Free Zen City by Eliot Fintushel Page B

he could not…
    * * *
    Forget Control’s hypodyne. Forget how it chewed Janus’s mind from his as a cat chews its kitten from a bloody placenta—“You will lose your small self and your name now, Janus, but you will gain the City.” Think: before that! Before the last queue, where her screen had been smooth as a stone rolled by glaciers. Think: before all that, and before zazen, zazen, zazen…
    Why had she left him? She was the only woman he ever called darling. Why, as they leaned toward the big picture window and Big Man kissed her neck, her breasts, her belly, had she let the moon they sighed for turn cold and black? He would forever think of that picturewindow when he thought of Janus. Remember the smile that sprang like a sudden flower from her lips every time he touched her, his picture-window girl.
    She had left him for the City. She hadn’t cared that he was from the ramps. Social barriers had dissolved when the Enclosure Acts cut nape from pate and bed from headboard fourteen years before. Ironic, that it was Big Man who had to explain all that to Janus:
    “It’s for the City, darling. It’s all for the City. Nothing else is worth a damn. The enlightened mind sees things a whole different way from you or me. The way you and me cut things up is personal. When we say a thing stops here—‘That’s one thing, and over there is something else’—why, that’s just our little minds making fences to keep mine from yours, don’t you see?
    “Even your body there—Mmmmm!—it’s really full of holes. Things go in and out of us all the time: cosmic rays, germs, water, heat. Air comes in and air goes out. Food comes in and shit comes out. I go in…”—hugging her, pulling her mouth to his.
    “…Not now.”
    “Right.”
    “I want you to tell me more.”
    He love-pecked her forehead, then each closed eye. He always smelled of gasoline, but she smelled of bath oils and wisteria. Once she told him: “Now I feel all ticklish inside whenever I smell gas.”
    “Sure, I’ll tell you more. It’s all for the City, Janus,” he taught her. “For the enlightened mind, for a Cityzen, none of those boundaries exist. Do you think you’d see you and me as two people if you were a realized zen? No way.”
    “So why do they have to cut things up at all?” said Janus. “Why the Enclosure Acts? Why Control?”
    “They see the way things really are, darling. They see the real lines between things, and that’s where they put them. It looks crazy to you and me when families are split up, when towns are sectored so that three walls zigzag through your bathtub and there’s a gap of sixty miles between two neighborhoods supposed to be in the same burg. Or whensomebody gets paid for somebody else’s job, for Amitabha’s sakes. Or when all the dates change around, and you’re assigned a new father. All that stuff is training, darling. It’s training us to be zens, not to be attached, to give up the idea of self-gain.”
    “I just love the way you can say that.”
    “Why don’t you come down to the Old Ramp with me and listen to a few beeohtees?”
    “Are you sure that’s what you want to do with me?”
    They made love like thunderclaps when they weren’t doing zazen.
    * * *
    “Salvo. Lost love. Wormwood. Direct hit. Game’s over. I’m the champion. Everybody cheer.”
    In the privacy of the uproar, Big Man edged close to Tenacity. “Tag No Mind. What do you see, Tenacity?”
    “He has Voices. I can’t tell if they’re good or bad. Only, something’s running him.”
    “Was he lying? Did he really try to kill Angela?”
    “Who knows? Somebody’s running
her
too.”
    “Running Angela?” Big Man cupped his ear to shut out the pandemonium. It was not sufficient—their “noise” was not just sound—but that was all he knew how to cup.
    “Who cares? We love her down here. Don’t you?”
    “That’s a one way street.”
    “Boy, did I tag you good,” Tenacity laughed.
    “How do you guys know