S. (5 page)

The roads down here are
endless
, and mostly dirt packed into ruts and ripples. It seemed to take forever to drive that forty miles, bumpety-bump-bump, trailing this enormous cloud of dust. I don’t see how people in Arizona can have any secrets, because anywhere you go you leave this giant clue of
dust in the air for hours. Not that there were any houses or people that I could see—not a sign of life except a few sorry-looking cattle and a lot of black-faced sheep who leave their wool snaggled all over the barbed wire. All the time, you are gradually rising, and the sagebrush, or maybe it’s mesquite, getting sparser around you, and the ground rockier, and then suddenly you’re overlooking this valley with tidy long fields of different shades of green, and yellow bulldozers and school buses crawling around on a system of roads below, and this big flat-roofed mall and rows of aluminum trailers, and on a shelf above them rows of A-frames being constructed on red earth scraped into shelves, and in the center of everything a sort of blue-paved space with an actual fountain, a fountain surrounded by rainbows and spray. The people in Forrest even mentioned the fountain to me as a waste of water, but I found out later it’s perfectly ecological, just the same ten thousand gallons being recycled over and over as a symbol of the circulation of karma. Midge, I was stunned. I was stunned breathless. This
had
to be the place I was meant to bring my life to. My poor bedraggled silly life, to be recycled. Even though Irving had shown us a few photographs you have to see it in context, to be in the
space
—all that gentle gray-green desert and then this unexpected valley with slanting walls of tumbled orange rock in their weird, soft-looking shapes the wind has carved, and this mild blue washed-out Western sky over everything like a face of Brahma. Inside I just felt this glorious
relief
.

There was a gate across the dirt road, and a guard dressed in lavender uniform but with a real enough gun, one of those Japanese machine guns that look like toys; but he saluted me, “Namaste,” just like Irving sometimes does, and was really only a boy, an ordinary curly-haired boy about Pearl’s age, rather cute and deferential, really, once I got over the shock
of being accosted. I explained how I wanted to join and he asked me if I had been in correspondence with the Master and I had to say no, it hadn’t occurred to me he would answer a letter and I had come pretty much on impulse. I heard myself saying this and realized that up to that moment it had been like I was doing everything in a dream and with one-half of my brain expecting Charles to wake me up and take me home. But then I took courage from the way Irving had made us see that all life is like that—lived on the skin of the void and without real substance, just motions we go through by constructing these hallucinatory goals and short-term strategies.

The boy frisked me for weapons or drugs—I had to laugh, but then felt I was undercutting some little performance he must do, like when you betray children who are being very serious about reciting a poem or shaking hands the way they’ve been taught to—and he gave me a card to put on my windshield, and from a checkpoint down in the ashram they took me to a place where several trailers had been put together to make offices. They call this hodgepodge the Uma Room, I know now. After a rudely long wait I was finally taken into this windowless place where a striking but not very pleasant red-haired woman with a black pearl in one nostril put me through an inquisition. So I wanted to become a sannyasin, she said. How come? I explained with what dignity I could muster how I’d fallen in love with the Arhat through listening to his tapes and meditating on his photograph in a yoga class I’d been taking. Oh really? she said. Did I have any venereal disease and how much money was I bringing to the Treasury of Enlightenment? I explained to her I had left my successful doctor husband on a more or less sudden inspiration and all I could bring away was eleven thousand dollars. I had thought of saying ten, but eleven sounded more like it really
was
all I
had. She said—her name, I should be explaining, is Durga, and she is sort of the Arhat’s right-hand person, he’s of course above the day-to-day details, and she has one of these quite red-headed complexions, with a face pale as ice, that opaque ice that builds up in the refrigerator, and furious green eyes and a cleft chin, which I think are generally handsomer on men—she said that didn’t seem like very much and was there any way I could get any more? Did I have credit cards? Access to jointly held securities? To make a long story short, I got
very
dignified and said I had brought my body and mind and atman and what more could the Arhat in his transcendent wisdom desire? She got uppity on her own side and said the Arhat desires nothing, his name and the concept of desire should not even be put in the same sentence, but that his work was great, as I no doubt must have noticed while driving in as an uninvited trespasser. I said I
had
noticed and marvelled and firmly intended to put myself at the service of this work. She asked me what my skills were, and I said those of a homemaker and helpmeet who had completed only two years of college intending to major in French philosophy, and she said it would certainly take some ingenuity to put those skills at the service of the Arhat. She spoke in this stilted way, like the high priestess in the old Cecil B. DeMille extravaganzas, but with this lovely Irish lilt that kept coming through. I wondered if she were exactly sane, but now that I’ve learned she had been an artiste of some sort in Dublin once, I suppose that explains it.

Really, it wasn’t all that intimidating, because outside the little windows of the trailer I could see these other sannyasins going by laughing and looking so happy and peaceful and hugging and kissing each other whenever they felt like it. She gave me a speech about how work here was worship, and
the harder the work the more fervent the worship, and she doubted I could do hard labor. I said I had been an active gardener in my old life—my old life, Midge! as if I already had a new one—and played tennis twice a week all summer, and would she like to arm-wrestle? It just popped out, a little like the things Irving sometimes says to us at the beginning of a session, to cleanse our minds and shock us into satori. I would never have been so fresh and aggressive in my normal life. Already I was
liberated
. The Arhat’s love was in the air here and giving me courage. You could see Durga was stunned for a second, her eyes narrowed and this chin of hers, like Cary Grant’s only of course on a woman not so effective, this chin of hers lifted a little inch, and all she said was I should save my internalized violence and hostility for the dynamic-meditation session. So that implied I was accepted, but, Midge, if I’d known what a dynamic-meditation session was I might have gotten back into my car, but they had taken my keys and driven it away, like valet parking, and in fact I never
have
been able to find out what happened to it, so tell Charles, if by any chance you see him, that I can’t help whatever notices from Hertz he keeps getting—they’re not my fault. The rest of that day was spent filling out forms indemnifying them against all sorts of damage and taking Rorschach and personality tests to see if I was mentally healthy enough, for my own protection as well as theirs they explained, and having a really very thorough examination for venereal diseases—
very
disagreeably done—though when I asked for a Contac for my cold they said it was just maya and to ignore it.

Oh God, I am
tired
. And now I hear people outside coming from the disco and I don’t want them to hear me talking to you on this thing—people
steal
here, there’s nothing really against it in the Arhat’s philosophy, and they say Durga has
spies everywhere and is really paranoid about betraying our secrets to the outside world—so I’ll say good night and tuck you into my sweater. You and the other girls would hardly know me. I sleep in my clothes and pretty much stink of sweat and cement, but after a while you don’t mind it, in fact you rather like it, your own smell. Here they all come, high as kites.

Next day. Just a few minutes before I go and face the hideous dinner brawl. I really shouldn’t say that; they do a wonderful job here organizing things, but the Arhat’s spiritual magnetism has just overwhelmed the facilities—a setup designed for four hundred is being asked to house and feed nearly a thousand, with a lot of day trippers and curiosity seekers on the weekends. It’s what Charles used to say of the hospital—no matter how many beds you put in, there’s always one sick person left over. I’ve found a place to be by myself a few minutes, though some of our group leaders tell us a wish for privacy is very pro-ego and anti-ashram. I don’t know—Buddha was always doing it, and the Arhat never tells us to go everywhere in a noisy smelly bunch like some of these sannyasins seem to want to. Obviously, you need to be by yourself just for spiritual sanitation now and then. When I think of all those days rattling around in my old house, going from room to room picking up, waiting for Pearl to get back from school or Charles from work or for somebody just to
call
or the mailman to come up the drive with his Laura Ashley catalogue—fourteen rooms and four baths and two and a half acres of lawn all for me—it seems obscene in a way and yet a kind of paradise. Isn’t it funny how paradise always lies in the past or the future, never exactly in the present? Just last night in his
darshan, the Arhat said there can be no happiness in the present as long as there is ego. He pronounces it “iggo.”
As lonk as sere iss iggo, the happiness
—I really can’t do his accent, he has the strangest, longest “s”s, different from any sound we make—
suh happiness fliesss avay. Like suh pet birt and suh pet catt, zey cannot exists in ze same room. Ven suh Master doess nut preside, suh vun eatss se utter
. I make it sound ridiculous, but in fact I could listen for hours, it’s like a fist inside me relaxing, like a lens that keeps opening and opening to let in more and more light. Even when I don’t understand the words—literally, from the way they’re pronounced—something very beautiful is going on inside me, by orderly stages, the way something grows, a few more cells every day.

For instance, Midge, I’m sitting out in the rocks about a half-mile from the Chakra—you know, where the Fountain of Karma plays—and there’s a kind of natural bench—out here where I am, I mean—under what they call an Arizona cypress, with these drooping gray-blue limbs and little brown berries seamed like tiny soccer balls, and I wish I had words to say how
charged
it all feels, how
pregnant
just the rockiness of the rocks seems—the little silvery veins of some mineral, the little loose heaps of rosy dust, the parallel ridges showing all the millions of years of sedimentation—and then too the breeze and the cypress with its resiny essence and the distant mountains like wrinkled tissue paper—how
sacred
, really, and the whole matter of whether God exists or not, which I always thought rather boring, is just plain tran
scend
ed, it seems so obvious that
some
thing exists, something incredibly and tirelessly good, an outpouring of which the rocks and I and the perfect blue sky with its little dry horsetails are a kind of
foam
, the foam on the crest of all these crashing waves, these outpourings all through the aeons of time, and yet terribly
still
, too—I know I’m not expressing it very well. There is something in
ev
erything, its
is
ness, that is unutterably grand and consoling. I just feel terribly
full
. I feel—how can I put this?—like I’m carved out of one big piece of crystal and exactly fitted into a mold of the same crystal. Tell Irving I feel
motionless
. Ask him if this is samarasa. My happiness is deeper than I’ve ever felt happiness before. It’s as if there is a level the sun has never reached before.
He
makes it possible, the Arhat, he per
mits
it—his voice, his glow. God, I love him, even though he makes me suffer. Love—
luff
, he says—is agony.
A-go-ny
, Midge.

A cute little lizard has just showed up. He’s quite bright green. As I’m talking he stares at me with one eye. He
really
knows how to be motionless.

I began to tell you about my dynamic-meditation session. It must have been a week ago, though it feels a lot longer. I wasn’t nearly so secure here then, so plugged into the energy sources. About ten people, most of them younger than I, plus Fritz, whose name here, I must remember, is Vikshipta. A bit like “stick shift.” Durga was there too, queening around with all her orange hair and a ton of bogus-gold bangles on her wrists and a big loose violet robe that didn’t quite conceal how overweight her hips are. I bet she put him up to it: the boy who after we’d all settled into the lotus position in a circle shouted I reminded him of his loathsome mother, even though she didn’t have a big black pussy like I did, and tried to hit me. I shouldn’t say “tried,” the little shit
did
hit me, right across the jaw so my back teeth on that side ached for days, and then tried to grab my arm to twist me down—you could see he was excited, if you know what I mean. We are all naked, I should have explained, except for the leaders, who keep their robes on. I was dumbfounded and numb, I initially
went into what Dr. Epstein used to call my masochistic-recessive mode, of, you know, the good girl who retreats into the knowledge that
she’s
not doing anything and somebody
else
is to blame. The few occasions when Daddy and Mother would get violent, over his drinking usually, I’d go into that mode, and in a way also when they bulldozed me out of Myron Stern, the boyfriend I had in college I know I’ve told you about, out of him and into Charles, who was just graduating from Harvard. Having all your clothes off in front of a lot of strangers makes you feel oddly detached. The meditation leaders in their robes weren’t doing anything to help, just swirling around shouting “Who
are
you?” at people, or “Ko veda?,” which means “Who knows?,” and the other sannyasins were making a kind of moaning hullabaloo that wasn’t any help either, and I looked up past this brat’s shaved head—you don’t
have
to shave your head here, but he was going all the way—and I saw this very Irish sort of Peg o’ My Heart smirk on Durga’s big white chalky face and I just got
mad
, Midge: you wouldn’t have known me. He, the aroused boy, had me pretty much on my back by then, and I kneed him right where he was most interested, let’s say, and then got a grip on his ears, since he didn’t have any hair, and pulled his head this way and that, and wound up pounding it on the floor while Durga and Fritz, I mean Vikshipta, were trying to separate us, which they hadn’t been doing while
he
was on top. Somehow that boy, who you could tell from the few words he pronounced and the supercilious way he tipped his head back and tucked up his upper lip had had all the advantages, was that particular kind of boy I’ve always taken an irrational dislike to. You see them all the time, the sons of people you know and the kind of country-club kid who used to be hot after Pearl. They act so—what’s the word?—
entitled
, screwed up
or not, flunking out of Andover or not, and if they don’t rack their Porsches up against a tree or overload their little heads with cocaine will end up being a professional something-or-other just like their smug chauvinistic absolutely insensitive old-fart daddies. The
language
I used against this poor boy you wouldn’t believe, Midge. It just vomited out of me, with all this suppressed rage. Tell Irving that meditation with him was never like
this
.