It's All In the Playing (36 page)

“How did you find out?” I asked.

“The English papers carried it first. I saw a squib here. Then I made some calls.”

“How’s his wife?”

“Devastated.”

“Is there going to be a funeral?” I asked, wondering if we’d be through shooting in time for me to go.

“I don’t know,” said Bella. “But if there is, you shouldn’t even show up in the city of London. That wouldn’t be wise for anybody.”

I couldn’t concentrate. I was thinking of our last meeting.

I put a hand over my eyes and tried to block out my surroundings. I tried to put the karmic pieces together. Had I, on some level, known it was going to happen and during our meeting made contact with him one more time? Had he known he was going to check out? Didn’t everybody know on a soul level when and why they were leaving? Was that our one monumental act of free will? But why did he do it?

“Are you all right?” asked Bella.

“Why did he do it, Bellitchka?” I asked.

She hesitated, knowing that she was suddenly into a metaphysical spiritual conversation, on a level beyond not only her comprehension but mine too. Maybe that was why she hadn’t wanted to be the one to tell me.

“You mean, why did he die?” she asked.

“I mean why did he
decide
to die now, when he had so much to look forward to, so much to accomplish? We had so many things to discuss together. So what changed his mind?” I asked, never expecting her to answer me really.

“Well,” she said, “he didn’t decide to die. I told you. It was an accident. Nobody decides to die. It just happens. It’s one of those mysteries.”

“No,” I said. “No. It’s not as simple as that. It’s
connected
somehow, Bella.”

I could feel my voice trailing off with my thoughts. I didn’t feel like crying, but I desperately wanted to go away somewhere, someplace I could just be quiet, by myself. I thought, I’m not emotionally involved with Gerry enough anymore to be stunned on a personal-loss level. But
something
had been bugging me the past couple of days. Was this why I had been thinking about him in Machu Picchu and today? Was he actually
around?
Was he trying to contact me as a soul energy now, because he no longer had a body?
Then
it hit me that I wouldn’t ever see him again. Instantly a picture filled my mind of the last time we had met, when he had prowled back and forth in front of his bookcase. Then an odd thought struck me—as such apparent irrelevancies do at times of stress….

Bella’s voice on the phone was saying, “Are you there, my darling? Are you all right?”

“I’m okay, Bella,” I said. “Bella? Listen. What if they find my love letters stashed in those books in his bookshelves? Who goes through those things?”

“God. I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m sure they’ll respect his privacy for many reasons.”

Yes, of course they will, I thought. They always did.

“Is Mr. Dance playing me well?” he had said that day in London. I wanted to say, “Excruciatingly so; with all the spiritually closed-minded familiarity he can muster up.” But I hadn’t. I could see Gerry was still operating in the dark ages of his own spiritual self, while functioning with all cylinders ignited, intellectually. At least I had learned to let him be. Let him have his own reality, his own pace in life.

And now he was not in that intellectually empirically provable body anymore. He was suddenly operating in territory the very existence of which he had always denied. He was now only a soul. Had he gone home and
not recognized it? Was I feeling his presence because he needed guidance and had no one else to consult?

“I’ve been feeling him around, Bella,” I finally said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, it’s like he’s been in my thoughts for a few days for no reason. Now I see why. God knows how he’ll contact me now that I know where he is.”

“Oh,” said Bella. “Well, my darling, like I said, this whole thing is too Pirandello-ish for me. I feel like I’m in somebody else’s play bringing you this news.”

“You know, Bella,” I said, “when I saw him last time I sensed so much that he was abusing people with his intellectual superiority and not asking enough spiritual questions. I almost wanted to warn him to develop that spiritual side of himself or he’d be in trouble.”

“Yeah,” she said. “You told me. But did you tell him?”

“No,” I said. “I couldn’t. He was so intimidatingly sure of himself, sort of ordering people around and stuff. But, God, I still found him attractive. I really felt we had another few rounds to go with each other.”

“Yeah,” said Bella. “I remember you said.”

“Soooo,” I said, not knowing what else to say, “I guess he had his reasons for going now.”

“You really believe that, don’t you?” she asked, very seriously.

“Yes,” I said. “I really do. And I’d say this if it were Sachi or you or anyone else I really, really would hate to lose.”

“So you think everyone decides
when
they want to go?” she asked, trying to clarify what I was saying.

“Oh, sure,” I answered. “Not only
when,
but
how.”

“I see,” said Bella simply.

“He knows from my book that he was a catalyst for my own spiritual search. That was the role he played in my life and now on the screen. He knows that he was one of the most important people in my life because he
made me realize that intellectual pragmatism is not enough.”

“How do you know he understands this?”

“Because he’s now on the other side, where brains and pragmatics don’t matter all that much.”

“You really think he’s over there, or rather over
you,
hovering around or something?”

“Yes,” I said. “I know it. I can feel it. And now he wants to understand.”

“So how are you going to help him?” she asked.

I thought a moment.

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah, well,” said Bella. “Like I said. I’m really sorry, my darling. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help.”

“Okay,” I answered. “But I really think it’s
him
that needs help now, not me. I think he’s really shocked to find that death is not oblivion. I need to help him over the problem of realizing, perhaps even of recognizing, that he is now disembodied.”

“Whatever you say,” said Bella. “I just can’t think like that. Sometimes I wish I could, but I can’t. So I’ll speak with you in a few days.”

“Thanks, Bella,” I said. “How’s Martin?”

“He’s fine. He sends his condolences. But he says you had closed that chapter of your life with Gerry, but here it is, an ongoing play, and I’m still playing the same part.”

We hung up.

I paced around the hotel room. I had to move around, walk. So then I got dressed and went out. I walked around Cuzco by myself, into the bazaars. I bought some baby-alpaca sweaters, some earrings, anything that felt like a familiar activity to divert my attention from what had happened. I stopped and listened to the church bells, to an old Elvis Presley record spinning on a jukebox somewhere. Then I heard a refrain of a
song that Gerry and I had loved together. I seemed to be moving through my own drama, watching myself react.

The gorilla-chasing dream came back to me. The dream where he chases me to the edge of the cliff and I turn around and say to him, “What should I do now?” and he says, “I don’t know, kid—it’s your dream.” I felt as if my life was a dream. An illusion, as the Buddhists and Hindus claim. If we created our dreams at night out of the stuff of the subconscious, superconscious, or whatever level of consciousness we utilize, then perhaps we were doing the same thing during our working-day hours. Perhaps we could make our daydream anything we wanted it to be, depending on what we wanted and needed to get out of it, “to rise out of the muck and the mire of the delusion of life,” the Hindus said in the old Vedic scriptures. Life was a dream, an illusion, a play, a delusion, an entertainment. Some of us enjoyed being entertained by violence, some by tragedy, some by comedy and adventure. And some didn’t like being entertained by the illusion at all anymore. When that happened to people, they decided to end the dream, draw the curtains on the magic they had created for themselves in the first place.

The question was this: Did I draw the curtain on Gerry? Or did he draw the curtain on me?

   From the time I knew that Gerry had left the body, everything changed for me. I felt that he was constantly around. It was an unusual and yet reconfirming experience. It wasn’t disconcerting, but more reassuring, because my spiritual principles were based on a belief in the eternity of the soul. Often I asked myself whether I was creating the feeling of his presence because I wanted confirmation of my beliefs. But it really didn’t feel like that.

Nothing bumped in the night, or materialized in a blaze of light at the foot of my bed in the darkness. No form of ectoplasm came to visit me when I least expected
it, tapping out messages on tabletops. Nothing resembling anything I had read of other people’s experiences happened to me. It was more a constant, continually pressing, yet gentle presence, as though Gerry were asking for clarification and guidance. I literally
felt
the questions, almost signifying that he might be stuck in some dimension between his earth experience and the higher truth of his next adventure. I felt that he found the result of his departure extremely disorienting, rendering him nearly incapable of adjusting to what he had done with any balance or acceptance. That was where I felt I came in. The conflict in our relationship had centered around my developing understanding that man was essentially a spiritual being, and his conviction that man was essentially a mental and physical being. He had been a confirmed atheist, actively denouncing the role of God and the Church in the culture of an advanced civilization, and as a good and intellectual socialist, he based his compassion and humanitarian impulses on the sociological shrewdness of the necessity for peace in an otherwise violent world.

He believed that mankind’s problems were essentially economic, where I believed that spiritual ignorance was the basic problem, therefore setting up the conflicts in a have and have-not world. Whenever I pointed out that most of the wars on the planet today were being fought over the interpretation of God (Arab versus Jew, Hindu versus Moslem, Protestant versus Catholic, communist atheists versus capitalist Christians), he said no, they were based on economic disparity. When I argued that belief in God gave people hope and literally kept them going, he said it was necessary to perpetuate such a myth in order to bear the tragedy of poverty.

When I said that I believed that the God-force was within each of us, not outside or above in a pink cloud surrounded by harps and milk and honey, he said that to believe God was within gave man a license to self-righteousness
and cruel abuse of power. I said that those who professed not to believe in God (communists, for example) abused their power more than anybody.

He kept saying we were in an age of economic disparity, and I that we were in an age of spiritual ignorance that caused a particularly destructive form of fundamentalism, each faction intolerantly believing
their
God was the only one because they couldn’t accept anyone else’s God, much less that God was within each of us.

And so it went, around and around. Neither of us got to the point of agreeing that our thinking was not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Since Gerry was such a brilliant economic and sociopolitical pragmatist, I was fascinated with the demonstration of his mental gymnastics. I was even more intrigued by the cold truth that spiritually he was so adamantly of a closed mind. This was an irresistible challenge to me, giving me something intriguing to try to overcome. How a man that compassionately brilliant and intellectually advanced could be so closed and threatened by the subject of God and soul became an adventure for me.

Of course he found it upsetting to contemplate such dimensions, because he couldn’t see them or prove that they existed, but I always had the feeling that it was upsetting to him because, if he had recognized the potential truth of the alternative realities, he would have felt swamped by the accompanying sense of lack of control. And one thing Gerry needed to feel was autonomy.

The other reason for his closed-minded intellectualism was more complicated. It had to do with his own self-esteem and his need to believe he was taking complete responsibility for the life he was leading. Because he was an insistent pragmatist, this had to relate to the things he did, rather than to who he was. It would seem that the natural base of his intellectual arrogance would be a high opinion of himself. But that was not the case.
When he had told me he liked to be admired, but not by people who meant anything to him, I understood that he meant he would have had to live up to those qualities that elicited such admiration on a daily basis and under scrutiny. He didn’t like the personal pressure which on closer examination
always
accompanied the question of the spiritual self on some level. He understood that man could not function without the unseen dimension of hope, but looking at the world through his admirably reasonable eyes, he couldn’t see where the hell it came from. Better to deny the basis for that hope, do the best he could in pragmatic terms for the large, unseen, impersonal masses. Yet somewhere deep in his gut, Gerry did know that he was failing both them and himself. Somewhere on some level he understood that his intellectualism was arrogant and that he really was afraid to admit that he, as well as everyone else, was aligned and attuned to the Divine, whether one went to church or recognized that one had a soul or not.

Now that he had crossed over, was he being forced to acknowledge that his earthly insistence on actively ignoring the dimension of the Divine had been a profound oversight? Was that why I felt him around me asking for help? Would I be able to give it to him if I could just figure out a way to do it?

   In the meantime I finished up the movie. Some members of the crew were suffering so badly from various forms of dysentery, insomnia, and just simple human maladjustment disorders that they were on automatic pilot, longing for the day when they’d be able to pop down to McDonald’s or Love’s Barbecue Ribs, sit in front of the TV with a beer, and enjoy the simple American pleasures that included the family and loved ones they often took for granted. Others had transcended the primitive trials of the Andes and could be anywhere from now on and feel happy. Neither was more advanced than
the other. As a matter of fact, several who were having the best time seemed not to have progressed one iota in their personal growth. Some of those who slept well and functioned in a perfectly ordinary manner were simply treading water and had opted not to look into themselves and stir up what was unresolved residue. Of course it could be that they didn’t have any…. Some of the most uncomfortable had taken quantum leaps in their personal self-knowledge because they had dared to confront their personal conflicts by giving themselves uncomfortable reactions to the primitive conditions.