Dinner with Buddha (31 page)

Forty-one

But, of course, you can't be ready for the things life throws at you. Not really. Not entirely. Being ready in that way would be like trying to cling to a particular state of the meditative experience, or like trying to stay young all your life. It would mean stopping the roulette wheel of time on your number and having the dealer pay and pay and pay without ceasing while the sirens sounded and lights flashed. It would be the extinction of surprise, which would mean the absence of learning. The world is not made that way.

Rinpoche and I went upstairs, showered off the chlorine, and changed into our walking-around outfits. His robe and sandals, my shorts, jersey, and tennis shoes. Outdoors again, in a lazy river of tourists, we made a promenade along the strip, where red-faced men and women sat on the pedestrian overpasses with signs like this:

WHY LIE? I WANT MONEY FOR BEER. YOU PAY, I'LL DRINK.
and
RAIN WASHED OUT MY CAMPING SPOT. ANYTHING HELPS.

Very small Mexican men and women stood mid-sidewalk, flapping strip-club cards in just the way they did in Midtown Manhattan. We passed a young guy wearing a T-shirt that read:
COVER ME IN CHOCOLATE AND THROW ME TO THE LESBIANS.
Loud music blared from speakers in front of souvenir shops. Hawkers sold tickets to country-music shows and excursions to the Hoover Dam. There were women in tiny skirts and tall heels. A fake Statue of Liberty. A fake Arc de Triomphe. Beside me I could feel Rinpoche taking it all in, making mental notes, maybe, for a future “speaking.” It was a museum of appetites, a promise of FUN, whether your idea of fun was the roller coaster roaring on its tracks near the Monte Carlo, the exotic dancing clubs on the edge of town, the escorts, the clubs, the chain restaurants, the jewelry shops, or even the glass-walled chapel, where a couple exchanged vows while a small crowd gathered on the sidewalk to watch. That, in particular, seemed so tawdry and sad to me. Were they actors, being paid to pretend to swear fidelity? Were they drunk? Were they really making a mockery of marriage that way?

We took a break from it all for a superb Indian meal in a second-floor restaurant set back from the revelry behind a courtyard with booths selling belts and hats. We walked some more, strolled through the Venetian with its fake canals, three-year-old frescoes, and phony gondoliers; we stood for a while in front of the fountain display near the Bellagio.

And then Rinpoche said he was ready for the machines.

Up the entrance ramp we went, past the illuminated hundred-foot-high fountains, past the stretch limos and glamorous women, past the midwestern families of four and the T-shirted couples, and into the Bellagio's lobby. There were tiled walls, vases of exotic flowers posed on marble tables, chandeliers, leather sofas and chairs in a comfortable arrangement . . . and a few steps to our right, the casino. Rinpoche moved toward it like a conquering emperor and we wandered for a while, savoring the atmosphere—the lights, the bells, the neon, the somber men at blackjack, and the lively scene at craps. And then, as if drawn and held there by an evil magnetism, he hovered near something called the Big Six, a roulette-like wheel with plastic-encased one-, five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills instead of numbers. After a moment, he took a seat on a high stool and I joined him, watching, ready for a lesson, telling myself not to worry. He purchased one hundred dollars' worth of ten-dollar chips and fielded the most curious of glances from the Thai woman behind the felt. It seemed to me that she'd given him the Evil Eye. On the first spin he lost twenty dollars. On the second spin he lost twenty more. On the third spin, enthusiasm untempered, he lost twenty again. More than half his cash gone in the space of two minutes. I was secretly glad, I admit it. He then placed three chips on the joker, at forty-to-one, and the wheel spun and spun, flashing, flashing, promising great things. Gradually, inexorably, the forces of friction took over and the wheel slowed, clicked, the rubber tongue bending one last time over one last pin and coming to rest . . . on a two-dollar bill one notch beyond the joker.

Unperturbed, Rinpoche fondled the last two chips, made them into a short stack, and set the stack on the five-dollar spot. The dealer yanked on the wheel, the bills blended into a glassy blur. A man pushed in too close on my right. I suspected a pickpocket and reached for my wallet and at that moment saw that he was Asian, built like a wine barrel, with hair cut in a low bristle a quarter inch above his scalp. He was dressed in a dark sport coat and dark shirt and he was looking at me with the blank expression of a killer. The wheel slowed, I could hear it, but I was no longer looking at it. I was looking over the man's shoulder at his twin, or something like his twin, who was standing on the far side of Rinpoche. I saw that he'd put one hand under the back of Rinpoche's arm. “Now you come with us,” I thought I heard him say. The wheel clicked in a dying rhythm. I heard the dealer announce, “Ten.” There was a hand on
my
arm now. I stood and tried to shake it free but the man did not let go. A thick neck. Steady black eyes. He seemed amused. “Come with us now.”

“I will like hell come with you!” I said, perhaps too loudly. The dealer looked up, ready to summon security. The other gamblers stared. Rinpoche had turned around on his stool and was standing now, too. “No,” I half shouted. “We're not going.”

“Come now,” Rinpoche's man said, rather gently, I thought, but, at the same time, in a tone that offered very little chance for disagreement. This was it, then. These were Natasha's parking-lot Chinese goons. We were about to be thrown into the back of the tinted-window SUV and driven into the Nevada desert. We'd be interrogated there, tortured, left to the vultures. The Chinese assassins would then find their way to our loved ones. A hundred scenes from various violent films showed in my brain.

Rinpoche was his usual calm self. The four of us shifted position so that we were a few steps away from the stools at the Big Six and I said, in a quavering voice, “Whatever you want to ask us you can ask right here.”

The man holding my arm gave me a small smile. His friend said to Rinpoche, “Ila Rinpoche is upstairs. She would like to speak with you.”

“Rinpoche, it's a trick.”

“No, no, fine,” he told me. “No problem. We go, Otto. I know about this person. Don't worry.”

My Asian friend released my arm and put a hand on my back, guiding me in the direction of the elevators. I calmed down by about 3 percent. The elevator arrived. We stepped in. I found it somewhat reassuring that the men were no longer gripping our arms and that several other people—three drunken guys with
RONALDINHO
T-shirts—had squeezed in with us. They exited at the nineteenth floor. We went all the way to the top. If the assassins took us out onto the roof. . . .

But the two men led us to a door marked
PRESIDENTIAL SUITE,
and infected perhaps by Rinpoche's confident posture and by the odd gentleness of the two legbreakers, I'd gone from red alert to orange. One of the men knocked. The door opened. We stepped into yet another bizarre Las Vegas tableau, a luxurious living room that had been turned into some kind of temple. There were bright crimson, blue, and gold sheets of cloth hanging from the walls, statuettes of the Buddha on side tables. Until I saw those brass Buddhas, and perhaps even for a second after seeing them, I worried that the forces of evil had brought us there for a mass murder. The spiritual lineage to which my brother-in-law belonged would be extinguished now, in Las Vegas of all places, the final insult.

All this happened—as things do in these cases—in a minuscule portion of a second. I had time only to feel a last cold wash of fear and then, as if it were background music in a film, I heard a voice speaking words that sounded like this:
Ys din diim patdr?
and then I heard a one-word response—
haie,
in a voice I knew. I turned toward the far end of the long room in time to see Shelsa practically sprinting across the carpet. She leapt into her father's arms and for just a moment Rinpoche's impregnable fortress of calm cracked open. There was a glint of moisture in his eyes, a glistening lens of the tenderest love. He held his daughter against him, twirled her in a circle, all the while making a sound like, “Haaaaaah!”

My turn next. The glorious embrace. The “I missed you so much, Uncle Ott!” And then Shelsa had her feet on the ground again—she seemed to have grown a few inches in our brief absence—and was taking my hand and turning me toward a middle-aged woman sitting near the windows. This woman, wearing a gold-trimmed robe not unlike Rinpoche's, sat on a meditation cushion that had been placed on a platform raised a foot above the carpet.

Rinpoche bowed to her, so I did the same. I suddenly felt grossly underdressed. The bodyguards had stayed near the door. Rinpoche and I were motioned onto cushions. I would have felt more at ease by then except for the fact that the woman four feet in front of me bore a frightening, a terrible, a spectacularly eerie resemblance to the framed Buddha on the wall of the Thai restaurant at the entrance to Zion. She rested her eyes on my eyes—not even glancing at my shorts and running shoes—then on Rinpoche, and while she was assessing us, or greeting us, or blessing us in this fashion, Shelsa sat down beside her, on a second cushion. This seemed strange to me, that she should sit with a stranger instead of with her father. It was almost as if she'd found her place in the world, as if every dust mote in the room was now offering formal recognition that she was, in fact, something more than a cute and loving little girl.

When the woman spoke it was in English and in a voice as quiet as summer wind on a field of grass. There was an accent, unlike Rinpoche's, and I will not try to replicate it here except in her first sentence, which was: “Iss goud goud dhat you kaim.”

I could not seem to squeeze out a syllable.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked, speaking into my silence. She was looking at me with a peculiar warm intensity.

I shook my head, no. I was sitting cross-legged, not in the full lotus position, of course. The outsides of my knees were already beginning to hurt but I barely paid attention to that because the woman was mesmeric. Calm to the thirtieth power. The air close to her face was vibrating, I'm sure of that. I could not stop looking.

“I am Ila Rinpoche.”

“I'm Otto,” I managed. “Ringling. Volya Rinpoche here is married to my sister,” I gestured to my right like a fool.

She smiled beatifically. “I know.”

I kept watching her.

She said, “I work with His Holiness. The men you met are my bodyguards.”

“Oh.” I looked at Rinpoche, who had turned toward me, eyebrows raised, amused. I felt, for some reason, very young.

“We have been trying to find you for one week now. You move around very much!”

“Road trip,” I said, stupidly. I could feel my heart slamming about in my chest and throat. I shot another sideways glance at Rinpoche, who had turned his face forward. In profile he looked the way he always looked, patient, at peace, pleased, mildly curious, unsurprised. I thought I saw him wink at Shelsa. I wanted Ila Rinpoche to stop staring at me, and at last she shifted her eyes to Rinpoche, and I saw something there that was—well,
love
is the word that comes to mind, though at the same time I was almost certain they'd never met. To say she saw him as an equal doesn't quite do it justice. She seemed to see him as herself. Shelsa reached out and put a hand on Ila Rinpoche's knee and there was so much pure affection there that I wondered—this is the slithering energy I carried into that room—if my sister would feel jealous.

“I wanted to find you and tell you in person,” Ila said.

Rinpoche nodded. Confident. Unsurprised.

Tell you what?
I thought, but I was biting down hard on my tongue.

“The child has been born,” she then said, shifting her eyes to me and holding them there.

I heard Rinpoche say, “Wery good,” in a pleased tone.

The woman turned back to me. Her eyes were black and bottomless. Kind, but, it seemed to me, capable of severity. In service of the truth, perhaps, but severity nonetheless. “Do you understand?”

“Not really. No. I don't understand any of this, actually. None of it. My sister—”

“A great teacher has been reincarnated. We knew this would happen, and when it would happen, but it has taken some time for us to find exactly where. Now we have done that. This spirit and Shelsa should meet now. You are to help them manage this.”

“Me?” I said. “Where? I mean, the reincarnated. . . . I mean, where is this person?”

“In Italy,” Ila Rinpoche said, “in a secret place.” And then she added these famous, unsettling, and unforgettable words: “In the mountains.” She paused without moving her eyes from me. I kept looking into those eyes, which seemed to open onto worlds as vast as the Nebraska sandhills, as stunning and massive as Zion, as soulful, deep, and full of old suffering as the Pine Ridge plains. An absolute peace came over me, and stayed with me—one second, two, three—until I heard her speak again, at which point a tickle of sour memory, of doubt, broke it apart. “This,” Ila Rinpoche said, “is the work now for Shelsa and for you and for her parents. To go there, to clean the pain from that place. The pain of war and history.”