A Short History of Richard Kline (23 page)

Martin waved.

‘You know them?' I asked.

‘In a fashion. The first time I ran into them they tried to mug me but we've progressed from there.'

I wondered what this ‘progress' had involved. ‘Perhaps you should invite them to a yoga class,' I said.

‘I've tried that. I think the idea of it scared them. I'd have more luck with martial arts.' And he told me of how a year earlier he had approached a state juvenile detention centre and offered to teach weekly classes of yoga and meditation. But the authorities had passed. Martin shrugged. ‘Too soon.'

And yet, I could see, these boys wanted to get to know Martin. They prodded at him; they sensed there was something there for them, even if they didn't know what it was. Perhaps it was the tattoo on his bicep, a badge of credibility. And, had they known it, they might even have liked the translation from the Sanskrit:
Salutations to the destroyer and re-creator of worlds
.

This was the intriguing thing about Martin: he could be so ordinary, ordinary in a good way, in a way that I could never manage. When I watched him kick a ball I reflected on the fact that in no way was he exotic.
She
was not a normal human being, that much I was sure of, but Martin was not so removed that I couldn't measure myself against him. Only four years separated us in age, and before anything else we were men together, and men from a common background. What lay between us was the depth of Martin's experience. Above all, I envied his naturalness, for it seemed that if ‘spiritual' progress meant anything, it meant a natural and spontaneous embrace of the moment, an embrace that was generous in its response to others, unfettered by any painful self-consciousness. Wherever he was, Martin seemed at home. One afternoon when we were discussing meditation, he stopped suddenly and said, ‘Sit here and meditate with me now.'

‘Here?' We were out in the open, not even under a tree. I glanced across at the boys who were nearby.

‘They're alright. They're used to me. I often sit here.'

But I baulked. I would feel like a fool, and even though I knew that this was what I most desired – to be a happy fool and not to care – I was an ocean away from that particular landing.

‘Well,' remarked Zoe, one Saturday evening in autumn as I lit the barbecue on the deck, ‘these talks with Martin always put you in a good mood. If I were a suspicious woman I'd think maybe you had a mistress.' Indeed, my walks with Martin did enhance my mood. I felt at last that I was coming to grips with the core of the riddle; that slowly, strand by strand, I was unravelling a knot that had sat between my shoulder blades for a very long time.

One school holiday, when I mentioned that Zoe and Luke were away, Martin invited me to his house for dinner. In no time at all he prepared a simple meal of kichari – ‘I lived on this at the ashram' – with a delicious side dish of coconut chutney, strong on the chilli he had grown on his balcony and dried above the sink. And he had no objection to me opening a bottle of wine, though he declined to share it.

While Martin was stirring the rice and lentil mixture, an enormous black cockroach flew at him, and he swatted it so that it dropped to the floor in a sudden dive. Then he ground it with the heel of his bare foot. You could hear the crunch.

I couldn't resist. ‘And the sanctity of all life?' I asked.

‘I've given this a lot of thought.'

‘And?'

‘And I make an exception for cockroaches.' With this he ladled the kichari into two deep bowls and set them down on the table.

That night over dinner, relaxed by the intimacy of the occasion, not to mention the wine, I asked Martin about his past. What had brought him to a fate so unlikely? Where had he grown up?

‘All over the place,' he replied. His father had been a major in the army and the family had moved around from base to base. He was a normal kid, he said, only interested in girls and surfing, and he didn't get on with the Major, who ran the home like a barracks. ‘He had rules about everything,' said Martin. ‘He was afraid, afraid that without his rules he wouldn't know who he was.'

I nodded. I knew the type.

At the age of twenty, he continued, he dropped out of a science degree and began to drift up and down the coast with friends, doing seasonal work, living out of a van and hitting the surf as often as possible. ‘I think I knew then I wasn't cut out for normal life.'

‘Who is?'

‘Well, some adapt better than others.'

The turning point had been an experience on acid. He was staying with his girlfriend in a caravan park in Kiama while his van was being repaired. Often he and his friends would drop a tab on the beach, lie on the sand and stare up at the clouds, comparing notes. Always for him these experiences were benign. But one evening when the weather was wet and steamy and it was just him and the girl in their cramped and gloomy caravan, they lay on the bed naked, dropped a tab of acid, and within what seemed only minutes he had plunged into a vortex of horror.

The caravan had a long wall mirror at the foot of the bed and when he looked into it he saw that he was melting, his whole body liquefying. First his head dissolved into a puddle of viscous red and yellow fluid that pooled on the sheet. Then it began, slowly, to trickle over the edge of the bed, and drip onto the floor. Next the right arm, then the left, the two legs together, until only his molten torso remained on the bed, and he could see his own heart beating on the sheet, a lump of pulsating meat. Before long, this too began to melt, and the horror of it was paralysing; he tried to shut his eyes but was unable even to blink. Any minute now there would be nothing left of him, he would be just a tiny speck in a gaping void that grew bigger and darker by the second.

Then, in the midst of his terror, a thought came to him:
who is observing this disintegration?
Something or someone remained. Some other self was present, something larger than the scared little Martin figure melting on an unmade bed. Then he knew: at his core there was a part of him that was indestructible, some other self, and here it was, quietly observing this lurid fantasy of the brain.

In the months that followed, a single question possessed him. Who was that observer? Where did he come from?

‘I'd never been a reader, but after that I began to read whatever I could get my hands on, all the acid literature I could find, and then some. What was the brain chemistry on this?'

‘And what is the brain chemistry?'

Ah, he said, this was a big question, and if I wanted to pursue it he would give me some books. But in the end those books had failed to satisfy him. The brain was just a transmitter, like a television set, infinitely more complex but a transmitter nonetheless. The question was: where were the programs coming from? From that moment a new restlessness took hold of him. He returned to the city, resumed his studies and worked part-time as a security guard, and occasionally as a bouncer at a club in George Street. One evening he wandered into a yoga class in Chinatown run by Tadeusz, an eccentric Pole and former martial arts instructor. They hit it off. Within three years he had become one of Tad's assistants. At the age of twenty-seven, he set off with a backpack for India.

I couldn't imagine Martin as a bouncer and said so.

He smiled. ‘The Major taught me to box,' he said. ‘Insisted on it. Not that that's much help when you're wrangling a crowd of drunks. It just gives you a false sense of security.'

I was distracted, and thinking of my youth. ‘I never got into drugs,' I said.

‘Never?'

‘Just dope in my twenties, nothing more. I was too much of a control freak. I didn't trust the suppliers.'

‘Well, I suspect they were more reliable then than now.' And in any case, Martin added, the problem with drugs was that they were not practical, just a temporary holiday from normality. Once the effect wore off you were back where you started, back to your old neuroses. What you needed was a practice that could weaken old behaviour patterns and destructive ways of thinking, weaken them permanently. You needed to recondition the neocortex. ‘You have to change the game, Rick, change it for good.'

‘The game?'

‘The Rick game, the Martin game, all that accumulated shit that builds up from childhood. The crazy wiring of the ego. The ego is a necessary organising principle that gets us through our day, but as we age we begin to tire of it, we tire of our own constructed persona. We start to experience it as baggage. This is the paradox of human maturation. Once the ego is established, in maturity it becomes stale, a burden. It tires of the game. After a while it begins to struggle for its own extinction.'

This was one of the things, he said, that in later life made us restless, and could lead to erratic or bizarre behaviour, a desire for radical change.

Later that night, writing up my notes, I found myself lingering over a phrase, the
burden of personality
. I recalled a book I had read not long after I met Zoe, a book I had found on Joe's shelves. It was a reflection on the nature of melancholy. In it the author had described his claustrophobia, his sense of being smothered by the barnacle weight of his own personality. He had used that same word, had compared his state of mind to that of a man trapped beneath the hull of a capsized boat, unable to dive deeper and swim free. Maybe this was a male thing. Did women feel it? At a certain age you felt the encumbrance of the identity you had constructed for yourself, or had thrust upon you: all those leathery accretions of habit, those barnacles on the psyche that are both you and not you. And you felt the need to be rid of them, to have it all – this construct, ‘Richard Kline' – dissolved in whatever merciful solvent you could find.

One morning, early, when it was still dark and after I had settled on the floor, cross-legged and with my back straight against the wall so that I did not sag and doze off, almost the moment I closed my eyes I felt that I was sitting beside a lake. And although the glazed surface of the lake was uncannily still, as if painted, beneath its waters lay a fathomless abyss, a ceaseless hum of meaning, a fertile chaos in which some force was endlessly giving birth.

Morning after morning this lake appeared. I didn't seek it, I made no mental effort to summon it to mind; it was simply the case that as soon as I sat on the floor and closed my eyes I was there, beside its dark water. The lake was rimmed by a forest of trees that fruited a kind of nut, like a chestnut, and all around me lay a glossy carpet of these small brown nuts so that I knew, if I grew hungry, I needed only crack open their shells. The lake was so vivid, and yet so soothing, that I was reluctant to open my eyes, to get up, leave the room and begin the rest of my day. But then one morning I was taken by the fear that I might no longer be able to go on leading the life I now led. I saw an image of my son, alone on the lake in a small canoe, and I shivered and grew cold. I opened my eyes, suddenly and with relief, and got up and left the room, and was especially attentive to Luke over breakfast.

Not yet, I thought.
Not yet.

But when I mentioned the lake to Martin, this internal landscape that seemed to me so portentous, Martin was dismissive. ‘The mind plays tricks,' he said. ‘Different images will arise in the meditation of different people. It does not further your practice either to resist them or to become attached to them. Just go on repeating your mantra. Don't get distracted.'

After a while the deal I had struck with Martin seemed one-sided. What was I giving in return? Martin had little money but would, I knew, have refused any I offered him. You didn't bring alcohol to a monk, and he was particular about his food. Plants? I wasn't a gardener and didn't have a clue and, besides, Martin had little space and what he had was already covered in carefully tended growth. But Zoe suggested I take him out for dinner once a month.

It was a tentative suggestion, for she wondered if Martin were one of those purists for whom commercially prepared food was a pollution, but he accepted the offer cheerfully and suggested an Indian restaurant in Marrickville where they were ‘easy on the salt and the sugar'. He liked the owner of this place, Rajesh, a former accountant from Cochin and one-time member of the Indian Rationalist Association.

On our first night there, Rajesh came to our table with the intent of resuming his friendly argument with Martin. ‘You Western soul-seekers, you fall for all that ancient mumbo-jumbo. And why? The sun comes up in the morning and makes things grow, but tell me this, do you worship the sun?'

‘I worship everything,' Martin replied, and gave his good-natured laugh. ‘I bow down to you, my dear friend.'

‘Yes, yes, you bow down to me, I bow down to you, we all bow down to one another. But you come from an advanced country and then you decide to go backwards. What is the point of that? All this superstition.'

‘You know I have no choice, Rajesh,' said Martin, with mock dismay.