“Well, it’s sort of traditional.”
“Is that part of the Zen thing, getting punchy so you can see God?
Isn’t that cheating?”
“It’s more just to stay awake. Because we don’t really have God in Zen Buddhism.” She turned away from me and began rifling through the cabinets, but didn’t quit her musings. “We just sit and try not to fall asleep, so I guess in a way staying awake is seeing God, sort of. So you’re right.”
The little triumph didn’t thrill me. I was feeling trapped, with the wizened teacher a floor above me and the plastic-legged hippie a floor below. I wanted to get out of the Zendo now, but I hadn’t figured a next move.
And when I left I wanted to take Kimmery with me. I wanted to protect her-the impulse surged in me, looking to affix to a suitable target. Now that I’d failed Minna, who deserved my protection? Was it Tony? Was it Julia? I wished that Frank would whisper a clue in my ear from the beyond. In the meantime, Kimmery would do.
“Here, do you want some Oreos?”
“Sure,” I said distractedly. “Buddhists eat Oreos?”
“We eat anything we want, Lionel. This isn’t Japan.” She took a blue carton of cookies and put it on the table.
I helped myself, craving the snack, glad we weren’t in Japan.
“I used to know this guy who once worked for Nabisco,” she said, musing as she bit into a cookie. “You know, the company that makes Oreos? He said they had two main plants for making Oreos, in different parts of the country. Two head bakers, you know, different quality control.”
“Uh-” I took a cookie and dunked it in my tea.
“And he used to swear he could tell the difference just by tasting them. This guy, when we ate Oreos, he would just go through the pack sniffing them and tasting the chocolate part and then he’d put the bad ones in a pile. And like, a really good package was one where less than a third had to go in the bad pile, because they were from the wrong bakery, you know? But sometimes there wouldn’t be more than five or six good ones in a whole package.”
“Wait a minute. You’re saying every package of Oreos has cookies from both bakeries?”
“Uh-huh.”
I tried to keep from thinking about it, tried to keep it in the blind spot of my obsessiveness, the way I would flinch my eyes fro a tempting shoulder. But it was impossible. “What motive could they possibly have for mixing batches in the same package?”
“Well, easy. If word got out that one bakery was better than the other, they wouldn’t want people, you know, shunning whole cartons, or maybe even whole truckloads, whole deliveries of Oreos. They’d have to keep them mixed up, so you’d buy any package knowing you’d probably get some good ones.”
“So you’re saying they ship batches from the two bakeries to one central boxing location just to mix them together.”
“I guess that’s what it would entail, isn’t it?” she said brightly.
“That’s stupid,” I said, but it was only the sound of my crumbling resistance.
She shrugged. “All I know is we’d eat them and he’d be frantically building this pile of rejected cookies. And he’d be pushing them at me saying, ‘See, see?’ I could never tell the difference.”
No, no, no, no.
Eatmeoreo, I mouthed inaudibly. I crinkled in the cellophane sleeve for another cookie, then nibbled off the overhang of chocolate top. I let the pulverized crumbs saturate my tongue, then reached for another, performed the same operation. They were identical. I put both nibbled cookies in the same pile. I needed to find a good one, or a bad one, before I could tell the difference.
Maybe I’d only ever eaten bad ones.
“I thought you didn’t believe me,” said Kimmery.
“Mushytest,” I mumbled, my lips pasty with cookie mud, my eyes wild as I considered the task my brain had set for my sorry tongue. There were three sleeves in the box of Oreos. We were into just the first of them.
She nodded at my pile of discards. “What are those, good ones or bad ones?”
“I don’t know.” I tried sniffing the next. “Was this guy your boyfriend or something?”
“For a little while.” “Was he a Zen Buddhist too?”
She snorted lightly. I nibbled another cookie and began to despair. I would have been happy now for an ordinary interruptive tic, something to throw my bloodhoundlike obsessions off the scent. The Minna Men were in shambles, yes, but I’d get to the bottom of the Oreo conundrum.
I jumped to my feet, rattling both our teacups. I had to get out of there, quell my panic, restart my investigation, put some distance between myself and the cookies.
“Barnamum Bakery!” I yelped, reassuring myself.
“What?”
“Nothing.” I jerked my head sideways, then turned it slowly, as if to work out a kink. “We’d better go, Kimmery.”
“Go where?” She leaned forward, her pupils big and trusting. I felt a thrill at being taken so seriously. This making the rounds without Gilbert could get to be a habit. For once I was playing lead detective instead of comic-or Tourettic-relief.
“Downstairs,” I said, at a loss for a better answer.
“Okay,” she said, whispering conspiratorially. “But be quiet.”
We crept past the half-open door on the second landing, and I retrieved my shoes from the rack. This time I got a look at Wallace. He sat with his back to us, limp blond hair tucked behind his ears and giving way to a bald spot. He wore a sweater and sweatpants and sat still as advertised, inert, asleep, or, I suppose, dead-though death was not a still thing to me at the moment, more a matter of skid marks in blood and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Wallace looked harmless anyway. Kimmery’s idea of a hippie, apparently, was a white man over forty-five not in a business suit. In Brooklyn we would have just said loser.
She opened the front door of the Zendo. “I’ve got to finish cleaning,” she said. “You know, for the monks.”
“Importantmonks,” I said, ticcing gently.
“Yes.”
“I don’t think you should be alone here.” I looked up and down the block to see if anyone was watching us. My neck prickled, alert to wind and fear. The Upper East Siders had retaken their streets, and walked obliviously crinkling doggie-doo bags and the New York Times and the wax paper around bagels. My feeling of advantage, of beginning my investigation while the world was still asleep, was gone.
“I’m con-worried,” I said, Tourette’s mangling my speech again. I wanted to get away from her before I shouted, barked, or ran my fingers around the neck of her T-shirt.
She smiled. “What’s that-like confused and worried?”
I nodded. It was close enough.
“I’ll be okay. Don’t be conworried.” She spoke calmly, and it calmed me. “You’ll come back later, right? To sit?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay.” She craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek. Startled, I couldn’t move, stood instead feeling her kiss-print burning on my flesh in the cold morning air. Was it personal, or some sort of fuzzy Zen coercion? Were they that desperate to fill mats at the Zendo?
“Don’t do that,” I said. “You just met me. This is New York.”
“Yes, but you’re my friend now.”
“I have to go.”
“Okay,” she said. “Zazen is at four oclock.”
“I’ll be there.”
She shut the door. I was alone on the street again, my investigation already at a standstill. Had I learned anything inside the Zendo? Now I felt dazed with loss-I’d penetrated the citadel and spent my whole time contemplating Kimmery and Oreos. My mouth was full of cocoa, my nostrils full of her scent from the unexpected kiss.