The MWL had two homes and the second of them was a park some distance from the first. One of the people who shared this second home with him was a parkie, one of the park workers whose job was to keep the park clean and in repair. This parkie was a small middle aged Japanese man who was also a Zen master.
The first time they met, the Japanese man, whose name was Utei, irrationally insisted that the MWL was really Japanese. He adduced the ladder as evidence and argued that the MWL was just too stubborn to recognize the fact. For a whole morning he persisted in speaking only Japanese to him, and it was out of frustration and wanting to say something very delicate that he gave up and shifted into English, remarking that the MWL must be from Tanka because they were the most stubborn people on the islands. The MWL was sorry the master stopped talking to him in Japanese because, towards the end, he felt he was beginning to understand, if only perhaps in a primitive way, what the little Japanese man was saying.
The MWL asked the Zen Master once, how and why he came to New York. Utei said that he discovered that he was a Zen master in a Honshu jail and that in a Kyoto monastery he discovered that his Zen had a New York accent. Another time when the MWL repeated the inquiry, the master said that he merely followed a Sony, because it was not right for the spirit to hang to far back from the flesh, and it had led him here. None of this added up to an explanation to the MWL so after a while he just accepted the fact that here in the park, where he sat on his ladder watching New York collect, mingle and dissolve, was a Zen master from Kyoto.
The section of the park that this Japanese man was responsible for always seemed to stay cleaner than the rest of the park. The grass was always healthy no matter how many people had trampled it, and the bark of the trees always had a deeper and richer brown color than the trees in the rest of the park. Even though it was an out of the way part of the park, it attracted the most interesting people because it felt good. People who were sensitive to the ground and the air always concluded that this was the part of the park they belonged to, and that belonged to them.
Utei, the Zen master, was married and his wife would often come and sit in near him as he worked on the trees or the grass. When she was in the park she sold things she made. The policeman, Dareth Heirath, whose beat was the park, let her do this even though it was against the park rules.
She would bring a little low table to the park on which she shaped and displayed little statues out of a stuff that appeared to be papier mache. On the table also was a little tank of water. When she dropped one of the little statues into the liquid it was as if someone had squirted fireworks into the tank. Jets of red and yellow exploded into stars which spun and twisted and moved in miniature arcs, bursting just below the water line. After the motion was finished the display would freeze in the water and stay that way for a long time.
On his day off, Utei, the Zen master, would come to the park alone with the little table. On the table he would put some sheets of paper and a little sign that said "Paintings" in Japanese. And he would sit and wait.
It was a mystery to the MWL how the people who came up to the table knew the sign said 'Paintings,' because it was obvious from who they were, and how they looked, that they did not know Japanese. But somehow the meaning of the sign was clear to them.
"What kind of paintings do you do?" they would inquire. And, receiving no answer from the little Japanese man behind the table, they would extend the question.
"Landscapes?" they would ask.
They would hear him say no, though he said nothing at all.
"Portraits!" they would conclude.
"No."
"Still lifes?" they would guess.
"No."
"Abstract paintings?"
"No."
At this point the impoverished dialogue would annoy many of them and they would walk away. But a few would ask again softly, "What kind of paintings do you do?"
He would look at them and he would say, "I paint on air."
When he announced what kind of painting he did, most of the people who had stayed through the line of half silent questioning would separate themselves from him and the table and turn away. But a few would say something like, "I need one," or "I want one," or "can I buy one?"
"To take home they are three dollars American," he would say. And the buyer would nod and Utei would open a satchel that he kept under the table and take out a number of cans of spray paint.
Utei always spent some time preparing for the painting. He would survey the space around the person who wanted the painting for what seemed a long time, as if he were examining a large expanse of canvas looking for the part of the surface that felt just right. When he found what seemed like the right spot he would spend some time tamping and smoothing the air down or mending a piece which appeared to have torn. While he was doing this he would talk to the person for whom he was doing this painting.
"You may sit on the grass," he would inform his patron. And after they sat, as they always did, they would begin to talk. They often recounted some episode in their lives that for some reason seemed important to them just then. And Utei would remind them of some detail that they had left out, and they would discuss it like two old friends reminiscing about some experience they had shared. No one ever found it surprising that Utei knew this detail that they had forgotten and all of this time the Zen master was preparing the air to be painted on.
When he was finished with the preparations, he would choose one of the cans and in deft little motions, begin to spray the air. Then he would pick up another and jab the can into the air, releasing the paint in long sweeps or gentle pushes, and then select another can and repeat the pushing and dabbing, until the air in front of the person was drenched with a palette of glorious, misty colors, a glistening brilliant curtain of vapors which hung before them for what seemed like a long time. Sometimes the different streams of air would mix slowly, sometimes they stayed separate and complete.
Most often he would sit with the person watching the painting until the colored air folded and dissolved back into the unpainted air and he would say simply, "Three dollars American."
Occasionally, he would say to the person, "I will wrap it up for you," and he would take a piece of paper off of the table and let it fall to the ground without paying any particular attention to where it fell. Then he would continue talking to the person who was sitting on the ground. After a while he would bend down and pick up the piece of paper, now covered with paint and hand it to them and say, "three dollars American."
Very infrequently he would pick a piece of paper off of the table and looking at the person not the paper in his hands, with deft little motions he would pull and push it through the colored air, tilting and shifting it until it was saturated with paint vapors, and then he would hand it to the person with his request for payment of "three dollars American."
"Did you ever see one of those paintings?" someone asked the MWL, after he had told the story of Utei.
"They were very private paintings", he replied.
"Did he ever make a painting for you?" his listener asked. The MWL blushed.
"One doesn't talk about things like that," he said gently, looking at the person who had asked the question . But then renouncing the admonition he said "Yes," he did. "On the ladder," he said pointing. And it was true that on the side of the ladder about the height of a short man standing or a tall man sitting, in paint of luminous hues, was what looked like a colored ink drawing of a man sitting on a ladder with a butterfly resting on his outstretched foot.