Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

Chapter 16

We were twelve days into our journey, following Balthasar’s meticulously drawn map, when we came to the wall.

“So,” I said, “what do you think of the wall?”

“It’s great,” said Joshua.

“It’s not that great,” I said.

There was a long line waiting to get through the giant gate, where scores of bureaucrats collected taxes from caravan masters as they passed through. The gatehouses alone were each as big as one of Herod’s palaces, and soldiers rode horses atop the wall, patrolling far into the distance. We were a good league back from the gate and the line didn’t seem to be moving.

“This is going to take all day,” I said. “Why would they build such a thing? If you can build a wall like this then you ought to be able to raise an army large enough to defeat any invaders.”

“Lao-tzu built this wall,” Joshua said.

“The old master who wrote the Tao? I don’t think so.”

“What does the Tao value above all else?”

“Compassion? Those other two jewel things?”

“No, inaction. Contemplation. Steadiness. Conservatism. A wall is the defense of a country that values inaction. But a wall imprisons the people of a country as much as it protects them. That’s why Balthasar had us go this way. He wanted me to see the error in the Tao. One can’t be free without action.”

“So he spent all that time teaching us the Tao so we could see that it was wrong.”

“No, not wrong. Not all of it. The compassion, humility, and moderation of the Tao, these are the qualities of a righteous man, but not inaction. These people are slaves to inaction.”

“You worked as a stonecutter, Josh,” I said, nodding toward the massive wall. “You think this wall was built through inaction?”

“The magus wasn’t teaching us about action as in work, it was action as in change. That’s why we learned Confucius first—everything having to do with the order of our fathers, the law, manners. Confucius is like the Torah, rules to follow. And Lao-tzu is even more conservative, saying that if you do nothing you won’t break any rules. You have to let tradition fall sometime, you have to take action, you have to eat bacon. That’s what Balthasar was trying to teach me.”

“I’ve said it before, Josh—and you know how I love bacon—but I don’t think bacon is enough for the Messiah to bring.”

“Change,” Joshua said. “A Messiah has to bring change. Change comes through action. Balthasar once said to me, ‘There’s no such thing as a conservative hero.’ He was wise, that old man.”

I thought about the old magus as I looked at the wall stretching over the hills, then at the line of travelers ahead of us. A small city had grown up at the entrance to the wall to accommodate the needs of the delayed travelers along the Silk Road and it boiled with merchants hawking food and drink along the line.

“Screw it,” I said. “This is going to take forever. How long can it be? Let’s go around.”

A month later, when we had returned to the same gate and we were standing in line to get through, Joshua asked: “So what do you think of the wall now? I mean, now that we’ve seen so much more of it?”

“I think it’s ostentatious and unpleasant,” I said.

“If they don’t have a name for it, you should suggest that.”

And so it came to pass that through the ages the wall was known as the Ostentatious and Unpleasant Wall of China. At least I hope that’s what happened. It’s not on my Friendly Flyer Miles map, so I can’t be sure.

We could see the mountain where Gaspar’s monastery lay long before we reached it. Like the other peaks around it, it cut the sky like a huge tooth. Below the mountain was a village surrounded by high pasture. We stopped there to rest and water our camels. The people of the village all came out to greet us and they marveled at our strange eyes and Joshua’s curly hair as if we were gods that had been lowered out of the heavens (which I guess was true in Josh’s case, but you forget about that when you’re around someone a lot). An old toothless woman who spoke a dialect of Chinese similar to the one we had learned from Joy convinced us to leave the camels in the village. She traced the path up the mountain with a craggy finger and it was obvious that the path was both too narrow and too steep to accommodate the animals.

The villagers served us a spicy meat dish with frothy bowls of milk to wash it down. I hesitated and looked at Joshua. The Torah forbade us to eat meat and dairy at the same meal.

“I’m thinking this is a lot like the bacon thing,” Joshua said. “I really don’t feel that the Lord cares if we wash down our yak with a bowl of milk.”

“Yak?”

“That’s what this is. The old woman told me.”

“Well, sin or not, I’m not eating it. I’ll just drink the milk.”

“It’s yak milk too.”

“I’m not drinking it.”

“Use your own judgment, it served you so well in the past, like, oh, when you decided we should go around the wall.”

“You know,” I said, weary of having the whole wall thing brought up again, “I never said you could use sarcasm whenever you wanted to. I think you’re using my invention in ways that it was never intended to be used.”

“Like against you?”

“See? See what I mean?”

We left the village early the next morning, carrying only some rice balls, our waterskins, and what little money we had left. We left our three camels in the care of the toothless old woman, who promised to take care of them until we returned. I would miss them. They were the spiffy double-humpers we’d picked up in Kabul and they were comfortable to ride, but more important, none of them had ever tried to bite me.

“They’re going to eat our camels, you know? We won’t be gone an hour before one of them is turning on a spit.”

“They won’t eat the camels.” Joshua, forever believing in the goodness of human beings.

“They don’t know what they are. They think that they’re just tall food. They’re going to eat them. The only meat they ever get is yak.”

“You don’t even know what a yak is.”

“Do too,” I said, but the air was getting thin and I was too tired to prove myself at the time.

The sun was going down behind the mountains when we finally reached the monastery. Except for a huge wooden gate with a small hatch in it, it was constructed entirely of the same black basalt as the mountain on which it stood. It looked more like a fortress than a place of worship.

“Makes you wonder if all three of your magi live in fortresses, doesn’t it?”

“Hit the gong,” said Joshua. There was a bronze gong hanging outside the door with a padded drumstick standing next to it and a sign in a language that we couldn’t read.

I hit the gong. We waited. I hit the gong again. And we waited. The sun went down and it began to get very cold on the mountainside. I rang the gong three times loud. We ate our rice balls and drank most of our water and waited. I pounded the bejezus out of the gong and the hatch opened. A dim light from inside the gate illuminated the smooth cheeks of a Chinese man about our age. “What?” he said in Chinese.

“We are here to see Gaspar,” I said. “Balthasar sent us.”

“Gaspar sees no one. Your aspect is dim and your eyes are too round.” He slammed the little hatch.

This time Joshua pounded on the gong until the monk returned.

“Let me see that drumstick,” the monk said, holding his hand out through the little port.

Joshua gave him the drumstick and stepped back.

“Go away and come back in the morning,” the monk said.

“But we’ve traveled all day,” Joshua said. “We’re cold and hungry.”

“Life is suffering,” the monk said. He slammed the little door, leaving us in almost total darkness.

“Maybe that’s what you’re supposed to learn,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

“No, we wait,” said Joshua.

In the morning, after Joshua and I had slept against the great gate, huddled together to conserve warmth, the monk opened the little hatch. “You still here?” He couldn’t see us, as we were directly below the window.

“Yes,” I said. “Can we see Gaspar now?”

He craned his neck out the hatch, then pulled it back in and produced a small wooden bowl, from which he poured water on our heads. “Go away. Your feet are misshapen and your eyebrows grow together in a threatening way.”

“But…”

He slammed the hatch. And so we spent the day outside the gate, me wanting to go down the mountain, Joshua insisting that we wait. There was frost in our hair when we woke the next morning, and I felt my very bones aching. The monk opened the hatch just after first light.

“You are so stupid that the village idiots’ guild uses you as a standard for testing,” said the monk.

“Actually, I’m a member of the village idiots’ guild,” I retorted.

“In that case,” said the monk, “go away.”

I cursed eloquently in five languages and was beginning to tear at my hair in frustration when I spotted something large moving in the sky overhead. As it got closer, I saw that it was the angel, wearing his aspect of black robe and wings. He carried a flaming bundle of sticks and pitch, which trailed a trail of flames and thick black smoke behind him in the sky. When he had passed over us several times, he flew off over the horizon, leaving a smoky pattern of Chinese characters that spelled out a message across the sky: SURRENDER DOROTHY.

I was just fuckin’ with you (as Balthasar used to say). Raziel didn’t really write SURRENDER DOROTHY in the sky. The angel and I watched The Wizard of Oz together on television last night and the scene at the gates of Oz reminded me of when Joshua and I were at the monastery gate. Raziel said he identified with Glinda, Good Witch of the North. (I would have thought flying monkey, but I believe his choice was a blond one.) I have to admit that I felt some sympathy for the scarecrow, although I don’t believe I would have been singing about the lack of a brain. In fact, amid all the musical laments over not having a heart, a brain, or the nerve, did anyone notice that they didn’t have a penis among them? I think it would have shown on the Lion and the Tin Man, and when the Scarecrow has his pants destuffed, you don’t see a flying monkey waving an errant straw Johnson around anywhere, do you? I think I know what song I’d be singing:

Oh, I would while away the hours,

Wanking in the flowers, my heart all full of song,

I’d be gilding all the lilies as I waved about my willie

If I only had a schlong.

And suddenly it occurred to me, as I composed the above opus, that although Raziel had always seemed to have the aspect of a male, I had no idea if there were even genders among the angels. After all, Raziel was the only one I’d ever seen. I leapt from my chair and confronted him in the midst of an afternoon Looney Tunes festival.

“Raziel, do you have equipment?”

“Equipment?”

“A package, a taliwacker, a unit, a dick—do you have one?”

“No,” said the angel, perplexed that I would be asking. “Why would I need one?”

“For sex. Don’t angels have sex?”

“Well, yes, but we don’t use those.”

“So there are female angels and male angels?”

“Yes.”

“And you have sex with female angels.”

“Correct.”

“With what do you have sex?”

“Female angels. I just told you.”

“No, do you have a sex organ?”

“Yes.”

“Show me?”

“I don’t have it with me.”

“Oh.” I realized that there are some things I’d really rather not know about.

Anyway, he didn’t write in the sky, and, in fact, we didn’t see Raziel again, but the monks did let us into the monastery after three days. They said that they made everybody wait three days. It weeded out the insincere.

The entire two-story structure that was the monastery was fashioned of rough stone, none larger than could have been lifted into place by a single man. The rear of the building was built right into the mountainside. The structure seemed to have been built under an existing overhang in the rock, so there was minimal roofing exposed to the elements. What did show was made of terra-cotta tiles that lay on a steep incline, obviously to shed any buildup of snow.

A short and hairless monk wearing a saffron-colored robe led us across an outer courtyard paved with flagstone through an austere doorway into the monastery. The floor inside was stone, and though immaculately clean, it was no more finished than the flagstone of the courtyard. There were only a few windows, more like arrow slits, cut high in the wall, and little light penetrated the interior once the front door was closed. The air was thick with incense and filled with a buzzing chorus of male voices producing a rhythmic chant that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once and made it seem as if my ribs and kneecaps were vibrating from the inside. Whatever language they were chanting in I didn’t understand, but the message was clear: these men were invoking something that transcended this world.

The monk led us up a narrow stairway into a long, narrow corridor lined with open doorways no higher than my waist. As we passed I could see that these must be the monks’ cells, and each was just large enough to accommodate a small man lying down. There was a woven mat on the floor and a woolen blanket rolled up at the top of each cell, but there was no evidence of personal possessions nor storage for any. There were no doors to close for privacy. In short, it was very much like what I had grown up with, which didn’t make me feel any better about it. Nearly five years of the relative opulence at Balthasar’s fortress had spoiled me. I yearned for a soft bed and a half-dozen Chinese concubines to hand-feed me and rub my body with fragrant oils. (Well, I said I was spoiled.)

At last the monk led us into a large open chamber with a high stone ceiling and I realized that we were no longer in a man-made structure, but a large cave. At the far end of the cave was a stone statue of a man seated cross-legged, his eyes closed, his hands before him with the first fingers and thumbs forming closed circles. Lit by the orange light of candles, a haze of incense smoke hanging about his shaved head, he appeared to be praying. The monk, our guide, disappeared into the darkness at the sides of the cave and Joshua and I approached the statue cautiously, stepping carefully across the rough floor of the cave.

(We had long since lost our surprise and outrage at graven images. The world at large and the art we had seen in our travels served to dampen even that grave commandment. “Bacon,” Joshua said when I asked him about it.)

This great room was the source of the chanting we had been hearing since entering the monastery, and after seeing the monks’ cells we determined that there must be at least twenty monks adding their voices to the droning, although the way the cave echoed it might have been one or a thousand. As we approached the statue, trying to ascertain what sort of stone it was made from, it opened its eyes.

“Is that you, Joshua?” it said in perfect Aramaic.

“Yes,” said Joshua.

“And who is this?”

“This is my friend, Biff.”

“Now he will be called Twenty-one, when he needs to be called, and you shall be Twenty-two. While you are here you have no name.” The statue wasn’t a statue, of course, it was Gaspar. The orange light of the candles and his complete lack of motion or expression had only made him appear to be made of stone. I suppose we were also thrown off because we were expecting a Chinese. This man looked as if he was from India. His skin was even darker than ours and he wore the red dot on his head that we had seen on Indian traders in Kabul and Antioch. It was difficult to tell his age, as he had no hair or beard and there wasn’t a line in his face.

“He’s the Messiah,” I said. “The Son of God. You came to see him at his birth.”

Still no expression from Gaspar. He said, “The Messiah must die if you are to learn. Kill him tomorrow.”

“’Scuse me?” I said.

“Tomorrow you will learn. Feed them,” said Gaspar.

Another monk, who looked almost identical to the first monk, came out of the dark and took Joshua by the shoulder. He led us out of the chapel chamber and back to the cells where he showed Joshua and me our accommodations. He took our satchels away from us and left. He returned in a few minutes with a bowl of rice and a cup of weak tea for each of us. Then he went away, having said nothing since letting us in.

“Chatty little guy,” I said.

Joshua scooped some rice into his mouth and grimaced. It was cold and unsalted. “Should I be worried about what he said about the Messiah dying tomorrow, do you think?”

“You know how you’ve never been completely sure whether you were the Messiah or not?”

“Yeah.”

“Tomorrow, if they don’t kill you first thing in the morning, tell them that.”

The next morning Number Seven Monk awakened Joshua and me by whacking us in the feet with a bamboo staff. To his credit, Number Seven was smiling when I finally got the sleep cleared from my eyes, but that was really a small consolation. Number Seven was short and thin with high cheekbones and widely set eyes. He wore a long orange robe woven from rough cotton and no shoes. He was clean-shaven and his head was also shaved except for a small tail that grew out at the crown and was tied with a string. He looked as if he could be anywhere from seventeen to thirty-five years old, it was impossible to tell. (Should you wonder about the appearance of Monks Two through Six, and Eight through Twenty, just imagine Number Seven Monk nineteen times. Or at least that’s how they appeared to me for the first few months. Later, I’m sure, except that we were taller and round-eyed, Joshua and I, or Monks Twenty-one and Twenty-two, would have fit the same description. When one is trying to shed the bonds of ego, a unique appearance is a liability. That’s why they call it a “uniform.” But alas, I’m getting ahead of myself.)

Number Seven led us to a window that was obviously used as a latrine, waited while we used it, then took us to a small room where Gaspar sat, his legs crossed in a seemingly impossible position, with a small table before him. The monk bowed and left the room and Gaspar asked us to sit down, again in our native Aramaic.

We sat across from him on the floor—no, that’s not right, we didn’t actually sit, we lay on the floor on our sides, propped up on one elbow the way we would have been at the low tables at home. We sat after Gaspar produced a bamboo staff from under the table and, with a motion as fast as a striking cobra’s, whacked us both on the side of the head with it. “I said sit!” he said.

Then we sat.

“Jeez,” I said, rubbing the knot that was swelling over my ear.

“Listen,” Gaspar said, holding the stick up to clarify exactly what he meant.

We listened as if they were going to discontinue sound any second and we needed to stock up. I think I even stopped breathing for a while.

“Good,” said Gaspar, laying the stick down and pouring tea into three simple bowls on the table.

We looked at the tea sitting there, steaming—just looked at it. Gaspar laughed like a little boy, all the graveness and authority from a second ago gone from his face. He could have been a benevolent older uncle. In fact, except for the obviously Indian features, he reminded me a lot of Joseph, Joshua’s stepfather.

“No Messiah,” Gaspar said, switching to Chinese now. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Joshua and I said in unison.

In an instant the bamboo stick was in his hand and the other end was bouncing off of Joshua’s head. I covered my own head with my arms but the blow never came.

“Did I strike the Messiah?” Gaspar asked Joshua.

Joshua seemed genuinely perplexed. He paused, rubbing the spot on his head, when another blow caught him over his other ear, the sound of the impact sharp and harsh in the small stone room.

“Did I strike the Messiah?” Gaspar repeated.

Joshua’s dark brown eyes showed neither pain nor fear, just confusion as deep as the confusion of a calf who has just had its throat cut by the Temple priest.

The stick whistled through the air again, but this time I caught it in mid-swing, wrenched it out of Gaspar’s hand, and tossed it out the narrow window behind him. I quickly folded my hands and looked at the table in front of me. “Begging your pardon, master,” I said, “but if you hit him again, I’ll kill you.”

Gaspar stood, but I was afraid to look at him (or Joshua, for that matter). “Ego,” said the monk. He left the room without another word.

Joshua and I sat in silence for a few minutes, thinking and rubbing our goose eggs. Well, it had been an interesting trip and all, but Joshua wasn’t very well going to learn much about being the Messiah from someone who hit him with a stick whenever it was mentioned, and that, I supposed, was the reason we were there. So, onward. I drank the bowl of tea in front of me, then the one that Gaspar had left. “Two wise men down, one to go,” I said. “We’d better find some breakfast if we’re going to travel.”

Joshua looked at me as perplexed as he had at Gaspar a few minutes before. “Do you think he needs that stick?”

Number Seven Monk handed us our satchels, bowed deeply, then went back into the monastery and closed the door, leaving Joshua and me standing there by the gong. It was a clear morning and we could see the smoke of cook fires rising from the village below.

“We should have asked for some breakfast,” I said. “This is going to be a long climb down.”

“I’m not leaving,” Josh said.

“You’re kidding.”

“I have a lot more to learn here.”

“Like how to take a beating?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m not sure Gaspar will let me back in. He didn’t seem too pleased with me.”

“You threatened to kill him.”

“I did not, I warned that I’d kill him. Big difference.”

“So you’re not going to stay?”

And there it was, the question. Was I going to stay with my best friend, eat cold rice, sleep on a cold floor, take abuse from a mad monk, and very likely have my skull split open, or was I going to go? Go where? Home? Back to Kabul and Joy? Despite the long journey, it seemed easier to go back the way I had come. At least some level of familiarity would be waiting there. But if I was making easy choices, why was I there in the first place?

“Are you sure you have to stay here, Josh? Can’t we go find Melchior?”

“I know I have things to learn here.” Joshua picked up the drumstick and rang the gong. In a few minutes the little port opened in the door and a monk we had never seen before stuck his face in the opening. “Go away. Your nature is dense and your breath smells like a yak’s ass.” He slammed the hatch.

Joshua rang the gong again.

“I don’t like that whole thing about killing the Messiah. I can’t stay here, Joshua. Not if he’s going to hit you.”

“I have a feeling I’m going to get hit quite a few more times until I learn what he needs me to know.”

“I have to go.”

“Yes, you do.”

“But I could stay.”

“No. Trust me, you have to leave me now, so you won’t later. I’ll see you again.” He turned away from me and faced the door.

“Oh, you don’t know anything else, but you know that all of a sudden?”

“Yes. Go, Biff. Good-bye.”

I walked down the narrow path and nearly stumbled over a precipice when I heard the hatch in the door open. “Where are you going?” shouted the monk.

“Home,” I said.

“Good, go frighten some children with your glorious ignorance.”

“I will.” I tried to keep my shoulders steady as I walked away, but it felt like someone was ripping my soul through the muscles of my back. I would not turn around, I vowed, and slowly, painfully, I made my way down the path, convinced that I would never see Joshua again.

Chapter 17

I’ve settled into some sort of droning routine here at the hotel, and in that way it reminds me of those times in China. My waking hours are filled with writing these pages, watching television, trying to irritate the angel, and sneaking off to the bathroom to read the Gospels. And I think it’s the latter that’s sent my sleeping hours into a landscape of nightmare that leaves me spent even when I wake. I’ve finished Mark, and again this fellow talks of a resurrection, of acts beyond the time of my and Joshua’s death. It’s a similar story to that told by the Matthew fellow, the events jumbled somewhat, but basically the story of Joshua’s ministry, but it’s the telling of the events of that last week of Passover that chills me. The angel hasn’t been able to keep the secret that Joshua’s teachings survived and grew to vast popularity. (He’s stopped even changing the channel at the mention of Joshua on television, as he did when we first arrived.) But is this the book from which Joshua’s teachings are drawn? I dream of blood, and suffering, and loneliness so empty that an echo can’t survive, and I wake up screaming, soaked in my own sweat, and even after I’m awake the loneliness remains for a while. Last night when I awoke I thought I saw a woman standing at the end of my bed, and beside her, the angel, his black wings spread and touching the walls of the room on either side. Then, before I could get my wits about me, the angel wrapped his wings around the woman and she disappeared in the darkness of them and was gone. I think I really woke up then, because the angel was lying there on the other bed, staring into the dark, his eyes like black pearls, catching the red blinking aircraft lights that shone dimly through the window from the tops of the buildings across the street. No wings, no black robe, no woman. Just Raziel, staring.

“Nightmare?” the angel asked.

“Memory,” I said. Had I been asleep? I remember that same red blinking light, ever so dim, playing on the cheekbone and the bridge of the nose of the woman in my nightmare. (It was all I could see of her face.) And those elegant contours fit into the recesses of my memory like a key in the tumblers of a lock, releasing cinnamon and sandalwood and a laugh sweeter than the best day of childhood.

Two days after I had walked away, I rang the gong outside the monastery and the little hatch opened to reveal the face of a newly shaven monk, the skin of his bald scalp still a dozen shades lighter in color than that of his face. “What?” he said.

“The villagers ate our camels,” I said.

“Go away. Your nostrils flare in an unpleasant manner and your soul is somewhat lumpy.”

“Joshua, let me in. I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“I can’t just let you in,” Josh whispered. “You have to wait three days like everyone else.” Then loudly, and obviously for someone inside’s benefit, he said, “You appear to be infested by Bedouins! Now go away!” And he slammed the hatch.

I stood there. And waited. In a few minutes he opened the hatch.

“Infested by Bedouins?” I said.

“Give me a break. I’m new. Did you bring food and water to last you?”

“Yes, the toothless woman sold me some dried camel meat. There was a special.”

“That’s got to be unclean,” said Josh.

“Bacon, Joshua, remember?”

“Oh yeah. Sorry. I’ll try to sneak some tea and a blanket out to you, but it won’t be right away.”

“Then Gaspar will let me back in?”

“He was perplexed why you left in the first place. He said if anyone needed to learn some discipline, well, you know. There’ll be punishment, I think.”

“Sorry I left you.”

“You didn’t.” He grinned, looking sillier than normal with his two-toned head. “I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned here already.”

“What’s that?”

“When I’m in charge, if someone knocks, they will be able to come in. Making someone who is seeking comfort stand out in the cold is a crock of rancid yak butter.”

“Amen,” I said.

Josh slammed the little hatch, obviously the prescribed way of closing it. I stood and wondered how Joshua, when he finally learned how to be the Messiah, would work the phrase “crock of rancid yak butter” into a sermon. Just what we Jews needed, I thought, more dietary restrictions.

The monks stripped me naked and poured cold water over my head, then brushed me vigorously with brushes made from boar’s hair, then poured hot water on me, then scrubbed, then cold water, until I screamed for them to stop. At that point they shaved my head, taking generous nicks out of my scalp as they did so, rinsed away the hair that stuck to my body, and handed me a fresh orange robe, a blanket, and a wooden rice bowl. Later I was given a pair of slippers, woven from some sort of grass, and I made myself some socks from woven yak hair, but this was the measure of my wealth for six years: a robe, a blanket, a bowl, some slippers, and some socks.

As Monk Number Eight led me to meet with Gaspar, I thought of my old friend Bartholomew, and how much he would have loved the idea of my newfound austerity. He often told of how his Cynic patriarch Diogenes carried a bowl with him for years, but one day saw a man drinking from his cupped palm and declared, “I have been a fool, burdened all these years by the weight of a bowl when a perfectly good vessel lay at the end of my wrist.”

Yeah, well, that’s all well and good for Diogenes, but when it was all I had, if anyone had tried to take my bowl they would have lost the vessel at the end of their wrist.

Gaspar sat on the floor in the same small room, eyes closed, hands folded on his knees before him. Joshua sat facing him in the same position. Number Eight Monk bowed out of the room and Gaspar opened his eyes.

“Sit.”

I did.

“These are the four rules for which you may be expelled from the monastery: one, a monk will have no sexual intercourse with anyone, even down to an animal.”

Joshua looked at me and cringed, as if he expected me to say something that would anger Gaspar. I said, “Right, no intercourse.”

“Two: a monk, whether in the monastery or in the village, shall take no thing that is not given. Three: if a monk should intentionally take the life of a human or one like a human, either by his hand or by weapon, he will be expelled.”

“One like a human?” I asked.

“You shall see,” said Gaspar. “Four, a monk who claims to have reached superhuman states, or claims to have attained the wisdom of the saints, having not done so, will be expelled. Do you understand these four rules?”

“Yes,” I said. Joshua nodded.

“Understand that there are no mitigating circumstances. If you commit any of these offenses as judged by the other monks, you must leave the monastery.”

Again I said yes and then Gaspar went into the thirteen rules for which a monk could be suspended from the monastery for a fortnight (the first of these was the heartbreaker, “no emission of semen except in a dream”) and then the ninety offenses for which one would receive an unfavorable rebirth if the sins were not repented (these ranged from destroying any kind of vegetation or deliberately depriving an animal of life to sitting in the open with a woman or claiming to a layman to have superhuman powers, even if you had them). Overall, there was an extraordinary number of rules, over a hundred on decorum, dozens for settling disputes, but remember, we were Jews, raised under the influence of the Pharisees, who judged virtually every event of day-to-day life against the Law of Moses. And with Balthasar we had studied Confucius, whose philosophy was little more than an extensive system of etiquette. I had no doubt Joshua could do this, and there was a chance I could handle it too, if Gaspar didn’t use that bamboo rod too liberally and if I could conjure enough wet dreams. (Hey, I was eighteen years old and had just lived five years in a fortress full of available concubines, I had a habit, okay?)

“Monk Number Twenty-two,” Gaspar said to Joshua, “you shall begin by learning how to sit.”

“I can sit,” I said.

“And you, Number Twenty-one, will shave the yak.”

“That’s just an expression, right?”

It wasn’t.

A yak is an extremely large, extremely hairy, buffalolike animal with dangerous-looking black horns. If you’ve ever seen a water buffalo, imagine it wearing a full-body wig that drags the ground. Now sprinkle it with musk, manure, and sour milk: you’ve got yourself a yak. In a cavelike stable, the monks kept one female yak, which they let out during the day to wander the mountain paths to graze. On what, I don’t know. There didn’t seem to be enough living plant life to support an animal of that size (the yak’s shoulder was higher than my head), but there didn’t seem to be enough plant life in all of Judea for a herd of goats, either, and herding was one of the main occupations. What did I know?

The yak provided just enough milk and cheese to remind the monks that they didn’t get enough milk and cheese from one yak for twenty-two monks. The animal also provided a long, coarse wool which needed to be harvested twice a year. This venerated duty, along with combing the crap and grass and burrs out of the wool, fell to me. There’s not much to know about yaks beyond that, except for one important fact that Gaspar felt I needed to learn through practice: yaks hate to be shaved.

It fell to Monks Eight and Seven to bandage me, set my broken legs and arm, and clean off the yak dung that had been so thoroughly stomped into my body. I would tell you the distinction of those two solemn students if I could think of any, but I can’t. The goal of all of the monks was to let go of the ego, the self, and but for a few more lines on the faces of the older men, they looked alike, dressed alike, and behaved alike. I, on the other hand, was quite distinct from the others, despite my shaved head and saffron robe, as I had bandages over half of my body and three out of four limbs splinted with bamboo.

After the yak disaster, Joshua waited until the middle of the night to crawl down the hall to my cell. The soft snores of monks filled the halls, and the soft turbulence of the bats that entered their cave through the monastery echoed off the stone walls like the death panting of epileptic shadows.

“Does it hurt?” Joshua said.

Sweat streamed from my face despite the chilly temperature. “I can hardly breathe.” Seven and Eight had wrapped my broken ribs, but every breath was a knife in the side.

Joshua put his hand on my forehead.

“I’ll be all right, Josh, you don’t have to do that.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” he said. “Keep your voice down.”

In seconds my pain was gone and I could breathe again. Then I fell asleep or passed out from gratitude, I don’t know which. When I awoke with the dawn Joshua was still kneeling beside me, his hand still pressed against my forehead. He had fallen asleep there.

I carried the combed yak wool to Gaspar, who was chanting in the great cavern temple. It amounted to a fairly large bundle and I set it on the floor behind the monk and backed away.

“Wait,” Gaspar said, holding a single finger in the air. He finished his chant, then turned to me. “Tea,” he said. He led and I followed to the room where he had received Joshua and me when we had first arrived. “Sit,” he said. “Sit, don’t wait.”

I sat and watched him make a charcoal fire in a small stone brazier, using a bow and fire drill to start the flames first in some dried moss, then blowing it onto the charcoal.

“I invented a stick that makes fire instantly,” I said. “I could teach—”

Gaspar glared at me and held up the finger again to poke my words out of the air. “Sit,” he said. “Don’t talk. Don’t wait.”

He heated water in a copper pot until it boiled, then poured it over some tea leaves in an earthenware bowl. He set two small cups on the table, then proceeded to pour tea from the bowl.

“Hey, doofus!” I yelled. “You’re spilling the fucking tea!”

Gaspar smiled and set the bowl down on the table.

“How can I give you tea if your cup is already full?”

“Huh?” I said eloquently. Parables were never my strong suit. If you want to say something, say it. So, of course, Joshua and Buddhists were the perfect people to hang out with, straight talkers that they were.

Gaspar poured himself some tea, then took a deep breath and closed his eyes. After perhaps a whole minute passed, he opened them again. “If you already know everything, then how will I be able to teach you? You must empty your cup before I can give you tea.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” I grabbed my cup, tossed the tea out the same window I’d tossed Gaspar’s stick, then plopped the cup back on the table. “I’m ready,” I said.

“Go to the temple and sit,” Gaspar said.

No tea? He was obviously still not happy about my almost-threat on his life. I backed out of the door bowing (a courtesy Joy had taught me).

“One more thing,” Gaspar said. I stopped and waited. “Number Seven said that you would not live through the night. Number Eight agreed. How is it that you are not only alive, but unhurt?”

I thought about it for a second before I answered, something I seldom do, then I said, “Perhaps those monks value their own opinions too highly. I can only hope that they have not corrupted anyone else’s thinking.”

“Go sit,” Gaspar said.

Sitting was what we did. To learn to sit, to be still and hear the music of the universe, was why we had come halfway around the world, evidently. To let go of ego, not individuality, but that which distinguishes us from all other beings. “When you sit, sit. When you breathe, breathe. When you eat, eat,” Gaspar would say, meaning that every bit of our being was to be in the moment, completely aware of the now, no past, no future, nothing dividing us from everything that is.

It’s hard for me, a Jew, to stay in the moment. Without the past, where is the guilt? And without the future, where is the dread? And without guilt and dread, who am I?

“See your skin as what connects you to the universe, not what separates you from it,” Gaspar told me, trying to teach me the essence of what enlightenment meant, while admitting that it was not something that could be taught. Method he could teach. Gaspar could sit.

The legend went (I pieced it together from bits dropped by the master and his monks) that Gaspar had built the monastery as a place to sit. Many years ago he had come to China from India, where he had been born a prince, to teach the emperor and his court the true meaning of Buddhism, which had been lost in years of dogma and overinterpretation of scripture.

Upon arriving, the emperor asked Gaspar, “What have I attained for all of my good deeds?”

“Nothing,” said Gaspar.

The emperor was aghast, thinking now that he had been generous to his people all these years for nothing.

He said, “Well then, what is the essence of Buddhism?”

“Vast amphibians,” said Gaspar.

The emperor had Gaspar thrown from the temple, at which time the young monk decided two things; one, that he would have a better answer the next time he was asked the question, and two, that he’d better learn to speak better Chinese before he talked to anyone of importance. He’d meant to say, “Vast emptiness,” but he’d gotten the words wrong.

The legend went on to say that Gaspar then came to the cave where the monastery was now built and sat down to meditate, determined to stay there until enlightenment came to him. Nine years later, he came down from the mountain, and the people of the village were waiting for him with food and gifts.

“Master, we seek your most holy guidance, what can you tell us?” they cried.

“I really have to pee,” said the monk. And with that all of the villagers knew that he had indeed achieved the mind of all Buddhas, or “no mind,” as we called it.

The villagers begged Gaspar to stay with them, and they helped him build the monastery at the site of the very cave where he had achieved his enlightenment. During the construction, the villagers were attacked many times by vicious bandits, and although he believed that no being should be killed, he also felt that these people should have a way to defend themselves, so he meditated on the subject until he devised a method of self-defense based on various movements he learned from the yogis in his native India, which he taught to the villagers, then to each of the monks as they joined the monastery. He called this discipline kung fu, which translates, “method by which short bald guys may kick the bejeezus out of you.”

Our training in kung fu began with the hopping posts. After breakfast and morning meditation, Number Three Monk, who seemed to be the oldest of the monks, led us to the monastery courtyard where we found a stack of posts, perhaps two feet long and about a span’s width in diameter. He had us set the posts on end in a straight line, about a half a stride away from each other. Then he told us to hop up on one of the posts and balance there. After both of us spent most of the morning picking ourselves up off the rough stone paving, we each found ourselves standing on one foot on the end of a pole.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now nothing,” Number Three said. “Just stand.”

So we stood. For hours. The sun crossed the sky and my legs and back began to ache and we fell again and again only to have Number Three bark at us and tell us to jump back up on the post. When darkness began to fall and we both had stood for several hours without falling, Number Three said, “Now hop to the next post.”

I heard Joshua sigh heavily. I looked at the line of posts and could see the pain that lay ahead if we were going to have to hop this whole gauntlet. Joshua was next to me at the end of the line, so he would have to hop to the post I was standing on. Not only would I have to jump to the next post and land without falling, but I would have to make sure that my take-off didn’t knock over the post I was leaving.

“Now!” said Number Three.

I leapt and missed the landing. The post tipped out from under me and I hit the stone headfirst, sending a white flash before my eyes and a bolt of fire down my neck. Before I could gather my wits Joshua tumbled over on top of me. “Thank you,” he said, grateful to have landed on a soft Jew rather than hard flagstone.

“Back up,” Number Three said.

We set up our posts again, then hopped up on them again. This time both of us made it on the first try. Then we waited for the command to take the next leap. The moon rose high and full and we both stared down the row of poles, wondering how long it would take us before we could hop the whole row, wondering how long Number Three would make us stay there, thinking about the story of how Gaspar had sat for nine years. I couldn’t remember ever having felt so much pain, which is saying something if you’ve been yak-stomped. I was trying to imagine just how much fatigue and thirst I could bear before I fell when Number Three said, “Enough. Go sleep.”

“That’s it?” Joshua asked, as he hopped off his post and winced upon landing. “Why did we set up twenty posts if we were only going to use three?”

“Why were you thinking of twenty when you can only stand on one?” answered Three.

“I have to pee,” I said.

“Exactly,” said the monk.

So there you have it: Buddhism.

Each day we went to the courtyard and arranged the posts differently, randomly. Number Three added posts of different heights and diameters. Sometimes we had to hop from one post to the other as quickly as possible, other times we stood in one place for hours, ready to move in an instant, should Number Three command it. The point, it seemed, was that we could not anticipate anything, nor could we develop a rhythm to the exercise. We were forced to be ready to move in any direction, without forethought. Number Three called this controlled spontaneity, and for the first six months in the monastery we spent as much time atop the posts as we did in sitting meditation. Joshua took to the kung fu training immediately, as he did to the meditation. I was, as the Buddhists say, more dense.

In addition to the normal duties of tending the monastery, our gardens, and milking the yak (mercifully, a task I was never assigned), every ten days or so a group of six monks would go to the village with their bowls and collect alms from the villagers, usually rice and tea, sometimes dark sauces, yak butter, or cheese, and on rare occasions cotton fabric, from which new robes would be made. For the first year Joshua and I were not allowed to leave the monastery at all, but I started to notice a pattern of strange behavior. After each trip to the village for alms, four or five monks would disappear into the mountains for several days. Nothing was ever said of it, either when they left or when they returned, but it seemed that there was some sort of rotation, with each monk only leaving every third or fourth time, with the exception of Gaspar, who left more often.

Finally I worked up the courage to ask Gaspar what was going on and he said, “It is a special meditation. You are not ready. Go sit.”

Gaspar’s answer to most of my questions was “Go sit,” and my resentment meant that I wasn’t losing the attachment to my ego, and therefore I wasn’t going anywhere in my meditation. Joshua, on the other hand, seemed completely at peace with what we were doing. He could sit for hours, not moving, and then perform the exercise on the posts as if he’d spent an hour limbering up.

“How do you do it?” I asked him. “How do you think of nothing and not fall asleep?” That had been one of the major barriers to my enlightenment. If I sat still for too long, I fell asleep, and evidently, the sound of snoring echoing through the temple disturbed the meditations of the other monks. The recommended cure for this condition was to drink huge quantities of green tea, which did, indeed, keep me alert, but also replaced my “no mind” state with constant thoughts of my bladder. In fact, in less than a year, I attained total bladder conciousness. Joshua, on the other hand, was able to completely let go of his ego, as he had been instructed. It was in our ninth month at the monastery, in the midst of the most bitter winter I can even imagine, when Joshua, having let go of all constructions of self and vanity, became invisible.

Chapter 18

I have been out among you, eating and talking and walking and walking and walking, for hours without having to turn because of a wall in my way. The angel woke me this morning with a new set of clothes, strange to the feel but familiar to the sight (from television). Jeans, sweatshirt, and sneakers, as well as some socks and boxer shorts.

“Put these on. I’m taking you out for a walk,” said Raziel.

“As if I were a dog,” I said.

“Exactly as if you were a dog.”

The angel was also wearing modern American garb, and although he was still strikingly handsome, he looked so uncomfortable that the clothes might have been held to his body with flaming spikes.

“Where are we going?”

“I told you, out.”

“Where did you get the clothes?”

“I called down and Jesus brought them up. There is a clothing store in the hotel. Come now.”

Raziel closed the door behind us and put the room key in his jeans pocket with the money. I wondered if he’d ever had pockets before. I wouldn’t have thought to use them. I didn’t say a word as we rode the elevator down to the lobby and made our way out the front doors. I didn’t want to ruin it, to say something that would bring the angel to his senses. The noise in the street was glorious: the cars, the jackhammers, the insane people babbling to themselves. The light! The smells! I felt as if I must have been in shock when we first traveled here from Jerusalem. I didn’t remember it being so vivid.

I started to skip down the street and the angel caught me by the shoulder; his fingers dug into my muscles like talons. “You know that you can’t get away, that if you run I can catch you and snap your legs so you will never run again. You know that if you should escape even for a few minutes, you cannot hide from me. You know that I can find you, as I once found everyone of your kind? You know these things?”

“Yes, let go of me. Let’s walk.”

“I hate walking. Have you ever seen an eagle look at a pigeon? That’s how I feel about you and your walking.”

I should point out, I suppose, what Raziel was talking about when he said that he once found everyone of my kind. It seems that he did a stint, centuries ago, as the Angel of Death, but was relieved of his duties because he was not particularly good at them. He admits that he’s a sucker for a hard-luck story (perhaps that explains his fascination with soap operas). Anyway, when you read in the Torah about Noah living to be nine hundred and Moses living to be a hundred and forty, well, guess who led the chorus line in the “Off This Mortal Coil” shuffle? That’s where he got the black-winged aspect that I’ve talked about before. Even though they fired him, they let him keep the outfit. (Can you believe that Noah was able to postpone death for eight hundred years by telling the angel that he was behind in his paperwork? Would that Raziel could be that incompetent at his current task.)

“Look, Raziel! Pizza!” I pointed to a sign. “Buy us pizza!”

He took some money out of his pocket and handed it to me. “You do it. You can do it, right?”

“Yes, we had commerce in my time,” I said sarcastically. “We didn’t have pizza, but we had commerce.”

“Good, can you use that machine?” He pointed to a box that held newspapers behind glass.

“If it doesn’t open with that little handle, then no.”

The angel looked perturbed. “How is it that you can receive the gift of tongues and suddenly understand all languages, and there is no gift that can tell you how things work in this time? Tell me that.”

“Look, maybe if you didn’t hog the remote all the time I would learn how to use these things.” I meant that I could have learned more about the outside world from television, but Raziel thought I meant that I needed more practice pushing the channel buttons.

“Knowing how to use the television isn’t enough. You have to know how everything in this world works.” And with that the angel turned and stared through the window of the pizza place at the men tossing disks of dough into the air.

“Why, Raziel? Why do I need to know about how this world works? If anything, you’ve tried to keep me from learning anything.”

“Not anymore. Let’s go eat pizza.”

“Raziel?”

He wouldn’t explain any further, but for the rest of the day we wandered the city, spending money, talking to people, learning. In the late afternoon Raziel inquired of a bus driver as to where we might go to meet Spider-Man. I could have gone another two thousand years without seeing the kind of disappointment I saw on Raziel’s face when the bus driver gave his answer. We returned here to the room where Raziel said, “I miss destroying cities full of humans.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, even though it was my best friend who had caused that sort of thing to go out of fashion, and not a moment too soon. But the angel needed to hear it. There’s a difference between bearing false witness and saving someone’s feelings. Even Joshua knew that.

“Joshua, you’re scaring me,” I said, talking to the disembodied voice that floated before me in the temple. “Where are you?”

“I am everywhere and nowhere,” Joshua’s voice said.

“How come your voice is in front of me then?” I didn’t like this at all. Yes, my years with Joshua had jaded me in regard to supernatural experiences, but my meditation hadn’t yet brought me to the place where I wouldn’t react to my friend being invisible.

“I suppose it is the nature of a voice that it must come from somewhere, but only so that it may be let go.”

Gaspar had been sitting in the temple and at the sound of our voices he rose and came over to me. He didn’t appear to be angry, but then, he never did. “Why?” Gaspar said to me, meaning, Why are you talking and disturbing everyone’s meditation with your infernal noise, you barbarian?

“Joshua has attained enlightenment,” I said.

Gaspar said nothing, meaning, So? That’s the idea, you unworthy spawn of a razor-burned yak. I could tell that’s what he meant by the tone in his voice.

“So he’s invisible.”

“Mu,” Joshua’s voice said. Mu meaning nothing beyond nothingness in Chinese.

In an act of distinctly uncontrolled spontaneity, Gaspar screamed like a little girl and jumped four feet straight in the air. Monks stopped chanting and looked up. “What was that?”

“That’s Joshua.”

“I am free of self, free of ego,” Joshua said. There was a little squeak and then a nasty stench infused us.

I looked at Gaspar and he shook his head. He looked at me and I shrugged.

“Was that you?” Gaspar asked Joshua.

“Me in the sense that I am part of all things, or me in the sense of I am the one who poofed the gefilte gas?” asked Josh.

“The latter,” said Gaspar.

“No,” said Josh.

“You lie,” I said, as amazed at that as I was at the fact that I couldn’t see my friend.

“I should stop talking now. Having a voice separates me from all that is.” With that he was quiet, and Gaspar looked as if he were about to panic.

“Don’t go away, Joshua,” the abbot said. “Stay as you are if you must, but come to the tea chamber at dawn tomorrow.” Gaspar looked to me. “You come too.”

“I have to train on the poles in the morning,” I said.

“You are excused,” Gaspar said. “And if Joshua talks to you anymore tonight, try to persuade him to share our existence.” Then he hurried off in a very unenlightened way.

That night I was falling asleep when I heard a squeak in the hall outside of my cell, then an incredibly foul odor jolted me awake.

“Joshua?” I crawled out of my cell into the hall. There were narrow slots high in the walls through which moonlight could sift, but I saw nothing but faint blue light on the stone. “Joshua, is that you?”

“How could you tell?” Joshua’s disembodied voice said.

“Well, honestly, you stink, Josh.”

“The last time we went to the village for alms, a woman gave Number Fourteen and me a thousand-year-old egg. It didn’t sit well.”

“Can’t imagine why. I don’t think you’re supposed to eat an egg after, oh, two hundred years or so.”

“They bury them, leave them there, then dig them up.”

“Is that why I can’t see you?”

“No, that’s because of my meditation. I’ve let go of everything. I’ve achieved perfect freedom.”

“You’ve been free ever since we left Galilee.”

“It’s not the same. That’s what I came to tell you, that I can’t free our people from the rule of Romans.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s not true freedom. Any freedom that can be given can be taken away. Moses didn’t need to ask Pharaoh to release our people, our people didn’t need to be released from the Babylonians, and they don’t need to be released from the Romans. I can’t give them freedom. Freedom is in their hearts, they merely have to find it.”

“So you’re saying you’re not the Messiah?”

“How can I be? How can a humble being presume to grant something that is not his to give?”

“If not you, who, Josh? Angels and miracles, your ability to heal and comfort? Who else is chosen if not you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I wanted to say good-bye. I’ll be with you, as part of all things, but you won’t perceive me until you become enlightened. You can’t imagine how this feels, Biff. You are everything, you love everything, you need nothing.”

“Okay. You won’t be needing your shoes then, right?”

“Possessions stand between you and freedom.”

“Sounded like a yes to me. Do me one favor though, okay?”

“Of course.”

“Listen to what Gaspar has to say to you tomorrow.” And give me time to think up an intelligent answer to someone who’s invisible and crazy, I thought to myself. Joshua was innocent, but he wasn’t stupid. I had to come up with something to save the Messiah so he could save the rest of us.

“I’m going to the temple to sit. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Not if I see you first.”

“Funny,” said Josh.

Gaspar looked especially old that morning when I met him in the tea room. His personal quarters consisted of a cell no bigger than my own, but it was located just off the tea room and had a door which he could close. It was cold in the morning in the monastery and I could see our breath as Gaspar boiled the water for tea. Soon I saw a third puff of breath coming from my side of the table, although there was no person there.

“Good morning, Joshua,” Gaspar said. “Did you sleep, or are you free from that need?”

“No, I don’t need sleep anymore,” said Josh.

“You’ll excuse Twenty-one and I, as we still require nourishment.”

Gaspar poured us some tea and fetched two rice balls from a shelf where he kept the tea. He held one out for me and I took it.

“I don’t have my bowl with me,” I said, worried that Gaspar would be angry with me. How was I to know? The monks always ate breakfast together. This was out of order.

“Your hands are clean,” said Gaspar. Then he sipped his tea and sat peacefully for a while, not saying a word. Soon the room heated up from the charcoal brazier that Gaspar had used to heat the tea and I was no longer able to see Joshua’s breath. Evidently he’d also overcome the gastric distress of the thousand-year-old egg. I began to get nervous, aware that Number Three would be waiting for Joshua and me in the courtyard to start our exercises. I was about to say something when Gaspar held up a finger to mark silence.

“Joshua,” Gaspar said, “do you know what a bodhisattva is?”

“No, master, I don’t.”

“Gautama Buddha was a bodhisattva. The twenty-seven patriarchs since Gautama Buddha were also bodhisattvas. Some say that I, myself, am a bodhisattva, but the claim is not mine.”

“There are no Buddhas,” said Joshua.

“Indeed,” said Gaspar, “but when one reaches the place of Buddhahood and realizes that there is no Buddha because everything is Buddha, when one reaches enlightenment, but makes a decision that he will not evolve to nirvana until all sentient beings have preceded him there, then he is a bodhisattva. A savior. A bodhisattva, by making this decision, grasps the only thing that can ever be grasped: compassion for the suffering of his fellow humans. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” said Joshua. “But the decision to become a bodhisattva sounds like an act of ego, a denial of enlightenment.”

“Indeed it is, Joshua. It is an act of self-love.”

“Are you asking me to become a bodhisattva?”

“If I were to say to you, love your neighbor as you love yourself, would I be telling you to be selfish?”

There was silence for a moment, and as I looked at the place where Joshua’s voice was originating, he gradually started to become visible again. “No,” said Joshua.

“Why?” asked Gaspar.

“Love thy neighbor as thou lovest thyself”—and here there was a long pause when I could imagine Joshua looking to the sky for an answer, as he so often did, then: “for he is thee, and thou art he, and everything that is ever worth loving is everything.” Joshua solidified before our eyes, fully dressed, looking no worse for the wear.

Gaspar smiled and those extra years that he had been carrying on his face seemed to fade away. There was a peace in his aspect and for a moment he could have been as young as we were. “That is correct, Joshua. You are truly an enlightened being.”

“I will be a bodhisattva to my people,” Joshua said.

“Good, now go shave the yak,” said Gaspar.

I dropped my rice ball. “What?”

“And you, find Number Three and commence your training on the posts.”

“Let me shave the yak,” I said. “I’ve done it before.”

Joshua put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll be fine.”

Gaspar said: “And on the next moon, after alms, you shall both go with the group into the mountains for a special meditation. Your training begins tonight. You shall receive no meals for two days and you must bring me your blankets before sundown.

“But I’ve already been enlightened,” protested Josh.

“Good. Shave the yak,” said the master.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when Joshua showed up the next day at the communal dining room with a bale of yak hair and not a scratch on him. The other monks didn’t seem surprised in the least. In fact, they hardly looked up from their rice and tea. (In my years at Gaspar’s monastery, I found it was astoundingly difficult to surprise a Buddhist monk, especially one who had been trained in kung fu. So alert were they to the moment that one had to become nearly invisible and completely silent to sneak up on a monk, and even then simply jumping out and shouting “boo” wasn’t enough to shake their chakras. To get a real reaction, you pretty much had to poleax one of them with a fighting staff, and if he heard the staff whistling through the air, there was a good chance he’d catch it, take it away from you, and pound you into damp pulp with it. So, no, they weren’t surprised when Joshua delivered the fuzz harvest unscathed.)

“How?” I asked, that being pretty much what I wanted to know.

“I told her what I was doing,” said Joshua. “She stood perfectly still.”

“You just told her what you were going to do?”

“Yes.”

“She wasn’t afraid, so she didn’t resist. All fear comes from trying to see the future, Biff. If you know what is coming, you aren’t afraid.”

“That’s not true. I knew what was coming—namely that you were going to get stomped by the yak and that I’m not nearly as good at healing as you are—and I was afraid.”

“Oh, then I’m wrong. Sorry. She must just not like you.”

“That’s more like it,” I said, vindicated. Joshua sat on the floor across from me. Like me, he wasn’t permitted to eat anything, but we were allowed tea. “Hungry?”

“Yes, you?”

“Starving. How did you sleep last night, without your blanket, I mean?”

“It was cold, but I used the training and I was able to sleep.”

“I tried, but I shivered all night long. It’s not even winter yet, Josh. When the snow falls we’ll freeze to death without a blanket. I hate the cold.”

“You have to be the cold,” said Joshua.

“I liked you better before you got enlightened,” I said.

Now Gaspar started to oversee our training personally. He was there every second as we leapt from post to post, and he drilled us mercilessly through the complex hand and foot movements we practiced as part of our kung fu regimen. (I had a funny feeling that I’d seen the movements before as he taught them to us, then I remembered Joy doing her complex dances in Balthasar’s fortress. Had Gaspar taught the wizard, or vice versa?) As we sat in meditation, sometimes all through the night, he stood behind us with his bamboo rod and periodically struck us on the back of the head for no reason I could discern.

“Why’s he keep doing that? I didn’t do anything,” I complained to Joshua over tea.

“He’s not hitting you to punish you, he’s hitting you to keep you in the moment.”

“Well, I’m in the moment now, and at the moment I’d like to beat the crap out of him.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Oh, what? I’m supposed to want to be the crap I beat out of him?”

“Yes, Biff,” Joshua said somberly. “You must be the crap.” But he couldn’t keep a straight face and he started to snicker as he sipped his tea, finally spraying the hot liquid out his nostrils and collapsing into a fit of laughter. All of the other monks, who evidently had been listening in, started giggling as well. A couple of them rolled around on the floor holding their sides.

It’s very difficult to stay angry when a room full of bald guys in orange robes start giggling. Buddhism.

Gaspar made us wait two months before taking us on the special meditation pilgrimage, so it was well into winter before we made that monumental trek. Snow fell so deep on the mountainside that we literally had to tunnel our way out to the courtyard every morning for exercise. Before we were allowed to begin, Joshua and I had to shovel all of the snow out of the courtyard, which meant that some days it was well past noon before we were able to start drilling. Other days the wind whipped down out of the mountains so viciously that we couldn’t see more than a few inches past our faces, and Gaspar would devise exercises that we could practice inside.

Joshua and I were not given our blankets back, so I, for one, spent every night shivering myself to sleep. Although the high windows were shuttered and charcoal braziers were lit in the rooms that were occupied, there was never anything approaching physical comfort during the winter. To my relief, the other monks were not unaffected by the cold, and I noticed that the accepted posture for breakfast was to wrap your entire body around your steaming cup of tea, so not so much as a mote of precious heat might escape. Someone entering the dining hall, seeing us all balled up in our orange robes, might have thought he stumbled into a steaming patch of giant pumpkins. At least the others, including Joshua, seemed to find some relief from the chill during their meditations, having reached that state, I’m told, where they could, indeed, generate their own heat. I was still learning the discipline. Sometimes I considered climbing to the back of the temple where the cave became narrow and hundreds of fuzzy bats hibernated on the ceiling in a great seething mass of fur and sinew. The smell might have been horrid, but it would have been warm.

When the day finally came for us to take the pilgrimage, I was no closer to generating my own heat than I had been at the start, so I was relieved when Gaspar led five of us to a cabinet and issued yak-wool leggings and boots to each of us. “Life is suffering,” said Gaspar as he handed Joshua his leggings, “but it is more expedient to go through it with one’s legs intact.” We left just after dawn on a crystal clear morning after a night of brutal wind that had blown much of the snow off the base of the mountain. Gaspar led five of us down the mountain to the village. Sometimes we trod in the snow up to our waists, other times we hopped across the tops of exposed stones, suddenly making our training on the tops of the posts seem much more practical than I had ever thought possible. On the mountainside, a slip from one of the stones might have sent us plunging into a powder-filled ravine to suffocate under fifty feet of snow.

The villagers received us with great celebration, coming out of their stone and sod houses to fill our bowls with rice and root vegetables, ringing small brass bells and blowing the yak horn in our honor before quickly retreating back to their fires and slamming their doors against the cold. It was festive, but it was brief. Gaspar led us to the home of the toothless old woman who Joshua and I had met so long ago and we all bedded down in the straw of her small barn amid her goats and a pair of yaks. (Her yaks were much smaller than the one we kept at the monastery, more the size of normal cattle. I found out later that ours was the progeny of the wild yaks that lived in the high plateaus, while hers were from stock that had been domesticated for a thousand years.)

After the others had gone to sleep, I snuck into the old woman’s house in search of some food. It was a small stone house with two rooms. The front one was dimly lit by a single window covered with a tanned and stretched animal hide that transmitted the light of the full moon as a dull yellow glow. I could only make out shapes, not actual objects, but I felt my way around the room until I laid my hand on what had to be a bag of turnips. I dug one of the knobby vegetables from the bag, brushed the dirt from the surface with my palm, then sunk in my teeth and crunched away a mouthful of crisp, earthy bliss. I had never even cared for turnips up to that time, but I had just decided that I was going to sit there until I had transferred the entire contents of that bag to my stomach, when I heard a noise in the back room.

I stopped chewing and listened. Suddenly I could see someone standing in the doorway between the two rooms. I drew in my breath and held it. Then I heard the old woman’s voice, speaking Chinese with her peculiar accent: “To take the life of a human or one like a human. To take a thing that is not given. To claim to have superhuman powers.”

I was slow, but suddenly I realized that the old woman was reciting the rules for which a monk could be expelled from the monastery. As she came into the dim light from the window she said, “To have intercourse with anyone, even down to an animal.” And at that second, I realized that the toothless old woman was completely naked. A mouthful of chewed turnip rolled out of my mouth and down the front of my robe. The old woman, close now, reached out, I thought to catch the mess, but instead she caught what was under my robe.

“Do you have superhuman powers?” the old woman said, pulling on my manhood, which, much to my amazement, nodded an answer.

I need to say here that it had been over two years since we had left Balthasar’s fortress, and another six months before that since the demon had come and killed all of the girls but Joy—thus curtailing my regular supply of sexual companions. I want to go on record that I had been steadfast in adhering to the rules of the monastery, allowing only those nocturnal emissions as were expelled during dreams (although I had gotten pretty good in directing my dreams in that direction, so all that mental discipline and meditation wasn’t completely useless). So, that said, I was in a weakened state of resistance when the old woman, leathery and toothless as she might have been, compelled me by threat and intimidation to share with her what the Chinese call the Forbidden Monkey Dance. Five times.

Imagine my chagrin when the man who would save the world found me in the morning with a twisted burl of Chinese crone-flesh orally affixed to my fleshy pagoda of expandable joy, even as I snored away in transcendent turnip-digesting oblivion.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” said Joshua, turning to the wall and throwing his robe over his head.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” I said, roused from my slumber by the disgusted exclamation of my friend.

“Ahhhhhhhhhh!” said the old woman, I think. (Her speech was generously obstructed, if I do say so myself.)

“Jeez, Biff,” Joshua stuttered. “You can’t…I mean…Lust is…Jeez, Biff!”

“What?” I said, like I didn’t know what.

“You’ve ruined sex for me for all time,” Joshua said. “Whenever I think of it, this picture will always come up in my mind.”

“So,” I said, pushing the old woman away and shooing her into the back room.

“So…” Joshua turned around and looked me in the eye, then grinned widely enough to threaten the integrity of his ears. “So thanks.”

I stood and bowed. “I am here only to serve,” I said, grinning back.

“Gaspar sent me to look for you. He’s ready to leave.”

“Okay, I’d better, you know, say good-bye.” I gestured toward the back room.

Joshua shuddered. “No offense,” he said to the old woman, who was out of sight in the other room. “I was just surprised.”

“Want a turnip?” I said, holding up one of the knobby treats.

Joshua turned and started out the door. “Jeez, Biff,” he was saying as he left.

Chapter 19

Another day spent wandering the city with the angel, another dream of the woman standing at the foot of my bed, and I awoke finally—after all these years—to understand what Joshua must have felt, at least at times, as the only one of his kind. I know he said again and again that he was the son of man, born of a woman, one of us, but it was the paternal part of his heritage that made him different. Now, since I’m fairly sure I am the only person walking the earth who was doing so two thousand years ago, I have an acute sense of what it is to be unique, to be the one and only. It’s lonely. That’s why Joshua went into those mountains so often, and stayed so long in the company of the creature.

Last night I dreamed that the angel was talking to someone in the room while I slept. In the dream I heard him say, “Maybe it would be best just to kill him when he finishes. Snap his neck, shove him into a storm sewer.” Strange, though, there wasn’t the least bit of malice in the angel’s voice. On the contrary, he sounded very forlorn. That’s how I know it was a dream.

I never thought I’d be happy to get back to the monastery, but after trudging through the snow for half the day, the dank stone walls and dark hallways were as welcoming as a warmly lit hearth. Half of the rice we had collected as alms was immediately boiled, then packed into bamboo cylinders about a hand wide and as long as a man’s leg, then half of the root vegetables were stored away while the rest were packed into satchels along with some salt and more bamboo cylinders filled with cold tea. We had just enough time to chase the chill out of our limbs by the cook fires, then Gaspar had us take up the cylinders and the satchels and he led us out into the mountains. I had never noticed when the other monks left on the pilgrimage of secret meditation that they were carrying so much food. And with all this food, much more than we could eat in the four or five days we were gone, why had Joshua and I been training for this by fasting?

Traveling higher into the mountains was actually easier for a while, as the snow had been blown off the trail. It was when we came to the high plateaus where the yak grazed and the snow drifted that the going became difficult. We took turns at the head of the line, plowing a trail through the snow.

As we climbed, the air became so thin that even the highly conditioned monks had to stop frequently to catch their breaths. At the same time, the wind bit through our robes and leggings as if they weren’t there. That there was not enough air to breathe, yet the movement of the air would chill our bones, I suppose is ironic, yet I was having a hard time appreciating it even then.

I said, “Why couldn’t you just go to the rabbis and learn to be the Messiah like everyone else? Do you remember any snow in the story of Moses? No. Did the Lord appear to Moses in the form of a snow bank? I don’t think so. Did Elijah ascend to heaven on a chariot of ice? Nope. Did Daniel come forth unharmed from a blizzard? No. Our people are about fire, Joshua, not ice. I don’t remember any snow in all of the Torah. The Lord probably doesn’t even go to places where it snows. This is a huge mistake, we never should have come, we should go home as soon as this is over, and in conclusion, I can’t feel my feet.” I was out of breath and wheezing.

“Daniel didn’t come forth from the fire,” Joshua said calmly.

“Well, who can blame him, it was probably warm in there.”

“He came forth unharmed from the lion’s den,” said Josh.

“Here,” said Gaspar, stopping any further discussion. He put down his parcels and sat down.

“Where?” I said. We were under a low overhang, out of the wind, and mostly out of the snow, but it was hardly what you could call shelter. Still, the other monks, including Joshua, shed their packs and sat, affecting the meditation posture and holding their hands in the mudra of all-giving compassion (which, strangely enough, is the same hand gesture that modern people use for “okay.” Makes you think).

“We can’t be here. There’s no here here,” I said.

“Exactly,” said Gaspar. “Contemplate that.”

So I sat.

Joshua and the others seemed impervious to the cold and as frost formed on my eyelashes and clothing, the light dusting of ice crystals that covered the ground and rocks around each of them began to melt, as if there was a flame burning inside of them. Whenever the wind died, I noticed steam rising off of Gaspar as his damp robe gave up its moisture to the chill air. When Joshua and I first learned to meditate, we had been taught to be hyperaware of everything around us, connected, but the state that my fellow monks were in now was one of trance, of separation, of exclusion. They had each constructed some sort of mental shelter in which they were happily sitting, while I, quite literally, was freezing to death.

“Joshua, I need a little help here,” I said, but my friend didn’t move a muscle. If it weren’t for the steady stream of his breath I would have thought him frozen himself. I tapped him on the shoulder, but received no response whatsoever. I tried to get the attention of each of the other four monks, but they too gave no reaction to my prodding. I even pushed Gaspar hard enough to knock him over, yet he stayed in the sitting position, looking like a statue of the Buddha that had tumbled from its pedestal. Still, as I touched each of my companions I could feel the heat coming off of him. Since it was obvious that I wasn’t going to learn how to reach this trance state in time to save my own life, my only alternative was to take advantage of theirs.

At first I arranged the monks in a large pile, trying to keep the elbows and knees out of the eyes and yarbles, out of respect and in the spirit of the infinitely compassionate Buddha and stuff. Although the warmth coming off them was impressive, I found that I could only keep one side of me warm at a time. Soon, by arranging my friends in a circle facing outward, and sitting in the middle, I was able to construct an envelope of comfort that kept the chill at bay. Ideally, I could have used a couple of more monks to stretch over the top of my hut to block the wind, but as the Buddha said, life is suffering and all, so I suffered. After I heated some tea on Number Seven monk’s head and tucked one of the cylinders of rice under Gaspar’s arm until it was warm, I was able to enjoy a pleasant repast and dropped off to sleep with a full belly.

I awoke to what sounded like the entire Roman army trying to slurp the anchovies out of the Mediterranean Sea. When I opened my eyes I saw the source of the noise and nearly tumbled over backward trying to back away. A huge, furry creature, half again as tall as any man I had ever seen was trying to slurp the tea out of one of the bamboo cylinders, but the tea had frozen to slush and the creature looked as if he might suck the top of his head in if he continued. Yes, he looked sort of like a man, except his entire body was covered with a long white fur. His eyes were as large as a cow’s, with crystal blue irises and pinpoint pupils. Thick black eyelashes knitted together when he blinked. He had long black nails on his hands, which were similar to a man’s except twice the size, and the only clothing he wore at all were some sort of boots that looked to be made of yak skin. The impressive array of tackle swinging between the creature’s legs tipped me off to his maleness.

I looked around at the circle of monks to see if anyone had noticed that our supplies were being raided by a woolly beast, but they were all deeply entranced. The creature slurped again from the cylinder, then pounded on the side of it with his hand, as if to dislodge the contents, then looked at me as if asking for help. Whatever terror I felt melted away the second I looked into the creature’s eyes. There wasn’t the hint of aggression there, not a glint of violence or threat. I picked up the cylinder of tea that I had heated on Number Three’s head. It sloshed in my hand, indicating that it hadn’t frozen during my nap, so I held it out to the creature. He reached over Joshua’s head and took the cylinder, pulled the cork from the end, and drank greedily.

I took the moment to kick my friend in the kidney. “Josh, snap out of it. You need to see this.” I got no response, so I reached around and pinched my friend’s nostrils shut. To master meditation the student must first master his breath. The savior made a snorting sound and came out of his trance gasping and twisting in my grip. He was facing me when I finally let go.

“What?” Josh said.

I pointed behind him and Joshua turned around to witness the full glory of the big furry white guy. “Holy moly!”

Big Furry jumped back cradling his tea like a threatened infant and made some vocalization which wasn’t quite language. (But if it had been, it would probably have translated as “Holy Moly,” as well.)

It was nice to see Joshua’s masterful control slip to reveal a vulnerable underbelly of confusion. “What…I mean who…I mean, what is that?”

“Not a Jew,” I said helpfully, pointing to about a yard of foreskin.

“Well, I can see it’s not a Jew, but that doesn’t narrow it down much, does it?”

Strangely, I seemed to be enjoying this much more than my two semi-terrified cohorts. “Well, do you remember when Gaspar gave us the rules of the monastery, and we wondered about the one that said we were not to kill a human or someone like a human?”

“Yes?”

“Well, he’s someone like a human, I guess.”

“Okay.” Joshua climbed to his feet and looked at Big Furry. Big Furry straightened up and looked at Joshua, tilting his head from side to side.

Joshua smiled.

Big Furry smiled back. Black lips, really long sharp canines.

“Big teeth,” I said. “Very big teeth.”

Joshua held his hand out to the creature. The creature reached out to Joshua and ever so gently took the Messiah’s smaller hand in his great paw…and wrenched Joshua off his feet, catching him in a hug and squeezing him so hard that his beatific eyes started to bug out.

“Help,” squeaked Joshua.

The creature licked the top of Joshua’s head with a long blue tongue.

“He likes you,” I said.

“He’s tasting me,” Joshua said.

I thought of how my friend had fearlessly yanked the tail of the demon Catch, of how he had faced so many dangers with total calm. I thought of the times he had saved me, both from outside dangers and from myself, and I thought of the kindness in his eyes that ran deeper than sea, and I said:

“Naw, he likes you.” I thought I’d try another language to see if the creature might better comprehend my meaning: “You like Joshua, don’t you? Yes you do. Yes you do. He wuvs his widdle Joshua. Yes he does.” Baby talk is the universal language. The words are different, but the meaning and sound is the same.

The creature nuzzled Joshua up under its chin, then licked his head again, this time leaving a steaming trail of green-tea-stained saliva behind on my friend’s scalp. “Yuck,” said Joshua. “What is this thing?”

“It’s a yeti,” said Gaspar from behind me, obviously having been roused from his trance. “An abominable snowman.”

“This is what happens when you fuck a sheep!?” I exclaimed.

“Not an abomination,” Josh said, “abominable.” The yeti licked him on the cheek. Joshua tried to push away. To Gaspar he said, “Am I in danger?”

Gaspar shrugged. “Does a dog have a Buddha nature?”

“Please, Gaspar,” Joshua said. “This is a question of practical application, not spiritual growth.” The yeti sighed and licked Josh’s cheek again. I guessed that the creature must have a tongue as rough as a cat’s, as Joshua’s cheek was going pink with abrasion.

“Turn the other cheek, Josh,” I said. “Let him wear the other one out.”

“I’m going to remember this,” Joshua said. “Gaspar, will he harm me?”

“I don’t know. No one has ever gotten that close to him before. Usually he comes while we are in trance and disappears with the food. We are lucky to even get a glimpse of him.”

“Put me down, please,” said Josh to the creature. “Please put me down.”

The yeti set Joshua back on his feet on the ground. By this time the other monks were coming out of their trances. Number Seventeen squealed like a frying squirrel when he saw the yeti so close. The yeti crouched and bared his teeth.

“Stop that!” barked Joshua to Seventeen. “You’re scaring him.”

“Give him some rice,” said Gaspar.

I took the cylinder I had warmed and handed it to the yeti. He popped off the top and began scooping out rice with a long finger, licking the grains off his fingers like they were termites about to make their escape. Meanwhile Joshua backed away from the yeti so that he stood beside Gaspar.

“This is why you come here? Why after alms you carry so much food up the mountain?”

Gaspar nodded. “He’s the last of his kind. He has no one to help him gather food. No one to talk to.”

“But what is he? What is a yeti?”

“We like to think of him as a gift. He is a vision of one of the many lives a man might live before he reaches nirvana. We believe he is as close to a perfect being as can be achieved on this plane of existence.”

“How do you know he is the only one?”

“He told me.”

“He talks?”

“No, he sings. Wait.”

As we watched the yeti eat, each of the monks came forward and put his cylinders of food and tea in front of the creature. The yeti looked up from his eating only occasionally, as if his whole universe resided in that bamboo pipe full of rice, yet I could tell that behind those ice-blue eyes the creature was counting, figuring, rationing the supplies we had brought.

“Where does he live?” I asked Gaspar.

“We don’t know. A cave somewhere, I suppose. He has never taken us there, and we don’t look for it.”

Once all the food was put before the yeti, Gaspar signaled to the other monks and they started backing out from under the overhang into the snow, bowing to the yeti as they went. “It is time for us to go,” Gaspar said. “He doesn’t want our company.”

Joshua and I followed our fellow monks back into the snow, following a path they were blazing back the way we had come. The yeti watched us leave, and every time I looked back he was still watching, until we were far enough away that he became little more than an outline against the white of the mountain. When at last we climbed out of the valley, and even the great sheltering overhang was out of sight, we heard the yeti’s song. Nothing, not even the blowing of the ram’s horn back home, not the war cries of bandits, not the singing of mourners, nothing I had ever heard had reached inside of me the way the yeti’s song did. It was a high wailing, but with stops and pulses like the muted sound of a heart beating, and it carried all through the valley. The yeti held his keening notes far longer than any human breath could sustain. The effect was as if someone was emptying a huge cask of sadness down my throat until I thought I’d collapse or explode with the grief. It was the sound of a thousand hungry children crying, ten thousand widows tearing their hair over their husbands’ graves, a chorus of angels singing the last dirge on the day of God’s death. I covered my ears and fell to my knees in the snow. I looked at Joshua and tears were streaming down his cheeks. The other monks were hunched over as if shielding themselves from a hailstorm. Gaspar cringed as he looked at us, and I could see then that he was, indeed, a very old man. Not as old as Balthasar, perhaps, but the face of suffering was upon him.

“So you see,” the abbot said, “he is the only one of his kind. Alone.”

You didn’t have to understand the yeti’s language, if he had one, to know that Gaspar was right.

“No he’s not,” said Joshua. “I’m going to him.”

Gaspar took Joshua’s arm to stop him. “Everything is as it should be.”

“No,” said Joshua. “It is not.”

Gaspar pulled his hand back as if he had plunged it into a flame—a strange reaction, as I had actually seen the monk put his hand in flame with less reaction as part of the kung fu regimen.

“Let him be,” I said to Gaspar, not sure at the time why I was doing it.

Joshua headed back into the valley by himself, having not said another word to us.

“He’ll be back when it’s time,” I said.

“What do you know?” snapped Gaspar in a distinctly unenlightened way. “You’ll be working off your karma for a thousand years as a dung beetle just to evolve to the point of being dense.”

I didn’t say anything. I simply bowed, then turned and followed my brother monks back to the monastery.

It was a week before Joshua returned to us, and it was another day before he and I actually had time to speak. We were in the dining hall, and Joshua had eaten his own rice as well as mine. In the meantime, I had applied a lot of thought to the plight of the abominable snowman and, more important, to his origins.

“Do you think there were a lot of them, Josh?”

“Yes. Never as many as there are men, but there were many more.”

“What happened to them?”

“I’m not sure. When the yeti sings I see pictures in my head. I saw that men came to these mountains and killed the yeti. They had no instinct to fight. Most just stood in place and watched as they were slaughtered. Perplexed by man’s evil. Others ran higher and higher into the mountains. I think that this one had a mate and a family. They starved or died of some slow sickness. I can’t tell.”

“Is he a man?”

“I don’t think he is a man,” said Joshua.

“Is he an animal?”

“No, I don’t think he’s an animal either. He knows who he is. He knows he is the only one.”

“I think I know what he is.”

Joshua regarded me over the rim of his bowl. “Well?”

“Well, do you remember the monkey feet Balthasar bought from the old woman in Antioch, how they looked like little human feet?”

“Yes.”

“And you have to admit that the yeti looks very much like a man. More like a man than he does any other creature, right? Well, what if he is a creature who is becoming a man? What if he isn’t really the last of his kind, but the first of ours? What made me think of it was how Gaspar talks about how we work off our karma in different incarnations, as different creatures. As we learn more in each lifetime we may become a higher creature as we go. Well, maybe creatures do that too. Maybe as the yeti needs to live where it is warmer he loses his fur. Or as the monkeys need to, I don’t know, run cattle and sheep, they become bigger. Not all at once, but through many incarnations. Maybe creatures evolve the way Gaspar believes the soul evolves. What do you think?”

Joshua stroked his chin for a moment and stared at me as if he was deep in thought, while at the same time I thought he might burst out laughing any second. I’d spent a whole week thinking about this. This theory had vexed me through all of my training, all of my meditations since we’d made the pilgrimage to the yeti’s valley. I wanted some sort of acknowledgment from Joshua for my effort, if nothing else.

“Biff,” he said, “that may be the dumbest idea you’ve ever had.”

“So you don’t think it’s possible?”

“Why would the Lord create a creature only to have it die out? Why would the Lord allow that?” Joshua said.

“What about the flood? All but Noah and his family were killed.”

“But that was because people had become wicked. The yeti isn’t wicked. If anything, his kind have died out because they have no capacity for wickedness.”

“So, you’re the Son of God, you explain it to me.”

“It is God’s will,” said Joshua, “that the yeti disappear.”

“Because they had no trace of wickedness?” I said sarcastically. “If the yeti isn’t a man, then he’s not a sinner either. He’s innocent.”

Joshua nodded, staring into his now-empty bowl. “Yes. He’s innocent.” He stood and bowed to me, which was something he almost never did unless we were training. “I’m tired now, Biff. I have to sleep and pray.”

“Sorry, Josh, I didn’t mean to make you sad. I thought it was an interesting theory.”

He smiled weakly at me, then bowed his head and shuffled off to his cell.

Over the next few years Joshua spent at least a week out of every month in the mountains with the yeti, going up not only with every group after alms, but often going up into the mountains by himself for days or, in the summer, weeks at a time. He never talked about what he did while in the mountains, except, he told me, that the yeti had taken him to the cave where he lived and had shown him the bones of his people. My friend had found something with the yeti, and although I didn’t have the courage to ask him, I suspect the bond he shared with the snowman was the knowledge that they were both unique creatures, nothing like either of them walked the face of the earth, and regardless of the connection each might feel with God and the universe, at that time, in that place, but for each other, they were utterly alone.

Gaspar didn’t forbid Joshua’s pilgrimages, and indeed, he went out of his way to act as if he didn’t notice when Twenty-Two Monk was gone, yet I could tell there was some unease in the abbot whenever Joshua was away.

We both continued to drill on the posts, and after two years of leaping and balancing, dancing and the use of weapons were added to our routine. Joshua refused to take up any of the weapons; in fact, he refused to practice any art that would bring harm to another being. He wouldn’t even mimic the action of fighting with swords and spears with a bamboo substitute. At first Gaspar bristled at Joshua’s refusal, and threatened to banish him from the monastery, but when I took the abbot aside and told him the story of the archer Joshua had blinded on the way to Balthasar’s fortress, the abbot relented. He and two of the older monks who had been soldiers devised for Joshua a regimen of weaponless fighting that involved no offense or striking at all, but instead channeled the energy of an attacker away from oneself. Since the new art was practiced only by Joshua (and sometimes myself), the monks called it Jew-dô, meaning the way of the Jew.

In addition to learning kung fu and Jew-dô, Gaspar set us to learning to speak and write Sanskrit. Most of the holy books of Buddhism had been written in that language and had yet to be translated into Chinese, which Joshua and I had become fluent in.

“This is the language of my boyhood,” Gaspar said before beginning our lessons. “You need to know this to learn the words of Gautama Buddha, but you will also need this language when you follow your dharma to your next destination.”

Joshua and I looked at each other. It had been a long time since we had talked about leaving the monastery and the mention of it put us on edge. Routine feeds the illusion of safety, and if nothing else, there was routine at the monastery.

“When will we leave, master?” I asked.

“When it is time,” said Gaspar.

“And how will we know it is time to leave?”

“When the time for staying has come to an end.”

“And we will know this because you will finally give us a straight and concrete answer to a question instead of being obtuse and spooky?” I asked.

“Does the unhatched tadpole know the universe of the full-grown frog?”

“Evidently not,” Joshua said.

“Correct,” said the master. “Meditate upon it.”

As Joshua and I entered the temple to begin our meditation I said, “When the time comes, and we know that the time has come for us to leave, I am going to lump up his shiny little head with a fighting staff.”

“Meditate upon it,” said Josh.

“I mean it. He’s going to be sorry he taught me how to fight,” I said.

“I’m sure of it. I’m sorry already.”

“You know, he doesn’t have to be the only one bopped in the noggin when noggin-boppin’ time rolls around,” I said.

Joshua looked at me as if I’d just awakened him from a nap. “All the time we spend meditating, what are you really doing, Biff?”

“I’m meditating—sometimes—listening to the sound of the universe and stuff.”

“But mostly you’re just sitting there.”

“I’ve learned to sleep with my eyes open.”

“That won’t help your enlightenment.”

“Look, when I get to nirvana I want to be well rested.”

“Don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it.”

“Hey, I have discipline. Through practice I’ve learned to cause spontaneous nocturnal emissions.”

“That’s an accomplishment,” the Messiah said sarcastically.

“Okay, you can be snotty if you want to, but when we get back to Galilee, you walk around trying to sell your ‘love your neighbor because he is you’ claptrap, and I’ll offer the ‘wet dreams at will’ program and we’ll see who gets more followers.”

Joshua grinned: “I think we’ll both do better than my cousin John and his ‘hold them underwater until they agree with you’ sermon.”

“I haven’t thought about him in years. Do you think he’s still doing that?”

Just then, Number Two Monk, looking very stern and unenlightened, stood and started across the temple toward us, his bamboo rod in hand.

“Sorry, Josh, I’m going no-mind.” I dropped to the lotus position, formed the mudra of the compassionate Buddha with my fingers, and lickity-split was on the sitting-still road to oneness with allthatness.

Despite Gaspar’s veiled warning about our moving on, we again settled into a routine, this one including learning to read and write the sutras in Sanskrit, but also Joshua’s time with the yeti. I had gotten so proficient in the martial arts that I could break a flagstone as thick as my hand with my head, and I could sneak up on even the most wary of the other monks, flick him on the ear, and be back in lotus position before he could spin to snatch the still-beating heart from my chest. (Actually, no one was really sure if anyone could do that. Every day Number Three Monk would declare it time for the “snatching the still-beating heart from the chest” drill, and every day he would ask for volunteers. After a brief wait, when no one volunteered, we’d move onto the next drill, usually the “maiming a guy with a fan” drill. Everyone wondered if Number Three could really do it, but no one wanted to ask. We knew how Buddhist monks liked to teach. One minute you’re curious, the next a bald guy is holding a bloody piece of pulsating meat in your face and you’re wondering why the sudden draft in the thorax area of your robe. No thanks, we didn’t need to know that badly.)

Meanwhile, Joshua became so adept at avoiding blows that it was as if he’d become invisible again. Even the best fighting monks, of whom I was not one, had trouble laying a hand on my friend, and often they ended up flat on their backs on the flagstones for their trouble. Joshua seemed his happiest during these exercises, often laughing out loud as he narrowly dodged the thrust of a sword that would have taken his eye. Sometimes he would take the spear away from Number Three, only to bow and present it to him with a grin, as if the grizzled old soldier had dropped it instead of having it finessed from his grip. When Gaspar witnessed these displays he would leave the courtyard shaking his head and mumbling something about ego, leaving the rest of us to collapse into paroxysms of laughter at the abbot’s expense. Even Numbers Two and Three, who were normally the strict disciplinarians, managed to mine a few smiles from their ever-so furrowed brows. It was a good time for Joshua. Meditation, prayer, exercise, and time with the yeti seemed to have helped him to let go of the colossal burden he’d been given to carry. For the first time he seemed truly happy, so I was stunned the day my friend entered the courtyard with tears streaming down his cheeks. I dropped the spear I was drilling with and ran to him.

“Joshua?”

“He’s dead,” Joshua said.

I embraced him and he collapsed into my arms sobbing. He was wearing wool leggings and boots, so I knew immediately that he’d just returned from one of his visits into the mountains.

“A piece of ice fell from over his cave. I found him under it. Crushed. He was frozen solid.”

“So you couldn’t…”

Joshua pushed me back and held me by the shoulders. “That’s just it. I wasn’t there in time. I not only couldn’t save him, I wasn’t even there to comfort him.”

“Yes you were,” I said.

Joshua dug his fingers into my shoulders and shook me as if I was hysterical and he was trying to get my attention, then suddenly he let go of me and shrugged. “I’m going to the temple to pray.”

“I’ll join you soon. Fifteen and I have three more movements to practice.” My sparring partner waited patiently at the edge of the courtyard, spear in hand, watching.

Joshua got almost to the doors before he turned. “Do you know the difference between praying and meditating, Biff?”

I shook my head.

“Praying is talking to God. Meditating is listening. I’ve spent most of these last six years listening. Do you know what I’ve heard?”

Again I said nothing.

“Not a single thing, Biff. Now I have some things I want to say.”

“I’m sorry about your friend,” I said.

“I know.” He turned and started inside.

“Josh,” I called. He paused and looked over his shoulder at me.

“I won’t let that happen to you, you know that, right?”

“I know,” he said, then he went inside to give his father a divine ass-chewing.

The next morning Gaspar summoned us to the tea room. The abbot looked as if he had not slept in days and whatever his age, he was carrying a century of misery in his eyes.

“Sit,” he said, and we did. “The old man of the mountain is dead.”

“Who?”

“That’s what I called the yeti, the old man of the mountain. He has passed on to his next life and it is time for you to go.”

Joshua said nothing, but sat with his hands folded in his lap, staring at the table.

“What does one have to do with the other?” I asked. “Why should we leave because the yeti has died? We didn’t know he even existed until we had been here for two years.”

“But I did,” said Gaspar.

I felt a heat rising in my face—I’m sure that my scalp and ears must have flushed, because Gaspar scoffed at me. “There is nothing else here for you. There was nothing here for you from the beginning. I would not have allowed you to stay if you weren’t Joshua’s friend.” It was the first time he’d used either of our names since we’d arrived at the monastery. “Number Four will meet you at the gate. He has the possessions you arrived with, as well as some food for your journey.”

“We can’t go home,” Joshua said at last. “I don’t know enough yet.”

“No,” said Gaspar, “I suspect that you don’t. But you know all that you will learn here. If you come to a river and find a boat at the edge, you will use that boat to cross and it will serve you well, but once across the river, do you put the boat on your shoulders and carry it with you on the rest of your journey?”

“How big is the boat?” I asked.

“What color is the boat?” asked Joshua.

“How far is the rest of the journey?” I queried.

“Is Biff there to carry the oars, or do I have to carry everything?” asked Josh.

“No!” screamed Gaspar. “No, you don’t take the boat along on the journey. It has been useful but now it’s simply a burden. It’s a parable, you cretins!”

Joshua and I bowed our heads under Gaspar’s anger. As the abbot railed, Joshua smiled at me and winked. When I saw the smile I knew that he’d be okay.

Gaspar finished his tirade, then caught his breath and resumed in the tone of the tolerant monk that we were used to. “As I was saying, there is no more for you to learn. Joshua, go be a bodhisattva for your people, and Biff, try not to kill anyone with what we have taught you here.”

“So do we get our boat now?” Joshua asked.

Gaspar looked as if he were about to explode, then Joshua held his hand up and the old man remained silent.

“We are grateful for our time here, Gaspar. These monks are noble and honorable men, and we have learned much from them. But you, honorable abbot, are a pretender. You have mastered a few tricks of the body, and you can reach a trance state, but you are not an enlightened being, though I think you have glimpsed enlightenment. You look everywhere for answers but where they lie. Nevertheless, your deception hasn’t stopped you from teaching us. We thank you, Gaspar. Hypocrite. Wise man. Bodhisattva.”

Gaspar sat staring at Joshua, who had spoken as if he were talking to a child. The old man went about fixing the tea, more feebly now, I thought, but maybe that was my imagination.

“And you knew this?” Gaspar asked me.

I shrugged. “What enlightened being travels halfway around the world following a star on the rumor that a Messiah has been born?”

“He means across the world,” said Josh.

“I mean around the world.” I elbowed Joshua in the ribs because it was easier than explaining my theory of universal stickiness to Gaspar. The old guy was having a rough day as it was.

Gaspar poured tea for all of us, then sat down with a sigh. “You were not a disappointment, Joshua. The three of us knew as soon as we saw you that you were a being unlike any other. Brahman born to flesh, my brother said.”

“What gave it away,” I said, “the angels on the roof of the stable?”

Gaspar ignored me. “But you were still an infant, and whatever it was that we were looking for, you were not it—not yet, anyway. We could have stayed, I suppose, and helped to raise you, protect you, but we were all dense. Balthasar wanted to find the key to immortality, and there was no way that you could give him that, and my brother and I wanted the keys to the universe, and those were not to be found in Bethlehem either. So we warned your father of Herod’s intent to have you killed, we gave him gold to get you out of the country, and we returned to the East.”

“Melchior is your brother?”

Gaspar nodded. “We were princes of Tamil. Melchior is the oldest, so he would have inherited our lands, but I would have received a small fiefdom as well. Like Siddhartha, we eschewed worldly pleasures to pursue enlightenment.”

“How did you end up here, in these mountains?” I asked.

“Chasing Buddhas.” Gaspar smiled. “I had heard that there lived a sage in these mountains. The locals called him the old man of the mountain. I came looking for the sage, and what I found was the yeti. Who knows how old he really was, or how long he’d been here? What I did know was that he was the last of his kind and that he would die before long without help. I stayed here and I built this monastery. Along with the monks who came here to study, I have been taking care of the yeti since you two were just infants. Now he is gone. I have no purpose, and I have learned nothing. Whatever there was to know here died under that lump of ice.”

Joshua reached across the table and took the old man’s hand. “You drill us every day in the same movements, we practice the same brush strokes over and over, we chant the same mantras, why? So that these actions will become natural, spontaneous, without being diluted by thought, right?”

“Yes,” said Gaspar.

“Compassion is the same way,” said Joshua. “That’s what the yeti knew. He loved constantly, instantly, spontaneously, without thought or words. That’s what he taught me. Love is not something you think about, it is a state in which you dwell. That was his gift.”

“Wow,” I said.

“I came here to learn that,” said Josh. “You taught it to me as much as the yeti.”

“Me?” Gaspar had been pouring the tea as Joshua spoke and now he noticed that he’d overfilled his cup and the tea was running all over the table.

“Who took care of him? Fed him? Looked after him? Did you have to think about that before you did it?”

“No,” said Gaspar.

Joshua stood. “Thanks for the boat.”

Gaspar didn’t accompany us to the front gate. As he promised, Number Four was waiting for us with our clothes and the money we had when we arrived six years before. I picked up the ying-yang vial of poison that Joy had given me and slipped the lanyard over my head, then I pushed the sheathed black glass dagger into the belt of my robe and tucked my clothes under my arm.

“You will go to find Gaspar’s brother?” Number Four asked. Number Four was one of the older monks, one of the ones who had served the emperor as a soldier, and a long white scar marked his head from the middle of his shaved scalp to his right ear, which had healed to a forked shape.

“Tamil, right?” Joshua said.

“Go south. It is very far. There are many dangers along the way. Remember your training.”

“We will.”

“Good.” Number Four turned on his heel and walked into the monastery, then shut the heavy wooden gate.

“No, no, Four, don’t embarrass yourself with a sappy good-bye,” I said to the gate. “No, really, please, no scenes.”

Joshua was counting our money out of a small leather purse. “It’s just what we left with them.”

“Good.”

“No, that’s not good. We’ve been here six years, Biff. This money should have doubled or tripled during that time.”

“What, by magic?”

“No, they should have invested it.” He turned and looked back at the gate. “You dumb bastards, maybe you should spend a little less time studying how to beat each other up and a little more time on managing your money.”

“Spontaneous love?” I said.

“Yeah, Gaspar’ll never get that one either. That’s why they killed the yeti, you know that, don’t you?”

“Who?”

“The mountain people. They killed the yeti because they couldn’t understand a creature who wasn’t as evil as they were.”

“The mountain people were evil?”

“All men are evil, that’s what I was talking to my father about.”

“What did he say?”

“Fuck ’em.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“At least he answered you.”

“I got the feeling that he thinks it’s my problem now.”

“Makes you wonder why he didn’t burn that on one of the tablets. ‘HERE, MOSES, HERE’S THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, AND HERE’S AN EXTRA ONE THAT SAYS FUCK ’EM.’”

“He doesn’t sound like that.”

“FOR EMERGENCIES,” I continued in my perfect impression-of-God voice.

“I hope it’s warm in India,” Joshua said.

And so, at the age of twenty-four, Joshua of Nazareth did go down into India.