Читать книгу Dukkha the Suffering - Loren W. Christensen - Страница 11
ОглавлениеIt’s noon. I can’t believe I’ve slept a full nine hours and I’m doubly amazed that I’m still so exhausted. The two big knuckles on both my hands feel like they’ve been skinned because, well, they have been, and my shoulders and legs have barely recuperated from last night’s assault on the heavy bag.
What triple amazes me, as I sit here on the edge of my bed scratching myself, is that now I want to leave the house. My middle-of-the-night thoughts convinced me that I would never go outside again, but the four walls are suddenly making me feel like a caged panther. Talk about your extreme convictions. Is this another one of those “normal reactions to an abnormal event” that Kari talks about? Is going crazy a normal reaction?
I stumble into the bathroom, do my thing and then walk down the hall to the kitchen. I pull the coffee pot out from under the shelf, hesitate, and push it back. If I don’t get out of here, I’ll go nuts. Okay, I’ve already gone nuts. Maybe I’ll just cap a round in my own medulla oblongata. I sputter-laugh at that and then stop abruptly. I’m definitely going nutso. I’m getting out of here and I’m going to walk the three blocks to the Coffee Bump.
Two minutes later, I’m dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and heading toward the living room door.
I’m greeted by a warm morning sun, a soft breeze, and a newspaper lying on the porch, its headline blaring: Cop Slays Child.
The bold font lands three hard punches into my heart: Cop. Slays. Child. The earth tilts and I stumble back.
“Son-of-a-bitch!”
A crow answers my curse from high atop a tree.
“Damn them!” I shout, kicking the paper off the porch and into a holly bush. The damn media.
Wait…
I don’t subscribe to the newspaper.
My cop instinct kicks in. I quick-scan my yard, the sidewalk, and the street beyond. Nothing. So who would have put it here? Only my friends and a couple of old partners know my address, I have an unlisted phone number and my Dodge pickup is registered to the precinct.
Mark? He knows I’m not coming in today so maybe he left it so I’d know what to expect. Tiff? Maybe she left it as a dig? Could she be that mean? No, I refuse to believe that. Maybe it was a neighbor. A couple of them have never been friendly.
Damn. A simple newspaper lying on my porch is charging my fight-or-flight juices, and I’m leaning toward flight—back into the house. Not because I’m afraid, but because I don’t want to hurt anyone again.
No no no. I can’t go back inside. I got to face it… it.
I scan the yard and street once more—a school bus passes, a couple of cars—and I pull the door shut behind me. I stand on the porch for a long moment, as if I were on the ledge of a thirty-story high-rise deciding whether to jump across the yawning space to the ledge of another roof.
I inhale, counting slowly to four, hold it in for a count of four, exhale for a count of four and hold empty for a count of four. Combat breathing. It’s a technique I’ve taught for years to cops and my martial arts students as a fast way to get calm and collected.
By the time I finish three cycles, my boiling juices drop to a simmer. I’m almost calm. Now I got to step off the porch before the feeling passes. Come on. Come on.
I step.
My heart thumps against my chest with frightening intensity. I force myself to take another step, and another. I make it to the sidewalk where I pause under the big Douglas fir to take a couple more combat breaths. Then I begin to walk, actually walk, heading west toward the strip mall three blocks away.
A couple of painless minutes later I’m at the end of the block. One down, two more to go. I’m feeling better. My anxiety seems to be lessening, the spring air is clean and cool, and the lawns and trees smell invigorating. Maybe I’ll get a breakfast roll with my big Americano.
Two blocks down now. One more to go.
I’m there.
The tables on the sidewalk outside the Coffee Bump are filled, and a line of folks wanting a noontime, four-dollar cup of caffeine stretches outside the doors. I hesitate for a moment, not sure if I want to wait. Okay, I’ll wait; it can’t take longer than fifteen minutes.
I step to the rear of the line behind a woman in a dark blue suit reading a paperback. She turns slightly, looking at me over black rimmed glasses. “Need a jolt, huh?” she asks with a teasing smile.
I nod. I’m not in the mood for chit chat no matter how attractive this woman.
“Me, too. Been one of those days. Know what I mean?”
I nod again. Indeed, I do, lady. Indeed I do.
She turns back to her novel, frowns, then looks back at me. “Excuse me, but are you… you look like… aren’t you that police officer in the paper today who—”
“No,” I say quickly. Got to get out of here. It was a big mistake leaving the house. I turn to leave, but a heavyset man in a blue flannel shirt blocks my way. Judging by the look of contempt on his face, he’s not here for a caramel frap.
“Why you lyin’ to the lady, Dee-tective Reeves?” the guy says in a voice like a deep blast from a tuba. “We all saw it on the news,” he spits, “read it in the paper, and saw your picture.”
“It was you,” the woman declares, looking at me with the same face Tiff did last night. “Oh my—”
“No it wasn’t,” I say quickly, but lamely. I sidestep around Tuba Man but he steps with me so that I’m between him and a seated man typing on a laptop. Conversations at the outdoor tables stop. My intestines churn as if trying to digest an old baseball mitt. I can’t be trapped here; I don’t want to hurt him. Please don’t let me hurt anyone again.
“I’m leaving,” I say. “Just get out of my way.”
“What’s the big hurry, Dee-tective?” Tuba Man sneers. “Afraid? Ha! It’s a hell of a lot different when you’re facing a grown man, huh?”
“I’m leaving,” I say. Did that come out as whiny as I think it did?
Tuba Man widens his stance, his face turning from red to purple. Who is this guy? A relative? A cop hater? He tilts his head a little and narrows his eyes to mere slits.
“Look, pal,” I say, my voice shaky. “Don’t write a check your ass can’t cash.”
The big man smiles. “Now that’s some serious false bravado, twitchy boy. Scared ‘cause you ain’t got your gun?” He juts his jaw, giving me a slow up-and-down.
I move to step around him but again he blocks my way. The guy on the laptop grabs his computer and scurries away.
“You aren’t going anywhere, Dee-tective,” Tuba Guy says. “Time to man up.”
If he isn’t going to let me by, then I’m going through him. I’ll—
A giant fist…
The world wobbles, tilts; Tuba Man drops below my field of vision, replaced by the underside of a green table umbrella and a roof overhang. My shoulders strike something, and that thing gives way and I’m falling again, but only for an instant before my back hits cement. A thought zips through my brain that if this were two days ago, I would tuck my chin to save my skull. Of course, two days ago, I wouldn’t have been punched.
My head hits. A flash of white, a flood of red. Blackness…
Struggling through the black, through the silence… trying to move, trying to see.
A moment passes, a second, a minute. I don’t know. I can hear something now. Sounds filtered through thick soup. What the sounds are I don’t know, I can’t…
Clarity now, and in surround sound. Chairs scraping on concrete. Voices. Shouting. A woman’s scream.
“He’s the son-of-a-bitch who killed the little boy.” I think that was the woman with the paperback. Not flirting anymore, I guess.
“That cop who…”
“Fucking cops!”
The darkness turns to gray then to fog. I can see shapes… now clarity, in living HD. Gray concrete under me, table legs next to my head, and over there, several pairs of feet. Anyone want to lend me a hand? Above me a table umbrella. Noise to my left. I turn toward it and see, just inches away from me, heavy legs in blue jeans, brown boots. Doc Martens, I think. One of them rockets toward me. A hair-of-a-second later, I feel a jarring pain in my hip.
I’m still open to getting a helping hand here, folks.
From overhead, Tuba Man’s voice shouts a barrage of curses, sprinkled with “Jimmy.” I see the flash of brown boot and feel another shot of pain in my hip. Better there than in the ribs, I always say. Actually, it’s better not to be kicked at all. Maybe he’s trying for my ribs but he’s a bad shot.
I have to get up… have to get up, have to…
A brown boot stomps my chest.
All goes red, but then a moment later, at least I think it’s a moment, I can see again. That hurt. Hard to breathe.
The impact twisted me around a little, because now I see a different table, this one lying on its side; five or six people stand behind it, one of them the guy with the open laptop. He looks mad. Must have been his table.
Gosh, people, I hope my little boot party isn’t disrupting your latte and biscotti.
The big legs in blue jeans come toward me again. I try to move, try to shield my head, but the command from my brain isn’t getting to my muscles.
I flash to a kickboxing match about fifteen years ago, another time when I lost my brain/body connection for a moment. It wasn’t a good thing then—it was one of my two losses—and it’s not a good thing now. I close my eyes and try to roll into a ball, but again my muscles ignore me.
A woman screams. Chairs slide on cement again. I open my eyes, though wary of catching a boot toe in a socket. The big legs in blue jeans are still there but the boots are pointing away from me.
I move my head a little to see another set of feet in front of the boots, these wearing red converse. Tuba Man is saying something, but my ears are ringing too loudly for me to hear. I get just a hint of another voice, a gentle one, accented.
Ignoring the mad taiko drummer going ape bananas in my skull, I look up, squinting my eyes for clarity. I can see the bottom half of the fat man in blue jeans, his legs spread, arms at his sides, hands fisted. I can’t see the other person, other than the motionless, red converse shoes between the big boots. If it were not for the dark pant legs, I’d swear the red shoes had been neatly arranged there, serenely side-by-side, as if no one were inside them. In contrast, the large, brown Doc martens are scooting, twisting and shuffling.
I want to warn Red Converse Man to look out for Tuba Man’s sucker punch, but my neck muscles give out and the side of my head drops back onto the sidewalk. All I can see now are the motionless red shoes and the restless boots. Then they stop moving. The right boot rolls up on the toe. Is Tuba Man launching another sucker punch?
The red shoes disappear and an instant later, they reappear a couple of feet over. What the hell? One of the shoes disappears and at the same time, I hear a loud grunt, then another and another, like three short, single notes through a tuba. A second later, a fat face thumps onto the cement just inches from mine, its eyes closed.
For a fleeting weird instant, I have a disconnected thought that the white cat that nose-poked my ear last night when I was lying on my garage floor might stop by to nudge the fat man awake. I have to get out of here before it does.
Gotta get out of here… gotta get…
*
Hear birds. Feel warmth. Smell grass.
It’s a peaceful place, wherever I am, and I want to stay here, to bask in the darkness and to avoid the light. Oh man! Gigantic pain in my forehead. Then like the voiceover in an infomercial, “But wait! There’s more. You also get a humongous throb at the back of your head and, if you call right now, we’ll throw in a crushing pain to your chest, ab-so-lutely free.”
The three-for-one price deal opens my eyes, but a searing brightness slams them shut. I examine the red behind my eyelids and mentally check out the pain in my body. It hurts like hell, but it’s manageable. I’ve received worse when I fought full contact… well, not quite worse, but I can handle this. I turn my throbbing head to the side and open my eyes again, just a slit this time. Green. I open them a little more—more green—and then all the way open. Lots of green.
Grass all around, trees, a light-cool breeze, a dog sniffing a bush a few yards away. I look down and see wooden slats. A park bench? I’m lying on a park bench?
“How is the head?”
I snap open my eyes and start to get up. “Uuugh!” I close them again.
“Beaucoup pain, I bet. The back of your head, too, where it bounced off the cement. That had to have hurt.” The voice is coming from above me.
Clenching my teeth, I force my eyes open and struggle to sit up. I twist my body toward the voice and cop-scan the man sitting at the end of the bench: white, early sixties, longish graying hair, wearing a white overshirt, and black slacks. I’m surprised to see that he’s not Asian. He sounded Asian.
“Who are you?”
“Just a guy in the park,” he says in a kindly voice. “Thought maybe you needed company while you meditated in the horizontal position about how you failed to block that punch.
Is this old guy busting my chops? And what’s with the accent? He sounds like Johnny Tran, my Vietnamese brown belt.
“You know, it is said that we must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. Well, you got lots of fuel today, I think. As Yoda would say, ‘Filled up your tank, you did.’”
What the hell is this guy saying? I touch the back of my head. “How’d I get here?” I can vaguely remember a big guy sucker punching me. After that, just images: red tennis shoes, chair legs, a fat face.
“Maybe the real question is: why? Why are you here? Why does your head hurt?”
I turn my face up toward the sun and close my eyes. It feels good and it eases the pain in my forehead a little, but not the pain in the back of my skull.
“I got sucker punched.” I say, looking back at him.
The older man shakes his head as if the thought amuses him. “Maybe you should learn self-defense if you are going to go around picking fights.”
“I was in line for coffee, pal. I hardly go around picking fights. I teach martial arts.”
The man giggles, child-like. “‘Your powers are weak, old man.’ That is from Star Wars.” He shakes his head again and looks up at the leaves flittering in the soft breeze. “What are you going to tell your students when they see that big knot on your forehead?”
Now I’m pissed. “Star Wars!” I shout. “Who-the-hell are you? Why are you—” I start to stand but a thunderclap of pain simultaneously hits the front and back of my head, forcing me back down onto the bench.
“You should sit for a while,” the man says, ignoring my shout. “It would be wise to get checked by a doctor. Personally, I do not think it is necessary. Of course, you are going to be sore. Why not just enjoy the park, the sun, and good air, and in an hour you will be good to go home. If you wish, I would be glad to go back across the street to the coffee shop to get you a cup. If you went you would just get into another fight.”
I start to react to that but my head hurts too much. I slump, lowering my head, and clasping my hands in my lap.
“That is better,” the man says. “You need your rest.”
“Yes,” I hear myself mumble. “I just need… a moment to…”
I’m holding Jimmy’s limp body against my chest but we’re not in the police car speeding to the hospital. We’re in some dark place, a room, maybe. I can’t tell because there isn’t anything around me but this park bench I’m sitting on, and Jimmy’s dying body nestled in my arms. He slowly turns his head toward me and looks into my face. I nearly scream when I see his lifeless, glassy eyes looking at me, looking into me.
There’s fresh blood on his purplish lips, and they’re moving.
“Not much of a shot, are you?” he says, matter-of-factly, and in a clear, healthy voice that belies the gaping hole my bullet punched through his small chest.
I open my mouth to scream—
“Heeeere’s Johnny!”
I jerk my head up, blinking several times.
“Jack Nicholson from The Shining. They shot the exteriors for that film right here in Oregon, up on your Mt. Hood.” He’s walking toward me carrying two paper cups. “I think you slept for a while. You either feel a lot worse or a heck of a lot worse.”
“You’re back,” I say without enthusiasm, sitting up straighter. The dream fades from my brain but I can still feel the unspent scream lodged in my chest.
“You never got your coffee earlier. Thought maybe it might help diminish the pain from the thrashing you took.”
He sits on the bench next to me again and extends a sixteen-ounce cup, the same size I was going to order. “You do not look like a frou-frou coffee drinker so I got you an Americano, double shot with a little cream. Green tea for me.”
I take it and nod thanks. The guy’s a pain but I need the jolt. “Why are you doing this?” I ask, removing the white plastic lid and blowing across the steaming surface.
The man crosses a leg and shrugs. “Got a soft spot for the down trodden, I guess.”
I can’t tell if these zingers are his way of being funny or if he’s trying to provoke me. If it’s the latter, it’s working. “Listen, pal, if you…”
Red converse! He’s wearing red converse shoes.
I feel my jaw drop. “It was you I saw when I was lying on the concrete? It was you who knocked that big guy to the ground. With a kick?”
“Guilty. One kick and two punches,” he says with that childish giggle before he sips his tea. “Hard to be humble.”
I lean toward him. “Why? I mean, thanks, but why?” I remembered how those red shoes seemed to disappear and reappear in a different spot—like magic. “Are you a martial artist? How old are you?”
“Because. You’re welcome. Just lucky. And what was the other question? Oh, I’m old enough, thank you very much.”
I look at him over the rim of my coffee. Eccentric dude with his red tennis shoes, long hair, the strange accent and flippant demeanor. The face shows his years, maybe even more than his birthday, but his stature and bearing is that of a Marine Corp officer. A Grandpa’s face on a warrior’s body. You don’t see that very often. Not only did he not back away like all the other people, he stood up to the big guy, knocked him down, and then stuck around to look after me.
“How is it going?” the man asks, then sips. “What is the verdict?”
“What?”
“Your conclusion?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You are analyzing me. Trying to get a read on the handsome stranger. Interesting, am I not?”
That’s it. He’s gay. Tiff would love this. She always teases me about gay guys checking me out. “It’s the muscles,” she always said. “They think you’re hard all over.” Tiff. I feel a tug in my chest.
The man twists toward me, his eyes looking into mine. Oh man, here comes the hustle.
“You have a lot of dukha going on right now,” he says gently. Compassionately?
A slight chill runs up my spine. He said ‘right now.’ What does he know about me? “Dukha?” I ask with a shrug.
His eyes penetrate mine for an unsettling moment. I don’t know why his gaze is unsettling, but it is. He nods. “It means suffering. It is grasping for things that cannot be obtained. You got it up the kazoo. You will not be healed until you come to terms with it.” He looks at me again for probably no more than three or four seconds, but it seems longer.
He stands, gulps his tea and drops his cup in a trash can behind the bench. “As Hannibal Lecter says, ‘I do wish we could chat longer, but I am having an old friend for dinner.’” He makes with that giggle again. “I like that one. Get it? ‘Old friend for dinner?’ Anyway, I will be here tomorrow around noon.” He nods at me, turns and heads out across the grass. “And,” he says over his shoulder without stopping. “I am happily heterosexual. So do not get your hopes up.”
“What! How did…”
He turns his head back toward the direction he’s walking and giggles again. He lifts his hand and waves without looking back again.
I watch him walk toward the far parking lot. What the hell was all that about? I touch my tender forehead and then lightly rub my index finger on the back of my head. Man it hurts. My hip, too. I’ve been kicked harder there but that fact doesn’t make it feel any better.
Peering through an opening in the park’s trees, all looks normal over at the Coffee Bump, as if my assault never happened. There is no line of customers waiting outside and there are only a scattering of people sitting at the now orderly outside tables. What happened to Tuba Man? Did anyone call the police? How did Converse Man get me over here to this bench? I must out-weigh him by forty pounds. I look toward the parking lot.
The strange man looks back toward me for a moment, waves with both hands, and climbs into a blue Toyota.
*
“You rang the doorbell?”
“Can I come in?” Tiff asks.
“Of course,” I say flatly, pushing the door open wider and stepping aside. “You have to ask?” I’m surprised to see her so soon after last night. With all that’s been going on this morning, I’d shoved our relationship, the end of it, into a Tiff compartment and planned to think about it when my head wasn’t throbbing.
“My God, what happened to your head?”
I move over to the couch and sit down carefully, holding my sore chest. “Bumped it. You look like hell.”
“Thank you. Right back at you.”
“It was a rough morning. My celebrity caught up with me up at the Coffee Bump. Took a cross to the forehead.”
“You?”
I shrug a what-are-you-going-to-do.
“Couldn’t sleep a wink last night,” she says, folding her arms as if she doesn’t know what else to do with them. She looks down at the carpet. It’s new. Beige. Plush. She helped pick it out.
“I’m sorry—”
“Just let me say this, Sam,” she interrupts, lifting her chin to look at me. She takes a deep breath for courage. “I loved you. Love, I mean. I think, anyway.” But I don’t love who you are. And I certainly don’t love what you do.” She looks away for a moment and drops her hands into her jean pockets, Calvin Klines. I was with her when she bought them. Tight. Look great on her.
I don’t want to do this right now. Last night was painful but quick, like chopping off a dog’s tail. Now she wants to talk about it. Why do women always want to talk about it?
She removes her hands and grips her trembling right one with her trembling left. “Our politics are different. We’ve talked about it a lot. Joked about it. You see the world as a violent place, or at least that’s the part you choose to live in. I abhor that. The very thought of it makes me ill.”
Okay, I’m not going to let her make me feel bad about my life. “Look, Tiff, you don’t like who I am or what I do, but who I am is who I am. And what I do is what I do, and it’s also who I damn well am. Okay, that sounds dumb, I know.”
“It makes a lot of sense, Sam,” she says, shaking her head. “And it’s that very thing that is the problem. It’s the ugliness of what you do.”
“Life would be a lot uglier if men and women like me weren’t out there trying to keep a lid on it. I don’t think you get that or maybe you simply choose not to accept it.”
“Then you should have let other men and women do it, Sam. Not you.” She shakes her head and sits down on the edge of the recliner’s cushion, as if sitting any farther back would make it hard for her to get away quickly. “I’m sorry. That’s not right for me to say that. It’s selfish and I don’t want to be that way. It’s just that sometimes I think we could have made it work. But then logic enters and it’s so perfectly obvious that there was never a way.”
Reminds me of something I read on one of those funny cards you give to people. It said: I love you, you’re perfect. Now change.
Tiff stands quickly, moves over to the window and lifts one of the mini blinds, then releases it without looking out. She looks down at her feet.
I take a long, deep calming breath. We’re two different people, plain and simple, both of us rigid in our beliefs. Tiff ’s right on some points and, I’m convinced, wrong on others. I suppose I am, too. I look at her as she toes the carpet. Maybe she’s thinking the same thing. A minute passes, the only sound a far off jet.
“A child! Sam… I just… can’t. I can’t.” She turns quickly and in two strides she’s turning the doorknob.
“Thanks, Tiff!” I say to her sarcastically to her back. “Thanks a whole hell of a lot.” She opens the door three or four inches and then stops. She doesn’t turn around but just stands there, holding the doorknob. I shake my head and look away. “I need to think about all this. I need to put the shooting, the shootings, into some kind of perspective.”
She turns part way around but doesn’t look at me. “I don’t see how you can.”
“Damn-it, Tiff!” I blurt. “Are you so rigid in your… Damn!” I’m squeezing the arm of the sofa so hard that I’m about to rip the leather off. “You have no idea how awful—You don’t even want to know how awful. You live in a la la land. A nice, tidy, and violence-free la la land. Well, life isn’t that way, goddamn-it.”
A few seconds pass and I forget that she’s in the room. “My head wants to explode right now,” I say, or maybe I just think it. “Last night I… My mind…” I shake my head again.
She moves and I snap my head up, startled. She’s turned part way toward me but she’s still looking at the floor. “I…” It’s her turn to shake her head, then she turns away and opens the door far enough for her to pass through it. “I did love you.” She leaves without looking back.
I don’t get up from the sofa; I just stare at the closed door for a while. “Well, that sucked,” I say aloud. At least today’s ending was more civil than last night’s. Still, I could do without having to talk about it anymore. I’m not cold hearted; I just don’t see the point. We both know we’re over. Let’s don’t rub salt in our wounds.
I scoot down into the sofa more comfortably, fold my hands in my lap and release a long breath of stress. What I wouldn’t give for a normal day where I’m chasing a burglar through a briar patch or settling a family fight between two vomiting newlyweds. Police work is a lot of boredom punctuated with moments of high stress. My police job of late has been heavy on the tsunami adrenaline dumps.
I read an article once that said the top stressors that tear people down are separation from a spouse, serious health issues, and expensive problems with one’s home. The piece didn’t mention anything about killing people, especially children, but I can attest that it’s number one. My relationship just went down the toilet, everyone in town hates me, a lawsuit is a matter of course, and I just got my ass kicked in front of a bunch of latte drinkers. I’m guessing that I’ll be diagnosed with gangrene next followed by my house burning to the ground.
Oh man, I need some ice cream and cake with my pity party.
I jump at the shrill ring of the phone. Still looking at the closed door, I fumble for the receiver on the end table. “Sam here.”
“It’s me. Sup?”
“Mark,” I say, more like a sigh than a greeting.
“You hanging in there, my friend?”
“Yeah.”
“You want the good news or bad news first?”
“Shit.”
“Sam, you sound awful. You need anything? You want me to come by?”
“I’m… fine. Just tired.”
“Okay. Well, the good news is that you can take off as much time as you want before coming back to work. The boss wants you to see the shrink again. It’s mandatory. You know all that.
“Yeah,” I say softly. What was that word the man in the park used? Some word that meant suffering. I’m starting to understand what he meant.
