The Shasta Gate

by Dick Croy

  As she turned to go back to the tent, Catherine was startled by a fawn that had approached to within twenty feet or so of her. Her quick intake of breath stifled what might otherwise have been a squeal of delight as she bent her knees and held out her hand to it. The little thing seemed tempted, but instinct kept it frozen and staring at her with an intensity softened by big liquid eyes. Then she saw the worried mother nearby. The doe clearly disapproved of this social call; her neck was erect and she seemed afraid even to breathe—while her fawn extended its head to get a better view of the intruder.

  Catherine longed to share this with Eugene…but it probably wasn’t a good idea to interrupt his meditation for it. Then something spooked the doe, and when she moved the little one was right behind her—with one…two…three of the cutest stiff-legged bounces. The fawn didn’t appear to touch the ground long enough even for its muscles to contract for the next spring. After the deer had vanished into the heavy mist, she looked over at Eugene almost with contempt. He sat there in the middle of nature and saw nothing.

  Catherine returned to the tent and took her toothbrush and toothpaste to the stream. When her face and mouth had been refreshed by the frigid water, she was ready for the day to begin. A cup of coffee would soon have her feeling inside the way her face felt right now. Then maybe she could get enthusiastic again about showing Eugene the waterfall. Something had to happen soon or this just wasn’t going to work out.

  At least last night they’d managed to avoid going to bed mad at each other. She appreciated his thoughtfulness. He’d apparently been able to see that her sarcastic remarks were more the result of her own confusion and self-consciousness than of anything he’d said or done. He left her alone for awhile without putting up any walls, and she found herself unable and unwilling to sustain her anger. What a pleasant surprise that had been. Of course you could attribute that in part to where they were but not entirely. She and Bill had ruined camping trips before with their fighting.

  On the other hand, she and Eugene had hardly kissed and made up either. Maybe they were better suited to be friends than lovers, but that didn’t appeal to her at all. Although she had male friends, Eugene didn’t fit the pattern. Some were former lovers, with whom she’d never have become close if it hadn’t been for the initial passion and intimacy. Others were either intellectually stimulating, able to keep her laughing, or gay.

  Eugene both attracted and confused her. He either had something she sensed but couldn’t name and hadn’t been able to bring out—or he didn’t, and she was chasing a phantom, a dream lover created by her own imagination out of her own need. There was no in-between with him—that was the one thing she was reasonably sure of.

  Last night, when they were speaking again, she had wanted him and had made this quite clear. She was reluctant to make any advances herself—something she normally wouldn’t hesitate to do—because she sensed that would only drive him further away. What else could you expect from someone who in three years had attempted only a couple of affairs?—not that she was sure she believed him. Her doubt had nothing to do with her experience of him, however; unfortunately, from what she’d seen so far his claim was all too believable.

  Rather, it sprang from her own way of life, in which such abstinence was simply incomprehensible. But this very disparity was part of his allure. Guys wanting to get it on with her were an old, if reassuring, story, while Eugene’s elusiveness was forcing her to stand back and look at things—interactions and reactions—which she normally took for granted or didn’t even see anymore, so familiar and automatic had they become.

  And while she complained to herself of her annoyance, and acknowledged but tried not to think about a greater degree of vulnerability than she usually permitted herself, there was an inner, fainter dialogue—like one radio station overpowered by another—which she found herself straining to hear.

  In it she had begun to ask some interesting and provocative questions of herself. Last night, for example, when she found herself fretting about Eugene’s lack of…what? aggressiveness? passion? warmth?—unfavorably comparing the evening with so many others she and someone new had spent learning each other’s rhythms and sexual dances—she’d suddenly stopped right in the middle of her parade of fond memories. Without taking anything away from the pleasures of the dance, where had most of those evenings led? What real and lasting satisfaction had they brought? They’d given her pleasure and excitement, but had such evenings—many of them preludes to short superficial relationships—merely held back the night? Or, in the whole way of life which they exemplified, had they prolonged it?

  Such questions, and an environment in which she felt comfortable asking them, made her think twice about coming to any rash conclusions at the moment. Contrary to what some people believed, she could be patient for awhile, when it was absolutely necessary. What was another day or so out of her summer? She wasn’t ready to write this experience off yet.

  * * *

  His eyes still closed, Eugene stretched and yawned deeply, then dropped his chin on his chest for a few minutes, to come out of his meditation gradually. Today this was just a formality since his “meditation” had been about as deep as a spray-on shoeshine. He was disgusted and irritated with himself: not so much for the inability to tune out his compulsive thoughts as for their occasion in the first place. He got so goddamn sick of floundering around in the same tired, worn patterns. It had been long enough since he was so drawn to a woman that he had deceived himself into believing he’d grown out of this enervating conflict of head, heart and sexuality. Fool—he could see now that he’d only turned his back on it.

  Waking up beside her this morning, he’d felt as if they had been together for weeks—months even. He looked down at her unguarded face on its bed of lustrous tangled dark hair, and there seemed to be a whole body of shared experience behind the two of them. Then some officious part of himself had piped up: Nah, that’s gotta be earned, buddy—and the gloating putdown by that part of his nature which held in scorn most of his normal share of human shortcomings and weaknesses was accompanied by a pang at the thought of the extraordinary work and sacrifice that went into building a relationship of real value. It was the repetitious replay of this unsettling moment of illumination, wrought by the critical overseer in him—his own impatient and short-tempered mental guru—which had so disrupted his meditation.

  Self-deceptions about the conflicts he created in his life and then chose to avoid were never very successful. He knew that revelations, dreams, and insights are a second line of defense against the anesthesia with which fear and laziness strive to “protect” us from the harsh realities of life. Of course we can choose to ignore these as well. Most of us spend a great deal of energy doing just that, and he was no exception. But when a deception was exposed, he tried to face it squarely and go from there.

  The fact that he had never experienced a long-term relationship with any human being—parents, brother, friend or lover—was not something Eugene spent much time contemplating or lamenting. He had felt great pain at his brother Daniel’s death but he’d gotten over it; and it had hurt when his father left, but he recovered from that as well. The only things painful about his mother’s death were the way it happened and the guilt he felt about not feeling any real sorrow at her passing; for all practical purposes they had parted a long time before.

  Anna was the only woman he’d loved with any thought of the future, the only woman who had effected any real change in his way of life. Yet when they parted three years ago, he’d told himself it was because a relationship with her was not compatible with either change or his future. He could either stay there with her or go off in search of himself, it had to be one or the other.

  At first this wasn’t a conviction so much as a working theory. But what he’d seen in the middle of his meditation this morning was that the distinction had been lost somewhere along the line. What he’d been asking himself since Catherine’s sleeping face set off the mental chain
reaction was, what had hardened theory into certitude? How much of his conviction that life is a path a man has to take, and a strong person must be willing to travel it alone if necessary…how much of this sprang from sound and honest thinking, and how much of it had grown up to justify the way of life he’d chosen?

  Maybe it was time to reevaluate that choice. Maybe this was why Catherine had crossed his path. Yeah, and maybe all this path business was utter bullshit. Maybe the inevitable culmination of such thinking was the cul-de-sac he was facing now. Or maybe when you put so much emphasis on paths, you were bound to keep your eyes on the ground following them—until you no longer even had to because they’d become closed circles, which you altered only by wearing them into ruts.

  Fuck it. He stood up and stretched again. Great—Catherine had made coffee. He realized for the first time how chilled he was; the heavy mist had dampened him from his hair to his boots. Not only did the coffee smell delicious but it would warm him up.

  “Coffee sure smells good!”

  Somehow the enthusiasm in his voice irritated her. Whether he was faking it or really felt it, either way she took exception. But that didn’t square with her good intentions; it made no sense to stay here if she was going to be bitchy the whole time. “It’ll be ready in a minute,” she said. You’d never have guessed her cheerfulness was an act—unless you possessed a modicum of sensitivity to moods and feelings. But Eugene appreciated her attempt anyway. Probably both of their moods would warm up as their bodies did and they got involved in the day’s activities.

  He warmed Catherine’s coffee for her, then poured a cup for himself, signaling his satisfaction with lifted eyebrows. She smiled appreciatively. He never regretted the extra room the small pot and filter-holder took up. Freeze-dried foods were one thing; instant coffee was one of civilization’s savage little regressions, like Agent Orange and napalm.

  “I saw the cutest little fawn a few minutes ago,” she said. “It came right up to me, as close as that log.”

  “By itself?”

  “Its mother wasn’t far away. She wasn’t too happy.”

  “No, I can imagine.”

  “I saw you meditating.”

  “Oh?”

  “Do you really get anything from that?”

  “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think it had some benefit.”

  “What kind of benefit? Isn’t it just like all the rest of that phony spiritual trip?” Oops—couldn’t let her anger get the bit between its teeth.

  Eugene gave her a searching look. “What makes you so uptight about it?”

  She answered matter-of-factly, the edge in her voice gone: “I told you. I think it’s a joke—like all the pseudo-spiritual bullshit going down these days.”

  “Have you ever tried meditating yourself?”

  “Of course not. Not like that anyway—like some kind of yoga or yogi, or whatever you call those Eastern ‘holy men’.”

  Eugene found it ironic to be defending meditation after a singularly unsuccessful session. What was the point? He didn’t like the idea of defending it, period. Explaining it, to someone who was interested, was difficult enough. But he felt surprising patience at the moment and an absence of defensiveness. Maybe behind Catherine’s hostility for what she so scathingly called “the spiritual trip” was a real desire to understand what it meant to him; maybe she was unwilling for some reason to admit that to herself. Why else would she keep harping on it?

  He prefaced his response with an ironic smile, picking his words carefully. “I don’t know exactly what meditation is or what it can accomplish. I only know that of the people who seem most impressive to me some say it’s a way to begin experiencing…what we were talking about yesterday: other parts of yourself. Parts usually covered up by just getting along in life.”

  “I didn’t know you took all that so seriously. I mean, I know we were talking about it earlier, but...”

  “It’s just an experiment, that’s all. There’s more going on in this world than we realize. Your experience with the Indian princess, for example—how do you explain that? You can’t—it just happened. I believe it happened. Anyway, if I ever decide meditation’s not doing me any good, I’ll quit wasting my time, believe me.”

  “I don’t see how you can equate what I told you with meditation. I don’t see how you could equate it with anything. I don’t even know why I told you about it.”

  “Well I’m glad you did. And I’m not comparing it to anything else....You’ve taken psychedelics before haven’t you?”

  “Sure. But I told you, I was only ten or eleven when that happened—years before I started taking any drugs.”

  “I heard you. In fact that’s my point: you’re the one who drew the comparison—when you said it couldn’t have been drugs, right? Why did you mention them in the first place?” She didn’t answer. “I’d say it was because the experiences were similar in some ways.

  “When you were stoned—on acid or mushrooms or whatever—didn’t you get a sense of how...arbitrary what we think of as ‘the real world’ really is? I felt like I’d been living my whole life with tunnel vision—and suddenly the blinders were off.”

  “I know the feeling,” she said dryly.

  “Well is that totally attributable to the drug? Or does the drug just interfere with the normal functioning of the mind so that things it normally filters out start getting through to us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t either, but I think it’s a possibility. And that certainly isn’t original with me; it’s a fairly accepted theory.”

  “I’m aware of it.”

  “Right. So then both of us may have been exposed to a different sort of reality than we normally perceive—maybe a different frequency mix or a different slice of the perceivable spectrum or something.”

  “Or maybe we were just hallucinating, right? You take one kind of pill and it lowers your body temperature. You take another kind and it makes you see things that aren’t there—or dream dreams while you’re awake.”

  “Exactly! Who knows? If I allow you the possibility of waking dreams or hallucinations, you should be willing to allow me the possibility of a different perspective of reality.” Catherine shrugged, but not from indifference. There was some excitement in her eyes now. She’d gotten involved in the discussion and Eugene could tell that she was waiting to pounce if she heard something she disagreed with.

  “For a long time I didn’t have anywhere to go with all these new perceptions I’d experienced in my own half dozen or so trips. I had nothing to relate them to. Then after I started getting more into books, I learned about the research that’s been done in psychic phenomena—especially in Russia and what used to be the Iron Curtain countries. And I read about people who could supposedly do ‘miraculous’ things. I’d always thought Christ was an isolated theological figure. Say the word ‘miracle’ to a hundred Americans and who’s going to come to mind ninety-nine times?”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Of course. But it turns out that the ‘literature of the miraculous’...” (he made a grand self-parodying scholarly flourish) “is very extensive indeed.”

  Catherine was not particularly impressed. “How are you defining ‘miraculous’?”

  “Good question. I’m not even going to try, except to say that I’m talking about supposedly superhuman feats ranging from those attributed to Christ in the Bible...to modern-day reports of Indian holy men supposedly able to materialize things out of thin air. Yogis able to remain buried alive for long periods of time—long enough that they should have died or suffered brain damage.

  “Anyway, the whole point I’m trying to make, Catherine, is that there seems to me to be evidence that there’s more to reality than most of us have any awareness of. And to me, that’s worth checking out. It’s a helluva lot better than spending a lifetime fixing cars. So that’s sort of what I’ve been up to the last three years. That’s why I’m going up to Shasta...and that’s why I me
ditate. Meditation’s supposed to be the best and quickest way to...’the next frontier’.” Again he tried to show Catherine, with a gesture to go with the hackneyed phrase, that he wasn’t really naive enough to take any of this uncritically.

  “Well...ask a simple question,” she said.

  He laughed. “Let me give you some advice about asking questions of us silent types. You’ve gotta be prepared either for one-word answers or encyclopedias, there doesn’t seem to be any in-between.”

  Catherine took a sip of her coffee and found that she’d let it get cold. She threw it away in disgust. “So you really are hoping to encounter some kind of strange experience up here?”

  “Oh absolutely.” Eugene’s eyes looked like the sun which was starting to burn through the mist, as he tried to keep a straight face. He couldn’t though, and she joined him in laughter, not quite knowing what either of them found so funny—and definitely not caring.

  Chapter 25

  If a hiker had stumbled onto the secluded spot Ram had chosen, he or she would have seen only a man, old in years but with a vigorous appearance that went beyond good health, seated cross-legged on the ground. If spoken to, Ram would not have answered, but if at all threatened, he could have roused himself instantly. But no one came by; no one ever did. Ram selected such spots for their solitude.

  So the body rested there, unmolested and uncalled upon to perform any but the most fundamental life functions. Pulse, breathing, and body metabolism were greatly reduced. No digestion was occurring for there was no trace of food or wastes in the intestines. The bladder was also empty. The kidneys and all the organs of the body were at rest.