Miss Buddha (62 page)

Julian nodded, agreeing. Melissa seemed
non-committal, as if something weighed on her.

“You don’t agree?” said Ruth to her
mother.

“It’s not that I don’t agree,” said Melissa.
“But it’s all going so fast, again. I’m just worried that it might
run away from us.”

“We did agree,” began Ruth.

“Yes, I know.” Said Melissa. “And I’m not
contesting anything. Just a little worried, that’s all. A mother’s
prerogative,” she added.

“Have you settled on which book to
recommend?” said Ananda.

“Rosenberg’s
Breath by Breath
may be
the most accessible,” she answered.

“And there is Buddhadasa
Bhikkhu’s
Mindfulness with
Breathing
,” said Ananda.

“And there is that,” agreed Ruth.

“I like Rosenberg’s book,” said
Kristina.

“You’ve read it?” said Ruth, a little
surprised. Then she checked herself, “Well, of course you
have.”

“I’m more than curious,” said Kristina.

“I shall teach you,” said Ruth.

When Julian moved to speak, Ruth said, “Oh,
and you, too, Julian. I will teach you.”

Julian smiled and nodded. Then said, “Is
there anything to this FBI business?”

Ananda and Ruth exchanged a brief glance.
“Apparently,” said Ruth.

“A little more than apparently,” said
Ananda. “There is definite interest.”

“Good or bad?” asked Julian, though he did
know.

“Never good, I don’t think. Not from those
quarters,” said Ruth.

“And you wonder why I worry,” said
Melissa.

:

Julian and Kristina had shared a ride to
USC, and after taking leave of Ruth, her mother, and her
great-great uncle—as Kristina now thought of Ananda—they made their
way across the vast parking lot to Julian’s new car (a Honda hybrid
that he had insisted on driving, boys forever being boys when it
came to their cars).

Kristina and Ruth had remained close over
the years, though of course not seeing each other as much once Ruth
left Pasadena Polytechnic, and even less once she transferred from
Cal Tech and Julian to USC.

Of anyone, Kristina had probably suffered
the most during the Federico Alvarez spectacle—vicariously
agonizing over what she (rightly) perceived as a threat to Ruth’s
mission.

And of anyone, Kristina had probably been
the happiest to see the adverse media attention move off and onto
some other spectacle in due course.

She was, if not a frequent guest, definitely
not a stranger to the Marten household, and they talked
occasionally over the phone as well. Kristina had been pleasantly
surprised, and very happy, to receive the invitation to this USC
lecture.

They reached Julian’s shiny car and he
clicked his remote to unlock the doors, then stepped around to open
the passenger door for Kristina.

“Why, thank you, sir.” she said.

“My pleasure,” said Julian in the same
mock-polite tone.

Once out of the lot and on their way, Julian
said, “It’s quite amazing that we know her.”

“Remember, you have me to thank for
that.”

“Oh, I remember,” said Julian.

“But I agree, it’s a little unreal, isn’t
it?” said Kristina.

Then neither said anything—each alone with
their reflections—until they were through downtown and winding
their way on the still too narrow 110 toward Pasadena, when
Kristina said, “There really is something to this FBI
business.”

Whether a question or a statement, he wasn’t
sure, still, Julian answered:

“I believe so. The LA Times usually gets
things right, and it seems very par for the course.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I believe that Ruth, and the stir
she’s creating online with her lectures, is—unintentionally, I’m
sure—treading on some toes.”

“What kind of toes?”

“The kind of toes that like to protect their
bottom lines.”

“What interests are threatened by seeing the
truth?” said Kristina after a moment of silence.

“Well, you tell me,” said Julian.

Another silence yielded: “Pharmaceuticals.
That’s who.”

Julian nodded. “I think you’re right.”

::
113 :: (Los Angeles)

Later that day, agent Roth—with a lump of
something cold and hard in his stomach, for he did not look forward
to this—knocked on Phil Anderson’s door. Hearing his boss on the
phone, he waited a few quick breaths, and knocked again.

His boss shouted a muffled “Yes” through the
closed door. Roth entered. Anderson, standing, was still on the
phone, listening with a pained grimace. He waved at Roth to sit
down, which he did. The tightness in his stomach refused to yield,
and he speculated—with good reason—that his boss was talking to his
own superiors about the very thing Roth was there to discuss.

“Of course,” said Anderson to the other end
of the line. “Of course.”

Then, “Okay. Yes. Okay.” And hung up. He
looked at the re-cradled handset for several seconds as if to
recall exactly where he had seen such a thing before. Then he shook
his head, may even have shivered a little, sat down, and turned to
Roth.

“I need some good news.”

“You mean bad news,” said Roth.

“You know what I mean,” said Anderson.

“Yes, I do.”

“So?”

“Is she a public menace? A threat to the
social order?”

“Well, we know she is,” said his boss.

Roth planted his mental feet firmly on the
ground: “I must beg to differ.”

“You what?”

“Listen, Phil. She is not a threat to the
public. Not in my opinion anyway.”

Anderson drew breath to answer, but Roth
rushed to fill the silence. “It’s true that she is a mesmerizing
lecturer. No doubt about that. She had the audience at very rapt
attention; all eyes and ears on her. You could hear the proverbial
pin drop. But that does not make her a danger to society.”

Anderson drew breath again, and this time
Roth stayed silent.

“That was Callahan on the phone,” his boss
said. “A more furious than usual Callahan. And why was he furious
this time? He was furious because he had just been chewed out by
Washington, and apparently so it goes all the way to the top. And I
mean the very top. It has been determined that the girl is a
menace.”

“A menace to whom?”

“Are you in a position to ask that question,
George?”

“Well, Phil…”

“Don’t you ‘Well, Phil’ me,
George.
I
am not
in a position to ask that question. The word is… No, let me
rephrase that. Our marching orders are that the girl is a threat to
the stability of our society. No,” and Anderson held up a hand, “I
don’t know who, precisely, determined this but Callahan’s ass is
apparently smarting from being chewed all afternoon.”

“So, what you’re saying,” said Roth, “is
that the Big Pharma lobby is all over Washington and shaking every
tree it can find.”

“Something like that,”
agreed Anderson. “Callahan mentioned that the Pharma lobby seems to
have doubled or tripled in size overnight, and they are indeed all
over Washington clamoring for us to
do
something about this
girl.”

“Us?”

“Well, it’s a federal problem.”

“For Big Pharma.” It was not a question.

“Listen George, we don’t have many options
here. In fact, we don’t have any. This girl has to be stopped.
Simple as that.”

Roth did not know how to respond to that. He
knew how the chain of command worked, the “It is not for us to
question why” principle of the thing, but you had to draw the line
somewhere. He had seen it with his own eyes, heard it with his own
ears: the Marten girl was not a threat, quite the opposite. She was
a source of calm. She should not be stopped. Especially not because
Big Pharma sales are dipping as a result of her lectures.

He shook his head, then shifted in his
chair. “You know, Phil. This doesn’t sit right with me. We’ve had
men on her for a couple of weeks now, around the clock. Nothing.
There’s nothing there, Phil.”

“That is not an option.”

“But it’s the truth.”

“I like you George. You’re a good man.
You’re a good agent. But in this case you either toe the party
line, or you’re off the case.”

“The party line being?”

“Do I have to spell it out for you,
George?”

“Yes, please.”

“Find something to charge her with.
Something that’ll hold up in court.”

“There’s nothing there, Phil.”

“Then make something.”

“Are you telling me what I think you’re
telling me?”

“Probably.”

“No, Phil. No way.”

Phil Anderson looked at his agent for so
long that Roth fleetingly wondered whether he had fallen asleep,
his open, unblinking eyes notwithstanding.

Finally, his boss spoke again: “You’re off
the case.”

“Phil.”

Anderson shook his head now, then held up a
hand. “You leave me zero options, George. You’re off the case.”

Roth, perceiver of patterns extraordinaire,
sensed the deeper and, to him, very ugly wrongness that his boss
personified. The girl, well-intended and obviously sincere, a much
needed positive in a negative world, posed a threat to corporate
profit. That was the simply stated bottom line. And those who stood
to lose would not permit that. Simple as that. And those who stood
to lose also had the largest and most vicious army of lobbyists
that money could buy. Now on a mission.

He rose, nodded in the general direction of
Anderson, and left the office.

:

Though he had known precisely what to do the
moment Anderson presented him his ultimatum, Roth still wanted to
think it over, he wanted to sense it through like he would sense
his celestial patterns.

Back at his desk (he was shaking a little,
he noticed) he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. His
pulse was racing. He could hear his heart so well it might as well
have moved up into his head. He tried to focus. Then tried
again.

He willed his heart back in place. Opened
his eyes and took in the office. Tried again to focus, and this
time succeeded: Ruth Marten’s speech. Her voice. Entering,
certainly, through his ears. But—and this was his true focus—also
evolving, blooming was the word that came to mind, up from
within.

Blooming up and out of internal silence. Had
he imagined that? Re-listening and re-seeing, he paid scrupulous
attention to those moments, those flowering moment, and there she
was. Clearly in his ear, and as clearly, resonating with more than
just voice, within. She spoke to him from within. He no longer
doubted this, for he heard this with the same sense of feeling, of
knowing, that he studied the night skies, with some faculty science
has yet to pinpoint.

He shuddered, then smiled to himself and
straightened in his chair. He reached for and pulled his computer
keyboard toward him. Then he opened up his office program and began
composing his resignation letter.

:

“You’ve been invited to Germany,” said
Ananda, looking up from his Mortimer screen.

Ruth looked over at him. Melissa, in the
doorway about to head for the kitchen, stopped and turned,
interested as well.

Ananda looked down again, and read from the
report, “The Humboldt University of Berlin has extended a formal
invitation to the University of Southern California for famed USC
lecturer Ruth Marten to address faculty, students and guests at the
famous German university.”

“Nobody has said anything about that,” said
Ruth.

“Germany,” said Melissa.

“The invitation was extended today via
telephone to your department at USC,” said Ananda, paraphrasing the
report.

“Would you want to go?” said Melissa.

“I don’t see why not,” said Ruth. “What do
you think, Ananda?”

He didn’t much like travel these days, but
could see no real objection to going, so he offered a noncommittal
echo, “I don’t see why not.”

::
114 :: (Los Angeles)

The following Monday saw an onslaught of
press and television reports warning about the dangers of Ruth
Marten’s seductive lectures.

“Recently, the phenomenon of Miss Marten’s
pop-philosophy has swelled from the quirkily amusing to the
seductively dangerous,” began a leader in the Los Angeles Times,
which had now apparently changed its editorial tune. The leader
then went on to say, “The college student—these days, as always,
precariously balanced between revolt against and soon-to-join the
responsibilities of adulthood—seems an easy, and gullible target
for Miss Marten’s groundless promises of universal peace.

“This morning, the American Psychiatric
Association issued a strongly worded warning against, as they put
it, ‘this burgeoning Kool-Aid Phenomenon,’ referring to the
Jonestown tragedy of 1978 where over 900 followers of Jim Jones
literally drank his offered solution to all earthly problems and
paid the ultimate price for doing so.

“By now Miss Marten has seduced the ears and
minds of thousands if not millions of young people, and it is now
high time that those responsible for these students, be it parents,
or teachers, or the authorities, realize the dangers facing perhaps
a whole generation, and take decisive action against this
well-planned and executed fraud.”

Many other papers as well as television
stations chimed in with similar messages in what appeared to be the
well-coordinated and orchestrated effort it actually was.

The most critical voice of all was raised by
the nationally syndicated political program “Nation Today” which
did not stop short of insisting that the authorities responsible
take immediate action “for the good of our nation.”