For Love of Audrey Rose (36 page)

Mr. Radimanath and Hoover spoke late into the night. Jennie, they agreed, had a force over him, and Hoover did not like it. There was a desire to possess her, to claim her soul, that was absent in all the other children. So he turned her case over to Mr. Radimanath and contented himself with elaborating Jackson’s unique fixation on car crashes.

But Jennie was never far from his sight or mind. Finally her sly, elfin, presence so tantalized him, that he took charge of her case once again and proceeded to a thoughtful series of video preparations, none of which elicited the slightest response from the girl.

The tragedy of autism was that retardation has the aspect of being willed, Hoover thought, watching Jennie squirm in the seat of the video cubicle. She refused to learn. Refused to be aware. Yet she was physically able to learn. Sometimes she tried to be deaf. It was all a deception. Why? To shut out pain. But there was no pain in the clinic. Something deep down had shut off, had left its imprint where the personality should have begun developing through language.

“You’re just a deception,” he whispered sadly, running his fingers through her fine, jet black hair. “Just a lovely, quiet little deception.”

Through the day he exhausted his prepared video tapes. Nothing worked. He detected a sly smile of triumph on her face. He grew angry. He wanted to break down the barriers, remove the potential locked up behind the grim walls and make a wonderful person of her. But she refused, willfully countered his every stratagem.

She was deception.

The idea lingered with him long after she went to bed. Jennie was a deception. Why did that have an odd ring? Something awesome toyed with his brain, edging into consciousness, dying away again. Jennie, the deception. Deceiving whom? Himself? Herself? Bill?

Suddenly he stopped. He had been walking along the side of the pool in the basement, so lost in thought that he barely realized where he was. The light flickered on the gently moving water. The banners and mobiles looked pitiful against the cold pipes, the dirt of the windows, the grime of Pittsburgh that seeped into everything, even floating on the surface of the water near the filter.

Bill?
Jennie deceive Bill?
What odd thoughts were coming? He sat down on the diving board at the dark end of the underground chamber. He pictured Bill with Jennie, but it made no sense. What was the connection? There was a missing equation. He walked the tiled floor, his shoes squeaking on the wet surface. He sensed the missing connection in this grand deception that he was plotting, but could not quite put his finger on it.

So he stared into the water. His own reflection was so distorted in the dark, moving hideously against the single bulb dangling from the far wall, that he appeared to be some form of monster come from the deep. So his thoughts worked into the idea of monster, and to heavy animals, and dark water; and, as always, he remembered lifting the enormous black bullocks from the dead children of the Indian villages, and the ugly masses of dirty, dead chickens that got stuck among the stinking boulders where the road had been, now all sucking mud. And the soldiers shooting diseased dogs. Rifle cracks echoing horrifically through the hills. A looter shot. Hoover scrambled through masses of brush, tangled debris, carrying his pitifully small canister of antibiotics, white cloth bandages, and water purification tablets.

The monster that was himself smoothed out as he remembered Janice as he had found her and washed the mud slowly from her legs. The small undulations of her hips and breasts, the navel so oddly smeared with grime, her unconsciousness throwing her pelvis forward in such deep sleep. So Janice was the missing equation, he thought.

He walked back to the diving board. Jennie was the deception. Bill was the object. Janice was the missing equation. Nothing else came to his fatigued mind, except that the meaning of the clinic was emerging. And the meaning of the clinic was more than the rehabilitation of thirteen vulnerable children. It was much more, and its purpose was on the verge of coming into the light of day.

Lying awake in his room, staring at the dark ceiling, listening to the sounds of the clinic—the warm-air heating ducts, the underground motor for the swimming pool, the kitchen refrigerators that hummed, and Uncle Earl moaning in his sleep—Hoover felt a presence in the darkness. And that presence took control of him. It was the way the growing root of a plant will insinuate itself into the crack of a rock, and with time, split it, the power so strong. Hoover’s lean physique had become leaner with the hard work at the clinic, his legs thinner even than they had been in South India. But it made his body taut. It vibrated with an interior desire. It insinuated itself into his very purpose on earth. The muscle and flesh began to take on a life of its own, and he felt overwhelmed by it.

Was it the continent of America? Its absence of spirituality? Its hardness, its meanness, its grasping for the material world? Or was it the isolation? Where even Hirsch and Mr. Radimanath could not form a strong enough brotherhood to raise his spirit to its former level? Or was it Pittsburgh, which awakened the dormant memories of Sylvia—the slender arms, the soft smell of her perfume, the Bartok string quartets long after Audrey Rose was asleep upstairs and the late autumn dust filtered into the house from the neighboring woods, like the fragrance of nature itself, until their blood burned and they were consumed, the one within the other.

He was washing dishes late at night in the kitchen. All the staff shared the menial tasks in rotation. Steeped in the hot steam, the water sloshing to his elbows, the tiny radio full of tinny voices as inconsequential as the rest of the world had become to him, a different memory came to Hoover. As he carefully hosed the red plastic dishes under the spray, his yellow gloves like emblems of a foreign life, he recalled the vermilion and yellow cloth that swirled through the bazaars of Benares, the cloth that floated into the holy Ganges, where the dead and the dying came to be bathed one last time.

A rapid mélange of imagery flashed through him. Dusty hills, debates at the brotherhood, Sesh Mehrotra, rain in the hills and soldiers everywhere—like a speeding train crashing through time and space, a movie film gone hay-wire—and he remembered, not the flood, but afterward. Not the safety of the mountains, or the loveliness of the Tamil
ashram,
but, again, inevitably, it was the dirty hut that he recalled, when his breathing had felt warm and difficult and Janice Templeton lay on the hard floor, her breasts rising and falling at the same rapid rate. Like some dark dream, as though following himself out of himself, unconscious of everything, as though the self tarried behind an unknown dimension of his own body, he had gotten close to her. He had pressed against her and her warmth had intoxicated him until he felt dizzy. His two hands pressed forward until the small, delicate softness of her breasts responded, and her hands pressed on his, and he had never in all his life been so awakened to any woman, so transformed without embarrassment by the strength of his need.

Remembering, almost dizzy with the remembrance, Hoover awakened to find himself standing in the brilliantly lit kitchen of the clinic. The water had filled over the sink and was cascading onto the floor, over his shoes, being sucked down into the drain. He turned off the tap. What had happened afterward? He remembered vaguely how he had trembled, gone off alone, to be safe, to sleep in the isolation at the edge of the tiled field. There he had prayed for deliverance, for strength, for even a portion of the purity once promised him by the master of his very first
ashram.
So the night had passed in prayer and in agony, in meditation and in hell, and somewhere in the blackness he had heard the sudden rumble of heavy hooves, the snorting of a bullock and a cow in the mud, locked in bestial, explosive copulation—or had that been a dream? Had it all been a transference of his own torment to the innocent night? There were sects, after all, which taught that the spirit may, in fact, infuse the spirit of an animal, to perform those acts which may not be performed by a religious pilgrim.

Depressed, Hoover mopped the floor. He turned off the radio. His mind felt as though it had gone through a shredder. Sleep was something of a luxury now. Every time he lay down, Janice Templeton came close to him in the darkness, and her spirit tortured his, not to mock him, but to challenge him, for he knew now, that like him, she had not forgotten the pressure of their bodies that distant night.

Hoover felt the need of prayer.

He needed guidance. And it had come from outside the clinic. It was clear now that the destinies of them all—Bill, himself, Janice, even Jennie, for all he knew—were in some perplexing way intermingled, and would find fruit together. Hoover took off his apron and toweled the perspiration from his face. He walked out of the kitchen, through the corridor, listening to Jennie mumbling incoherently in her sleep, and fat Janeen beating heavily against the protective rails of her cot. The sounds soothed him in some obscure manner. As he walked to his office, the desire of his body, aroused by the strong memory of the South Indian night, receded, relaxed, leaving only a vibrant, trembling sensation through his wracked frame.

He entered his office. The red carpet was now littered not only with cushions and a tea set, but with papers, photographs, dossiers, manuscripts, books, and correspondence. Perhaps the breeze through the window had upset the desk. Perhaps Henry had gotten into mischief during an unguarded moment. Hoover lit a small candle and brought it to the center of the room, set it on the floor, and made a clear circle in the midst of the envelopes and stationery there. There was no other light. He stuck two small sticks of incense into the quiet flame, and the ends of the incense stick sparkled, then glowed dully, and a smoke like jasmine circled lazily upward where the heated air from the candle flame issued toward the ceiling. He placed the incense sticks near him, between two fallen books, lowered his head slightly, and crossed his legs. As he sat, emptying himself of the days’ thoughts, slowly purging the weariness of the physical labor, the complexities of fighting the psychic defenses of the children, his awareness seemed to simplify. He found himself staring blissfully down at his own palms, outstretched, facing upward on his own knees.

He opened his eyes. Slowly, all thoughts, all fatigue, all desires that fixated onto earthly objects began to dissolve. Specifically, he shut himself off from the open window where the curtains stirred in the fragrant, dusty breeze. Then he closed his eyes. In the dissolving, curious reddish atmosphere of the inner eye, behind closed lids, he felt the familiar, comforting atmosphere of meditation. The subtle sense of becoming less substantial and vastly more expanded, as the body withdrew from consciousness. He concentrated on the breathing, control of the diaphragm, breathing through one nostril only, one of the most difficult exercises.

In the dreamy, sensuous atmosphere where there was no floor, no wall, no sound, but only sensations that intermixed freely, he felt a different kind of love. It was not the vague radiance that flowed from the interior of the spinal column, and translated itself into the gentle bliss. It was not the beneficence of the accumulated teachings of yogis through the countless generations, a softness and a melodious moral regeneration. It was more like an embrace. As though a love had come to restore him, to answer the love within him and make it whole. And the sensation terrified him.

Perspiring, he opened his eyes. He was breathing hard with the effort. Calmly he rose, closed the window, lit two more sticks of incense, and then paced the room in agitation. He shuffled through a series of books on a low shelf behind the desk and pulled out a worn volume of Vedic poems, given to him by Mr. Radimanath’s son, printed on his own small printing press in Calcutta.

Hoover read several poems. They seemed to exude a sweet peace, a consuming confidence that had become foreign to himself. Yet he needed them now as never before.

The verses treated of the Supreme Personality, the Godhead that inhabited and formed all moving and nonmoving entities, which passed over and through all the obstacles of growth and decay.

Though engaged in all kinds of activities, the pure devotee reaches the spiritual kingdom.

Work, therefore, always under the consciousness of the Godhead, through all the trials of conditional life.

The supreme Lord is situated in everyone’s heart O Arjuna, and directs the wandering of all living entities.

The room was so quiet that Hoover was unaware of himself, unaware of the noises of the clinic. There seemed to be only the thoughts of ancient yogis, and within that thought he now existed in pure spirit. The words burgeoned in a radiant charisma, flooding into his ego, transforming it with confidence and love. With tears in his eyes, Hoover read:

Under illusion you may decline to act according to the direction of the Godhead. But, compelled by your own nature, you will act all the same.

He reread the passage. He closed the book, mumbled the passage by heart. There was a sensation of purification, of intense potentiality to act, but he did not know exactly where and how. The answer was in the room, in the low-hanging ribbons of incense smoke, in the mundane noises and water pipes, scratched paint, crayoned murals of the clinic. The answer lay in his memories, in his fantasies. Above all, it lay in his body, the body he had been afraid to admit to his thoughts.

Compelled by your own nature, you will act all the same,
he repeated to himself.

A bit confused, feeling the warmth radiating from his own face, he sat cross-legged once again on the floor and began to meditate. This time there was no difficulty. In seconds he slipped into a slight trance, a falling away of minute perceptions. In a few more seconds he slipped further, and was unaware of the smell of incense, or any noise, or even of his location.

A radiance spread out before him. A landscape of disintegrated form, bathed in a translucent glow. In it he recognized pieces of his ego, fragments of his past, his desires, his fears, actual experiences. The shards of himself were iridescent and floated rapidly, winking out of sight as he rose above and beyond them. He was without ego. Without pain. There was no turbulence or doubt, only a rich sense of trust, as though he had entered a destiny far larger than his own. He was not afraid. Several times he had ascended to these heights, but never with such a pulsating, relentless momentum.