First Person
By Laura Schmitt
In a public café the woman who attained enlightenment ahead of the Buddha eats a large breakfast burrito and drinks a small green tea. Sunlight sparks at the close coils of her silver hair and shows her, wrinkled and snarfing, against a huge window that could at any time explode into uncountable shards. Her ears are remarkable: their deep brown lobes stretch toward her shoulders; their lightless canals yawn. On her phone, young wellness witches clog her feed with dharmaless posts re: self-love, -healing, -becoming, -care. She darkens the screen, belches quietly, and emanates to the sound of frothing milk, becoming rootless, gently touching the forehead of the worker who saw her empty bowl and filled it with food, asking nothing in return. In the midst of coiling whipped cream atop a large half-caf mocha latte, the worker is stilled by the sensation of being submerged in warm, golden oil. It passes in an instant. What was that? They see a white, gray-bearded man reaching down from above: God bless.
The Buddha finally notices her where she has always been, in Nirvana, sitting in a lotus position she has altered to accommodate her arthritic hip. He unrolls an ancient scroll upon which he has written with an ancient brush, and reads aloud: Please stop belching; it is distracting. He rerolls the scroll, returns to his meditation. She is delighted, rises, approaches the Buddha, belches. Asks: Who is that who will not do what you want her to? The Buddha opens his eyes, takes her in, closes them again.
That night she goes out in joggers and a puffer. She walks miles through busy city neighborhoods and industrial wastelands, along a commercial thoroughfare, unnoticed. She passes a line of young people waiting outside a brick building; two figures struggling in an alley; a woman sitting on a curb cradling a tiny, inconsolable baby. In the early morning a coyote lopes alongside her, the animal's light rhythmic gait enviable and unceasing, its deep silence joining hers in a dry canyon where people have piled their garbage in heaps. She dematerializes in the gloaming, the atoms that compose her physical form rising up in a loose, watery configuration that echoes that of the pink clouds above. She speeds within the warming air, passing through the bristled tops of ancient evergreens, the upper floors of skyscrapers, the brass telescopes of observatory domes, the warm feathered bodies of crows.
In Nirvana she sits without greeting, adjusts her heavy rear on the bolster, grapples with a flowing pant leg that is somehow caught beneath her, shouts when she finally yanks it free: Ha! He scowls, focuses on his enlightenment. She, also, focuses on his enlightenment. Look how we share this single-pointedness, she says. Shhhhhhttt! he says.
When the canvasser outside the grocery store hisses at her for passing him by without word or money, she envisions the vast net that connects them—two jewels—to all other beings in the universe. She feels herself joining the mats of packaged sprouts, the seeds in every apple, before noticing in the harsh light of the dairy aisle a giant red salsa stain on the great belly of her yellow shirt. She leaves with her bowl held against her hip, passing again the canvasser and wondering at his youth and strangeness: his strong body, complicated hair style, watertight shoes, white skin blotched red by the sun. "Don't you care about starving children?" he queries to what he sees of her: an old fat woman of indeterminate ethnic origin holding an empty wooden bowl. She turns to him, extends the bowl, which shines brightly in the sunlight. "You may take this," she says. "It's what I have." The bowl is beautiful, she realizes, and is precious to her. She shakes it a little. "Take it!" He does not take it. "Or this!" she exclaims, disappearing and leaving behind the stained shirt, sweatpants, bra, underwear in a sudden heap.
Of course it's not possible to banish her. Whenever she arrives (this time naked, but for the bowl) Buddha tries: Go away. But she sits instead, wincing at the sharp pinch in her hip. She is the teacher, after all, and he her student. Let's tell each other what we have seen, she suggests. But he sits: eyes closed, mouth closed. He drops one hand from gassho: We are not one. She presses her palms together lightly: We are.
—
About Laura Schmitt
Schmitt is a multiracial writer with family roots in Hawaii and the Midwest. Her fiction can be found in the New England Review, Boulevard, Indiana Review, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. Laura was a finalist for the 2021 New England Review Award for Emerging Writers and was a 2019 writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. A native of Southern California, Laura currently lives in Los Angeles