The Tao
When Marvin woke in the morning, he always felt emptied, like a catharsis had happened in his sleep in dreams he couldn’t remember, clearing away clutter, as if he’d cleaned up the garage and now each tool was hanging in its proper place. When he pressed the button on the coffeemaker and the blue light lit up like a hello, he felt comforted, and even more so when the gentle gurgle and drip sound decorated the silence. Today would be a trouble-free expanse of happiness stretching like canvas that the Tao would paint according to its own rules and regulations. So much to look forward to. And it was still hours before dawn.
He poured his first cup of coffee and sat on the couch where he always sat. He picked up a book, but didn’t open it because reading sucked you into the minds of other people. Was it Sartre who said hell is other people? It was why Thoreau had lived alone at Walden Pond, but Sartre was the one who had articulated the inner truth. Marvin lived alone in this apartment south of the university. He’d once lived with his mother in the burbs in a house with a garage, but that was another story. The cop working the cold case had thought it odd that Marvin hadn’t kept any pictures of his mother, but having pictures would be like living with her again. Instead of the gurgle of the coffeemaker, he would hear his mother’s voice. Make yourself useful, clean up the garage. Annoying comments that always meant something entirely different than what she was saying.
A fly buzzed by his face and Marvin’s eyes followed its flight. It landed on the coffee table. Marvin slowly raised the book over the table, then slammed down hard. The fly was too quick and it escaped. That was the Tao for you.
Blue lights were flashing through the window, so Marvin got up to look. He watched the lights trail into the darkness. Most crime happened at night, but Marvin didn’t think it was because darkness made it hard for the victim to see what was coming. It was because the day’s clutter builds up, and clutter is stultifying and noisy, so by nightfall it has to be cleaned out. Cops always looked for motives. Every motive was only one motive – getting rid of the clutter. People always make things more complicated than they really are.
Marvin didn’t bother with motives. He looked for signs. The Tao unfolds in a series of signs that foreshadow everything, tiny mustard seeds growing into great trees, yin becoming yang and yang becoming yin. The blue lights were a sign. They were part of the Tao unfolding.
#
Marvin opened his eyes when the gong sounded ending the meditation session. It was time for the group’s break. The people around him stood, stretching stiff legs, and he did, too. No one said anything so as not to soil the tranquility they’d spent the past couple hours cultivating by emptying their minds, just watching thoughts bubbling up, letting them go like balloons released into the sky, floating away, eventually descending where birds, turtles, and fish would swallow them and die. Marvin had asked the meditation director where he thought the thoughts went when you let them go, and the director had said they just disappear. This, of course, is a lie. Nothing disappears. Thoughts just float to some street corner where they wait for a victim. Nothing is ever wasted by the Tao.
Gradually, the meditators migrated to a room where a table was laid out with herbal tea and snacks. There would be talking, now, and Marvin felt anxiety build in his chest like a tea kettle boiling but you couldn’t hear the whistle. Someone would speak to him and he would have to talk back. He would have to justify his existence to this person and this person would dislike Marvin or would like him, which was worse, because being liked meant being imprisoned in a cage constructed by the mind of the other person, like a lightning bug some kid caught and put in a jar because he ‘liked’ it. This disliking or liking would stick in Marvin’s mind like flies stick to flypaper, all these noisy annoying flies making the tea kettle boil hotter. It made Marvin sick to his stomach to think about it.
“Is this your first time at a meditation weekend?”
A woman was talking to him. Her name was Charlene. She was nice. But that’s how trouble started, thinking everything is okay, treating that gut feeling as something wrong with you instead of the flashing yellow light it really is.
“No,” Marvin said. “Is it your first time?”
The logistics of talking are easy. Be a mirror. If they say hello, say hello back. If they say what do you do, recite your job description and ask for theirs. But all the while, flies fill your brain like it’s a rotting carcass, the noisy clutter ringing in your ears until you can’t hear anything else.
Charlene continued talking but Marvin was having trouble listening. She stopped, waiting for him to say something. Marvin felt like he’d been herded into a cattle chute that led to the slaughterhouse and he and this woman were going there together.
“Want to walk outside?” he asked. She looked at him as if assessing his intentions.
“In the meditation garden, I mean,” he said, and that seemed to assuage her concerns. They slithered between folks congregating in the kitchen and slipped out the back door where a gravel path meandered between shrubs and under trees. They entered that path as if going somewhere together. The garden was tiny, not much bigger than Marvin’s apartment, but it was carefully designed to create distinct spaces, only a few feet apart, that cohered like little self-contained bonsai parks. They moseyed from spot to spot like visitors in an art gallery, but the flies buzzing in Marvin’s head were getting louder. And then, as they rounded a corner, he heard them with his ears, too.
“Oh,” Charlene said, stopping. On the ground in front of them was a dead robin covered with angry flies. The angry buzz of the flies grew louder as if the flies feared there wouldn’t be enough dead bird to go around. The flies were like prisoners with an arm around their plates and eating as fast as they could. The buzzing in Marvin’s head grew louder, too. The dead robin and her entourage of flies was a sign, a correspondence between the inner world and the outer world. It was the Tao. Charlene pointed at the little bird corpse.
“We should be mindful of death. Then we won’t put off meditating because we never know when death will take us.”
Marvin started to take issue with her assertion that we never know when death will take us, but checked himself. Suddenly, he felt like Charlene was annoying him. Suddenly, the weight of her annoyance was so great it almost made him tip over. Suddenly, the breadth of her chest, her low hips, and her short legs reminded him of a robin. Her robin-ness felt like an insult or a provocation.
“We should get back inside,” Charlene chirped. “The next session will start up soon.”
They re-entered the building and slithered through the kitchen again back to the meditation room. Other people were assuming the lotus position on their cushions. The din of noisy flies was deafening. Marvin had trouble catching his breath as he sat on his cushion and tried to look like everyone else.
#
It was 5:30 and the Saturday session was over. The group would return tomorrow morning for the Sunday session. Sitting on the meditation cushion for a few hours had quieted the flies. They still filled Marvin’s brain, but they were asleep. He walked gently so he wouldn’t wake them. Charlene was checking her phone when Marvin approached.
“Want to meet for dinner?”
She hesitated as if surprised, but quickly said yes, a smile on her robin face. They picked a time, 7:30, and a place, the Italian restaurant in the old neighborhood south of the university, not far from Marvin’s apartment. It also was near where she lived, she said.
“It is? Where do you live?” he asked. She gave him the address, adding, “It’s within walking distance of the restaurant.”
Marvin felt the tea kettle in his chest simmer.
“See you then.”
As he left the building and went to his car, the flies were stirring, but he shushed them by singing a little melody in his mind. When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin along.
#
Marvin was pacing back and forth outside and looking at his watch. At 7:15, Charlene came out the front door of her tiny brick house that probably was considered nice when it was built back in the 1930s. Nostalgia gave the university neighborhood character otherwise denied low-income housing, as if the people living in these old houses were a better class of victim than someone in a housing project.
“Hi,” he said. “I came early so I could walk you to the restaurant.”
Charlene smiled. The flies exerted pressure in Marvin’s head, but their wings were still. Charlene was wearing lipstick. She liked Marvin. It occurred to Marvin that this might be a nice dinner date. It could be a pleasant evening. Perhaps that’s what the Tao had in mind. It was nothing to Marvin either way – he would simply follow the Tao as it unfolded.
Charlene launched into a blow-by-blow description of the mundane events of her week, the way people do when they think you care, a monologue requiring no response from Marvin. It reminded him of his mother. He didn’t like that. Charlene had been better when she was quiet. All her talking was like someone splashing water in your face when all you want to do is float in the ocean. Then she said, “I’m actually glad you came to walk with me. I was thinking maybe I should drive to the restaurant instead of walking. There was another murder last night. Did you read about it?”
“No.” Marvin’s answer was literally true. He never read news. News was just clutter, the hell of other people. Marvin felt the tea kettle start to boil. The flies were waking up, rubbing their eyes, compound eyes, each of which consist of 3,000 to 6,000 simple eyes. Thousands of flies, tens of millions of eyes looking and looking and looking.
When they passed an alleyway that cut between this block and the next one over, Marvin took Charlene’s hand. He nodded.
“This is a shortcut.”
Charlene wasn’t looking at the alley. She was looking at Marvin, forming an opinion about Marvin holding her hand. This kind of behavior was typical of most people, wasting time imagining motives instead of looking for signs. People typically insist on being clueless, even when surrounded by clues.
Charlene followed the gentle tug of Marvin’s hand like a horse bridled as they slithered down the alley together between empty boxes and garbage cans. There was a broom leaning against the wall, as if someone had started to clean up the clutter and then abandoned the task. At the end of the alley, next to a child’s bicycle, was a dead rat, coated with a mass of flies walking back and forth unhurriedly across their booty, sated from a round of feeding, waiting until they became hungry enough to do it again.
“Oh,” Charlene said, squeezing his hand. She was reacting to the smell. Marvin saw that she had no appreciation of the beautiful intimacy of the flies crawling over the dead rat. Charlene was a stupid robin. The lipstick made it worse. Marvin pulled her through to the end of the alley. Across the street was a run-down public park with an empty playground where a flock of starlings strutted about, pecking at the ground. Beyond the playground were the woods.
“If we cut through the park,” he said. “We’ll be there in sixty seconds.”
He pulled her with him and she followed without resistance as if they were dancing and he was leading. As they approached the playground, the starlings rose in mass like dark rain returning to the sky. Barely a beat later, the flies in Marvin’s head released and rose with the starlings, and Marvin felt his eyes roll back in his head as he felt himself disappearing into uncluttered emptiness.
#
Marvin got out of bed and made coffee. Some kind catharsis had happened in his sleep, a dream he couldn’t remember, as if he’d cleaned out the garage and each tool now was hanging in its proper place. Henceforth, there would be nothing but order and contentment. That always was his thinking when he drank coffee in the morning. Today would be trouble-free, an expanse of happiness stretching like canvas the Tao would paint. And it wasn’t even dawn yet. He sat on the couch where he always sat and began humming a tune, and words came to mind to go with it. When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin along. It’s funny how songs stick in your head for no reason at all.
Marvin heard sirens in the distance, coming closer, now coming down his street. He went to the window to look and watched blue lights flash as they passed and then trail into darkness. It was a sign, a mustard seed that no doubt would grow into a great tree. Marvin heard the voice of his mother – make yourself useful, clean up the garage – bounce around in his brain. He willed it away, like releasing a balloon into the air, a balloon that eventually would land on some street corner to wait for a victim. Marvin remained at the window, sipping his coffee. After a few minutes, he saw a glimmer of light in the east, and then a sliver of orange peeking over the horizon, the Tao replacing night with day, yin becoming yang and yang becoming yin.
A fly buzzed past his face. Marvin’s eyes followed its flight to the window sill where it landed. He slapped at it, but the fly was too quick and escaped. That was the Tao for you.
This story appeared in Omens: An Anthology, published by Antimony and Elder Lace, 2021
