Zen City Read Online Free

but here I am forty miles from the Blue Plymouth Hotel, letting my couch grass rot and doing what skinny Angela tells me. I can’t believe it.”
    “Hush, you,” Angela said, “please.”
    She and Pirate lifted me up by the armpits and walked me to the perfect, cubical chamber hewn into the mountainside in ancient days from the main passage of the cave. The room housed candles, censers, wrought-iron snuffers with Buddha figures on the handles, the abbot’s pyx, the sexton’s staves, scrolls and ornaments for special holidays, and other ritual implements—along with wash rags and buckets.
    “How’d you get a black robe, Angela?” Pirate wanted to know. “What did you do, sleep with Control?”
    “Yeah”—pulling back her caul—“I sleep with Control. Just sit tight for a minute.”
    “What are you doing this for, Angela?” I said. “You don’t love me.”
    “Give it a rest, Big Man,” Pirate said. “She wants to help you. What is it with you, anyway?”
    Angela ignored us. Soundlessly, she opened an ancient red-lacquered cabinet and pulled out nine small, green jars, all of them the same, and laid them side by side on a smooth stone counter. Then she carefully closed the cabinet, turning the knob slightly as it came flush with the casement, so that it made no sound at all.
    Angela handed us each three of the jars and kept three for herself. “Take off your robes,” she said. “Smear this all over you. Please don’t waste any time.”
    Pirate couldn’t help flashing his tattoo at me, the eight-spoked Wheel of the Dharma, the symbol of the City, around his navel. He could make it shimmy and wave by undulating his stomach. I think he had put it there when he was fourteen and a zealot;then, a dozen years later—I don’t know why—he’d turned around. He had gotten some drunk with a knife and ink to add these words around the circumference: “PARTY DOWN.”
    “Let me do you,” Pirate said to Angela as she slipped off her black robe. I jabbed him with my elbow. “What’s the beef?” he said.
“She doesn’t love you.”
    It smelled like eucalyptus. “The zendors use it for their sore stick hands,” Angela said. “But it’ll work as a lubricant, see? Use a lot. Don’t be skimpy. We gotta squeeze through some tight places.”
    I peeled and slathered. I had to work carefully around the raw bruises on my shoulders and neck. When I winced, Angela gave me one of her concerned looks. She was about to help me, but I stopped her. “So you really do know a way in,” I said. “I gotta hand it to you, Angela. You’ve got your finger in a lot of pies. So how come you’re not a Cityzen?”
    “Don’t make a mess,” she said, looking away. Suddenly Angela paused, still as a stalagmite or a startled deer. “Someone’s nearby.” We stopped moving. I didn’t hear anything.
    “It’s okay,” she said after a minute had passed. “It don’t matter. It’s not a zendor, and there’s nothin’ we can do about it without gettin’ ourselves nabbed. Finish up.” She slipped out of the chamber and stood outside to hurry us along.
    “Wait a minute,” I said. “We’ll need a lamp.”
    “Come on, Big Man,” Pirate said, falling in after Angela.
    “How we gonna see?” I said. “She’s nuts, Pirate. I don’t know what she’s trying to prove.”
    We followed her along the smooth flowstone leading back into the cavern. We stayed close to the wall. The stone underfoot was scalloped, and the scallops were filled with mud, and the mud hid pebbles and gravel that stuck between our toes. I had to hop to keep up while I pulled bits of shell out of my instep.
    “Steady, Big Man,” Pirate cracked. “It’s good for your zazen.”
    When I tried to swipe him, I fell. Angela stopped while I gotto my feet. I was covered with cave now, and stinking of guano. When she saw I was alive, she started moving again.
    The guano got thicker underfoot. Lifting our legs out of it, step by step—and flicking off