It took him as long to eat one of the halves of his burrito as it took me to eat the whole. He asked for the second half to be wrapped up to go. We left a generous tip, exchanged nods with our cook—who seemed pleased and proud that we’d ventured into his world—and then we went out into the parking lot to discover a police car parked where the Popsicle man had been.
Up Michigan Street we drove in a slow, full-bellied silence, past the Glo-Worm Lounge, past a bar with a sign outside that read, NOTRE DAME STOP IMPORTING CRIME, DRUGS, AND HOMELESSNESS FOR MONEY, past the Hope Rescue Mission, then, after a few blocks, past the shrine to the miracle at LaSalette, the Inn at St. Mary’s, and then into a gas station where we stopped for a fill-up and where the newspaper headlines read FORTY-ONE KILLED IN BAGHDAD BLAST. And then onto the superhighway headed west.
TWENTY-SEVEN
It was at this point in the trip that something in my interior world began to break open. The shell cracked, the thick whitish fluid started to leak out, though I had not yet taken the drastic, untakebackable step of pulling the brittle halves apart and dropping the egg into the pan. It was the passage I’d read in Rinpoche’s book, and the angry, proud resistance of the nun reminding me so much of myself. And then that sense of having stepped, for half an hour, into the Mexico I remembered from our honeymoon. “No one runs away from anything here,” Jeannie had said as we boarded the plane for the trip home, and though it wasn’t precisely true, I have always remembered that remark.
And then, just as we merged onto the interstate and turned in the direction of Illinois, I spotted three white crosses by the side of the road, with flowers and an inscription I could not read. It made me think of my parents, naturally, of the feelings I’d been having since their death, that puzzled emptiness, that sense that the ground had slipped out sideways from beneath our secure, rich life. There, on that highway, I felt something change inside my mind, and it was a physical sensation, though very small, as if four tiny walls had been moved outward a few inches, or a door cut in one of them, a sliver of light peeking through, nothing more.
As we rode along the flatlands of northern Indiana, Rinpoche fell into one of his quiet reveries, those stretches of time during which he did not speak, and seemed not to move and, almost, not to be breathing. In order to relieve the monotony of the landscape—and possibly to put a temporary halt to the breaking of the eggshell—I turned on AM radio. Rinpoche wouldn’t mind, I knew that, we’d talked about it. AM radio did not reach the place he traveled to.
It did not take more than a minute of hitting the seek button to come upon another religious talk show, the kind of thing I’d been listening in on, during odd moments, for as long as I could remember. This one turned out to be a Catholic show—unusual in my experience—from a Chicago station. The name of the host was Colleen or Eileen or Irene, and her subject was gluttony. I am not making this up for narrative convenience. My belly was full; her subject was gluttony. The first words I heard her say were: “Remember, gluttony is the sin that brought sin into the world.”
I pondered that, took it personally perhaps. I assumed she was talking about Adam and Eve and the apple, and I started talking back, as I sometimes do. “I thought their sin had been a sin of pride,” I said, too loudly. “I thought they were kicked out because they were sure they knew better!” Stirred from his contemplation of the internal alfalfa fields, Rinpoche sent a curious look across the front seat. Eileen or Colleen or Irene went on about gluttony for so long I felt myself starting to get hungry again, and then she took a call and moved on to one of the other great areas of sin.
The caller was a mother, concerned and upset because her twelve-year-old son had been told in school that it was okay to fantasize. About sex apparently, though that incendiary term was not explicitly mentioned. Eileen told her that what she had to do was to take her son out of school on the day sex classes were given and have a talk with the principal.
“Sure,” I said to Rinpoche. “The kid’s twelve, bursting with hormones. Keep him out of school. That’ll do it. That’ll fix everything!”
Rinpoche said nothing.
“Let his mom keep him home on the day of the sex lecture, so all the other kids can give him a hard time for the rest of the semester. He’ll turn into a . . . a . . . a glutton, for God’s sake, Mom. Cut the kid a little slack, Irene!”
But there was no slack to be had from the direction of Colleen. She started to go on about how bad the schools were for making kids think it was okay to be “selfish” and “do selfish things with their bodies” when sex was supposed to be “a selfless act for the pleasure of husband or wife.”
I was, by that time, squeezing the steering wheel with both hands and wondering who it was we were talking about, which twelve-, fourteen-, or eighteen-year-old boy or girl on American soil—bombarded with erotic images from every angle—who was going to think of sex only in terms of giving pleasure, ten or fifteen years down the road, to his wife or her husband? Why was it always the middle-aged and old people, their sexual urges barely a shadow of what they had once been, their own guilt and regrets ballooning as they aged, who insisted on telling the young to abstain? And why was it that the loudest and most public religious types always sooner or later circled around to sex: talking about the “filth and whoremongering,” and the evils of birth control, and going on about abstinence, and then everyone expressing such shock when teleministers were caught with prostitutes of both sexes and priests went after little boys and pregnancy rates shot through the roof. Sure, kids were having sex too early—we’d talked about it at length with our own children. Yes, the act of lovemaking ought to have some meaning attached to it—it was the source of life, after all—ought to be more than a release of some thoughtless, mutual lust. But sex was natural and wonderful, an essential part of life, and I hated this overlay of guilt and terror, hated to think of my children growing up to think it was somehow filthy in the eyes of God.
There were a lot of Catholics in Dickinson, and senior year in high school I had dated a Catholic girl. She was, in fact, my first real girlfriend. And I remembered, with a kind of agonizing vividness, the things she would and wouldn’t do; the way, in the grassy field behind her uncle’s house, she’d tiptoe around the Catholic definition of sin and somehow manage to suspend us both in a state where sex was all we could think about, for days. Her mother told her I’d end up in the flames of hell after I died, simply for being Protestant, and that she would, too, forever and ever, if she married me. I remembered sneaking into St. Patrick’s Church in downtown Dickinson and attending Mass with her one time, and how wonderful it had been—the stained-glass saints and gilded altar—and how terrifying and old and marvelous the ritual had seemed.
I have a real affection for Catholicism; I make that claim in all sincerity (believe me, not all my Protestant brethren share that feeling). A deep respect for real Christianity. But these radio shows were making me want to strangle somebody.
The last straw came when Colleen took the subject and ran with it, going on about couples who had their “two token children.” When those words registered I slapped my fingers down hard on the dashboard and yelled out, “They are not token, goddamn it!”
And Rinpoche put his hand on my arm until I calmed down.
“Listen,” I said to him, snapping off the radio. “I want you to tell me something. In your tradition, is pleasure bad? I mean, sex, eating, and so on, does it keep you from holiness? Does it keep you from God?”
“It leads you to God,” he said in a simple way, as if he were a chemistry teacher answering a question about the molecular weight of calcium.
I had an urge to reach out and shake his hand. “Now that makes sense to me. I want to convert. Where do I sign up?”
He was smiling and nodding. After a while he said, “But when you get tired of those things, your tiredness leads you to bigger pleasure.”
“What if you don’t get tired of them?”
“You should get a little tire
d of them,” he said.
I was suddenly not so sure about converting. “But what if you don’t? What if you like to eat, and you always like to eat; it never gets boring. Does that make you evil somehow? Not as good as these goddamned, self-righteous—”
He held up his hand, smiling, smiling, smiling. “Sex, food, anger, violence, greed,” he said. “Dirt in the glass. Then if you give up sex and food and anger and greed and you feel so proud about giving these things up, better than people, all about you, you gave this up, you are good, other people are not as good as you. That is more dirt in the glass, that’s all. No big fuss, just that.”
“You’re talking about the golden mean,” I said hopefully. “The middle way.”
“Middle,” he repeated. “Little this side of middle, little that side of middle. No fuss. What matters is how you treat people.”
“Not what you believe about what happens after death?”
He laughed. I had made a joke, apparently. “What difference makes what you believe? What happens will happen anyway, exactly same, no matter what you believe. What you do makes the important part, what you do.”
“But if some people believe one thing, and you don’t, then what they’ll do is tell you you’re wrong. They’ll try to change you, judge you. Maybe kill you, in extreme cases. So what you believe and what you do are connected, aren’t they?’
“Do not worry so much all the time, my friend, about the other people, what they say. And do not have so many strong opinions, so many strong judgments. What you do matters. And what you think matters. . . . Here is Buddhist prayer,” he said, and he rolled off a few sentences in what must have been Ortyk, then struggling just a bit, translated them. “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: It is built on our thoughts, it is made from our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with evil thought, pain follows him, just like the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the . . . cart. . . . If a person speaks or acts with pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves.”
“So you can control your fate, then, to some extent.”
“To every extent.”
“So is there a life after death, then, in your belief system?”
“Not a system,” he said.
“But there is what we call an afterlife?”
“After this, yes,” he said. “How could there not be?”
“Well, plenty of people think it’s obvious how there could not be. You die, your body rots, end of story. Couldn’t that be the way it’s set up?”
“Of course.”
“You’ve just contradicted yourself. You’re playing Zen games with me. I hate that.”
“When your mind is clear you see it, that’s all. You know what is and what is not, what will be and what will not be.”
“You sound like my sister.”
“I like very much your sister,” he said. “Very, very much.”
“But she claims to see the future.”
“In some way she does see it. In some way you see it.”
“But you see it differently than I do.”
“Little bit different,” he said.
“But you talk as if you are sure, and the people on the radio talk as if they are sure, and how can you both be right when your ideas of how things work don’t match at all.”
“They match. Of course they match.”
“Oh, man, this is the worst conversation we’ve had, do you know that? Do you know how much I hate this kind of going around in circles?”
“Maybe you hate it because you like very much your thinking mind, one plus one is two. Always one plus one. Always B after A and then C after B. Dostoevsky—you know Dostoevsky? My father in Russian liked to read to me Dostoevsky. Then I read it, too, later.”
“Of course I’ve heard of Dostoevsky. In college we—”
“In one book Dostoevsky said two plus two makes five, not four. What does this mean? My father asked me this question for many years until I get the answer right. What if you had another mind, maybe even for a few seconds? What if you knew how to make it so your mind did not think for a few seconds, or for a minute? What would happen then to your ideas and your opinions and your judgments?”
“I have not the slightest urge to make my mind stop working.”
“Not your mind, your ordinary mind that thinks so much all the time for no usefulness. What then? Then maybe you see something new. But you cannot do that because all the time you are thinking about food, about sex, about worries, about who is saying something in this radio, about who is rich and poor, who is smart, who is good, who is right. Good, think like that. Very good. Not bad. You do that all the day and even when you are at sleep. But what about a few seconds or a minute or a few minutes of not thinking? Then what happens? Then what do you see? But you don’t do that, my friend. You are afraid to do that, my good friend.”
“Who on earth could do that? Even if they wanted to.”
“Many, many peoples.”
“Who? You? How? What does it feel like? How do you learn to do it?”
“I will show it to you if you want,” he said.
I very nearly said, Okay, we have a deal. I wasn’t ready to start taking not-thinking lessons, but I didn’t hate the conversation so much anymore. I didn’t resist him so much anymore, down in a deep part of me. It wasn’t as if I’d suddenly turned gullible in western Indiana, but the raspy hard edges of my suspicion had been worn down, and I have to admit that it frightened me. This was not a physical fear but something else, a shakiness at the base of who I thought I was.
TWENTY-EIGHT
We let the conversation die there and soon we were leaving the corn-carpeted countryside of the heart of the Midwest and being drawn into the windy steel tangle of its greatest city. The first sign of that approach was the huge factories near Gary. I pointed through the passenger-side window and passed on a tidbit of Americana: “There’s an important place in the history of American industry, that city right there. It was founded by the U.S. Steel Company and named after the chairman.”
“Ah. Very good place,” Rinpoche said.
Soon we could see the lake spreading northward like a blue sea, and then the skyscrapers of downtown Chicago. And then, on I-90 after we’d paid our toll, we became embedded in one of the most stupendous traffic jams in recorded human history, worse, even, than the one in Pennsylvania. The radio said the White Sox were playing that afternoon, that was the reason, and when I mentioned that to Rinpoche, he said he’d heard about baseball, and was it possible to go see the men play?
At last we crept into the city proper and parked in a lot on Harrison and Clarke streets not far outside the Loop.
Walking north from the parking lot we were presented with the magnificent variety of the American metropolis: a man sitting in a doorway with a fistful of scratch lottery tickets, checking them one after the next as if his happy future lay hidden there beneath a thin silvery layer; the imposing public library; the overhead trains on their rusty steel supports; people jaywalking; five muscular boys drumming on upside-down plastic buckets and accepting money from passersby; businessmen in suits and businesswomen in black shoes; lovers holding hands. There was every sort of life here—people who looked rich and people who looked poor, who seemed happy and who seemed miserable; mothers and fathers walking contentedly with their children; and men and women who appeared to be addicted to drugs, or to be suffering from mental problems, or who were ill, or whose lives were a walking nightmare.
As we moved along the west side of State Street with a warm, wet breeze stirring off the lake a few blocks to our right, I saw a billboard for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, with pictures of the two biggest individual fund-raisers in the area. Jeannie and I had friends who had two children with that illness, and over the years of knowing them we’d watched the children struggle and fight against it, and their parents worry about it, and we’d sent thousands of dollars in donations. “From the time I was a boy,” I told Rinpoche, �
��I’ve always been obsessed with the way lives can be so different. I mean, even if you just take the people we’ve seen in the past ten minutes, a tiny sampling of the spectrum of good and bad fortune on this earth, look at how different they are. Some of them are so miserable and some so happy. Some people seem to have an enormous burden set upon them at birth, and others seem to cruise right through with very little pain. I’ve always wondered why it’s set up that way.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, fixing his brown-gold eyes on me as if he were seeing not my face and features but something buried beneath that, beneath the personality. It had been unnerving, at first; now I was almost used to it.
“‘Yes, yes,’ isn’t much of a reply to such a profound question,” I said.
He smiled. “It was a question?”
“All right. In your belief system, is there an explanation for that?”
He kept smiling. He said, “Yes.”
“All right. Cut it out. What is it? What is the theory of the Ortyk non-Buddhists, or Sufi-Christians, or whatever it is you call yourselves?”
He laughed. By this time we had reached Marshall Field’s, the wonderful old department store where Jeannie and I had gone for lunch on our first real road-trip-adventure, the start of our love affair. Rinpoche and I suspended the conversation temporarily and walked through the revolving doors, through the perfume and makeup department, and into an elevator that carried us up to the Walnut Room on the seventh floor. It was exactly as I remembered it: a sea of white tablecloths, large windows looking out on the city, the elegant walnut paneling with its brown and black swirls. The hostess led us to a table by the window and we were greeted immediately by a waiter carrying a pitcher of water, menus tucked under his arm.
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