Lamb (27 page)

“Look, Scooter, you look a little tired, you want me to watch the bowl while you take a break?”

“Get your hand out of there!” The kid caught my wrist (me, the kung fu master). He was quick. “I can tell what you’re doing.”

“Okay, fine, how about I show you some magic tricks. A little sleight of hand?”

“Oh, that’ll be fun. I’m blind.”

“Look, make up your mind.”

“I’m going to call for the guild-master if you don’t go away.”

So I went away, despondent, defeated—not money enough to look at the edge of a page of the Kama Sutra. I skulked back to the cliffs, climbed up to my nook, and resolved to console myself with some cold rice left over from last night’s supper. I opened my satchel and—

“Ahhh!” I leapt back. “Josh, what are you doing in there?” And there he was, his beatific old Joshua face with the sole of a foot on either side like big ears, a few vertebrae showing, one hand, my ying-yang amulet vial, and a jar of myrrh.

“Get out of there. How’d you get in there?”

I’ve mentioned our satchels before. The Greeks called them wallets, I guess you would call them duffel bags. They were made of leather, had a long strap we could throw over our shoulder, and I suppose if you’d asked me before, I would have said you could get a whole person in one if you had to, but not in one piece.

“Melchior taught me. It took me all morning to get in here. I thought I’d surprise you.”

“Worked. Can you get out?”

“I don’t think so. I think my hips are dislocated.”

“Okay, where’s my black glass knife?”

“It’s at the bottom of the bag.”

“Why did I know you were going to say that?”

“If you get me out I’ll show you what else I learned. Melchior taught me how to multiply the rice.”

A few minutes later Joshua and I were sitting on the ledge of my nook being bombarded by seagulls. The seagulls were attracted by the huge pile of cooked rice that lay between us on the ledge.

“That’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.” Except that you really couldn’t see it done. One minute you had a handful of rice, the next a bushel.

“Melchior says that it usually takes a lot longer for a yogi to learn to manipulate matter like this.”

“How much longer?”

“Thirty, forty years. Most of the time they pass on before they learn.”

“So this is like the healing. Part of your, uh, legacy?”

“This isn’t like the healing, Biff. This can be taught, given the time.”

I tossed a handful of rice into the air for some seagulls. “Tell you what. Melchior obviously doesn’t like me, so he’s not going to teach me anything. Let’s trade knowledge.”

I brought rice to Joshua, had him multiply it, then sold the surplus in the market, and eventually I started trading fish instead of rice because I could raise twenty rupees in fewer trips. But before that, I asked Joshua to come to town with me. We went to the market, which was thick with traders, haggling, making deals, exchanging cash for goods and services, and over on the side, a blind and legless beggar was making a killing on the change.

“Scooter, I’d like you to meet my friend Joshua.”

“My name’s not Scooter,” said the waif.

A half hour later Scooter could see again and miraculously his severed legs had been regenerated.

“You bastards!” said Scooter as he ran off on clean new pink feet.

“Go with God,” Joshua said.

“Now I guess we’ll see how easy it is to earn a living!” I shouted after the kid.

“He didn’t seem very pleased,” said Josh.

“He’s only learning to express himself. Forget him, others are suffering as well.”

And so it came to pass, that Joshua of Nazareth moved among them,
healing them and performing miracles, and all the little blind children of Nicobar did see again, and all the lame did stand up and walk.

The little fuckers.

And so the exchange of knowledge began: what I was learning from Kashmir and the Kama Sutra for what Joshua was learning from the holy man Melchior. Each morning, before I went to town and before Joshua went to learn from his guru, we met on the beach and shared ideas and breakfast. Usually some rice and a fresh fish roasted over the fire. We’d gone long enough without eating animal flesh, we had decided, despite what Melchior and Gaspar tried to teach us.

“This ability to increase the bounty of food—imagine what we can do for the people of Israel, of the world.”

“Yes, Josh, for it is written: ‘Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, but teach a man to be a fish and his friends eat for a week.’”

“That is not written. Where is that written?”

“Amphibians five-seven.”

“There’s no friggin’ Amphibians in the Bible.”

“Plague of frogs. Ha! Gotcha!”

“How long’s it been since you had a beating?”

“Please. You can’t hit anyone, you have to be at total peace with all creation so you can find Sparky the Wonder Spirit.”

“The Divine Spark.”

“Whatever, th—ouch. Oh great, and what am I supposed to do, hit the Messiah back?”

“Turn the other cheek. Go ahead, turn it.”

As I said, thus did the enlightened exchange of sacred and ancient teachings begin:

“What’s a jelly donut?” Joshua asked.

“I don’t know. It’s a Vedic term lost to antiquity, but it is said to have had great significance to the keepers of the law.”

“Oh.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You have to think about it, but it means that there’s something eternal in everyone.”

“That’s swell. What’s with the guys on the bed of nails?”

“A yogi must leave his body if he is going to experience the spiritual.”

“So he leaves through the little holes in his back?”

“Let’s start again.”

“Look, she sells me pieces of sheepskin parchment, and each time, after we’re finished, I’m allowed to copy the drawings. I’m going to tie them all together and make my own codex.”

“You did that? That looks like it hurts.”

“This from a guy I had to break out of a wine jar with a hammer yesterday.”

“Yeah, well, it wouldn’t have happened if I’d remembered to grease my shoulders like Melchior taught me.” Joshua turned the drawing to get a different angle on it. “You’re sure this doesn’t hurt?”

“No, not if you keep your bottom away from the incense burners.”

“No, I mean her.”

“Oh, her. Well, who knows? I’ll ask her.”

“What’s the Bhagavad Gita?”

“It’s like a long poem in which the god Krishna advises the warrior Arjuna as he drives his chariot into battle.”

“Really, what’s he advise him?”

“He advises him not to feel bad about killing the enemy, because they are essentially already dead.”

“You know what I’d advise him if I was a god? I’d advise him to get someone else to drive his friggin’ chariot. The real God wouldn’t be caught dead driving a chariot.”

“Well, you have to look at it as a parable, otherwise it sort of reeks of false gods.”

“Our people don’t have good luck with false gods, Josh. They’re—I don’t know—frowned upon. We get killed and enslaved when we mess with them.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“I couldn’t find that one in the book, so she dictated it to me from memory.”

“Kashmir’s quite the scholar.”

“She had the sniffles, but agreed to my lesson anyway. I think she’s falling for me.”

“How could she not, you’re a very charming fellow.”

“Why, thank you, Josh.”

“You’re welcome, Biff.”

“Okay, tell me about your little yoga thing.”

“Is that the kind of advice you’d give someone who’s riding into battle? You’d think Krishna would be saying stuff like, ‘Look out, an arrow! Duck!’”

“You’d think,” Joshua sighed.

“Your drawings are getting better,” Joshua said. “In the first one I thought she had a tail.”

“I’m using the calligraphy techniques we learned in the monastery, only using them to draw figures. Josh, are you sure it doesn’t bother you, talking about this stuff when you’ll never be allowed to do it?”

“No, it’s interesting. It doesn’t bother you when I talk about heaven, does it?”

“Should it?”

“Look, a seagull!”

“That’s what you’re looking for, huh, the Divine Spark thing?”

“It’s not for me, Biff.”

“Josh, I’m not a satchel of sand here. I didn’t spend all of my time studying and meditating without getting some glimpse of the eternal.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Of course it helps when angels show up and you do miracles and stuff too.”

“Well, yes, I guess it would.”

“But that’s not a bad thing. We can use that when we get home.”

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Not a clue.”

Our training went on for two years before I saw the sign that called us home. Life was slow, but pleasant there by the sea. Joshua became more efficient at multiplying food, and while he insisted on living an austere lifestyle so he could remain unattached to the material world, I was able to get a little money ahead. In addition to paying for my lessons, I was able to decorate my nook (just some erotic drawings, curtains, some silk cushions) and buy a few personal items such as a new satchel, an ink stone and a set of brushes, and an elephant.

I named the elephant Vana, which is Sanskrit for wind, and although she certainly earned her name, I regret it was not due to her blazing speed. Feeding Vana was not a difficulty with Joshua’s ability to turn a handful of grass into a fodder farm, but no matter how hard Joshua tried
to teach her yoga, she was not able to fit into my nook. (I consoled Joshua that it was probably the climb, and not his failure as a yoga guru that deterred Vana. “If she had fingers, Josh, she’d be snuggling up with me and seagulls right now.”) Vana didn’t like being on the beach when the tide came and washed sand between her toes, so she lived in a pasture just above the cliff. She did, however, love to swim, and some days rather than ride her on the beach all the way to Nicobar, I would have her swim into the harbor just under water, with only her trunk showing and me standing on her forehead. “Look, Kashmir, I’m walking on water! I’m walking on water!”

So eager was my erotic princess to share my embrace that rather than wonder at the spectacle as did the other townsfolk she could only reply:

“Park the elephant in back.”

(The first few times she said it I thought she was referring to a Kama Sutra position that we had missed, pages stuck together perhaps, but it turned out such was not the case.)

Kashmir and I became quite close as my studies progressed. After we went through all the positions of the Kama Sutra twice, Kashmir was able to take things to the next level by introducing Tantric discipline into our lovemaking. So skillful did we become at the meditative art of coupling that even in the throes of passion, Kashmir was able to polish her jewelry, count her money, or even rinse out a few delicates. I myself had so mastered the discipline of controlled ejaculation that often I was halfway home before release was at last achieved.

It was on my way home from Kashmir’s—as Vana and I were cutting through the market so that I could show my friends the ex-beggar boys the possible rewards for the man of discipline and character (to wit: I had an elephant and they did not)—that I saw, outlined on the wall of a temple of Vishnu, a dirty water stain, caused by condensation, mold, and wind-blown dust, which described the face of my best friend’s mother, Mary.

“Yeah, she does that,” said Joshua, when I swung over the edge of his nook and announced the news. He and Melchior had been meditating and the old man, as usual, appeared to be dead. “She used to do it all the time when we were kids. She sent James and me running all over the
place washing down walls before people saw. Sometimes her face would appear in a pattern of water drops in the dust, or the peelings from grapes would fall just so in a pattern after being taken out of the wine press. Usually it was walls.”