Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (16 page)

The time and country in which his plan took shape were not at all conducive to its success. He gave over half his life to it. It demanded
sacrifices — like every properly accredited spiritual goal, incidentally. The energy he expended overcoming the obstacles in his path would have powered a small factory. He has sacrificed his vacation from last year, this year, and part of next year as well. He has sacrificed practically all his savings.

At thirty-five, he has succeeded. He has an exit visa, a plane ticket, and an invitation to a “Yoga Centre” somewhere in the south of India. Even a replacement — the weakest point in his program, which had threatened to wreck the entire plan — has now been secured: Hartl. His spartan rucksack is packed, with a precious five hundred U.S. dollars sewn into an inner pocket. Tomorrow is the day he departs.

His mother is small and is constantly laughing. She finishes her sentences with laughter even when there is nothing laughable about them. Wiping her teary eyes with the back of her hand, she says apologetically, “Why do I find everything so funny!”

He inherited his small stature from her, and a vigilantly guarded tendency toward plumpness, which has no chance against the hundreds of points he racks up daily. He inherited neither the lively briskness of chubby sprites nor their laughter.

His father was absent, so to speak. The man had spent most of his time in his room. Although he owned a hearing aid, he usually carried it in his pocket. He never heard when they knocked on his door. Not long ago he had died, leaving no visible trace. If he had inherited anything from his father, he did not know what it was.

“How about a baby, sonny?” his mother would ask regularly, breaking into loud laughter immediately afterward. “I know you're a terribly busy man, no time to get married, but don't worry, I'll bring him up for you!” She seemed blissfully oblivious to any role the prospective other parent might play. “Don't forget to come back from that Shangri-La of yours. And don't pull your long
faces at people there, they won't like it!”

She would often rub the bridge of his nose with her thumb, right where his wrinkles met, “so you won't be such a sour-puss.” The place would itch long after.

“Watch out you don't overeat, Mom. You know what I told you about those varicose veins!”

“Oh please! What do I have left in the world besides those few miserable goodies?” she would say, exploding in mournful laughter. The problem of dependency and overcoming it.

A durga in ward seventeen means failure. Mostly they constitute that unfortunate percent or two in the column labeled
Treatment Interrupted.
They escape from the wards and often take drugs during their therapy. Their eyes shine too brightly in their scrawny, foxlike snouts.

This last one had even studied medicine before pervitin, a homemade amphetamine known in underworld slang as “nerve whip,” put an end to that. Her three years of study had left her with some jargon and a skepticism of psychiatry bordering on hatred.

“I'll tell you what you are: voyeurs with prescription glasses. And still you don't see fuck-all, ‘cause you're totally out of it! You take away the one thing we have and give us absolutely nothing in return.”

“Don't forget that sometimes in doing so we save your life.”

“Know where you can put that sorta life?”

A banal conversation he had had a hundred times. Only

now a bony regret grabbed at him, probably an inevitable mark of his final day.

“I don't expect us to share the same scale of values; otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here together.”

What he wanted to say was: we'd be sitting together somewhere else, but he knew it wasn't true. With durgas it was here
or nowhere.
Dhum!

“But I took the Hippocratic oath and that requires me to save your life first, and only later ask what sense there is in it.”

Unselfconsciously she peeled a layer of skin from her chapped lips, examined it carefully, and then began to pulverize it between teeth that had not seen a dentist in ages.

“You ever try it?” she said.

“I assume you mean drugs. I drank wine when I was a student, and other than that just black coffee.”

“Lucky you!” was her provocative retort. “Only someone completely out of touch would do a crappy job like this.”

One durga, whom he thought he had parted with on good terms (she hadn't run away but had discontinued treatment for a kidney operation) had sent him a letter. Over the address it said:
Sadist Fascist Onanist
and the text ran: “You don't know shit about BLISS!!!”

He wanted to believe she'd written it under the influence of a volatile combination of hashish and beer, even though as a doctor he should not have wanted that. No, he expected no satisfaction from his work. He had been soberly aware of that when he began.

He was already at the door, with one foot in southern India, and she was about to make her escape, and yet she added:

“You still think you can change us. We all make fun of you. Your whole life is a mistake. No one changes, not ever, even if they stand on their head.”

Two durgas were already dead. They had found one of them about a month ago in the boiler room of ward seventeen. She had a plastic shopping bag over her head, still reeking from alcohol and tied firmly beneath her chin with panty hose.

“Well, you're the logical one,” Hartl announced. There was an implicit sneer in it: you're just one of those reductionist western types.

Yes, but beneath that was a deeper layer and, as he firmly believed, a more authentic one. An austere, insistent yearning for the Holy Spirit, which had taken the form of Indian spirituality, coupled with the awareness that this was only one of its many veils.

He spent hours in his meditation bubble. There would be a firm silence around him, a pair of parentheses in the midst of a passionate sentence, a membrane rigid as a fetal sac. His striving was deep and genuine, confirmed day after day. Sometimes, rarely, he had the feeling he was close to his goal. But he knew that he was not yet ripe, because he still lacked a Teacher.

“When the pupil is ready, the guru comes,” that American book had told him, at the age when such striking slogans comfort us. He believed it. It was an anchor of hope, lodged in the deepest sea-bed of the End. But how many more points? What did it mean to be ready?

He did not hurry. He was exceedingly patient. (Hartl: “Fantastic stuff, yoga. I did a course last summer!”) If need be, he would wait till he dropped. His belief in the karmic logic of crime and punishment, merit and reward, was unflagging. It was what he found most captivating about yoga: the colossal point system of karma. The clear, inexorable equity of a Spirit incapable of judicial error.

The deepest dream beneath the lid of his daily reverie: he enters a room lit so sparsely that the dream is not set against any specific background. In the middle of the room sits the Teacher. From the first moment it is obvious. They recognize each other, confidently, completely. “How long I have waited for you!” both say in their wordless tongue. There is nothing left but to bow.

Of course, his ladies were inclined to tout their trips there and back as enticingly as they could: gushes of never-seen colors and incandescent spits turning between ecstasy and torture. He did not enjoy hearing about them, especially in public conversations; it
retarded the healing process, he claimed. The truth was that it disturbed him. He neither needed nor wanted this sort of psychedelicizing. His pillar of firmament was narrow and bare. A rigid bubble of silence, the eye of the hurricane — this is what he wanted.

True, sometimes it even happened to him — very fleetingly and rarely — that the flares of consciousness inside him were garbed in blissful colors, an irrepressible rapture surged two or three decimeters up his spine, the eye of the hurricane threatened to yield to a whirlwind and tear his membrane apart. The membrane pulsated and grew hot, swelling like a blood-filled sac; IT was almost close enough to touch. One barely perceptible movement, and
IT WOULD HAPPEN
.

The membrane always remained intact. At the last moment anxiety would course through him, and the condition would dissipate as quickly as it arose, leaving him on the bare plain of his own emptiness.

Recently the first signs of aging had begun to trouble him: an as of yet insignificant delay when urinating and unpleasant nighttime awakenings with burning pins and needles. It was time, high time to depart, to go where — as it said, word for word, in the invitation letter — they were all awaiting him with love.