The introductory talk finished early, around nine-thirty, and he hadn’t far to drive his companion, who asked to be dropped off at a club in Oxford Street. Refreshed by his nap at the meditation centre, Mark was ready to party. On the way up the hill Rick teased him about falling asleep, and with the disarming ingenuousness of a child Mark asked for a ‘recap’ on what he had missed.
‘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,’ he said, winking at Rick as he lurched out of the car at an 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 anticlimax: he had hoped for revelations but none had come. 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 chanting 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 from their ears within seconds.
For the next two nights the talks continued as before. And each evening Mark sat dozing in his chair beside Rick 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.
Mark shook his head in mock commiseration. ‘This is what happens when you get married, K.’
Rick continued to find it extraordinarily difficult to summarise what Jack said about anything. Zoe would ask him and he would hesitate and then ramble. It was as if the words were little nodules of polystyrene filler, the kind that come as packing around white-goods and spill out of the box when you attempt to extricate the appliance. You could gag on them. At other times the words felt like ball bearings rolling around in his mouth: precise, elegant and full of weighty momentum, but also 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’d 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. This was taboo. And anyway, it was far too difficult to explain, especially to someone like Mark, that lurking 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 program, or that movie Fantastic Voyage, where something was making its way through the pathways of the body, like a microchip afloat in a vast cyclotron.
Was this pain 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 playing field where small, neurotic athletes jostled for position, and learning to meditate might enable him to marshal them into a team where all the elements could combine well, could get onto 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’, to adapt Mark’s metaphor, the soothing balm that would ease the disparate elements into the right formation, and he would become a cyber program without glitches. Debugged. The perfect dream of neuroscience. At last he would be rid of that 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 pay-off, the magic formula.
As usual, he and Mark drove straight from the office but this time they were late. When Mark wanted to stop near Taylor Square and get a falafel, Rick said, ‘We haven’t time.’
‘I’m starving.’
He knew that, like many of his team, Mark would have skipped lunch, or shot out for a Mars Bar from the vending machine in the corridor. The way they worked was crazy. In the glovebox, he told Mark, there was a bag of roasted almonds kept there by his very practical wife for times like this, or for when Luke was hungry. And had he, Mark, remembered to bring the ritual offering? He’d half-expected Mark to forget this – the flowers and the fruit that they were required to bring as a gesture of respect – but was touched to find that Mark hadn’t forgotten, that he had some grapes in a takeaway food container that he produced from his designer backpack, along with a bunch of violets he had bought at the station on his way to work.
When they arrived there was an air of quiet expectation. Everyone was sitting on the meeting-room chairs with their small parcels of flowers and fruit on their knees. Some had bought large, expensive bunches, 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 a fruit stall.
Rick was the first to be initiated.
In a small room at the top of the stairs Jack was waiting, seated in a cane armchair. Against the wall and facing the door was a table that had been turned into a 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 his small bouquet of Zoe’s roses and an apple and banana wrapped in foil. 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 will 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 his face away from the more esoteric character of Jack’s discourse, something hazy that seemed to hover on the fringes of his perception. He knew meditation was an adaptation of a practice derived from eastern mysticism, with the same origins as, say, a suburban yoga class, and beyond that he did not intend 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 he 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 hadn’t expected to be inducted into anything spiritual; he thought he was 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 anticlimax, 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 this simple? Could peace of mind ever be simple?
Mark was second-last to go in. Rick waited for him on the verandah, looking out over the dusky roofline of the hill, the purple night sky over Port Jackson. Eventually Mark emerged, exhaling heavily in a bemused sigh. ‘I need a ciggie,’ 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. This would have been an affront to them both.
‘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 Rick that Mark wouldn’t last three days. He seemed unhappy with the outcome; his cocksureness had fallen away and he was peculiarly sombre. He was as restless and as jittery as ever, but not in his teasing, good-natured way – more irritable, hostile even, curiously offhand.
‘I’m starving,’ Mark said, with a sharp intake of breath, and tossed his glowing butt into the bougainvillea that ran like flame along the side wall. And then, brusquely, ‘Do you have to go home? Why don’t we go somewhere and eat?’
‘Why don’t you come back to my place?’ Rick had been thinking of bringing Mark home for a while. Zoe would find him amusing.
Mark hesitated, and then with a shy, haunted look he 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. He 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 his childhood dreams.
‘Y’now, 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 … pure momentum – like an arrow.’ He raised his right arm in a gliding motion across his face. ‘Straight … straight …’ He shook his head, gazing out into space, unable to finish the sentence. ‘And I cry, I cry just watching it. I admit it.’ Again he crouched over the lip of his glass. ‘And that’s all I ever wanted to do. Ever.’ He repeated it, this time loudly, with drunken emphasis. ‘Ever!’ And banged the parquet table, which reeked of smoke and beer.
By the end of the night they were both drunk, slouching out of the bar with all the elan of two deflated tyres. He dropped Mark at a cab rank two blocks down the road and hoped that he would make the two kilometres home without being breathalysed.
Zoe, 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 cut his heel 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 bandage and sank heavily onto the lavatory seat to bind his foot. 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 5 am 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 hours, scarcely 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 car serviced, had he paid his insurance? All the endless minutiae of daily life zoomed across the inner screen of his brain like balls careening across a billiard table.
The minute he settled himself in the stiff-backed chair in his study, his scalp would begin to itch, his collar chafe … he would spin the mantra into an imaginary space before his eyes like a bowler unleashing an imaginary ball but he could never, as it were, find his length: the mantra ball would fall to the earth with a thud and lumber 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 the ballpark of his neural field in a noisy short-circuiting clamour, like machine-gun fire ricocheting in a stadium.
Only a few months before, he had felt himself at a point of near despair, and now here he was, like an idiot child unable 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, he listened as the others in the class reported their efforts. Mark had only managed to ‘try it’, he said, on ‘two or three mornings’, and couldn’t understand why even to contemplate the doing of it seemed an enormous mental effort. It felt like homework, he said: the mere thought of it set up an internal resistance.
Rick had 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 were forced to listen 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,’ or, ‘There’s always someone, someone who’s had an experience.’ There are 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 hits are bigger and better than yours.
Jack sat quietly, acknowledging each response with his customary smiling detachment. When at last it was Rick’s turn to speak, it was as if Jack had been waiting for what he had to say, as if the responses of the others had been too good to be true and what Rick had to say was real. Rick gave a brief account of the banality of his efforts and Jack n
odded 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, Jane, and fifteen-year-old nephew, Justin, came to stay. Justin drifted into the study one morning as Rick was halfway through his meditation practice, sitting up straight-backed in the dining chair he had carried in for that purpose (it was important to have the spine straight in order for the breathing to be steady and even, the lungs open and expanded). He was sitting 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.’
His secret was out.
Over breakfast Jane gave him a look of bemused scorn. ‘You’ve gone New Age, brother,’ she said.
‘I think it’s cool,’ said Justin.
But, no, it wasn’t cool, it wasn’t at all cool. It was impossible.
At one of their Sunday lunches with Zoe’s parents, his father-in-law said, ‘I hear you’re meditating, Rick.’
Looking up from his plate, he saw Zoe cast a warning look at her father.
‘Yeah.’
‘You find it relaxes you?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘From what Zoe said, it sounded 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 said, knowing Joe was intensely competitive and hoping to change the subject. This was one of those times when Joe’s propensity to talk rather than listen was a distinct plus, since Rick had no intention of discussing this with him of all people. Later, perhaps, 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 anyway, there was nothing to say. Nothing was happening. Which was kind of the point. For a while. As long as he wasn’t losing his temper and slapping strangers, the rest could be counted a plus.
A Short History of Richard Kline Page 11