Riverine (5 page)

The word
meditation
sat on my tongue like a cube of salt, simple and addictive. It held the promise of a long suck life. He offered to teach me how.

He placed the jar on the table. We sat on the living room floor of Aunt Carleen’s mobile home, Indian style, our knees and palms sweating. He told me to close my eyes and picture the white stone. I tried, but instead I wondered what his wandering eye did when it was closed, whether it changed the darkness into alphabet soup or split it like a speedboat, pushing one part north and another part south, a clip of rough water smudging the centerline. How did it change his meditation? How black was the curtain of that closed side eye? How white was his stone? The mystery of other people’s minds was endless. Did Dawn think words even though she didn’t say them? Did my mother really not believe that my heart had stopped? Did my father have any thoughts at all after all the screaming matches? There was, from a young age, already a disconnect between the way I processed experiences and the way others conducted themselves, the way I was critical of my surroundings and the way others seemed to float through them without taking note of anything.

Tully told me to be very quiet, as though he could hear the roar of my mind, and to listen for silence. When I tried, I found the silence right away and was proud of myself for being such a peaceful and meditative person. I was a natural, I thought, enlightened by birth. He told me to listen longer: that silence was a stone in a jar of sand and that finding the silence, the stone, was a meditative practice. I tried again, eyes closed, visualizing the jar and the manipulations I’d performed to bring the stone into view. This time, a few moments after I reentered the silence I thought I’d found the first time, there came a barrage of sounds I hadn’t noticed at first. A car barreling down the road outside created a Doppler wave of noise. A housefly buzzed against a window screen. My uncle’s breath hissed in and out. My own breath made its own slight sound, and the soft rush of blood to my head pulsed. The window air conditioner hummed in the bedroom down the hall. The kitchen faucet plunked drops of water into a sink. My uncle’s pager vibrated itself right off the coffee table, landing on the carpet with a muted thud. Nothing was as I had perceived it to be. What I had thought to be true was false, entirely. The lesson was this: what my mind wanted, my mind could create. I heard “silence” by ignoring the blur of everyday noise. But silence was a whole concept. It required purity. It was like truth in a literal sense, which any fallacy rendered tainted. It was fleeting and easily corruptible.

Meditation, I would discover in time, brought its practitioner to the halfway point—creating a bubble between silence and noise, consciousness and unconsciousness, that lent itself to the quality of noiselessness if not the thing itself. Frequent meditators found the stone in the sand more easily. They didn’t even have to look for it. They had stones for eyes.

Break down a subjective feeling into constituent parts: language fails, and you resort to cause and effect, relational equations that help make sense of things by putting words to them. Eventually, it can feel like blame—all this connecting of who did what and why and to what outcome. I felt sad because; I was happy because. One thing acted on another, and a third thing resulted. My heart had stopped and I was certain there was a cause for that sensation, but what was it? No one could pinpoint it with a machine. Did that mean it wasn’t real? Then, I never gave the kitten milk. I never held her. I never said, “Here, see how I hold your hand. Feel this. Know this.” I would have done it for another person. This one, I couldn’t explain.

Why I failed Dawn, I don’t know. She looked at me with those eyes. I looked away. I climbed a tree instead, and the tree made me feel better. I was busy breathing my way through heart failure and could not help her. We could neither of us save each other from this place, and no one knew we were in need of saving. When I began to wonder if I was even real, whether my feet were planted on Earth and my blood was pumping, I opened the door of meditation, of altered consciousness, and I walked through to keep myself from going insane, from falling over, exhausted from the limitations of my tiny world and tinier existence. At points in my life, I would keep choosing trees over people. I would keep escaping through the boughs of pines, sap-handed and daydreaming. Higher and higher, as if some kind of answer lay waiting at the upper limit of the world. Meditation would become a way out, a quicker exit to the sky, a way to soften a seized heart, a way of remembering what the mind can do.

Ten years later, the kitten became a cat. Dawn stole my graduation money. She stole my underwear. She packed a bag full of my things, whatever was around, as though she were me leaving in the middle of the night. Where was she going with all that? It was a better idea than climbing trees, so what could I say? When she was caught, she had no explanation. We sat with our mothers, all four of us aghast. Startled, wet eyes and small mouth sounds. But I was already long gone in my mind. I let her keep the clothes. They meant nothing to me.

III

A recent
Time
magazine fold-out diagram of the big bang shows the expansion of the universe alongside the trajectory of time. Wider and wider it grows along the x-axis. I cannot look at it too closely, for it shocks the body to consider the brevity of a life in the context of the endless universe. Max Tegmark, a quantum physicist at MIT, is working on a hypothesis about consciousness as a state of matter that can process information. His theory asserts that consciousness might have emerged alongside time. The scientific community generally accepts that consciousness, like all matter, cannot be broken down into smaller pieces. Perhaps this is why language fails. It alone could never do the accounting for thought or for the choices we make. Perhaps consciousness is the supportive tissue upon which language is constructed. Blame is a scaffolding. Fault is another. Time heals both, moving along at the same pace as thought.

Tegmark’s hypothesis says that consciousness, the state of matter termed “perceptronium,” requires “a certain amount of independence in which the information dynamics is determined from within rather than externally.” Meditation requires even more than using one’s own awareness to recognize internally the pretense of external surroundings. It requires training one’s mind, its perceptronium, to dismantle the reality contained within the pretense and to make it into something useful and enjoyable by peeling back the layers of perceived reality. That takes practice. It would seem that, if Tegmark is correct, meditation could be tangible proof of consciousness. The fourth state of matter manifest.

IV

After my aunt and uncle moved out of the trailer, another family moved in. Two parents, a daughter. There were more dogs. There was more yelling from this set; I’d hear them in the mornings from our house. The woman screamed, a door slammed, the man screamed. Sometimes I heard crying, loud sobs. A need that no one within earshot could fulfill and so no one even tried. It would go on that way for hours. Breakfast through lunch. Sometimes I wanted to live that loudly.

The new family had big black guns and knives with handles wrapped in leather. The father was only five feet tall, covered in tattoos. Smaller than me at age eleven. I tried to see his eyes once. I wanted them to be kind. They were not. Even a girl looked to him like the enemy. He mowed the lawn shirtless, weapons strapped to his bare body. He was ready for a war that never came, his capacity for violence stitched onto his skin. Waiting.

The mother towered over the small man, at least a foot taller. She was massive and fleshy. The daughter looked like her mother. Over tight stretch pants, she wore large T-shirts featuring gigantic faces of kittens and puppies and Tweety Bird, a false sense of softness atop her body. On the school bus she held her friends like dolls. She offered overt acts of care: one hundred hair brushes, licks from her own Blow Pop, long back rubs to anyone who would endure them. I curled into a ball in the green seats, counting telephone poles until they let me off, fingers checking my own pulse. Still alive.

V

In a truly meditative state, the cousin of dreams, the mind lingers in a pleasing purgatory between consciousness and unconsciousness in a space that might be visually represented by the intersection of a Venn diagram. Outside the crosspatch are the tools we use to manipulate the sensation of feeling and understand the dreams. Language, experience. Whatever happened in a day. We move the matter around, sand in a sandbox. Children at play. Families rotating through the same house over time. Wisdom, a sieve. Sometimes, a glimpse of stone.

I have wondered which part is most real—the conscious or the unconscious. Whether the place itself is the thing that stays, or its effects on a person. One is concrete and one is embedded in the brain, in memory. Does the dog fit into its new family, molding itself to its ways, or does the dog’s life before that dictate the new family? Fido brought her old home with her. She ordered us to abide by its rules and we obeyed. That she was in a new place, a new home, changed nothing about her previous experience. What she had known as a pup stuck, though we could not see it in the air.

Dawn’s abandonment as a toddler had stuck. It affected her development for years, though it was not palpable. Speaking would come slowly for her. I would not be the last woman she stole from, her subconscious need to reinstate loss stronger than her control over right and wrong. I have taken meditation everywhere and sprinkled its soft gray middle across the land like salt. The place stays, and the people go. They take the experience of the place with them in their perceptronium. Thought could be
a state of matter
, resilient as water or Stardust, moving in parallel with the passing of time.

VI

When I walked by the trailer twenty years later, on a visit back to the road I grew up on, I tried not to look too closely at what it had become. The home had outlived the manufacturer’s guarantee. A smattering of litter covered the ground around it like a light rain that would not soak in, caught by twigs and corners and sharp edges, arranged almost artfully. Exposed cinder blocks propped up the trailer, its aluminum stairs shakily supporting the daily comings and goings of a family of three and plenty of neighborhood kids.

Other families had come and gone. A TV tray was climbing the stairs. Eyes on the road, I tried not to look inside the windows. I walked on, stopping to look up at Corey’s old window. In my pocket, I carried my stone, which had long since been removed from the jar. Curiosity will kill this cat. I could nearly feel the sap beneath my fingernails, transferred from tree bark to skin long ago. Matter cannot be created or destroyed: the sap was somewhere, the families were somewhere, Corey was somewhere. The memories still existed. Though I discovered meditation here, my first way out of that riverbed, I could not knock on the door of any of these houses. I would not be let inside. I could only return in my mind. If I thought of Corey long enough, meditated on the day he’d carried me home that first time my heart failed, my body would follow and leave a gap in the present.

When Magic Precedes Belief

Early memory: It is dark. My father, a welder at Merit Steel, walks into our trailer and sits down on a bench near the shiny aluminum door. Our carpeting is brown and the floor in this room slopes when I crawl toward the window, beneath which brightly colored balls collect during daytime play, as though one end of the home tilts toward the center of the earth. Sometimes I dream of falling through this floor into a cracked-open world exposing a belly full of snakes. My father looks very tired, and his face is reddened and rugged. White strips of tape secure two white patches of gauze over his eyes: never look directly at the flame, unprotected. He wears a navy blue T-shirt and stained, faded blue jeans. He smells like oil and scorched metal. He bends to remove his work boots, which are made of brown leather and tied with yellow industrial-grade laces. I comfort him. I make sure he knows he will be all right. I don’t know how I accomplish this, but I do. I don’t know how I know that his work is difficult and dangerous, but I know. What I don’t know is that my father is only twenty-three years old, trying to avoid falling into a snake pit of his own. He has come so far already. The home he grew up in did not have running water or a bathroom.

Early memory: I have my own bedroom in a real house, and the walls are painted a soft peach color. There are no pictures on the wall, only the paint. I have a small bed and a pink blanket beneath a high canopy, the shabby quarters of a poor princess. My window is trimmed in white. Outside my white square of window stands a large sycamore tree that sways in the nighttime wind. When I’m scared, I watch the boy in the window across from mine to help me fall asleep. He is my bedtime story, and he keeps the monsters away. I watch him laugh and jump off his bed when he is alone. I watch his brothers beat up on him. I watch his mother scold him. We are both so powerless. I believe that someday he’ll save me and we’ll disappear, wriggling free from this place like little Houdinis. It takes me forever to fall asleep when my boy in the window is gone. One night, a shadow approaches and then comes close to my window screen. A man’s head, looking in. I wake my mother and she calls our neighbor, Wild Bill, our street’s self-appointed patrolman, but they never find a man to go with the shadow.

Early memory: My imagination reigns for a time and books become reality. When I am seven, our crabgrass yard is my Secret Garden, or I am Matilda, smarter than her parents already, or I am the Little Princess, secret heir to another life, or I walk through mirrors into upside-down lands. I push a glass of milk across the table without touching it. I bend a spoon with my blue eyes. During a tour of an antique jail, I see a stuffed white dog stand up and walk across the small cell. “Is that so?” my grandmother says, looking at the dog, then at me. Then his friend the stuffed raccoon follows him. “I see what you mean,” she says. I recall a favorite line from
Macbeth
, though I’ve never read Shakespeare, and quote it out loud: “My dull brain … wrought with things forgotten.” I have someone else’s memories in my head. A blue jay lands on my hand and talks to me in blue jay, and my papa says, “Don’t talk to blue jays. They’re mean.” I wear Indian beads on my fingers. I point my toes and float above my house, above the river, so high. Everything is possible.