Impossible Vacation (21 page)

As we went down, the melting snow banks turned into banks of
green grass with the most spectacular profusion of spring wildflowers growing out of them. Down, down, down we went until at last we reached Kashmir, where Meg and I took the flight to Delhi, to the truly unbearably hot and humid flatlands, where the dark, moist clouds of the encroaching monsoon season gathered.

The heat of Delhi was impossible to deal with. It was 110 degrees and 100 percent humidity when we landed, so we went right to the air-conditioned Lodhi Hotel. I drank Indian whiskey and Indian beer, trying to calm myself and get ready for the big flight home, while all the time that old dark, vacillating
dukhka
part of me began to think maybe I should go up to Nepal since I was so close. But when I’d think about it I’d get afraid that Nepal would be too depressingly corrupt after that pure experience in Ladakh.

Meg wanted to stay for a while in Delhi and take a yoga class. I was incredulous. I couldn’t imagine how Meg could do yoga in that heat, but she was disappointed that she’d come all this way to India and never once got to take any lessons in yoga. All she did was buy rugs. Until then I had been thinking of myself as the spiritual quester and Meg as the merchant, now that was changing.

So we were busy getting organized, Meg dealing with getting the rugs shipped out and trying to find the right yoga class and me trying to get a flight out to New York. I had no idea what I would do when I got there except try to figure out how to be happy. I was rolling down from the top of the world and running blindly for home base and couldn’t stop until I got there. I wanted to be able just to stand still in some familiar place, like a New York City cocktail party, and say things like, “Well, I’ve been to India. Yes, I’ve seen the Taj.”

I didn’t know what Meg wanted. I didn’t know what held us together anymore except that we were companions in motion. She was still a bright beacon counteracting my gloomy pessimism. I had no idea what I gave back to her.

I just wanted to get on that plane and fly alone to New York, to prove to myself that I could travel without Meg as my guide. I was shaking all over when we said goodbye at the Delhi airport. I felt like I would never see her again.

I
NEVER STOPPED
looking down onto that clear, clear day. It was as though a whole part of the earth had been swept free of clouds just for my view. I saw it all: the mountains of Pakistan; sweeping, endless desert; and then we were suddenly over the Pyramids. There they were! The pilot didn’t even announce them. I could say I’d seen the Pyramids and I hadn’t even been in Egypt. I craned my neck even more as my breath fogged up the window. Then we were over the Greek Islands. All of them! I was amazed at how barren they were, like scattered fragments of moon rock, broken and strewn in azure. As soon as I saw the islands, I wanted to go there. I wanted to be there. As soon as the plane lands, I thought, I will vacation in the Greek Islands. But before I could dwell on that, we were over the Swiss Alps, and then the lush plains of Belgium, and then slowly coming in low over the flatlands of Holland, and then
bump, bump
, and we were down. We had landed at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. I didn’t want the flight to be over. Six hours had gone by like six minutes. That dizzy feeling of too much freedom came over me again, the feeling that I was no one and everyone everywhere, and that I could do anything I wanted, except there was hardly any “I” left to operate out of. Then, pulling away from the window, I realized that my head was locked to the right from having stared out that way for six hours.

I strolled into the almost empty Amsterdam airport with my head locked to the right, walked right past Dutch immigration officials, who all looked like stoned-out hippies in uniform, and it occurred to me that I could have been bringing in pounds of hashish and opium and it wouldn’t have mattered to them.

Yes, Amsterdam felt like a little paradise of freedom, and all my plans to get on the next flight to New York City began to dissolve and crumble. “Why not spend one night in Amsterdam?” the little gremlin voice was saying in my ear. “Just one night.” After all, what was the rush to get back to New York City in summer?

So I called Hans and Sonia and said, “Hi, it’s Brewster. I’m just in from India and I’d love to come over and see you.” It felt so exciting to be able to say “just in from India.” Never in my life did I think I’d be able to utter a phrase quite as jet-setty as that.

“But of course,” Sonia crackled in her thick Dutch accent. “What a surprise!”

I caught a cab and was off, sitting in the back trying to force my head to the left, overwhelmed by the large, hypertrophied prosperity of all I saw out the window. The wealth of that city! Never did I think Amsterdam would look so luxurious. The people in the streets were like great blown-up sex giants, strapping male towheads and butter-and-peach-cream-skinned women, coming and going on black Mary Poppins bicycles, their spines gloriously erect, their eyes straight ahead with the great purpose of life.

As my Mercedes cab wound through the narrow Dutch streets, I could see flashes of bright-colored, overflowing vegetable stands. After India, all the vegetables in Holland looked as though they had been blown up by bicycle pumps. That’s about the time the fever came on me, just as I was looking at some particularly plump cauliflower. It was a cool, wet, beautiful Nordic day in June and everything was so fresh, but all at once I felt a chill creeping into my bones. I saw all the people again, all those Dutch people, and the realization crept into me, like the chill, that all of this had been going on without me: Amsterdam had been going on all this time, all this time that I was in India, all my life, and now I was just peeking in on it. Yes, all of Amsterdam—not to mention Frankfurt, Paris, Brussels, or London—had been going on without me. And no one cared whether I came or went, no one cared what I did or felt; so my newfound freedom was turning into a horror. No one even knew I was in that cab or who I was, much less how I perceived the cauliflower or the upright Dutch women on their black Mary Poppins bikes. No wonder so many people craved fame, I thought. It allowed you the grand illusion that you were someone. No wonder people need to pretend that God is watching them all the time. Any illusion would be better than this loneliness, this awareness of infinitesimal existence, this horrible disappearing. Thank God for Hans and Sonia, I thought. At least they’ll recognize me.

By the time I got to Hans and Soma’s apartment I was shaking and sweating with fever and sure now that I’d come down with some exotic Indian disease. I couldn’t believe how fast it had come over me, since I’d stepped off that damned plane.

Well, there they were, Sonia and Hans and Sonia’s new baby, wee little Willie Winkie. And there I was with all my bags, wanting to collapse and not deal with anything. I had all my dirty laundry in a bag flung over my shoulder. I was suddenly very sick and needy, flinging my fevered body and laundry on their cozy Dutch hospitality.

“Come in, come in!” Sonia and Hans cried in their broken English.

“Stay away, stay away!” I cried back. “I think I’m very, very sick!” I said with my head still stuck ridiculously to the right, staring at the wall as I went up the stairs. “Just give me a bed to recuperate in. That’s all I ask for.” Then, seeing little Willie, I said, “Oh, what a lovely baby—but don’t let me get close to him.” The truth was that the baby, after what I’d seen in India, looked like he, too, had been blown up with a bicycle pump.

Hans took my fevered condition seriously and immediately showed me to the attic room above their apartment at the end of a very ancient winding stairway. The room was like a monk’s chamber, just perfect for me, with a single bed, a little dresser, and one gabled window that looked down into three or four old Dutch backyards. I lay down, fully dressed, and Hans covered me over with layers of old grandmother quilts and the eiderdown. I fell fast into sweaty delirium, only to come to, wet and wasted, days later. Between the jet lag and this Indian fever, I was quite out of it, and thought I was back in bed as a child, with Mom, not Sonia, downstairs preparing vegetable soup.

At last I was back in the familiar land of the cool; and I realized that the great blessing of any illness like the one I had just gone through is that it leaves no room for neurosis, no room for regret, no room for the things I slowly began to feel upon waking. What I felt while in that fever I can only describe as spiritual, and this was a surprise to me, because I had expected to feel spiritual in India, not while suffering from a fever in Amsterdam. There in that attic looking out over cool, damp, green Holland in June, I felt a great renewal, combined with a melancholy that belonged to some other, lame, romantic time. I lay
all damp and crusty under a pile of quilts, emptied out for the first time in a long time, and it was such a splendid feeling that I was even reluctant to open the door, lest I get filled again with the ten thousand things. I didn’t want to have it all come in on me again. I even avoided going downstairs to the toilet by keeping an old Mason jar by my bed. I would empty it slowly, pouring it out over the slate roof that led to the ancient rusty gutter that carried my urine down to the garden far below. And as I poured, I looked out on all those Dutch backyards with their fresh laundry on the lines.

From my window I could see, as if framed in a storybook, great clouds billow, give off streaks of sun, then fold in on themselves. They would grow black and spit rain on the old irregular glass panes as I lay there cozy, thinking of that rain splashing on giant white fields of cauliflower, fields that spread near Dutch dikes, and beyond, the gray North Sea rolling in its late-spring chop. I was empty at last, empty of desire, content for the first time in months. I was content to live only in my imagination. It was purer, safer, sweeter. I’d seen enough to remember for the rest of my life, and I wanted to stay there under that quilt in that little room, just remembering.

Gradually I got better. I drank the mugs of homemade vegetable soup that Sonia brought up to me. As I got better I began to miss Meg a whole lot, and I tried to figure out when she would be passing through Amsterdam on her way to New York. I was sure she planned to spend twelve or fourteen days at that yoga school in Delhi, so I figured in twelve days’ time I would have all the incoming flights from India paged at the airport.

On the third day of my recuperation I got curious about the books on the little shelf in my room. I pulled out a small paperback called
The Grammar of Living
, having no idea what a vulnerable state I was in, and how careful I should have been about what I filled my empty head with. Looking back on it now, I know it was the wrong book. I should have been reading my copy of
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
. I should have even carried that with me. Yes, that’s why people carry Bibles with them: for when they get in dark places, places of temptation or sickness. Then they have a book to turn to, to guide their thoughts. Anyway,
The Grammar of Living
was filled with all these lusty, sexy sixties stories, told under the guise of teaching the reader
how the nuclear family, with its accompanying Oedipal problems, had to be broken down and destroyed immediately, so we could all become free of guilt and experience liberating good sex. I lay there and swallowed it whole.

This guy Cooper would tell about how he was just hanging out at the local antifamily commune in London, hanging out tripping on pure Sandoz LSD, happy just to be there with no longings or desire, and then came this knock on the door. I mean, it wasn’t even
his
door. It was just
the
door, because he was involved in this communal nonego, nonfamily door situation. So there was this knock, and there she was, this leggy Suzette, a long-torsoed, beautiful Frenchwoman from across the Channel. Without a word, the next thing Cooper knew, he was locked into some Kama Sutra Tantric pose with her—Cooper deep and hard into Suzette, and she with her long legs wrapped around him, swooning like a swan in blind lust. They were in the doorway just doing it in front of the whole commune, if they even cared, just doing it so the whole commune could observe and celebrate the end of the nuclear family. They were in what he called a deep sexual meditation, the unification of opposite poles, sex as a big France-and-England joy-juice spiritual thing. Pure sex with no words, no conditions, no apparent historical consequences, just dying to the moment.

Those stories put me in an almost unnatural state of desire and lust. I was so taken in by this damn book that I forgot to realize that this guy, this Cooper, had to have taken the time to write it all down and to get it edited and to get it published, which most likely meant that he must have rewritten it a number of times; but all of this didn’t enter into my head then. I just kept seeing him as completely ecstatic in this state of ideal, pure, sanctioned, antifamily sex. I wanted some myself right away.

As I lay there in bed I began to have a big stirring notion that I could find what I needed down at the Dam, the main square in Amsterdam, where all the hippies hung out. And to make it even more perfect, Hans and Sonia were going away to the country for the whole month of July and they offered me their apartment for free! I could have it, I could stay there and do anything I wanted. I could smoke hash all day, or drink, or take LSD or read whatever books I wanted or indulge in Tantric sex.