Mitchell dropped his head back to the floor. He was lying on a straw mat, with a plaid L.L.Bean bathing suit for a pillow. It was cool in the hut and he didn’t want to get up himself. Unfortunately, his stomach was erupting. All night his insides had been quiet, but that morning Larry had persuaded him to eat an egg, and now the amoebas had something to feed on. “I told you I didn’t want an egg,” he said now, and only then remembered that Larry wasn’t there. Larry was off down the beach, partying with the Australians.
So as not to get angry, Mitchell closed his eyes and took a series of deep breaths. After only a few, the ringing started up. He listened, breathing in and out, trying to pay attention to nothing else. When the ringing got even louder, he rose on one elbow and searched for the letter he was writing to his parents. The most recent letter. He found it tucked into Ephesians, in his pocket New Testament. The front of the aerogram was already covered with handwriting. Without bothering to reread what he’d written, he grabbed the ballpoint pen—wedged at the ready in the bamboo—and began:
Do you remember my old English teacher, Mr. Dudar? When I was in tenth grade, he came down with cancer of the esophagus. It turned out he was a Christian Scientist, which we never knew. He refused to have chemotherapy even. And guess what happened? Absolute and total remission.
The tin door of the outhouse rattled shut and the German woman emerged into the sun again. Her towel had a wet stain. Mitchell put down his letter and crawled to the door of his hut. As soon as he stuck out his head, he could feel the heat. The sky was the filtered blue of a souvenir postcard, the ocean one shade darker. The white sand was like a tanning reflector. He squinted at the silhouette hobbling toward him.
“How are you feeling?”
The German woman didn’t answer until she reached a stripe of shade between the huts. She lifted her foot and scowled at it. “When I go, it is just brown water.”
“It’ll go away. Just keep fasting.”
“I am fasting three days now.”
“You have to starve the amoebas out.”
“Ja, but I think the amoebas are maybe starving me out.” Except for the towel she was still naked, but naked like a sick person. Mitchell didn’t feel anything. She waved and started walking away.
When she was gone, he crawled back into his hut and lay on the mat again. He picked up the pen and wrote, Mohandas K. Gandhi used to sleep with his grandnieces, one on either side, to test his vow of chastity—i.e., saints are always fanatics.
He laid his head on the bathing suit and closed his eyes. In a moment, the ringing started again.
* * *
It was interrupted some time later by the floor shaking. The bamboo bounced under Mitchell’s head and he sat up. In the doorway, his traveling companion’s face hung like a harvest moon. Larry was wearing a Burmese lungi and an Indian silk scarf. His chest, hairier than you expected on a little guy, was bare, and sunburned as pink as his face. His scarf had metallic gold and silver threads and was thrown dramatically over one shoulder. He was smoking a bidi, half bent over, looking at Mitchell.
“Diarrhea update,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re fine?”
“I’m OK.”
Larry seemed disappointed. The pinkish, sunburned skin on his forehead wrinkled. He held up a small glass bottle. “I brought you some pills. For the shits.”
“Pills plug you up,” Mitchell said. “Then the amoebas stay in you.”
“Gwendolyn gave them to me. You should try them. Fasting would have worked by now. It’s been what? Almost a week?”
“Fasting doesn’t include being force-fed eggs.”
“One egg,” said Larry, waving this away.
“I was all right before I ate that egg. Now my stomach hurts.”
“I thought you said you were fine.”
“I am fine,” said Mitchell, and his stomach erupted. He felt a series of pops in his lower abdomen, followed by an easing, as of liquid being siphoned off; then from his bowels came the familiar insistent pressure. He turned his head away, closing his eyes, and began to breathe deeply again.
Larry took a few more drags on the bidi and said, “You don’t look so good to me.”
“You,” said Mitchell, still with his eyes closed, “are stoned.”
“You betcha” was Larry’s response. “Which reminds me. We ran out of papers.” He stepped over Mitchell, and the array of aerograms, finished and unfinished, and the tiny New Testament, into his—that is, Larry’s—half of the hut. He crouched and began searching through his bag. Larry’s bag was made of a rainbow-colored burlap. So far, it had never passed through customs without being exhaustively searched. It was the kind of bag that announced, “I am carrying drugs.” Larry found his chillum, removed the stone bowl, and knocked out the ashes.
“Don’t do that on the floor.”
“Relax. They fall right through.” He rubbed his fingers back and forth. “See? All tidy.”
He put the chillum to his mouth to make sure that it was drawing. As he did so he looked sideways at Mitchell. “Do you think you’ll be able to travel soon?”
“I think so.”
“Because we should probably be getting back to Bangkok. I mean, eventually. I’m up for Bali. You up?”
“As soon as I’m up,” said Mitchell.
Larry nodded, once, as though satisfied. He removed the chillum from his mouth and reinserted the bidi. He stood, hunching over beneath the roof, and stared at the floor.
“The mail boat comes tomorrow.”
“What?”
“The mail boat. For your letters.” Larry pushed a few around with his foot. “You want me to mail them for you? You have to go down to the beach.”
“I can do it. I’ll be up tomorrow.”
Larry raised one eyebrow but said nothing. Then he started for the door. “I’ll leave these pills in case you change your mind.”
As soon as he was gone, Mitchell got up. There was no putting it off any longer. He retied his lungi and stepped out on the porch, covering his eyes. He kicked around for his flip-flops. Beyond, he was aware of the beach and the shuffling waves. He came down the steps and started walking. He didn’t look up. He saw only his feet and the sand rolling past. The German woman’s footprints were still visible, along with pieces of litter, shredded packages of Nescafé or balled-up paper napkins that blew from the cook tent. He could smell fish grilling. It didn’t make him hungry.
The outhouse was a shack of corrugated tin. Outside sat a rusted oil drum of water and a small plastic bucket. Mitchell filled the bucket and took it inside. Before closing the door, while there was still light to see, he positioned his feet on the platform to either side of the hole. Then he closed the door and everything became dark. He undid his lungi and pulled it up, hanging the fabric around his neck. Using Asian toilets had made him limber: he could squat for ten minutes without strain. As for the smell, he hardly noticed it anymore. He held the door closed so that no one would barge in on him.
The sheer volume of liquid that rushed out of him still surprised him, but it always came as a relief. He imagined the amoebas being swept away in the flood, swirling down the drain of himself and out of his body. The dysentery had made him intimate with his insides; he had a clear sense of his stomach, of his colon; he felt the smooth muscular piping that constituted him. The combustion began high in his intestines. Then it worked its way along, like an egg swallowed by a snake, expanding, stretching the tissue, until, with a series of shudders, it dropped, and he exploded into water.
* * *
He’d been sick not for a week but for thirteen days. He hadn’t said anything to Larry at first. One morning in a guesthouse in Bangkok, Mitchell had awoken with a queasy stomach. Once up and out of his mosquito netting, though, he’d felt better. Then that night after dinner, there’d come a series of taps, like fingers drumming on the inside of his abdomen. The next morning the diarrhea started. That was no big deal. He’d had it before
in India, but it had gone away after a few days. This didn’t. Instead, it got worse, sending him to the bathroom a few times after every meal. Soon he started to feel fatigued. He got dizzy when he stood up. His stomach burned after eating. But he kept on traveling. He didn’t think it was anything serious. From Bangkok, he and Larry took a bus to the coast, where they boarded a ferry to the island. The boat puttered into the small cove, shutting off its engine in the shallow water. They had to wade to shore. Just that—jumping in—had confirmed something. The sloshing of the sea mimicked the sloshing in Mitchell’s gut. As soon as they got settled, Mitchell had begun to fast. For a week now he’d consumed nothing but black tea, leaving the hut only for the outhouse. Coming out one day, he’d run into the German woman and had persuaded her to start fasting, too. Otherwise, he lay on his mat, thinking and writing letters home.
Greetings from paradise. Larry and I are currently staying on a tropical island in the Gulf of Siam (check the world atlas). We have our own hut right on the beach, for which we pay the princely sum of five dollars per night. This island hasn’t been discovered yet so there’s almost nobody here. He went on, describing the island (or as much as he could glimpse through the bamboo), but soon returned to more important preoccupations. Eastern religion teaches that all matter is illusory. That includes everything, our house, every one of Dad’s suits, even Mom’s plant hangers—all maya, according to the Buddha. That category also includes, of course, the body. One of the reasons I decided to take this grand tour was that our frame of reference back in Detroit seemed a little cramped. And there are a few things I’ve come to believe in. And to test. One of which is that we can control our bodies with our minds. They have monks in Tibet who can mentally regulate their physiologies. They play a game called “melting snowballs.” They put a snowball in one hand and then meditate, sending all their internal heat to that hand. The one who melts the snowball fastest wins.
From time to time, he stopped writing to sit with his eyes closed, as though waiting for inspiration. And that was exactly how he’d been sitting two months earlier—eyes closed, spine straight, head lifted, nose somehow alert—when the ringing started. It had happened in a pale green Indian hotel room in Mahabalipuram. Mitchell had been sitting on his bed, in the half-lotus position. His inflexible left, Western knee stuck way up in the air. Larry was off exploring the streets. Mitchell was all alone. He hadn’t even been waiting for anything to happen. He was just sitting there, trying to meditate, his mind wandering to all sorts of things. For instance, he was thinking about his old girlfriend, Christine Woodhouse, and her amazing red pubic hair, which he’d never get to see again. He was thinking about food. He was hoping they had something in this town besides idli sambar. Every so often he’d become aware of how much his mind was wandering, and then he’d try to direct it back to his breathing. Then, sometime in the middle of all this, when he least expected it, when he’d stopped even trying or waiting for anything to happen (which was exactly when all the mystics said it would happen), Mitchell’s ears had begun to ring. Very softly. It wasn’t an unfamiliar ringing. In fact, he recognized it. He could remember standing in the front yard one day as a little kid and suddenly hearing this ringing in his ears, and asking his older brothers, “Do you hear that ringing?” They said they didn’t but knew what he was talking about. In the pale green hotel room, after almost twenty years, Mitchell heard it again. He thought maybe this ringing was what they meant by the Cosmic Om. Or the music of the spheres. He kept trying to hear it after that. Wherever he went, he listened for the ringing, and after a while he got pretty good at hearing it. He heard it in the middle of Sudder Street in Calcutta, with cabs honking and street urchins shouting for baksheesh. He heard it on the train up to Chiang Mai. It was the sound of the universal energy, of all the atoms linking up to create the colors before his eyes. It had been right there the whole time. All he had to do was wake up and listen to it.
He wrote home, at first tentatively, then with growing confidence, about what was happening to him. The energy flow of the universe is capable of being appercepted. We are, each of us, finely tuned radios. We just have to blow the dust off our tubes. He sent his parents a few letters each week. He sent letters to his brothers, too. And to his friends. Whatever he was thinking, he wrote down. He didn’t consider people’s reactions. He was seized by a need to analyze his intuitions, to describe what he saw and felt. Dear Mom and Dad, I watched a woman being cremated this afternoon. You can tell if it’s a woman by the color of the shroud. Hers was red. It burned off first. Then her skin did. While I was watching, her intestines filled up with hot gas, like a great big balloon. They got bigger and bigger until they finally popped. Then all this fluid came out. I tried to find something similar on a postcard for you but no such luck.
Or else: Dear Petie, Does it ever occur to you that this world of earwax remover and embarrassing jock itch might not be the whole megillah? Sometimes it looks that way to me. Blake believed in angelic recitation. And who knows? His poems back him up. Sometimes at night, though, when the moon gets that very pale thing going, I swear I feel a flutter of wings against the three-day growth on my cheeks.
Mitchell had called home only once, from Calcutta. The connection had been bad. It was the first time Mitchell and his parents had experienced the transatlantic delay. His father answered. Mitchell said hello, hearing nothing until his last syllable, the o, echoed in his ears. After that, the static changed registers, and his father’s voice came through. Traveling over half the globe, it lost some of its characteristic force. “Now listen, your mother and I want you to get on a plane and get yourself back home.”
“I just got to India.”
“You’ve been gone six months. That’s long enough. We don’t care what it costs. Use that credit card we gave you and buy yourself a ticket back home.”
“I’ll be home in two months or so.”
“What the hell are you doing over there?” his father shouted, as best he could, against the satellite. “What is this about dead bodies in the Ganges? You’re liable to come down with some disease.”
“No, I won’t. I feel fine.”
“Well, your mother doesn’t feel fine. She’s worried half to death.”
“Dad, this is the best part of the trip so far. Europe was great and everything, but it’s still the West.”
“And what’s wrong with the West?”
“Nothing. Only it’s more exciting to get away from your own culture.”
“Speak to your mother,” his father said.
And then his mother’s voice, almost a whimper, had come over the line. “Mitchell, are you OK?”
“I’m fine.”
“We’re worried about you.”
“Don’t worry. I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound right in your letters. What’s going on with you?”
Mitchell wondered if he could tell her. But there was no way to say it. You couldn’t say, I’ve found the truth. People didn’t like that.
“You sound like one of those Hare Krishnas.”
“I haven’t joined up yet, Mom. So far, all I’ve done is shave my head.”
“You shaved your head, Mitchell!”
“No,” he told her; though in fact it was true: he had shaved his head.
Then his father was back on the line. His voice was strictly business now, a gutter voice Mitchell hadn’t heard before. “Listen, stop cocking around over there in India and get your butt back home. Six months is enough traveling. We gave you that credit card for emergencies and we want you…” Just then, a divine stroke, the line had gone dead. Mitchell had been left holding the receiver, with a queue of Bengalis waiting behind him. He’d decided to let them have their turns. He hung up the receiver, thinking that he shouldn’t call home again. They couldn’t possibly understand what he was going through or what this marvelous place had taught him. He’d tone down his letters, too. From now on, he’d stick to scenery.
But, of course, he hadn’t
. No more than five days had passed before he was writing home again, describing the incorruptible body of Saint Francis Xavier and how it had been carried through the streets of Goa for four hundred years until an overzealous pilgrim had bitten off the saint’s finger. Mitchell couldn’t help himself. Everything he saw—the fantastical banyan trees, the painted cows—made him start writing, and after he described the sights, he talked about their effect on him, and from the colors of the visible world he moved straightaway into the darkness and ringing of the invisible. When he got sick, he’d written home about that, too. Dear Mom and Dad, I think I have a touch of amoebic dysentery. He’d gone on to describe the symptoms, the remedies the other travelers used. Everybody gets it sooner or later. I’m just going to fast and meditate until I get better. I’ve lost a little weight, but not much. Soon as I’m better, Larry and I are off to Bali.
He was right about one thing: sooner or later, everybody did get it. Besides his German neighbor, two other travelers on the island had been suffering from stomach complaints. One, a Frenchman, laid low by a salad, had taken to his hut, from which he’d groaned and called for help like a dying emperor. But just yesterday Mitchell had seen him restored to health, rising out of the shallow bay with a parrotfish impaled on the end of his spear gun. The other victim had been a Swedish woman. Mitchell had last seen her being carried out, limp and exhausted, to the ferry. The Thai boatmen had pulled her aboard with the empty soda bottles and fuel containers. They were used to the sight of languishing foreigners. As soon as they’d stowed the woman on deck, they’d started smiling and waving. Then the boat had kicked into reverse, taking the woman back to the clinic on the mainland.
If it came to that, Mitchell knew he could always be evacuated. He didn’t, however, expect it to come to that. Once he’d gotten the egg out of his system, he felt better. The pain in his stomach went away. Four or five times a day he had Larry bring him black tea. He refused to give the amoebas so much as a drop of milk to feed on. Contrary to what he would’ve expected, his mental energy didn’t diminish but actually increased. It’s incredible how much energy is taken up with the act of digestion. Rather than being some weird penance, fasting is actually a very sane and scientific method of quieting the body, of turning the body off. And when the body turns off, the mind turns on. The Sanskrit for this is moksa, which means total liberation from the body.
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