The Last Laugh

by Arjuna Ardagh

  “What do you mean, Matt?”

  “I mean, I can’t wait to hear what you’ve been up to.”

  “Oh, yes.” She giggled.

  “Looks like things are going to work out now. I’m really … I’m really … hmmmm …” I cleared my throat. “Confident.” Silence. She had to have known I was bluffing. I didn’t even fool myself. I found a sticky spot on my shirt and tried to wipe it off with my spare hand.

  “Call me soon?” A question, a tentative one at that, more than a demand.

  My breath tightened. I felt like I had won a prize by accident, and it was only time till I had to give it back. A pause. Sadness. “Bye.”

  I turned around. Joey was standing in the kitchen doorway, grinning at me.

  “What did you tell them?” My voice was cold, accusing.

  “Just the truth.” I hated his innocent, deerlike eyes in these moments.

  “Which is?”

  “That you’re doing very well. She asked me how you were doing.”

  “And you said?” There was a kitchen knife a few inches from my hand. I pulled away from it.

  “I said you were doing very well. I said that you were an intelligent and capable young man, who would have no problem turning his life around.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you said?” I was staring. I knew him a little by now.

  “Let me see … ” Joey looked pensive. I knew there was more, and I knew he’d do everything to wriggle out of confessing. “Well, hurry up and make your coffee. We’re going to open our gifts now.”

  I did as I was told and joined the others in the living room. Cheryl patted the sofa next to her where there was an empty space. “I wrapped the things you made,” she whispered, theatrically. “Something for Joey, something for Katie, and plenty left over for your family.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered back and squeezed her hand, trying to conjure up Christmasy feelings. I noticed the mess on my shirt from my misadventure with the bread ball.

  And so began the strangest game I ever played at Christmas. It didn’t need much guesswork to figure out who made it up. Somebody would get a gift from the tree, and open it. The next person could either get another gift or take away the gift that the first person got. If your gift got taken, you would take another. Then the third person could choose, either from under the tree or from one of the previous two. The person having a gift taken from them got to choose another gift, either from under the tree or one already in possession, but couldn’t take back one of the gifts they previously had taken away from them. This went on in the same vein until all the presents had been opened. Much later I found out that this was another of Joey’s little ideas that had spread virally from one party to another all over the world.

  I was the third to receive a gift, which was a bottle of red wine from Napa Valley. Not bad stuff at all. I lost it in round five. I spent two rounds wondering what I would do with an ugly, fuzzy red steering-wheel cover, when Charlie greedily exchanged it for a CD of *NSYNC. Jessie took that from me in round 11, and I wound up with a nice woolen hat, clearly one which Katie had made, which suited me just fine.

  Around noon everyone dispersed to do various tasks. I went in the kitchen to see how I could help, but Katie insisted I sit down to eat the eggs and toast that I had missed for breakfast. Then, with a quick jerk of his head, Joey motioned me outside. I found my jacket, put on my new hat, and we were off again into the forest.

  “It’s day six,” said Joey. He paused for a long time. “How did you sleep?”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  We were walking thick into the woods now, deeply off the path through the underbrush. The damp moss greeted us, as though this was our own home. The forest washed us with its dew, as if to remind us that the world of people had dirtied us unnaturally. A squirrel ran up a tree into a hole. I breathed the smells in deep. I wanted to take my clothes off and rub in the mud and moisture and texture of it all.

  “Did you dream?” asked Joey.

  I had to think. “Yeah, I dreamed of my parents again.”

  “Ah, tell me about them.”

  “They died in a plane crash.”

  “When?”

  “I was still in college.”

  “Do you miss them?”

  “Yes and no. We were kind of distant when they died.”

  “Where were you when you heard the news of their death?”

  I thought about it. “I was working at a late night café. It was after two in the morning; we were just closing when a phone call came.”

  I could feel a burning sensation on the left side of my face now, as though remembering something violent in my body, as well as my mind. “They had called the shared house that I lived in, and someone there gave them the number of the café.”

  “Who was calling?”

  “Some government agency. They were very diplomatic, I remember. It took them ages to get to the point.”

  “What did you feel?”

  I tried to remember. “Nothing. That was the strange thing. I didn’t feel anything; it was more an absence of feeling. After I hung up the phone I just went back to washing the dishes.”

  “What did you feel later?”

  “Numb. Like I said, we’d grown apart.”

  “Okay,” said Joey. He motioned toward a tree stump. “Close your eyes.” I sat and did as he said. “Now go back to your memory of a few minutes before you got the call.”

  “I was doing the dishes.”

  “Okay, now play it slowly forward till the phone rings.”

  “I just remembered one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’d smoked a joint about one hour before. I was stoned.”

  “Aha. Good to know.” He was playing Sherlock. “So listen now to the voice on the phone.”

  “Yeah, he’s asking me for my name and various irrelevant details to prove that it’s me. Now he’s talking about flight numbers, giving various disclaimers about the liability of the government.”

  “And?”

  “Well, he hasn’t said that they’re dead yet, but I sort of know it. I can feel it.”

  “Where do you feel it?”

  “There’s a tightening here.” I put my hand to my gut.

  “Okay,” said Joey. “Put your hand there and forget all about the memory now, and just like we did yesterday, make it stronger. How strong is it now, if one is almost nothing, and ten is as strong as it could be?”

  “Maybe four.”

  “Make it stronger.”

  A fire was beginning to burn in the middle of my body. It started as a smolder, but it was soon raging. With every breath, it took over more and more until my head ached and my mouth was dry.

  “How strong is it?” I heard Joey’s voice, from far away.

  “Nine,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Keep building it; keep making it more. Let this overwhelm you.”

  Soon I was convulsing completely, imploding into a tight knot of not wanting to feel. I heard Joey’s voice again.

  “Relax; let go. Relax back into yourself.”

  I breathed deeply and sighed out. It was like taking off a tight shoe.

  “Now. Could you forget all about what has happened before? Could you start fresh?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Bring your hand back. What’s there now?”

  I was surprised. “Nothing, it’s, it’s … there’s nothing there at all.”

  “Good,” said Joey. “Go back again to the phone call. The man is asking your name, for proof of your identity, and now feel.”

  As I returned to the memory, it was quite different. Instead of numbness there was grief. “Mummy,” I whispered involuntarily.

  “Yes,” said Joey. “Let yourself feel.”

  Suddenly I was soft. I had lost my mother and my father all at the same time.

  “Let go of the images and feel your body.”

  It was all in my lower belly, a vacuum. A pain too
strong to feel.

  “Give it a number,” Joey whispered.

  “Four,” I said. I was falling into it, falling out of control; consumed by a fire that burned so strong it destroyed. It took much longer to work our way up through the numbers this time. I would contract completely, and then he would encourage me to breathe until I could feel again. Finally, after what was maybe a few minutes, but seemed like hours, I was feeling it fully. There was nothing but an overwhelming agony; nothing left but a universe devoid of all the support I’d ever known. It was searing, like an operation on the nervous system without anesthetic. It was pure scream without any sound. Finally, I heard his voice again.

  “Relax, let go; fall back into yourself.”

  My body was trembling. I could hear the sounds of the forest, very fresh and vivid. My body felt tremendously soft, as though this were my first moment, newborn, innocent, absolutely innocent, just pure hearing. I could feel the wetness of the moss against my skin as a caress.

  “Put your hand to your belly,” said Joey softly. “What’s there?”

  “It’s warm,” I said. “It’s sweet; it’s soft.”

  “Good,” he said. He waited a few moments and then asked me to return again to the phone call. He had me replay it a couple of times, but there was no charge. It was as if I was listening to someone else’s memory.

  Joey came over and put his arm around me. He looked into my eyes like a parent or a lover.

  “You’ve been resisting that one for a long time.”

  I laid my head in his lap. He placed his hand on my head. Together, we listened to the forest; neither of us spoke. He hummed to himself softly, under his breath; I could feel the rise and fall of his belly with my head. Finally, without speaking, we slowly stood up together and continued our walk through the moss and the ferns and the dew and the hint of animals, for whom this was home. It was quite some time and some walking before we spoke again.

  He squeezed my elbow. “You jumped in at the deep end. Most everything we do and say is the product of memory. We almost never respond innocently or spontaneously to what’s before us. It’s all filtered through what’s gone before, and not even the clear memory of that—a distorted, filtered view of what’s gone before. Instead of responding, we react.” He turned from me, stretched his back, and opened his arms wide toward a tree.

  “We react inappropriately, based upon the distorted perceptions we carry in our bodies,” he went on as he turned back to me. “Memory can have a charge when it’s carried in the body, or it can be factual, you remember the facts of a situation with no feelings attached to it. To live freely you need to be able to know how to transform charged, emotional memory into factual memory. Feel now in your body whatever you couldn’t or wouldn’t feel then.”

  “But Joey,” I said. “There must be millions of events that happened in my life. The number of charged memories must be virtually infinite.”

  “It’s not a process of time,” he went on. “It’s not a goal you have to work toward, to become finally complete. It’s a dance, an endless exploration. I didn’t say you have to liberate every charged memory to be free, only that you have to know how to. You have the God-given ability to feel each impulse as it arises and return again and again to your natural state.”

  We walked back into Katie’s cottage. George Gurdjieff was sleeping by the fire. It felt warm after the walk. Katie had been baking bread, the whole cottage smelled sweet and reassuring. Some knitting had been left in the chair next to the fire. Joey motioned for me to take a seat at the dining table, and he put on the kettle for tea.

  “You know, Joey,” I began. “None of these lessons are exactly easy. It could take me years of practice to master even one of them.”

  Joey opened the cupboard above the kitchen counter. Dozens of kinds of herbal teas. He opened his eyes wide, and whistled. “What kind of tea do you want?”

  “Whatever. Whatever you are having.”

  “Lipton.”

  “I mean we have habits that have lasted all our lives, habits like judgment and fear.”

  Joey wasn’t listening. He had found a little bottle among the tea, and was eyeing it with rapt curiosity.

  “Vitamin C. One thousand milligrams.”

  “It’s all very well to go out into a field, with a teacher there to remind you, and to have an insight of how things could be, but what about daily life? What about the marketplace?”

  “Made from organically grown rosehips,” Joey went on.

  “Joey, I just don’t feel it is enough. Are you expecting me to master all this stuff you’re showing me overnight? Just because I get it once?”

  “Patented time-release formula. What’s that mean anyway?”

  I was feeling impatient. “It means that you take a big dose in one shot, and they’ve figured out some clever way so that it slowly absorbs into your system.”

  “Ah,” said Joey. “Yes. That’s the idea.”

  He twinkled, and put a large handful in his mouth.

  CHAPTER 19

  BLIND MAN’S BASEBALL

  I don’t remember too much about the rest of the day. At five o’clock we all gathered for a magnificent dinner. There was turkey and gravy, mashed potatoes, salad, and an infinite variety of vegetables. Tim brought some very special wine he’d had for many decades. Enough to lubricate every one of us. We stayed up late playing Pictionary and Charades and a number of very bizarre games that Joey appeared to make up on the spot.

  Sam looked so beautiful that evening. She wore a black velvet choker with a stone set in it and a dark blue dress. Her blue eyes were shining. We could look into each other, my heart was free like an animal released from years of living in a cage. I knew she knew it. She had become closer to me than a sister.

  The next day we all woke late. There was a befuddled morning-after feeling to the whole house. I sat for a long time in the kitchen, drinking Katie’s coffee, eating her bread, and listening to stories about her life with Joey. All the details he had dwelt on, that evening in the city, she either glossed over or forgot completely. Her version was filled with colorful, simple people. A single mother in Barcelona who had traveled with them through Europe. Stories of Tim when he was auditioning for his first parts on the stage. Katie would stop what she was doing as she recalled different friends. She would look hazily into the distance, remembering them as “a sweetheart” or “such a honey.”

  Joey walked in around 11 A.M. He nodded briefly to each of us, but looked serious and determined, like a doctor on call who just got beeped and must hurry to the hospital. He drank his coffee standing up and looked frequently at his watch. Then he strode to the back door, nodded at me, and we were off again.

  Near the pile of logs, which I had not yet stacked, was a shed, three walls closed in, but open at the front. He disappeared into the back for a few minutes, then returned with a baseball and a bat. He said not a word to me, nor did our eyes meet. He seemed angry about something, and I couldn’t imagine what.

  He led me up a dirt road. It quickly rose to a much higher elevation above the farm; as we walked in silence, the trees got thinner, the ground more gravelly. The wind was cold, and made noises in the trees. The combination of remoteness and his silent, determined attitude made me nervous. I looked back over my shoulder now and then at the farm, the warm fire, the warm bread, his warm wife.

  We continued up beyond where the dirt road ended, walking on a small path, and finally came to a cleared area overlooking the most incredible view of the valley below. From where we stood there must have been an almost sheer drop of perhaps 2,000 feet to the bottom of the valley. Right on the edge, jutting out a little over the drop, was a large boulder, flat on the top, perhaps three feet square.

  Joey motioned me to stand away from the drop, so it was off to our side. He handed me the baseball bat. He looked solemnly into my eyes.

  “Focus your mind,” he said, quietly and with slightly pursed lips. “Focus your mind, very precisely into this m
oment. Now we’re going to find out just how serious you are.”

  I completely forgot his soft, gentle humor. Jesus, this guy could throw me over the cliff without a moment’s hesitation and lie to the others about what had happened. Was I with a raving psychopath? It really didn’t seem like any of this made any difference to him. He did seem to care, but without giving a hoot for consequence.

  Without a moment’s warning, he threw the ball forcefully toward me. For a man in his late 70s, he had the pitching power of a 20-year-old. I missed completely. The ball sailed off behind my head. I went scurrying after it. After a search of a minute or two, I brought it dutifully back. His face was expressionless as he took the ball. “Focus,” he said. “This is just the beginning.”

  The next pitches were easier. I was ready now. As he threw each ball with great force, I managed to hit almost all of them. Some he caught. Others, I had to run and find.

  “Okay,” he said after a while. “You’re ready for the next level.”

  He pulled a red bandanna out of his hip pocket. He folded it down into a narrow strip and tied it around my eyes. His touch was rough. He caught my hair in his knot; when I made a sound he ignored it, breathing hard.

  “We’re going to do the same thing now, but blindfolded.”

  There was clearly no opportunity for discussion here. I stood holding the bat. I could feel the rings on its handle, designed for fingers to grip. I could feel the slightly wet earth beneath my feet, the heightened tension in my chest. The rush came suddenly. I felt my arms move quickly; a split second later came the thought to do something, after it was over. There was a crack as the bat hit the ball. I heard Joey’s voice.

  “Stay there,” he said. “I’ll get it.”

  I could hear the crunching of his feet. My whole body was electric. Thought completely suspended. I had just hit a ball square on without using my eyes. I heard the sounds of Joey’s return. Then another ball. The whole thing happened so quickly. If I break it down, it sounds like a sequence of events. But it was all happening at the same time. The sound of the ball in flight. A thought, perhaps a clenching of fear, the ball might hit me. Instead of swinging the bat, I raised my arm to defend myself. The ball struck my elbow. Excruciating pain. My body crumpled. I dropped the bat. I lay on the ground, gripping the pain in my arm. Joey walked toward me. His voice was cold, crisp, militaristic.