Mr. Bean’s mother didn’t look as old as she really was, either. In fact, she wasn’t alive. Mr. Bean had mounted a life-size picture of her on cardboard and placed it at the kitchen sink. He used the picture as a towel rack. I said, “Excuse me, you’re sure your name isn’t Norman Bates?” Mr. Bean laughed, his hands flying to his face in mock horror. “Oh no,” he mumbled.
At this juncture I told myself: We’ll be friends. Mr. Bean will be a strange but interesting friend—he talks little and that’s always a blessing. And then I began to like the attention, the way he worried over my comfort—rushing off to pick me flowers out of neighborhood gardens, wiping off chair cushions with an elaborate gesture before I sat down. That kind of attention can grow on you.
I don’t know why but I couldn’t stay away from his little apartment, perhaps because the place was old-fashioned and cozy, crammed full as it was of mementoes and pictures: life crammed inside walls as thin as parchment. Like Mr. Bean’s body crammed inside his young-looking skin. Any moment I expected his true body to explode from it’s sausage-like casing and there he’d be: Mr. Bean violently exposed like some equatorial flower only it would be beauty in reverse—a decaying flower, mouldy and rank.
Mr. Bean must have been 90 when I met him.
His marriage proposal was strange but by now I’d come to expect oddness from him. It happened while we were out driving. He drove rather well, I might add. Smartly. A tiny, yellow car which he was forever trying to maneuver beneath transport trucks, the look of intense concentration on this face that I’ve come to love—tongue protruding, eyes rapt.
During this particular car ride we came upon an accident: a car stopped sideways in the traffic flow. Inside, two people: a youngish man slumped against the steering wheel and a woman sitting upright, a look of terror on her face and screaming: “He’s dead, he’s dropped dead!”
Since I’m a trained nurse, I had a look, thinking perhaps I could revive him. I was right. The man bolted upright as soon as I touched his arm. I was disappointed. I’d been hoping for a more dramatic rescue; I’d been hoping to impress Mr. Bean with my medical expertise.
Mr. Bean was having more success with his rescue operation. He’d applied mouth to mouth to the woman who struggled under his awkward embrace. How kind of him, I thought, even though the woman was conscious and the gesture might be construed as misplaced. Mr. Bean then looked up from the woman and grinned at me, his enormous tongue licking his chin. Lipstick smeared across his face. “Yummee-eee,” he said. I took this to mean, “Marry me,” and said, “Yes!”
After the wedding ceremony we celebrated at a Chinese restaurant: stir-fry with green beans, of course. Mr. Bean noticed that the beans were off—over-cooked and lifeless. He picked one up and wagged it at the waiter. When the waiter didn’t understand what was happening, Mr. Bean got agitated, stood up with a handful of beans and wagged the entire lot under the waiter’s chin. I gently took the beans from Mr. Bean and said, “A wedding bouquet! How lovely!” Mr. Bean immediately smiled and nodded his head. By now I’d learned that it’s always best to divert Mr. Bean. If you rebuke him directly he whimpers.
After dinner we walked back to the apartment. It started to rain and Mr. Bean produced an umbrella from his back pocket. It sprang to life like a clown accessory and he held it over my head. Being so much taller than me, Mr. Bean got soaked: rain splashed off his nose and ears and pretty soon his shoes filled with water making a squish, squish sound while he walked. Back at the apartment he wrung out his brown sports jacket and filled the kettle. Then we had tea and toasted our marriage.
Now that I’m Mrs. Bean, people often ask me about Mr. Bean’s teddy bear, the one he used to sleep with. I’m happy to say that Teddy now sleeps on the floor beside our bed and that Mr. Bean covers Teddy’s eyes with a handkerchief during our intimate relations. About this, I’m in complete agreement: Teddy should be spared from witnessing Mr. Bean’s exuberant sexual antics. Not that I’m complaining … that tongue, that tongue …
Since our marriage, I’ve had some success in supervising Mr. Bean’s medication; he’s stopped that annoying business of pulling apart people’s bow ties and he’s stopped wandering off to have picnics on freeway dividers. But then, as if to replace these antics, he developed a new and alarming habit: grabbing his genitals in public. He does this while waiting in a lineup—bank or supermarket—it makes no difference. Mr. Bean reaches into his trousers at waist level and then frantically rummages around inside his pants as if he were looking for something. It took a kindly woman standing behind us at the grocery checkout to suggest why Mr. Bean might be doing this. “My dear,” she whispered,” I think he’s lost something.” Of course! The new boxer shorts! His eleven-and-a-half-inch penis! (He isn’t called Mr. Bean for nothing.)
I’ve since reinstated the Lycra underwear.
Another thing: we won’t be having children; they wouldn’t be safe. First chance, Mr. Bean would be tying helium balloons to the baby carriage and then: good-bye baby. I know the way it is. I walked into this marriage with my eyes open. With my sewing kit intact. People would be amazed at the effort it takes to keep Mr. Bean’s sausage-like skin in good repair. Many a snug evening finds Mr. Bean lying naked on our marriage bed but not for the obvious reason: Mr. Bean loves the medical attention I’m able to provide; my agility with the surgical needle and cat gut thread. This is the one thing he’ll lie still for: my sewing on him well into the night, the invisible mending of crevice and bone—Mr. Bean cooing his relief and appreciation.
We couldn’t be happier.
THE HEARTSPEAK WELLNESS RETREAT
AFTER THE GUESTS HAD LEFT we did, you know, Feng Shui. We had this book, Instant Feng Shui, that did away with the three thousand years it takes to understand the practice and made it, well, instant. Feng Shui has to do with energy flow and balance and harmony and it had just been discovered in the West. It’s the latest ancient thing. And this book, Instant Feng Shui, boiled the practice down to a few handy how-to’s which we appreciated, being on the short side of a three-thousand-year-old tradition. The book had a checklist called “Tips for Serenity” which was a kind of fast track to cosmic understanding and this was another thing we appreciated.
Feng Shui is this ancient Asian practice, a very old practice, we understood, even more ancient than Moses or the Greeks. The most ancient practice there is, practically ground zero as far as enduring, ancient practices goes. More ancient than stone worship by the Druids which, when you think about it, was really just a bunch of people in good-looking hooded robes staring at boulders and getting cold at the sunrise.
So we consulted Instant Feng Shui after the guests had left their, you know, negative karma about the place, their critical, snotty comments and their foul moods making it difficult for us to sleep and generally carry on in the elevated, serene way we’d been so diligently practicing.
The guests, a pair of hefty, middle-aged sisters from Winnipeg—nylon leisure suits, brush cuts—had rented the suite sight unseen from our ad in Nature Now! It was the first ad for our suite, renamed The Heartspeak Wellness Retreat—: “Experience the life-enhancing calm … ”—and the sisters were our first guests.
On the second day of their three-week stay they began complaining. Where was the ozone-filtered water? What was Eco-friendly about a track house set in the suburban wilderness behind a strip mall? And where, they demanded, with three noisy preteens in residence, was the calm?
Soon after they began directing their malevolent energy towards us from below. We could actually feel it invading our sacred meditation time like a seeping mould. It took the form of chills and crankiness and black-hearted nastiness amongst the upstairs inhabitants—Jason and the boys, the household pets, myself. We could actually, you know, experience our perfect Now being contaminated. The sun may have shone for the time the guests were with us but their souls were imprisoned in a permanent thundercloud.
The dog’s vicious dislike of the guests was their fault, of
course; animals know and despise negative beings. Ditto for the droppings left by the cat on their kitchen floor. The suite’s repeatedly overflowing toilet, the rips in the sheets, and the rock thrown through their bedroom window were further examples of the negative attracting the negative. About the broken window, we’re certain it was not caused by one of our boys. More likely it was a message from a large, rock-hurling eagle and doesn’t that speak volumes? Eagles, as everyone knows, are emissaries, ancient emissaries from the spirit world and they always make an appearance when negative forces are at the boil.
It’s a blessing, I told Jason, that the guests paid for the rental in advance. It was an even greater blessing when they cut short their visit by ten days and moved to a motel in the city. Their names were Arlene and Bonnie and they left in a huff. I tried practicing Tonglen while they loaded their rented Mazda. I tried practicing Tonglen very hard. I stood on the front porch, screwed shut my eyes, breathed deeply, and concentrated on sending wave upon wave of loving kindness to those red-faced beings. Any time you encounter blood-boiling rage, Tonglen is the kindest thing you can do. Never give irritating paying guests a refund.
After they’d roared out of the driveway flinging gravel everywhere we meditated for thirty minutes. Then we consulted Instant Feng Shui. The book told us how to cleanse our home after unwelcome visitors have left. First you put two heavy stone jars on either side of the front door to usher in new beginnings. Then you light firecrackers. Set off firecrackers in the places where the offending guests have been. And this setting off of firecrackers made sense to us. Tiny explosions clearing the air, shaking things up, restoring harmony. Throw open the windows, the book advised, and light about two dozen firecrackers, mainly in doorways and in places where the guests have slept. And viola!, the book promised, clarity and peace restored.
But we encountered this big problem. It was mid-August and just try buying firecrackers in mid-August. There’s some law against it. Some law that says you can only buy firecrackers during the last two weeks of October, for Halloween. So we wondered, what now? Because our need was pressing—bad karma headaches, pictures falling off the walls, general imbalance and disharmony in our home, the human and pet inhabitants gnawing on one another’s tranquility.
So we built a bomb. Five bombs actually. Five little bombs trying, you know, to approximate firecracker size. But, of course, this was difficult. Jason and I visited Home Hardware for the raw ingredients, the dynamite and fuses and something to put the bomb-making materials into—tubing, we decided, plastic or metal tubing. And we encountered difficulty in the form of suspicious looks from the hardware store clerks who seemed to be thinking, you know, that we were dangerous, and while we’d certainly be the first to admit that there’s plenty of things to be dangerous about these days, animal testing being a major scandal in our opinion and generally, the abuse and neglect of cats and dogs, well, this was not one of those times.
I said to Jason, after receiving a blast of ill wind from the pinch-mouthed clerk while purchasing bulk dynamite and filling out all those forms, I said, what we need to do right now, right here is Light Body. That’s when you imagine, you know, a protective white light surrounding your body. So we did that. We said to the clerk, “Excuse us!” ran outside to the parking lot, got in our car, and practiced Light Body. We got comfortable on the front seat—shoes off, lotus position—and took several deep abdominal breaths. We then visualized a protective white light emanating from the tips of our skulls and surrounding our bodies, top to bottom, side to side, like an egg.
When we returned to the hardware store inside our newly created, shimmering eggs everything was serene and delightful. In no time we completed our purchases.
Jason later said in affirmation, “You know, while I was practicing Light Body it was amazing. A red light traveled all the way up from my perineum to my sixth Chakra where it became the most beautiful purple colour.”
Jason, formerly in real estate, formerly called Gerald, followed his bliss last year and now does ear coning for a living. “I can’t explain it,” he’s often said of his transformation, “But I felt this overwhelming call for ear wax and candles, for helping people with sinus irritation and tinnitus. I feel like I’ve got a Date with Destiny.”
For a fee he’ll also read your aura. So when he tells you he sees purple he means purple. Thanks to meditation, yoga, ozone therapy, touch point reflexology, zero-balancing, his Shamanic drumming circle, and a Vegan diet, Jason’s become a mild, pony-tailed, teddy bear of a man and all the women, his clients, just love “Ears by Jason.”
He’s funny, too, but in a joyful, non-judgmental way. When everyone started doing Random Acts of Kindness, Jason, for some reason, misunderstood the word “kindness,” the way you can misread a headline and get a completely different meaning. He started doing Random Acts of Kinkiness and, for several days, handed out condoms and yellow nylon rope to complete strangers. While sharing with me the hostile reactions he’d received, I discovered his error.
“I don’t understand it,” he said, mystified. “Handing out all those condoms and ropes, I really believed I was touching peoples hearts, rekindling our oneness, our kindred spirits. It felt wonderful.”
What also felt wonderful was our successful practice of Feng Shui to rid our home of the bad karma left by the guests. Our homemade firecrackers, our mini-bombs, were each about the size of a Cuban cigar. For safety’s sake, we made sure that each one had a fuse long enough to travel from inside the suite to the far end of the back yard. There, the boys and Jason and I gathered in a healing circle to ask for the Earth Goddess’s blessing before lighting the fuses. And when those bombs exploded our relief was instant. Peace and harmony just came flooding back into our home like from an unleashed dam. We were so overjoyed we danced in spinning, you know, cosmic circles around the back yard—Jason and me, the boys, the dog.
The municipal firefighters, when they arrived with their sirens screaming, were amazed that there’s been so little damage—only one window broken and some incidental burn holes in the bedding. Otherwise there was just this pervasive, healing, sulfur-smelling smoke everywhere.
A month later that smell was still with us working it’s Feng Shui magic. That is, until we received a registered letter from Wisdom Inc., the company in Phoenix, Arizona that was giving Jason and me our correspondence course in Enlightenment. It was the letter we’d been waiting for. Although we know we’re supposed to live without fear or hope, we couldn’t help feeling disappointed by the letter’s contents.
We’d taken the course, completing all the chapters, writing the tests, pondering the red-inked replies, and redoing some of the questions, as required. We took it all very seriously. Then, when the final exam had been written, we filled out the application form for Graduate Postings, hoping for some exotic background in which to parade our newly awakened selves. Our passports were in order; we’d designated a Power of Attorney, and packed our bags. In short, we did everything that was required, including finding foster homes for the boys.
Now came the reply: Overseas posting denied. Candidates insufficiently evolved. Recommendation: Stay where you are. Take another course. Better luck next time.
We were stunned. We’d been posted to our own back yard.
Jason was momentarily, you know, livid. He’d been hoping to practice ear coning internationally. He started seeing red everywhere and not the good kind of red, either. “I’m forty-nine years old!” he cried. “I paid all that money to go through all those bleeding levels and I have to remain here?”
“Maybe it’s a test,” I said. “Some kind of ultimate test.”
“What isn’t ultimate?” he snapped.
“Exactly.”
We unpacked our bags.
Temporarily, for a nanosecond of my emptied Now state of mind, I was disillusioned. I was having misgivings about the Human Potential Movement and nearly changed my name from Ambika Crystal, Divine Bodywork Pet Counselor, back to Debbie Thornbur, prepare
r of income tax returns.
Fortunately, Instant Feng Shui was on hand with its sage advice. “To promote happiness and prosperity and to hasten your journey along the path to Enlightenment,” I read, perhaps a little too anxiously, “place a clear glass paperweight before a mirror in your hallway. At the exact same time each day, stand before the mirror and place your hands on the paperweight. Now, with shoulders relaxed and head erect, gently smile at your reflection. Keep smiling for forty-five minutes. Do this for twenty-seven days.”
This has now become my principal daily practice. While awaiting results, I’ve been writing in my “Vision Journal” as instructed by the knowing people at Wisdom Inc. Our first assignment for the new course is this: We are to imagine that the house we’ve lived in for eleven years with the boys, the dog and cat and assorted possessions, is entirely New. We are to experience each moment with awakened eyes, as if the next moment after that will be one of blindness, deafness and/or sudden, violent death.
This is what I wrote this morning:
Daybreak. Light frost. Sky along the strip mall washed pink and grey. Brush stroke of cloud stretching east to west. I, Ambika Crystal, a human Haiku in a velour dressing gown, am throwing toast crusts from an upstairs window to the scavenging crows in the back yard below. The cat sits beside me at the window, her jaws vibrating at the sight of the birds. Oh, get on with it, kill the bloody things, I want to scream. And scream.
Startled by what I had written, I raced back to the mirror. A double dose of Feng Shui should help.
Now I’m smiling. And for added measure, chanting “Ommmmm.” Smiling and chanting at the same time is not as difficult as it sounds. Try this when the journey’s just not moving along, you know, fast enough.
Darwin Alone in the Universe Page 4