by Alex Shakar
“So you stole it,” Fred surmised. It was tight in the armpits and the sleeves were short.
“Buddhists don’t steal. It’s like an alm. And here I am giving it away, a minute later. Don’t be such a milquetoast. Zip it up.”
Fred fumbled with the zipper. His trouble, he realized, had to do with its being on the wrong side. “I think this is a women’s jacket.”
“What’s the difference? Looks good on you. Anyway, you don’t like it, you sell it. Donate it. It’s a tax write-off. Let’s go. I’m hungry.”
“Manny, I don’t think—”
“You’ll feel better outside. We’ll go somewhere downtown you can keep drinking. Hey. Our president. And his rascally brother.” Manny stepped around to the far side of the bed, approaching the desk. “And who’s that in the middle? Another brother? And what’s this?” He picked up the picture to get a look at the space helmet against which it was propped. “Wow. Looks like the genuine article.” In either hand, he held up the helmet, the picture, making them bob and dance above Fred. “Where’d you get this shit?”
Fred gripped his face, with the vague thought of peeling it off. “I stole it.”
On an evening a month back, when no amount of suctioning seemed to be totally clearing George’s airway, hoping to distract him from the fetters of material existence for a while, Fred had read to him about holography, how illusions of spatial objects are re-created from frequency patterns stored on plates of glass; how the eyes are essentially frequencypattern recorders and the visual cortex is essentially a holographic projector; how every sense operates in similar fashion, detecting not definite features but only particular patterns out of what might be an infinite number; how, for all people know, beyond the parsings of their senses and measuring devices, the cosmos might exist not as matter at all, but a domain of pure frequency, a vast, resonating sea of waves.
Tonight, slumped in the passenger seat of Manfred’s van, gazing out the window at the jouncing lights and colors resolving into a spectral flume ride, a Hooters sign, or any other astronomically unlikely thing, Fred thought he could imagine phenomenal existence as nothing more than the scup and chop of that resonating sea. Which might have even been comforting, had he a boat, a life vest, a set of gills.
Manny stopped at a light just up the street from the hotel, a way Fred hadn’t gone before. At the corner was a New York-themed miniature golf course, the fiberglass metropolis bunched around curving, greencarpeted streets. The jaunty, cartoon angles of the buildings notwithstanding, the place had a Camp X-Ray vibe, thanks to the chainlink fence around it, and the klieg lights overhead, which, reflecting off the artificial turf, bathed the subway cars and taxicabs and Broadway marquees in a sallow hue. Off in the corner—Fred couldn’t help but look for them—stood World Trade Center One and Two: obsolesced, one more shabby tribute, as evidenced by a bouquet of waxy plastic flowers resting at their base. A shorts-wearing father hunched around his son, guiding the boy’s arms, their expressions conscientiously solemn as they banked their ball up a slope around the plaza fountain and back down toward the Towers. Fred failed to catch whether the ball made it between them and into the cup. The whole course was already receding in the sideview.
“We’ll drive by where I’m working now.” Manfred steered onto the Interstate. “Holy Land Experience. You heard of it?”
Fred reached into the pocket of the ill-fitting motorcycle jacket for the remaining gin bottle he’d taken on the way out of the room. “Is that like Christworld?”
“Christworld? Not at all. That’s a megachurch. Holy Land’s an amusement park. Not with rides, really. A lot of models and replicas and wax dummies, and some shows—that’s what I do. I started out playing the old Jew who makes animal sacrifices to Yahweh. They’ve got this big smoke machine and lights that go with it. Last week I snagged the Centurion gig. Big step up. Normally they got this twentysomething surfergod playing him, but that little lamb went rogue and left for Hollywood. Tipped me off beforehand, so there I was, the part already memorized. Here it goes on the left. You can see the Mount over in the corner.”
Fred registered very little—the tops of a score or so of palm trees behind a crenellated wall.
“Only problem is, you know, it’s a musical-theater act, so I have to sing,” Manny added, and then, without warning, began doing so, though it sounded more like ordinary shouting: “I know, Jesus, I know who you arrrrrrrre! Oh Lord Jesus, show me your … mmmmmmmmheart!” He coughed. “Fuck, hurt my throat, got to preserve the instrument.” He reached down and grabbed a thermos from the drink tray, unscrewing it and taking a sip. “Drinking this honey-lemon shit by the gallon.”
Fred swigged the gin. To the extent he could be happy about anything at the moment, he was no longer regretting having Manny and his ceaseless stream of mind-numbing blather at hand. Fearing the man might now stop talking to preserve his singing voice, Fred searched for a question.
“So what do they think of your being a Buddhist over there?”
“Yeah, that’s the other problem. Once they realize they can’t convert me, I’m probably getting the boot. Bad as it is over at the Holy Land, it’s better than Disney World, being a Goofy or a Mickey. They spy on you over there. They’ve got a system of informants. Everybody there’s miserable and on Xanax. Bad scene.”
Manny fell silent. They listened to a story about Lockheed Martin winning a NASA spaceship contract.
“Consider this,” Manny said. “Judeo-Christian-Muslim, all these religions coming out of the Middle East, spreading east and west for all those centuries. But now the West, the most godless consumerists are finding religion in the East. It’s the yin and yang, opposites becoming one. So now what, will the East and West rejuvenate the Middle? Will the Mideast and Midwest blow us all up before that can happen?” He laughed. “Answer me, Freddy. What’s the answer?”
“I don’t know,” Fred muttered.
“Right answer. You’re a sage already. A worthy godson. Your dad named you after me, you know.”
Fred at first thought Manfred was joking. But then he wasn’t sure. “He did?”
“What? You didn’t fuckin’ know that? I said, Hey, Vart, you got two of the little monsters, you can name at least one after me, can’t you?”
Manny turned, gave him a watery look appended by a cankered smile. “I was gunning for firstborn,” he added in a confidential tone. “No offense.” He turned back to the road. “So here we are.”
They were veering off an exit. No large buildings in sight.
“I thought we were going downtown.”
“Yeah, no, not the real one. There’s a better one here.”
Manny swung them through a gate of the Universal Studios theme park, and onto a featureless service road outside a park wall. Streetlights illuminated the van’s interior every few seconds. The vehicle was even older than Vartan’s, possibly by half a dozen years, and in far worse shape. Tan vinyl upholstery hung in shreds from the door panels. The glove compartment was missing, as were the window cranks, a pair of small vise grips taking their place. The interior was clean, however, and the equipment in back—what looked like a pair of set lights and a director’s chair—lay folded and held fast to the wall by straps. Manny noticed Fred looking in back.
“You want to be in a movie?”
“Absolutely n—”
“I’ll put you in one. I’ve got a whole new angle after the monastery. Kensho Pictures. Website and everything. Every flick guaranteed to bring on sudden enlightenment.” Manny held up a qualifying finger. “If you’re ready. I’ll find a way to use that space helmet, too. That’s a great costume piece. You steal it before or after they canned you?”
“After.”
“I’ll get a shot of you in it. It’ll make a great scene–… for something. I’ll hash out the story later.”
As Fred raised his arm to finish off the gin, the stiffness and creaking of the motorcycle jacket pulled Fred back to his young adulthood, his subsequent ach
ievements falling away like they’d never been. He laid even odds on the possibility that when they got back to the hotel, the police would be there waiting. Lipton, Erskine, Gibbon, that smug sonofabitch Gretta—he might as well swear revenge on a dream, on a daydream in the Military-Entertainment Complex’s riotous, conglomerated brain. Descending in that elevator, he had felt himself morphing into a meatspace version of that running-amok chemotherapy angel. If he’d had an axe he would have been chopping at the walls, but all he’d had was his little Blade of Many Powers, and all he’d had time to do with it was to use the first tool he pulled open to pry out the elevator buttons of all five floors.
On the ground floor, the security guard’s eyes burning his back as he exited the main doors, Fred rebuked himself for his timidity up there—tossing those items into the hedges hadn’t been enough; some sycophantic employee would discover the helmet out there and just come toadying back up with it and all would be forgotten, all trace of Fred’s existence—of George’s—cleanly excised; and no one here would ever again have cause to be troubled by the memory of them—of George. It was too horrible, and so, when Fred saw the guard busy with other visitors through the glass, he walked around the side of the building and stuck the stupid things under his arms. In plain view of all those darkened windows, he then trudged back to the minivan, and, at a speed he hoped would be seen as leisurely, peeled out of the lot.
He hadn’t been worried about repercussions at the time. In that state of jangling indignation, he’d thought he could see the results of his act with utter clarity—how the executives up there, after everything they’d stolen from him and George, would think it best to let the matter drop, relieved to have gotten off so easy; yet how, nevertheless, word would circulate internally, becoming part of the corporate mythology, ensuring that every new employee would hear of Armation’s theft of Urth, and the former CEO’s revenge. Pathetic, maybe, as legends went. But at least there’d be something.
It didn’t take long after that, though, for Fred to consider the possibility his on-the-fly analysis might not have been entirely spot-on, and upon reaching his hotel room, he proceeded to take the only remaining course of action imaginable, namely, draining the minibar, and waiting—either for his cell phone to ring or for the police to show up and take him away.
The van plunged into a multilevel parking structure, and Manfred steered them up some ramps. The ripped upholstery flapped on the doors as they disembarked. Fred’s door wouldn’t quite close. He pushed on it, staggered, nearly fell over. The garage spun. Manfred stepped around and, by lifting it slightly, forced the door into place.
“Got it at a police auction. They took it apart looking for drugs. Didn’t quite get it all back together.”
When Manny had said “downtown,” Fred had been envisioning a gloomy, empty dive on a dead-end street, a venue a bit more conducive to dissolving into a pool of despair than a heavily populated theme park. With little choice now, he followed his godfather into an enclosed skyway and onto a peoplemover, synth-inflected pop music pulsing from the speakers above.
“Matter of fact…” Manny leaned against the moving handrail as the track trundled them along, and producing from a fishing-vest pocket a small video camera. “This might make a good scene too. You never know.” He flipped it open at chest level, peering down at the screen as one might a poker hand, the lens aimed at Fred.
“What’s my motivation?” Fred grumbled, increasingly uncomfortable.
“Your choice.” Manny nodded. “If I could go back in time, I would have recorded my whole life.”
“Who would watch it?”
“No one.”
There was a light in Manny’s eyes as he said this, charged yet lucid, which, more than the words themselves, made Fred wonder.
The walkway ended. Manny led them through a concession area into the park’s transgenic hybrid of urban downtown and outdoor mall. They made a slow loop around the carefully orchestrated chaos of lights and music—taking in the NASCAR and NBA restaurants; the Hard Rock Cafe; the fountain around which people sat gaping up at music videos on giant screens; the Endangered Species store; the Bob Marley A Tribute to Freedom nightclub; the person-sized Spider-Man, Betty Boop, and Shaggy from Scooby-Doo cutouts; and out across the water, the company’s emblem, UNIVERSAL, and the globe around which it wrapped, transformed from a mere image to a physical thing, as gigantic as ever it appeared on any screen. Manny remained uncharacteristically silent during these few minutes, gazing around serenely.
“So I’ve heard you’ve attained nirvana or something?” Fred mumbled.
“Attained nonattainment!” Manny answered, gaze keen.
“So what’s that mean, then, exactly?”
“It means beyond attachment, Freddy. Beyond the vicious cycle of desire and aversion.” He wheeled an arm back at the artificial river ahead at the plaza. “Beyond the slum of human reality. It means free, Freddy. Just free.”
That half-amazed, half-amused expression might have been a remnant of shock treatment, might have been Stanislavskian immersion, might have been the actual experience of something approaching that freedom of which he spoke. It occurred to Fred he’d never met an enlightened person, that he was aware of. He didn’t have much basis for comparison.
“At least I think so,” Manny said. “None of those monks over there spoke very good English. We communicated mainly by slaps. Hey. Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville. Let’s go there. They’ve got good fries.”
Manny picked out two free stools at the bar, under a massive sail, and ordered his fries. Fred ordered a margarita from the fifty-gallon, blender-shaped plastic tank over the register. As the drink was being prepared, Manny positioned the videocamera—which for all Fred knew had never been turned off—on the bar between them, propping its front end up with a stack of folded napkins so that it pointed at Fred’s face. The irritation this caused him was so small a drop in the ocean of his misery that it didn’t seem worth fighting. He asked for another margarita before picking up and draining the first. Only after he did so did he realize he’d just spent his last ten dollars. Turning his wallet upside down, he shook the bill out onto the bar. There’d be no choice now but to give in to the hospital’s continual calls for George to be moved to a long-term-care facility, self-storage for the not-quite-dead. And even there, the fees would be staggering.
“So … enlightenment—how does it happen?” he asked. Maybe he just wanted to punish himself.
Instantly, Manny slammed his palm on the bar’s copper surface. Fred started, his fluorescent yellow drink slopping onto his shirt and motorcycle jacket.
“Like that,” Manny said. “It’s a shock. Then eventually, they transfer the Buddha Mind Seal to you.” He made a gesture with clutched fingers in front of Fred’s eyes, resembling, more than anything, the Vulcan Mind Meld. “But to start, you’ve got to penetrate the mu.”
He gave Fred a significant look. Behind him, on a projection screen, Jimmy Buffet himself sang into a mic and strummed a guitar. Higher up toward the ceiling, the propellers of a suspended seaplane spun with a hypnagogic slowness.
“The mu?” Fred asked.
“The monk Joshu was telling his disciples how buddhanature was present in all things. One of his disciples asked, ‘Is it also to be found in a dog?’ And Joshu replied: ‘mu.’”
Fred waited for more. Manny, however, was already elsewhere, picking up his camera and zooming in, with a phallically extending lens, on a table of women under a thatched umbrella. “Tits tits tits,” he said, then, turning back to Fred: “It’s very simple. This isn’t real.”
For an unearthly moment, they stared at each other, that giddiness Fred had felt seeing the realtor cupping the daughter’s shoulder returning. It almost made sense, he thought. How could this crass, shimmering place—how could any of this—be real?
“It’s not not real,” Manny added.
Fred was still nodding, trying to understand. Manny continued staring into him, judging his rea
diness.
“It’s not both not real and not not real,” Manny elucidated.
Fred chased the words, fighting the despair.
Manny tictocked his finger. “It’s not neither not real nor not not real.”
“Just … tell me why life sucks so much,” Fred said.
Manny fixed him with that peculiar eye-light. “What are you talking about? This is the Pure Land. Hey,” he spread his arms wide, “Paradise.”
The flashing gelled lights positioned above the bar reflected off Manfred’s bald head, now red, now yellow, now blue.
“You guys are incredible,” Manny went on. “A year ago, George asked me the same thing.”
“He … he did?”
“Same fuckin’ words, just about. ‘Manny, why does life suck so much? Manny, why can’t I get what I want?’”
“Why couldn’t he?” Fred said, dizzy from the alcohol and lights, nearly slipping off his stool. “Why can’t I?”
“So change what you want.”
“Who can want failure?” Fred shouted. “Who can want misery?”
“So stop wanting.”
“How can I stop wanting?”
“So stop being.”
“What do you mean? Kill myself?”
“Whoa,” said the bartender, a sunburned guy with a gold necklace and open Hawaiian shirt, as he set Manfred’s fries on the bar, “no suicide in Margaritaville. Wasting away only. It’s in the charter.”
“No self, no problem,” Manny said, with a placid smile.
“Is that what you told him?” Fred said, his voice giving out.
Manny’s expression changed, sad and happy at once, it seemed. “I didn’t know what to tell him. That’s why I had to go join the monks. Fries?”
Fred waved the proffered basket away. Placing it in front of himself, Manny tucked a napkin into his sweatshirt, bent his head, and began to eat. Methodically, one by one, he conveyed the fries to their destination. He didn’t rush or overfill his mouth, but made rapid progress nonetheless, without a wasted movement or lapse of attention. A mesmerizing calm, the first gentle breezes of a stupor, perhaps, descended upon Fred as he watched.