—Monks, Seb said, shaking his head. Just after I arrived for the first time in Thailand, I was out on Khaosan Road, right, in Bangkok. It must have been five in the morning, and in front of us was this giant flock of monks, a gaggle, like birds, or like creatures. We waited until they passed us—we couldn’t move, stupid with awe. They had these begging bowls, already full, and orange robes glowing against this pale green light. I think I saw God, you know. …
He laughed, but the vision animated his body, energized his hands and eyes.
—To the detox of your spirit, he said, raising a glass.
The tempo of the music quickened.
The club was hot. I don’t remember its name or anything about it other than patches of arms, legs, and stomachs as mirror balls scattered light over Thai women and Western men. It was smaller than our club in Chiang Rai and smelled of sweat and cologne.
The traveler was there with friends, all men. He ordered whiskeys, and we stood in a circle as the lights spun around us. They were talking about the hill tribes. I don’t know why. To make conversation, I told them about volunteer work I’d done with Muay and Aurelia. I described Thai Women of Tomorrow, TWOT for short, an organization to protect village girls against the sex trade. Something about the club made me say this. There was awful silence.
—Can’t stop a force of nature, one of the men said finally.
The others laughed. Tension rose, but I kept talking, my body flushed with indignation.
—You are fourteen years old, I said to the man who had spoken. You are no longer legally required to go to school. A man comes to the village. He tells you and some of your friends that you can work in the city for a year—just one year—and come home with money for your family. Your family needs that money—
—Baht for twat! another man said, interrupting me.
He had a round, doughy face and small beady eyes. I looked to Seb, who was covering his face, trying to hide that he was laughing. Still, my rage was only for the dough-faced man.
I left them, shaking with anger, and began to pace the area around the dance floor, faster and faster, until I crashed into a man moving slowly in the opposite direction. His sour smell reached me before I saw his greasy hair, a grin floating on spit-coated lips, hot glare of yellow eyes. In a humid, cramped room, my heart beat in my ears and my vision blurred as I heard the clink of his belt buckle and felt the sour damp of his pubic hair, his sticky white saliva, the terrible taste of him. I stood as if caught in the man’s stare, until a girl in blue platform heels swept by on a breeze sweet with perfume, linked her arm in mine, and led me to the dance floor. We danced to Thai pop. Despite it all, ashamed, I was energized by the thought that Seb might be watching.
At the end of the night, last chords sputtered in the speakers and the lights came up, revealing a sad, bleak room full of sweaty people. Around me, hands smoothed skirts and hair. The dancing girl disappeared. I found Seb leaning against a wall, his arm around another girl.
—You’re still here, he slurred, seeing me.
—We figured you bailed, the traveler said, emerging from a cluster of foreigners.
—We’re going for pad thai, Seb said: Luna knows a place.…
The girl laughed, slipping a finger between the buttons of Seb’s shirt. He batted her hand away, then reached his hand under her blouse, clipping her nipple. She sucked in breath.
—I don’t think Loona’s your name, he said, his face in her neck. The problem with Thai names is they’re too long. You can’t use them.
A middle-aged falang nodded to Seb.
—No more than fifteen hundred baht. They’ll talk you up. Don’t go for it.
My cheeks began to burn. I glanced at the traveler.
—Not my thing, he said, shrugging. But if it were, I’d double-bag it.
A laugh sputtered at his lips and died.
Outside, I pushed through throngs of Thai women with money belts. Seb’s image stayed with me in the streets amid the burned-garlic odors of noodle stands. I hailed a tuk tuk and gave the name of my guesthouse. Bends crashed me against the sides. Heat closed in as the engine vibrated. Fumes of petrol made the streetlamps, palms, and city walls seem large and close.
I wanted to believe that Seb wouldn’t, that it was the traveler’s influence. But the traveler, seeing me make this calculation, had headed it off.
The self is a crack in a glass globe. Seb again in the guesthouse lobby, on the stairs, in my room, where a ceiling fan churned slowly through the stale heat. I opened the window and looked out. In a lit room across the courtyard a man on a bed was masturbating. I watched until the body jerked in orgasm, then drew my curtain and fell asleep.
In the morning, the sun on the black curtains unlocked the smells of everyone who’d used the room. My sinuses were blocked. I folded my clothes into my backpack and walked outside. White sunlight. Guesthouses mirrored each other on the threadlike streets of the old city. It was a desert of lit concrete. Cafés for backpackers advertised on laminated menus: Flesh fruit smoothly, banana ban cake. Choosing one, I sat down with my things and ordered an egg, sunny-sigh up. Newspapers on the table: Terror ravages. Madrid. Europe’s worst attack since ’88. Snot dripped onto the copy of the Bangkok Post. A morgue had been set up in an exhibition hall. Relatives had to identify remains. The government blames the Basque separatist group ETA for the bombings, which come three days ahead of Spain’s general election. For the first time in a long time, I began to cry. I didn’t know anyone in Madrid, had never even been there. But I put my face on the table and sobbed. The server set a box of tissues beside me with a glass of water. Maybe he thought I was Spanish. Maybe he thought I was crying about the papers. Maybe I was.
The crying stopped as abruptly as it started. I was left with a hollow feeling, the feeling of having seen the other side of the world’s Janus face. I wanted to hold my breath for as long as those families had to search the rubble for their brothers and children and husbands and wives. I needed to start moving. It was late, and I still had to buy temple offerings before my arrival at the monastery: eleven lotus blossoms, eleven orange candles, eleven incense sticks. I dried my face, puffy and swollen in the mirror of the cafe, and hailed a tuk tuk. Traffic was stalled all the way to Payong Market. The heat of the day was already suffocating. The stoplight turned green, hardly visible against the bleached sky. Inching toward the market, I read the retreat handbook. Rules: 1. After midday, no solid food. 2. No reading of newspapers or other material. 3. No writing. 4. Speech is not allowed. 5. White clothing will be distributed upon arrival and must be worn at all times.
30
—IT WASN’T ETA, SIOBHÁN SAYS FLATLY, waving my pages in the air. It was a local cell with ties to al-Qaeda.
From her white couch, I watch the winter sky, gray and unchanging. Siobhán is driving at something I don’t yet see. To me, it’s clear that Ella dwells on the attacks because they feed her wider sense of catastrophe. What more?
—The conservative government in Spain was voted out of office for blaming the separatists, Siobhán says. The public felt manipulated. Then al-Qaeda claimed the attacks, called it Operation Death Trains.
She lights a cigarette and walks to the window. I have the unnerving sense that she is acting out something, or that she has said this before. Why tell me about the bombings? I didn’t ask. Ella’s distress over them is symptomatic of her sense of a world violence. Micro, macro, it was all mixed up for her.
—Ella didn’t know that, I say. So why does it matter?
—She found out later.
Siobhán looks away. The contents of the journals now are more familiar to me than parts of my own life, and there is no mention of al-Qaeda.
—How do you know?
She opens the window to smoke. Cold air rushes in.
—She told me.
Siobhán turns, tapping her cigarette on the ashtray, her face pale.
—Over the phone, she says. She called from the monastery. The news upset her.<
br />
Her words pin me like a specimen to the couch.
—You spoke to her? I ask, shocked.
—I thought it was important that you base your work on her journals, nothing more. But, yes, we spoke, and now it’s relevant that you know about our conversations.
—How often? I ask, hating that she can divulge crucial information on a whim. It feels like a betrayal.
Siobhán regards me, displeased.
—It started in November, exactly a month after her birthday. She called four more times, monthly, on the twenty-third. The twenty-third was the day she was born. There was no way to call her. She used a calling card. All that came up was a string of zeros. I could have gone through her mother, but …
Siobhán’s affect is so unusual that it takes me a moment to realize what she’s doing—justifying herself—and to me, as if I had the authority to declare her innocent.
—In March, she called sooner. On the fifteenth.
She shakes her head. Her skin looks ashen, but her eyes are alive, full of light and pain.
—She was upset, Siobhán says. She wanted to talk about how the terrorists blew themselves up when they were found, not weighing their chances to survive. I didn’t know what to think. It was the last time she called.
Siobhán lights another cigarette. Her hands are shaking.
—She confused everything, she says, her voice trailing off.
I churn through remembered script, looking for some reference I might have missed to their conversations. Nothing. Ella felt she was expanding into what was around her. I don’t know where I end, she wrote. I am too much.
—What else did you talk about? Was she angry? Did she ask things like why you gave her up? I ask, thinking it would be like Ella to get straight to the point.
Siobhán closes the window.
—She asked about my family origins, Irish, Scottish, that kind of thing. She wanted to know why I lived in France. I also told her about the London years, about the strength of my friendship with her adoptive mother—with your mother, too.
—Did she ask about her father?
Siobhán looks at me, as if to say she understands my game and will play along.
—Yes, she says. After all, she has a right to know. He was a philosophy student. From Germany. He doesn’t know about her.
—What color is his hair?
—Very light. Long when I knew him.
—Were you in love?
—No.
—Why didn’t you tell him?
—I was very young. I wasn’t sure what I would do, but I wanted it to be my choice.
Siobhán moves away from the window, breaking whatever spell we’d fallen into.
—Ella and I spoke five times. Now you know. Her last call was from the monastery. She said she was breaking a vow of silence to do it. She said she found the meditation difficult.
Siobhán seems at peace, but I’m agitated, shaken, having taken a role that isn’t mine.
31
IT’S HARD TO REMEMBER THE MONASTERY. The month is splashes of color and angles of light. My journals are my memory, and I didn’t write much. A few words every few days. I had to play by the rules if the experience was going to work. If it was going to change me.
The bikkhuni says not to cry for lost worlds. They are not real. Only presence is real.
Flesh has worn off the world and I’m wandering among its old bones, listening for lonely whistles of the void.
No sick, no intestines, no stomach, no anus, no vomit, no dizziness, no suffering, no heat, no thirst, no clamminess, no consciousness, no muscles, no bone.
Tomatoes. Life seduces. Strange fruit.
The Man from Augsburg says I’m a scorpion.
Gone so wrong in this selfless place of stone and bone and no difference, only whiteness.
Punished by floods and the tiny dead for company, weak mind that was mine flayed by the moon.
Each day there was reporting with the head monk, Pra Ajarn. It was the only time speech was allowed—a time to pose questions, confess doubts, and discuss our practice, its difficulties or ecstasies. At my first reporting, Pra Ajarn—ancient body, baby-smooth face—sat under a photograph of his teacher. Rings of incense dissolved above us as I bowed, holding my palms at my chest, thumbs pressing hard against my sternum.
—Ella, Pra Ajarn said, glancing at a notepad for my name, How is your practice?
That I didn’t get it was obvious from the way I moved: from one courtyard to the next, to the library, to the bikkhuni huts, to my room, unable to find stillness, peace. That morning, I’d endured the gongs at four thirty and at seven, falling asleep again until the white sun began to sear me alive on my wooden-board bed.
—Walking meditation is easier for me than sitting meditation, I said, saving face.
Pra Ajarn’s eyes closed for a moment. He adjusted his earth-colored robes. I stared at the weave of the mat, any desire I had to be precocious made ridiculous by how little I understood.
—Samsara is joy, too, he said finally. It is strong. Most English speakers say it is suffering. It is not only suffering. Samsara is everything attracting us to life.
Even—especially—when I thought I’d made progress, grasped some facet of the Way, reporting would undo the new certainty. So, when frustration boiled over in the heat of the afternoons, I would often seek out the young monk, Pra New, who had led orientation, chipper, chatty, different from Pra Ajarn.
—Use this, here, he would tell me, pressing his stomach. Do you know about vicara? It is practice, steady pressure, like the ringing of a bell. It is what you learn only by practice. It is the only way to take away your doubt.
—But how do I know if I’m doing it right? I asked. What if I practice wrong?
—From here, Pra New said, pressing my gut, then shooing me out of his welcome office.
IT WAS AGAINST THE RULES TO CONSUME solid food after midday, but each night at dusk, a woman came to the temple gates with vats of steaming soya milk, which she ladled into plastic bags, plugged with a straw and tied off with a tiny rubber band. It was customary to drink the milk at a cluster of picnic tables with plastic tablecloths, under a tent where fluorescent light strips attracted insects of all kinds. Sitting at the tables, I noticed, each night, one of the other meditation students doing a vigorous walking meditation in the main courtyard. He had white shoulder-length hair. His walk was razor-sharp, fast, and riveted to some goal. He fascinated me because he moved without doubt. Perhaps he had found a way, through practice, to banish it. It became my habit to watch his meditation every evening, when incense snaked from the feet of the sleeping Buddhas and lanterns flung their brassy light against the stupas in the courtyards.
One evening, I arrived at the picnic tables and found the main courtyard empty and the man seated in my usual seat, three bulbous bags of soya milk in front of him. I sat across from him (we weren’t allowed to speak). His body was thin and hard, old enough to be my father’s. He consumed his first bag of soya milk, its shape collapsing under the pressure of his mouth.
—Breast milk, he muttered, as if to me.
I chewed my straw, then sucked through the slit I’d made. He consumed the second bag.
—Always hungry here, he said. They want you to forget your body. It’s impossible.
I said nothing, thinking of how we’d been advised to eat lightly to avoid desire. Sensual appetites cannot be quenched and will just grow if you give them fuel.
A sucking sound, and he was gone. In his place were three crushed bags with milk traces.
THE PRESENT, HOT, MAKES THE JOINTS of the world disengage. Salt tears in the library. Can see no humanity past my own. Mind, blown open, turns, returns. Fingernails on the buttons of Seb’s shirt. Meditate on rotting flesh to combat lust. Intestines voided themselves regularly, my body a hollow tube: secreting. Mind bound to sickly flesh, bobbing, rocking on uncomfortable seas. Skin chalk white as the sky.
The bikkhuni brought me tomatoes, saying I
needed color in my cheeks. I refused, wanting the full experience. She sat before me, patient, a tomato in each upturned palm. Finally, I took one and sucked at the skin indifferently. With the burst of seeds and juice there was sensing, taste! Lethargy broke. Pure exuberance for the rest of the day.
ONE DAY I ASKED PRA NEW ABOUT the other meditation students.
—The man who walks more quickly than the others?
—Yes, yes. He signs the ledger as the Man from Augsburg. He doesn’t give his name.
—Why? Is he really from Augsburg?
Pra New shrugged. He didn’t know.
—Every year, he comes on the same day and stays three months. His practice is not typical. He does no sitting meditation and walks too fast. We have to warn the novices not to imitate him. They always try. He builds to twenty hours of meditation per day. In his last week, he stays in his room and sees no one. We bring him food, but he won’t eat.
—And no one knows his story?
—Look at how he walks, Pra New said, exasperated. It’s there, his story. You want more than that? You are nosy. Worse than I am! He laughed. Now go, meditate!
GONGS ANNOUNCED THE MORNING MEAL: mouthfuls of Pali prayer, laminated transliterations of Thai and English on the tables. Word designs like serpents would slip into the tympanum through the cavities of the eyes. Breakfast was rice in a watery stew of what may have been vegetables. I left with my usual hunger, which felt like nausea. There would be another meal at noon, then no solid food. Some afternoons there would be ice cream, which is only artificially solid. Like all things.
Words scooped of meaning collected against me like cicada shells. Whey of words. Sibilance just sensation when its semantic privilege peels away.
Language carries dis-ease in the form of desire.
When the noon gongs sounded, I lined up at the refectory, thinking only of tomatoes: skin, color, taste on my tongue. Feeling a hand on my tunic, I turned, wanting to fall against this body, anybody, so as not to have to stand. White hair shone in the sun. He beckoned. Hesitation was brief, ineffectual in the face of my curiosity. We crossed the temple grounds and slipped between the bars of the north gate. His presence focused my thoughts. His smell was patchouli wood. Outside the monastery, a sidewalk curved through conifers and palms.
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