Dinner with Buddha (32 page)

I tore my eyes away from her and glanced again at Rinpoche, who offered only the raised eyebrows, the tiny smile. My mind went scurrying back across a series of comments and encounters—Seese's casino dreams, Jeannie so atypically at prayer in the church in Italy, the chance meeting with the Italian family at Arches, the absurd predictions of Joe John Jones. I would, no doubt, have felt that I'd descended, at last, into the epicenter of my sister's illogical world, except for the fact that the woman sitting a few feet in front of me had a presence like no other human being I had ever encountered. If Rinpoche was a thousand-watt bulb, she was the sun.
Radiance
is the word. An absolute stillness at the heart of every word and movement, and, at the same time, a vibrating radiance. In the face of that, though I tried hard to resist, my doubts, my old assumptions, my entire former life, was a shallow puddle, evaporating by the second.

“I can see that you are surprised. I thought you would have been prepared for this.”

“I. . . . Not one bit.”

I expected her to ask me if I believed what she was saying, but she didn't do that. She kept looking at me with this severe, loving gaze. She watched me, assessing. As a boy, on those few occasions when the cold services of my parents' Lutheran church had actually made an impression on me, I'd imagined what it would feel like to meet God after the moment of death. You would be seen, judged, loved. Something would be expected of you, an impossible blend of reverence and fearlessness. That is precisely what it was like in the Vegas hotel room.

At last, Ila Rinpoche said, “Your daughter is here.”

What came out of my mouth then were these words: “I love her.” And then, “Here where? In Las Vegas?”

A stretching of the lips. “We have spoken earlier. What a fine soul.”

“Thank you. Can I see her?”

“Take Otto to his daughter now.” Ila Rinpoche nodded toward the people behind me, speaking to them in a tone of absolute, quiet authority. “Shelsa and her father and I will speak.”

She bowed to me. I was shaking. I tried my best to bow back. I shifted my eyes to my niece and offered her a shaky smile. I looked at Rinpoche, who was beaming. I stood up, shaking, on creaky, aching knees and took a few steps backward into the care of the bodyguards. Sinner that I must be, I have to admit here that the second I was released from Ila Rinpoche's gaze the doubts came flooding back, the snake slithered. A voice from my old life, with all its rules, assumptions, and intelligent certainties, began to chatter. The craziness of it all, the weirdness.

In a kind of post-anesthesia daze I let myself be given over to the company of one of the bodyguards. He led me out of the room and a short distance along the hallway to a door, where he gestured for me to knock. I did so. My daughter opened it, wrapped me in a magnificient hug, and said, “Dad! Isn't it great!”

Forty-two

By now I hope I've made it clear that I'm a rational man, a more or less middle-of-the-road American who, while acquiring a Buddhist brother-in-law and developing an interest in meditation, has nevertheless retained a certain basic normalcy, a sane ordinariness. I am not, in other words, my sister. I am not a flake. I consider myself open-minded about many things, but I am rational in the extreme, a friend of science and logic. And so, being told, by a woman in a maroon robe, a woman with a remarkable presence, that some twin soul spirit to my beloved niece had reincarnated as a child in the Italian mountains, a child with some special mission, a mission that I was somehow going to help facilitate . . . well, I perhaps don't need to say that a resistance rose up in me. As much as I doted on Shelsa, and as much as I loved Celia, Natasha, and Rinpoche, I didn't envision myself leaving everything behind to follow some child around the Apennines in an attempt to wash the historical pain from the soil of Italian hill towns.

“Give me a few minutes before we talk about it,” I told Tasha when I'd released her from our strong embrace. “Let's go out. Let's go out into the real world and take a walk and get an ice cream or something and then discuss it, okay?”

“Sure, Dad. It's a shock, isn't it.”

“Shock isn't the word. Please, let's take a walk. Let me have a minute to think.”

We went down in the elevator and out onto the street. I needed, then, to see the fake Statue of Liberty. It was somehow reassuring. I needed to see the strolling partiers from Missouri and Louisiana and Minnesota and Vienna and London and Ouagadougou, the ads for alcohol, even the shops selling thongs with
WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS, STAYS IN VEGAS
printed on them in silvery script.

Natasha hooked her arm inside mine. I tried, and failed, to calm my mind. It was as if, in Rinpoche's company, in Ila's, my doubts had settled quietly into an underground tunnel. Now, walking the Vegas strip with Natasha, I felt as if I'd tripped over a hornets' nest and they'd all come out and were intent on stinging me. I had a strange urge to flee.
It's real then,
a squeaky interior voice kept saying.
Celia was right. It's real. Shelsa has a mission. You're supposed to help. It's real.
And then came something saner, something more
adult
is the way I thought of it.
If you buy into this one, Otto, my man, then surely all hope is lost. . . .

Natasha and I walked along the sidewalk without speaking, crossed the strip, and stopped to buy a couple of ice cream cones. We walked another little ways and sat on a bench with the whole American circus passing in front of us, and she said, “
This
is what you call reality, Dad?”

“I'm sorry. I can't . . . I just can't . . . there's only so far I can stretch my acceptance. I feel like I've reached my limit. Really, honestly, it calls everything into question.”

“Everything? The kinds of experiences you've been having in meditation?”

“How do you know about that?”

“You're a stream entrant now, Dad. Rinpoche told Aunt Seese on the phone. Ila Rinpoche confirmed it. Do you know what that is?”

“No, and I suspect I don't want to.”

Her marvelous tinkling laughter floated in the air above our heads. “It means you're on, like, a conveyor belt. Another few lifetimes at most and you'll be enlightened and you won't have to live on this plane of suffering ever again if you don't want to. It's a kind of guarantee. You really can't screw it up at this point. Do you have any idea how wonderful that is?”

“It's absurd, is what it is.”

“Nice, Dad.”

“I love you, I'm sorry, but right now the only stream I feel qualified to enter is the jet stream. I should fly home. I've . . . it's gone too far, hon.”

“Is it the idea of reincarnation or just that Shelsa really is someone special?”

I looked at her. “Tasha, I've just been told that I'm supposed to go and help out some little baby in the Italian mountains and believe that baby is the reincarnated spirit of some great teacher who is going to save the earth from cataclysm!”

“It's only weird by our standards, Dad.”

“Our standards are the only standards I know. I'm American, Christian by birth and upbringing, a rational man.”

“The Christians believed in reincarnation for five hundred years after Christ, Dad. They changed it at some meeting, that's all. Now it's one of the main things that divide East and West, spiritually, can't you see?”

“Reincarnation, sure, maybe. It's a nice theory and it makes a lot of sense—why should we have only one shot at living? And why should some people have such an enjoyable time of it and others endure a kind of hell? But if it is, in fact, true, then I want to find out after I die, not now. How am I supposed to believe that . . . a reincarnated holy teacher, I mean, baby, child . . . who'll work with Shelsa to unite East and West, spiritually! Tasha, please. It's . . . beyond absurd.”

“The entire Buddhist world worships Ila Rinpoche.”

“I can understand why. But that's not the point here.”

“You don't see that Shelsa is special . . . in that way?”

“I suppose I do. Yes. She's a marvelous girl, but—”

“But she could never be
that
marvelous, right, Dad?”

“What is she, what are they supposed to do? Walk from Venice to Rome with their Chinese bodyguards?”

“Taiwanese, Dad.”

“Become the next twin Dalai Lamas? It's nuts. My sister has brainwashed all of us. And why didn't she come with you, anyway?”

“Why?” Tasha tossed her paper napkin in a trash barrel to her right and hesitated in a way I recognized. “Because she didn't want you to be embarrassed. Because she predicted it just this way and you . . . doubted her.”

I stared out at the street.

“We don't know exactly what Shelsa's supposed to do,” Tasha went on, “but it's good, it's special, and it's supposed to begin over there in the mountains—just as Aunt Seese predicted.”

“Don't rub it in.”

“Maybe they'll write or teach or something, give talks, start a new religion that combines Christianity and Buddhism. We can't know yet.”

“Tash. They are seven and a newborn.”

“The Dalai Lama was four when they found him. Don't you believe he's special?”

“Of course I do.” I went silent. I felt, for lack of a better word, grumpy.

“So what is it then, Dad? That something like this could never happen to you because you're not special enough? Mom wasn't? Anthony isn't? I'm not? That it's okay for Rinpoche to be a holy teacher, respected all over the world, but the people who revere him are a little messed up, or that it was some kind of accident that he married your weird sister? A fluke? Can't you just accept what it is you're being asked to do?”

“No. I'm too modest for that. Too humble. I'm ordinary, Tasha. I think I was, am, a good father. I was a decent husband. But I'm not special.”

“That's a kind of conceit.”

“It's the opposite of conceit.”

“No, it really isn't, if you think about it. There are teachers who say that one of the main obstacles, spiritual obstacles, for westerners is a sense of unworthiness, a self-limiting sense of what's possible for them in a human life. You personify that, Dad. At least at the moment, and you're not humble enough to let your logical Western mind take a backseat for a while. A lot of these people,” she waved an arm at the passersby, “are just hoping for a little pleasure in their lives. Some sex, some food, some drink, a little partying, a new boat or a house or a nice kitchen. They kind of go along, working at some job maybe they don't love, grabbing these little pleasures, and there's this, like, whole enormous golden life inside them that they've never been allowed to imagine. They're miracles, all of them, but everything tells them they're not special, not worthy of anything more. They hope to hang on until they die and then maybe be let into heaven.”

I sat there, held in a silent, grumpy stubbornness.

“The thing about Aunt Seese, Dad, is that she understands what I just said. She sees beyond the little pleasures. She sees that there's another dimension to life and that every one of us has been put here to pursue that dimension. Why do you think Rinpoche married her?”

“Because she's nice looking and because she owned part of a farm.”

“You don't really think that, Dad. You can't.”

“Sorry, you're right. I don't. I used to, at first. I worried she'd be taken advantage of, but I don't really think that way now.”

“Let me tell you, Dad, from working at the Center there's one thing I'm sure of . . . there are a
lot
of very rich, very nice-looking women who'd marry him in a nanosecond.”

“And he chose my sister.”

“That's right.
Your
sister. A flaky North Dakota girl. And he chose to be
your
friend and teacher, to take trips with
you.
And the weird thing is, you think that's just an accident. That's a kind of pride in your own thoughts and a self-hatred mixed together, isn't it, Dad?”

“I've let him guide me, Tash. You have no idea what I thought of meditation and those things—guys wearing red robes—before I got to know Rinpoche. At least give me credit for that: I've changed a lot because of him. Abandoned friendships, changed my diet, sat in meditation all these years—”

“Okay, but the one thing you've never really changed is how you think of yourself. He's been trying to get you to do that. What would happen if you at least went and met this child? Aunt Seese and Rinp are going, you can bet on that.”

“Bad choice of words.”

“And you know Shels will be absolutely devastated if you don't go. I'm going. If I get there and it feels too weird, if this kid seems like just another ordinary kid, if I get some sense that there's a mistake, or somebody's trying to put one over on us, then I'll admit that and come home and probably go back to school or something. But nothing, nothing I've seen or heard or experienced at the farm makes me think that will happen. I'm not flaky, Dad, and not stupid. Are you afraid?”

“Probably.”

“Well, is that a good reason for not going?”

“No, it isn't. If they just hadn't brought the war and Europe into it, history, the karmic stain. . . .”

I stopped myself there, unable to tell my daughter about Joe John Jones, the Leadville psychic. But the guy was haunting me. The Jesus hair, the embroidered yin and yang, the stuff about dying in a war and a karmic stain and Italy and having Jewish friends . . . as if there were a soul in New York who
didn't
have Jewish friends! The idea that Joe John had seen or predicted even
one tiny piece
of my actual past or future was more than I could bear at that moment.

I couldn't look at my daughter, but I did have the presence of mind to reach out and take hold of her hand and rest it on the bench between us. “I feel like,” I said, and then I had to wait for a noisy bus to pass in front of us. “I feel like it was one thing to believe in this stuff, abstractly, but that if I let myself act on it, leave everything, follow Shelsa to Europe, then it will be like I'm dropping my whole life off the Verrazano Bridge. I'm standing at the rail, a thousand cars going by behind me, the skyline I love there in the distance, and I'm holding a huge bag that contains everything I think of as ‘my life.' You and Anthony are in there, memories of Mom, Jasper, friends and relatives, our house, my job, all the hours and years we spent together living according to a certain set of assumptions. Everything I believe to be true about life. I say yes to this and it's like letting all that go, letting the bag drop, watching it sail down and down and splash into the water and then gradually sink. There's no getting it to come up again. It would be like dying.” I turned to look at her. “That's what it feels like for me.”

She looked back. My mother's eyes, gray-green, widely spaced, wet but unwavering. She said, “Exactly, Dad. Exactly like dying. . . . That's the whole point,” and she started to cry.

I remembered then, strangely perhaps, something Jeannie had said to me in the latter stages of her illness. “This wasn't the way I imagined for myself, Otto. When it happened, when we got the diagnosis, I kept saying to myself, ‘No, no, this isn't right. This isn't going to be my path. I have a different life, a different death planned out for myself.' I kept saying no, no, no, and then last night, for some reason, I said ‘Yes, okay.' I don't like it, but last night it came to seem right for me. Unavoidable. Intended. Do you understand?”

I sat there with one arm around Natasha, the girl who'd lost her mother, then turned her back on an Ivy League education in order to find, for herself, the meaning of life and death, a truer purpose to our being here, something beyond food, sex, pain, and fear. I held her until the tears subsided and then, for no good reason I could think of, just to have something to say, just to put some sound in the air between us, I said, “What language were Ila and Shelsa speaking when I walked in? I'd never heard it. It's not Italian. What was it, Tibetan? Greek?”