No Style :: No Content

What had it been, the thing building up inside him? How had he known what was going to happen later that day in Kyoto? Thomas had felt almost post-ecstatic as his Shinkansen tore down the Japanese countryside, Mona's head lolling against his shoulder as he stared out the window at the foreign geometric countryside. The rapid hum click from the engine and wheels-on-rails was like the backbeat of a good dance club track, throbbing, almost subliminal. He was transfixed by the morning sunlight, flashing staccato on his face as it flickered through the slender trunks of cedars on the side of the railway, the train tearing through a forest thirty minutes past Nagoya at a propeller plane's cruise speed. That flashing moment stretched, creeping up on him slowly. But then surrounded by the gestalt of sound and flickering light he felt himself expand somehow with the sensation... he was at once man and girl and train and forest and light... At first it was as if he could see all around him at once, and then it was as if he could see through it all...

It lasted only a moment before the Shinkansen tore out into a plain dotted with industrial towns as it approached Kyoto, but the moment had been there, and as he and Mona stepped out from the glass and steel abstractness of Kyoto station, he'd felt different, changed.

Myoshinji was much larger than he'd been prepared for. When Mona described it as a "temple," she'd not brought across the scale of the 40-in-one temple complex, and it had been busier than he'd expected—more tourists and less ascetic formality. But then some time in the late afternoon when the sunlight was angled flat again, and Mona had tired of telling him about her Japanese childhood—her dad's alcohol problem and mom's retreat from the world into Buddhism—and they'd just been standing still for a moment in the shadow of a big orange pagoda with unreadable, kanji-encrusted walls... it was then that a huge brass bell had been struck somewhere nearby, and that's what had done it for him.

The two-tone hi-freq buzz lo-freq rumble washed over him in a moment of fatigue... he was tired and thirsty and had given up on thinking and just was... Maybe he was still feeling a little rarified and abstract from the morning's sun-through trees experience. But the two-tone sound of that bell, the sudden clarity and foreverness at once... like a rogue wave crashing on a beach, like his ears popping clear of moisture hours after swimming as a boy, like the moment of waking and remembering the night's whole dream in all its scintillant complex repose, like an old friend's voice suddenly amazed, breathing the words "of course!"... The sound found him ready and did its work.

When he came to, he was cradled in Mona's arms. She was fanning him with a tourist map and asking him in worried tones to respond. It took a few moments for him to be able to focus, but when her face came through it was dark in silhouette, the strong lines of her jaw suggested rather than drawn by the sunlight radiant behind her head, filtered through the corona of her dark hair like a halo.

"My God, Mona... It's as if we are stars..."

The first thing he was able to whisper, and the one and only coherent image he was ever able to bring back from the garden, the ten thousand Buddhas smiling in their ancient sleep as he struggled for words. He realized almost immediately that the language did not yet exist for him to tell her what he then understood, and that, through the sudden painful joy of unexpected knowledge, brought its own sadness.

The moment couldn't last and it didn't. He had not been prepared for the garden but stumbled into it through a back door. Much was lost too quickly. But even now after all that happened, all the desolation and exquisite agony of the last few years, he still remembers. He doesn't remember the garden itself, for that is a thing inaccessible outside the now and therefore forbidden to memory, but he remembers, will always remember, the sound, the light.