out—he was really in some deep state of meditation with the Source of Being, a communion that was so powerful he was lost to the world. Somehow I doubted it. I had a quick fantasy of going downstairs in the middle of the night and waking Zack up, conceiving a daughter with him by firelight, and never telling him; raising her in some convent-like commune of purity and beauty where she would be the apple of everyone’s eye and think of everyone as her parents.
It also included Zack wandering the globe forever, feeling that something was missing, and never knowing what. I was just about to fall asleep when I realized my cat had abandoned her usual place at the foot of my bed. In the morning, I discovered she had spent the night under the covers with him, curled against his chest.
“I could use a cat like this when I’m out, she’s like a little heater,” he grinned, stroking her chin as I put the tea water on.
“She never does that with me,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to get a dog.”
“Arf, arf,” he said. But he was only joking.
The next night we got into an argument while I was standing on a chair so he could raise the hem of the new dress he’d found for me in the freebox in town. It was red, or mostly red, if you didn’t count the big Hawaiian flowers. He had a mouth full of straight pins and was folding up the cloth and pinning it all around so he could sew it for me—he had a lot of talents that seemed squandered on a hermit. The argument was about Jesus and Buddha. He said, with his lips over the pins, that if Jesus had lived longer he would have come to the same enlightenment as Buddha, that the goal of the individual was the end of suffering.
“But isn’t suffering somehow tied up in every-
thing… maybe even to the good? I mean, isn’t there some way that it makes us reach deeper, rely on each other more?”
This made him agitated enough to take the pins out of his mouth and sit back on his heels where he could look up at me. “You are addicted to misery,” he said in a prophetic tone that almost scared me. “If you believe that you need to suffer, then make no mistake, you will suffer.” He sounded like Charlton Heston.
“Yeah, but...” I felt miserably inarticulate, but some stubborn spirit rose up in me and made me hang on to my little glimmer. “But what about your carving? There is suffering on that woman’s face, but it’s beautiful.”
“That’s just physical suffering. That’s different.”
“If the expression on that woman’s face is only physical suffering, then you can have it back,” I said. I stepped off the chair, half-pinned, and went to the mantel. “Here,” I said, handing it to him. He looked at it closely, as if he hadn’t even known what expression he’d carved into his creation.
“No, you keep it,” he said, handing it back.
When it came time for Zack to leave, I was sitting on my deck in the chilly sunshine sipping tea and watching him carefully wrap his feet with strips of brown denim and flannel he had sewn together to make an ingenious wraparound shoe. He had designed them so that the flannel was in contact with his skin and the heavy denim made a sole of sorts, and the whole thing tucked in tidily at the top. He had even sewn in a little pocket on one side, which would have been the perfect place for stashing a folded bill for a traveler like himself, but I knew by now that Zack intended it for a bit of soapstone, or a book of matches—anything but a bill, because Zack used
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