The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [100]
“Oh, man, aren’t you tired? Just go to bed, we’ll eat tomorrow.” But he sadly put on his boots again and went out. Everybody was gone, the party had ended when it was found that Japhy and I had disappeared. I lit the fire and lay down and even slept awhile and suddenly it was dark and Japhy came in and lit the kerosene lamp and dumped the groceries on the table, and among them were three bars of Hershey chocolate just for me. It was the greatest Hershey bar I ever ate. He’d also brought my favorite wine, red port, just for me.
“I’m leaving, Ray, and I figured you and me might celebrate a little….” His voice trailed off sadly and tiredly. When Japhywas tired, and he often wore himself out completely hiking or working, his voice sounded far-off and small. But pretty soon he roused his resources together and began cooking a supper and singing at the stove like a millionaire, stomping around in his boots on the resounding wood floor, arranging bouquets of flowers in the clay pots, boiling water for tea, plucking on his guitar, trying to cheer me up as I lay there staring sadly at the burlap ceiling. It was our last night, we both felt it.
“I wonder which one of us’ll die first,” I mused out loud. “Whoever it is, come on back, ghost, and give ’em the key.”
“Ha!” He brought me my supper and we sat crosslegged and chomped away as on so many nights before: just the wind furying in the ocean of trees and our teeth going chomp chomp over good simple mournful bhikku food. “Just think, Ray, what it was like right here on this hill where our shack stands thirty thousand years ago in the time of the Neanderthal man. And do you realize that they say in the sutras there was a Buddha of that time, Dipankara?”
“The one who never said anything!”
“Can’t you just see all those enlightened monkey men sitting around a roaring woodfire around their Buddha saying nothing and knowing everything?”
“The stars were the same then as they are tonight.”
Later that night Sean came up and sat crosslegged and talked briefly and sadly with Japhy. It was all over. Then Christine came up with both children in her arms, she was a good strong girl and could climb hills with great burdens. That night I went to sleep in my bag by the rosebush and rued the sudden cold darkness that had fallen over the shack. It reminded me of the early chapters in the life of Buddha, when he decides to leave the Palace, leaving his mourning wife and child and his poor father and riding away on a white horse to go cut off his golden hair in the woods and send the horse back with the weeping servant, and embarks on a mournful journey through the forest to find the truth forever. “Like as the birds that gather in the trees of afternoon,” wrote Ashvhaghosha almost two thousand years ago, “then at nightfall vanish all away, so are the separations of the world.”
The next day I figured to give Japhy some kind of strange little going-away gift and didn’t have much money or any ideas particularly so I took a little piece of paper about as big as a thumbnail and carefully printed on it: MAY YOU USE THE DIAMONDCUTTER OF MERCY and when I said goodbye to him at the pier I handed it to him, and he read it, put it right in his pocket, and said nothing.
The last thing he was seen doing in San Francisco: Psyche had finally melted and written him a note saying “Meet me on your ship in your cabin and I’ll give you what you want,” or words to that effect, so that was why none of us went on board to see him off in his cabin, Psyche was waiting there for a final passionate love scene. Only Sean was allowed to go aboard and hover around for whatever was going to happen. So after we all waved goodbye and went away, Japhy and Psyche presumably made love in the cabin and then she began to cry and insist she wanted to go to Japan too and the captain ordered everybody off but she wouldn’t get off and the last thing was: the boat was pulling away from the