The Fountain of Eden: A Myth of Birth, Death, and Beer Read online

  Chapter 4

  The Adventures of a Patchrobed Novice

  Bright and early Sunday morning, Sitting Lotus dug through garbage. His skinny white legs dangled out of the Dumpster behind the local Italian restaurant, Vittorio's Pizza and Pasta Palazzo. While delving through globs of rotten tomato sauce and piles of rock-hard garlic bread, he dozed off and tumbled into the Dumpster. The metal lid clanged shut above his head.

  He awoke thirty minutes later, covered head to sandals in kitchen grease, gelatinous pasta clogging his mouth and up his nostrils. After recollecting his senses, he opened the Dumpster's lid and crawled out into the crisp morning sunlight.

  Brushing soggy rigatoni from his robe, he pondered why it was that he, out of hundreds of novice monks at New Shaolin Monastery, always got stuck with the Dumpsters along Restaurant Row. He figured that Master Mirbodi, who assigned the novices their Dumpster diving districts, had it in for him. All you found in the restaurant Dumpsters were rotten foodstuffs and rats that stared at you as if they were rodent royalty and you a huge bandit hunting in their stinking royal forest.

  The haul was always better on the east side of town, over by the College of Bill & Gary, the only university in Eden. You name it, the novices had found it in the B&G Dumpsters: furniture, electronics, designer clothing, books and magazines, kitchen appliances, sex toys (hopefully unused, but probably not). The pickings were also pretty nice on the south-side, especially at Eden Crossing, which acted as a commercialized bumper between the historic downtown area and the outlying middle-class neighborhoods. The sprawling shopping complex was also the best place to acquire discarded garments to patch up your robe, as Eden Fab & Stitch, the only fabric store in town, rented a space in the busy outlet center.

  But Sitting Lotus never landed those gigs, and had to use worn, stained rags—found in abundance in the Dumpsters along Restaurant Row—to stitch up his robe. His fellow novices often joked that he more resembled a giant, hideously animated dishrag than a Buddhist monk-in-training. He and his unforgiving peers would Dumpster-dive every Sunday, taking whatever was salvageable back to the warehouse at the monastery. There, under the supervision and with the occasional help of the masters, they would repair, clean, and polish these discarded items. Then, every August, the monastery held a grand, carnivalesque yard sale called “Your Trash, Their Treasure” on the grounds to benefit the on-site orphanage. The popular annual garage sale—or garbage sale, as Sitting Lotus liked to call it—would take place on Wednesday, and was sure to draw yet another record crowd this year.

  Siddhartha's sizzling sutras, thought Sitting Lotus, I’ve gotta solve my koan sometime soon! I can’t be stuck as a novice forever, digging into restaurant Dumpsters every Sunday morning for the rest of my days on the material plane! He repeated the koan to himself for the billionth time.

  A monk asked of the Sixth Patriarch: 'What is Zen?' Hui-Neng replied: 'When not dwelling on good, when not dwelling on evil, what is your original face before you were born?'

  Sitting Lotus sighed. Here we go again, attempting to find an answer to a question that cannot be answered in a rational manner. He tried to think about the koan and nothing but the koan, as per Master Mirbodi's instructions, but it just wasn't happening this morning.

  He thought, glumly, that perhaps he would be a novice for the remainder of this life and all the rest, just as Master Mirbodi had said yesterday. The many “answers” to the koan he had thus far produced (pulled out of his ass, more like) were nothing close to what the masters were looking for. If he went in there and tried to fake it again, Master Mirbodi would just laugh in his face again.

  But how did that shriveled old raisin of a monk expect him to concentrate on his koan and nothing but his koan when he could hardly get any sleep at night?

  Yesterday, Master Mirbodi had left New Shaolin at dusk and returned well after “lights-out,” wired as hell on something or other—probably green tea, which he drank in abundance. The eccentric Zen master had remained awake and active until the “wake-up” gong (fondly nicknamed “That-Rise-n'-Fuckin'-Shiner” by the novices). All night long, he had sat on the front steps of the novices' dormitories, banging on kitchen pots and pans like drums, singing terrible “songs” at the top of his lungs to accompany the “music,” and laughing like a drunken Trickster god between the eardrum-scorching numbers, which had grown louder and more discordant as the endless night dragged on.

  The other resident masters, when complained at the following morning about the ruckus, had no clue as to what anybody was talking about, and told the red-eyed novices, in one way or another, to leave them the hell alone until after they’d had their coffee.

  Reeking of foulness, Sitting Lotus walked down the familiar alley behind the mile-long stretch of restaurants and bars that lined the western end of Colonial Towne Road. The next Dumpster in the queue was the one behind the Olde Eden Brewery & Taphouse, one of those rare refuse bins that was always pristine, or at least as near it a Dumpster could be.

  Upon approach he noticed something odd sitting on the ground in the middle of the alleyway: one of those translucent blue Nalgene water bottles, filled to the brim with sparkling, fizzing water. It was probably a deposit from an Olde Eden Brewery employee for the novices to find, but why hadn’t they left it next to the bin like they usually did with the small items? And why was it full?

  Unsure, Sitting Lotus picked up the bottle and held it out for examination, then decided that it must be a donation. He would take it back to the monastery, and if someone came looking for it they would realize who had taken it and come to New Shaolin to retrieve it.

  He unscrewed the cap of the bottle to dispose of the fluid, and an indescribable aroma of loveliness wafted its way up to his nostrils. This smell was the best-smelling smell he had ever smelled; it was the smell to end all smells. It transported his mind into new, undiscovered realms—and Sitting Lotus’s longstanding crystalline walls of mental formations fragmented into oblivion, and he solved his koan.

  With no sense of accomplishment—accomplishment was a drug, a dream, a lie—he looked down, down, down, into the bubbling Water, shining within the bottle like liquid starlight. Not dwelling on good, not dwelling on evil, he brought the bottle to his lips, tipped it back—and drank Zen, Buddha, Mind, all the way down to the last drop.

  Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug.