‘Fill me in, K,’ he said. ‘What was the gist of it?’
‘Some things are too subtle to be rendered into paraphrase.’
Mark threw back his head. ‘Seriously?’ And then: ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll bet.’
God, he was a boy; a slick, smart-arsed boy.
‘You’d better stay awake tomorrow night.’
‘Yeah, definitely, if you say so, K,’ winking at him as he lurched out of the car at the intersection and sauntered off up the neon-lit street.
Driving home, Rick was disconcerted by the fact that even if there had been time, he couldn’t have told Mark much of what Jack had said. Was his concentration as shot as all that? Or had it all been too vague, too abstract? He would have to say the evening had been something of an anti-climax: he had expected revelations but none came. Perhaps the first night was a test, and if you persevered and kept coming back, in the end you’d get a pay-off; the magic word, the open sesame.
And you did. Get the magic word, that is. On the second night Jack told them about the mantra. The mantra was a special sound. It was like a key in the lock of their inner being, and the insistent chant of it would open them up and put them in touch with—
With what? On this they still weren’t clear. Everything Jack said sounded reassuring at the time, but evaporated in your ears within seconds.
For the next two nights the talks continued as before. And each evening Mark sat dozing in a chair beside him, so that Rick had to ‘recap’ for him on the way home before dropping him off at a club: Zero in Oxford Street, Moscow in Surry Hills, Yada Yada in Leichhardt. Clubs seemed to have a life of twelve months; Rick hadn’t heard of any of them. It made him feel old. ‘I don’t know any of these places,’ he said to Mark.
Mark shook his head in mock commiseration. ‘This is what happens when you get married, K.’
He found it extraordinarily difficult to summarise what Jack said about anything – like the words were little nodules of polystyrene filler, the sort that come in vast crates as packing around white-goods and spill out of the box when you attempt to extricate the new appliance. You could gag on them. On another night he would find the words rolling around in his mouth like ball bearings: precise, elegant and full of weighty momentum, but cold, smooth and hard to trap.
One night, clearly bored with Rick’s struggle to condense ‘the message’, Mark interrupted his waffling to say: ‘Y’know, K, I was really surprised when I saw you had put your name down for this course. You impress me as the strong type. You know,’ his mouth curled into a mock grimace: ‘Stress? What stress?’
‘I am the strong type,’ Rick said. He was not about to enter into emotional correspondence with a younger man.
And anyway, it was far too difficult to explain, especially to someone like Mark, that lurking somewhere in his consciousness, like a virus in the bloodstream, was a sliver of pain he could neither disgorge nor salve. He could think of some parodic scenario that might make sense to Mark: a virus, say, infecting his programme, or that movie, The Invisible Man, where something starts making its way through the pathways of the body, like a microchip afloat in a vast cyclotron.
Was it in the shadowy background of his consciousness? Or at the forefront of his unconscious, whatever that was. When he thought of it at all, he tended to think of the unconscious as a level playing field where small, neurotic athletes jostled for the front row – and learning to meditate might enable him to marshal them into some kind of team where all the elements could combine well, could get on cosy terms, could resolve whatever it was that was creating friction between them. The mantra would be the oil in the grease-and-oil change, some soothing balm that would ease them into their right formation, and he would become a cyber programme without glitches; debugged.
The perfect dream of neuroscience.
At last he would be rid of the unresolved yearning that had haunted him all his life; that was so unsettling, like a metaphysical pinprick in every balloon of pleasure; in every activity, actual or potential, virtual or real.
On the fourth night they got it: the mantra. The payoff, the special word, the magical formula.
As usual he and Mark went straight from the office and they were late, and hungry. Mark wanted to stop near Taylor Square and get a falafel.
‘We haven’t time,’ Rick said.
‘I’m starving.’ He knew that Mark, like many of his team, would have skipped lunch, or shot out for a Mars Bar from the machine in the corridor. The way they worked was crazy. In the glove box, he told Mark, there was a bag of roasted almonds his very practical wife kept for times like these, or when his son, Luke, was hungry. And had he, Mark, remembered to bring the ritual offering? He half expected his young colleague to have forgotten this: the flowers and the fruit. He was touched to find that Mark had remembered, that he had them in a white plastic take-out food container in his backpack.
When they arrived there was an air of quiet expectation. Everyone was sitting on the green meeting-room chairs with their small parcels of flowers and fruit on their knees. Some had bought a large expensive bunch, wrapped in sharp peaks of cellophane and tied with twirling boutique ribbon. Others appeared to have garnered random blossoms from the garden, or purchased something cheap and already wilting about the edges from the fruit stall at the station kiosk.
Rick was first to be initiated.
In a small room at the top of the stairs Jack was waiting, seated in a stylish cane armchair. Against the wall facing the door was a table that looked like some kind of simple altar with a gold silk cloth and a single candle. Jack was dressed, as ever, in his corporate suit and welcomed Rick with his usual glowing smile. Awkwardly, and with both hands, Rick held out the small bouquet of mixed flowers, the apple and banana and the white cotton handkerchief. The ritual gifts, the token of respect. But respect for whom, and for what?
Jack accepted the gifts and placed them casually on the altar. ‘This is a very simple procedure,’ he began, ‘and it won’t take long. I’m going to say a prayer in Sanskrit in praise of all gurus, or spiritual teachers, and then I’ll give you your mantra.’
Spiritual teachers? What spiritual teachers? Could Jack be classified as a spiritual teacher? Surely not. All through the course Rick had resolutely turned a deaf ear to the more esoteric parts of Jack’s discourse; they would hover, like a haze, on the fringes of his perception. He knew the technique was an adaptation of a practice derived from Eastern mysticism, similar to, say, a suburban yoga class, and beyond that he did not wish to venture. It wasn’t necessary, as Jack himself had intimated from the outset. But now the presence of the altar, however minimalist, made him feel uncomfortable.
It was a low-key ceremony, simple and precise. The mantra was no recognisable word, just a high-pitched sound, an exhalation of air with the tongue against the bottom teeth. Jack said it, and then he asked Rick to say it. After Rick had repeated it a few times, Jack said ‘Good,’ and then cautioned him not to repeat it to anyone else, as this would diminish its potency.
Rick nodded but his neck felt stiff. He was not used to being in a room with an altar. He hadn’t expected to be inducted into anything spiritual: he thought it was about getting a technique that was scientifically based.
As if reading his mind, Jack said: ‘Remember, this is not a religion, you are not being asked to adopt any set of dogmas. Just meditate on your mantra each day, morning and evening, and come back in a week for a checking.’
And that was it. Something of an anti-climax, really. At the back of his mind was the thought that some people, not under corporate sponsorship, were paying hundreds of dollars for this. Could anything that expensive be this simple? Could anything worth having be that simple? Could peace of mind be so simple?
Mark was second last to go in. Outside, Rick waited for him on the veranda, looking out over the dusky roofline of the hill, the purple night sky over Port Jackson Bay.
Eventually Mark emerged, exhaling heavily in a bemused sigh. ‘I need a
ciggy,’ he said. ‘Do you mind waiting?’
Like furtive children they moved into the side lane and Mark lit up. He looked around him, up and down the lane, down at his feet, and then up and down the lane again. He seemed edgy.
‘So that’s it, K,’ he said.
‘Apparently.’
‘The secret word.’
‘Yep.’
‘Is yours one syllable or two?’
‘One.’
Mark seemed reassured by this, as his was two, which meant at the very least that they were not all getting the same mantra. The idea of this was an affront to them both, a possible sign that they were being suckered, not succoured.
‘Are you seriously going to do this every morning and every night?’ Mark asked.
‘I’m going to try. I’ll give it three months.’
Something told him that Mark, on the other hand, wouldn’t last three days. He seemed unhappy with the outcome; his cocksureness had fallen away and he was peculiarly sombre, as though he’d been purged of all his wise-cracking. He was as restless, as jittery, as ever but not in his teasing, good-natured way; more irritable, hostile even, curiously offhand.
‘I’m starving,’ he said, with a sharp intake of breath, and tossed the glowing butt of his cigarette into the bougainvillea that ran like a flame along the side wall. And then, brusquely: ‘Do you have to go home? Why don’t we go somewhere and eat?’
Rick thought for a minute. ‘Why don’t you come back to my place?’ He had been thinking of bringing Mark home for a while. Zoë would find him amusing.
Mark hesitated, and then, with a kind of shy, haunted look, said, ‘No, no, thanks anyway. I’ll grab a bite on the way home.’ There was something in the way he said it, something in his manner that was worrying. For Rick the little ceremony had been of scarcely any moment – bland, even – but Mark seemed unnerved. Rick felt protective towards him. ‘Let’s go to Miro’s,’ he said, mentioning a bistro only a few streets from where he lived. Mark could get a taxi on from there.
At Miro’s they sat on a quilted leather banquette in a dim red light and Mark downed two quick schooners of Guinness. As he drank, he became more and more morose, straying ruefully into a reverie of childhood dreams.
‘Y’know, K, all I ever wanted to do was play Rugby League,’ he said, crouched over the lip of his glass. ‘Not because I wanted to be rich and famous, not that …’ His voice trailed off, and he brooded for a minute. ‘Even now, sometimes when I’m watching a game on TV, I get so emotional I could cry. There’s something pure about it, you know what I’m saying? Honest. No bullshit. The speed, the strength, the raw courage … the sight of one man hurtling through the pack like …’ He stopped, lips pursed together, as if stymied by the inadequacy of mere words, ‘… like a human fucking projectile. All heart, nothing’s going to stop him, you can see the veins bulging in his neck, you can see the look he’s got in his eyes, and it’s a look of … of …’ He shook his head. ‘… pure momentum – like an arrow,’ and here he raised his right arm in a gliding motion across his face, ‘straight … straight …’ And he shook his head again and gazed out into space, unable to finish the sentence. ‘And I cry, I cry just watching it. I admit it.’ And again, he crouched over the lip of his glass. ‘And that’s all I ever wanted to do. Ever.’ He said it again, loudly and with drunken emphasis. ‘Ever!’ And banged the parquet table that reeked of smoke and beer.
By the end of the night they were both drunk, slouching out of the bar with all the élan of two deflated tyres. He dropped Mark at a cab rank two blocks down the road and hoped that he, Rick, would make the two kilometres home without being breathalysed.
Zoë, thank God, was a heavy sleeper. Stumbling into the bathroom for a pee, his head in a purple-brown fug of Guinness, not to mention the vodka chasers, he stubbed his toe on a broken tile and began to bleed, a thin rivulet of red dripping onto the white tiles. He swore, fumbled in the cabinet for a band-aid and sank heavily onto the lavatory seat to bind his toe. For such a small injury, the pain was acute. Softly, he swore again. So much, he told himself, for meditation.
That night he dreamed that a currawong was pecking out his eyes. Strangely, there was no pain. Around five o’clock he woke in the dark with the mantra spinning in his head.
After the first week he asked Mark how it was going.
Mark hesitated. ‘Uh … on and off, K, on and off.’
‘More off than on?’
‘Uh, not exactly. I just don’t do it at the usual times. You know, morning and evening.’
Rick didn’t pursue it. For one thing he was having his own difficulties. To his surprise he found he couldn’t sit still for five minutes, never mind twenty. At his workstation he could sit for what seemed like hours without moving a muscle but without his beautiful backlit colour screen and his Boolean logic, his algebraic grammar, his magical formulae of conditionality – if this, then this – he was at the mercy of his chaotic and untidy brain, a jerky and primitive slide-show of trivia. Football fixtures for the coming week, what to buy for Luke’s birthday, reminders to get the drier fixed, had he paid his car insurance? – all the endless minutiae of daily life flashed across the inner screen of his brain like balls careening across a billiard table. The minute he settled himself in the stiff-backed dining chair, his scalp would begin to itch, his collar chafe … he would send the mantra spinning into an imaginary space before his eyes like a bowler unleashing a ball, but he could never, as it were, find his length: the mantra-ball would fall to earth with a thud and roll grimly along the turf, or fail to land at all and sail off, disappearing into the clouds while his thoughts, those mad computer-game figures, scuttled about in the ballpark of his neural field in a noisy, short-circuiting clamour, like machine-gun fire ricocheting in a stadium.
Only a few months ago he had been near despair, all but lost to the black dog; now he was like an idiot child struggling to master the first letters of the alphabet. After what seemed like half an hour he would look at his watch and find that five minutes had passed or, on a good day, ten. Where was the timelessness, the loss of self that others spoke of? How come he never made it into the zone, not even for a second?
A week later, at the first group checking on the Monday night, Rick sat and listened to the others, with Mark beside him. Mark had only managed to ‘try it’ on ‘two or three mornings’ and couldn’t understand why even to contemplate doing it seemed an enormous mental effort. It felt like homework, he said: the mere thought of it triggered an internal resistance.
Rick smiled and patted him on the shoulder, as if it were no big deal really, and all the while he was thinking: You’re not desperate enough.
All through the first checking Mark fidgeted in his chair as they listened to the brilliant experiences of the others. One man had seen white lights, another had drifted off into an orange haze, someone else had experienced an intense sensation in the middle of her forehead where the third eye lay. With each declaration Mark looked sideways at Rick and rolled his eyes, as if to say: What a bunch of tossers. There’s always someone, someone who’s had an experience. Always the goody-goodies in the class, the point scorers who announce with transparently fake wonder and humility that they’ve hit the mark, can top whatever you’ve got to offer, are among the chosen. Always someone whose experiences are bigger and better than yours.
Jack sat quietly, acknowledging each individual response with his customary smiling detachment. When Rick at last spoke up it was as if Jack had been waiting for it, as if the other responses had been too good to be true, and what Rick had to say was real. While Rick laid out the banality of his efforts, Jack nodded sympathetically. ‘Firstly,’ he said, ‘scientific tests show you are always doing better, and going deeper than you think you are. Second, don’t ever force it, just witness the thoughts that come up and then let them go, while gently bringing the sound of the mantra back into your head.’
But nothing Jack said served to dispel Rick’s scepticism. I’ll
give it three months, he thought. It seemed, then, like an eternity.
A few weeks later his sister came to stay, with his nephew, Justin, who was fifteen. Justin drifted into the study one Sunday morning as Rick was halfway through his meditation practice, sitting up straight-backed in a dining chair he had carried upstairs for that purpose (important to have the spine straight for the breathing to be steady and even, the lungs open and expanded). Rick was there with his eyes closed, hands on knees, assuming the posture, he sometimes thought, of one of those stone pharaohs. He heard Justin come in and said, without opening his eyes, ‘I’m meditating.’
Later that morning over breakfast his sister had given him a look of bemused scorn. ‘You’ve gone New Age,’ she said.
‘I think it’s cool,’ said Justin.
But, no, it wasn’t cool, it wasn’t at all cool.
It was impossible.
On one of their Sunday lunches with Zoë’s parents, his father-in-law, Joe, said: ‘I hear you’re meditating, Rick.’
Looking up from his plate he saw Zoë cast a warning look at her father.
‘Yeah.’
‘You find it relaxes you?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘From what Zoë said, it sounds to me a bit like playing chess. You lose yourself in the strategy and afterwards you feel surprisingly refreshed.’
Rick laughed. ‘Depends on how competitively you play chess.’ He knew Joe was intensely competitive and he was hoping to change the subject. Perhaps he would discuss it with Joe later, when he knew what he was doing, but not now when he was at sea. As a novice he could scarcely speak with authority. And there was nothing to say. Nothing was happening. Which was kind of the point. For a while, anyway. As long as he wasn’t losing his temper and slapping strangers, the rest could be counted as a plus.
Reading Madame Bovary Page 11