American Spirit: A Novel (6 page)

It is not a meditation instructor’s nature to worry, obviously. And it is not Matthew’s intention to worry a meditation instructor. That being said, this guy is looking out the window occasionally and one would have to think he’s noticing the only car in the lot and the fact that it’s only about twenty yards from the huge window where he’s setting up some sort of yoga mats for class. More accurately, one would
have to think he’s noticing the guy in the car. He’s putting the mats down, evenly spaced, giving his students the room they’ll need to meditate once they show up. Room enough to think about not being fenced in. One cannot be fenced in. The brain pushes through the budget beer and Tylenol 3 warm pre-meditative haze and lays this little gem from the ether:
One cannot be fenced in if the goal is total personal freedom and endless horizons.
Matthew tries to catch it, tries saying it to himself, tries to type it up on his little apple or berry or whatever this phone thing is. He’s typing it up completely wrong, the keys microscopic now instead of tiny or small, and adding to the thumbs stumbling is the fact that Matthew is genuinely excited about his new class.
“Don’t fence when…”
Wait.
“When you fence…”
No.
“If you think you’re fenced in…”
It’s not coming back, that one. But the brain is being compassionate today, telling Matthew that it’s fine to lose a maxim or slogan occasionally, telling him that it doesn’t matter, that it’s fine even if it’s wrong, and that the universal truth is that if it is wrong, then it was supposed to be wrong. He whispers quietly to himself, “Holy shit. I love meditating already.” And as long as we’re talking about maxims and slogans, this is the mantra that the instructor is repeating in his head right about now:

Who’s the man with the dead eyes

Sitting in that car

Drinking in that car

Singing in that car

Staring at me.

Matthew sees him looking and this sets him in motion, like a curious grizzly spotting a tourist’s campsite, he falls over himself to push his body from his den in the kind of cautious curiosity. He slowly puts the last empty bottle under the passenger seat, turns off the satellite radio so that all the love songs in space will have to find another place on earth to go. Waits for the car’s antenna to retract, opens the door, and makes his way toward the front door that will allow him to pay what he wishes to be on the other side of the windows from which he’s been drinking and at which he’s been staring for forty-five minutes. He wishes to pay nothing today. There is, of course, the sudden panic and intimidation at the prospect of meditating with other people. The head interferes here, already asking the body to turn around and get back to the safety of the car/social club/den; the brain starts a slow drip of rationalizing not trying this. Matthew starts drilling himself to continue forward. This is what Milton has taught him, to move forward, to always choose activity; that when one moves forward, they are able to intuitively handle what used to baffle them; that one has to take a first step, has to move a muscle to change a feeling, as Milton says. So on the remaining twenty yards of the walk up to the windows and door, Matthew drills himself forward with a lack of kindness, in perfect meter. Walking becomes
quarter notes in perfect 4/4 time, each step slamming down to stab the planet and punctuate the little refrain he’s issuing to himself about not getting this wrong.

“Fucking do this. Do this! At least get this one thing right. Because there is a very limited number of things left for. You. To. Get. Wrong. Fuck. Do. This. Please.”

The instructor has been watching Matthew walking in this aggressive locked-tight walk from mid-horizon in the lot. The brain gathers data, sizes the instructor up as seeming afraid, and then issues a correction. The instructor is not afraid, he’s amused, this fucker. The gray has found a match on the identity—the instructor is the man that threw a blanket over Matthew when he was hit by the car while jogging. The brain continues updating the feed and the crawl now reads:
The instructor is amused by you because he is the man who has slept with Kristin.
Matthew feels the instant desire for petty vengeance and mistakes this for self-realization, actually believing this:
The instructor has been brought here today to teach me how to relax and not let fear govern my life. I have been brought here today to teach the instructor how to be tense and afraid again.

Matthew thinks, at least for the moment, that this is how things work in the universe—probably the result of the average American’s exposure to a peripheral diet of half-baked self-help culture. The brain drifts into this slogan:
Guns don’t kill people, a misguided grasp of one’s place in the universe, gleaned from intermittent exposure to bestselling self-help
books, kills people. Well, that and guns.
Synaptic cues are sent to the hands to type it into the little screen while walking, which adds a hunch to the stagger that Matthew is walking with, and leaves the cigarette bobbing up and down at the corner of his mouth as he silently mouths what he is typing.

Meet Your Classmates

T
HERE IS THE USUAL
smattering of people one might expect showing up to this kind of thing. And they are, for the most part, the people Matthew has spent a lifetime avoiding. Which is to say, perfectly well-adjusted people who seem pleasant enough; the kind of people most folks think they should be involved with. But after one summer lifeguarding when he was nineteen years old, one thing sticks in the brain about the people you think you should reach out to and it is this: They are the people who will drown you. It is their zeal that attracts you, and it is their zeal that will kill you. It is their confidence in seeming to know what is best for them. It is the broad wave, the feigned kisses on the cheeks of friends and acquaintances. In Matthew’s
memory of his training that summer, he recalls that these attributes—overzealous, excited, a delusional sense of confidence, the frantic waving of arms—are the hallmarks of a person you need to assist but physically distance yourself from. The brain and heart both decided long ago that if Matthew ever has/steals a kid, the kid is going to spend at least one summer lifeguarding at swim club if only to learn this life lesson: The only people saved are the sufficiently tired. There are a few of these people sitting in front of Matthew and to the left and right of him, since he’s landed, as usual in the case of any class or gathering, in the very back row. But Matthew doesn’t have a kid, so this idea of insisting that the kid will spend at least one summer lifeguarding is moot at the moment. His only children to his knowledge are five empty bottles that have been left out in the car in the parking lot, the Empty Bottle Quintuplets, and when they were emptied into the body, they went about filling the head with a smog of hops and miasma that now hangs between him and these happy-go-lucky overachievers who have what it takes to meditate. Something inside of him (alcohol) issues the challenge to at least try to make contact with one of them. There’s a guy to the right who one imagines is named Greg or Chad and is probably not daydreaming of buying guns while killing time in his car and tricking his wife like a tenth-grader cutting classes daily.

The rows are all mimicking some kind of warm-up stretch that someone somewhere in the room started them into
mimicking; a trend with a cue and origin that is completely untraceable. The brain suggests in flinches and shudders that this could be a stretch started by the muscle memory of someone who was in this room a hundred years ago, which makes the buzzed and lazy mouth mutter: “Jesus Christ, I’m like a drunk who’s read three pages of Stephen Hawking.” At this, a couple of stretching classmates take note of Matthew just as he is undoing his stretch enough to attempt a moment of social grace and form to say hello to the man beside him. The heart speeds a little knowing this is about to happen. Matthew undoes half of the pretzel his legs have become, and weirdly turns his upper-body stretch into a broad wave of hello, aimed at the guy sitting right next to him.

“How’s it going?” he ventures for probably the first time since grade school.

“Shhh,” comes the reply.

“Real fucking polite!” Matthew immediately huffs in a hushed whisper.

The neck pulls upward in the warm-up stretch and the eyes size up the others around the room as Matthew displays a helpless look of Can-you-believe-this-guy-is-such-a-dick? and the class is looking back at him with a What-is-your-problem-have-you-been-drinking-in-your-car-all-afternoon? look on their faces. Inside the head, there is much drive about somehow defeating them.

Oh, I’m going to meditate so well that I make all of you disappear. We will disappear from each other and you’ll be free
to quietly think about nothing, and when it’s all over you can wave to one another in the parking lot, you can do air kisses, you can put your arms around each other and pull each other under.

The instructor is the only man regarding Matthew with a kind look instead of a punishing stare. Although, the brain argues that he’s punishing Matthew in other ways, and quite well. The brain has automatically inserted him into the post-coital-breakfast-with-Kristin-at-home scenario. And then the instructor speaks up.

“Okay, relax. We’re not thinking about if what we’re doing is right or wrong. We’re not measuring ourselves and judging ourselves as good or bad, fat or thin.”

And Matthew taunts himself by thinking,
Jesus, everything he’s said so far is basically what Kristin would consider foreplay. I mean, add two glasses of wine and a hair compliment and it’s the exact same routine that
got me laid three nights a week
for the first year of marriage.

Matthew wants to ask the guy next to him if he thinks this is crazy, this kind of talk from the instructor, but he thinks twice of asking when reflecting on how the first hello went over. How is it that adulthood becomes like walking into a new school and never wanting to meet a soul, and somehow knowing that this time the feeling wouldn’t wear off after the first or second week of classes? When did it become a matter of quietly knowing that isolation wouldn’t stop being an attractive option until old age? At that point, while shoving oneself along the very middle or southernmost route
across this country in a medium-sized motor home with a large second or third wife and small second or third dog, it will be time to reach out again, simply because the choices have become:

A. Make friends with the other aged couple driving a motor home.

Or:

B. Ponder the very real and very urgent shadow of death that seems to come to mind when there’s too much silence.

Matthew continues to sit on his little square of foam real estate, listening to the instructor seduce his wife, looking around the room and doing the stretches that everyone is doing, it feels like copying the answers off the other students. And then it’s time for everyone to leave. But Matthew stays after, letting the class file out to have alone time with the instructor. On the outside this seems ambitious or a good start, in the cracked gray interior of the head, however, this has become a marching order to get inside the enemy’s mind and find out what makes him tick. The first line of thinking is that meditating hasn’t done this poor son of a bitch much good; a pear-shaped body under a fatty face bearing mileage, probably mid-thirties but weathered more like forty-something; brown curly hair fighting gray for space or just running away altogether; maybe five-eight running twenty-five pounds heavy; nails bitten to the quick and still deep, meaty red at the side from the last time he bit too far in.

Matthew advances with a residue of middle-aged self-appraisal
rock and roll from the car, a head of rotted hops and yeast and pills, and a heart dragged back to every public school or foster home failure at befriending people his own age.

“Hi. How’s it going?” he ventures.

“Namaste.”

“I don’t even… what’s that mean?”

“Greetings.”

“You’re… so, you’re saying ‘greetings’ or is that what it means?”

“What?”

“You’re saying ‘greetings’?”

“Namaste just means greetings. Indian. Namaste.” And with this he tilts his fattened middle into a slight bow with his burger-patty hands pressed together.

“Native American.”

“You lost me, friend.”

“Nobody says ‘Indian’ now.”

“Why are you…”

“That’s dick, you think, fuck?”

Matthew’s profanity goes poorly in the wake of adrenal glands realizing they’re fighting for the first time since maybe the fourth grade. There is a small flash of confusion between them, a tension to this exchange, and suddenly Matthew lunges forward, issuing a weird embrace. Both are a bit confused by this, and it’s lasting too long and starting to sway, and then without warning, the brain feeds the filmstrip’s tag end in through the projector and there is the footage
of this guy and Kristin. The heart races and stammers, the head starts thinking of loss and losers, and the embrace turns weird with wrestling when Matthew’s leg comes up and around the instructor’s waist and they fall to the ground, the energy of things accelerating. At first the brain and head think the body is about to have sex, and then they exclaim in chorus with the heart and adrenal glands and spirit: It’s a fight! But the body is picking up right where it left off with this sort of experience, fourth or fifth grade, a clumsy and dumb exchange between Matthew and a bully in the house he had to live in; a boy who tried to take one of the few toys Matthew had managed to hang on to after he had to when he had to live in other people’s houses and everything started changing so fast.