Vandal Love (28 page)

At the Sikh ashram Harvey heard other arguments, that anything aside from an ancient path was New Age. Even yoga had been cheapened, though the ashram remained a stronghold of traditional practices. Not a few members had pursued higher education, been professors and psychologists but had seen nothing certain or stable in American culture.

At first Harvey thought the ashram was a throwback, but he learned that even when the spiritual trends of the sixties and seventies had passed, the ashram had endured, incorporating, starting businesses, establishing yoga training programs, its membership still growing. The community now centred around several companies that skyrocketed returns by claiming non-profit status and paying devotees a pittance. Experts in everything from health food to surveillance, CEOs, copywriters and secretaries turned out in droves each morning in turbans and robes to occupy the stucco buildings at the edge of the ashram. Their success, they explained, came of their being spiritual householders, dedicated to raising families and living in the world and not seeking the ascetic’s path—what they considered sterile. Their clarity was tempting.

After a brief application process Harvey got himself hired to tend the grounds and to clean up after the Chicano youths who performed lawn jobs and left gutted bags of trash. He also called the pound on strays. Members had made an effort to chain their own dogs as they had a tendency to run with packs of wild dogs and rabies was a concern. But though he bent himself to this new life, the ashram girls, buxom with ghee and chapatis, laughed when they saw him. Marriage was stressed, often young. It is the highest yoga, the master said, true purity. Harvey believed that eventually a girl would perceive the devotion in his heart. She would be small and incorporeal and ageless, like an elf.

In his room in Brendan Howard’s trailer he worked into more strenuous postures. He practised intense meditations, hours at a time, holding his palms on his head and inhaling through his curved tongue. Soon he found he wasn’t so short of breath from the altitude. He read books on yoga and anatomy and learned to speak of his body in scientific terms. Sweating, holding postures, he felt primal, no longer the domesticated thing he’d been. He was proud of the dawns when he got up for selfless service, warming his car at three a.m. Even his suffering gave him pride, and though the master said that only the ascetic, the sadhu, takes pride in suffering and shirks the responsibilities of the world, Harvey worked for the good of the ashram. He loved the ancient practices, the robes and sense of tradition, the authority of the outmoded. Once, impressed by his newfound presence, he braved asking someone out, a diminutive girl slightly beyond
his age range, blue flecks of acne scars on her cheeks.

Sorry, she told him, I’m going chanting with friends tonight.

Oh, he said and waited, but there was no invite. Back home he meditated on his breath, blocked one nostril to exhale from the other, the sound that of a punctured tire.

You must resist thinking yourself through the suffering of life, the master told them in his weekly lecture. Spring winds howled over the hills. Everyone talked about ionic charges in the air, how traditional societies judged crimes more compassionately when committed in seasonal winds. The master’s dust and juniper allergies were rampant. His frazzled beard lay on his chest, and he blew his nose frequently.

Listen to the wind, he said. Its chaos scares you. Your chaos scares you. Look at the world. Bonds are disintegrating. The future is shapeless. There is nothing to hold us. We have had chaos before, but nothing like this. Only the teachings can carry us through.

Harvey had often heard the master say that history was a burden, that Americans were blessed to be slipping free. Ancient wisdom was timeless and would transform them. But who would they become? A new order—Jedi knights, the white-clad forefathers of Superman whose minds could move crystals? What of Harvey Hervé? Of Hervé-François Hervé? He thought of those stories, the brutal men, the enduring grandmother.

Let go of your past, the master said, his eyes bugged out, his turban sloppy.

The next afternoon Harvey drove into Santa Fe and went to the mall. He needed underwear but ended up walking for an hour, from store to store, pausing to watch music videos in Foot Locker, movies in Radio Shack. A Chicano girl, probably thirteen, passed with a fishnet shirt showing a black bra. He wished this would all burn away. He didn’t want to be like his father.

As he started home, a storm was blowing up. Cars rocked at red lights. The wind scoured his windshield with grit, tiny tumbleweeds crossing the highway like terrified cats. Lightning punctuated the mountain horizon to the south.

History, chaos, suffering? Did words mean anything within nature? Maybe even the ashram was too much, the ascetic’s life preferable—a cave or a monastery to protect him from judging eyes. But did he have the heart of a solitary? The master said you had to live in the world. The journey began with taking a name, but then what?

When he arrived for the evening lecture, members had gathered outside. A few had on work goggles to keep sand out of their eyes. Siri Ram, a six-year-old whose husky mutt, Snowball, often ran with strays, had gone missing. They thought that the boy had left to look for Snowball. As search parties gathered, Harvey shivered in the high desert night.

They advanced into the hills, blowing whistles, calling out, flashlights weaving in the dark. The wind buffeted them as if they were walking into surf. Junipers
and all the cactuses and cholla of the desert waited for them to stumble. Brief and muted moonlight gave ridges shapes like sunken boats.

A dog’s yaps came from below a drop-off. It yelped, then barked, as if wanting out to pee. They edged along the rock face until their flashlights found Snowball in the clouding dust. The wind had almost erased whatever struggle there had been. Bloody paw prints showed on the stone. A dry, bent tree in the hillside was broken, and Snowball stood beneath, head lowered, his panting, bloody muzzle to the dust.

Wind rocked trailers and ruined meditation gardens.

Master, he said. Will you give me a spiritual name?

You will be Sat Puja. It is a powerful mantra. An offering to truth, you will be the true offering, a great devotee.

Each dawn he meditated on his name.

Harvey, his mother said over the phone.

It’s Sat Puja, mata.

Such a fanatic, she thought, calling me the Indian word for mother, and he, with a mix of pride and worry and curiosity at the odd mechanisms of self, thought the same.

Why are you doing this? she asked.

He wanted to tell her they’d been living an illusion, but would she be willing to change, or would it require her suffering?

They waited quietly on the phone. Finally in a faint voice —I’m proud of you, she said. Whatever you do, I’m proud.

A week after receiving his name, Sat Puja took an indefinite vow of silence. It was too easy just to bide one’s time for a set duration, he told others before he began, in the days that he let everyone know he wouldn’t be speaking and made a few phone calls so no one would worry in case he chose to cease communicating altogether. Then, one dawn, when he awoke, he took a deep breath and blew through his mouth as if cleansing the palate of all the nonsense it had spoken. He’d read this was a proper beginning.

Every action was now meditation. It was June, the sun fierce. He’d begun bowing to the holy book, did predawn service in the cold kitchen that smelled of onions and garlic and ghee, and had graduated from a light turban, like an Indian puggree, to a towering beehive. In fact he tied his so high that at times he had to support it and looked like a peevish society lady patting her hair. He purchased the robes and knickknacks of religious life and even worked at growing a beard. He had a fringe of blond fuzz like that of a very old woman.

He continued his yoga, staying in excruciating postures, freeing up the anxiety of past lives. He pressed his fingers over his eyes, phosphenes flowering inside his head: the devoured boy, the bright threads of jacket. He wasn’t sure how to give up the world and still live within it with any certainty, and it seemed messy to attempt both. Nor did he care much for groundskeeping. Each second stooping to move a sprinkler was enough for the back of his neck to burn. Mostly he just sat, sweating in the shade as the ashram green longed to return to the baked pie crust of desert.

Perhaps the silence would have gone on forever, and he’d have become one of those unobtrusive ashram members who laid foundations while the others played, but two weeks after he began, a young man arrived in a BMW convertible. Though mute, Sat Puja wasn’t deaf. Donald was everywhere at once but never in one place long enough to get hitched. Raised by absentee parents in Carmel on a diet of packaged organic foods with a Mexican maid to open them and throw out the
wrappings, he was an old study in the art of drawing attention and became the ashram’s heartthrob by artifice alone. Evenly tanned, with a patrician nose that none doubted he would come to own and the coarse beginnings of a dark jaw, he had a physique trained by the popular calisthenic yoga that ashram members held in disdain. They all soon learned his story, which he frequently recounted, as if his arrival at an ashram after two years preparing a double major in political science and philosophy at Yale was as astounding as the conquests of Cortés or the journeys of Magellan. Born into a world of euphemistic money—trading, managing, observing—he’d rarely seen his father, who was among the elite to have mastered the prima materia of the capitalist world, and who could do so easily from his home PC. Like Sat Puja, Donald had had a weak spot for biographies and had noted that a worthy life lay in contradictions. With a profile so like a coin’s he’d found it hard to turn his back on money, but he knew that youth necessitated rebellion or else would pass soundlessly into spongy middle age. The day he’d arrived at Yale, he’d made a spectacle of pitching bed and desk from his dorm windows, a bit of ostentation that the financial office put on his father’s bill. He meditated often, studied crosslegged and slept on a mat he’d bought at the flea market. He received nighttime visits from stoners seeking consolation or God. He was the dorm wise man. Detached, he passed unscathed through campus debauchery and quoted holy texts on the subject of craving, all the while breezing his academics.

Not long after his arrival at the ashram he beseeched the master for a name. Each time someone arrived, the community waited to learn what name and hence what destiny the master would divine. When Harvey had taken his, he’d heard the assistants discussing Puja, whether it meant worship or reverence and that, really, it better suited a girl. Donald, with all the pleasure the ashram youth expressed at his arrival, was expecting something prophetic. The master grumbled, spat into a tissue and said, Jamgoti. An assistant wrote it down. Jamgoti was whispered around the room. No one had heard it before.

What does it mean? Donald asked.

The master laughed roughly. Loincloth, he said.

The ashram soon decided that this reflected an unworthiness that only the master could perceive. Insincerity most likely, many agreed, so that when Donald applied for jobs, he was refused all but the most transient and ended up at Sat Puja’s side. Those who’d resented his popularity, quick wit and expansive learning assumed he’d never use the name. The girls told him that he’d be renamed once he’d proven his devotion. But with a politician’s sense of humour, he began introducing himself as Jamgoti. Means loincloth, he clarified even to those who knew—Can’t leave home without it.

His first day tending the grounds he took up his rake, thumped himself on the chest in mockery of Sat Puja’s silence, then proceeded to talk until well past noon. He was smoothly analytical of what he called the ashram’s pedestrian approach to spirituality. With so much
emphasis on being a householder, he said, there isn’t much time for enlightenment, is there?

Sat Puja tried to appear absorbed in meditative silence, but after Jamgoti had discoursed on his precocious mysticism, a youth of Internet surfing for arcana, meditation with a penny on his third eye and on-line spoon-bending societies that had tried to teach him to shift the molecules of cutlery with his mind, Sat Puja cleared his throat, introduced himself and spoke of his own attempts, his fears and yearnings and pain, on and on and often returning to the essential theme of how similar they were, and on, until it was well past quitting time. Those last weeks he’d reconsidered his projection. He spoke with the deepest voice he could manage, from the navel as he’d learned in his college theatre class. There was nothing he didn’t tell and he was somewhat taken aback that he could fit his entire life into an afternoon.

Besides, he said, this job gets you dirty.

They were now sitting under a cottonwood, in its splotch of shadow. Jamgoti chewed a blade of obscenely green grass that probably tasted like hairspray after all they’d done to make it grow. He scratched his calf with a big toe and declared that they needed to take action or drift forever in mediocrity. We must plan, he said. There’s no reason to wait.

Far off, ranchera had begun to play from a hotel terrace in the hills above the ashram as it often did this time of year with all the local weddings. After a while, Sat Puja invited Jamgoti to his trailer and couldn’t believe his offer was accepted.

Jamgoti insisted they take his convertible. They drove in the warm evening, roof down, wind attempting to unfurl Sat Puja’s turban. Jamgoti began explaining the groundwork for a more intensive approach to understanding the divine. But Sat Puja was mute, an invisible touch flourishing in his chest, an emotion that he couldn’t name, like a strange bloom in a vast desert.