The lines that the commissaris remembered, when he had to wake up to go to the bathroom, were part of a dialogue between Avalokitasavara, a bodhisattva, who returns from his meditations in high realms, and Sariputra, a less-developed Buddha-spirit.
As the sutra is outlined further the bodhisattva dominates the stage. Avalokitasavara wants to share with his pupil his basic discovery:
Sariputra, form is not other than emptiness and emptiness is not other than form form is precisely emptiness and emptiness precisely form
Beautiful, the commissaris thought. So now what? So now not what? He liked the idea of emptiness. If something isn't there, one doesn't have to worry about maintaining or protecting it. The two spirits were active on higher levels, however. The commissaris, from his lowly position as an incarnate human, could only see the empty aspects of his case, the loopholes. How to turn them around and give the bits of void form?
"Imagine the missing piece," the commissaris told his mirror image in the bathroom, "right here. On your lower level."
Chapter 14
"Mounted Maggie," as the desk sergeant called her, was late coming from duty. As she strode into the precinct's front room she seemed pleasantly surprised to see de Gier. "Are you the foreign policeman?"
De Gier shared her feelings. Maggie •was a good-also intelligent-looking woman. He explained his presence. She looked less pleased. "The old freeze and frolic man. I called him Fritz. Fritz won't go away, will he? Did you see those terrible photos?" She shook her head in disgust. "The Urban Rangers say raccoons are a plague now. Never see them myself; the varmints mostly move at night. We should hunt them with hounds and flashlights like they do in the country."
Maggie's ponytail bobbed as she walked next to him. "And you came all the way from Amsterdam? What is so special about the old man?"
De Gier suggested lunch but Maggie was still in uniform and wanted to go home and change. Home was on West Twelfth Street, where she shared an apartment with another female "mountie." She asked questions as he walked her to her car, a battered enclosed jeep parked behind the building on the Eighty-fifth Street transverse. So he was only staying a few days. So he knew no one but his superior at the Cavendish Hotel ("But that's a thousand bucks a day. Is your chief connected?"). So he wasn't married-did he have a boyfriend? No? Did he like sports? Judo? Really? And where was he staying?
Their addresses were close. She dropped him off at Fourteenth Street and Eight Avenue. She touched his arm as he got out of the jeep. "You like Italian food? Can you find your way around? Want to meet me in SoHo? Prince and Sullivan Streets, in an hour?"
He walked over to the restaurant, worrying. The carefree days were over, he didn't feel at ease with attractive women who signaled welcome. Did she think Europeans were exciting lovers? He should have told her he was married. She probably expected him to perform. Keep it up for some record period. Do weird stuff like sucking toes while she played French harmonica music on a CD.
De Gier felt sleepy. He had a vision of his quiet Horatio Street rooms. He could open the windows there and listen to birds singing. Have tea. Play Miles Davis through his earphones. Take a nap.
Walking down Greenwich Avenue he was stared at by men in black leather, in safari suits, in riding breeches and oversize linen shirts, in bib overalls and back-to-front caps. De Gier stopped consulting his street map to avoid offers to show him the way "to wherever you may be going, Mistah Macho. You're from out of town?"
"No, thank you," de Gier told a bodybuilder in a straw hat, an Indonesian sepia-colored vest and short shorts. "I think I know where I am going."
Maggie, looking gorgeous, he thought, sedately sexy in a close-fitting flowerprinted dress, was waiting in the restaurant. The restaurant was decorated with posters advertising Fellini films and tall plants with large leaves. The furniture was heavy pine, varnished. Rustic looking. The waiters wore aprons and bow ties and seemed to like walking with one hand behind their backs. While he checked twenty-dollar specials on the blackboard Maggie told him she felt awkward about Termeer: "I could have done better."
When she saw he was having trouble understanding the menu she translated the names of some of the fancier spaghetti sauces. "My ex-husband is an Italian cook. Our schedules were always wrong, we hardly ever saw each other. It's easy to drift apart in this town."
Any kids?
No kids.
Was de Gier ever married?
No.
Any particular reason?
Because of the things, de Gier explained while they shared the antipasto. It wasn't just marriage, it was that marriage comes with the need to collect things, and the need to worry about losing things. Things weigh heavily. There is monthly interest. There is anxiety.
"You can't handle marriage?"
De Gier couldn't handle marriage.
Maggie looked up from her black olives. "You don't want kids?"
"In Holland?" de Gier asked. "What if they don't want to be stacked on top of each other? Where am I going to put them? In a hole in a dike? What if they don't want to stay stacked? I don't want to myself."
"Where do you want to go?"
To Papua New Guinea, to the furthest place. She wouldn't know where that was.
"North of Australia," Maggie said. "My sister sails in that area, to Milne Bay out of Brisbane. Her husband owns a schooner. They take tourists for big dough. There are pirate cannibals there, Papuans in canoes, with razor-sharp paddles."
That's where de Gier wanted to go.
"To have room for your kids?"
Just a dog maybe. De Gier hadn't owned a dog yet. He would like to try that.
"They eat dogs there," Maggie said. "It said so in Kathleen's last letter. The cannibals keep dogs for food. There is no refrigeration, so if the family wants meat for dinner Pa picks up a stick and chases Fido. But they don't eat their kids. You would get to keep them."
He didn't want to keep them.
"But you look fine," Maggie said. "You look smart too. You might improve the gene pool."
He muttered, as he raised his tumbler filled with the house wine, dry white California, "Fok the gene pool."
She laughed. "You have a cute accent. It's okay. I don't want kids either. I thought I did but kids keep killing each other at school now. So are you an egotist? Incapable of sharing?"
De Gier said that he did like his cat, now being taken care of by friends.
"So you have friends? You socialize?"
De Gier looked horrified. "You mean do I visit with people?"
"You don't do that?"
"To do what?"
"You're not gay?"
De Gier shook his head. "I keep busy."
"You're a ladies' man?" She smiled. "You cruise the singles bars?" She smiled again. "But you wouldn't have to, would you? You don't want them to fall in love with you, to jump at you from their high horses."
Jesus, de Gier thought. Anybody up there. Please.
Maggie was shaking her head. "There is old age, you know, and loneliness."
He waved defensively. "I know. We are programmed to be gregarious."
"You know why I became a mountie?" Maggie asked. "To stay away from what is happening now. To look down on things. I was a street cop first. I did everything-cars, a motorcycle even-and I always managed to find old people in their little apartments, always alone, always dying or dead or just disgusting. The linoleum is always cracked and sometimes the walls move because of the roaches crawling on roaches and there are the smells, rusted-through refrigerators filled with yechch"-she gestured-"rats rattling in useless dishwashers…"
He knew. It was the same in Amsterdam but there they're short on dishwashers. Not on rats. He had seen rats jump to get at the dead canary in the cage.