Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

hand to stop me. Both dogs, thinking his gesture was meant for them, lay down.
    “In China ,” he said, “tradition dictates that the student follow the teacher, and that is how he learns. Here we place great emphasis on education. It is different. But even the way we teach here, giving our students helpful images and patiently correcting postures, we still count the time of study in decades instead of years. Even that may be optimistic. So we try to find peace and beauty along the way. Now, about Lisa”—he pointed to the black shoes, their toes touching the wall—“a few days, Rachel, would be on the optimistic side in this study, too, wouldn’t it?
    “Twenty years or forty years, there isn’t enough time in the world to know someone after they are gone. It’s just not possible to get a true portrait of a human being from the detritus of his or her life and the opinions of others.
    “Zen teaches you who you are, Rachel. Once you know that, you will know everything you need to know.”
    Then why, I wondered , had Alan Watts said, “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth”? Or was that my grandmother Sonya, the night her false teeth fell into the split pea soup?
    “And t’ai chi—” I interrupted him.
    “ Yeah , yeah , Zen in motion .”
    So what else could I do? I took off the pink high-tops, put on Lisa’s t’ai chi shoes, and silently, standing behind my mentor, I practiced the form. Afterward Avi asked me to do a silent round, and this time, instead of working with me, he watched.
    Something was different. Perhaps the study now had foiled a link with the past, with the t’ai chi I had studied so long ago and thought I had forgotten. Or perhaps concentrating on what I was doing rather than on watching Avi was what made the difference. Now when I placed my foot in an empty step, it felt as flat as a sheet of paper. I felt at ease, my body remembering everything, energy moving up my spine, over my head, spilling down my chest, connecting me to the earth beneath my feet and the universe above and beyond.
    “Better,” he said, stroking one side of his beard and then the other with the back of his hand, like a cat cleaning its whiskers.
    But the moment I stopped moving, all my confidence fled. I felt only the enormous weight of my ignorance. It was a familiar feeling.
    The work I do is like driving in heavy fog. Sometimes it clings to the windshield, and you can’t see an inch in front of you. At best it rolls a foot or two away, or lifts for a moment and allows a tantalizing glimpse of the road ahead before closing in all over again. Most of the time I feel as if I were driving blind.
    I slipped off Lisa’s shoes and put on her sneakers. When I looked up, Avi was holding Ch’an’s thick, black leather leash.
    “Come in the morning Monday. We have a staff meeting. You can meet the others. Maybe they will answer some questions for you. And leave your boy at home. Only bring Ch’an with you.”
    I began to shake my head.
    “Can’t you do this one thing for me?”
    He didn’t wait for an answer. The master was used to obedience.
    “Lisa—”
    “Yeah. I know,” I said. “Lisa never took the elevator. She always took the stairs. And I do, too. But this I can’t do for you.”
    “But Lisa always brought Ch’an to school with her.”
    “Lisa always brought her dog to school. And I—”
    But he wasn’t listening. He was looking toward the big windows.
    “Even on the night she died,” I said.
    He nodded.
    “I was asleep when the police called me. They said there was an emergency and asked if I could come right away with the keys. They didn’t say what it was. They didn’t tell me what had happened here. I thought a pipe was leaking. I had no idea.
    “There were so many people here, so many. I could see them from down the block. I got confused. I couldn’t understand why. A fire, I thought. There must have been a fire.
    “Then I saw.
    “She was lying on the street, under a yellow tarp. I could see one of her hands, the palm up”—he turned his hand to show me—“sticking out from under the plastic.
    “They asked me to look. They asked if I could identify her. One of the detectives slipped his hand around my upper arm and another one drew the tarp back, uncovering her face, her beautiful face.”
    Avi shook his head and began to cry. He took a wrinkled handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes.
    “We walked up the stairs,” he continued.