Plow the Bones Read Online Free Page B

does not believe in. All so fast that you can see the bones in his face shift, change shape. A series of patchy beards grown and then shaved off, a dozen pairs of glasses becoming scratched or broken at the bow and then replaced, a thousand T–shirts and a thousand pairs of jeans, recycled over and over again. Spend a single second watching Gordon shout black–metal lyrics in the face of the street–preacher on the quad, both of them red–faced, both of them with veins standing up in their necks.
    Now stop.
    Did you miss it? The moment of his awakening? It is easy to do when you fly through a life. But look at him now, sitting at a desk with his notebook in front of him, scribbling with intense concentration. He loves this class. It is very possibly the only class he has ever taken that he has ever enjoyed. He is twenty–one years old. The heading he has scrawled at the top of the perforated standard–rule page says, ZEN NOTES. Behind it are fifteen pages with the same heading, filled with simple, perfect discoveries excavated from a history he never knew existed, quotes from men who became historical footnotes thousands of years before Gordon Dratch was born, revelations of a life that could be lived without anger or fear.
    Gordon Dratch is joyful.
    Speed forward again, just a few months, and Gordon Dratch is standing at a bar with a beer in his hand, smiling and talking to a stranger in a T–shirt that says, “Jesus died for his own sins, not mine.” He is saying, “Zen and atheism are totally compatible philosophies.” He takes a drink, feels the alcohol going to work on him, making him feel smiley and fuzzy. “Or at least,” he says, “that’s a good place to start.” The words sound funny to him, like they don’t make quite enough sense, and he decides he’s done drinking for the night. He’s proud of himself, sort of. His dad could have never done that. Then he says, “Let me tell you a story.”
    The story he tells is a story the Buddha told when asked to explain what happens to a man after he dies. Gordon says, “There is a war. During that war, a man is shot in the arm with an arrow, and is taken to a medic. The medic takes the man aside and attempts to remove the arrow, but the man is agitated. He won’t sit still, he’s freaking the fuck out, right? He keeps saying, who shot me? Was it someone on the other side or was it one of my own kinsmen, mistaking me for the enemy? Where was the archer when he shot me? I want to know about the trajectory of the arrow. What type of bow was used? What type of wood is the arrow made out of? What will happen now to the archer? What was he thinking when he shot me?”
    The stranger laughs, and Gordon knows he’s doing this right, acting out all the right parts, holding his shoulder and glancing around wide–eyed, selling the comedy. “The medic stops him, calms him down. Then he says, ‘the answers to those questions will not remove the arrow from your arm.’ ”
    The stranger says, “Nice, dude. Nice.”
    Gordon shrugs. “It’s a good story. Basically, Buddha was saying that what happens when we die is inconsequential. We die.”
    The stranger points his beer bottle at Gordon, narrows his eyes, “Yeah, but that proves my point. Even you worship somebody. Buddha is your Jesus.”
    Gordon thinks about it, shakes his head. “No, I don’t think so. For me, Buddha was nothing that I can’t be. It’s weird. You can’t rank somebody as any higher or lower than you. That’s the point. Nobody is my Jesus, because there is no essential duality between entities. Bodhi Dharma… he’s another of those pre–Zen guys who kinda set the stage for Zen… he said, if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.” He smiles wide. “Everything is temporary. Even the Buddha. He’s dead now. He doesn’t exist anymore. When I die, I won’t either. It’s sort of liberating, if you can accept it.”
    The stranger shakes his head, sighs, runs a hand over his