Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

Larry swallows her with his arms, like the male hero in an anachronistic spectal, and then pushes her away to study her more objectively. Immediately, he pulls her back in to him again, checks her pulse at wrist and throat, and pivots her toward me with odd contrasting expressions washing over his face.

“She’s fainted, I think.”

“Fainted?” My mother, so far as I know, never faints.

“It’s all the travel… and her anxiety about the gold-urn lottery.”

“Not to mention her disappointment in me.”

Larry regards me with such deliberate blankness that I almost fail to recognize the man, whom I have known seemingly forever.

“Talk to her when she comes ‘round,” he says. “Talk to her.”

The blousy monk who ran click-scans on us enters the makeshift mausoleum and helps Larry tow my rag-doll mama outside, across the road, and into the battened-down Temple courtyard. The two accompany her to a basket-like bower chair that suppresses her driftability and attend her with colorful fake Chinese fans. I go with them, looking on like a gawker at a cafeteria accident.

Our post-swoon interview takes place in the nearly empty courtyard. Mama clutches two of the bower-chair spokes like a child in a gravity swing, and I maintain my place before her with the mindless agility of a pond carp.

“Never say you’re forsaking the gold-urn lottery,” she says. “You bear on your shoulders the hopes of a majority, my hopes highest of all.”

“Did my decision to withdraw cause you to faint?”

“Of course!” she cries. “You can’t withdraw! You don’t think I faked my swoon, do you?”

I have no doubt that Mama didn’t fake it. Her sclera clocked into view before her eyelids fell. But, before that, her gaze cut to and rested on Sakya’s face just prior to realizing my intent. Feelings of betrayal, loss, and outrage triggered her swoon. Now she says I have no choice but to take part in the gold-urn drawing, and I regard her with such a blend of gratitude, for believing in me, and loathing, for her rigidity, that I can’t speak. Do Westerners carry both me-first ego genes and self-doubt genes that, in combination, overcome the teachings of the Tantra?

“Answer me, Greta Bryn: Do you think I faked that faint?”

Mama knows already that I don’t. She just wants me to assume the hair shirt of guilt for her indisposition and to pull it over my head with the bristly side inward. I have sufficient Easterner in my makeup to deny her that boon and the pinched ecstasy implicit in it. All at once dauntless, I hold her gaze, and hold it, until she begins to waver in her implacability.

“I didn’t swoon solely because you tried to renounce your rebirth right, but also because you tried to humiliate me in front of Larry.” Mama stands so far from the truth on this issue that she doesn’t even qualify as wrong.

And so I laugh, like an evil-wisher rather than a daughter. “Not so,” I say. “Why would I want to humiliate you before Larry?”

“Because I’ve always refused to coddle your self-doubts.”

I recall Mama beholding Sakya’s death mask and memorizing his every aura-lit feature. “What else caused you to ‘fall out’?”

Her voice drops a register: “The Dalai Lama. His face. His hands. His body. His inhering and sustaining holiness.”

“How does his ‘sustaining holiness’ knock you into a swoon, Mama?”

She peers across the courtyard road at the van where the DL lies in state. Then she pulls herself upright in the bower chair and tells this story:

“While married to your father, I began an affair with Minister Trungpa. He lived wherever Sakya lived, and Sakya chose to live among the secular citizens of Amdo and Kham rather than in the ridiculously scaled-down model of the Potala Palace in U-Tsang. As one result, Minister T and I easily met each other; and Nyendak—Neddy, I call him—courted me under the unsuspecting noses of both Sakya and Simon.”

“You cuckolded my daddy with Minister T?” I need her to say it again.

“That’s such an ugly old word to label what Neddy and I still regard as a sacred union.”

“I’m sorry, Mama, but it’s the prettiest word I know to call it.”

“Don’t condescend to me, Gee Bee.”

“I won’t. I can’t. But I do have to ask: Who fathered me, the man I call Daddy or Sakya’s old-fart chief minister?”

“Your father fathered you,” Mama says. “Look at yourself in a mirror. Simon’s face underlies your own. His blood runs through you, almost as if he gave his vitality to you and thus lost it himself.”

“Maybe because you cuckolded him.”

“That’s crap. If anything, Simon’s growing apathy and addiction to pod-lodging shoved me toward Neddy. Who, by the way, has the eggs, even at his age, to stay on the upright outside of a Z-pod.”

“Mama, please.”

“Listen, Neddy loves you. He cherishes you because he cherishes me. He sees you as just as much his own as Simon does. In fact, Neddy was the first to—”

“I’ll stop saying ‘cuckold’ if you’ll stop calling your boyfriend ‘Neddy.’ It sounds like filthy baby talk.”

Mama closes her eyes, counts to herself, and opens them again to explain that when Sakya Gyatso at last figured out what was going on between Mama and Minister Trungpa, he called them to him and urged them to break off the affair in the interest of a higher spirituality and the preservation of shipboard harmony.

Minister T, ever the tutor, argued that although traditional Buddhism stems from a slavish obeisance to the demands of morality, wisdom cultivation, and ego abasement, the Tibetan Tantric path channels sexual attraction and its drives into the creation of life-force energies that purify these urges and tie them to transcendent spiritual purposes. My mother’s marriage had unraveled; and Minister T’s courtship of her, which culminated in consensual carnality and a principled friendship, now demonstrated their mutual growth toward that higher spirituality.

I laugh out loud.

“And did His Holiness give your boyfriend a pass on this self-serving distortion of the Tantric way?”

“Believe as you will, but Neddy—Minister Trungpa’s—take on the matter, and the thoroughness with which he laid out everything, had great effect on the DL. After all, Minister T had served as his regent in exile in Dharmasala, as his chief minister in India, and finally as his minister and friend here on the Kalachakra . Why would he all at once suppose this fount of integrity and wise counsel a scoundrel?”

“Maybe because he was surfing the wife of another man and justifying it with a lot of mystical malarkey.”

Mama squints with thread-thin patience and resumes her story. Because of what Minister T and Mama had done, and still do, and what Minister T told His Holiness to justify their behavior, the Dalai Lama fell into a brown study that finally edged over into an ashen funk. To combat it, Sakya hibernated for three months, but emerged as low in spirits as he had gone into his egg. All his energies had weakened, and he told Minister T of his fears of dying before we reached Guge. Such talk profoundly fretted Mama’s lover, who insisted that Sakya Gyatso tour the nursery in Amdo Bay. There he met me, Greta Bryn Brasswell. He was so smitten that he returned many times over the next few weeks, always singling me out for attention. He told Mama that my eyes reminded him of those of his baby sister, who had died very young of rheumatic fever.

“I remember meeting His Holiness,” I tell Mama, “but not his visiting our nursery so often.”

“You were four,” Mama says. “How could you?”

She recounts how Minister T later took her to Sakya’s upper-deck office in Amdo to talk about his long depression. With the AG generators running, they shared green tea and barley breads.