T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  But now she was bending to the oven, where the flattened balls of dough were taking on the appearance of bread, her meditation skirt hitched up in back so that he was able to admire the shape of her ankles, a shape as miraculous as that of the dragonfly—or no, a thousand times more so. Because her ankles rose gracefully to her calves and her calves to her thighs and from there . . . he caught himself. This was not right-mindfulness, and he had to suppress it. There would be no touching, no kissing, no sex during the length of the retreat. And that length of time looped out suddenly before him like a rope descending into an infinite well: three years, three months, three days. Or no: two. One down, or nearly down. A quick calculation: 1,189 to go.

  He reached for the handle of the pot and had actually taken hold of it, so entranced was he by the poured gold of the chickpeas, before he understood that the handle was hot. But not simply hot: superheated, all but molten. He managed to drop the pot back on the burner without upsetting it, the harsh clatter of metal on metal startling his wife, who shot him a glance out of enlarging eyes, and though he wanted to cry out, to curse and shout and dance through his pain, he just bit his finger at the knuckle and let the tears roll down both flanges of his nose.

  Tarantula

  The first night came in a blizzard of stars. The temperature dropped till it was almost bearable, not that it mattered, and he stared hard at the concentric rings of the yurt’s conical ceiling till they began to blur. Was he bored? No, not at all. He didn’t need the noise of the world, the cell phones and TVs and laptops and all the rest, transient things, distractions, things of the flesh—he needed inner focus, serenity, the Bodhisattva path. And he was on it, his two feet planted firmly, as he dropped his eyes to study the movements of Karuna while she prepared for bed. She was grace incarnate, swimming out of her clothes as if emerging from a cool clean mountain stream, naked before him as she bent for the stiff cotton nightshirt that lay folded beneath her pillow on the raised wooden pallet beside his own. He studied the flex of her buttocks, the cleft there, the way her breasts swung free as she dipped to the bed, and it was so right, so pure and wholly beautiful that he felt like singing—or chanting. Chanting in his own head, Om mani padme hum.

  And then suddenly she was recoiling from the bed as if it had burst into flame, pinning the nightshirt to her chest and—it was her turn now—jamming a fist into her mouth to keep from screaming. He jumped to his feet and saw the tarantula then, a miracle of creation as stunning in its effect as the dragonfly, if more expected, because this was its environment, its home in the world of appearances. Big as a spread hand, it paused a moment on the pillow, as if to revel in its glory, and then, on the unhurried extension of its legs that were like walking fingers, it slowly ascended the adobe wall. Karuna turned to him, her eyes fractured with fear. She mouthed, Kill it, and he had to admire her in her extremity, because there was no speech, not even the faintest aspiration, just the drawn-back lips and the grimace of the unvoiced verb.

  He shook his head no. She knew as well as he that all creatures were sacred and that the very worst papa attached to taking a life.

  She flew to the drainboard where the washed and dried pot lay overturned, snatched it up and shoved it in his hand, making motions to indicate that he should capture the thing and take it out into the night. Far out. Over the next ridge, if possible.

  And so he lifted the pot to the wall, but the tarantula, with its multiple eyes and the heat of its being, anticipated him, shooting down the adobe surface as if on a hurricane wind to disappear, finally, in the mysterious dark space beneath his wife’s bed.

  Geshe

  In the morning, at an hour he supposed might be something like 3:30 or 4:00, the first meditation session of the day began. Not that he’d slept much in any case, Karuna insisting, through gestures and the overtly physical act of pinching his upper arm between two fingers as fiercely tuned as any tarantula’s pedipalps, on switching beds, at least for the night. He didn’t mind. He welcomed all creatures, though lying there in the dark and listening to the rise and fall of his bride’s soft rasping snores he couldn’t help wondering just what exactly the tarantula’s message had been: I am the karmic representative of the arachnid world, here to tell you that all is well among us, which is why I’ve come to bite your wife. Hooray! Jabba-jabba-jabba!

  Geshe Stephen, who’d awakened them both with a knuckle-rap at the door that exploded through the yurt like a shotgun blast, was long-nosed and tall, with a slight stoop, watery blue eyes and two permanent spots of moisture housed in his outsized nostrils. He was sixty-two years old and had ascended to the rank of Geshe—the rough equivalent of a doctor of divinity—through a lifetime of study and an unwavering devotion to the Noble Eightfold Path of the Gautama Buddha. He had twice before sought enlightenment in a regimen of silence and he was as serene and untouched by worldly worry as a breeze stirring the very highest leaves of the tallest tree on the tallest mountain. Before the retreat began, when the thirteen aspirants were building their domiciles and words were their currency, he’d delivered up any number of parables, the most telling of which—at least for this particular aspirant—was the story of the hermit and the monk.

  They were gathered in the adobe temple, seated on the floor in a precise circle. Their robes lay about them like ripples on water. Sunlight graced the circular walls. “There was once a monk in the time of the Buddha who devoted his life to meditation on a single mantra,” the Geshe intoned, his wonderfully long and mobile upper lip rising and falling, his voice so inwardly directed it was like a sigh. “In his travels, he heard of an ancient holy man, a hermit, living on an island in a vast lake. He asked a boatman to row him out to the island so that he could commune with the hermit, though he felt in his heart that he had reached a level at which no one could instruct him further, so deeply was he immersed in his mantra and its million-million iterations. On meeting the hermit he was astonished to find that this man too had devoted himself to the very same mantra and for a number of years equal to his own, and yet when the hermit chanted it aloud the monk immediately saw that the hermit was deluded and that all his devotion had been in vain—he was mispronouncing the vowels. As a gesture of compassion, of karuna”—and here the Geshe paused to look round the circle, settling on Karuna with her shining braid and her beautiful bare feet—“he gently corrected the hermit’s pronunciation. After which they chanted together for some time before the monk took his leave. He was halfway across the lake when the oarsman dropped both oars and stared wildly behind him, for there was the hermit, saying, ‘I beg your pardon, but would you be so kind as to repeat the mantra once more for me so that I can be sure I have it right?’ How had the hermit got there? He had walked. On the water.” Again the pause, again the Geshe’s eyes roaming round the circle to settle not on Karuna, but on him. “I ask you, Ashoka: what is the sound of truth?”

  Ashoka

  His name, his former name, the name on his birth certificate and his New York State driver’s license, was Jeremy Clutter. He was forty-three years old, with a B.A. in fine arts (he’d been a potter) and an M.A. in Far Eastern studies, a house in Yorktown which now belonged to his first wife, Margery, and a middle-aged paunch of which he was—or had been—self-conscious. He’d met Sally at a week-long Buddhist seminar in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and she’d pointed out to him that the Buddha himself had sported a paunch, at the same time touching him intimately there. In his former life he’d made a decent income from a dot-com start-up, thepotterswheel.com, that not only survived the ’01 crash but had become robust in its wake. Money built his yurt. Money paid off Margery. Money embellished the Geshe’s grace. And the Geshe gave him his true name, Ashoka, which when translated from the Sanskrit, meant “Without Sadness.”

  Ironwood

  The second morning’s meditation session, like all the ensuing ones, was held out of doors on a slightly pitched knob of blasted dirt surrounded by cactus and scrub. There was a chill to th
e air that belied the season, but to an aspirant they ignored it. He chanted his mantra inside his head till it rang like a bell and resolved to bring a jacket with him tomorrow. Geshe Stephen kept them there till the sun came hurtling over the mountains like a spear of fire and then he rose and dismissed them. Bowing in his holy, long-nosed way, the Geshe took Ashoka gently by the arm and held him there until the others had left. With a steady finger, the finger of conviction, the Geshe pointed to a dun heap of dirt and rock in the intermediate distance and then pantomimed the act of bending to the ground and gathering something to him. Ashoka didn’t have a clue as to what the man was trying to impart. Geshe Stephen repeated the performance, putting a little more grit and a little less holiness into it. Still, he didn’t understand. Did he want him, as an exercise, a lesson, to measure the mountain between the space of his two arms extended so as to reduce it to its essence? To dirt, that is?

  Finally, exasperated, the Geshe pulled a notepad and pencil from his pocket and scrawled his redemptive message: Go up to the mountain and gather ironwood for the winter fires in the temple. Then report—report, that was the word he used—to the temple kitchen to peel potato and daikon for the communal stew.

  Flypaper

  The days stuck to him like flypaper. The moment was all there was. He went inward. Still, very gradually, the days became unglued, loosening and flapping in the wind that swept the desert in a turmoil of cast-off spines and seed pods. Nights came earlier, mornings later. One morning, after group meditation, the Geshe pressed a note into his hand. The note asked—or no, instructed—him to meet the water truck that came bimonthly from the nearest town, Indio Muerto, which lay some thirty-five miles across the motionless plain.

  The truck, painted an illusory forest green, appeared as a moving speck in the distance, working haltingly over the ruts and craters of what was once and occasionally a dirt road. He sat cross-legged in the infertile soil and watched it coming for what might have been hours or even days, all sense of time and the transient rush of things foreign to him now. There would come a moment when the truck would be there before him, he knew that, and so he spun a prayer wheel and chanted inwardly until it was in fact there, planted before him and obscuring the horizon as if it had sprung up out of the ground.

  He saw that there was a new driver to replace the expressionless old man who’d come in the past, a lean monkey-faced boy of nineteen or twenty with tattooed arms and a cap reversed on his head, and that the kid had brought his similarly tattooed and capped squeeze along for the desolate ride across the waste. No problem there. Ashoka didn’t begrudge him. In fact, as he watched them climb down from the cab of the truck he couldn’t help remembering a time when he and Margery had driven across country together in a car that had no radio and how Margery had said afterward that he’d never shut up for one instant the whole way, singing and laughing and spinning out one story after another, because for him, at least in those days, conversation wasn’t about truth or even communication—it was there for its entertainment value, pure and simple.

  “So, uh,” the kid began, startling him out of his reverie—or no, shocking him with the impact of those two syllables spoken aloud and reverberating like thunderclaps—“where you want me to pump it?”

  He pressed his hands to his ears. His face reddened. In that moment, rising, he caught a glimpse of himself in the big blazing slab of the truck’s side-view mirror and it was as if he’d been punched in the chest. What he saw reflected there was the exact likeness of one of the pretas, the restive spirits doomed to parch and starve because of their attachments to past lives, his hair white as death and flung out to every point of the compass, his limbs like sticks, face seared like a hot dog left too long on the grill.

  “Whoa,” the kid said, even as the girl, her features drawn up in a knot of fear and disgust, moved into the protection of his arm, “you all right there?”

  What could he say? How could he begin to explain?

  He produced a gesture to wave him off. Another for reassurance. And then, turning so gradually he could have been a tree growing toward the light, he lifted a hand and pointed, shakily, to the water tank, where it floated on wooden struts behind the two whitewashed yurts that housed Geshe and Lama respectively and rose like twin ice-cream cones from the dead blasted earth.

  Air-horn

  Everyone in the community, all thirteen of them plus Geshe Stephen and Lama Katie and including their nearest neighbors, the former Forest and Fawn Greenstreet (now Dairo and Bodhi respectively), had an air-horn. For emergencies. If there was an accident, an illness, a fire, the air-horns were to be used to summon help. He spent a long while each day in contemplation of the one he and Karuna had been given, for what reason he couldn’t say. Perhaps because it represented a link to the renounced world, a way out. Or because it had a pleasing shape. Or because it was the only object of color, real color, in the yurt.

  Karuna was at the cutting board, dicing cucumbers. She’d lost weight. But she was firm and lean and beautiful, not that it mattered, and he was enjoying the sight of her there, her elbows flashing beneath her robes that pulled back to reveal the pink thermal longjohns beneath. Outside it was dark. There was a fire in the woodstove. Karuna’s elbows flashed. Earlier, she’d been trying to tell him something of her day, of what she’d experienced on her walk out into the desert, but he couldn’t really catch much of it, despite the fact that she was leagues ahead of him when it came to charades. Something about a hillside and a moment and something she’d seen there, tracks, he thought, and a discarded water bottle. He’d smiled and nodded, feigning comprehension, because he liked the way her eyes flared and jumped and sank back again, liked the purse of her mouth and the ghost of her breasts bound up and held tight in the thermal weave that fit her like a new skin.

  These thoughts were unhealthy, he knew that. And as he watched her now, he couldn’t help feeling even more unhealthy—aroused, even—and so he shifted his gaze to the air-horn, where it stood on an adobe shelf like a work of art. And it was a work of art. The milk-white canister topped with a red rooster’s comb of plastic which was to be depressed in an emergency, the matching red lettering (SPORTS/MARINE, and below it, BIG HORN) and the way the sound waves were depicted there as a flaring triangle of hard red slashes.

  Big horn, he said to himself. Sports/Marine. Big horn. Sports/Marine. And for that moment, for that night, it became his mantra.

  Bup-Bup-Bah

  That was a problem, a growing problem, as the days wore on. The mantra, that is, because as the Buddha taught, life means suffering and the origin of suffering is attachment and the cessation of suffering is only attainable by taking the Bodhisattva path, and yet his mantra became mangled in its eternal repetition until other mantras, meaningless phrases and snatches of tunes, blotted it out altogether. Big horn lasted a week or more. And then one chill afternoon, sitting buttock to buttock with Fawn Greenstreet—Bodhi—on one side of him and Karuna on the other, staring through the long-nosed ascetic face of Geshe Stephen and digging inward, shovelful by shovelful, bup-bup-bah came to him. It was a musical phrase, from a tune of the great and towering giant of inwardness, John Coltrane, a tune called “Bakai.” The horns chanted it rhythmically, bup-bup-bah, bup-bup-bah, with a rising inflection on the first bah and a descending on the second. He tried to fight it off with Om mani padme hum, tried with all his concentration and practice, but it wouldn’t budge. It was there, bup-bup-bah, bup-bup-bah, like a record stuck in the groove, repeating over and over, repeating endlessly. And worse: his proximity to Bodhi on one side and his own wife on the other, given the day and the cold of the ground and the warm inviting odor arising from them both—bup-bup-bah—was giving him an erection.

  Twins

  Another note, this one handed to him by Lama Katie after the morning cleanup in the temple and the incantatory scraping of the baked-on oatmeal from the depths of the communal cook pot. Lama Katie, squat, big-breasted, h
er hair the color of midnight in a coal mine and her eyes even darker, gave him a smile of encouragement that radiated down the two deeply etched lines defining her chin and into the billowing plumpness beneath. She knew the contents of the note: she’d written it herself. According to the date marked on the calendar secreted in a chest in the back corner of her yurt, the twins—his twins, Kyle and Kaden—were due to appear this evening for the first of their biannual visits. He should wait for them half a mile out, Lama Katie suggested, so that the noise and presence of the rental vehicle their mother was driving wouldn’t impede his fellow aspirants on their journey down the Bodhisattva path.

  It was mid-afternoon, the winter sun bleached white and hanging motionless overhead, when he turned away from Karuna, who was shucking a bushel of corn delivered to them via muleback by one of the Geshe’s more worldly followers, plucked up a prayer wheel and went on down the dirt track to wait for them. The desert ran before him. Birds visited. Lizards. He sat on a rock and stared off in the distance, chanting beneath his breath, his mantra beating as steadily in the confines of his skull as the heart beating in his chest, the Coltrane riff retired to another life in another universe and the Buddha, the very Buddha, speaking through him.