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Bilgewater in Heaven: Enlightenments in a Short Story
Tom cat Bilgewater had arisen on a bright and cheerful morning feeling depressed. Depressed in part because of temperament, perhaps. And in part because of his dislike of his name and because his nonagenarian owner was deaf. Mostly, though, he was down because he'd been subjected to hearing the squawking of his neighbour’s horrible singing almost every morning for nine years. Bilgewater had long since stopped trying to out caterwaul Alfred.
For some reason Alfred's singing was beyond horrible this particularly bright and cheerful morning and had just the edge to supplant the last remaining images Bilgewater had kept in his mind of plump singing birds and mewling she-cats. He leapt, head first, from the roof of his home in a desperate, last ditch and melodramatic attempt to escape Alfred's lacerating licks.
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Unfortunately for one of his nine lives, and despite his conscious intent, Bilgewater's body righted itself as it always did and he landed feet first. Fortunately for Bilgewater and his other eight lives he suffered only a broken right front leg. Unfortunately for his ninety-seven year old owner, Grandma Bedlam, he had landed on her shoulder. His weight snapped her clavicle and knocked her face first into her lovingly tended rose bushes which scratched her face and hands and arms and tore her dress. Fortunately for Grandma Bedlam her head bounced off a large ornamental rock which knocked several minutes of consciousness from her and gave her a large goose egg and mild headache and completely restored the hearing she had lost when hit by a dump truck the day before her seventy-first birthday. Unfortunately for her, the first thing she heard since the dump truck's horn was her neighbour's nerve-jangling singing accompanied by the almost as jarring notes of her tom's howling which, combined with the blood that had seeped into her eyes from the scratches on her face and now covered her hands too, managed to convince her that she had died and gone to Hell. Unfortunately the shock of that realisation brought on a massive heart attack from which she did, in fact, die.
Since Grandma Bedlam was completely free of sin, except for her overwhelming pride in being a good Catholic, she went straight to Heaven, bypassing both St. Peter and the Pearly Gates. She was eternally, but mildly, disappointed at not having seen either of them after all she had heard and read so much about them. Unfortunately, before getting there, she had become convinced that her pride in being a good Christian must have been her sinning downfall and so she spent her eternity in Heaven blasting everyone who smiled at her — and everyone in Heaven smiled — with "You can't fool me! I know that you're Satan in disguise so go away and leave me alone!"
Under her breath Bedlam muttered "And I thought fire and brimstone would have been bad! Now I know that Hell is, truly, being put in the simulacrum of Heaven with the full knowledge that it isn't! Yup, that is Hell indeed." But she didn't let that get her spirit down with the thought of her eternity. Instead she took great, even stoic pride in knowing that the degree of this torment indicated the level of respect held for her by Satan. "This is my Hell, and I'm damned proud of it!" became her nightly prayer.
— ✑⚤✑ —
As for Bilgewater, after his unsuccessful bone-shattering plunge, he had crawled, in great pain, over to the broken and bloodied body of his Bedlam, where he saw, very clearly, that she was dead. He had killed her. With his broken heart and broken leg, Bilgewater yowled as he had never done before. When he stopped he gave his beloved Bedlam one last look, then a quick lick and a gentle nuzzle against her neck and ear.
Bilgewater assessed his situation. He realised that, if this was an example of a cat trying to commit suicide, he would need nine more tries before succeeding — the thought of which he found odious. He decided that escape was the only option. And so the battered and forlorn cat three-leggedly limped and dragged himself until after dusk, only stopping after he was completely exhausted. He found himself many miles far from home at the stoop of a small and rather disgruntled looking Buddhist monastery which was hiding behind a shaggy hedge and a cracked and weed filled tarmac parking lot. Despite the pain and sorrow he fell into an immediate and profound sleep.
— ✑⚤✑ —
Sometime after midnight an unenlightened monk from the monastery, who was wandering around dazed as usual because of his chronic insomnia, stepped on Bilgewater and broke his other front leg. Bilgewater's caterwauling startled the monk into the here and now for the first time in many months. The level of horror he felt when he mistakenly concluded that he had broken two of the cat's legs was a significant measure of how far he had yet to go as a Buddhist despite his fifteen committed, self-mortifying, effort-filled and celebrated celibate years. So it came to pass that, against the strenuous protestations of the kindly abbot, who tersely cited one vague catastrophe after another, the unenlightened monk took Bilgewater in and set his legs and brought him back to health.
He couldn't quite explain it, and at first was unaware of it himself, but during the first few months of mollycoddling the mouser, something within the unenlightened monk's heart and soul shifted. The first noticed sign of change was that he no longer suffered from insomnia, although he did not link that blessed change with having taken on Bilgewater. When he did become aware that he no longer fruitlessly paced the night he ascribed the change to an abatement he felt in the omnipresent feelings of unease and panic at being unenlightened. He didn’t wonder why the change with the thought or hope that his practice had made the difference because, what would splinting a cat’s legs have to do with easing anxiety in a dedicated Buddhist monk?
— ✑⚤✑ —
As for Bilgewater, he was so grateful, not just for being given succour but for the peace and quiet he experienced in the monastery with both the enlightened and unenlightened monks, that after a period of detached mourning for his Grandma Bedlam he became a monk himself in an expression of gratitude and joy. To everyone's surprise he was mostly successful at being both celibate and vegetarian, and it was with great pleasure that the abbot named him Enlightened Tom Cat, despite his reputation for laconic communication in a religious organisation noted for terse personal instruction. Enlightened Tom Cat was quickly abbreviated by the rest of the monks to ETC to accord with their perception of the abbot’s predilection for terse verbiage and secret web-surfing. To no one's surprise this three letter acronym annoyed the abbot, who found TLA's to be an abuse of language, despite his in-the-closet surfing and preference for terse language.
— ✑⚤✑ —
At ETC's recognition ceremony the unenlightened monk's distress at the abbot’s claiming he could discern that a mere cat was or was not enlightened nearly drove him mad. "How is it possible for you to determine that of even a humble tinker or tailor, let alone for a creature which can at most meow?" the unenlightened monk ached to ask the master. But he did not, frightened that it would show his lack of enlightenment. And yet, when he watched that damn tom of his — yes, he had come to see the cat as being his despite his discipline to renounce materialism and feelings of possessiveness — he too could see that there was something about that damned — blessed? — ETC which reminded him of the abbot. Maybe, he thought, it was just that neither one answered when spoken to.
"Damn, damn, damn!" he chanted to the statue of the smiling Buddha, who quietly watched from its altar over his futon, seeming to find funny his quintessential failure in a way which inexplicably gave him heart enough to keep up the good fight of fleeing the cycle of life and death's false entrances and exits.
— ✑⚤✑ —
ETC lived to the ripe old age of eighteen, and would have lived longer had he not developed the habit of sleeping in the bed of his overweight and unenlightened saviour, because….
— ✑⚤✑ —
One dark and blustery night, after several years of having listened to stage-whispered cat calls and jibes which compared his lack of enlightenment against that of ETC's and his expanding girth, the despairing monk decided that his enlightenment must be hidden in the base, bodily mire of the earth and not in the purity of either the diamond sutra or Buddha's teachings. "Would not this explain both my inability to stop gaining weight, while eating the monastery's meagre meals, and also my apparent incapability to experience enlightenment?" he asked himself desperately. When he apprised the abbott of his thoughts, his master assured him that this was not unheard of. "I take it," the abbot said, "you are referring to the master of the eighteenth century who, after despairing of ever achieving enlightenment, left the monastery and became enlightened upon his first experience of coitus with a common hooker?"
"Yes, master," he answered with his head bowed, "that is the story.” His face blushed with shame and desperation.
"I see," the master moved his head with what the unenlightened monk took to be a sagacious nod. Excited by such an unusually generous reaction from his master, the unenlightened monk waited with vainly abated breath for other sagacious words or salubrious bodily communications.
The master, whose mind was tumbling his thoughts like a confectioner her dull jellybeans, kept his thoughts to himself. Specifically he did not share with his inept adept that he was himself dubious about the veracity of such stories, and that he was even more sceptical of the efficacy of such an approach to enlightenment. But who was he, his thinking rumbled, to say what is or is not the personal path of anyone's individual enlightenment? Why, I'm a Zen Buddhist, he answered himself, and an abbot to boot. So what?! he retorted. And so his mind see-sawed, oblivious to anything but the sound of his thoughts jostling inside the drum of his shorn pate.
After many minutes of silence, the unenlightened monk sighed, and pushed himself with a heavy heart to his feet. He returned to his cell. "What did he mean?" he posed to the wall behind the smiling Buddha, preferring, this time, the wall’s flat silence to that of the Buddha's smarmy, smirky, self-possessed, surety smile. The lack of direction from the master had plunked him into a mental quarry within which he scurried to find the one metaphysical stone under which his enlightenment lay hid. Hidden while blithely communing, he was sure, with the worms, bugs, and slugs getting their nourishment from good old dirty earth. He did not know whether the master's reticence was a sign for him to seek enlightenment within the vicissitudes of life or to continue his search within the monastery's sanct erudition. So, with the wind and rain buffeting the windows and the Buddha silently laughing at him in time to ETC meditatively purring from the comfort of his cat cushion, the unenlightened monk plopped himself down on his battered zafu to meditate on his situation in order to clarify the meaning of the abbot’s nodded "I see."
The unenlightened monk's so-called meditation began with his usual inability to not follow his thoughts, which ineradicably and inexorably formed an unending, unwanted and unbroken train crowded with brightly clad ideas and hale bugbears, naked, which smiled lasciviously like the scantily dressed hookers in the city.. But this time, for the first time in his life, his mental babbling was interrupted by an uncomfortable flash of searing white light. The white flash fluttered into waves and then the waves of white broke up like spindrift and blew into droplets which, when they hit the ground, splashed into full spectrum bursts of scintillae which whirled around, forming themselves into the characters of a Japanese parable which he had fearfully pushed from his mind many years ago. The galaxy of glowing lights that formed the parable which filled his inner eye was so bright that he blinked and squinted his physical eyelids. He was aghast when, after his inner eye had adjusted itself to the intensity of the lights, he could see that the brilliance came from what looked like a Japanese Las Vegas on steroids. Each of the parable's Japanese characters were comprised of enough tiny multi-hued neon lights to light up a mile high casino a mile long. Unlike the hope he found in the image of the monk groaning joyously inside the hot and noisy embrace of a zealous prostitute's luscious thighs, this one filled him with a dread heavier than the thought of death creeping up in fog on cat feet to his unsecured door.
This is what he read across the dream sky scape:
One day Baso, disciple of Ejo, the Chinese master, was asked by the master why he spent so much time meditating. Baso: "To Become a Buddha." The master lifted a brick and began rubbing it very hard. It was now Baso's turn to ask a question: "Why," he asked, "do you rub that brick?" "To make a mirror." "But surely," protested Baso, "no amount of polishing will change a brick into a mirror." "Just so," the master said: "no amount of cross-legged sitting will turn you into a Buddha.”
All the lights began to pulse in unison, in a rhythmic double heartbeat which terrified him. The unenlightened monk flushed with recognition, and began to sweat with foul, fear imbued, profusion. The lights were in tune with his panicked heart's increasing beat. In what seemed like an eternity the lights began to pop one at a time, with the distinctive sound of cheap sparkling wine’s plastic corks. Now in the blackness he could hear the ominous breath of some omnivorous beast stalking him. He jumped up, out of his vision and into his cell, to discover that what he had been hearing was his own rasping panting. He sopped his forehead with a sleeve as he looked around. ETC was still purring. The Buddha was still smugly smirking. He began to pace, and by long habit designated it moving meditation.
What had so distressed him when he'd first read that parable, in black and white — and even more so now that he'd seen it in bright light colours — was how long had Baso been sitting cross-legged and failing, and how was it that the master knew that Baso was just cross-legged sitting? "How," the unenlightened monk moaned to himself, "do I know whether or not I have been vainly sitting with my legs crossed?"
The structure of this terrifying image convinced him without doubt that he was to seek his enlightenment in those defiled and polluted city streets which existed just outside of the spiritually pristine monastery's unkempt easements. "Yes," he argued at himself, "I know that the abbot would tell me that such dream-images are a delusion no different than those found in the material universe, except in being even more appealing than real life. But just look at the humour in it! Here I am, seeking enlightenment and just when I begin to think that my enlightenment might be in the dirty, so-called 'real' world, that's the time when I just happen to see a long forgotten parable of a man failing to achieve it with meditation brightly lit up in the neon image of a city whose entire existence is bound to pelf and narcissistic excess!" He unhappily concluded that a no more apt en-lighten-ment metaphor could be imagined. And then cursed his existence to the implacable, ever grinning Buddha above him.
So, in a pure act of base enlightenment-desperation — or perhaps it was only a base act of pure enlightenment-desperation, the two acts being, to the unenlightened, hard to distinguish — the unenlightened monk left purring the meditating ETC and the smiling mute Buddha when he snuck out into the stormy night. The first place he furtively entered was a run-down and dirty all-you-can-eat and drink rib place where he ate eight pounds of pig ribs and drank four pints of pale ale locally brewed with pride to some foreign country's purity laws. At first he liked that he was defiling himself with something pure, but after a couple of the pints he decided that maybe his liking it and its purity would defeat his purpose. After that he proceeded to the scummiest beer parlours he could find, pushing through wind and rain from one to another, longing for enlightenment in bottoming-up vile tasting lagers and popping stale nuts and other salty snack foods.
Eventually he forgot his purpose, forgot that he was supposed to be finding another foul bar, and accidentally thought about home. He had a momentary panic of not remembering where that was, or if he even had one, during which he stumbled into the back of Pandora, a kind-hearted prostitute. She fell into the wet street, and rolled with it just as her self-defence training had prepared her to do. The umbrella which had been keeping her more or less dry in the blustery wet weather was crumpled in the process.
— ✑⚤✑ —
"Hey!" she yelled, picking herself up off the cement and kicking at the mangled umbrella. "Can't you bloody-well watch where you're walking?!" He blubbered unintelligibly as she inspected the shallow scrapes on her right hand. "Fucking moron!" she barked, then checked her clothing to find that she had torn her third pair of stockings that week and had scuffed both her jacket and skirt. "Asshole!" she cursed and flipped him the finger. Then she muttered to herself "And just when I was about to pack it in after a God damned slow night." She stopped herself from cursing him a third time because, in part, she saw that his head was shorn — something she has always found odd but appealing in men — but mostly because she had looked into his sad eyes and, despite the coldness of the street lamp and the rain pouring over his booze-bleared eyes, she thought she recognised in them something which brought a lump to her throat.
"Go on," she barked over that lump. "Go on! Get lost, you God damn drunk! You think I've got nothing better to do than curse you for knocking me down?" When he said nothing, but moved his eyes from hers to her perkily nippled tits, at which he stared intently, she barked "Well I do! Oi! What are you looking at? These mommas don't come cheap! If you want to touch them with more than your eyes, it'll cost ya!" Like a skilful fly fisher naturally bringing to her hook a chary bass, she began to stretch back to both enhance the shape of her breasts and move them away from his ogling eyes. But her mind shouted to her that he had spent his money on booze already, so she stopped fishing. She discerned that his clothes were badly outdated and just about threadbare, which further bespoke of a dearth of funds, even before his having gotten drunk. She relaxed, turned her back to him and began to walk away. "What a night!" she cursed, "What a wasted night."
With a drunken slur he solemnly pleaded "May I feel them? Your breasts, I mean." She kept on walking. "I would really like to feel your breasts," he cried out desperately, stumbling after her. "I haven't felt anyone's since my mother's. When I was a baby. And I can't even remember the face I had before I was born let alone her sweet, soft, warm tits." Pandora stopped. Despite his drunken slurred language, Pandora had been able to make of them out, after her years around drunks beginning with her parents. She turned to look at the source of such a peculiar, heartfelt, supplication. Before she could think to say anything, he fell to his knees and started to cry "And all I've got to pay you with is my Soul!" Despite her best intentions and a few years of perfecting her professionalism, her heart went to him. Then she heard him mutter "And all I have to gain is my enlightenment."
After a long blubber-filled near-silence she said "Sure," with a rueful chuckle and resigned shake of her head. "Come on," she said, dropping her tough-stuff voice and moved to him. She grasped him by the arm with "you don't need to beg!" and helped him back to his unsteady feet. Pandora had accepted the reality that her stars, which were normally weak on the best of days, were particularly badly aligned that week. Mercury and/or another planet likely in retrograde. And she found what he said quixotic, despite having understood little of his babble — except for the breast part. She also liked the directness of his sad, sad eyes, despite his drunkenness, and felt an inexplicable...she stumbled for the word to describe her feelings. It wasn't kinship, exactly, but she felt emotionally closer to him than the stranger he was. "Kithship"? "Yup," she said to herself, "‘kithship’. A nice word to describe the inexplicable connection between strangers as they fumbled through life's bleak and colourful calamities and good fortunes."
The unenlightened monk seemed surprised, pleased and embarrassed all at the same time at her answer, which Pandora found very endearing. What she did not know was that he had requested the same thing of several women already that night, all of whom had either slapped his face or laughed derisively at him. And when he timidly reached for Pandora's breasts, in nervous fits and starts, she quietly laughed at his slow seriousness and intensity. She gently took his hands in hers and said, "Hey, mister, let me take you home first." Normally she would not have done this but, because it was a slow night and because she recognised that he was a unique customer who obviously did not belong on the streets knocking down and feeling up prostitutes, she felt compelled to take him home. Not her home! And, she mused, maybe there might actually be a few bucks there, although his threadbare clothes again emphasised the "fewness" of them. "But," she added with her usual edged optimism, "don't judge a book by its cover, even if you buy it by its cover, as I like to say."
With patience and persistence she was eventually able to get from him a comprehendible version of his address, to which she directed the cabbie. During the ride he began talking non-stop and increasingly loudly about what sounded like gibberish to her. Was the eightfold path something to do with ironing sheets? she wondered with a shrug. But she knew all about enlightenment, from first hand experience with a couple of her overweight regulars — when they rolled off of her! She laughed to herself.
Once disembarked from the cab — after she had sighed and paid the cabbie — the monk weaved them across the empty parking lot. Pandora was so busy keeping him from falling and joyfully bellowing that she did not notice that the dilapidated looking place was not a very small apartment complex. She just thought that its tenant parking lot was unusually large and empty.
Pandora's familiarity with the covert handling of drunks managed to keep him quiet until they entered the monastery, where she had to quickly cover her own mouth to muffle the "Holy shit!" that wanted to burst from her when she saw not the unlit halls hiding gaping holes filled with dirt between rank and torn carpeting, but the brilliant gleam of the gold plated Buddha and the lustre of the beautifully maintained hardwood floors. "Well, I'll be damned," she said to herself. And she gave the drunk and his shorn head a second look, one which couched both more respect and bemusement. "Just when you think you've seen everything.... I'll be doubly damned!" Then she took in a deep breath in order to inhale the aromas. Musky sandalwood incense, sharp floor wax and wax candles, and, faintly, cooked garlic and onions and beans. "This must be what heaven smells like!" she said.
— ✑⚤✑ —
With his mouth now uncovered, the unenlightened monk burbled in a drunk's rather too loud stage whisper "This way! My cell is this way!" and waved his arms loosely in all directions. The knuckles of his left hand thwacked the Buddha's large belly with a hollow ka-chung which reverberated for a long time. "Hungry, are you?" he asked the idol's belly. "Well, then, I guess that's how you got such a big gut — always stuffing yourself with discontented souls! Well, you didn't eat me!" He kissed it with an exaggerated and particularly wet smack and then giggled loudly before Pandora once again covered his mouth. They wove their way down the hall. Despite her efforts they bumped the walls several times and each time they did he laughed behind her hand like a kid having just discovered the joy of madly driving bumper cars.
Fortunately for the other residents their exhausting meditation regime, as well as their having become inured to the unenlightened monk's percussive nocturnal peregrinations, kept the monks from responding to the noise except by grumbling as they rolled over and/or covered their ears.
Pandora and the unenlightened monk entered his small room, where he immediately began to undress. As he was unsteadily removing his pants over his shoes he lost his balance and grabbed Pandora's shoulder to keep himself from falling backwards. But his drunkenness added weight to his momentum which dragged her onto the futon with him. The crash shook the bedroom walls. A softer bed would have crumpled. As it was, his fall crushed ETC who was, as usual, there dreaming of mousing Buddha-bellied rodents. So it was that ETC was surprised to find himself dead on only his second life. At the time of his death his dream mouth was comfortably stuffed with a dead fat mouse. The awake ETC, with his Buddhist training, had imagined that he would with this death be free from the bodily mires of pain, desire and walking fur ball factories.
"Hey!" a muffled voice through the walls could be heard, "Keep it down in there!" A few other faint voices could be heard from farther away in a muffled and haunting echo.
"Shhhhhh!" the monk slurred. He had forgotten about his Enlightened Tom Cat and did not notice ETC's crushed body beneath his unenlightened bulk. The drunk monk lost at losing his virginity with the now naked prostitute who, astride him, rocked and quietly moaned with as much professional encouragement as she could muster at that late hour. But the booze kept him down and she stopped proffering passion when he began to snore. He had obviously had a bad hair day today, she thought with a smile, and rubbed his head. But it had been a very long day for her too, so that instead of getting up and leaving immediately after sliding off of him as she had originally intended, she laid down crosswise on the futon beside him.
She thought about the peculiarities of life while distractedly playing with his matted chest with her fingers. And before she knew it, the aura of safety and warmth which exuded from the monastery imparted a feeling of contentment within her that Pandora had not felt since early childhood. She felt embraced by peace and, with a feeling of surprise at the tiredness that instantly filled her being, fell into a deep, naked sleep.
— ✑⚤✑ —
When the monk woke later that morning he discovered first that his head was splitting itself open, then, through bleary eyes, that there lay breathing beside him a naked woman. After what seemed to be an eternity of watching the woman’s chest and belly move softly with her breath, he rolled away from her to shakily begin the process of getting up and off of the futon. He wobbled his way out of his room and down the hall to the bathroom. After relieving his bladder he splashed cold water on his face to little positive effect.
He slumped back to his cell to see that the woman who he still couldn’t quite recall how she got there was up and buttoning her blouse. She looked at him and then pointed to the futon. He followed her finger to see the inert and obviously dead body of his friend and companion, ETC. Even through his cat’s closed lids the monk felt as if the energy of ETC's eyes had entered his own like darts.
With those darts he felt ashamed with the memory of his intention last night — and now this completely unforgotten and obviously deadly result. Results. There was the now the clearly alive and now skimpily dressed woman standing close to him in the tiny room. He felt her eyes on him. He racked his wrecked brain cells, in vain, to recall anything or even something about the woman and his dead cat. There was nothing.
He moved his eyes to Pandora’s and once again felt darts of guilt exacerbated by the obvious kindness with which she looked at him. Her eyes felt more compassionate than any he had seen before. Was it just because he had killed his cat? The cat. A cat.
The penetrating kindness was a touch too much to bear and with a heave of nausea he clutched his stomach and ran, still naked, for the bathroom down the hall. This time the hallway wasn’t empty and he bowled over the abbot who, uncharacteristically yelled out his surprise before being rattled to near unconsciousness when his head bounced off the hard wooden floor. He moaned briefly and then called out to the monk ‘Really?! Haven’t you learned anything?’ His voice was somewhat louder than the sounds of the retching disciple.
The unenlightened monk would forever be able to link his experience of enlightenment with his cat's death, his lost innocence, all hope of escaping from the cycle of life and death, having shamed and bowled over his master, waking to a naked women sleeping beside him and the projectile vomit with which he had painted the bathroom. That was to come a few minutes later. For the presenting now-moment all he could do was rest his cheek against the cool lip of the porcelain toilet bowl and flaccidly splash its water in a vain effort to cool his face, clear his eyes and calm his head. He felt his heart tear itself apart. Then, out of the bowl, he experienced his most genuinely "Zen" act in the fifteen years he had been in the monastery. In a flush the unenlightened monk realised that he could never be a Buddhist and promptly renounced Buddhism "and every other goddamned religion!"
He cried for his wasted life.
After a while he clumsily stood up and eased his hands over his pulsating and prickling scalp. He tried to remember what long hair felt like, but the be all was his massive headache so he properly washed his face at the sink and, with a stomach he had to forcefully keep from jumping up his throat, cleaned the bathroom of his vomit before slouching back to his cell with paper towelling draped protectively over his genitals. The Abbot was sitting on a bench near the door, a look of curiosity opening his eyes with a childlike wonder. He didn’t speak.
The unenlightened monk dressed quickly without saying a word to the woman who was still there. She was sitting, now, at the end of the futon with a great calmness and remarkable stillness. And silence. Her eyes followed him. It seemed to him that her beauty came from within her to become her.
And he felt a peculiar envy at her ease and then with that he suddenly felt rebuked by her gentle beautiful presence. After cinching his too short belt into place, he looked up for the smiling Buddha in its small altar adjacent to the futon. The Buddha image was laying on his side, having tipped over, perhaps from the shock wave of the monk and prostitute hitting the futon earlier that morning. Or maybe it fell over in honour or respect for the death of the physical ETC and the liberation of that spirit. Regardless the physical or metaphysical causes, he saw that the Buddha's normally upraised hands now pointed to the door. The unenlightened monk took this as a synchronicity and thus a sure sign of his failure and destiny. He quickly recited a short death chant for ETC, and gave a apology to one of his brothers — now ex-brothers — the one who would be faced with dealing with the dead cat. And then the enlightened ex-monk, after pulling a pillow from its case, threw his few remaining clothes and personal effects into it.
He didn’t think to pay the woman, because he had no memory of her being a prostitute. In the hallways he turned his eyes away from the still sitting abbot who still remained silent and whose eyes he would have seen were kind if he had had the courage to have looked at them.
And so it was that the now enlightened ex-monk left the monastery. He did not look back.
— ✑⚤✑ —
Pandora watched the sad monk leave. After a pause she turned to look at the dead cat. Was it smiling? she wondered. As she gazed at the dead tom, she reflected on the previous night. Again, something that she saw in the monk's pathetically sad and desperate eyes struck her heart. She felt something twinge or tweak or maybe poke her. She blinked her eyes and felt them begin to tear-up. What is that? she wondered. To distract herself from feeling what was manifesting in her tears, she stood and moved around the room. She was a little puzzled that she still hadn’t left. Why am I here? At the time she didn’t catch the odd timing of that question, posed as it was inside a tiny room with a dead and enlightened cat inside a tiny Buddhist monastery without any ostensible metaphysical implication.
She moved to the cat’s form and sat beside it, and looked at it. At death. The aloneness she had been denying swept over her and she struggled to hold back gulping crying and found herself wanting to console the spirit of the dead tom. She reached to it and gently stroked the still cooling, not yet cold, remains.
She was surprised when the recognition she had inexplicably felt when he had pleaded with her in the middle of the drunken night gelled into a strong sense that she had been feeling his kind of sadness and desperation herself too, these last few years. Turning tricks, which had for so long seemed like easy money, had come to feel like a waste of her life. The weeping blew up into wailing and without thinking, only needing someone to share her pain, she put her head down on the side of the cat.
— ✑⚤✑ —
Pandora's hands and tears were all Bilgewater-ETC's spirit, that was only two dimensions and three planes away, needed to purr-ge itself out of the cycle of life and death permanently. Instead of doing so he had been so moved by the generosity and compassionate humour that he had experienced in the monastery that he had decided before his death he was to be a "Bodhi-cattva". He laughed at the joke often, perhaps not understanding that his enlightenment had in fact elevated him into the reality of that option.
With the generosity of his jokingly and unknowingly having become a "Bodhi-cattva" came the concomitant open-heartedness which enabled him to hear his old name called out by a familiar voice. "Bilgewater? Bilgewater? Is that you?" The voice he heard sounded like his dead Grandma Bedlam. Was that possible? His spirit, or perhaps whatever it is that gave his spirit spirit, had unbeknownst to him very generously made himself manifest in his younger form for Bedlam who resided in herself made Hell in Heaven. He didn’t know at that time that he had been given a most bodhisattvic challenge.
When he next opened his eyes from what felt like a dreamless and delightfully refreshing sleep, it seemed to him that he had arrived in what could only be the Heaven Bedlam had endlessly described when she was alive. As he was struggling to recover from the shock of the existence of Heaven, in contradistinction to what he had come to believe from his Buddhist days, Bilgewater-ETC felt familiar hands grab him around his ribs and lift him up and around. Her hands moved him too quickly for him to enjoy the panorama which blurred by his eyes. Before he could say Bilgewater Blues, his eyes were face-to-face with Bedlam's. It was she he had heard calling his name, and who had picked him up and was now looking into his eyes just like she had always done.
"Et tu, Bilgewater?" she asked sadly, her voice cracking a little from the emotional pulls she felt between the joy of once again having his companionship, and knowing that her feeling such joy at someone else close to her having gone to Hell was at best selfish and at worst a Christian abomination. "You've come to Hell, too!" Then she cried a little for him and his eternal torment enjoined with her own. When she finished crying she surreptitiously thanked God for this small but enormous blessing. Even more than her emotional masochism Bilgewater's presence gave her an enormous boost of heart and strength with which to continue fending off the Devil during her protracted existence in Hell.
By this time Bilgewater-ETC had adjusted himself to the realisation that he was indeed, as well as body — if it was possible to even be embodied in Heaven — in Heaven. He was having a hard time understanding what Bedlam had said about being in Hell.
"Look around you, Bilgewater," Bedlam said, as if reading his mind like she had always done. And, as she had always done, she swung him around holding him in his armpits with about as much elegance as a sack of potatoes. "See! See all those smiling faces? They are a lie! A clever lie, to be sure. They are very well painted, their smiles and friendly faces."
Bilgewater-ETC could see clearly that they were not a lie. And he realised that she could no longer understand him. Since becoming a "Bodhi-cattva" he could see beneath the surface of things. He saw that this "Heaven" was Bedlam's construct, but that she had somehow managed to wed her Heaven to Hell as if they were a "Westernised", heavenly-bodied construction of the Taoist's Tai-ch'i-t'u, with black and white inside one another. Bedlam's wedded schism reminded Bilgewater-ETC of one of the monk's at the monastery and his endless fascination with the Taoist implications that riddled William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In particular the monk often used ETC as a sounding board whenever he recited, among other things, the "Voice of the Devil”1:
All Bibles Or Sacred Codes Have Been The Cause Of The Following Errors: 1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body and a Soul. 2. That Energy, called evil, is alone from the Body and that Reason called Good is alone from the Soul. 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. But The Following Contraries To These Are True: 1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. 3. Energy is Eternal Delight.
"Did you hear that, ETC," the monk would almost shout with excitement, "'Energy is Eternal Delight!' Doesn't that remind you of the I Ching's description of Yin and Yang?" It seemed like babble to Bilgewater-ETC at the time, but he thought that it might help Bedlam. Bilgewater-ETC opened his mouth to tell her that "Energy is Eternal Delight" but "Meow" was all he heard himself say. That shut him up for a few minutes. The implications of that "meow" reverberated inside his head ominously. Now, he thought, that I am dead I seem to have the ability to remember the details of a massive poem-like thing such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and all I can say is "meow"? "Kowabunga," he tried to say. "Meow," was all he said.
"I know, I know. It was a shock to me too. Hell is not what I thought it would be." Bilgewater-ETC was surprised and happy for Bedlam when he realised that she had obviously heard him for the first time in his life. And after life. He thanked Heaven that his ears would no longer be subjected to Bedlam's bellowing.
But he was also puzzled and very worried. He wanted to tell her everything that had happened to him, how that he had become enlightened, and that this was indeed Heaven, not Hell, and that the Energy of life was beyond both of them. And when he opened his mouth all he heard himself say, again, was a long "Meeeooowwwwww." He looked at her with as much intelligence as he could, willing her to understand that he understood her and could help. He dreaded the thought that now that she could hear him she could no longer understand him.
"There, there," Bedlam said softly. "It'll be alright. I've been here for nine years and know the ropes and all their tricks. You'll be alright with your Grandma Bedlam." She looked him straight in the eyes then touched her nose to his like she always did. He had forgotten that she had liked to do that. And he was surprised when he found himself disliking it as much now that he was a "Bodhi-cattva" and dead as when he was alive and ignorant. He tried to tell her to stop, but all that he wound up saying was "Meeeooowwwwww."
Good grief, he thought, and looked all around himself. Where am I going to find a fat monk here? Everyone is thin and very, very light on their feet. He looked Bedlam in her eyes and pleaded for her to understand. "Meeeooowwwwww." He wanted to cry but felt his tail flick instead. “Meeeooowwwwww!"
——Finis——
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Song of the Essay: Lullaby.
Lyrics by William Blake, Music by Loreena McKennitt.
Prologue Intended For A Dramatic Piece Of King Edward The Fourth By William Blake
O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue To drown the throat of war! - When the senses Are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness Who can stand? When the souls of the oppressed Fight in the troubled air that rages, who can stand? When the whirlwind of fury comes from the Throne of god, when the frowns of his countenance Drive the nations together, who can stand? When Sin claps his broad wings over the battle And sails rejoicing in the flood of Death; When souls are torn to everlasting fire And fiends of Hell rejoice upon the slain O who can stand? O who hath caused this? O who can answer at the throne of God? The Kings and Nobles of the Land have done it! Hear it not, Heaven, thy Ministers have done it!
William Blake. "The Voice of the Devil" (Plate 4), from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Delightful! Well done. "Bodhi-cattva!" What a punch line. I liked the character development. Well worth it, Guy.