On the Edge A Novel (17 page)

‘Finally,’ said Carlos, taking out his half-moon glasses and unfolding a piece of paper, ‘I would like to read you a very short poem I wrote about old age:

“Old age is when your back goes out more often than you do.

Old age is when the little old lady you are helping across the road is your wife.”

‘Or the little old man is your husband, um, if you’re a woman, of course,’ said Carlos.

‘Isn’t that great?’ said Martha, carrying most of the group with her in bleating acquiescence.

Peter glanced at Stan. Stan smiled fixedly.

Christ, thought Peter, old age is when you smile in terror because the idea of death gets in everywhere, like sand in the desert, whispering under the door, and snaking its way into the saddlebags.

As the group filed out of the Big House, Frank stopped several men, including Peter, with the words ‘Do you have a problem with your back?’ and, if they answered no, press-ganged them into helping shift Martha’s new white Range Rover from the rock onto which Carlos had driven it. When he heard why he had been asked about his back, Jason cried, ‘I think I’ve just slipped a disc,’ and staggered groaning into the night.

Frank, Carlos, Peter and Paul stood outside in the thick drizzling darkness.

Paul crouched down and peered at the chassis with an air of calm expertise.

‘Can’t see a damn thing,’ he said, still staring.

‘I can’t believe she bought this car,’ said Frank, the perplexed disciple.

‘Why not?’ asked Carlos.

‘It’s so big and ostentatious. In LA it’s a target car.’

‘Well, eh, don’t tell her that,’ said Carlos.

‘Oh, no, God, this is just between you and me.’

‘Maybe she’s influenced by the fact that I have the same car,’ said Carlos.

Each man felt he had to have a suggestion which would establish his mastery of mechanics, physics or engineering. The car remained immobile.

Peter couldn’t think what to say. Paul had already asked if the transmission was in neutral, the one thing Peter knew somebody always said on these occasions.

‘Perhaps we should wait until tomorrow to move Martha’s car,’ he finally blurted out, and then without the slightest effort added, ‘We could show that we were all prepared to collaborate
as a group
to overcome our individual problems.’

‘Sounds good,’ said Frank.

‘Way to go,’ said Paul, finally getting up from his crouching position.

‘Yes,’ said Carlos, ‘tonight we learned that play can be work, tomorrow we will show that work can be play.’

Peter was amazed by the ease and success with which he had learned to manipulate the new language at his command.

He was learning, he was definitely learning.

10

Crystal changed course abruptly and headed down the steps and onto the lawn. She was determined to keep up the noble silence of her Dzogchen workshop for at least one day.

If she overheard one more person say that light was both a wave and a particle, or talk about left-brain and right-brain activity, she was going to throw up. Who did they think she was? She had been turning physics clichés into spiritual metaphors before most of them had given up jogging for t’ai chi.

She had been a child of the alternative scene, amazing the questing hippies of her mother’s endlessly shifting and yet monotonous circles with the precocity of her questions. When she was nine, during her mother’s Zen phase, they had gone to Tassajara, a remote monastery in the hills behind Carmel.

‘When will impermanence end?’ Crystal had asked a balding student from the Bay area.

He smiled comically as if to say, Who will rid me of this turbulent child?

‘Are you attached to non-attachment?’ she persevered.

‘Quit bugging the man, he’s trying to be mindful,’ her mother said, bowing apologetically to the student and dragging her away.

It was at Tassajara, visiting the shrine of the monastery’s revered founder, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, that she’d had her first taste of that magical reality she had been pursuing ever since.

Standing in the clearing where Suzuki was buried, she bowed to the shrine and asked him with childish earnestness to teach her something about Buddhism. Mosquitoes clouded the air around her, landing on her face and whining in her ears. Too frightened of being bitten to stay in the clearing, she immediately ran down the path, flailing her arms and slapping her face to get the bugs off. Halfway down, she was overcome with guilt at having shown so little equanimity and given Suzuki no time to offer her an answer.

She doubled back, determined to withstand the distraction of the mosquitoes for at least a minute or two in case he had something to tell her. The air was still smudged with bugs and they still danced around her, but this time they remained a foot away from her face, like a ring of debris around a planet, as if she were radiating a force that held them in place. She stood in the clearing, amazed. Unable to understand what was going on, and unable to mistake it, she burst out laughing, like a spring that gushes out of the ground when the right rock is kicked aside.

By the time she was twelve, and her mother entered her Spanish phase, Crystal had already meditated in four different countries and six different traditions.

In Spain they attended an ‘English-speaking’ meditation class.

‘Relax de ties, relax de boathooks,’ said the teacher solemnly. ‘De mint is your enemy, de mint is fool of false contraceptions. Let go of de mint! Let go of de contraceptions!’

They’d had to leave because they were laughing too much. After that, one of them only had to say, ‘It’s all in the mint’, or ‘mint over matter’, and they would both giggle helplessly for several minutes.

Then adolescence hit. She suddenly stood critically removed from her mother’s enterprise, and at the same time inescapably immersed in its fascination and self-importance.

How vulgar to think that every guru was corrupt, how naive not to realize that most of them were.

Why did her mother pursue her spiritual longings so indiscriminately? Again and again Crystal saw her set out with fawn-like credulity, only to end up stalking disappointment like a tigress, bringing it down expertly and living off it for days; ferocious, possessive, alone, while it putrefied beside her. Her mother’s aspirations to communal life always collapsed into a territorial craving for her ‘own space’. At the same time Crystal’s family life kept shifting from tribal kinship to semi-nuclear isolation. One month she would be circle-dancing in a yurt with a community of seekers; the next she would arrive back to an empty apartment, some tofu leftovers and a note from her absent mother, who was out at a part-time job, or being empowered by some dubious class on the other side of town, or doing ‘service’ by nursing an acquaintance through a repetitious crisis.

Crystal’s diagnosis that her mother lacked psychological stability because her analysis had been interrupted carried with it a measure of anxiety. The interruption had after all been caused by the pregnancy of which she was the result. She undertook an analysis of her own to complete the one she had interrupted for her mother. She also hoped to snuggle up to her unknown father, if only in the cool laboratory of his profession. The elegant formulas yielded by this tight familial matrix proved less liberating than she had hoped, and this search for a distinct identity curved back into the capitalized Universe in which she had been brought up, where Self and Reality came in those giant sizes which are only stocked in the hypermarkets of the Divine.

Liberation seemed to lie beyond a self-knowledge that described her, however precisely, as a product of her past. And yet without it she would end up like her mother, too unstable to live with any other kind of knowledge. She interrupted her own analysis on the grounds of youth and expense. Her analyst said she was leaving because she had been trying to reconcile her parents by finishing her mother’s analysis, and that next time she should come back for herself. Slick bastard. She didn’t pay his last bill. They were moving again anyhow.

A second attempted rebellion, with daily acid trips and hits of Hawaiian grass from water-cooled bongs, foundered even faster as the analogies between the unreal and the Absolutely Real multiplied mockingly before her eyes. The brilliantined palm trees and the humming air, the way in which space collapsed into two dimensions and became perfectly pictorial, only to give birth by Caesarean section to a mental reality of potentially unlimited dimensions: all these flashy effects seemed to mimic the ecstatic promises of Realization. She felt the guilt and exhilaration of artifice, as if she were eating tropical fruit in a snow-bound city.

She only really broke away from her mother when the trips started to go wrong and the surface excavations of her analysis opened into the deeply grooved fissures of an earthquake zone.

This time it was Crystal who left a note for her mother in the empty apartment. She was only seventeen at the time but seventeen years later the embarrassment of that note still sometimes ambushed her.

Dear Lynda,

I’ve gone to live with Krater and Stash. We’ve decided to
grab
and
grasp
at the debris of the American Dream you’ve always so despised, before the Nuclear Winter gives birth to the ultimate Cockroach Civilization.

Stash says that Roaches are going to be the only survivors and that they’re going to evolve into a superintelligent Roach race with weird myths about the Beautiful Bipeds who once ruled the planet, knew the secrets of flight, fission and long-distance communication but
abused their power
and destroyed themselves.

Skeptical young Roaches are going to say that those are just myths, but we know that it’s true, because we’re living in the backward-stretching shadow of the Age of the Roach.

Krater says that in view of the gravity (and the entropy) of the situation, we should get as many kicks as possible before we get the ultimate cosmic kick of Extinction. The only thing we have to do, of a religious nature, is to
bow down
every time we see a roach and say, ‘I salute the future.’ After that you can step on them while you’ve still got the chance to show that two feet are better than two dozen.

‘When I got this note I felt middle-aged for the first time,’ Lynda told Carla, an acquaintance of hers who was a therapist.

‘The note is about standing on her own two feet,’ said Carla. ‘She feels you’ve been involved with too many religions. Two feet are better than two dozen because when you’re looking for independence, your own despair is better than someone else’s hopes.’

‘Oh, my God,’ wailed Lynda, ‘my daughter sees me as a roach.’

‘Ya, but she’s a “sceptical young roach”, so she’s still your daughter.’

‘Anyhows, it’s not her own despair,’ said Lynda, ‘it’s Stash and Krater’s.’

‘Those are her two feet for the moment. They may not really be hers but at least she chose them.’

‘Here I am trying to be a good midwife to the New Paradigm and all the thanks I get is that my own daughter wants to squash me like a bug.’

‘It’s tough being a parent,’ said Carla, ‘but you gotta let go of her, she’s in her own process now.’

‘You’ve helped me a lot,’ said Lynda, but somehow she lost touch with Carla after that.

Crystal entered a period of overwrought nihilism, cruising around LA on amphetamines. Fidelity was for the faint-hearted and everyone fucked everyone else.

‘It’s no coincidence,’ Krater used to say, ‘that “committed” is the word they use when they lock you in a mental institution.’

Before abandoning formal education for TV, Krater had discovered that Goya was supposed to have said ‘Nada’ on his deathbed. Instead of ‘Yo’ or any other traditional gang salute, Krater, Stash and Crystal said ‘Nada’ to each other at breakfast (a meal they usually ate in the evening) and ‘Nada’ to each other when it was time to crash at lunch the next day.

Televisions blared in every room, artfully tuned by Stash to ‘self-surf’, switching channels haphazardly so you couldn’t lose a sense of the triviality of the medium. If visitors were uncool enough to want to watch a programme, the gang would shout ‘Nada’. Sometimes, if Krater was up, he would launch into the fuller rap.

‘TV is the sewer pipe of this society. We stand underneath it, we
shower
in it, because that’s where the biggest roaches are.’

They would clasp their hands together and bow reverently, ‘We salute the future.’

One day, the gang was so bored by their own boredom, so underwhelmed by their own negativity, that they decided to stay awake until they died, in an amphetamine equivalent of
La Grande Bouffe.
Krater couldn’t do anything without a sound theoretical context. Although he regretted this lingering positivity, at least his need for meaning was dedicated to Nada, and so he said that there would be an exemplary sarcasm in dying of starvation in an obese society. They would represent an imploding population amidst the population explosion, homing in on Nada by diminution, consciously conspiring with the real nature of the world rather than struggling against it pathetically.

He was worried by the respect for harmony inherent in this last part of the theory, but Stash and Crystal, who wanted to get going, told him it was perfect.

Everything was fine for the first three days. They bounced around LA telling everyone that this was It, Adios, The End. Their friends were too cool to dissuade them; they were too proud to dissuade themselves. During the next three days the insomnia started to take its toll. Krater worked on refinements of the Theory. Should they stretch out their terminally weakened bodies in a roach-infested room, or did this show an unreconstructed desire to be part of the future? He argued each side of the case with increasing violence.

Stash’s teeth started to fall out of his bleeding gums like ripe fruit. This blow to his vanity seemed to undermine his desire to die. Only Krater’s incandescent personality held the operation together. Stash was burning through a layer of cultural conditioning, he claimed. Romanticism had taught them that death was beautiful. Naturally they would have to break through the barrier of this myth as they descended into Nada. There would be a layer of horror also, he warned them. That too was superficial. Nada was flavourless, odourless, without affect: when they hit Nada there would be no pain and no peace, just an indifference he called White Time which would cancel the presence of either possibility. As usual, Krater was thrown into crisis by his own claims. Was he giving a transcendent value to White Time?