Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories Read Free

there and found a bottle of rum. I poured a few ounces into a glass and handed it to her. She drank it, made a face, and sighed.
    â€œNow tell us what happened.”
    She nodded and led the way out of the kitchen, through a room which served as a dining room, clean, rug on the floor, cheap ornate furniture, polished and loved, to the door of the next room, which had two beds that served as couches, a chest of drawers, and a hole in the middle of the floor about three and a half or four feet across.
    â€œGoddamn floor fell in,” said McCabe.
    â€œThe way they build these places,” said Robinson.
    â€œThe way they built them seventy-five years ago,” I said.
    Mrs. Gonzales said nothing, stopped at the door to the room, and would go no further.
    â€œWho lives underneath?” McCabe asked.
    â€œMontez. He is a teacher. No one is home now—except the devil.”
    Robinson entered the bedroom and walked gingerly toward the hole. The ancient floor creaked under his feet but held. He stopped a foot short of the edge of the hole and looked down. He didn’t say anything; just stood there and looked down.
    â€œThe building should be condemned,” said McCabe. “But then where do they go? You want to write about problems, here’s a problem. The whole goddamn city is a problem.”
    Still Robinson stared silently into the hole. I envisioned a corpse below or the results of some unspeakable murder. I started into the room.
    â€œTake it easy,” McCabe warned me. “The floor’s rotten. We don’t want you down there. What do you think?” he asked Robinson.
    Still no answer from Robinson.
    I moved carefully in on one side of the room, McCabe following on the other side. We both reached the hole at the same time. Robinson was in front of the hole, his back to the door. McCabe and I stood on either side of him.
    Even before my eyes registered what was down there, I was conscious of the smell. It reminded me of the odor of jasmine, yet it was different. It was something I had never known before, as indescribable as it was different, and it came on a slow current of warm air that I can only think of as silver. It’s not possible to explain why a breath of air should evoke the image of silver, but there it was.
    And then I saw what I saw. I saw what McCabe saw and what Robinson saw, so I did not dream it and I did not imagine it. About ten feet beneath the hole was a grassy sward. Its appearance suggested that it had been mowed, the way an old English lawn is mowed, yet something about it argued that the thick, heavy turf grew that way and had never known a mower’s blade. Nor was the grass green the way we know green; it appeared to be overlaid with a glow of lilac.
    No one of us spoke. No one suggested that this might be the floor of Mr. Montez’s apartment and that the teacher specialized in horticulture; we knew it was not the floor of Mr. Montez’s apartment, and that was all we knew. The only sound in the apartment was the gentle sobbing of Mrs. Gonzales.
    Then Robinson crouched down, sprawled his huge bulk back from the edge of the hole, and let his head and shoulders hang over, bracing himself with his hands. The rotten floor creaked under him.
    â€œWatch it!” McCabe exclaimed. “You’ll be down there on your head.”
    He was wonderful. He was what only an old New York City cop could be, possessed of a mentality in which there was neither the unexpected nor the impossible. Anything could happen in New York, and it usually did.
    â€œWhat do you see?” I asked Robinson.
    â€œMore of it. Just more of it.” He drew himself back and stood up, and he looked from my face to McCabe’s face.
    â€œWe’re four stories high,” McCabe said bleakly, his universe finally tilting on edge.
    â€œA lot more of it,” said Robinson.
    â€œI’ll phone it in. I’ll tell them there’s a cow pasture on the fourth