Read Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories for Free Online Page B

atom bomb shelter, or to propose a philosophical attitude toward man’s future; in fact, as Barbara often pointed out to her husband, he so alienated the tycoon that Gordon cast off his sister, even as a recipient of small gifts.
    Year after year, more and more of the atom bomb shelter emerged—or did not emerge, since shelters are sheltered—and a great cavern grew in the ground. Airlocks, elevators, generators, hidden tanks of oil and gasoline, vitamins by the thousands, dehydrated food, film-projectors, films for amusement, water tanks—only name it and rest assured that it was there. Meanwhile, Gordon’s wife, Zelda, played tennis. Whatever else she did was. unseen; the tennis was public. Between his financial interests and the atom bomb shelter, he had little time for her. He had become a fanatical pioneer for survival, one of that handful of fortunate beings in America who would survive a direct hit.
    In March of 1970, Gordon was on his way from his thirty-two room mansion to the bomb shelter. He often took the little path that led from the one to the other, that he might look upon his recently completed work and find it good. Halfway there, one of those tremendous rainstorms that douse Southern California in March exploded upon him. He quickened his pace, slipped, fell, fractured his skull, and died. They found him there the following day.
    Two weeks after the funeral, after the reading of the will which left everything to her and not one penny to Barbara, Zelda married the tennis pro at her club. The happy couple then took off for the south of France, where for years Gordon had maintained a splendid villa which he never had time to visit. And since anything and everything grows like mad in Southern California, the bomb shelter was soon covered by a heavy blanket of Moorish Ivy—forgotten of the world and especially of Zelda, who had never given the atom bomb a second thought.
    All this Professor Melrick reflected upon as he made his way from the house to the garden, where he grew his cacti. There were, perhaps, elements of cosmic justice in Gordon’s fate, if one desires to believe in so silly a business as cosmic justice—which, Timothy Melrick, for one, did not—but the bitter nut of the matter was that three elegant Mercedes had been standing idle in Gordon’s—now Zelda’s—garage for five years. How could he blame Barbara for bitterness, frustration, anger? He had never even been able to afford a Buick and, even worse, had never even desired a Buick—the trouble with being a Zen person in a very non-Zen environment.
    He turned with a sigh to that marvelous diversion, the cacti. He, for one, had never accepted the theory that the cactus was a primitive plant—a holdover from the early time of life on earth. Quite otherwise; he saw the cacti as plants faced with that same threat of extinction that the environmentalists forecast for all of mankind these days. An earth once wet and rich now dried up; where once were seas, deserts appeared, and where once were cloudy skies and cool winds, there was a burning sun, never shaded. The plants were faced with the imperative of life. Adapt—or perish. In musing over this, he thought of a story told recently in the faculty dining room. It would seem—according to this little tale—that the Russians had exploded a very large atom bomb at the North Pole. The Polar ice cap began to melt at a rate that would raise the seas above all the land masses of the earth. One by one, the heads of nations informed their people that human life was doomed, that they must prepare to perish—that is with the exception of the Prime Minister of Israel. She said to her handful of people: “Fellow Jews—we have three months to learn to breathe under water.”
    Not so different from what the plants faced, the professor mused, when the land turned into desert. Their life-giving leaves shriveled under the burning