voice was hoarse, as though he had not used it in days. “Don’t you say my name like we’re friends. You don’t get to do that. Not again.”

The revolver pressed harder. Yun closed his eyes. His lips were moving, very slightly, and I knew without hearing that he was reciting the Heart Sutra.

“You promised me,” Randy said. “A year ago. You sat in that garden out there and you held my hands and you looked me in the eye and you promised me. And I believed you. You know what that cost me? To believe a man like you?”

“I know.”

“You don’t know anything.” His face twisted. “I drove to Boston. I sat by her bed for nine days, waiting for you. I told her you were coming. I told a woman in a coma that the man who killed her was coming to bring her back, and I held her hand and I told her to hang on just a little longer. Nine days. And you never came.”

“I was in Boston, Randy. I lost myself. I didn’t know who I was.”

“I saw you!” The shout cracked against the wooden walls. “On the street. On Boylston Street that morning, running right past me like I was nothing. Like she was nothing. Same as before.”

He was breathing hard. “I was nineteen the first time. I stood at your gate with her picture in my hand, and you wouldn’t even look at it. Then last year I came back, like a fool, and you held my hands.”

Behind me, Claire made a small sound. I did not turn around.

I did what I had come back to the mountain knowing how to do.

I let my mind fall silent. Every thought, every fear. I gathered my attention into a single point, as narrow and steady as a beam of light, and I aimed it at the man in front of me.

“Randy,” I said softly. “Be at peace.”

For a moment, I felt it begin. The tingling above my ears. The faint, warm current gathering in my chest.

Then Claire said my name.

Only that. Barely a whisper, from somewhere behind my left shoulder. But in that one word was everything we had been to each other an hour before, and my mind turned toward it the way a flower turns toward the sun.

The beam shattered.

Pain came instead. It came the way it had come in the zendo fourteen years before, a blade driven in at the temple, white and blinding. I staggered and caught the door frame. The room tilted. For a second, I could not see.

When my vision cleared, Randy had taken a step forward, dragging Yun with him, and the revolver was no longer at Yun’s throat.

It was pointed at my chest.

“What was that?” he said. “What did you just try to do to me?”

I could not answer him. The pain was still ringing in my skull like a struck bell.

“You were going to do your little trick on me. Weren’t you? The thing you did on TV. Make me calm. Make me nice.” He laughed, and it was a terrible sound. “That’s what you people do. Lawyers. Monks. Same thing. You find the loophole.”

He cocked the hammer.

“Xavier, please,” Claire said. “Please.”

There is a moment, in every trial, when the lawyer knows his case is lost. Every argument has been made. Every witness has been heard. There is nothing left in the briefcase. The good lawyers know what to do in that moment. They sit down.

I had been a good lawyer.

I let go of the door frame. I did not try to reach for the silence again, or for the light, or for any of the things I had learned in the cave. I simply stood there, a man pushing fifty in jeans and a T-shirt, with a headache and a gun pointed at his heart.

“You’re right,” I said.

Randy blinked.

“You’re right. I was going to use it on you. It was a trick. It was the same thing I did to your mother, fourteen years ago. I found a way around you instead of facing you.” I took a breath. “So let me face you now.”

The revolver did not move. But he was listening.

“Your mother was a single mother,” I said. “She was in an accident, and afterward she had a stroke, and she lay in critical condition at City Hospital with no health insurance and no money of her own. My client should have paid for her care. Instead, I dug up records from two different hospitals showing an earlier stroke, and I used them to argue that the accident had nothing to do with it. I knew how to make that argument sound stronger than it was. The judge gave me summary judgment.”

Randy’s mouth had begun to tremble.

“Before the hearing, her lawyer stood outside the courthouse and told me to call her if I ever grew some compassion. I laughed at her, walked back to my car, and put Bach on the stereo. Two weeks later I won.” My voice broke, and I let it. “I never once asked what had become of her. Not even when a boy held her photograph in front of my face at the gate.”

The revolver had begun to shake.

“I’m not asking you to forgive me. I don’t deserve it, and nothing I do in Boston will change what I did. But you were right about one thing. I have spent my whole life finding the loophole. I’m done. There isn’t one here. There’s only your mother, in a bed, and a debt I owe her.”

I held out my open hands.

“If you need to shoot me, Randy, I understand. But if you do, there will be no one to go to Boston. And she has waited long enough.”

For a long time, nobody moved.

The only sound in the room was Claire, crying quietly behind me, and somewhere outside, very far away, the wind moving through the magnolia leaves.

Then Randy made a sound I had heard only once before in my life, in a hospital corridor, from a man who had just been told his wife would not wake up. It was not quite a sob. It was something older than that.

His arm fell away from Yun’s chest. The revolver tipped toward the floor. He did not drop it; he simply forgot he was holding it. Yun reached over, very calmly, and took it out of his hand, the way he might have taken a scalpel from a nervous intern.

Randy sank down onto his knees in the doorway and put his face in his hands.

I knelt in front of him. I did not touch him. I did not use the current, or the light, or anything else. I only stayed there, where he could see me, until he was ready to look up.

When he finally did, his eyes were red and wet and very young.

“A single mother,” he said. “How did you know she raised us on her own?”

“Because it was in her file,” I said. “I saw it in 1995 and turned the page. Last year, after you came, I read every word. I wanted to know who she was.”

He nodded slowly. He wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“She would have liked you,” he said. “That’s the hell of it. She liked everybody.”

“Thank you, Randy.”

Yun slipped past me into the room and sat down heavily on the bed beside Claire.

I looked at the two of them.

“It’s time for me to go. I’m taking the next flight to Boston.”

“Then I’m coming with you,” Claire said instantly.

“So am I,” said Yun.

I glanced at Randy. “Then it seems the four of us are going. Is that all right with you?”

Randy nodded.

“First,” Yun said, “I need a word with you. In private.”

I asked Claire to show Randy around the monastery while I spoke with our new abbot. She hesitated, and I did not blame her. But when Randy smiled at her, shyly, almost apologetically, I saw her shoulders ease. This was not a hired killer. This was a son who had spent fourteen years watching his mother lie in a bed, and who would have done anything to bring her back.

The moment Yun’s office door closed, he rounded on me.

“You are not God!”

He was not shouting at his teacher. He was shouting at his friend, and in that moment he had forgotten every vow he had ever taken about equanimity and nonattachment.

“You will not survive this. Do you understand me? To restart another person’s brain, you would need to channel more electromagnetic energy than your own synapses can possibly withstand. They will burn out. And even if you could hold the state long enough, there is no guarantee she will wake up. You could give your life for nothing.”

He lowered his voice. “And if you do survive it, it will be worse. A woman wakes up after fourteen years in a coma, in a house in Somerville, with a famous healer kneeling at her bed. Do you think the newspapers will miss that? Do you think the men under that mountain in Peru will miss it?”

“Xu Yun.” I kept my voice quiet. “The woman in that coma is Mrs. O’Brian. The man outside is her son. Fourteen years ago, I took his mother from him, as surely as if I had buried her, and I did it willingly. Happily. I pulled the plug on his mother’s only chance and put Bach on the stereo for the drive home.” I held his gaze. “This is what we call karma. I am not going to turn my back on the suffering I caused that family. Trying to save her is my responsibility as a Buddhist and my duty as a human being. Even if it kills me.”

For a long moment, Yun said nothing.

Then he stood, crossed the room, and put his arms around me.

“Abbot or not,” he said, “it seems I will never stop being your disciple.”

I held him tighter.

“There are no masters and no disciples here,” I said. “Not in this room. Not now.”

We stood there in silence, and we both understood that when true unity arises, there are not two people in a room.

There is only one.