Reading Madame Bovary (14 page)

‘You look at it this way,' Mark said. ‘You check for reality statements. You ask yourself: where am I now compared to where I was? You get feedback from people you work for. They'll tell you: now you score – I don't know – say, eight out of ten, whereas once it was three, four, something like that.'

He remembers thinking: here is Mark, talking as if he were a machine, a machine within a machine; a bright red Honda SL encased in my old silver Fiat. And then Mark said something poetic: ‘Y'know, K, I'm annoyed at having my future dictated by my footprints in the sand – places I've been, what I've done in the past, all that.'

‘You read that in a book somewhere?'

Mark shrugged, glanced away. ‘Yeah, probably.'

At that moment they turned into Underwood Street.

The house they were looking for was an elegant old terrace, painted in lavender and white. It stood on the brow of the hill looking down to the sweep of the bay and had a big peach-coloured hibiscus bush in bloom by the front door. He remembers it now as one of those stifling summer evenings, the gardens petrified in a humid stillness; remembers how he and Mark paused at the iron gate, struck by the shadowy beauty of the street; the exquisite tracery of the trees in outline against the darkening sky and the rich, orderly beauty of the terraces, unfolding down the hill with the satisfying symmetry of a series of perfect numbers.

The door was ajar so they went in and through to the front salon, a room of elegant proportions fitted out like a corporate office; pale-grey carpet, eight rows of pale-green chairs and a whiteboard positioned in front of a marble fireplace. On the chairs were twenty or so men and women who looked like Mark, mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, stressed-out yuppies in casual but expensive clothes. Instinctively he cast an appraising glance at the women in the room and noted Mark doing the same. Primal instinct.

They sat and looked ahead without speaking, as if they had exhausted their chitchat in the car. Before long a man in his early forties, dressed in a suit, entered the room from the rear and stood by the whiteboard. Smiling at them, he introduced himself as Jack.

Jack was to be their trainer.

Rick liked Jack on sight. In his light-grey suit, pale-blue shirt and yellow tie he presented in every way as a middle-level executive. His skin shone with a tanned glow and this, combined with his balding head and round face gave him the appearance of a corporate buddha. Jack spoke with an almost permanent smile on his lips, as if sharing a joke, but his eyes shone with a warm dark gloss, insinuating that yes, the unfathomable
could
be fathomed.

He began by telling them that meditation was a simple, undemanding process through which the mind effortlessly arrived at the source of consciousness.
The source of consciousness?
Immediately Rick's fickle mind began to play with this, punning on the idea of source – he couldn't get out of his head an image of sauce on the brain; a large brain on a plate with a lurid red sauce poured over it, and then a white sauce, and next a yellow, like thick custard … without this sauce the brain looked remarkably naked, uninteresting even … doughy and grey, like batter left overnight in the fridge that has begun to oxidise … could this be the
organe supérieur
, the
summa cum laude
, the source of all that was bright and beautiful and inspired?

Look how his mind had wandered already! He recollected himself.

Jack was talking about peak performance. ‘During meditation the body enters into deep levels of relaxation and rest, a more profound rest than that experienced even in deep sleep. The body becomes attuned to the subtle vibrations of nature, which repair the body and release the creative energies of the human organism …'

Next to him, Mark had fallen asleep, which was not surprising, given that the words had a high degree of abstraction, an airy quality, and that often Mark didn't leave his workstation until after ten at night. And Jack had a soft, soothing voice which exuded warmth. The effect was soporific. He was, Rick could see, a very contained man, though with a surprising tendency to a soft, silent giggling. Nevertheless there was something attractive in his persona that was hard to define, something subtle.

Rick looked around him. Not everyone, it was clear, had a mind as restless as his. Everyone else appeared attentive, and serious. Most of them were younger than he, and as junior executives they were used to paying attention; used to listening for the ‘grab', the slogan, the key phrases, the code words, the open sesame.

And now they were here for the mantra. As Mark would say: ‘If it works, it's cool.'

In Jack's discourse there seemed, he thought, to be a lot of emphasis on the brain. What about the heart?

As if reading his mind Jack moved on to the subject of ‘perfect health' – didn't these people ever use qualifiers? – and heart disease, and how medical research had shown conclusively that meditation regularises blood pressure and lowers cholesterol and stress levels. Indeed, in orthodox terms, this was the area of its greatest success.

Beside him now, Mark had begun, gently, to snore.

Jack's soft, hypnotic tones were such that perhaps they didn't need to learn to meditate; perhaps all they needed was a tape of Jack's voice with one of those piping flutes in the background and the sound of running water. On the way over Mark had told him about the time he worked for a hot new IT company in Palo Alto in California where, during a particularly tense and difficult project, one of the supervisors had had a notion to play a relaxation tape as background in the office, a tape of running water, until all the programmers had shrieked that it was getting on their nerves. Tonight, however, The Voice was working for Mark, who dozed through almost the entire talk, eyes closed, head slumped forward on his chest.

Jack concluded by asking each one of them to say why they had come. And they all said something sensible. They wanted ‘better concentration'; they wanted ‘to achieve more', to do twice their current workload. They wanted to feel less tense, less tired, less impatient, more calm. No-one said they wanted to maximise their potential. No-one admitted to being fed-up and angry. And no-one talked about ‘the mysterious absences at the heart of even the fullest lives', to quote from a book review Rick had idled through in the dentist's surgery only yesterday.

Mark woke up in time to say that he regarded his body as a prime racing machine, and just lately he realised it needed a bit of a tune-up. Rick said he wanted to get more done with less fatigue. What else was he going to say? That he was angry? That as he grew older he was getting angrier? Angry at the universe for failing him? Listening attentively to the reasons the others gave for being there that night, he wondered if they too were dissembling, cam-ouflaging some inner vision of flames – some moment of madness, some visceral ache of yearning – with the managerial workspeak of the brochure, a language they knew how to put on like a suit of armour; like battle fatigues.

The introductory talk finished early, around nine-thirty, and Rick hadn't far to drive his companion who asked to be dropped off at a club in Oxford Street. Refreshed by his nap at the meditation centre, Mark was ready to party on. On their way up the hill Rick teased him about falling asleep and with the disarming ingenuousness of a child, Mark asked for a ‘recap' on what he had missed.

‘Fill me in, K,' he said. ‘What was the gist of it?'

‘Some things are too subtle to be rendered into paraphrase.'

Mark threw back his head. ‘Seriously?' And then: ‘Yeah, yeah, I'll bet.'

God, he was a boy; a slick, smart-arsed boy.

‘You'd better stay awake tomorrow night.'

‘Yeah, definitely, if you say so, K,' winking at him as he lurched out of the car at the intersection and sauntered off up the neon-lit street.

Driving home, Rick was disconcerted by the fact that even if there had been time, he couldn't have told Mark much of what Jack had said. Was his concentration as shot as all that? Or had it all been too vague, too abstract? He would have to say the evening had been something of an anti-climax: he had expected revelations but none came. Perhaps the first night was a test, and if you persevered and kept coming back, in the end you'd get a pay-off; the magic word, the open sesame.

And you did. Get the magic word, that is. On the second night Jack told them about the
mantra
. The mantra was a special sound. It was like a key in the lock of their inner being, and the insistent chant of it would open them up and put them in touch with—

With what? On this they still weren't clear. Everything Jack said sounded reassuring at the time, but evaporated in your ears within seconds.

For the next two nights the talks continued as before. And each evening Mark sat dozing in a chair beside him, so that Rick had to ‘recap' for him on the way home before dropping him off at a club: Zero in Oxford Street, Moscow in Surry Hills, Yada Yada in Leichhardt. Clubs seemed to have a life of twelve months; Rick hadn't heard of any of them. It made him feel old. ‘I don't know any of these places,' he said to Mark.

Mark shook his head in mock commiseration. ‘This is what happens when you get married, K.'

He found it extraordinarily difficult to summarise what Jack said about anything – like the words were little nodules of polystyrene filler, the sort that come in vast crates as packing around white-goods and spill out of the box when you attempt to extricate the new appliance. You could gag on them. On another night he would find the words rolling around in his mouth like ball bearings: precise, elegant and full of weighty momentum, but cold, smooth and hard to trap.

One night, clearly bored with Rick's struggle to condense ‘the message', Mark interrupted his waffling to say: ‘Y'know, K, I was really surprised when I saw you had put your name down for this course. You impress me as the strong type. You know,' his mouth curled into a mock grimace: ‘Stress? What stress?'

‘I
am
the strong type,' Rick said. He was not about to enter into emotional correspondence with a younger man.

And anyway, it was far too difficult to explain, especially to someone like Mark, that lurking somewhere in his consciousness, like a virus in the bloodstream, was a sliver of pain he could neither disgorge nor salve. He could think of some parodic scenario that might make sense to Mark: a virus, say, infecting his programme, or that movie,
The Invisible Man
, where something starts making its way through the pathways of the body, like a microchip afloat in a vast cyclotron.

Was it in the shadowy background of his consciousness? Or at the forefront of his unconscious, whatever
that
was. When he thought of it at all, he tended to think of the unconscious as a level playing field where small, neurotic athletes jostled for the front row – and learning to meditate might enable him to marshal them into some kind of team where all the elements could combine well, could get on cosy terms, could resolve whatever it was that was creating friction between them. The mantra would be the oil in the grease-and-oil change, some soothing balm that would ease them into their right formation, and he would become a cyber programme without glitches; debugged.

The perfect dream of neuroscience.

At last he would be rid of the unresolved yearning that had haunted him all his life; that was so unsettling, like a metaphysical pinprick in every balloon of pleasure; in every activity, actual or potential, virtual or real.

On the fourth night they got it: the mantra. The payoff, the special word, the magical formula.

As usual he and Mark went straight from the office and they were late, and hungry. Mark wanted to stop near Taylor Square and get a falafel.

‘We haven't time,' Rick said.

‘I'm starving.' He knew that Mark, like many of his team, would have skipped lunch, or shot out for a Mars Bar from the machine in the corridor. The way they worked was crazy. In the glove box, he told Mark, there was a bag of roasted almonds his very practical wife kept for times like these, or when his son, Luke, was hungry. And had he, Mark, remembered to bring the ritual offering? He half expected his young colleague to have forgotten this: the flowers and the fruit. He was touched to find that Mark had remembered, that he had them in a white plastic take-out food container in his backpack.

When they arrived there was an air of quiet expectation. Everyone was sitting on the green meeting-room chairs with their small parcels of flowers and fruit on their knees. Some had bought a large expensive bunch, wrapped in sharp peaks of cellophane and tied with twirling boutique ribbon. Others appeared to have garnered random blossoms from the garden, or purchased something cheap and already wilting about the edges from the fruit stall at the station kiosk.

Rick was first to be initiated.

In a small room at the top of the stairs Jack was waiting, seated in a stylish cane armchair. Against the wall facing the door was a table that looked like some kind of simple altar with a gold silk cloth and a single candle. Jack was dressed, as ever, in his corporate suit and welcomed Rick with his usual glowing smile. Awkwardly, and with both hands, Rick held out the small bouquet of mixed flowers, the apple and banana and the white cotton handkerchief. The ritual gifts, the token of respect. But respect for whom, and for what?

Jack accepted the gifts and placed them casually on the altar. ‘This is a very simple procedure,' he began, ‘and it won't take long. I'm going to say a prayer in Sanskrit in praise of all gurus, or spiritual teachers, and then I'll give you your mantra.'

Spiritual teachers? What spiritual teachers? Could Jack be classified as a spiritual teacher? Surely not. All through the course Rick had resolutely turned a deaf ear to the more esoteric parts of Jack's discourse; they would hover, like a haze, on the fringes of his perception. He knew the technique was an adaptation of a practice derived from Eastern mysticism, similar to, say, a suburban yoga class, and beyond that he did not wish to venture. It wasn't necessary, as Jack himself had intimated from the outset. But now the presence of the altar, however minimalist, made him feel uncomfortable.