A Short History of Richard Kline

by Amanda Lohrey

  He woke at eight and did not bother with breakfast. For a moment he contemplated not having a shower, so keen was he to make his escape. By the time he had dried off and dressed, the dormitory hut was empty and he was able to pack up his things without having to face any awkward questions. No-one would notice he was gone; everyone there was completely self-absorbed, absorbed in their own salvation, their own ‘experience’, and the other bodies around them were not much more than props or dummies, a human blur.

  As he lifted his bag into the boot of the car, he stopped for the first time and thought about what he was doing. He was behaving like a child. He had forgotten about one thing: her. It would be churlish of him to go without making any farewell. Some instinct, a throb in his pulse, told him he would regret it. He would be leaving without closure. It was messy, it was adolescent and it was beneath him.

  Slipping the car keys into his back pocket, he headed for the hall. Just as he rounded the corner of the dining-room block, suddenly there she was, walking towards him with a small crowd in a procession behind her, the hem of her white sari trailing in the dust. Surely she should be in the hall by now? He must have looked puzzled because a man next to him explained that she had made an unscheduled walk to the beach, and as a result the program was running late. So he stood there, goggle-eyed, waiting for her to pass, but as she approached the wooden steps leading to the hall she stopped, looked straight at him and said one word, in English. ‘Going?’ But her eyes were more eloquent: I have put you through all this, they said, and now you are going to run away like a scared child.

  What happened immediately afterwards was hazy; he staggered up the wooden steps of the hall in a daze, slumped into a chair against the side wall and wept.

  In the long wait in the queue he was shaking, and when finally he found his way to her chair, she looked into his eyes with the most compassionate smile she had ever given him, laid her hands on his head and gave him a prolonged blessing. As if she knew. But of course she knew. On a low table beside her there was a brass bowl filled with rose petals, and, taking a handful of petals, she began to stuff them into his ears, to the delighted laughter of those looking on.

  Drunk with bliss, he staggered back to his seat.

  That night, when he rested his forehead against hers, he had, for the first time since he was a boy, prayed. Take this absurd pain away from me, take it all. I don’t want it. I’m laying it down here, at your feet. I’m giving it to you. Take my life’s burden.

  He had booked himself onto the last plane out on the Monday evening, and when he arrived at the airport he was hungry. All the food stalls were closed, except one, and even there they had only a single packet of sandwiches. By now he was exhausted and he slumped into a seat in the departure lounge and unravelled the wrapping from the soggy white-bread sandwich in his lap. Inside was a slice of plastic yellow cheese, two slices of pale, watery tomato and a single leaf of limp lettuce. Great. It was the theme of his benighted excursion. Still, he was empty, and he took a half-hearted bite and began to chew. What followed was perhaps the most remarkable part of the weekend. The sandwich was delicious; the sandwich was the best sandwich he had ever eaten. With each mouthful it grew more subtle and more satisfying so that he began to chew more slowly, the better to savour it, to linger over its sweetness. Now he was not so tired. Now, suddenly, he was very focused, he was like a scientist in his lab, wholly absorbed in an experiment.

  When he boarded the plane and the steward brought him his plastic tray with its two airline biscuits, brittle circles of flour dust in cellophane packets, he couldn’t wait to open one of the packets and bite into the dun-coloured orb. Yes, delicious, and the other one equally so! And he saw what she was doing, how she had played with him all weekend, how she had taken pity on his arrogance, his discontent, and was teaching him now to take pleasure in the simplest things. To be grateful.

  It was gratitude that he lacked, that he had always lacked. Since childhood it had been his curse to see the flaw in everything. This he had prided himself on; this, he had told himself, was discrimination. No-one could fool him.

  And with this thought a rush of tears welled behind his eyes and he laid his head against the window to conceal his overflowing heart.

  What did he learn from this? He learned that he was not in control, and that any expectations he had were foolish in their naïve presumption. Sometimes they would be met, sometimes not; sometimes they would be met but when he least expected it and not in the form he had anticipated. His imagination was a tantalising distraction; pleasurable in itself, often, but nothing ever came of it. Nothing was ever as he imagined it. To re-imagine the past or daydream the future was beside the point. Only the present mattered.

  But this was not an insight that stayed with him. He was unable to hold this wisdom, this freedom in his heart, for long. For the first month after the retreat he lived and breathed and worked in a serene state, and the memory of that single word, the sound of her voice, its gentle ironic inflection of mock surprise – ‘Going?’ – was enough to make him smile to himself in the middle of a meeting. But it was not enough. Nothing would ever be enough for him. And later, when he looked back, he could see that this short-lived phase of serenity was nothing other than a return to his original smugness. Which is why it was inevitable that he should fall out of it, without warning.

  Now began some terrible mood. A sense of futility seeped into his viscera like a thin drip of poison. So, he thought, so, it’s going to wear off, just like every other infatuation. Every morning, in his meditation, he could feel a sharp instrument twisting in his bowels, some double-edged sword of disillusionment and longing. The pain was unbearable.

  He began to brood on the boy, Oliver. He felt that Oliver and the baby in his dreams were one and the same, that the baby had come to him in human form, as an idiot boy, and he had failed to recognise it. He loved his son – of course he loved his son; the test of Sri Mata’s influence was whether he could love others, and he had failed that test. He was uncharitable. For the first time it occurred to him that he was lacking in love, not in the receiving of it but in the giving.

  He began to feel an underlying panic. One night he dreamed that he was riding in a crowded old bus with its windows wound down. He had two babies in his care, and as the bus jolted along the potholed road he feared that one of them might fall out of a window. It was dangerous – so dangerous he had to get off the bus in the middle of the busy city and carry the babies awkwardly along the middle of a road congested with traffic – and the infants were so heavy, and what if he dropped one? He asked a man loitering in a doorway to call him a taxi. The taxi came but the driver protested that he didn’t know the way. He became angry, he swore loudly in the street. Someone will have to come and help me, he shouted, and, clutching the babies, he strode off up the road, shouting and weaving through the traffic …

  And woke.

  He began to resent her. How dare she do this to him? Lead him to bliss and then hang him out to dry? Why didn’t she help him more? Why had she brought him this far and no further? What was the point of meditation and the energetic connection to her that they called grace if he still behaved badly? He was worse off now than he had ever been, because now he was disappointed in himself for failing the spiritual course. He had always been a good student, always done well in whatever course he enrolled in, whatever project he took up. Now he was a dunce.

  He gave up meditating. What was the point?

  Zoe was shocked, alarmed even. He could see that, perhaps even more than him, she had become attached to the idea of her husband as a master’s apprentice. It didn’t matter which master; all that mattered was that he was a good boy, that he acknowledged his problem and made an effort, that he was a horse in some kind of harness. Well, fuck that.

  Even so, giving up made him uneasy. He told himself that his unease was mere superstition. Meditation had become his voodoo, his rabbit’s foot talisman, his lucky charm, his anxious ritual, like t
hose obsessive-compulsive types who tap three times on the front door when they leave the house.

  He became clumsy. His energy was rough, more abrasive even than before. He began to bump into things, into people. He was febrile, a scattergun. It was no special mood you could name – not anger, irritation or depression – just an off-centredness, like his internal scales had been tipped out of balance. Could it be that since he began to meditate he had arrived at a subtle equilibrium he didn’t realise he possessed? It didn’t mean that he had no moods or never lost his temper, but that the moods and the temper passed quickly. It was as if he walked now on the balls of his feet, or on an invisible tightrope.

  It was early April and he drove to the airport and took a plane to Brisbane. He had a one-day conference at Surfers Paradise but had decided to hire a car and drive there after lunch with his sister, Jane, at her house in Woolloongabba.

  They sat out on the big, wide deck at the rear, built up high on stilts like the rest of the house, and it was like sitting in the middle of a jungle: banana palms, papaya trees and a flagrant pink hibiscus poked through the derelict fence of the low-rent apartment block next door. The run-down apartments had token balconies that were all but obscured by an overgrown garden, luxuriant trees with branches laced together by creeper and spiderwebs.

  Moments after Jane brought out coffee, they heard shouting. A skinny, shirtless man ran out onto one of the balconies, waving his arms. His brown tufts of hair stood on end, his grey beard was matted and he was raving. ‘The flies, the flies, they’re everywhere, the flies …’

  His sister pursed her lips. ‘Him again,’ she said. ‘Last night he was hurling pot plants at the wall of the girls’ bedroom.’

  A police car pulled up, and then another, then a van. Suddenly there were nine uniformed police in the street. Three of them opened the iron gate to the garden and stood on the cracked concrete path, looking up at the balcony.

  ‘No arms, no weapons! No arms, no weapons!’ cried the wretched figure. He was clearly terrified and dropped to the floor of the balcony like a ragdoll. ‘Look, look, I’m lying on the floor. I’m lying on the floor. No arms, no weapons.’

  One of the policemen stepped back to get a better view. ‘You’ll have to come down, sir.’

  ‘No, no, it’s the flies, the flies, they’re everywhere. You have to spray the bushes. I’m not coming down till you spray the flies.’

  One of the policemen tried the door, which was unlocked, and the three entered. Before long they had picked the ragdoll up off the floor of the balcony and were frogmarching him across the road to the van.

  Rick turned to his sister. ‘What will they do with him?’

  ‘What they always do with him. Take him to hospital, and after twenty-four hours they have to release him. And he comes back and he’s quiet for a while, then it starts all over again.’

  Yes, he thought, it starts all over again.

  By the time he drove into Surfers it was late afternoon. He checked into his hotel, one of those white behemoths that line up behind the Esplanade, and he was too tired, too apathetic, to do anything but order room service. It was years since he had been to Surfers, and in the morning, before breakfast, he went for a walk through the seedy streets, past a whole arcade of empty shops plastered with ‘To Lease’ notices. On a corner, outside the brass framed doors and glossy plate glass of a Louis Vuitton shop, a drug-raddled youth, whey-faced and reed-thin, was begging for small change, his eyes glazed, the palm of his left hand extended listlessly.

  He turned and headed for the Esplanade, the great white beach, ever lovely with the waves rolling in like layered motion in series of eight or nine … two, three, four, five … And as they surged to the shore they broke simultaneously as if orchestrated, rolling crests of surf that gave off a muted roar and a sea mist that wafted across the Esplanade.

  Already a portion of the beach was set with red and yellow flags, so narrow a space for permitted immersion, so limited a licence to frolic. The lifeguard was tall and lean and muscular but surprisingly old, in his forties at least. Or was it just that he had weathered into premature age? He had attached a resistance band to one of the steel columns of the lifeguard tent, and as he stood there, gazing out to sea and waiting for the raised arm that signalled distress, nonchalantly he worked the extender, in–out, in–out, first with his right arm, then with his left. The day had begun quietly. No-one was drowning.

  Rick had an impulse to dive in, to swim, but he had no togs. And in any case he did not want to challenge the series of the waves, to immerse himself untidily in their rhythmic formation. The bodies in the water, between the flags, looked like flotsam. They did not belong; they trespassed and flailed. A lone surfer, outside the flags, pitched from his board, his body tossed into the air in an arc before folding neatly into the oncoming waves.

  He walked on, past the Anzac memorial, a simple stone at the ocean edge of the Esplanade, its rigid, immobile form set against the relentless surge of the tide … five, six, seven, eight … He paused beside a bronze statue of a lifesaver, larger than life, a man in Speedo trunks, racing for the surf like a sprinter out of the blocks, eyes fixed ahead on the water. He read the plaque beside the bronze form. It said that this man died in his fifties. He was a world champion lifesaver, had won gold medals. But now, here he was, stalled in frozen motion. Forever on the cusp of rescue.

  He looked at his watch. It was time to return. On the way back to the hotel he stopped at a shop that had opened early, and he bought a cap for Luke and a pair of crazy thongs in the shape of alligator paws.

  In the hotel conference room the air was uncomfortably chill and they put on their jackets. He hated air-conditioning. Outside, the air was muggy, it clung to the skin, but in the artificial light of the conference room little draughts of icy air began to chill their shoulders, their forearms, the backs of their necks. They were at the mercy of controlled temperature.

  Before dinner he went up to his room on the twenty-second floor, and sat out on its small, vertiginous balcony. Across the way a giant ferris wheel rotated slowly with a pulsating neon eye at its centre. The fairground looked fragile, as if temporary and constructed from Meccano. On the other side of the street was a new shopping plaza with a mock medieval tower and a clock that gave off soft musical chimes on the hour, like muted church bells heard from a distance. The boxy white towers of the hotels rose in stark outline against the blue mountain range in the distance. The ridges of the mountains rose in curved, flowing shapes that looked kneadable, as if made of a smoky charcoal dough.

  Later, a small group of them dined at a yum cha palace on the Esplanade, desperate to escape the chill of the air con. After dinner, some went off to look for a bar, others sat on the ruffled sand, still warm, and gazed at the waves … five, six, seven, eight … He counted the series rolling in, the mesmerising order of it. Did he imagine it? Was he imposing order on chaos? The answer didn’t matter, never would matter, for in his heart he knew suddenly that there was no chaos, anywhere, not in the commonplace sense of the word, and he was consoled by the knowledge of this.

  In the burgeoning dark they strolled back along the sand to the street that turned off to their hotel, past the pandanus trees with their naked roots and their phallic growths hanging from the trunk, uncircumcised and pointing down to the concrete pavement.

  Back in his room he watched the late news, thinking he should go outside again, should go out onto the balcony and watch the neon ferris wheel while it spun its slow compass through the warm, salty air. He opened the sliding door and settled onto a wrought-iron chair, so hard, so uncomfortable.

  After a while he looked over to the wheel. It had stopped turning and its neon eye was dark. He got up, went inside, didn’t bother to undress and lay on the bed, waiting for sleep. It fell on him, a depthless surge of something powerful, and he dreamed he was standing on the Esplanade, gazing at the waves, their exquisite unending series, rolling in …

  When he woke there w
as an unbearable tumescence behind his eyes, and he felt grateful, not for anything in particular, just that he was alive. It was the dream; some resistance in him had dissolved. But why had that dream been so powerful? After all, it had merely repeated what he had already done that morning on his walk, when he had looked out to sea. But the dream version had been infused with a powerful presence, unsought, given to him as a gift.

  Now he was awake, and the reliable Gold Coast sun was shafting through the heavy drapes, and he wrenched himself upright on the edge of the bed. He glanced at the bedside clock: it was late and he would miss his flight. He phoned down to the reception desk for a quick checkout, lurched into the shower, drowned himself in over-chlorinated water, dressed and packed his overnight bag. Then he drove out to the airport. There, brandishing a pair of alligator thongs, he joined the queue for home.

  The very next morning he returned to his meditation practice, only he got up earlier, at five instead of six, and he meditated longer. He made no resolution about this, it just happened.

  Now, truly, he began to feel as if nothing important was within his volition. He had had a dark night of the soul, had bumped into things, and he was meditating again. Stuff happened, and he was moved on. And where was ‘on’? He hadn’t a clue. He felt like a knight that was being picked up and slid about on a chessboard.

  What he needed was someone to talk to. He had a secret life, and he needed to make sense of it.

  Sydney Park

  I rang Rebecca.

  No, I didn’t want to join her chant group (I said this as politely as I could, making the excuse that I often worked late and she lived on the other side of town). But could she suggest someone I might meet with on a regular basis?