At six they met in the main shrine room. There were forty of them. They sat overlooking a valley. At the bottom of a nearby hillside was a manmade turtle and lotus pond. The pads were flowerless in the muddy water, which was golden in the morning light. The umdze rang the gong and they stood and walked in circles around the shrine room, their right hands in the palms of their left.
* * *
Bill was the dhathun leader. He had a long face and gray hair, and he was tall. He had put on a shirt and tie. They were in the dining room, and it was just after 2 p.m., and he sat on the meditation cushion on the floor. “Is this anybody’s tea?” he asked. “Can everyone see me okay?”
“I can’t see,” Ema said. She stood up. “I can see now.”
“Okay.” Bill clacked two pieces of wood together. “So, when you hear that sound, that means you bow, and you untie your set.”
He bowed.
“You might want to follow along,” he said, and he looked at Ema.
Ema sat down. She said, “Are we supposed to come up after the bow? Or do we just go straight down.”
“Just go straight down.” Bill made the gesture again. He bowed, bent down farther, and untied his oryoki set. He said, “What’s nice about this knot is, if you do it right, it just pulls apart. It’s a slipknot.”
“How do you tie that?”
“You start out like this.” He laid his left hand, palm up, on top of his set.
“Wait. Can you do that again, this time so I can see it?”
“Well, you might want to stand up.”
“I can’t stand up and do the knot,” Ema said. “That’s what I said at the beginning, but you wouldn’t listen.”
“Okay, okay.”
He untied and retied the knot for her twice, then moved on to the second knot, and then he stopped short.
“I made a mistake. I’m sorry. Okay, now, actually, I forgot. The first thing we’ll do is, you’ll hear the ding, and then you’ll go and get tables. Now, there’re a lot of variations on that, and you’ll hear a million different ways, so let’s just say that the fourth member of the quadrant gets up, goes to the head of the quadrant, bows, and walks down the line to the back of the shrine room.
“Do you bow first?” Ema asked.
“What do you mean first?”
“Before you go and get the tables.”
“You bow first,” Bill said.
“I know that, but where do you bow? At the front or at the back?”
“At the head. Now,” he said, lifting the wipe serviette, “you want to take this ratty dirty thing here and fold it in half, then fold it in a trifold.”
“I can’t see,” Ema said.
Bill extended both arms high above his head, and he repeated himself, demonstrating the fold.
“But normally, of course, you’re going to want to do this with your hands held a little lower.”
“A comedian,” Ema said.
“What?” The dancing-stretching woman gave Ema a look that struck to her core. She said, “Some of us want to learn.”
“I was just kidding.”
“Some of us have dexterity issues,” an elderly woman said.
“Some of us have just plain issues,” the dancing-stretching woman murmured, and everyone laughed, except Bill and Ema.
Bill said, “So once you’ve got your wipe serviette folded, you’re gonna want to take that in your left hand and set it down before you. Then you’re gonna want to pick up your setsu case with your left hand and rotate that forty-five degrees, and set that down under your wipe serviette.” He shook his bowl out as he went on. “We always want to pick up bowls with our two thumbs,” he began. “Tell me if you can do that.”
“Uh, no. No, I can’t do that,” the dancer woman said. “Carpal tunnel. Lifetime of typing!” She turned to all the retreatants and said, “Use ergonomic keyboards!”
“I can’t do it either,” the elderly woman said. “Could you explain it better? I don’t think we’re getting it.”
* * *
After two weeks, during a break, Bill came and sat beside Ema. The dancer-stretcher was on the floor with her heel to her cheek. After some small talk, Ema said, “How long does it take to do a thousand prostrations?”
“Not very long,” the dancer-stretcher said, even though no one asked her. She said, “About two, or two and a half hours.”
“It always took me longer,” Bill said. “Boy, you’re flexible.”
“Well, either way,” Ema said, “that’s a long time to stay focused.”
“But it really isn’t,” the dancer-stretcher said. “I mean, when you think about it.” She flopped forward to full splits and tapped her forehead to the carpet. Ema thought she had to be at least fifty-five.
“Who said I was focused?” Bill said.
“I did ngondro two times,” the dancer-stretcher said. “I did the Drukpa Kagyu ngondro and the Longchen Nyingthig.”
“So you’ve done, in your life, two hundred thousand prostrations?” Bill asked.
The dancer gave a short nod. “The first time, I did them too fast—I was told to. The second time, I did them slower, and that was better. The first time, it was too much. We had armed gunmen come into the place where we were practicing.”
“Oh my God.”
“It was too much.”
“What did they do?”
“They tied us up and kicked us around.” She held her hands as though she had a machine gun. “It was too much. But then we called up this lama, and he did a mo, and he said it was okay to go on.”
A blind woman came and sat on Ema’s other side. She dipped her tea bag methodically in a cup of hot water and turned her eyes from person to person.
“Hey,” Ema said to the dancer, “I’ve been meaning to ask you this, because I saw you sleeping in the shrine room at first, and then I didn’t. Where’re you sleeping?”
“I’m sensitive to the heating system,” the dancer said. “I have a secret place.”
“Where?”
The blind woman laughed.
“What?” the dancer said.
The blind woman said, “Nothing. Just, you know. ‘The secret place.’ I think we all have one.”
The dancer lifted one shoulder. She said, “Gross.”
Ema would have grilled the dancer, but apropos of nothing, the blind woman began to ask Bill about the nature of reality. The blind woman wore color-coordinated outfits, and Ema always wanted to ask her how she did it. The blind woman offered reiki during breaks, and Ema kept meaning to sign up so she could get her alone and ask the secret. Probably just something on her tags.
“If it’s all a dream…” The blind woman was talking to Bill. She had her face pointed at him. She said, “If I’m not real, then what about science? What about objective truth and reproducible scientific data?”
“But that could be a dream, as well,” the dancer said.
The blind woman turned to face the dancer-stretcher and said, “Sloane, think about it. Someone does an experiment in one place, and a hundred years later, in an entirely different place, it can be done again with the same results. How is that a dream? Fusion has been taking place on the sun before humans existed, so how is the atom bomb imagined.”
“Your name is Sloane?” Ema asked. She had a funny feeling.
“But all of that is in your mind,” the dancer said. “Sloane Newam. You’re Ema, right? Nice to meet you.” She rolled through the splits, then bent her knees and arched her back to touch the balls of her feet to her forehead.
“That’s impossible,” Ema said.
“I think they’re just two understandings of reality,” Sloane Newam said. “Both are completely logical. See, in the Western sense, a subject precedes an object. Or I mean—sorry—an object precedes a subject.”
“No, I mean it’s impossible that you’re Sloane Newam. I mean, the Sloane Newam? Sloane Newam the writer?” Ema said.
“Used to be, yes. Now I do yoga.”
Sloane
Newam rolled onto her neck and tried to touch her toes to the ground in front of her as she explained to the blind woman that, relatively, there were truths, but ultimately, there was nothing.
“I’m freaking out,” Ema said. “The same Sloane Newam who interviewed Gorbachev?”
Addressing both Ema and the blind woman, Sloane Newam got her feet onto the ground. She lifted herself to standing and said, “Take it like this. This table. When I reach out and touch it, I can’t experience anything but my mind. I’m not experiencing a table, but rather, sense data—so-called touch, sight—is being transferred from my fingers to my brain.”
“I’m seriously actually freaking out,” Ema said. “Can everyone please be quiet?” She wanted to touch Sloane Newam.
But the blind woman seemed moved by what Sloane Newam had said. She touched the table and said, “So the scientific data is in my mind as well.”
Ema let out a groan and stormed off.
* * *
It was a special day. In the shrine room, Bill had set up a large flat-screen TV, and on it was a ceremony for the teacher, who was going into a yearlong retreat. Sloane and Ema were servers, and sat outside the shrine room with group of five others serving the meal. Inside the shrine room, people watched the TV, for the most part, from cushions. They were seated Indian-style on the floor, and the mood was quiet and still, as though they were waiting to, or wondering if they would, feel something. The ceremony itself was being held in a gymnasium on the other side of the country. Twelve Asian women in brightly colored dresses were dancing. Ema still hadn’t approached Sloane Newam to tell her the truth about what was happening. Whatever that truth might be—she herself wasn’t sure.
“He is utterly liberated from the skandhas,” the people inside the shrine room began chanting. “He has cut the knots.” Ema noticed that Sloane Newam was chanting, so she started to chant, too.
A server whom Ema had not noticed before stood abruptly and said, “Do we set the rice bowl down on the ground?”
“We hold it,” Sloane Newam said.
“Exactly,” Ema said.
“You hold their bowl?” The man was in his sixties, and he looked desperately panicked.
“No, the pot of rice.”
“Right, of course.”
“Rice,” Bill said. It was the first time Ema had seen him flustered. “No! No. Not rice. No rice.” He held a flat palm toward Sloane Newam, indicating she was not to stand.
“If you can’t hold it,” Sloane said, “kneel on one leg, and balance the pot on your knee.”
Sloane Newam said, “Enter the shrine room with elegance.”
There was a soft clacking sound. It was the blind woman.
“To the shrine,” Bill said. “To the shrine, to the shrine.”
“With elegance!”
“Do we bow?” the desperate man asked, and Sloane Newam pushed him forward. Ema was at the threshold to the shrine room when she realized all the people inside, hundreds of them, were singing, “Ema, the phenomena of the three worlds of samsara, not existing, they appear, how incredibly amazing.” She stopped dead. She set the pot of rice on the ground. Then they all stared at her. They kept saying it! Were they crazy people? Did they think this was a game. “Who arranged this?” she said.
She saw Bill raise his eyebrows at Sloane Newam. Others of them looked confused, but they all kept staring at her and singing that song. She picked up the pot and went to a quadrant. It was a back one. You were supposed to start at the head. Some divorced guy was really enjoying this psycho gag. He was a bald loser, and now he was smiling at her, singing, “Ema, the phenomena, of the…”
“Cute,” she said, and spooned rice into his bowl.
He lifted two fingers to indicate he’d had enough, and furrowed his brow. She spooned three more shovels of rice in his bowl. “Cute,” she said. “Cute, yes, I see your fucking fingers. How incredibly amazing.”
She went to the next woman, and she was at the third when Bill placed a hand on her shoulder.
“What happened?” he asked outside.
When she told him, he explained that they had been singing one of Milarepa’s songs. Ema, in Tibetan, meant “How wonderful.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have trust issues. I get these panic attacks, so if I seem weird, that’s why. This is kind of like a nightmare to me, and I think maybe I should just—”
Sloane Newam walked up and put a hand on her shoulder. “Babe, it’s why we chant. We chant each morning, ‘May my confusion dawn as wisdom.’ That’s why.”
Ema sat on a bench. As she began to put her shoes on, the tears started. She got up and walked back to Bill and Sloane.
“I’m having an anxiety attack,” she said. “I’m having a breakdown.” Her face twitched as she spoke, folding in at her cheeks, and the color rose up past her forehead, shading into her hairline. She knew when that happened that she looked like a samurai at the height of emotion in a kabuki play, and—in speaking the words—she had begun to cry harder. Sloane said, “Okay—okay,” in a soft voice.
Bill said, “You go.”
“It’s only going to get worse,” Ema said. “I know myself. I can’t do it, so you guys better figure something out. I can’t be here. I need to go away.”
She went down to the women’s changing room, where she sat in a plastic chair and, for a little over ten minutes, cried.
It was close to five, and almost dark outside. She got her cell phone from the pocket of her coat and turned it on. The house was quiet. It was empty. Everyone was in the shrine room, watching the time-delayed simulcast of the ceremony in Asia. In the dining room the tables were pushed against the wall. Lights floated in goblets of colored water, and globe-shaped paper lanterns were strung from the ceiling.
In the main office, two recent arrivals were looking around. One was in her late sixties. She was tall, healthy, and trim. She was tidy and debonair. The other was a man in his late thirties. He was handsome, with even features, large sympathetic eyes, and a beard that was just going gray. The office was spread with their baggage. They looked lost.
“Have you been checked in?” Ema asked.
“No.” The woman was angry. “We’ve been standing here alone.”
“I’ll go and get someone,” Ema said. “I wish I could help you, but I’m just a program participant, and I’m having a personal problem. I’m sorry, if you’ll wait here—they’re all—watching this thing. One minute.”
“No,” the woman said. She held up a piece of paper. “We’re checked in.”
“Oh.” Ema was confused. “What are your names?”
“I am Alida and this is Francisco.”
“Then I’m going to go and make a phone call.”
In the parking lot it was possible sometimes to get cell phone reception. It took several attempts before she reached him. She cried, and she tried to tell him what had happened. She said, “They have some big ceremony. They’re all in the shrine room. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I just—”
“Ema, what are you doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“What are you doing? You hate New Age and you hate nature and you hate amateurs. But you’ve set yourself up with all three for a month, and you wonder why you’re feeling bad.”
“Oh God,” she said. “It’s good to hear an ordinary person. Sloane Newam is here. She’s turned into some kind of contortionist know-it-all. She’s the worst! And then there’s a blind lady who does reiki.”
“I’ve been reading her, too. You’re right, she’s a bit convoluted. But I’m glad you brought some good books to that place.”
“No, for chrissake, she’s HERE!” She started crying again. It was dark, and the parking lot’s packed-sand surface was almost like asphalt. Ema tried to tell the married man about the real Sloane Newam, but the cell phone cut out. It went dead, and then it began playing a three-note error tone.
Sloane seemed to manifest from the darkness. She came to a stop several inches clo
ser than a friend would, and she said hello.
“Could you hear what I was saying?” Ema asked.
“I heard, ‘Dee-dee-deep. Dee-dee-deep.’” She imitated the phone’s error tone several more times.
“I was talking to the married man. It was a conversation I wouldn’t want anyone else to hear.”
“That’s what married men are for,” Sloane Newam said.
“What ever happened with yours?” Ema asked. “I mean, I read your novel.”
Sloane Newam said, “I never wanted to do the obvious thing. It seemed to me like we had two choices. I would either ask him to get a divorce or I would leave him. I didn’t see another option, but I didn’t want to do the thing everyone does, so I didn’t do either, and then he died.”
Ema crumpled in a ball and clutched her knees. She said, “I hate this. I hate everything. I can’t handle any more.”
Sloane Newam touched her head. She said, “Think of the benefits of renunciation. Or if you prefer, contemplate the illusory nature of samsara, and appreciate that you have nothing to renounce.”
“What?”
“Be skillful and practice whichever works for you at this very moment.”
“At this very moment,” Ema said, “I wish that I were dead. I’m heartbroken, and if I had a gun I would use it.”
“Suicide is no escape. You must follow your karma.”
“I would shoot you,” Ema said. “And then I would go in there to that shrine room, and I would shoot Bill.”
When she said that, it was so outrageous, she couldn’t help feeling a little better. She said, “Then I’d shoot the blind lady.”
“Eve.”
“Yes, I’d shoot Eve. Thank you. I’d shoot Eve in the chest.”
The Commission
He did not look like our ordinary client at Seibu. He was about fifty years old, and although his shirt was nicely pressed, his pants sat low under his stomach, with deep creases in a triangle around his lap area. It was early in the afternoon and the floor was almost empty, but the members of my sales staff were avoiding the client, pretending not to see him. This goes against our policy. For this reason, although it is not within my job description, I approached the client and offered him assistance. I prefer to lead by example.
You Are Having a Good Time Page 9