A Short History of Richard Kline (14 page)

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 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, 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.

Day after day he maintained his regimen. He got up at six, took a shower, went into his study, shut the door, set the timer on his desk clock and sat. There was no mystique to it, no charm, no solemnity, nothing. Yes, nothing. In a curious way he felt he had entered into nothingness. And yet it was a ritual, a process, a frame; it was
something
.

And then one morning it came to him that he would do this every day, and that it would work. It would be his cure, and the essence of that cure would be silence and surrender. But the cure would be a long time coming. He must wait, and for the first time in his life he must have faith.

currawong

Over the weeks that followed I kept to my practice. And then, out of nowhere, I had what I can only describe as a visitation. The woman in white arose in my meditation.

It was almost eight by the time I got home from work. Zoe and Luke were at a school concert. The house was empty. In the wok there were the leftovers of a stir-fry, and I carried a bowl upstairs with the intention of eating out on the small cedar deck at the rear, after I had meditated. But I was hungry, and thought that for once I might cut my meditation short.

In the bedroom I paused to look for a cushion, and then unlocked the sliding glass door that opened onto the deck and the shade of an old plane tree. It was a perfect late summer evening, mellow and warm, and I settled onto the floor of the deck. By this time I had given up the straight-backed chair and taken to sitting cross-legged on the floor; I had always been flexible, and somehow in this position I felt more natural, less of a stone pharaoh. Because I was hungry I planned on fifteen minutes only but after a while my hunger faded and before long I glanced at my watch to find that forty minutes had passed and the deck was beginning to darken. Just five more minutes, I thought, and it was then that I felt a presence and opened my eyes.

The leafy clusters of the plane tree fluttered at the edge of my vision, and the lights in the houses opposite glowed in the ripening dark. I saw that a currawong was hopping across the deck, its beak glinting, its head cocked to the side, one yellow eye looking bold and quizzical. So it was only a bird. Staring back into that eye, I held its gaze for an hypnotic moment before the bird jerked its black head and flapped up onto the deck rail, where it looked back at me as if it knew me. And from nowhere a line came to me from
Siddhartha,
the book of my youth: ‘
and the bird in my breast has not died
'.

My arms and feet were warm in the humid dusk; I could feel the heat penetrating the fabric of my shirt; the jasmine coiled around the deckrail was heady … And how rare it was to sit becalmed, how soothing … I needed only to lay my head back and I would be able to doze comfortably for a half hour or so …

And it was then, as I closed my eyes, that the woman in white came to me, the woman I had dreamed of in the months after my brother's death, the woman with her strange, blank-eyed baby in its white swaddling clothes. I felt rather than saw them, as if glimpsing a fold of the infant's cloth out of the corner of my mind's eye, but not in a way that evoked any feeling. There was none of the yearning or hysteria that had welled up in my dreams. I was merely an observer, aware that my heartbeat had slowed, and that the image of the woman had dissolved, leaving the baby to float across my internal eye.

And then I felt a buzzing in my temples and my mind began to brim again with random thoughts that zipped and buzzed across my screen like manic spermatozoa, while the baby, that luminous egg, wafted on the night air.

I opened my eyes, startled again by a sense of presence, of someone near me. But again it was only the currawong, perched on the rail close to my head. Brazen, fearless. What a strange creature to come so close. By now it was dark, the sudden darkening of a sub-tropical night. Possessed by a sense of some other self, I stood, and, glancing back over my shoulder at the bird, which was still there, staring at me with its yellow eye, I opened the glass door and withdrew into the house.

The next morning I stopped by Mark's cubicle. Mark was on the phone, which wasn't uncommon; lately he had been spending too much time on the phone, usually to some woman or other, and I stood, disapprovingly, making it clear he should hang up and give me his full attention. But Mark, insouciant as ever, continued to remonstrate in an urgent tone with whoever was on the other end of the line.

My temper rising, I made a conscious effort to distract myself (no more outbursts) and took to studying the rogue's gallery on the wall of Mark's cubicle, a space where the analysts pinned their notices, cartoons, photos of wives or girlfriends, children, wilderness scenes and whatever fantasy objects got them through their day. The centrepiece of Mark's gallery had long been a red Ferrari and it was still there, in pride of place, but pinned beneath it was a small colour photograph of a woman in early middle age. Her skin was dark and she looked to be from the subcontinent. Her black hair was pulled back tightly from her forehead, and around her shoulders was a white shawl. Her eyes blazed at me.

Mark hung up the phone with a sigh. ‘Sorry, K, I've told her not to ring me at work.'

‘Who's this?' I pointed to the image of the woman on his cork-board.

‘A joke,' he said, unpinning the photo and tossing it onto his desk. ‘Some guru that Phoebe – my girlfriend – goes to see.
She
put it' – he nodded at the photo lying on the desk – ‘up there. She's into that stuff.'

Phoebe, it turned out, had been a member of our meditation class. She and Mark had run into one another in a coffee shop near the office, and Mark, with a more than respectable excuse to strike up a conversation, had made a successful move.

‘So you meditate together?' I raised an ironic eyebrow.

Mark's smirk said it all. ‘Not exactly, K, not exactly.'

Later that evening I told this story to Zoe, who by then had met Mark and found him an amusing if feckless study. ‘So this is where you go to meet chicks,' she said, ‘a stress management class. I suppose it's a step up from cruising a singles' bar. And when the relationship falls apart you can meditate to get over it.'

Zoe approved of my meditation. How could she not? In the months since ‘the incident' we had behaved with a wary affection towards one another, but I could feel that in some deep part of her I was unforgiven. She was waiting. She would see.

So I was meditating, I was a good boy, but still the black shadow hovered at my shoulder. Winter came and it was cold, and harder to get up in the early mornings. There were many days when I was irascible and withdrawn. Sometimes I would sit in the dark before dawn and think: this isn't enough. I thought of that benign field I had sometimes felt part of when I was a boy. What had happened to it? When had I lost my connection? Had it been a figment of my imagination, like an imaginary friend, or a belief in Santa Claus? Was it some kind of electromagnetic field, and if so, when had the circuit broken? And then an overwhelming sadness would take possession of me and the thought would come: no, this isn't enough. I can't do this alone.

It was spring, and a Saturday morning. Zoe, who never got sick, was in bed with the flu. I dropped Luke off at a friend's place and continued on across the bridge to my office. I planned to catch up on some work.

Shoppers were out sipping coffee on the pavement or strolling the Chatswood mall. Unable to find a parking space near the office, I cruised for several blocks in the direction of a car park at the eastern end of the mall, and as I turned into its entrance I glanced across at the Chatswood Community Centre, a red-brick and glass complex surrounded by green lawn. A steady stream of people were making their way towards the wide front doors, and for a moment I thought – could swear – I caught a glimpse of Mark Paradisis among them, and yet this seemed unlikely, as Mark didn't surface from clubbing until mid-afternoon. Still, I was sure it had been him; I thought I recognised the white shirt and embroidered vest, the distinctively cocky set of the head, the familiar swagger.

Inside the cavernous car park I found a place high up on the fifth floor and strode to the lift. It seemed to take an age to reach me. It appeared to be stuck on Level 3 and I felt the old impatience rising, that razor-like cut of irritability, and I thought, no, cool it, it's Saturday morning. Once out in the bright sunlight I looked over to the community centre and saw a row of posters on the notice-board, and I crossed the grass verge to look, wondering if it really had been Mark that I had seen. What could he possibly be doing in such an uncool venue as a community centre at a time some hours before he would normally rise from his bed?

Up close, the posters showed the head and shoulders of a dark-skinned woman draped in a white shawl, and instantly I recognised her as the woman in the photograph on the wall of Mark's office cubicle. So it must have been Mark.

I glanced at my watch. Plenty of time to look in. Perhaps I could catch Mark in some embarrassing posture, or see a side to him that as yet I had no inkling of, and I stepped up to the main doors.

As I approached I could see that the wide concrete terrace outside the doors was covered with shoes, left there by members of the crowd, a disorderly spread of cheap sandals and worn sneakers. Ignoring these, I pushed open the heavy glass door that led into the foyer; I had no intention of leaving an expensive pair of almost new Italian leather slip-ons in a place where they could easily be stolen. But as I attempted to enter through the inner doors, a middle-aged man with grey hair touched me on the arm and said, ‘Sir, would you mind leaving your shoes at the door?'

‘Why?' I asked, sounding churlish.

‘Because it's the custom,' said the doorkeeper, ‘and for the purposes of today's program the hall will in effect become a temple.'

A temple? The Chatswood Community Centre? I felt myself on the edge of rudeness, surprisingly so, since I had left home in a good mood. Still, that was the way it was then: hair-trigger. For a moment I considered leaving and then, glancing through the open door as an (unshod) woman pushed past me, I thought I caught a glimpse of Mark again. Damn it, I would go in, barefoot or not.

Frowning, I stepped back onto the top step and removed my shoes, being careful to place them in a far corner, in shadow, where they would not be obvious. I would just look in, confirm that it was indeed Mark I had seen entering, discover what cult fantasy he had got himself into, and either tease him about it if it were harmless or look out for his interests if it were not.

Inside, the hall was three-quarters full. People sat or stood around idly, with an air of low-key expectancy. In a quick scan of the room I could see no-one I recognised, yet I was
sure
it was Mark I had seen walking up the path towards the doorway. Perhaps he had looked in, thought better of it and left, in which case I would leave too, and I began to move back towards the main doors. Too late. Something was happening.

In an instant the atmosphere in the hall changed. A group of people was clustered around the entrance, and they began now to chant in a low, sing-song inflection, over and over with a kind of hypnotic rise and fall, in some foreign tongue I didn't recognise. From the excitement by the doors I deduced that the main attraction had arrived. It could only be the woman on the poster.

The chanting intensified and grew louder. A bell rang and the back rows of the crowd surged forward towards the door, people standing on their toes and craning their necks to see, and I knew that she must be standing there, in the doorway. I couldn't see but I knew that someone was there, or at least something had changed in the room, because at that moment I felt a wave of energy move towards me – or, rather, it both came towards me from some external source and at the same time it arose within me. The cavity of my chest filled with an intense pressure that shot up suddenly into my head in a column of heat. My face flushed, my vision blurred and I began to cry.

Right there, in the middle of the hall, I was weeping.
Oh, my God
: this was my first thought.
Oh, my God, how embarrassing, thank God no-one here knows me.
I turned my face away from the incoming crowd, which was streaming to fill up the chairs at the front, and I moved across to the far wall lined with wooden benches that were empty.
I'll just sit here for a bit
, I thought,
and pull myself together. I'll get over this and then I'll go.
It must have been the chanting. Sometimes music could do that, could move me for no good reason, or make the hairs on my skin prickle. So I would just sit there, and take out my handkerchief and try unobtrusively to wipe my eyes, and then I would leave.