Killing the Buddha

by Peter Manseau

  A little death here, a little death there, we can take, make our peace with, but He went too far. And the stronger, more fervent our faith, the worse our loss. The mistake we’ve made for as long as He’s killed us is that belief does not entail the necessary corollary of worship. If I wander into Fifth Avenue traffic and get run over by a bus, that does not mean that I should hobble to my knees and pray to the bus.

  Forget the land of milk and honey, you kikes, or the old sod, you micks, or La vida splendida, you spics. You’re all doomed because He loves blood. It’s His idea of ink. And Jews have always provided the best plots. That’s why He chose us to be protagonists of the tale that moves from the Destruction of the First Temple to the Destruction of the Second Temple to the Crusades to the Inquisition through expulsions and pogroms and on and on and on to the twentieth century, and glimpsing beyond today on to the glorious future that will culminate in one gigantically big bang, so that a radioactive Tel Aviv will look the way it did when my forebears looked on the wilderness, so that another race can rise from the cosmic stew to birth again and die again, to go round and round like the horses on a carousel. No wonder we’re driven crazy.

  Son of Man, The Voice says privately. Stop thinking and speak.

  But I can’t. It’s unspeakable. Can these bones live?

  That depends on your definition of life. If the deity is the prime mover, then the creations on my carousel must qualify as lesser movers. And if you ask for something more than mere existence, say the two greatest possible attributes—beauty and morality—well, these creatures are beautiful, more so than the immortal, intolerable deity who informs them. And as for morality; well, they do no harm, so they’re ahead of the game in their endless circle, striving, striving, and never advancing an inch, just like people.

  Giddyap!

  The horses’ painted wooden coats begin to take on an odd texture that could make me swear individual hairs were growing out of their wooden cores, rippling in the wind. Their curved wooden muscles are gaining depth and nuance. Above the calliope, I hear a neigh.

  The Wednesday girl looks scared, the twins are screaming, and the tall boy on the cow is suddenly much taller, his knees leaving the ground, the cow lowing and, unencumbered by a brass pole, lumbering to its feet.

  Jesus!

  Lenny the lion is snarling, and children are desperately unwrapping themselves from their thin leather belts, installed as protection. Sigmund snaps his head up, and his glasses fly from his nose. The faces of the parents and care-givers are changing, too, as they realize that what they thought were bizarre daydreams arising out of the mesmeric whirl of horses and other beasts and waving hands and smiling faces are quite real. Duke the donkey, otherwise known as Alan the ass, brays and bucks, and knocks his brass pole into another, which topples into another like a bowling pin, and the carousel is spinning faster.

  The girl in the Wednesday dress, first onto the carousel, is first off her mount, running for the edge, but a brown mare jostles her toward Wally the whale, gulping air in search of water and plankton, commencing to flop over onto his side.

  One horse, rearing, smacks its foot against the calliope and opens a gash, from which blood as red as onion paste spills, and an ivory white shaft gleams through.

  Can these bones live?

  No, no they can’t. I’ve had enough. My ministry is over. I hit the stop lever, but it snaps in my fingers, and the merry-go-round goes round more wildly.

  I dash out of my enclosure onto the spinning platform. I’m like a speck of dust on an old record turntable, kept in place by the gravitational field, trying to release the screaming children, too late to save them, too late. God is here and there is no escape. As they throw themselves off the edge, the centripetal force hurls them out of their intended path, to the paving stones. The tall boy flies headfirst into the ticket kiosk and lies silent.

  Can this God be?

  The dizzy lion leaps off the platform and stands on an outcropping of rock, roaring, while the runaway chariot clatters over a curb, dragged into the path of a hansom cab filled with tourists, who also start to scream. The air is filled with noise and the snake slithers into the underbrush and the barley-shaped shamir buzzes through the base of the fake pipe organ, and the pipes crash and bang against each other, the first sound they’ve ever made.

  And I can make a sound, too, a single syllable, a word, and the word is the same word spoken earlier by the vulgar, spoiled, stupid child who worried because there wasn’t anyone in control of this ride. It’s No. No, I’ve waited forever to receive The Voice that I can finally deny. No to torture. No to death. No to any form of control.

  Look at the manes of the horses, fine as spun silk, look at the carved nostrils, flaring so widely you can practically hear the intake of breath. Look at their finely marbled eyes, glittering in the last rays of the sun, taking the light of creation and spitting it back. There’s something worth worship, because it was made by a person.

  So the people sculpt and prostrate themselves before idols. Fine. So they fornicate. Great. Greed is only another word for desire, which implies hope; wrath is righteous anger. Slander is the same thing as fiction, which I love. Every sin is a virtue, because it is human, and every virtue a sin because it belongs exclusively to the deity who does not exist and has countenanced every evil since Eden.

  Listen to me.

  No.

  Listen and obey!

  No! Take your voice back to the mountains. You had your chance and it got us nothing. God of chance, we are Chosen indeed—by ourselves.

  At last, the carousel grinds to a halt. The children are gone, the animals gone. I stand alone among the ruins of my very own Temple. I grab the brass ring.

  Crestone, Colorado

  But you laugh at them, O Lord…

  PSALM 59:8

  BEFORE we left Texas, an older friend gave us some advice for writing about God, which is to say, for telling stories about what people want and fear and what they think will happen when they die. Our friend knew something about it; he’d written books about those kinds of things. “People are gonna want to hear wacky stories,” our friend said. “The folks back home are gonna ask you to tell them about the crazy things people out in the provinces believe.

  “Here’s what you do,” he said. “Tell them a story. Any story.” We’d already told him a few, and he rattled them back at us. “Tell them about the strippers in the church in Nashville, or about the Buddhists dropping food on each other. Tell them about the Dickheads and the waitress who wants more. Get them waiting for a punch line.” We nodded. “Then tell a few more stories. Tell them about the serial killer in Florida. About the girl’s mother and the preacher and the choir singing for the electric chair. Then tell them about the calf in the mud with the birds picking it to pieces. And then here’s what you say. You say: ‘Getta laugh outta that one, asshole.’ ”

  So there was this witch, and three times a week she drove fifty miles and back to play rehearsal in Salida, Colorado. She looked just the way you’d want her to look: She was forty-two with hair as black as a bat, her eyes big and spooky-beautiful and surrounded by makeup like it had been applied with a Sharpie. The show was Damn Yankees, and she had the female lead: the devil’s handmaiden. Seriously. This witch, Debra Floyd, was starring in a musical about Satan put on by a town so Christian people wrote letters to the local paper demanding the theater change the first word of the title to Darn.

  And get this: the town Debra lived in? Not Salida, where the play was, but where she actually lived? Crestone, Colorado. This place was a zoo, an inter-religious petting zoo. A three-ring multifaith circus. Catholic monks and nuns shacking up together, three kinds of Buddhists on one long dirt road, an ashram tucked away on a dead-end street, and this Japanese art cult sitting at the top of it all, polished rocks and fake streams everywhere, like some kind of Frank Lloyd Wright Shinto ski chalet.

  The woman who runs all this—no, not the witch—the rich Danish lady who hold t
he keys to this menagerie is an oilman’s wife who discovered Native American spirituality by reading The Last of the Mohicans. Now she gives her land away to seekers. All kinds, she says, she doesn’t care what they call themselves, though she hasn’t found any Jews that fit in yet. People say her husband, Maurice Strong, has got a bunker under the valley, where he and Henry Kissinger will run the world after global warming melts the ice caps.

  Assuming, of course, the aliens don’t come first. There’s this group called the Arcturians who wanted to build a pyramid in the desert outside town, so the mothership would know where to land. Forty stories high. Hot pink. The zoning board said no. They didn’t like the color.

  But you’d have to ask the local alien expert about that. He wrote a book on Crestone and its surroundings, The Mysterious Valley, about UFOs and cattle mutilations—you know, livestock found in the desert with weird patterns carved in their haunches, poor cows sucked dry by Martians in search of bovine blood. That’s what he writes about. Did we mention he used to date Debra? The devil’s handmaiden. For a while, they were like the prom king and homecoming queen of Crestone, but they couldn’t make it work. Nothing mysterious about it—they couldn’t stop fighting.

  When we met Debra we’d been trapped in a car together for four months, and had been getting along about as well as you’d expect. Every day a new reason to hate each other. One of us shouted; one of us grumbled and stewed; both of us were tired and wanted to stay put for more than a day or two. In Crestone, we met a nice young couple who ran the local video store and were building a house made of straw outside of town; they gave us a place to stay and probably saved our lives by keeping us from killing each other. Debra lived up the road, in a black-roofed A-frame with a shingle hung out front that declared VILLAGE WITCH. Inside was cluttered with a piano, drums, a guitar, a dog, two cats, two mice, a pink python, a rat with an earring, and a scimitar Debra used in her belly-dancing routine, all of it covered with the pale red dust the wind worked in through the cracks of every house in town.

  Back in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she came from, Debra used to manage an occult store called Arsenic & Old Lace. Read every book in it. Took a course in witchcraft at community college. The instructor brought her out to his coven in the country. Back then, Somerville was still a tough working-class town, run by a thug named Whitey Bulger and his Winter Hill Gang. Debra was like a Fresh Air Kid, walking among wildflowers for the first time. Soon the witches had her in a garden, planting herbs, and in a big roomy kitchen, baking bread, and sitting under the trees in the evenings with guitars and banjos and tambourines like it was a special camp for heathen. They taught Debra how to channel her natural power, taught her magic was no different than the prayers she’d said at Catholic mass. They stripped her naked, bathed her, blindfolded her, bound her hands, dipped a magic knife in a magic cup (“Yes,” Debra said, “it’s that Freudian”), and consecrated her to the “dread Lord of Shadows,” the “God of Death and Rebirth,” the “Bringer of Fear who maketh men flee,” the “Giver of wine and vine and ecstasy.” Debra worshiped He or She of many names: Pan, Venus, Odin, Isis, Mars, Mary, Lucifer—the devil, right? Not really, said Debra. “I mean, what’s in a name? We put gods in costumes because we can’t understand.”

  The day we met her she was wearing patchwork jeans and a purple velvet top of her own creation, covered in roses, scooped low to reveal toned muscles and smooth skin. She sat out in the sun with us, offered us cigarettes. Took her about two minutes to size us up and figure out we’d been fighting. So she read our fortunes, palms and tarot cards, told us everything would be fine, and even gave us a love potion in a little turquoise pouch, told us to hang it from our rearview mirror. She noticed our eyebrows raise as she put the pouch and a small vial of magic oils in our hands. “Oh, it’s not just for romance, it’s for harmony. Trust me, it will make things better.”

  She said she had proof of her powers. Once, back when she was still new in town, she went hiking up in the mountains. Nobody told her about spring storms, so she was going along in shorts and a halter top when out of nowhere comes snow. It’s May or June, she can’t remember. Anyway, she wants to keep going, so she thinks, If only I had a hat. And what do you know? Up ahead, she spots a little blanket snagged on the branch of a tree. She takes it, wraps it around her head, and keeps going. And the snow keeps coming. She reaches the lake, but when she turns around to go down, the trail is gone. The snow is coming hard. Snow and lightning, zapping rocks and bushes, and Debra’s the tallest thing standing. So she fixes her big black eyes on the cloud, her head wrapped in the blanket, her bare arms and legs shaking, and says the magic word: “Please can you just go over there for a minute? Please?” And—according to Debra—presto, the cloud jumped away from the mountain like it was playing hopscotch. Debra was amazed. “These things don’t always happen when you try,” she said, “but when you’re in desperate need sometimes they will.” Then she laughed, a cute, benevolent cackle, all witch plus a dollop of teenybopper.

  Then there was another time, back when Debra really was a teenager, still kind of Catholic, only a little bit magic. Her father had been a drunken bum, and he’d left her. Her stepfather was a loan shark, and a drunken bum; he beat her. So one night, while the family was out on a miserable vacation on Cape Cod, Debra’s mother wakes her up in the dark. They’re leaving. They race back to Somerville, pack up their things. As soon as morning rolls around, her mom heads to the bank. While she’s gone, Wicked Stepdad shows up. “Our dog had just had puppies,” Debra remembered, “and my stepfather came in, really drunk, really enraged, and he tried to come in my room, where the puppies were, I was protecting them, and I screamed at him not to, and there was a pair of scissors, and he laughed at me”—Debra did that cackle again—“and said, ‘Well, I have a gun.’ ”

  Then? We don’t know. After a while, he left. Debra wouldn’t explain. All she’d say was that the puppies survived.

  A couple weeks later, he showed up at their new house and stole the whole litter.

  Debra had this problem you see sometimes in people who’ve been abused. It’s sort of like stage fright, but it happens all the time. Debra said it made her fall down. “Like, kerplop.” It was worst, of course, when she was actually onstage. So she had this trick to help her stay on her feet. She made her own costumes. She threaded her own belly-dancing bells and made a dog suit once to play the lead in Sylvia, and when she auditioned in Denver for a reality show, she brought along her five-foot-long pink python, Sheesha. For Damn Yankees, she made herself sparkly shoes. Spent hours gluing sequins on a pair of heels, just so.

  We caught the show three days into its sold-out run at the Salida High School auditorium. Debra was a hit, all Fosse flips and belly-dancer hips, eyelashes so long and thick you could see them flutter from the back rows. She played a sexy demon, Lola, summoned by the devil to seduce a mark, a man about to sell his soul for a song. “Straight seduction job,” the devil tells Lola. No problem, she says, before launching into her big number: “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.”

  Afterward, we were relaxing at the devil’s apartment, which was over a flower shop on the quiet main street of town. The devil’s name was Greg West, and he was the only pro in the company, a costume designer who’d grown up in Salida, fled, and returned twenty years later for reasons he couldn’t himself explain: “I guess at heart I’m just a small-town queen,” he said. Greg was a big man, neither fat nor muscular so much as simply of very large proportions. His hair was a bowl of carrots upside down, and he spoke in a rolling baritone rich with the accents of every city he’d ever lived in. He sat in the corner and lit a small blue pipe while the rest of us shared a jug of tequila. We praised the show and laughed over the bloopers and apologized to Debra for failing to make the previous night’s performance, for which she’d reserved our tickets. “Couldn’t be helped,” we said. “We flew off the road.”

  Debra’s eyes, drooping a bit, went wide.

  “Yeah,” w
e said. “On the road to Salida.” It was a straight shot of blacktop lifted off the desert floor by a low berm, no shoulder, no rail, nothing to get in the way of ninety miles per hour. We hadn’t been going that fast; we’d slowed down so we could read the map while we drove, to figure out how far we had left to travel. Then we’d looked up and there it was: not a UFO, not an apparition, just a jackrabbit in the road. We swerved hard, but there was no room for mercy, and before we knew it we were airborne, the hum of the tires weirdly gone. We thought, calm as could be, Well, that’s it.

  Neither of us could remember the landing, just the cloud of red desert dust that surrounded us for the ten minutes we sat there, wondering if we were dead or alive, Debra’s turquoise pouch of twigs and leaves dangling from the mirror. Blessed be: The car was still running. We turned on the radio—thin but perceptible, a pop song we couldn’t name. Well, shit. Guess we’ll just drive out of this one. We hit the gas and got ready to go, but nothing happened. Spinning in the sand, maybe; a little digging and a shove and we’d be off to the show. So we got out to inspect, and we’d about guessed it right, the car looked fine. Only there were no tires. We’d knocked off three out of four.

  Debra was staring at us while we told her all this, so we tried to reassure her that it was no big deal, nobody hurt, kind of funny. She shook her head slowly but didn’t say a word, so we kept going. We told her about how we stood out on the side of the road for half an hour, waiting for someone who could go for help. A small fire truck came out of the dark, two volunteers in the cab, completely soused. They put in a call on their walkie-talkies or their CBs or whatever, and then set off in a hurry, weaving away before the cop got there. “Real sonofabitch,” they warned us.