Misthrown Prayers

The little boy was hopping around, his eyes turned downward looking for coins, prayers that had missed the coffer and were now free game for the curious. He skipped before us and disappeared into a crowd buying souvenirs and charms. I tried to follow him with my gaze, but my eyesight--skewed by a fair amount of wine, beer and whisky, all working some horrid scheme in my stomach--quickly lost track of the kid and his blue windbreaker.

“Come on, let’s walk down again,” she said.

So we walked down the steps from the inner sanctum, exposing us to a wind that I knew was supposed to be cold but which did not feel cold on my skin. I almost tripped on the last step, but she held onto my arm and, as I rose up, gave me a light kiss on the cheek.

“Come on,” she said, and I wondered if she really kissed me at all.

We went and stood among the crowd surrounding the bell that, come midnight, would ring off the one-hundred and eighty sins of Buddhism. An acolyte was handing out pink slips of paper to all those gathered around. The one that I received had the number seventy-four on it.

“What number did you get?” I asked her.

“Seventy-four.”

“Me too, I wonder what these are for.”

I asked the Japanese person nearest me.

“It’s for the ringing of the bell,” he said.

I turned back to her. “I guess we get to ring the bell for one of the sins of Buddhism.”

“Do you know what sin number seventy-four is?”

“I think it’s showing up to a temple on New Year’s Eve and ringing the bell while drunk.”

She laughed and almost lost her balance. I held out my hand to her and she took it. We held hands and watched the priests make preparations for the New Year. I saw the little boy floating around the heels of one priest and wondered if perhaps he worked for the temple, and I thought how nice it would be if he did work here, roaming the grounds searching for prayers misthrown, to restore them to their proper place.

She unlocked her fingers from mine and put the palm of her own hand against the back of my own. I could feel her thumb slide along the length of my fingers. Her hand was so warm. I nestled my hand into her palm and explored the in-betweens of her fingers. Soon enough, our fingers were moving between and over and under, like the parts of a loom. I could have closed my eyes and lived entirely through my one hand and would have been closer to her than a prophet could be with his god.

The first tolling of the bell came unexpectedly. I looked up to see a young couple walking down the steps that lead to the large bell housed under an ornate roof supported by four pillars. Two more people walked up the steps. Each threw a few coins down, performed the obligatory bow, and took into their hands the straps connected to the large wooden beam suspended from the ceiling of the alcove. A priest held the strap connected to the rear of the beam. He lead the count, and the three of them together swung the beam into the bell, producing a heavy sound that hung in the air and accounted for the second sin of Buddhism.

Everything was so blurred. I thought that perhaps I had forgotten my glasses, but it did not even occur to me to check and see if they were on my face.

I looked at her and noticed that she was shivering. “Are you really cold?” I asked. She nodded and I started to remove my coat for her.

“No, don’t take off your coat. You need it more than I do,” she said, backing away from me.

“Go ahead and take it. I’m fine.”

“How can you not be cold, wearing a summer coat like that?”

The sound of the bell once again filled the air.

“A summer coat? Maybe where you come from.”

“Please,” she said, looking at me with a hurt expression, a wincing of the eyes. I relented and hoisted the coat back upon my shoulders and moved closer to her to try to shed the least bit of warmth upon her.

“Can we sit on the steps?” she asked. I nodded and led her over to the steps overlooking the courtyard of the temple complex. As we sat down, I could see the vague shapes of visitors pouring through the gateway. I pulled her close and put my arm around her and held her nearest hand in mine, and for a few spare moments the ringing of the bell took the place of any words between us.

“Did you kiss me?” I finally asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking down the steps.

“Please don’t apologize. I enjoy being kissed by beautiful women.” A gaunt breeze whispered through the temple, and she shivered once again. Perhaps because my mind was heavy and free with alcohol, my next question left my mouth with no trouble or pain at all. “Can I kiss you on the cheek?”

“Yes,” she said, still staring down into the courtyard.

I pulled her closer, my far hand moving up on the other side of her face, the streams of her sunny hair tickling the insides of my fingers. I found the curve of her ear and skated it for a second, and then I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. And then I kissed her again. The bell rang once more. I took my arm from her and slid a step away. I felt like a villain and told her as much.

“I’m sorry. I’m such and evil person, taking advantage of a slightly drunken woman in a Buddhist temple. That’s probably sin forty-two or something. I’ll end up being reborn as a turnip because of tonight.”

But she did not say anything. She only stared into the courtyard. An inaudible sigh left her lips, escaping into the air in a long stream that the wind quickly fashioned into a bouquet of tiny curls before it formed it into something that could no longer be seen. Instead of saying something, I let my eyes play with the children that giggled and ran and bounced happily beneath us. I did not see the young boy in the blue windbreaker among them.

“You know that we’re not really engaged,” she said.

“But we make such a great couple. We hate the same kind of music and like the same kind of beer.” I looked at her face and knew instantly that I would not hear her laugh again tonight.

“What about your girlfriend back home?” she asked.

“What about her?”

“What about my boyfriend back in my country?”

“What about him? You and I don’t have to return to our countries. We could stay here in Japan and get married and produce blonde-haired, blue-eyed children, spend all of our time making babies and maybe arrange for your boyfriend and my girlfriend to get together and hope that they fall instantly in love.” I forced a broad smile across my face, hoping to see its reflection on her lips.

She turned toward me. “Tell me about your girlfriend.”

“Nah,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about her.” But her face turned sad, and the expression it held was that of a kindly old nun who just heard her youngest and most innocent student proclaim disbelief in God. The bell rang again. “Anyway,” I quickly added, trying my best to rescue myself, “you were about to tell me about your boyfriend.”

She seemed to accept my offer, and began to order her thoughts. “Well, to begin with, he’s about seven years older than me.”

“Really?” I was astounded.

“He’s working on his doctorate in biology. I don’t understand anything about what he studies, and he doesn’t know the first thing about literature. And he’s quite serious about his studies, whereas I just float around, doing literature because I can do it. We don’t have anything in common in that area, and sometimes I wonder why we get along at all. But we’ve been living together for quite awhile now, and this day is actually our fourth anniversary of being together.”

“Your fourth anniversary?”

“Yes,” she said, a smile of fond memories awash over her face. “We met at a New Year’s Eve party. He was the brother of the best man at my sister’s wedding and someone introduced me to him and we’ve been together since then.” Her lips were happy and her eyes warm, which was comforting but nonetheless left me with a small pain of jealousy.

A moment of silence, then I confessed my girlfriend.

“My girlfriend is doing theology at her university.”

“Oh, like you?”

“Yes, except that, back home, we go to universities several hours away from each other. I go to see her about once a month or so, and since our parents live in the same town, we get to see each other for all the major holidays. I guess that our being apart is good because we’re always happy to see each other when we’re together, plus the fact that we have plenty of time with our friends, without the annoying jealousy problem, while we’re apart. On the other hand, sometimes it feels like we don’t have much of a relationship at all, like it doesn’t grow. For a month, it is in stasis. Then we get together, smooch and be happy, and then put our relationship in the freezer again when we leave.” The bell tolled my last word.

“Do you write to each other?” she asked.

“Yeah, we write and e-mail and talk on the phone.”

“Then you have a relationship, don’t you?”

My heart squirmed as she fastened down the reality of my life, secured it to the ground to keep me from tearing it away. “Yeah, but sometimes it’s like I get used to being without her, and sometimes when we’re together, I just want to be by myself and read a book.”

“It’s the exact opposite for me,” she said, straightening up. The wind caught her hair and played with it and rubbed itself across the sides of her face, where her cheeks slowly curved into her lips. “I feel that I’m such an independent person, but some little string of dependence always pulls me back to him. I really love him.”

And with that, we let the silence that was at our sides drape itself between us once again. The wind was still. I tried to focus my eyes on anything, but each object left my grasp. Even the stone statue of Buddha that stood in the courtyard looked like just another innocent child that misplaced his parents for the moment, ready to indulge in the dizzying freedom of the night.

“Anyway, we’re not engaged,” she reminded me.

“I know,” I admitted. “It was just a nice joke for the party. But still, it was nice planning our whole lives together, even if it wasn’t real.”

“It was your fault though. You kept pouring me beer.”

“I’m sorry. I was just happy that a beautiful woman would let me pour beer for her.”

The bell tolled another unknown sin. Its echo was heavy and satisfying in the night air.

“What number was that?” she asked as the last grain of sound dissipated into silence once again.

“I don’t know. It was probably the sin about flossing your neighbor’s cat without permission. Let me go check.”

I stood up and brushed the grit from my pants as I walked into the crowd. “What number are they up to now?” I asked someone. “Sixty-five,” I heard. “Thank-you.”

I walked back to her. She was standing now, her hands tucked tightly into her pockets and her arms squeezed closely to her side so as to make herself a smaller target for the wind that returned and had already begun to paint her cheeks red.

“Well, they are almost up to us. Are you ready?”

She did not move, just stood there still and shivering. “Oh, I really don’t feel like ringing the bell. Go on up without me.”

My heart cringed. I could not be the seventy-fourth sin without her. “Come on,” I said, returning my arm to her shoulders. “It will be fun. We get to be one of the sins of Buddhism together.” The bell rang again, as if counting down the spare moments that I had left.

“No, I don’t want to.”

“Come on,” I said with a smile that I hoped kept the despair I felt from crossing my face. “It will be interesting.”

“Please,” she said, drawing out that desperate syllable.

I let my arm fall from her. “Okay. I’ll be back soon,” I said, and then walked to the base of the pavilion where those who had lost count but figured that it would be their turn soon stood within shouting distance of the monks and waited for their numbers to be called. I watched a young Japanese couple throw down their money, bow, ring the bell, and leave only to be replaced by a foreign couple that repeated the motions. And the sins of mankind marched on.

“Seventy-four!”

I handed my ticket to a young acolyte who gave it a brief glance before putting it away. The lad in the blue windbreaker was at his feet, smiling. I wondered if he would manage to pick up my misthrown prayers when the day was over.

“Seventy-four!” the acolyte yelled again, his face on the verge of worry that my lack of partner would delay the procession of sins.

I did not look back at her.

“Seventy-four!”

“I’ll go with you!”

I peered to the left to see a woman pushing her way through the crowd. She had a pale face over which brown curls of hair swayed as she walked--a foreigner like myself, though what nationality she was, I could not tell. She smiled at me as she reached the steps, and the acolyte motioned us forward, relief obvious on his face.

At the top of the stairs, my unnamed companion asked me if I knew what to do. I said nothing to her as I pulled a few coins from my pocket and tossed them into the coffer, clipped a bow before the bell, and took one of the tasseled ropes at the side of the wooden beam. As my new partner did the same, I looked down into the crowd of people. I saw her standing on the fringe, hands tucked in her pockets and her eyes resting upon some unknown corner of the ground.

The monk behind us held up two fingers and the three of us gave the beam two swings to build up momentum before knocking it into the bell on the third.

The bell rang through my fingertips and chest.

The seventy-fourth sin had been sounded.

As I walked down the steps, a new couple readied themselves. In their eyes I saw the reflection of a moon that was not in the sky. They smiled with expectation.

I went over to where she was standing. Without any word between us, we began to walk toward the temple gate. We left having heard less than half the sins of the world. We walked into a night that only a few stars sought to enjoy, and her hands stayed in her pockets the entire time.