The Breath of God

by Jeffrey Small

  The screen above Brady flashed from his book cover to a three-dimensional computer rendering of a town square centered around a huge church. “This lesson today underscores the importance of the greatest undertaking this church has ever attempted. Of course, I’m referring to the ongoing construction of the New Hope Community. Just twelve miles from here and twenty-four months from completion, our new church is truly evidence that the Lord is smiling down on us. Our community will be a place where you and your children can live and grow in God’s image, a sanctuary of hope away from the evil influences of other religions. Our new gym will offer Christian stretching classes,” he said, winking at Barbara, who smiled up at him, “set to the sounds of our own gospel choir. Your kids can learn martial arts, but they will bow before the Ten Commandments posted on the walls, not some self-proclaimed sensei spouting confusing Zen statements.”

  He softened his voice. “I feel so humble to be in the presence of each of you. For you are the ones making God’s plan for our community a reality. Your generous contributions to the Lord have made this dream possible. And we are so close. We are so close, but we are not there yet. I must ask each of you to look deep inside yourselves and ask whether you can give just a little more. We don’t want to shortchange God’s vision. I hope that when you get a phone call next week from our volunteers, you will do what you can.”

  Reverend Brady moved to the altar in the center of the stage. “Please take a moment with me to pray silently as we ask for God’s guidance with this holy project.”

  Brady knelt at the altar, turning his back on the congregation, who dutifully bowed their heads. A stillness fell over the sanctuary. After three minutes of silence, interrupted only by a few muffled coughs, Brady rose just before the audience grew restless and turned to face his people. His eyes remained closed. Tears streamed down his face. He opened his arms wide, palms upwards. “Can you feel it?” he cried. “The power of our prayer. Can you feel it? The presence of God is here, today, right now. Can you feel it?”

  An elderly man in a wheelchair at the back of the church proclaimed in a voice that seemed too strong for his frail body, “God is with us! Hallelujah!” A number of people joined the reverend in his tears.

  “Something special is happening here today,” Brady cried out. “We are witnessing something sacred and holy. Come to us, Lord Christ!”

  With his last exclamation, the people erupted into a chorus of amens and praise Gods. Brady opened his eyes and surveyed the upturned faces in their ecstasy. The man in the front row had cinched his eyes closed, while his chapped lips mouthed a silent prayer. Leaning on the altar railing, Brady bent over and removed his black Ferragamo loafers. He presented his shoes to the crowd. “We are on sacred ground here today. Let us not soil it with our dirty shoes.” As the five thousand rustled to remove their shoes as well, Brady knelt again in prayer, but this time he faced the audience. His shoes lay on the ground in front of him.

  After the rustling quieted, Brady opened his eyes and said, “Praise Jesus.” Without waiting for a response, he picked up his shoes, stood, and walked past the band off the stage.

  Once he disappeared through the side curtains, the stunned congregation erupted into the loudest cheers Brady had ever heard. The band and choir took their cue and launched into “Cruising with Jesus,” one of their popular rock-inspired songs. Backstage, Brady strode past the lighting and sound technicians who hovered over their control boards. He stopped by a bank of video monitors overseen by a thin, balding man in a charcoal suit. Brady took the towel the man offered and wiped his face.

  “I was really good today, William, wasn’t I?” Brady said more as a statement of fact than as a question needing an answer.

  “It was one of your best. You owned them,” replied William Jennings, director of operations of New Hope.

  Brady smiled at his number two as he tossed the damp towel, stained with tears, sweat, and smudges of bronze foundation, back to him and continued walking down the corridor.

  CHAPTER 3

  PUNAKHA, BHUTAN

  IN THE DARKNESS, GRANT COULD HEAR soft voices speaking in a language he didn’t understand. He became conscious of an unfamiliar smell: some sort of incense infused in a musty atmosphere. He shifted his weight; his arms felt heavy, as did his head. Gradually, the light returned, as if someone had slowly turned up a dimmer switch on his temple. He lay on a lumpy cot in a small room with a stone floor and sand-colored plaster walls. A pair of candles burned on a simple wooden desk by a narrow window. A second smaller table by his bed contained a carved wooden bowl and a hand-hammered tin cup.

  Three men stood by the door, whose heavy timbers, painted a kaleidoscope of reds, yellows, and blues, provided the only color in the drab room. The men stopped speaking and turned their heads toward him.

  “Where am I?” Grant croaked. His swollen tongue filled his dry mouth. He tried unsuccessfully to raise himself on his elbows. “What happened?”

  The men approached his bed. Grant recognized two as monks because of their robes, sandals, and shaved heads, but the third was dressed in a gho—a plaid, knee-length woolen robe whose sleeves were rolled into cuffs exposing a hint of a white shirt worn underneath. On his feet the man wore leather shoes and argyle socks. Grant had first encountered the traditional Bhutanese garb on his arrival at the Paro airport. How many days ago, he was no longer sure.

  The man in the gho responded in heavily accented in English, “Don’t try to move.” In answer to the confused look on Grant’s face, he said, “My name’s Karma. I am the Punakha drungtsho—the town’s doctor. You suffered a complete fracture of your right tibia. Worst I’ve seen.”

  For the first time, Grant became aware of his right leg, elevated on a folded blanket. He touched the rough plaster cast that ran from his hip to his toes. Then he glanced at his watch, a digital sports model with a waterproof band of rubber. The push of a button gave him the barometric pressure, altitude, and temperature—all for under a hundred dollars. Grant’s favorite feature, though, was the tiny radio receiver that kept the time and date precisely set to the second. He was never late to an appointment.

  When his eyes focused on the date, he shouted, “Four days!”

  “You’ve been unconscious,” Karma told him. “Should have died on the river from loss of blood, but your wet suit acted as a compression bandage and restricted the bleeding until these two rescued you.” He nodded toward the monks.

  Grant turned to catch a better look at them. The older one was dressed in a neatly wrapped orange robe that fell to his ankles. Judging from the saltand-pepper stubble sprinkled across his shaved head, the monk was in his late fifties. His face was angular, with prominent cheek and jaw bones that joined to a point at his chin. The monk studied Grant with black eyes that were Asian in character but wide in shape, and placed close together. His unblinking gaze should have been disconcerting, but for a reason Grant couldn’t explain, he found it comforting. His younger companion, who couldn’t have been much over twenty, had a rounder face with a mixture of Tibetan and Chinese features. Several inches shorter than the older monk, and wearing crimson rather than orange robes, he was skinny in a still-filling-out sort of way.

  “Thank you,” Grant said to all three men, his fingers tapping his cast. “But what ...” As if a projector in his head had suddenly come to life, the recent events replayed for him: the river, the rush of the cold water, grasping for his guide’s kayak, the panic of being trapped underwater. From the corner of his eye he spotted his PFD on the floor by the table. Instinctually, he touched the wool blanket covering his chest. He guessed what had happened. When he blacked out from the breaking of his leg and lack of oxygen, the current must have pulled him free of the boulder. The flotation device would have shot him to the surface.

  “My guide, Dasho?” he asked, dreading the answer he already knew.

  The older monk approached the bed and rested a warm hand on Grant’s shoulder. He answered in precise English with an unexpect
edly clear British accent. “I am sad to report that our brothers found his body downriver from the dzong. He was upside down, still in his kayak.”

  Grant swallowed back the acidic taste of bile that rose to the back of his throat. If he hadn’t requested to go on the most challenging section of the river, Dasho would still be alive. Maybe if I’d tried harder in the hydraulic? The friendly guide had been supporting his family.

  As if reading Grant’s thoughts, the monk added, “You couldn’t have saved him. His neck was broken.”

  Grant broke eye contact. He didn’t find comfort in the information. To distract his thoughts, he glanced around at his spartan surroundings.

  “Is this some kind of hospital?”

  “My apprentice and I found you lying on the riverbank about a mile from here,” the elder monk replied. “We carried you to the closest building where we could provide help—to the Punakha Dzong.”

  The leftover haze vanished from Grant’s mind. The Punakha Dzong was his next stop. He remembered driving past the imposing five-hundred-year-old fortress rising from the peninsula where the Mo Chhu and the Pho Chhu joined. Constructed in traditional Bhutanese style, its massive inward-sloping walls of whitewashed stone starkly contrasted with the intricately carved and painted wood molding around the windows and doors—in the same style as the painted door to his room, he realized. A colorful cornice anchored the pagoda-style roof.

  He recalled Dasho’s explanation that although the dzongs were originally forts built to protect the country from invaders who crossed the imposing Himalayan range and attacked from neighboring Tibet or India, today they served a dual purpose: to house both the local government offices and the country’s Buddhist monasteries. Evaluating the furnishings in his room, Grant guessed that he must be in the living quarters of the monastery.

  The monk who spoke English so well held out his hand. “I am Kinley Goenpo, the senior monk here during the summer season, and this is my student, Jigme.” Jigme bowed from the waist but remained silent.

  “Grant Matthews. Thanks so much for rescuing me, but ...” Grant struggled for the right way to express his concern. “Shouldn’t I go to a hospital—have a surgeon x-ray my leg?” He again drummed his fingers on the gray plaster.

  The doctor shook his head. “Kinley and I debated the idea of moving you, but the nearest hospital is in our capital city, Thimpu, a three-hour drive over the mountains. My little office in town wouldn’t provide you any more help than I can offer you in this room. Fortunately, your leg sustained a clean break, though a severe one. If you stay off it for the next six weeks, it should heal nicely. You’ll go home with just a scar as a souvenir of your adventure.”

  “Six weeks?” Grant felt the blood drain from his already pallid face. He still had many monasteries to investigate, and then he had to be back at school in ten days. His palms began to sweat.

  Karma shook his head. “Any movement before your leg stabilizes risks permanent disability.”

  “I shouldn’t have even gone kayaking,” Grant mumbled, feeling sorry for himself and guilty for his role in Dasho’s death. Grant glared at his cast as if the sheer force of his gaze would fuse his bones together. His original plan had been to spend just an hour or so in this monastery, to let his guide ask the monks some questions, and then move on if the legend about a boy named Issa didn’t ring any bells.

  Kinley lowered himself to the edge of Grant’s bed. “I understand your frustration. We will work with you to make your stay as comfortable as possible.”

  Grant craned his neck to search the room. “Did you find my stuff? I had a dry bag in my kayak—my credit cards and cell phone.”

  “My brothers who found your guide’s body also found your kayak,” Kinley replied. “It was empty.”

  Even though the room was cool from the September breeze flowing through the open window, Grant felt flushed with heat. He pushed the quilted blanket covering his torso to his waist so that he could breathe more easily. He looked down to find that he was wearing an off-white cotton shirt; the monks must have dressed him. The material was coarse, and Grant felt it start to scratch his skin.

  “Can you lend me a phone? I need to call my professor and let him know what’s happened.” He owed his mentor so much. Grant refused to worry, much less disappoint him. Billingsly had gone to bat for him with the Emory admissions committee. He still recalled his professor’s words verbatim from seven years ago: “Grant has one of the best analytical minds I’ve seen. Harvard was foolish to reject him because of that incident.”

  The elder monk shook his head. “Oh, there are no cell phones in the goemba , the monastery, but if you give the number to Karma, he can call anyone you wish when he returns to town.”

  Grant flopped his head on the thin pillow. “I suppose email is out of the question too?”

  Kinley shook his head. Grant thought he detected something in the monk’s eyes. Is this amusing to him? Grant stared at the fine lines crisscrossing the beige ceiling. Bedridden in a jail cell of a room in a remote monastery with some monks who were enjoying his predicament. For the first time since he’d woken, Grant became aware of the throbbing pain in his leg. He also realized that his left shoulder was bruised, and he had a pounding headache behind his temples.

  “What about the bathroom?” he asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.

  The doctor chuckled and bent over to retrieve a battered metal bedpan from the floor beside the bed. “I brought this from town.”

  Grant wiped his palms off on the sheets. Accepting this situation for six weeks was out of the question. He needed to devise a plan.

  “Pen and paper?” he asked the men.

  “That we can do,” Kinley said, nodding to the doctor. Karma reached into his black bag—the kind of doctor’s bag that Grant had seen in old TV shows but didn’t think were used anymore—and produced a ballpoint pen and a blank prescription pad.

  Grant wrote Harold Billingsly’s office number at Emory and the name of his hotel in town, the Zangdho Pelri, and handed it to the doctor. “Room oneoh-eight. If you don’t mind, I have a backpack with my clothes, and my laptop is on the desk.”

  Before Karma could respond, the door to the room opened. A third monk, a boy no older than ten or eleven with a perfectly round bald head, dressed like Kinley’s apprentice Jigme in a crimson robe, entered carrying a steaming cup centered on a tray.

  Kinley took the cup from the boy and patted his shoulder in a fatherly way. “Thank you, Ummon.”

  After the boy bowed to the older monk and left the room, the doctor emptied the contents of a small envelope into the cup. “Drink this,” he said. “It will ease your discomfort.”

  Grant sniffed the cup, wondering what sort of herbal concoction he was about to consume. He took a sip. Just a little bitter. He hoped the effects would kick in quickly. After Grant finished the tea, the doctor left, but the two monks remained, watching him silently.

  “I appreciate your help, but really you don’t need to stay.” Grant focused on the notepad on his lap. He drew a line down the center of the page and wrote at the top of the left column “Options.” At the top of the right he wrote “Plan of Attack.”

  Kinley sat on the edge of the bed, his hands folded in his lap.

  “Grant, you are experiencing the dukkha of life.”

  Without looking up from his notepad, he responded, “Suffering.” He resisted the temptation to glance at the monk to gauge his surprise at Grant’s knowledge of the Pali word: it was the language of the ancient Buddhist canon. Grant enjoyed near-photographic recall of the texts he’d studied. His comparative religions class had been six years earlier, but he still remembered the basic tenets of Buddhism as if he’d read them yesterday.

  “Yes, that’s the common translation, but not entirely accurate,” Kinley said without missing a beat. “Actually, dukkha means out of balance, like a cart with a broken wheel.”

  “So you’re saying that my life is out of whack right now.” Grant p
ut his pen down and looked Kinley in the eye. “I could have told you that.”

  “Indulge me in a story,” Kinley began, as if he were telling a fable to a group of children gathered at his feet. “A farmer in the foothills of the mountains had a beautiful horse that ran away. The farmer’s neighbor stopped by to console him on losing such a magnificent animal, but the farmer surprised his neighbor by saying, ‘Who am I to judge what is an unlucky event or a fortunate one?’ The next day his horse returned, bringing with it a herd of similarly beautiful wild horses. The neighbor returned and said, ‘You were right yesterday not to wallow in your loss. Look how fortunate you are now with all these horses.’ But the farmer surprised him again by repeating his comment from the previous day, ‘Who am I to judge what is an unlucky event or a fortunate one?’ A few weeks later the farmer’s son fractured his leg while trying to break in one of the new horses. Of course, the neighbor returns to offer his condolences again, certain that the farmer cannot be unaffected by his son’s injury.”

  “Let me guess,” Grant intervened, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “Even with his son lying in bed, his leg in a splint, the farmer repeats his previous response, ‘Who am I to judge what is an unlucky event or a fortunate one?’”

  Kinley grinned and rested a hand on Grant’s cast. “The following week the army came through the farmer’s village, drafting men to go to war, but they passed over the farmer’s son because of the broken leg.”

  “Well, I’ll be safe then, if the Bhutanese army comes looking for soldiers,” Grant said. He added a smile so the monk who had just saved his life wouldn’t think him rude. But really, he thought, I need time alone to work through my predicament.

  “You are a student?” Kinley asked.