The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (51 page)

A short drive to a bumpy stop in front of a shack of raw, warping boards, a tin chimney protruding to exhale a thin line of smoke.

“You or me?” Brian asked, not looking at Jeff.

“Aw, d’you mind? I think I did it last time. Just, say hi for me.”

Brian opened the cab and jumped down, then took something from a knapsack on the footboard. He approached the door and knocked, then waited what seemed a very long time. Jeff leaned over the wheel, stretching his back and watching Brian.

“Dude has cancer. It’s, like, got his whole body now. His wife maybe goes to the store once every couple of weeks but apart from that, they’re just up here. Alone. They used to be totally self-sufficient, I heard.” No one had yet opened the door and Brian knocked again. When the door at last swung out, pushing the snow off the step onto the snow-covered yard, Seth saw a large person, with a bloated, hairless face, long iron-black hair and a dark robe. Man or woman, he couldn’t tell. Brian handed over the item from the bag. “C’mon, Brian,” Jeff said softly. “Sometimes they make us come in. I get it, they’re isolated. But the place smells like death.”

“They don’t want to move into town?” He didn’t even know what town he might be speaking of. Maybe it was only the idea of a town.

“Wants to die in his own place, his own bed. Docs can’t do anything for him now and he thinks the cities are poison.”

They drove back along the cliffside and out of the snow, to a little apartment complex with no apparent reason for being where it was. Brian got out.

“Crackhouse,” said Jeff, opening his door to spit onto the ground and slamming it shut again. “It’s the thing I hate about this job,” he told Seth. “You’re lumped in with the lowlifes. Bottom feeders”—Jeff indicated the door, where a small, backlit man in a T-shirt and sticking-up hair was talking to Brian—“but also organized crime, you know. It’s all up and down the coast. Vancouver. Roll down Brian’s window, would you?” Jeff peered out past him. “We grow a high-quality product. Totally organic. We work for it and we guarantee it and we believe in it. Free access, man. Mayor Owens said it himself—grow it, sell it, tax the hell out of it. Why not? But it’s the drug war.”

There was some shouting now from the apartment complex and Brian was backing away, holding up his hands.

“Cross this dump off our list.” Brian climbed in. “Asshole.”

The next drop was in a thickly settled suburb, the clients a Mountie and her husband. Brian laughed at Seth’s confusion. “She’s cool. She’s fighting those huge, disgusting grow-ops too. Illegals, smuggled in to work up here, using chemical fertilizers and selling that mass-produced shit on the streets.”

Seth recalled having read that marijuana now accounted for 60 percent of British Columbia’s sagging provincial economy. When they first arrived in Lohikarma, he had, once or twice, seen a joint passed at a party. Earlier, back home, he used to see ganja-smoking sadhus drifting in the vicinity of some holy places. But those were different times, simpler, more innocent. Then again, Brian and Jeff seemed as simple and innocent as anyone. He looked at their faces. He liked them. Good eggs.

“But can I ask, I think there are official suppliers of medical marijuana now. I saw something on the news. You can’t apply?”

Both men were shaking their heads. “First of all, unless you’re employed by some mega-secret-underground government-owned lab in the frozen prairies, you can’t get certified to supply to more than one person.” They had arrived in a tiny hamlet (was there any other kind?) and pulled up to a hospice, pink stucco, indeterminately institutional. “All the trouble to get certified, and you get to help one person!”

“Apart from which,” Brian chimed in drily, “we believe in helping people who just want to get stoned. Apart from which, even, a person’s gotta make a living.”

Seth elected to wait in the foyer. He jingled change up out of his pockets for a machine-vended coffee and spun a white-wire rack filled with leaflets, mostly on “Living with AIDS” and “Letting Your Loved One Go.” The door opened and he felt a bluster of chatter blow in on a cold breeze. A well-dressed man and a couple of very tall women clattered over the tiled floors toward the elevator. One of the women glanced at him impersonally as the doors closed: she was a man. False eyelashes. Evening dress. Wig?

His first thought was of a group of
aravanis
, eunuchs who disrupted his sister’s wedding, dancing, clapping, tweaking the men’s dhotis, until they were paid off and left. Everyone hated them, but they were said to be good luck. His second was of the New Year’s Party he and Lakshmi were to have attended tonight, over the mountain and far away. Maybe he would get home in time to join it.

The elevator opened again and Jeff and Brian stepped out. They held the door for a gaunt man in a bathrobe. He shuffled out, no word of thanks or anything else, toward the vinyl-covered armchairs.

“Ready, man?” Brian asked Seth. As they went through the vestibule, Seth looked back at the man, now sitting and looking where Seth could find nothing to see.

Their final stop was a pub—worn carpet on the floor, worn felt on the pool table, worn faces on the clientele. A board advertised
Mac-n-Cheez
and
Pikled Eggs
. The latter seemed unnecessary given the quantity of such eggs displayed on the bar, enbrined in a jar large enough to be an aquarium. They went to a booth, and a waitress, her hair recently tunnelled by curlers, slopped six-ounce glasses down, three per person, on the table.

“Numerous and pale, like the patrons,” Brian said, lifting a glass.

Seth laughed, but Jeff looked mortified. “Except Seth, of course,” he said.

Seth stood the drinks, eighty-five cents a glass, against the men’s protests. “It’s the least I can do. I’m just glad I have cash. I’m usually a little short.” They gave him a look he was used to: students on the first day of his class, not sure when he was joking. “Get it?” He put a hand above his head. “A little short.”

“Badoom-ching,” Jeff said, and they clinked glasses.

From across the room, an untidy fellow otherwise dressed like Seth’s companions nodded a greeting at them. They nodded back, and he joined them at their table. The waitress sped over but he waved her away.

Jeff slid one of his glasses over. “Happy New Year.”

The man inclined his head and raised the glass. “Dude,” he said, and sipped.

Brian was rummaging under the table in his knapsack. The man fidgeted with his gloves in his lap. He nodded at Seth. Brian nodded at him. He finished his beer and left.

A few other similar encounters ensued: people, singly or in pairs, came and sat, made small talk and kept their hands under the table. The waitress was permitted to lay another round down. Seth wondered at the social rituals of the young. On his way back from the restroom, he noticed the cigarette machine. A fixture of his younger years. It had been so long since he had used one. He bought a pack of Number 7, for old times’ sake, and got matches off the bar.

Brian gave the cigarettes a sour look as he rejoined them at the table. “Things’ll kill you, Seth.”

Yes
, he wanted to say,
things will kill me and things will kill you. And probably not the things you expect
. He laid the cigarette package on the table as he realized marijuana was being sold beneath it, under his very nose, slightly above his very knees.
Look at these two babies
, selling the stuff of life: soma, bliss, an end to pain. He shook his head, snorting with laughter.
Things’ll kill you. Oh, yes. Oh, oh, yes
.

Brian and Jeff were starting to look concerned. Seth waved his hand at them, wiped his eyes, but couldn’t quite stop.
Ayoh-yoh-yoh. The kind of thing Shivashakti would have laughed at
.

That at last dampened his mirth. He pictured his god, seized with delight, and was himself seized with drunken longing. Was he all alone? For twenty years, he had carried his god, or his god had carried him. He looked around the bar, looked at his new friends, finished another beer, and remembered the injunction against drinking alone. Was everyone in here drinking alone? Or had they chosen their gods more wisely? If they had, it was because they had been raised to choose: Westerners. Even if they chose badly, they understood this to be part of the risk.
Brinda
. Why had he not been content with the gods of his childhood? They had not betrayed him. Lord Shiva, passionate and generative; the goddess Shakti, grounding and generative; they quarrelled and united, danced and fought, their mutually encircling arms holding and elevating one another. They were fractious, faulty. Above all:
inaccessible.
Above all
 … He smiled again. They were above all, while Shivashakti moved among men. What if Shivashakti wasn’t so different from them, though?

All the bad decisions Seth would have taken had he not had Lakshmi. Which left only the bad decisions he still managed to make with her. Lakshmi, too: without him, she would be anxious, even sharper-tongued, possibly friendless.
I should phone home
, he thought, but the pay phone by the door was in use.

Shivashakti was both man and woman, self-regenerating, the dragon biting its own tail. Maybe the problem was celibacy. Seth pictured Shivashakti torn from himself, flung out along some infinite trajectory.

He sat up. Brian and Jeff seemed ready to go.

They were quiet as they drove to the gas station, where Seth purchased a plastic canister and filled it. It was late. He glanced around for a pay phone, but didn’t see one.

The crossroads by moonlight had an air of abandonment more serene than its mood by day, the snow in the fields like guttering flames, the woods like a crowd come to pray. “This way?” Brian asked, turning down the logging road, but neither of them expected Seth to answer. They had led him a merry dance off his path of grief, but time was leading him back to the tapering end of the spiral.

Time.

In the temples of his childhood, one way to worship was by walking clockwise around the deity, or even around the temple, each worshipper a human shadow on a divine sundial, marking time. Had he intended to go the wrong way, the direction of undoing, the demon’s march? Was his god undone?

He poured the gas into his tank and his new friends pointed him toward the highway.

Brian handed him a joint. “Happy New Year, my friend.” Seth accepted it without thought.

“You take care,” Jeff said, as both men shook his hand.

Seth made a straight shot through the spiral and past its centre—coasted past his home, elbows on the wheel, while he put the joint in
his mouth and lit it, then drove downtown and stopped across from the Shivashakti Centre.

The joint had gone out. He lit it again. There was no charge for any municipal parking spots tonight, and the cab tabs were on the city. D
ON
’
T
D
RIVE
D
RUNK!
billboards had shouted for weeks now. A few minutes to midnight, according to his car clock. He dragged, held, coughed.

Shivashakti, undone. He was dizzy as he left the car.
She’s come undone
, that voice in his head sang, the one that loved to sing him songs he didn’t feel like hearing. Brinda, undone.
She didn’t know what she was headed for / And when she found what she was headed for / It was too late
.

The keys jangled on his finger. Images of tottering revellers behind him swung and wobbled in the glass door and then he was through the looking glass and up the stairs.
We’re off to see the Wizard!
For twenty years, the wizard had lived in him, made it possible for him to live.

Seth stepped into the ashram’s darkness. Disappointment came at him. What? Had he thought Shivashakti would be here, waiting, the way he had when they met twenty years ago, all ready to explain?

Vertiginous, he touched the walls. At one end of the meditation hall, a photo of the guru presided. Seth’s eyes began to adjust. The room was lit by a misty glow from beyond the cheap white blinds on the windows. Windows high up, office style: natural light but no distractions. Good for meditation as well as the business of the world. Street lights refracted through falling snow dulled by dirty window panes and edited again by the blinds, but still, the resulting low haze was enough. The room was empty but for Seth and … God? The spirit of God? The likeness of the guru? He looked at Shivashakti’s picture on the shrine, but couldn’t tell whether it was becoming clearer in the low light or less so.

Should he sit, as usual? Stand, as he would for a confrontation? He approached the shrine and struck a match, as if to light the candles, but instead re-lit his joint.
Out, out brief candle
.

The only way Seth had ever invoked Shivashakti was by use of a
mantra, given to Seth by the guru himself—he called Shivashakti by praying to Shivashakti. Seth didn’t think that was what he had come here to do.

The night is yours and the day is yours
.

He felt the floor shove against his bottom, as though some aggressive host had popped his knees with a chair. So: he would sit, then.