Dreamer Page 9

  Winged open in her hands was one of Smith’s sketch-books. She turned each page slowly, puzzling over verses he’d scrawled beneath a series of eight charcoal illustrations of a herdsman searching for his lost ox. Finding it. And leading it home, where—in the final panel—both hunter and hunted vanished in an empty circle. “Chaym is talented,” she said as I stepped closer, looking over her shoulder, “but I can’t see him helping the Movement. Look at these.” She flipped through more pages, turning them carefully at the bottom edge, as if she were afraid the images might soil her fingers. But I was not seeing Smith’s drawings. No. I saw only the softness of her skin, and before I knew full well what I was doing I encircled my arms round her waist and lowered my head to her shoulder in a kiss. Amy stiffened for an instant. Then I felt her relax, offering no resistance whatsoever to my embrace. She squeezed my arm gently, then stepped to one side and placed the sketchbook back on the kitchen table.

  “That was sweet, Matthew, but please don’t do it again.”

  “Why not?”

  “I know you’re attracted to me,” she said. “I know that. And I’m flattered. I really am. It’s just that I’m not right for you. Or you for me. Your sign is water—didn’t you say that once? Mine is earth. Together, all we’d make is mud.” She tried to laugh, to get me to laugh, as one might a child who has knocked over his water glass at the table and needs to be chastised but not crushed for his blindness. His blunder. She was not angry, only disappointed, I thought, and was doing her best to be gracious—to salvage the situation for me and herself—after the minor mess I’d created. And it was strange, I realized, how at that moment my emotions were a pastiche of pain and wonder at her civilized composure, her ability to absorb the discomfort and disorientation my desire caused her—as if she were stepping over a puddle—and at the same time transform it into something like sympathy for me, for how confused and aching I felt right then—like someone who’d fallen off a ladder, say, or stepped on a rake. Yes, that was how I felt. Gently she placed her hand on my arm, and in a voice as full of candor as it was of Galilean compassion, said, “I’m fond of you, really I am, but I’m not the right person for you.” Once again she smiled, as one might when a child is being unreasonable. “Someday, if you do well, you’ll find someone right for you. I need somebody a little more like the men I knew when I was growing up. Or like Dr. King. Oh, God, I hope I haven’t hurt you.”

  Actually I couldn’t say; I’d never been shot down with such finesse before. Nor had I ever felt so impoverished by desire. Just then, her words were more than I could bear.

  “We can still be friends?”

  I couldn’t look at her, but I said, “Sure.” My eyes began to burn and steam, blurring the buckled, floral-print linoleum floor as she pushed up on her toes, pressing her lips against my cheek in a chaste kiss. “I suppose we should get back to unpacking, eh?”

  “You go ahead, I’ll get Chaym.”

  More than anything else, I needed to be away from the farmhouse. And her. It was dark now. My feet carried me east, from the kitchen to an open field. Looking back at the lighted rear window of the old, warm house with its family heirlooms and positivist history as it grew smaller, I felt better being outside, stepping through humus, round moss-covered stones green as kelp, past the well where the water tasted faintly of minerals, skinks, and salamanders. The brisk walk left me panting a little, perspiring as if a spigot somewhere in my pores had switched on, pouring out toxins in a tamasic flush of sweat that soaked my shirt. Yes, it still hurt. I’d always known I was hardly the model for Paul’s Epistle in Corinthians 13, but to be rebuffed because I fell so short of the minister’s example was confounding. Who could measure up to that? Yet—and yet—in her refusal I also felt relief, as if the weight of want had lifted. I sat down in weeds high as my waist, the night closing round me like two cupped hands. Wondering less about the woman I’d desired than the mystery of my desire itself, how it had made me experience myself as lack and her as fulfillment, all of which were false, mere fictions of my imagination. Just beyond there were woods that looked vaporous and incorporeal in the moonlight; and I felt just as vaporous and incorporeal, as if maybe I might vanish in the enveloping, prehuman world around me. Leaves on the nearest trees trembled with tiny globes of moisture clear as glass. And then, as my eyes began to adjust, I saw numinal light haloing the head of a figure—it was Smith—kneeling amidst the trees.

  His eyes were seeled, his breath flowed easily, lifting his chest at half-minute intervals and flaring the flanges of his nostrils faintly with each inhalation. His exterior was still as a figure frozen in ice. Yet inside, I knew from his notebooks, he was in motion, traversing 350 passages he’d memorized from numerous spiritual traditions, allowing the words to slip through his mind like pearls on a necklace. The passages—called gatha in Buddhist monasteries—ranged from Avaita Vedanta to Thomas à Kempis, from Seng Ts’an to the devotional poetry of Saint Teresa of Avila, from the Qur’an to Egyptian hymns, from a phrase in John 14:10 to the Dhammapada; they were tools—according to jottings he’d made—selected to free him from contingency and the conditioning of others. When he focused on a gatha, the gatha was his mind for that moment, identical with it, knower and known inseparable as water and wave. He was utterly unaware of me, and his practicing the Presence, reviewing these passages like a Muslim hafiz, was so private and intimate an exercise that I felt like a voyeur and was about to pull myself away, back toward the farmhouse, when I saw tears sliding down his cheekbones to his chin.

  Then his eyes were open, and he asked softly, “You like what you see, Bishop?” He wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. “Yeah, I cry sometimes. Can’t help myself. When I sit, it just comes out. I can’t keep it down. At the zendo, I wasn’t the only one who cried when doing zazen.”

  I stepped closer and sat down as he stretched out his legs from the kneeling position, massaging them vigorously to get blood moving again. “Where was that?”

  “Kyoto,” he said. “Two years after my discharge I was there, tossing down sake, and the fellah I was drinking with told me ’bout a Zen temple way out in the forest that accepted foreigners. ’Bout that time I was a mess, man. Drank like a fish. Hurt inside every damned day. I wanted to kill myself. Kept my service revolver right beside my pillow, just in case I worked up the courage to stick the barrel in my mouth and paint the wall behind me with brains. I went to the temple ’cause I was sick and tired of the world. I wanted a refuge, someplace where I could heal myself. I figured it was either the zendo or I was dead.” Smith kept on massaging his right leg as he talked, working his way methodically from his hip downward.

  “When I got there, I kneeled in front of the entrance, on the steps, and kept my head bowed until I heard the straw sandals of one of the priests coming toward me. I begged him to let me train. Naturally, he refused my request, like he was supposed to do, and then he went away. That’s the script. So I sat there all day—like I was supposed to do—on my knees, my head bowed, keeping that posture and waiting. Night came, but I still didn’t move. On the second day it rained. I was soaked to the skin. I damned near caught pneumonia on the second evening. But sometime during the third day the priest came back and gave me permission to enter the temple temporarily. See, he was playing a role thousands of years old—same as I was playing mine. He had me wash my feet, gave me a pair of tatami sandals, put me in a special little room called tankaryo, shut the sliding paper door, and went away again, this time for five days. For five days, I didn’t see nobody. They didn’t bring me food. Or water. I waited, kneeling just like you seen me doing, my eyes shut, hands on my lap, palms up with my thumbs kissing my forefingers, meditating for a hundred twenty hours nonstop to prove to the priest that I could do it. I say five days, but when you’re in zazen that long, there is no time. That’s another illusion, Bishop. In God, or the Void—or whatever you wanna call it—past, present, and future are all rolled up in now. And the hardest thing a man can do, especially a
colored man whose ass has been kicked in every corner of the world, is live completely in now. But I did. And the priest came back. He led me down a hallway with wooden floors polished so brightly by hand that they almost gleamed, then he stopped in front of a bulletin board listing the names of the monks and laymen presently training at the temple. Mine was the last, the newest one there. I tell you, buddy, when I seen that I broke down and cried like a goddamn baby. I was home. You get it? After centuries of slavery and segregation and being shat on by everybody on earth, I was home.”

  I did get it, and in his voice I saw the beautiful vision of a tile-roofed, forest temple encircled by trees, the grounds spotless, the gardens well tended, and here and there were statues of guardian kings. Smith began slowly massaging his left leg as he’d done his right, working from hip to heel.

  “I was a good novice, I want you to know that. Every day I was up at three-thirty A.M. when the priest struck the sounding board. When I washed up I didn’t waste a drop of water. I brushed my teeth using only one finger and a li’l bit of salt, and I was the first in the Hondo—the Buddha hall—for the morning recitation of sutras. After that, when we ate, I didn’t drop nary a grain of rice from my eating bowl. I shaved my head every five days. Kept my robes mended. With the others, I walked single file from the temple into town, reciting sutras and collecting donations in a cloth bag suspended from a strap around my neck. Always I blessed those who gave, singing a brief sutra that all sentient beings may achieve enlightenment and liberation. But for that year I trained, I never touched money. Or thought ’bout women. Or drink. The world that hurt me so bad didn’t exist no more, and I was happy. Hell, I wasn’t even aware of an I. After our rounds we came back and did samu—monastic labor. Chopping firewood. Maintaining the gardens. And all this we did in silence, Bishop. Each daily task was zazen. Was holy. No matter how humble the work, it was all spiritual practice.”

  Smith had finished stretching. He scooted back from the spot where he’d been sitting and rested his back against a tree.

  “What I’m saying is that my practice was correct. So good the Roshi promoted me to kitchen chef or tenzo. That’s an honor, right? It means I’d been diligent. He put me in charge of preparing food to sustain the Sangha, and I was ’bout the only one the Old Man, the Roshi, didn’t whack with his bamboo stick when time came for him to interview me ’bout my koan.

  “It was great,” Smith said. Then, sourly, “For a year.”

  “What happened? Why’d you leave?”

  “Didn’t want to.” He laughed. “I felt like I was in Shangri-la. I coulda stayed there forever. But one year to the very day I started, one of the priests said the Roshi wanted to see me. I was in the kitchen, making a sauce to go with wheat-paste noodles. Lemme tell you, it was good. Li’l sea tangle, sesame seeds, ginger, chopped green onions, and grated radishes. I washed my hands, then hurried to the Roshi’s room. I struck the umpan, the gong, to let him know I’d arrived, then entered when he called. I knelt before him, never lifting my eyes, but I wondered fiercely why he wanted to see me. Had I done wrong? No, he told me. My practice was perfect. The other monks respected me. But (he said) I was a gaijin. A foreigner. Only a Japanese could experience true enlightenment. That’s what he said. He didn’t want me to waste my time. He was being compassionate—see?—or thought he was. I left that night, Bishop. If anything, my year in the temple taught me what Gautama figured out when he broke away from the holy men: if you want liberation, to be free, you got to get there on your own. All the texts and teachers are just tools. If you want to be free, you’re supposed to outgrow them.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t feel sorry. There’s no place anywhere for me. I seen that a long time ago. Wherever I go, I’m a nigger. Oh, and I been to mother Africa. Over there, where people looked like me, I didn’t fit either. I don’t belong to a tribe. To them I was an American, a black one, and that meant I didn’t belong anywhere.” He patted his pants and shirt, searching for his cigarettes. Having found the pack in his breast pocket, Smith lit one with a Zippo lighter, and blew a smoke ring my way. Then quietly he asked, “What about you? Do you feel at home—really at home—anywhere?”

  “No.” I thought of my blundering pass earlier in the farmhouse. “I don’t. Ever …”

  “Then you’re damned too,” Smith said. “You got the mark. That’s what I seen on you. Outcasts know each other. The blessed know us too, and keep their distance, and I can’t say I blame ’em. We scare ’em. We make ’em uncomfortable. We’re the unwanted, the ones always passed over. Until the day we die, we’re drifters. Won’t no place feel right for long. And that’s okay. I accept that. Hell, I embrace it. My spirit don’t ever have to be still. It don’t need to sleep. Fuck that. The only thing is, I don’t want to be forgotten. Not by the goddamn sheep. Or God. I want to do something to make Him remember this nigger—me—for eternity.

  Then Smith was quiet for a while, staring past me toward the lights of the farmhouse, and something in me quieted as well. He was a man without a home. Without a race. I pitied him and myself, for what he’d said about knowing no place on earth where he could find peace and security was something I’d often felt and feared, and perhaps that was even why I wanted—or believed I wanted—Amy. Now I feared it less, and for the first time since Chaym Smith surfaced during the Chicago riots, I understood the labyrinthal depths of his (our) suffering. Or did I? Hadn’t he said all stories were lies? What, then, was I to make of the one he’d just told me? It had seduced me, but as always I didn’t exactly know where truth ended and make-believe began with him.

  “What will you do?” I asked. “Doc told us to help you—”

  “Help me, then.” He got to his feet, brushing grass off the seat of his britches. “Best thing you and the girl can do is teach me what I don’t know about Dr. King.” His smile gleamed in the moonlight, followed by that maddening, ticlike wink. “Do that, and I’ll take care of everything else.”

  6

  At the SCLC part of my job description was recording the Revolution, preserving its secrets for posterity—particularly what took place in the interstices. Naturally, this is where the stories of all doubles occur. In a spiral notebook, one I kept from my college days, I made entries on Chaym Smith’s progress, having no idea at the time that just possibly I was composing a gospel. I—even I—was startled to discover how much he’d already absorbed about King since 1954, as a man might meticulously study his rival, or an object of love, or—in his case—someone he loved and envied simultaneously. He was determined to possess the mystery of the minister’s power and popularity, to make it his own. In the days following our arrival at the Nest, one flowing into the next in a round-the-clock ribbon of dress rehearsals for the role Smith was set on playing, we three were subtly transformed, Amy no less than I as we looked to impress the matrix of the minister Unto our charge.

  Of course, he began with the Bible, rereading his heavily underlined New Testament in a marathon review that began Friday late and lasted well into the following Monday His capacity for sustained, one-pointed concentration was uncanny, a skill—that of dharana—he’d acquired during his year at the temple in Kyoto. He highlighted in red every statement by Jesus, who most certainly was known as “Joshua” in his own time and possibly was a member of the Essenes, a Jewish monastic order influenced by Hinduism. Around the farmhouse Smith had Amy pin photographs of everyone important in King’s life and sheets of paper containing the scriptural citations most often encountered in his sermons. These he committed to memory, sometimes through rote repetition, sometimes through mnemonic devices that allowed him to absorb whole speeches, provided he could call up the pictorial “pegs” on which key phrases and ideas had been placed. Soon enough it became clear that as Smith immersed himself in the first thirty-seven years of King’s journey, he was entering a portal that, far from stopping at the borders of the black world or the Baptist faith, exploded outward into what King himself once called,
in a phrase far more revealing of himself than he knew, the “inescapable network of mutuality.”

  He sent me to the state college over in Carbondale, where I photocopied the available sermons by preachers who’d influenced King’s oratorical style. This took a full day, and led to the startling (for me) and exhilarating (for Smith) discovery that many of the minister’s most famous speeches were tissues of pirated material from nearly three dozen theologians and popular (white) American preachers from the ’4os and ’5os, their ideas and idioms, voices and vocabularies, so blended with his own blistering denunciations of bigotry that, once I brought these documents back to the Nest, we found it impossible to demarcate where the minds (and the archaeology of that most ancient of objects, the self) of Harry Emerson Fosdick, C. L. Franklin, and Robert McCracken ended and King’s properly commenced. In his sermons he was, in essence, not one man but an integrated Crowd, containing here a smidgen of Walter Rauschenbusch, there a bit of Gerald Kennedy, and everywhere the imposing influence of his father. In effect, the minister riffed (not unlike Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington) on the entire, two-millennia-old history of Christendom, blending its best and making that his own in a stunningly Yankee amalgam.

  Smith found this discovery of some of King’s sources, his borrowings, gratifying. Gleefully so. “You know, I always figured he couldn’t be as smart as he seems,” Smith said, yet I doubted he believed that. He was looking for faults, anything to reduce the minister’s stature and give himself room to breathe. But I wondered, as we examined King’s intellectual genesis and his Elizabethan borrowings, if the self we constructed was anything more than a fragile composite of other selves we’d encountered—a kind of epistemological salad—indebted to all spoken languages, all evolutionary forms, all lives that preceded our own, so that, when we spoke, it could be said, in the final analysis, subjectivity vanished and the world sang in every sentence we uttered. (And thus narrative was not a lie.) Added to that, and perhaps strangest of all, I noticed that as Smith pored over King’s speeches he at first resisted statements that contradicted his own experience of things—for example, the minister saying, “It is quite easy for me to think of the universe as basically friendly mainly because of my uplifting heredity and environmental circumstances.” In learning, there was an inescapable moment of alienation and displacement, a plunge into uncertainty and insecurity in the new, the other; but then, miraculously, as he relaxed from resisting the revolution possible with each new perception, that interval of disorientation passed, and he found that no matter how far his mind had traveled, or how alien the data of knowledge might have seemed at first, he had in the end through these studies encountered only a dimension of himself.