Adapted from "MORNING MEDITATION"
Copyright 2006 by CAMERON GAUT

Brother Roach

A short story
by Michael Wright

Sally came in from her evening meditation and stood in the doorway of my room. She had on the long black robe that everyone wore in the Zen center. I waited until the movie paused for a commercial, then stood up and switched off the television. Right away she began, "I need to tell you something." I didn't look at her.

"Jane's going to be moving out."

I took a step to the other side of the room and poked a finger between the folds of the heavy, dark red curtains. The street looked inviting, snow piled like a blanket on the sidewalk, glistening under the yellow streetlamps.

"It'll be okay. You'll see." Her voice whined in my ear. I resented her blocking my door.

I know it'll be okay, I thought, but I said, "So she got into medical school?" I inhaled the faint smell of the curtains, stale flowers, and sweet dust.

This time Sally waited until I twisted my head to look at her over my shoulder. "No. She's been accepted into an acupuncture school. Out in California."

I pulled my towel from its hook on the door of the closet and took a sideways step towards the door. "Well, we knew this day would come, sooner or later."

"Stuart, it'll be okay."

"I know it will be okay. I can handle it." I was angry that she was taking care of me. I pushed the anger away, then turned slowly to face her. She had an expectant look, and I understood there was something more she needed to say.

"You found someone already?" I guessed.

"Actually, it's a couple."

Right away I didn't like it, but I needed to be fair to her. "That could work out." I forced a smile. "Split the rent four ways instead of three."

I saw a faint blush of color under Sally's pale cheeks. "They don't have much money."

Another of her charity cases, I thought, then felt ashamed. What was I? I looked at the floor, breathed in, then out, hearing the faint whistle in my nostrils. "We'll work it out," I said, trying to dismiss the conversation. I looked down at my bed, wishing she would leave.

"And..." Sally hesitated until she got my attention again. "She's pregnant."

I imagined a baby crying in the corner bedroom. I don't know why that pleased me.

"That's cool."

"You're sure?"

"Yeah. Some noise might be good for us." I picked my toothbrush out of the mug on my bureau.

Her lips twisted in an uncertain smile. After three years, she still doesn't know if I'm joking. She backed into the hall, gave me a small bow with her palms pressed together in front of her. She said, "I'll ask them over tomorrow evening."

I suspected she'd already done that. Sally thinks she knows what's best for everyone. Maybe she does. She offered me a place to stay when everyone else turned their backs. A month after I moved in, she found Jane in the detox center and brought her home. That was three years ago, and we've lived together as a family ever since, Jane and I, brother and sister, Sally like the mom.

I'll miss Jane. She's had a hard life: an abusive father, a lot of dope and pills in her teenage years, her husband missing in Laos. Over time she's put all the bad stuff behind her, and is intent on healing herself and others. She's small and thin, but radiates a warmth that's good to be around. She spends most of her time working at the neighborhood free clinic.

Once I woke up in a sweat to find Jane wiping my forehead with a cold washcloth. "You were screaming," she told me.

"Sorry." Her eyes were steady on me. "Did I say anything?"

"Nothing I could understand."

When I woke up again it was dawn and she was gone. She never mentioned what happened and I wasn't about to bring it up.

Sally's also dedicated to helping others. She teaches English at a refugee center run by the local Episcopal Church. After Saigon fell last year, her classes swelled with Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees. We live in a small house near the Zen meditation center. Every morning at five a.m. Sally slips out the front door and pads along the dark street in her slippers to sit in silence for an hour, along with a dozen other people who live nearby. Their teacher—sensei, she calls him—is Japanese.

Myself, I don't go into the meditation center. I went once with Sally, but the place gave me the creeps. It was gloomy and musky with incense, everyone in dark robes bowing to each other, meek and superior at the same time. Anyway I'm too restless to meditate, too full of splinters that poke me if I sit still without some distraction, so when I hear the click of the lock at dawn I stay in bed dozing for another hour, reluctant to come out of sleep, until it's time to get ready for work. I try not to think about the path that led me here, to this house, to this room. I work in a warehouse, hard steady work that leaves me weary and without thought at the end of the day. In the evenings I watch movies on television. Sometimes I watch World War II, a good war in black and white. I wonder what Vietnam will look like when Hollywood makes up stories about what happened there. Occasionally Sally gives me books about Buddhism or Zen. I read some of them.

One of Sally's creeds is "reverence for life," and she means all life—birds, beasts, and bugs. She won't even kill a roach or a mosquito. Once I walked past the center when the group was chanting, "Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them all." That doesn't make sense to me. Everyone is out for themselves, the jungle taught me that. In the morning mist, with their white faces and black robes bowing to each other, the group looks like a lost colony of penguins. I don't argue with Sally about the value of a mosquito but I keep the window screens in good shape. We keep the kitchen spotless.

One autumn day I was splitting logs in the backyard. Sally sat on the steps, watching me for a long time. Then she said, "You do have a practice."

"What?"

"Chop wood. Carry water. These are the first tasks." I grunted. That sounded like one of Sally's books.

"Stuart, when you split a log, you are totally focused. You are present entirely in the moment. That's all I'm trying to do in my meditation."

I knew what she meant about being present in the moment. The one time I let my attention slip, I caught a bullet in the jaw. But I couldn't explain to Sally how I learned that lesson, so I turned the conversation. "What about saving the numberless sentient beings? Isn't that a necessary part of it?"

"I just vow to save them all. I won't ever succeed."

I couldn't think of an answer for that. I brought the maul down ferociously, relishing the crisp scent of pine and the creaking noises as the log slowly opened. I admired what Sally was trying to do, I just couldn't do it myself. But she was generous and forgiving towards me. I tried to respect her beliefs and worked to control my anger and clean up my language.

I spent twenty-eight months in Vietnam. My first tour I spent mostly as a grunt until headquarters discovered I was a crack shot and turned me out as a sniper. I enjoyed the work and volunteered for more. It was the first thing I'd ever been really good at. Four months into my third tour I got careless and a VC sniper I'd been tracking saw me first. I spent three weeks in intensive care in Da Nang, then six months in an Army hospital stateside. Sally met me on the street the day I was released. We had gone to the same high school, but I'd never hung out with her. She went to the country club and drank with the other rich kids. I drove my old man's junker and got stoned in the parking lot behind the convenience store. She went off to college and I enlisted.

But that first day back on the street I was just relieved to find someone who didn't spit on me or pester me with their concern, their assurance that I would "adjust" to society. Sally looked me in the eye and said she was happy I was alive. And Sally doesn't act coy and stupid like most women. She believes in her work and in her Zen practice. She never asks me what I did in the service.

As I brushed my teeth I watched my face in the mirror. If I stretched out my jaw I could see fine white scars beneath my beard. They looked like a map of a territory I didn't recognize. I thought again about a baby. Another screamer would be good.

The next evening, after dark, Sally tapped lightly on my door. I followed her into the dining room. The couple stood together, a thin young man and a reedy woman with a stomach the shape of a basketball. His head was shaved, making his narrow face look like a knife blade. When Sally introduced him he bowed very slightly, his palms together, ignoring my outstretched hand. I swallowed my irritation and smiled at his wife, who blinked at me nervously.

They sat at opposite ends of the long table. Sally and I sat facing each other. The three of them folded their hands together, resting arms on the table. I felt like I was being squeezed into a box, but I didn't know how to break out. So after a moment I folded my hands too. Sally beamed at us, all sitting like good children. The young man asked Sally, "How long have you lived here?" He sat as straight as a ruler, on the edge of his chair.

"Five years," she said, "since the meditation center opened." She turned her gaze to me.

"I've been here three."

"And you both practice?"

"Not religiously," Sally said. I thought it was funny, but the young man's face narrowed even more and the skin folded between his eyebrows.

"I don't sit," I rushed to say. Maybe that was too blunt, so I added a hesitant smile.

His body stiffened and his gaze flickered to his wife. She sat on the edge of her chair, straining backwards, resisting the pull of gravity on her swollen belly. Sally waited for a second and then, inclining her head slightly in my direction, announced, "Stuart practices in his own way." The man and his wife both nodded the same fraction of an inch and absorbed these words with solemn faces. We sat in silence for a minute. I thought, okay, I can handle this scene, we'll get along. The curtains were open and through the window I could see a couple of black-robed figures standing on the corner.

Sally turned to the young woman. "When is your baby due?"

"January." She blushed.

"You two should have the master bedroom, the one in the corner," I said. "It has its own bathroom."

She smiled at me, and I felt the room growing softer.

"And you're both vegetarians?" he asked. Sally and I agreed. A brief satisfied smile appeared on his face. His wife allowed her eyes to roam around the walls.

A small roach appeared at my corner of the table and sped towards Sally. My hand was quicker. I squashed him under my palm.

Everything in the room turned to stone except the hand that I slowly drew towards myself. "Sorry," I said, "just instinct." I pushed my chair back and rose. "Habit." I backed away, then turned and walked into the kitchen. I cursed quietly. I had fucked up. I wiped my palm with a paper towel and tossed the crumpled ball into the garbage can beneath the sink.

I heard Sally's quiet murmur in the dining room, the tone she uses when she's apologizing. Hell, I thought, I did it and that's who I am. I braced up, and went back to my chair.

Sally looked at me sympathetically while she spoke, but I knew she was disappointed. "We were just agreeing that we all need to think about this before making any final decision." I nodded, but nobody else did. I knew the decision. We all pushed our chairs back quietly and stood up. Sally escorted them out the door.

I felt relieved that they were gone but ashamed that I had let Sally down. She came to the door of my room, which I had left open. I lay on the bed in the dark. "Sorry," I said, "sorry." I couldn't look at her.

"It's okay, Stuart. They wouldn't have worked out anyway."

"I don't understand, Sally. I've never seen a roach in this house, not in three years, and tonight of all nights one has to waltz across the table."

"I know. I've never seen one either." She was quiet for a moment. The light from the hallway picked out a few grey strands in her dark cap of hair. "Think about it. Goodnight, Stuart." She closed the door behind her.

Something was choking me. I sat up. It felt like a drowned ship in my guts, trying to rise up through my chest, distorting my throat. I opened my mouth wide, breathed in and out, slowly, deeply, trying to keep my insides from pushing out of my skin. My eyes flooded with tears. My deep breaths turned into frantic gasps and then into fierce, racking sobs. I must have passed out.

The drowned ship swept away in a river, a flood that covered me. When it receded, I found myself washed up on the floor, aware of my lungs breathing in and out, in and out, in a jerky, tired rhythm. I felt my shape returning. I could feel my soft, perfect body.

Sometime later I got up and went into the kitchen. I opened the door under the sink and stared at the garbage can for a long time. Then I brought my hands up to my chin, pressed my palms together and bowed deeply to my brother.