Miss Buddha (52 page)

But there is no way to undo it, and I simply
have to live with that.

I feel very sorry for Alvarez, who must be
wondering which way to turn now that his boss has been fired for
ostensibly pulling this stunt. I wonder what he’s thinking. Untrue
to form—he should have at least made a comment by now—there has
been nothing but silence form the man. I must have shocked him
terribly to seal his tongue so thoroughly. No, that is not funny,
and I realize that. I’ve scarred the man, deeply, I fear.

I also feel very sorry for Fairweather,
jobless now (though, from what I understand, well compensated) for
my antics.

Ananda is a walking “told you so” and
Melissa not much better—or perhaps that’s just how I perceive them
with my clouded heart. Julian and Kristina are being as supportive
and forgiving as any human beings can be, and I appreciate them
both more than I can say.

I am rarely despondent, but this is as close
to hopelessly as I’ve seen things in a while.

:

“It’s for you,” said Melissa offering me the
phone.

“I don’t take calls,” I said, for that was
the long standing agreement.

“This one you will,” said Melissa.

“Who is it?”

“Federico Alvarez.”

I could see that Melissa would not take no
for an answer and she was right. I owed Alvarez this.

“This is Ruth.”

I could hear the man breathe at the other
end of the line, and a little erratically, but he said nothing. So
I told him again, “This is Ruth.” I tried to sound friendly.

“This is Federico Alvarez,” he said finally.
He sounded tired, as if the confidence that seemed to constitute
the man had all but evaporated.

“Yes, Federico,” I said.

“Is this Ruth?”

“Yes it is.”

Then he said nothing. And then nothing.
Gathering strength, is what it felt like. Then he said:

“I have to ask you this. I have to know. Did
you do it?”

What could I say? I had to be truthful.
“Yes, I did.”

He took a deep breath, as if to steady
himself. Then surprised me, to say the least by what he said next.
“I’m sorry,” is what he said.

“Whatever for?” I asked, though it was
suddenly clear to me.

“For doubting you,” he said. “And for,” then
seemed to changed his mind, “well, for doubting you.”

“Are you?” is all I said before he answered,
for he knew the question to come.

“No,” he said. “Let them believe
Gordon.”

Then I began another question with “Are
you?” I paused, but he said nothing.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. “Well, yes and no.” Then
he asked a question. “Am I to believe everything you said.”

“All,” I answered, “but my denial.” I meant
my morning-after denial of causing the rising, and I knew he
understood that.

“I see,” he said. Then again, “I see.”

Then I said, “I am sorry too.”

“For what?”

“I reacted.”

“With a reason to,” he answered.

“Be that as it may.”

“I was out of line,” he said.

“Yes you were,” I agreed.

After a brief silence, he asked, “What will
you do now?”

Strangely, the question seemed born from
solicitude, true concern.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“I would, if I were you, lie low for a
while,” he offered.

“We’ve been considering that,” I
replied.

Then another short silence as he formed the
question. “Can I call some other time?” is what he finally
asked.

“Yes,” I said. “That would be fine.”

Again, he said, “I’m sorry. So many things
got in the way.”

I knew when he meant, and confirmed it, “I
know.”

Then, without a goodbye, He hung up.

I handed the phone to Melissa who stood
nearby looking at me. She took it, but didn’t ask the question.
Ananda did.

“What did he want?”

“To apologize,” I said.

:

Whoever in Washington—or was it someone in
Sacramento had who put the final touches to the Fairweather
resignation strategy?—had estimated the situation and its
resolution correctly. The official hoax announcement gained almost
immediate, and universal, traction and things around the country
soon began to simmer down.

The Savior had not returned, after all.
Judgment Day still some ways off.

The major urban stations and papers ran
self-congratulatory we-told-you-so stories, making Fairweather the
villain of this unforgivable deception of the public. Stories
served up with indignation wholly out of proportion to the many
times they themselves had deceived the public, and its God-given
right to know the truth and nothing but.

Reporters and journalists continued to call
for interviews, but Melissa and Ananda fielded them all and turned
them down, and as one overcast Pasadena day after the other crawled
by, the story of Ruth Marten and the rising chair, of the coming of
saviors and the ending of worlds, began to fade into the
background, overtaken and overshadowed by other, more urgent events
in the world.

One aspect of the story did, however,
linger. That of Federico Alvarez’s silence. Nobody could explain
it. Several papers and stations even tried to goad him into a
response, alternately ridiculing and accusing him of complicity,
but from the Alvarez camp there came only silence.

Eventually, even this angle of things died a
silent, natural death.

Kristina Medina and Julian Lawson arrived
together one afternoon to see how Ruth was holding up under all
this.

“I’m doing okay,” she told them over tea.
Then turned to Julian, “How are they taking things at Cal
Tech?”

“They are as happy as can be expected,” he
said. “Not all that, in other words. But they’re not vilifying you
or anything. As far as they’re concerned, you did nothing
wrong.”

Ruth nodded. “I’m glad,” she said, and
looked it.

“They’ve defended you, and your paper,
against a few skeptics. Successfully, I think.”

“I’m glad,” she said again.

Ruth then took them all in when she said,
“I’m really, really sorry about all this.”

“Shit happens,” said Julian. Which earned
him a few quick, rather startled glances. “I’m sorry,” he said when
he noticed. “That just slipped out.”

“Things do happen,” said Ruth. “And I’m not
too proud of my part in this.”

Later that afternoon the phone rang again.
Melissa answered. After a brief exchange, she went looking for Ruth
to once again break their long-standing phone policy.

Found her.

“It’s for you Ruth. It’s Abbot White.”

::
100 :: (Pasadena)

Timothy White, the Abbot of the Los Angeles
Franciscan Mission, was born in Ireland in the spring of 1948. Four
years later, in the summer of 1952, his parents emigrated to
America.

Growing up, he was often told that his first
words were Irish, but he has little memory of that. What he does
remember is the Mauretania, the ship that took them to America;
well, not so much the Mauretania herself as the ocean. Growing up
in a small town, in hilly country, there had never been much of a
vista in his forming years, the horizon always close and uphill.
But here, leaning his head up against the stanchions of the
promenade deck railing looking out at the endless water he
realized, for the first time that he can recall, that the world was
a very large place, near enough endless.

His father, a deacon of the parish church,
had been offered a small parish of his own in the Irish section of
Chicago, which his well-to-do brother—who had settled there a score
of years earlier—attended and supported. So, off they went,
soon-to-become-priest father, mother, four older brothers and one
sister on the way, and Timothy, staring at the watery horizon so
distant, and so all around. So almighty (which was a word he’d
heard his father use often, and which seemed to fit well,
especially with the way the water glittered in the sun). So
everywhere. It was an experience and an image that he would carry
with him and treasure for the rest of his life. His first
impression of God.

It established a special relationship
between them, that’s how Timothy would tell it later. And so,
whereas his brothers always did their best to shirk any church
duties their father saw fit to assign them, Timothy
volunteered.

Timothy volunteered because in the church,
even on early winter’s mornings, when the cold and dark said
otherwise, he felt—almost saw—the endless horizon of God’s sea
stretch in all directions. He felt at home, as if called there not
by his father, but by ocean.

By age eight he was his father’s favorite
altar boy; his father’s favorite, period. He took his duties
seriously, and frowned (though he never bothered to defend himself,
it was beneath him) when his brothers teased him for being a
push-over and a toady.

After high school there was never any doubt
what his next step would be. By then, his father had arranged a
place for him at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio,
which, together, they had already selected during his junior year
in high school. The following summer he visited (and liked) the
campus, and even got to meet some of the staff—which all seemed of
the finest cloth as far as he was concerned.

A few days before the start of fall term his
second year at Steubenville, Father Martin broached the subject not
of priesthood but of joining the order.

“Becoming a monk?” said Timothy. “No,
Father. I admit, I have thought about it, but my plan remains the
priesthood. I already know the parish.”

“You have a higher calling than that,” said
Father Martin.

“Why is joining the order the higher
calling, Father?”

“Perhaps I did not put that very well,”
answered Father Martin. “The priesthood is a fine calling, of
course it is. Heaven knows we need dedicated priests these days.
But the order is a narrower path, more arduous, but, in the long
run, more rewarding. Purer.”

“I don’t know, Father. My father expects me
back. It is his mantle I mean to shoulder.”

Nodding that he understood, Father Martin
said, “Do me this one favor, Timothy. Add a Franciscan History
class to your curriculum this year, find out more about our roots.
See for yourself whether you think I would steer you wrong.”

He considered that. Considered his workload
for the next two semesters—which was not light—but he liked Father
Martin, trusted him, and so consented. He would add Father Martin’s
own class of Franciscan History to his workload.

A choice he never regretted.

Half-way through the fall semester that
year, he had already dropped another class in order to delve deeper
into the Franciscan Mysteries (as he called them), and by the
following spring he saw for himself what Father Martin had already
known: this was his path.

To better serve his chosen fraternity and
its mission, Timothy (with Father Martin’s gladly given blessings,
and his father’s less gladly given consent—at heart he would rather
have seen Timothy take over his church and congregation) remained
at Steubenville to complete his studies—which included master’s
degrees in both theology and philosophy, and so it was not until
1974 that he joined the Los Angeles Mission to become Brother
Timothy, which is what he to this day liked to be called, even
though he was now the abbot of the Mission.

And of a surprisingly successful Mission at
that. Successful both in terms of finances and of outreach and
goodwill. Under his guidance the Mission had established not one
but several very effective drug rehabilitation programs with a more
than twice the national average success rate, many graduates of
which moved on to successful careers and who never ceased to share
their success with generous donations.

Other donors included those whose lives
Abbot White personally had consoled, consulted and changed,
steering some from the brink of despair back into the light.

By any conventional yardstick, Abbot White
had lived a full, rewarding life, achieving all that he had set out
to achieve. Even his father, toward the end of his life, had to
concede that his son had made the right choice—something that
gladdened Timothy deeply. And his brothers, to a man, not only
respected him, but brought their many problems to him, and quite
often at that.

Viewed objectively, Abbot White was an
unqualified success.

Viewed subjectively, he was not.

Many of us deem ourselves as successful or
as good as others consider us to be, sustaining our sense of worth
on their praise and admiration. It is a trap easily stumbled into,
and one comfortable to settle in. Abbot White, however, was not one
of us, and he carried his own yardstick of success: the glittering
ocean, the far-reaching horizon of no land in sight. The glimmering
presence that excluded all other presences. And, in truth, while
longing for it his whole life, he had never managed to return
there, nor had he—to the best of his knowledge—managed to lead
others to it either. Toward, sure. But all the way, no. No, there
was always a falling short.

And that is why, during the last decade or
so, he had taken to study other paths, including thorough readings
of Dogen’s complete Shobogenzo, of the Dhammapada, of the Tao Te
Ching, and of other Eastern writings, wondering now if his chosen
path had not been too restrictive, too narrow; and wondering, too,
if it were not too late to do anything about it.

And it was with this view, against this
backdrop, that Abbot White, with mounting interest watched the Ruth
Marten spectacle unfold.

:

When he saw a startled
Federico Alvarez levitate, chair and all, his immediate thought was
that he was witnessing a miracle. In fact, he
knew
that he was witnessing a
miracle. Don’t ask him how he knew, he just did.