There’s a small temple off to the left of the veranda, with a sculpture of a tiny, sexless god peeking out at us, smiling placidly. It almost looks like the god and Jessica are smiling at each other. Like they’re both in on the secret.
I did ask Jessica if she thought it would be bad if I allowed myself coffee in the morning. She said yes. Which is an understatement. She basically responded as if I’d suggested it might be okay if I freebased cocaine before class.
“No biggie,” I said, but it came out in a sort of ragged whisper. The thought of going without coffee made my throat hurt in the way it does just before I break into uncontrollable sobs. But that was fifteen minutes ago. I’m better now. I think.
OH SHIT. Oh my God. Oh God, gross. I just reached out to take one of the prickly-looking lychee fruits from the bowl in the middle of the table, thinking that maybe some natural sugar could be my replacement for caffeine, but just as I was figuring out how to remove the skin, a tickling on my forearm drew my attention to a parade of ginger-colored ants marching from the fruit in my hand up to my armpit.
Only now do I notice that the fruit is swimming in a soup of ants.
I can’t stop wiping my arms of both real and imaginary bugs. There’s a never-ending line of ants climbing up the table leg like pilgrims on their way to the promised land of lychees.
The only good thing about these ants is that they are distracting me from my nerves about class. One hour till we have to be there. Please, God. Let it go well.
Evening
Oh no. Oh God. Oh Jesus. Oh, this is bad. I don’t even know how to say it.
No, wait. I do know how to say it. They’re a cult. A cult!
But it’s not Kool-Aid they’re drinking.
Shit, Jessica’s coming. I’ve gotta go. I know what’s in that Starbucks mug of hers. Run, run.
Okay. I’m ready to get this down, now. I’ve escaped the house and am safely ensconced in a little restaurant called Wayan’s Warung. Wayan is this great big woman with, like, five babies on her hips at all times and a booming laugh. I wish I could tell her why I’m here alone.
But I don’t think it would translate.
Today started off so well. I got to class this morning a little bit nervous, but excited to see Indra. And right away I felt like things were going to be okay. Everything was going to be just fine.
Class was held in that big wooden pavilion where Made dropped me off yesterday. It’s called a wantilan. It has a pointed roof woven like a wicker basket and a panoramic view of green fields and forest that makes me want to stand in the center of the wood floor and spin like a top. All along one side are the women’s gamelan instruments, a million different xylophones and gongs encased in wood painted red and gold. When we jump or fall, you can hear them reverberating for minutes afterwards.
Indra and Lou arrived holding hands, both of them dressed from head to toe in flowing white linen. I realized right away it was the first time I’d seen them together. They smiled at us, and then at each other, and then back at us. I was struck by their commitment to being so yogic—I would probably laugh if I tried to be so serene.
We quickly formed a circle, and Indra and Lou took their places among us, Indra sitting on her heels, Lou cross-legged. Indra looked into each of our faces before welcoming us. When she looked at me with her big brown eyes I couldn’t help myself—GOD I am such a nerd—I broke into a huge grin. It was just such a relief to see her. She laughed.
As Indra talked about the two months ahead of us, Lou massaged his entire body. He was constantly working on himself, either his toes or his heels, his calves or his hips. His earlobes, even. I wanted to tell him to calm down and just hire someone to do that for him. Someone like Jessica! But he just kept right on milking his toes, and seemed to be only slightly there with us.
So we went around the circle, checking in.
Lou said, “I’m looking forward to our practice together. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be hard.”
He said some other stuff, too, but that’s all I really heard.
Indra said, “I’m excited for this great group of yogis and yoginis to get to know each other! And Lou”—she turned to him, her whole face brightening—“what do you say we make these yogis into teachers over the next two months?”
And I felt like jumping up and cheering.
When it was my turn to check in, Indra made my day, saying, “Suzanne is my plant, everyone! In Seattle, she always asks for the things I want to teach. So tell me, Suzanne, are you ready for some core work?”
“Yup, definitely core work,” I said.
“And how are you today, Suzanne?” Lou asked, cracking his toes five at a time.
“Oh, fine,” I said. “Ready to stretch after the plane ride yesterday.” Everyone laughed as if I’d said something very true and funny. And then something awful happened. Without a thought, I announced to the circle, “And also, I’m fearing death.”
A moment of silence followed, and I felt the faucets in my pores turn on. Then Indra looked into my eyes and I stopped sweating. “We all are. That’s why we’re here. Good for you, Suzanne.” And then we moved on.
So, right away, I felt that I was in good hands, that it was the right choice to come here and get my head together before I move to New York. It occurred to me that maybe this feeling of safety and understanding is why some people go to therapy. And just when I was about to float up to the rafters with relief and happiness, Indra said she wanted to have a little chat about health precautions for our time in Bali.
“Don’t drink the water,” she said. We all laughed. I mean—we all pretty much know this, right? Doesn’t everybody know that you don’t drink the water in developing countries?
Well. Indra says that when you’re in a place for two months, it’s almost impossible to avoid drinking the water at some point. For instance, one morning when you’re really tired you might forget and run your toothbrush under the faucet. Or you might be singing in the shower and not notice that the water is running right down your face and into your open mouth. Give that water a little time in the petri dish of your stomach, and voilà: you’ve got the Bali Belly.
The thing about the Bali Belly is that it’s really nasty. It’s amoebic dysentery, just like Montezuma’s Revenge or the Delhi Belly, but Indra says it has a particularly bad caboose on the end of its long, mean train. Apparently, after you spend several days on the toilet, you start leaching toxins out your tongue.
And you know, I hate leaching toxins out my anything. I’m completely against it.
So this layer of toxins, it starts out green—like mucus—and then it turns gray, as if that mucus were decomposing in your mouth. And then, when you’re dangerously dehydrated, your tongue turns black.
The second she said this, I started thinking about Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, all of those poisoned priests found with blackened tongues. I pictured my yogamates sprawled across the floor of the wantilan, inky squids exploding from their breathless mouths. And I quickly descended from the happy rafters.
“But no worries!” Indra said. “Nothing to worry about. There’s a really easy way to avoid contracting the Bali Belly, and you don’t even have to take antibiotics. I’ve never had to worry about the Bali Belly or a black tongue—because I drink my pee.”
Right, I’m thinking. No antibiotics, great. Then: Wait.
Now’s when the wantilan became a carousel in the middle of the rice fields, spinning and spinning.
“People,” Lou said, “I know it might sound strange to you, but urine therapy is a common practice outside the Western world. It’s a natural way to fight aging, disease—”
“And it makes for a great facial,” Indra added.
Lou was rubbing his neck something fierce. He seemed suddenly very tired of having to explain all of this to us. “Urine is very pure. It has a bad rap as a waste product. But urea,” he finished, sighing and speaking at the same time, “is a great toxin-killer.”
&nbs
p; Indra said that urine has cured people of everything from acne to AIDS. Like, they drink the urine and then they say good-bye. To their AIDS.
I wasn’t even thinking about how crazy that is. All I was thinking was, “But is it worth it?”
Indra was still talking. I got the feeling she’d delivered this speech a few times. “Tonight, before you go to bed, drink a glass of water. Purified water, that is! Then, tomorrow, when you wake up, go into the kitchen and fetch a tall glass. Your glass should be able to hold about eight ounces of liquid.”
I know from my career as a cocktail waitress that eight ounces equals about four double shots. My mind sat with that knowledge for a long, grave moment.
“Now, take that glass with you into the bathroom and pee into it,” Indra said, “catching the midstream, just as you would at the doctor’s office. And then—drink it.” She rubbed her hands together as if she was just getting to the good part. “If you do this every day of your stay in Bali, I can guarantee you won’t leave with a black tongue.”
“Do it for the rest of your life,” Lou added, looking at us one by one, “and you will have greater health, happiness, and, most important—a deeper yoga practice.”
Oh, Holy Jesus.
My teachers have told me to drink my pee. To partake of my own piss. That urine is a beverage. I know from years of cleaning up after both babies and grandparents that urine is not a beverage. Urine is urine. So, were they joking? They didn’t look like they were joking.
Indra and Lou went on to discuss the tasty option of mixing urine with fruit juice, and I felt that familiar seizure in my stomach, that feeling I used to get in church when I knew at any moment I would burst out laughing and piss Mom off. And just as I did as a child at St. Monica’s, I started looking around to see if I could get anybody else in trouble.
As I made my way around the circle, my eyes landed on Marcy, a middle-aged woman from San Francisco with a thick white ponytail. She was smiling. An easy target.
But then I noticed something. She wasn’t just smiling. She was also—nodding.
And Jason, sitting next to her, nodding.
Jessica, my roommate, nodding.
They were all nodding. As if this were something we all already did. As if one day our parents taught us how to pee into the toilet, and the next day how to pee into our sippy cups.
And then it dawned on me: I am the only one here who doesn’t already drink from the midstream. I am the only one here who hasn’t tasted my own waste. I am the only one here who isn’t out of her fucking mind.
Looking around at my nodding yogamates and beaming teachers, I knew that I had made a huge mistake coming here. I had left my home, my people, and for what? To join a cult? But I had to be careful. I’ve seen enough zombie movies to know that your doom lies in your discovery. So even before I made the conscious choice, my neck tensed, my chin lowered—and I nodded. I tried to smile, like great, so great to be here with other people who drink pee, and I kept on nodding. I doubt I was convincing anybody, but what else could I do? I’m outnumbered, there’s no escape. I’m stranded on an island, among pissdrinkers.
2. Holy Ghosts
To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
—WALKER PERCY, The Moviegoer
I know people who would have left my yoga retreat after that first day. People who, when they find themselves in bad situations, say, This situation is not for me. They say, I will leave this bad situation, because it is not for me. And then, having acknowledged this in thought, they honor it in deed. They leave. They leave cities, families, relationships. They leave yoga camps when they discover that they are surrounded by pissdrinkers.
I stayed.
It’s very difficult to look into the murky past and know, for sure, why we once did the things we did. So all I can say is that I know my staying in Bali—when my brain was screaming at me to get the hell out, to go be a tourist for a few weeks and then catch an early flight home—had something to do with penance. Penance is in my bones. So’s a desire to confess, even when it isn’t technically necessary. I think it stems from seeds of superstition left over from a childhood belief in an omniscient creator. I imagine this creator, this observer, as a sort of annoying sibling in the sky, forever calling me on my bullshit. When I lie or cheat, I actually feel like that annoying sibling in the sky calls down, “Bullshit, Suzie, BULLSHIT!” and that anyone nearby, if they’re at all sensitive to the catcalls of the gods, can hear him. And so I behave accordingly, and try to make amends for what I have done.
This sounds like a rigid sort of self-discipline, doesn’t it? As if I’m the sort of person who has a fight with her mother and then, out of regret and devotion, spends a month of atonement picking up trash on the streets, like a criminal who will eventually have served her time.
Forgive me, but no. Time served? No, no, no. As I understand it, the best penance is the free-floating kind you vaguely engage with every day until you die, like a mild flu bug that doesn’t keep you from going in to work but ensures that you won’t enjoy yourself while you’re there. The longer you can suffer, the more you please God. Self-loathing, you see, is nothing more than agreeing with Him. This type of penance takes no self-discipline, just a good memory on repeat.
I deserved to be stuck in the land of the pissdrinkers, you see. I had sinned against the very teachers I was there to learn from.
I had vowed not to censor myself in my Bali journal, but even as I wrote that, I knew I wasn’t going to tell the whole truth. There was something I simply couldn’t bring myself to write about, it was so mortifying, so childish and selfish and, I hoped, out of character. I wrote that Lou intimidated me, but I wasn’t ready to admit why Lou scared me so much, or why I felt like he looked down on me like the most judgmental priest from my Catholic girlhood. I wrote that I suspected Lou thought I was weak—but I never admitted why.
I had spent months saving every penny for both my move to New York and my trip to Bali. I sold books, clothes, returned Christmas presents. My one luxury was my yoga pass. When I started at Indrou Yoga, I was still taking one final college course for my Comp Lit degree, a class called “Terror, Apocalypse, Revolution,” which was perfect, really, for my state of mind. But it was also perfect for my wallet: taking that class meant I was eligible for the discounted student yoga pass. When that class ended, I was no longer a college student, which meant I had to pony up almost twice the amount each month to keep practicing yoga.
According to the Yoga Sutras, we’re supposed to be grateful for what we already have and avoid focusing on what we don’t have but would really like. (Like the forty-dollar candles at my yoga studio, the ones with the matching-scent organic beeswax body butters that promise to balance my Ayurvedic doshas.) This is called the practice of abundance, and it seems to me that it would be much easier to practice if you had lots and lots of money.
Enter Karlee, one of my best friends in college, and a woman in possession of profoundly flexible morals. (Here’s where that annoying sibling in the sky says, And you’re one to talk?) Karlee thought that no one who was serious about yoga would care all that much about taking money from artists, which is what we were. “That would be against samtosha,” she explained one day, as she blithely stole three Odwallas from the QFC on Broadway. “Or, no. Wait—that would be against, you know, ahimsa. Or whatever, you know. The one that’s all about not being greedy. The practice of abundance. You know. Also? Everything’s an illusion. So nothing really matters.”
Karlee believed in the yogic idea of abundance, but with a twist: The yogic idea is about not fixating on what we don’t have, but instead appreciating that we already have everything we truly need; it’s about focusing on our abundance rather than on our poverty. In Karlee’s world, this meant that everything was in abundance, and the world was your community garden: Pluck at will. In other words, everything belongs to everyone, including sun, rain, time, Odwallas, and
ninety-minute packages of sun salutations and pranayama. In Karlee’s world, if a yogi cared about money, she might as well be an aerobics instructor. “A yoga teacher who seriously cares about money is no yogi. Yoga is a gift from the Ancients, and a true yoga teacher is the conduit. If money becomes important, the entire transaction is corrupted and the cycle of karma continues.”
Karlee had read a lot more yoga books than I had. I had read none. I didn’t even have a subscription to Yoga Journal yet.
Which is not to suggest that I was a complete moron. Well, obviously I was, for going along with her plan at all. But I knew what we were doing was sketchy. I knew that we weren’t so much proving our yogic righteousness as our corrupt judgment and bad morals. But here’s the problem: I needed to save a lot of money. My future depended on it. I needed to save every penny I earned, but what I wanted (yoga) required me to spend a lot of those pennies. There was no way to resolve such a conundrum without changing the terms. So now I could continue to save my money, but I could get what I wanted for a more reasonable price: the price of my soul.
“Suzanne, are we doing yoga tonight?” This was at 5:25. Class began at 6:00.
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’m going drinking with my sister and Fran.”
“Can’t you do that after? It’ll be out by seven thirty.”
“Nope. I’m broke.”
“So?”
“So, Karlee, it’s wine or yoga, and the wine’s winning.”
“Just don’t pay.”
“Don’t pay?”
“Yeah, don’t sign in, it’s like you were never there.”
“Oh. Okay.”
And that’s how it happened. See, every month Karlee and I bought passes to the yoga studio. The way the system worked was that you signed in at the door, and Indra or Lou would check off your name against their books, which told them who had paid their monthly pass and who hadn’t. Karlee’s idea was that if you didn’t sign in, there was no way to check to see if you were paid up or not. It seemed brilliant, especially since Indra and Lou weren’t actually there that month. They were teaching a retreat somewhere, so the teachers that month were all substitutes who didn’t know us. As Karlee suggested, they’d never catch on.
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