Jacob Atabet (7 page)

Atabet winced when the hand reached his stomach. “Yes,” he groaned. “It’s about like before.” Kazi Dama put the towel on the bed and turned to me. “Would you mind waiting in the kitchen?” he asked with a bright and high-pitched voice. “We’re going to operate.” Before I could answer, he turned back to his patient who was smiling reassurances at me.

“Can I help?” I asked.

“Reassure Carlos,” said Corinne from the doorway. “I think he likes you.”

But Carlos was nowhere in sight. I peered down the stairwell into the mazeway of landings, but the place was deserted. There was just a murmuring now from the bedroom. Then, for no apparent reason, I felt strangely at peace.

Sunlight was streaming into the kitchen, and there was laughter from the other room. It sounded as if the patient were recovering.

My outline was sitting on the table, and I slowly thumbed through it. There was another passage from Thurston: “A large number of stigmatics also bear across the forehead and around the head a circlet of punctures, such as might have been caused by a crown of thorns . . . The stigmatic has declared that the sense of interior pain in the part affected preceded by many months or even by years the visible appearance of scars or bleeding wounds.”

I turned the page. “Prayer,” I had written, “may recreate the cells. The saint is blindly remaking his body. Stigmatics, in this respect, are signs of our further evolution. Like wheels on the toys of primitive men, these seemingly useless things anticipate the ways of the future.” I sat back with a start. There was a peal of laughter, and the door to the bedroom flew open. Corinne came out and crossed the studio to the kitchen. “You must think this is all pretty strange,” she said with mock exasperation. “And you’re right! Those two in there. I mean—
they are something!”

“How is he feeling?” I ventured.

“Oh he’s fine. He’s such a
horse.
” She opened a door and I could hear her descending an interior stairwell. Apparently, it went down to the apartment below.

My excitement was growing. Could the mark on his chest have appeared in the wake of his experience last night? I turned back to the book and reread the passage from Thurston.

“Would you hold the door open?” her voice came up from below. I crossed the room to help her, and she appeared with a steaming tureen. “From the Echeverrias,” she lifted the lid to reveal a consomme with parsley floating on it. She put the tureen and a bowl on a tray and carried them into the bedroom.

Why had he asked me to come? I thought. There had to be a reason. “I’m sorry,” she smiled, coming back through the door. “Now we can talk.”

“I’ve no idea what’s going on,” I said. “I’d like to know what’s happening.”

She sat down at the table. “This has all happened so unexpectedly. This accident—but first, he really
is
all right, in spite of that thing on his chest. Something like it has happened before. It’s as if there’s a circuit-breaker in his system—but I take it you’re familiar with the kinds of things he’s doing.” I could tell she was feeling me out. “And you were up here last night?”

“Yes. I guess he told you about that electricity around his painting, that lightning bolt.”

“He told me something. But it’s a little unclear. So you saw it?”

“Well it only lasted a second or two. There was a blue sheet of fire and something seemed to pass from his hand to the painting.”

“About what time did it happen?”

“About midnight I think. Yes, around twelve-thirty. But I left as soon as it happened. He came out on the deck—I was watching from out there—and asked me to leave.”

“What do you think it was?”

“I don’t know. A static electric charge maybe. The wind last night was blowing from the east and everything was funny.”

“You know it’s strange,” she held my gaze, “trying to fill you in like this. Jacob rarely brings another person up here. And your being here last night. Well, he never lets people in like that.”

“That was my doing. I just blundered in. I guess I was a little drunk, and I’ve wanted to get his reaction to my book.”

“I’ve looked at your outline. Jacob asked me to. And the articles about Bernardine Neri. I can see why the two of you made this connection.” She pulled the manuscript toward her. “It’s quite a thing really, quite a thing—all these examples you’ve got. It’s impressive. You’ve got to give us a seminar one of these days. But let’s talk about what happened. You don’t know much about him, do you?”

“Not much. I guess he told you about the thing at the church.”

“He told me something about your experience—and the others. But you’d better tell me in your own words. It’s still unclear what happened.” She nodded toward the bedroom with ironic good humor. “As you might guess, things can get confused around here.”

I briefly told her the story. As I did she listened intently. “We’ll have to talk more about this,” she said when I finished. “And talk to the others if we can, that lady and the priest. Because whatever happened then connects to last night. But maybe it would be best if I told you something about Jacob so you’ll have a better sense of what’s going on here. The trouble is—where to begin.” She looked down at the table, her green eyes darkening. “How to begin . . . well, since you know so much about this,” she tapped the manuscript, “let’s start with first things first. To say it simply, Jacob is religiously gifted, strangely and terribly gifted. When he was sixteen, he had the kind of realization you’ve written about, a kind of
nirvikalpa samadhi
if you will.” A subtle change came into her face, a sad ironic look. “But he had to enjoy it in a mental hospital. I guess you’ve heard about that sort of thing.”

I said something about Ramakrishna, the Indian saint, that he and other mystics might have been locked up too.

“That’s right,” she said. “He wasn’t acting out, or hurting anyone. It was just that he couldn’t get around very well. He was simply lost in ecstasy.”

“How did it happen?”

“Well, who can really tell? He says that it started much earlier—I don’t know when exactly. We had met the year before, in ’46. And fallen in love. God!”—suddenly there were tears in her eyes. “I don’t often tell the story. Forgive me.” She threw back her head. “Oh, I was madly in love at sixteen. We had gone up to the Sierras on a camping trip with some other kids when it happened. No warning. No hint to the rest of us. Just whoosh!” She spread her arms wide. “He was gone. There was nothing we could do but take care of him.”

“Could he function at all?”

“Not for the first couple of days. But by then we had him back in the city and of course his parents were frantic. Sweet people, but poor and uneducated—putting him in the hospital was the only thing they knew how to do. The only thing any of us knew how to do . . .” She paused. “So he was in there for a couple of months, until some shock treatments brought him out of it. Fortunately he came around fast, after the third or fourth one, I think.” She straightened her back and smiled as if the memory refreshed her. “He was shaky for several months, but full of a light. Even the doctors saw that. One of them—I’ve got to hand it to him—called him a genuine mystic. He knew what was happening, I think, somewhere down deep in his little psychiatrist’s head. After they let him out some other people saw it too. I certainly did. It meant the end of our romance, for one thing. At Lowell that year—Lowell High School—he was a pretty odd figure, but somehow he managed to get through it. He hardly ever studied. Just spent the day in some kind of reverie, they said. Then his parents sent him to live with their friends, the Echeverrias. Ever since, he’s lived right here.”

“In this building?”

“That’s right. He’s been here ever since. For twenty-three years I guess. Yes, twenty-three years. Then after high school he went to Berkeley for a year, and to the California School of Fine Arts. That’s where he learned how to paint. All the time having this incredible experience.”

“Did he have any spiritual guidance at all? It’s amazing if he didn’t.”

“Not really. There were the priests down the street at Sts. Peter and Paul’s—not Father Zimbardo or any of the ones there now—and some books, but no one else he’s ever told us about. He says the experience was simply given.”

“But what was it like? How did he function?”

“Well, for me—and I would see him just a few times a year after he went to Lowell—he was strange. And sometimes he would take my breath away. Sometimes he would sit here just looking out at the city and to be around him . . . those were unforgettable days.”

“And you say this all started when he was twelve?”

“That’s what he says. It was building up all those years, though he didn’t know what was happening. There were a lot of unusual things. Yes . . . but anyway, he seems to have been born with it. And I think his parents contributed to it. They didn’t have him in school regularly until he was nine or ten—they were moving around a lot—and that might’ve let his gifts develop. In any case, that summer—whoosh!” She made another spreading gesture to suggest his mind coming open.

“Like the salt doll that drank in the ocean,” I recalled the famous Indian image.

“Like the salt doll. But he learned to control it. After those shock treatments, he didn’t want to be put away again.”

“And he didn’t have anyone to help him? I find that hard to believe. No guides or friends?”

“No. In those first years his only help came from books and his own intuitive sense of things. Maybe the priests, though I doubt they did much. He was an acolyte for a while. And someone gave him St. Theresa’s autobiography and a collection of Meister Eckhart’s sermons. Of course, living here with the Echeverrias looking after him and his family giving him support helped enormously. He couldn’t’ve come through that period without them, because things were still breaking loose. For example, during that first year he started seeing everything as if it were inside him. Physical events even, and sometimes they left marks on his body.”

“What kind of physical events?”

“You’ve written about it in your book. Like Ramakrishna’s getting a welt on his back when he saw the boy being whipped. Or Bernardine Neri’s taking on the features of the icon she worshiped. It happened to him several times, with injuries he saw, with his parents’ illnesses. He was awfully suggestible, until he learned to control it. Or almost control it. In any case if he hadn’t had this protection here I wonder if he would have survived those first two years. That he got through it at all still amazes me. Eventually he found his way to the yoga literature and the Academy of Asian Studies, but it wasn’t until Kazi came along in the sixties that he got any personal guidance. Kazi has helped him handle these states more than anyone else. He’s a Rimpoche, one of the Tibetan orders sent here to start a meditation school, an extraordinary man. He’s been trained in the contemplative life from the time he was five or six years old, but strangely he’s a little in awe of Jacob. He says he might be a tulku—a reincarnated lama!” She shook her head with an ironic smile. “He says he never saw a tulku in Tibet with such gifts. The two of them have been close friends since ’62 . . . .”

“Did he start a meditation school? I don’t think I’ve heard of it.”

“No, he didn’t. He has a few students, that’s all. And this friendship with Jacob. He says he’s not the organization type. But let me go on with the story. It’ll help explain these last few days. When Jacob went to the Art Institute he found he had another . . . let’s call it an ‘opening.’ He started to put his visions on canvas, and as he did he felt his body changing. You might call it an experience of God translated into body language, the usual kind of interpretation, except that all of us could see him changing too. Actually changing his looks. There seemed to be a relaxation here.” She made a circular motion around her forehead and eyes. “More beauty, and a light. And changes in the texture of his skin. I wasn’t the only one who saw it. After all,” she tapped the floor with her foot, “physicists say that all this hard stuff is mainly fields of empty space. He seemed to be finding a way to alter its pattern slightly.”

“And that was when he was twenty?”

“Yes. About nineteen or twenty. Right after he started to paint. He thinks his painting helped quicken the process, that experimenting with the contours of space and human flesh revealed the body to an extraordinary depth. Like a new kind of x-ray. Because—and this is the most important thing— because all of this would help him discover the body’s deepest secret. That’s what all of it was saying—that spirit, the One, was waiting to emerge in the flesh. His work was beginning to show how it would happen.”

For a moment we sat there in silence. To find the secret of embodiment was the central theme of all my research. My instinct about him had been right from the beginning. “So,” she said. “You can see why your book’s made such a hit around here!” As she said it, Kazi Dama opened the door and called for us both to come in. “We’ll continue this later,” she said, and I followed her into the bedroom. Crossing the studio, I seemed to move in a daze. This confirmation of my work and ideas seemed too perfect to be true.

Atabet was sitting against the bedboard with the tray at his side. He raised a hand in greeting. “Cured now!” exclaimed Kazi. “Very quick recovery.” Corinne picked up his pajama top to look. Apparently the wound had partially healed.

Kazi Dama stood with his arms folded across his chest. I guessed that he was proud of the cure he had helped bring about. Or proud of something—for no apparent reason he tilted his head back and laughed. Atabet turned to see me, but made no effort to speak. He held my gaze, his dark eyes sunk in pools of peace. A wave of pleasure passed through me, and I remembered a picture of an Indian sage. Ramana Maharshi, I thought, had those eyes, swimming in the same kind of bliss.

Corinne took the tray from the room, and Kazi Dama started humming. “Don’t mind us,” Atabet whispered. “It’s cheaper than penicillin.”

The Tibetan inspected the wound, and nodded with approval. Then with a radiant smile, he left. “As good as the family doctor,” Atabet murmured. “And he doesn’t charge a cent.” But he winced as he said it. It was obvious his wounds were still hurting.