Larry and the Meaning of Life

by Janet Tashjian

  “At least let me check this guy out, make some inquiries,” Peter said.

  I told him I didn’t care who the guy was—he’d done wonders for Janine.

  “I’m glad she’s doing well,” Beth said. “But that doesn’t mean this program will work for you.”

  “Hear, hear,” Peter agreed.

  Beth stopped the glider we were both rocking on. “How did she look, by the way?”

  “Janine? Great.”

  She nodded and started up the glider again. “Skinny?”

  I shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “Good skinny, though, right? Not too skinny, I hope.”

  I told her Janine looked good.

  “’Cuz sometimes you can get too skinny.” 31

  “I wasn’t focused on her weight,” I answered. “She just seemed content.”

  “Sure it’s not drugs?” Peter asked. “You can never tell with these cults.”

  “It’s not a cult. I’ll be living here! I can leave anytime.”

  “Is her hair still long?” Beth picked at her tiny bangs. “It’s not like I care, I’m just wondering.”

  “You’re so focused on the externals, maybe you should take a course in spiritual enlightenment.”

  “I’m not the one playing D & D in my basement all day.”

  “As of tomorrow, neither am I.”32

  “Please don’t do this,” Beth said. “And I’m not saying it because Janine will be there.”

  “My mother said Gus was for real.”

  “No offense, but I wouldn’t make a life decision based on people standing at the Chanel counter,” Peter said.

  “It’s always been my most important decision-making criterion—you know this!”

  Peter mumbled something about learning from my own mistakes, then lit the grill for dinner. I waited until Beth left before I dropped the bomb I’d been saving since yesterday.

  “Uhm, there’s a fee to study with Gus,” I said. “Two thousand dollars.”

  Peter turned the knob of the grill with so much force a stripe of orange flame leaped toward his head. He jumped back and lowered the burner.

  “Two thousand dollars? Whatever happened to ‘all you need is love’?”

  I explained that lots of teachers charged tuition, including those at Princeton. He explained he’d been working almost pro bono since he left his advertising job and barely had any savings left.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll make other arrangements. Don’t worry about it.”

  Peter turned off the grill; it seemed neither of us were hungry anymore. I headed to the basement.

  Since I was a kid, the back-and-forth movement of the cellar swing had served as a mental metronome for me. After climbing on, it took only a few moments for the repetitive motion to calm my mind.

  I had to admit that Beth and Peter weren’t the only ones with doubts. Suppose Gus further derailed my already-precarious mental state? And I couldn’t say I was looking forward to being in “class” again. The longer I thought about it, the more reasons I came up with to bail on the whole thing. But a little sliver of hope deep inside forced its way to my consciousness. You’re sick of just lying around. You want your life to have meaning again. You need help getting out of your own way.

  I remembered a quote from Joseph Campbell that I’d read in tenth grade: “I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” The quotation summed up my feelings exactly. I didn’t care about the why of life so much as I just wanted to partake in it again—with full attention and participation. I didn’t want to sleepwalk anymore; I wanted to be awake. I just had to find a way to make it happen.

  Peter came downstairs and sat cross-legged on the floor next to me. He pushed me on the swing as if I were a toddler at the playground. I was embarrassed by his fatherly attempt at connection and braked the swing with my leg.

  “If you really want to do it, I’ll lend you the money,” he said. “It’s up to you.”

  I thanked him for his generous offer and told him I’d repay him in full.

  “You’re right about that,” Peter said. “With interest.”

  “No way,” Gus said. “You wanted out, you’re out. I’m not taking you back as a student because of an ex-girlfriend.33 What do you think this is—two years ago, when you ran that anticonsumer Web site to impress the girl next door?”34

  I explained that Janine recommended his program highly and that was good enough for me. Gus listened for several moments without speaking.

  “You’ll have to prove yourself,” he said. “If these other kids give one hundred percent, you give two. If I’m setting up a utopian community, I can’t have kids waffling back and forth on their commitment.” Gus whittled a knight from a piece of maple as he spoke.

  “Whoa! Utopian community—are you talking about a commune?”

  “Did I say commune?” Gus asked. “I’m talking about a community of people who live together with common goals.”

  “That’s the definition of a commune.”

  “Well, I found a three-story Victorian down the road, a Victorian Utopia. Think I’ll call it Victopia.”35 Gus beat his hands on his chest and let out a Tarzan yell. “The other students will stay there, but I think you should commute. You’re much more the commuting type.” 36

  When I held out the check for two thousand dollars, Gus snapped it up faster than a tree frog snaps up flies. “Welcome to Utopia, my boy. Whatever’s in your internal world will manifest itself in the outside world. Make sure what you bring to the group is positive.”

  He shook my hand and told me to get ready to work my butt off.

  I spotted Janine down by the water. She and several other students were walking the circumference of the pond from the inside, the way Gus had done that first day.37 I walked to the shoreline and yanked off my sweatshirt. I stumbled to the water until I reached Janine. “I want to feel alive again. I’m in.”

  She ran her hand along the surface of the water and splashed me in the chest. I dove in and popped back with a frigid scream. Up at the treeline, I spotted Gus watching us through a pair of high-tech binoculars. He was several yards away, but I could swear he was laughing.

  PART TWO

  “Man is firmly convinced that he is awake;

  in reality he is caught in a net of sleep and dreams

  which he has unconsciously woven himself.”

  Gustav Meyrink

  An engraving of Thoreau’s 1846 survey

  from the first edition of Walden

  I’d be lying if I said personal enlightenment was the only thing on my mind after finally seeing Janine again. It had been a while, and we had a lot of time to make up for. Until Gus set the group’s ground rules.

  “Rule number one: There’ll be no chatting up the opposite sex,” he said. “You’re here for one reason and one reason only—to focus on your studies. Celibacy is a given.”

  What?

  The smirk on his face made me think he had Janine and me in mind with this first rule. But, unlike me, Janine seemed to gladly accept the regulation. I forced myself to suck it up and pay attention to the rest of Gus’s lecture.

  “Rule number two: Possessions tie you down. For those of you new to the group, it’s time to get rid of your belongings.” Gus passed a stained pillowcase around the circle, and we tossed in our gear.38 MP3 players, cell phones, books, and makeup, as well as IOUs for the possessions we had at home and would bring in the next day.

  “Your auras look lighter already,” Gus said. “Rule number three: ‘Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.’”39 Gus handed out photocopies for us to share. They appeared to be hand-drawn maps of the pond and its surrounding areas. “As you may know, Thoreau was a man of many interests—writer, naturalist, philosopher, gardener, house helper for Ralph Waldo Emerson. But of all his skills, surveying was a way for him to support himself and tramp through the woods at the same time.”

  I st
udied the tiny numbers measuring the pond in rods,40 taking special pleasure in Thoreau’s messy handwriting, as difficult to read as my own.

  Gus pulled a well-worn paperback of Walden from his back pocket. “From chapter sixteen. ‘As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond, I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in ’46, with compass and chain and sounding line.’ Back in Thoreau’s day, some people thought this glacial hole had no bottom, that it was so deep it went right through the center of the earth. Thoreau proved them wrong with a cod line and stone.” It seemed as if Gus was looking straight through me. “Sometimes we get so lost, it feels as if we’ll never reach the bottom of ourselves, but like finding the floor of Walden, all it takes is some good, hard work.”

  I watched the water lap to the shore, afraid to look Gus in the eyes. Was I the only one whose insides felt like a bottomless abyss? I hoped I wasn’t the most screwed-up person in the group.

  “Thoreau performed more than a hundred fifty surveys in his lifetime but only a few here at Walden,” Gus continued. “We’re going to take up where he left off, learning this skill and surveying the rest of the area.”41

  Mike was first to complain. He was a big guy from Kansas City, who’d joined the group after his sister claimed studying with Gus had changed her life. “Haven’t other people surveyed it since Thoreau? Why do we have to do it again?”

  Gus explained the exercise wasn’t busywork but would force us to follow in Thoreau’s footsteps, metaphorically, as well as physically. He opened a box filled with several rusty artifacts. “These are from the same time period as Thoreau, so please be careful.”

  We sorted through the plumb lines, angles, compasses, and weights. I don’t know how the others felt, but I could sense the history embedded in the antique metal, linen, and wood. Gus split us into groups for the survey work. Mike was assigned to work with Janine and me. The three of us hiked to the west end of the pond.

  With all the walking and meticulous measuring, it didn’t take long to break into a sweat. “And to think we had to pay to come here,” I said.

  Mike stopped counting his steps. “You had to pay?”

  I stopped counting also. “Didn’t you?”

  He shook his head and asked how much studying with Gus had set me back. I was too embarrassed to tell him my stepfather had to underwrite my spiritual journey, but Mike nagged until I relented. I mumbled the words “two thousand dollars” as we started back on our task.

  “Are you insane?” Mike pointed to the others farther up the hill. “None of them had to pay. You can never trust those Lebanese.”

  “Armenians,” I corrected.

  I looked to Janine for support, but she told me to take it up with Gus. After finishing our first assignment, I did. He listened while I raised my grievance, putting down his whittling to give me his full attention. When I finished, he thanked me for sharing my feelings, then picked up his wood.

  “That’s it?” I asked. “Thanks for sharing?”

  “Sharing is not something to be taken lightly,” he answered. “It’s a very sacred activity.”

  “I agree. I’m just wondering why I had to pay such an exorbitant amount when no one else had to.”

  “Maybe you should stop worrying so much about other people,” he said.

  “And everyone else gets to live in that big house down the road while I bike in every day. It just doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Who said life was fair? That’s a concept guaranteed to bring unhappiness.”

  Intellectually I knew he was right, but that didn’t stop me from obsessing about the inequality of Gus’s program for the rest of the day. The downward spiral I’d been experiencing these past few months seemed ready to envelop me for good. It took all my willpower to resist it, forcing my mind to focus on the surveying instead. Like Thoreau, I was determined to reach the long-lost bottom.

  After spending four hours surveying,42 we settled in for Gus’s lecture.

  “I had a talk with a student earlier today about fairness, so today we’ll discuss an ethical dilemma dealing with questions of life and death, fairness and responsibility.”

  He closed his eyes for several minutes and basked in the autumn sun. This guy definitely knew how to build suspense.

  “Suppose a man needed an organ transplant,” Gus began. “A man, like all of us, who’d been sometimes good, sometimes bad, but had repented. Suppose he had a rare blood type, but you were a match. Would you consider donating a piece of your liver, your kidney, your lung?”

  “Why go through all that hassle for a stranger?” Mike asked.

  “Because the man will be dead by the end of the week if he doesn’t have the operation. Because only two percent of the population is a biological match. Because you’re young and healthy and would probably weather the operation with few complications.” Gus closed his eyes again and garnered the sun to his face like a solar panel. “Would you do it then?”

  Vigorous discussion ensued regarding the risks and benefits. We talked about the common good versus individual needs. In the end, most of us agreed to help save a stranger’s life.

  “Good,” Gus said. “Now let’s add another factor. Suppose this person who needs the transplant is in prison.”

  Katie asked him to clarify.43

  “He’s a murderer doing a life sentence. Or maybe he’s on death row, waiting to be executed.”

  Why save a murderer? Why donate an organ to someone scheduled to die? Aren’t there worthier people who could use our help? Gus might’ve been playing devil’s advocate, but he couldn’t understand how the new details were relevant. “There is no us and them.44 In an enlightened life, there’s only we.”

  “I wouldn’t let myself get cut open for a murderer,” Mike said. “Absolutely no way.”

  I took the other side of the debate. “Convict or not, he’d still be dying. If he could live another thirty years with some bone marrow I wouldn’t miss, why not?”

  “So your bone marrow could rot in prison?” Mike asked.

  “Who knows? Maybe while he was in there, he’d find a cure for Alzheimer’s or design a new hybrid engine.”

  “Or kill someone else,” Mike said.

  I could tell from the look in Janine’s eyes she knew why I’d taken this side of the argument. She knew I’d watched the life slowly seep from my mother’s body; being able to help someone delay that inevitable decline would be worth any temporary and personal inconvenience.

  “Can we talk about something else?” Janine asked with a slight stutter. “This discussion is totally hypothetical.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” Gus said. “I’ve done volunteer work at the National Kidney Foundation, one of the many organizations that facilitates living organ donation.” He reached into his pack and took out a pair of rubber gloves, some gauze, and a box of syringes. “This is completely voluntary, but a simple blood test can determine if any of us would be viable donors to the long list of people waiting for transplants. I can’t think of a better way to put a theory of changing the world into practice.”

  “Not for a murderer, I hope,” Katie said.

  Gus tied the tubing around his arm, then held it taut between his teeth.45 After letting go of the tubing, he told Katie the list was full of deserving recipients, not convicts. Up the hill, the train heading west punctuated our collective silence. Given the stand I’d taken in the argument, I didn’t have much ground for backing out. I rolled up my sweatshirt and held up my arm. I’d given blood many times since my mother’s illness; another sample was no big deal. Mike mouthed the word brownnoser as Gus stuck the needle into my arm.46 Janine went next. She appeared upbeat, but I could tell her bravado was a facade. Everyone except Mike gave samples.

  Gus held up the vials, now filled with deep red blood. “We can discuss these ethical dilemmas for days, but this is a whole new level in commitment to finding out the truth—your truth.” He told us he had to package the samples for the lab, and
we should finish the day’s surveying.

  “A girl I know from high school has been waiting for a tissue transplant for months, but I never thought of volunteering my own,” Katie said later. “I’m a perfect example of Gus’s theory—talking about making the world a better place but not doing anything about it. I’m going to see what blood type she is and see if I’m a match.”

  “Gus isn’t going to do anything with those samples,” Mike said. “It’s all for show. He is one crazy Albanian.”

  “I thought he was Armenian,” I said.

  “He told me he was from Pakistan.” Katie pointed toward Janine. “Ask her—she’s his favorite.”

  The conversation devolved into an am-not, are-too harangue between Katie and Janine.

  “We’re here for spiritual enlightenment, not one-upsmanship,” I said. “Knock it off.”

  “You could’ve stood up for me back there,” Janine told me later. “Katie hates me because Gus let me keep my cell.”

  “How’d you get to keep it?”

  She shrugged and smiled mischievously. “I guess he just likes me.”

  I put my arm around her. “So why don’t you get him to relax the celibacy rule too?”

  “Very funny.” She ducked out from my arm and threw a stick to Brady. Park rules forbid pets, but Janine insisted on taking him there every day anyway. Surprisingly, she hadn’t been caught.

  We walked away from the water toward the tracks. While he lived here, Thoreau never thought of the train as disturbing his peace and quiet but embraced the noise as part of his surroundings. “Did you know the railroad company built an amusement park here after Thoreau died?” I asked. “There was dancing, football fields, even a racetrack.”

  “Thoreau probably would’ve hated it.”

  “His sister Sophia thought it was profane.” I took the stick from Brady’s mouth and threw it again. “What else were you doing in L.A. besides studying with Gus?”

  “Nannying, surfing, waitressing—the usual Southern California thing.”