Miss Buddha

by Ulf Wolf

  “Then you are certain,” he answered.

  “Yes I am.”

  :

  Ananda had finished the delicious fruit salad, and Melissa was now serving tea in the dining room.

  “I doubt this needs saying,” said Ananda, “but I will say it anyway, for it’s too important to leave unsaid.”

  Melissa looked at him and waited for more.

  “No one, Melissa. No one must know about this, about Ruth, about the Buddha.”

  She nodded.

  “Not Charles, especially not Charles. Not your mother. Not your father. None of your friends. Not Dexter or your mother-in-law. No one, Melissa.”

  Her nod slowed, but did not cease.

  “Do you see why?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “If I have trouble believing, or knowing,” she corrected herself. “If I find it hard to know this, and this certainty swims in and out of focus, to be honest, then anyone else would find it impossible, would not believe, could not.”

  Ananda’s turn to nod. “But more importantly,” he said. “Anyone you tell would know, would be absolutely certain that you have taken leave of your senses.”

  “Would think me mad,” she suggested.

  “Would think you mad,” Ananda confirmed. “Would know you mad. And that would threaten everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Melissa,” began Ananda. Then, when she had her full attention, “The Buddha Gotama has returned for a reason.”

  “The Buddha?”

  “He always referred to himself as The Buddha Gotama, or Gotama Buddha, and that’s how I think of him.”

  “I think of him as Ruth,” she said.

  “Yes, that too. He is Ruth. He is your daughter. And Gotama Buddha is here, as Ruth, for a reason.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “In due course.”

  “As a savior?”

  “Yes,” said Ananda. “As a savior. As a seer and a teller. As a pointer of path.”

  “It is hard to grasp.”

  “I know.”

  “It is true,” whispered Ruth within their inner hearing.

  “I know,” whispered Melissa in return. Then, overwhelmed by certainty she either cried or laughed, Ananda wasn’t quite sure which.

  :

  “I worry about Charles,” said Ruth as Ananda drove back to his hotel. He is convinced Melissa has already turned some delusional corner, and has talked to his father about it.”

  “He has?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she in danger, do you think? Right now?”

  “No,” said Ruth. “Not yet. But I am not happy with the situation.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “Stay in close touch with her, Ananda, and as much as you can, keep an eye on Charles.”

  “Yes,” he replied. “Yes, I will do that.”

  :: 43 :: (Pasadena)

  One thing about telepathy is that the word itself is misleading, for the secret to the concept is that it involves no distance.

  Tele, at heart, means distant, or remote. Pathy grew from pathos, and means feeling, so telepathy, as commonly understood, is to feel (or communicate, mentally) across a distance, which conjures the image of transmission and reception between two points a distance apart. That is the misleading part, for the key to telepathy is the utter lack of distance.

  Some have described telepathy as the spiritual sharing of the same room—an other-worldly, or un-worldly room that everyone on some level occupy at all times, though few are aware of this.

  This room is impossibly vast—it has outgrown space itself—and encompasses the Physical as well as any other Universe you’d care to conceive; still, when two (or more) beings commune in this sphere, it is as if only those are present. It is then a co-existence of sorts, a co-being where thoughts are plainly visible, where feelings are plainly feel-able, where all is wholly shareable.

  :

  When Ruth entered this sacred room and whispered Melissa’s name just before dawn, Melissa visibly shivered with the sensation of presence, then answered, in the same manner of just being the answer: “Yes.”

  “You are still certain, then,” confirmed Ruth.

  “Yes.”

  Melissa rose slowly and quietly, so as not to wake Charles, still asleep beside her. She gathered her robe and her slippers and tiptoed out of their bedroom and over to Ruth’s little chamber, the better to hear her (was the notion that moved her); that, and the wish to see, as well as hear, her daughter.

  Entering Ruth’s room, she moved over to the little crib where Ruth lay and looking down upon her met eyes looking right back up at her: aware, sparklingly blue, intelligence shimmering within, a profound presence beneath.

  “Ruth,” she said in their shared internal room

  It was as if the eyes answered, while Ruth’s lips only smiled. “Yes.”

  “I have a question.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why me?”

  This question, true and burning for her, rose not only wordlessly within them both, but also, reflexively, crossed her lips and into air.

  “Because,” said Gotama Buddha, “I do not terrify you.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Melissa.

  “Sit down,” said the Buddha. “Please.”

  Melissa did, and Ruth rolled onto her side, the better to see her mother, now sitting cross-legged by the side of the crib, looking in.

  “What man does not understand, frightens him,” said Gotama Buddha.

  “Always?” asked Melissa. Again, as if not yet trusting her internal tongue to alone convey words, she also said this aloud.

  “On some level, yes. Always,” said Ruth, who, if she noticed, did not wonder at, nor did she comment on the words leaving her mother’s lips along with their shared sister-thoughts.

  “But man prefers ignorance to terror,” continued Ruth.

  When Melissa said nothing, Ruth elaborated. “Numbness seems always preferable to pain. Sleep, if it shields him, seems preferable to fears awake. At least so he acts.”

  Melissa nodded, assimilating, understanding, but said nothing.

  “It is as if on some collective level man has chosen, or created an unawareness so deep that it appears like an ocean, or as a mist of oblivion covering this earth. And here he spends lives, submerged, barely visible to the spirit, far below the surface, among the deep-sea fishes and other creatures of darkness.”

  “That’s a grim picture,” said Melissa.

  “Yes, it is,” said Ruth. “But true.”

  “How does that explain your choice?”

  “You, Melissa, are near the surface, sometimes even breaking it.”

  “I am?”

  “Do you remember the night, when as a young woman you pondered life? At college. You wrote it in your daybook.”

  “I pondered life often at college, and I wrote in my daybook every day.”

  “I am thinking of that one evening you saw that the quality of life, what you thought of as the phenomenon life, was and is very different from the quantity of life, it’s physical aspect.”

  This Melissa remembered. “Yes,” she said. “I remember that.” Then wondered, “How come you know about that?”

  Ruth did not answer her question, only smiled. Then said:

  “That was the evening you saw, clearly and viscerally, the evening you experienced that life, as an event, was the same, regardless of physical size, whether a mouse or an elephant. Unquantifiable.”

  “Yes,” she was nodding now, remembering quite vividly. “It was like an epiphany. I remember.”

  “That’s breaking the surface,” said Ruth. “That’s waking up, or refusing sleep at any rate.”

  In her mind, Melissa returned to that evening. The afternoon had seen snow, draping the world in white. Evening had fallen now, and with it the darkness. Still, she could sense a softness of a million, million flakes the other side of the window, and in it her own reflection o
f short blond hair and pondering eyes.

  The soft breathing of her roommate, asleep alongside her assignment, and shifting now to push the book onto the floor with a soft thud, brought a sense of intimacy, a love for her race.

  And as she thought about the in and out of Elizabeth’s breath, and wondered at the force—no, not the force, but the motivation, the real cause, the motive power—behind each intake of air, replete with oxygen, and each expulsion of air, replete with carbon dioxide, a rush of knowing suddenly rose within her like a geyser and leapt out upon paper. A shiver that told her that life as phenomenon, as motivation, was different from, and much larger than its manifestation, its tangible result.

  She had not been seeking that answer specifically, she had simply been marveling onto paper about the multitude of life on this planet, at the strange forms life took to survive in this jungle of chemicals and motion. At the soft in and out of Elizabeth’s breath, and suddenly the knowing simply arrived as experience, as geyser (is how she put in then), as irrefutable in and of itself: it is the phenomenon life that motivates and animates. It is the unquantifiable non-thing that knows and thinks that moves the fingers that write these words, that steers the feet that wander, that grows the bodies that rise and play and fall, only to grow again.

  The epiphany had been brief. The following morning, though still quite vivid as recollection, it did not ring quite as immediately true. It had struck her as a little presumptuous even. And a little more so a few days later.

  Still, there was no denying the rush, the geyser, rising and filling her, as the notion first appeared, as truth. So real as it rose that doubt could find no footing.

  “It was just a thought I had,” she said. “Something that arrived as I was looking at things.”

  “Yes. But you were looking above the surface,” said Buddha Gotama.

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “I know about that,” he replied.

  Melissa fell quiet for a moment. Then asked, “How do you know? How can you see that I am near the surface?”

  “You glow.”

  “I do?”

  “Faintly, but yes.”

  “What do you mean, glow? Like an aura?”

  “Not unlike an aura,” he said.

  “And that is why you chose me as your mother?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “You saw me, as aura?”

  “Yes.”

  “From where?” she asked.

  “From the Tusita Heaven.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It is a place that is more frame of mind than place.”

  “And you saw me from there?”

  “Just like I hear you from here, in this frame of mind.”

  “Were there other glows?”

  “Yes.”

  “Many?”

  “No.”

  “How many?”

  “Here in Los Angeles? Or here in the world?”

  The question should have appeared odd, or impossible, to Melissa, but it did not. It made perfect sense. Define thy terms. “Here in Los Angeles.”

  “Perhaps a hundred.”

  “So why me?”

  “Because you were, you are, right. Just like your knowing about the phenomenon of life that evening in college was right.”

  Melissa, again briefly re-living that geyser moment, said, “I can see that.”

  “And communing like this, I know I chose you well.”

  “Good point,” she said, still into the shared room as well as into the air.

  Then she asked, “If that is why me, then why you? Why are you here?”

  “Ananda has not explained?”

  “I want to hear it from you.”

  That is when Charles, standing in the doorway behind her and listening to a strange and impossible one-way conversation, shifted his weight from one foot to the other and so caught her ear.

  :: 44 :: (Pasadena)

  What woke him were spoken words, drifting. A soft breeze.

  At first—even though he was now awake—they seemed like so much dream, part of his lingering inner landscape, but then (listening now) they were not. No, they came from elsewhere. Not inside his head at all. Outside. In the house. Somewhere.

  Sitting up in bed now, the better to listen, he recognized the voice: It was Melissa’s. Then nothing, and nothing. Then he hears her again. Yes, talking, softly. Nearby.

  Wide awake now, he heard her say, “What do you mean, glow? Like an aura?”

  He looked down at her empty pillow, who seemed strangely eager to corroborate; then out through the bedroom door, slightly ajar.

  “And that is why you chose me as your mother?” she said from the hallway outside, or from just beyond it.

  Placing his feet on the carpet, he heard, “You saw me, as aura?”

  Standing up now, unsure, a little afraid, he heard her say, “From where?”

  By the bedroom door now, he knew from where the voice came: Ruth’s room. “What are you talking about?” Melissa said.

  And as he slowly, and silently, made his way for his daughter’s door, “And you saw me from there?”

  At this point Charles felt a rising terror. There was someone else in that room with Melissa, and she was talking to him, or her, in a conversation that held her interest—he could tell by her voice: intent, even a little urgent. “Were there other glows?” she said, and she really wanted to know.

  He reached the door and pushed it slightly more ajar to reveal Melissa sitting on the floor by Ruth’s cot, looking at his daughter.

  “Many?” said Melissa, as if addressing the baby.

  Then, “Here in Los Angeles.”

  What now slowly rose, fueled by what could not be, by what had no right to be—not Melissa, not this sick—was an ice he knew as terror. He was afraid. Really, really afraid.

  “So why me?” she said. Then, as if listening to a silence replying, “I can see that.”

  Then, again after a brief silence, as if listening, “Good point,” she said.

  Then, incomprehensibly, she asked the room, the child, her demon, “If that is why me, then why you? Why are you here?”

  The she said, “I want to hear it from you.”

  Charles, unaware of legs and feet, nonetheless shifted his weight from one foot to the other, making a sound, catching her ear, spinning her head. Ruth, too, looked up at him, and for the fleetest of moments her eyes, too, seemed to hold alarm.

  “Charles,” said Melissa, eyes wide.

  :

  “Charles,” she said again, less terrified now—though he wasn’t sure whether it was his own feelings or hers he sensed.

  “What are you doing?” he heard himself ask.

  “How long,” she asked. And he knew precisely what she meant, what she was hiding.

  Two conflicting emotions swelled side by side: briefly, compassion for his wife, his—yes, indeed, quite crazy wife; and alongside it, the urge to run, to turn and flee this madness, as if the demon that possessed her was contagious and of immediate danger to himself. But as with so many conflicting emotions, none truly gained the upper hand, so instead Charles remained, looking at his wife looking up at him, still awaiting an answer.

  His compassion then shifted into the practicality of the situation facing him and with that the lawyer in him surfaced, annoyed at the obvious trouble ahead.

  “Long enough,” he answered. Then he turned, looked at his watch, twice, and headed for the shower.

  :: 45 :: (Pasadena)

  Her first sensation was: this had not happened. Could not, must not have happened.

  No, not the conversation with Ruth, her Buddha Gotama. That was as real as anything, was the most real thing she’d ever experienced. What must not have happened was that she had said her words not only directly to Ruth, in their shared space, but also into the air, for Charles to hear and see—see his wife talking to his infant daughter at no (obviously imaginary) replies. She’d seen his
face, and she’d venture that he had—in that brief moment of eye contact—been more terrified than she.

  “He heard you,” whispered Ruth.

  “I know,” answered Melissa, quelling the impulse to, again, also say this aloud. Succeeding.

  “He is in turmoil.”

  “I saw that.”

  Yes, that is what she had seen in his face, in his eyes. Terror at first, then turmoil—as if terror clashed with some other equally potent force—and then, as he turned and left, surrounding him, protecting him, a cloud—stiff and impatient—of annoyance.

  “He will pose a danger,” said Ruth.

  The certainty of the statement shook her. “How?”

  “He thinks you mad.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even so,” said Melissa—still consciously suppressing the urge to again also voice the words. “He wouldn’t harm me. I doubt that.”

  “Perhaps he would not, but his father might.”

  “How?”

  “Remember that man is terrified of what he does not understand, and a terrified person never acts rationally, and then only to preserve self.”

  “And Charles does not understand.”

  “No, he does not.”

  “Nor will his father.”

  “Even less so.”

  :

  She eased herself up from the floor and with one last glance at Ruth she left her daughter’s room. Charles was in the shower; she could hear the water sing the pipes. She checked her watch and saw that Charles, for a change, would have plenty of time for a real breakfast, and proceeded to the kitchen to prepare it for him.

  By the time he entered the kitchen, all suited up, but without a “good morning,” breakfast was ready. French toast, syrup, bacon, coffee. The way he liked it.

  She turned to look at him, but he would not meet her eyes. Instead he sat down by the table and looked first at the plate, then out the window. She followed his gaze. Plate overloaded, sky overcast, almost milky.

  “Charles,” she began.

  He shifted, and looked in her direction, but would still not meet her eyes.

  “Charles,” she said again. “I am not crazy.”