T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

Chickpeas

Dinner for their first evening of the retreat, after the meager portions of rice and lentils doled out for the communal morning and afternoon meals, had been decided on in a time when they could express themselves aloud — yesterday, that is. It was to consist of tahini, lemon juice and chickpeas blended into hummus, basmati rice and naan bread. He was at the stove watching the chickpeas roiling in a pan of water over the gas jet, which was hooked up to the propane tank half-buried in a pit behind the yurt. It must have been seven or so in the evening — he couldn’t be sure because Geshe Stephen had encouraged them all to remove their watches and ceremonially grind them between two stones. The heat had begun to lift and he imagined the temperature dipping into the nineties, though numbers had no value here and whether it was diabolically hot or, in winter, as he’d been forewarned, unforgivingly cold, really didn’t matter. What mattered were the chickpeas, golden in the pot. What mattered was the dragonfly.

He’d done his best to communicate the experience to Karuna, falling back on his admittedly rusty skills at charades. He led her to the entrance of the yurt and pointed to the place where he’d been sitting in the poor stippled shade of a palo verde tree and then used the distance between his forefinger and thumb to give her an idea of the creature and its relative size, jerking that space back and forth vigorously to replicate its movements and finally flinging his hand out to demonstrate the path it had taken. She’d gazed at him blankly. Three syllables, he indicated digitally, making his face go fierce for the representation of dragon — he breathed fire, or tried to — and then softening it for the notion of fly, and he’d been helped here by the appearance, against the front window, of an actual fly, a fat bluebottle that had no doubt sprung from the desiccating carcass of some fallen toad or lizard. She’d blinked rapidly. She’d smiled. And, as far as he could see, didn’t have the faintest idea of what he was attempting to convey, though she was trying her hardest to focus on the bliss in his face.

But now she was bending to the oven, where the flattened balls of dough were taking on the appearance of bread, her meditation skirt hitched up in back so that he was able to admire the shape of her ankles, a shape as miraculous as that of the dragonfly — or no, a thousand times more so. Because her ankles rose gracefully to her calves and her calves to her thighs and from there… he caught himself. This was not right-mindfulness, and he had to suppress it. There would be no touching, no kissing, no sex during the length of the retreat. And that length of time looped out suddenly before him like a rope descending into an infinite well: three years, three months, three days. Or no: two. One down, or nearly down. A quick calculation: 1,189 to go.

He reached for the handle of the pot and had actually taken hold of it, so entranced was he by the poured gold of the chickpeas, before he understood that the handle was hot. But not simply hot: superheated, all but molten. He managed to drop the pot back on the burner without upsetting it, the harsh clatter of metal on metal startling his wife, who shot him a glance out of enlarging eyes, and though he wanted to cry out, to curse and shout and dance through his pain, he just bit his finger at the knuckle and let the tears roll down both flanges of his nose.

Tarantula

The first night came in a blizzard of stars. The temperature dropped till it was almost bearable, not that it mattered, and he stared hard at the concentric rings of the yurt’s conical ceiling till they began to blur. Was he bored? No, not at all. He didn’t need the noise of the world, the cell phones and TVs and laptops and all the rest, transient things, distractions, things of the flesh — he needed inner focus, serenity, the Bodhisattva path. And he was on it, his two feet planted firmly, as he dropped his eyes to study the movements of Karuna while she prepared for bed. She was grace incarnate, swimming out of her clothes as if emerging from a cool clean mountain stream, naked before him as she bent for the stiff cotton nightshirt that lay folded beneath her pillow on the raised wooden pallet beside his own. He studied the flex of her buttocks, the cleft there, the way her breasts swung free as she dipped to the bed, and it was so right, so pure and wholly beautiful that he felt like singing — or chanting. Chanting in his own head, Om mani padme hum.

And then suddenly she was recoiling from the bed as if it had burst into flame, pinning the nightshirt to her chest and — it was her turn now — jamming a fist into her mouth to keep from screaming. He jumped to his feet and saw the tarantula then, a miracle of creation as stunning in its effect as the dragonfly, if more expected, because this was its environment, its home in the world of appearances. Big as a spread hand, it paused a moment on the pillow, as if to revel in its glory, and then, on the unhurried extension of its legs that were like walking fingers, it slowly ascended the adobe wall. Karuna turned to him, her eyes fractured with fear. She mouthed, Kill it, and he had to admire her in her extremity, because there was no speech, not even the faintest aspiration, just the drawn-back lips and the grimace of the unvoiced verb.

He shook his head no. She knew as well as he that all creatures were sacred and that the very worst papa attached to taking a life.

She flew to the drainboard where the washed and dried pot lay overturned, snatched it up and shoved it in his hand, making motions to indicate that he should capture the thing and take it out into the night. Far out. Over the next ridge, if possible.

And so he lifted the pot to the wall, but the tarantula, with its multiple eyes and the heat of its being, anticipated him, shooting down the adobe surface as if on a hurricane wind to disappear, finally, in the mysterious dark space beneath his wife’s bed.

Geshe

In the morning, at an hour he supposed might be something like 3:30 or 4:00, the first meditation session of the day began. Not that he’d slept much in any case, Karuna insisting, through gestures and the overtly physical act of pinching his upper arm between two fingers as fiercely tuned as any tarantula’s pedipalps, on switching beds, at least for the night. He didn’t mind. He welcomed all creatures, though lying there in the dark and listening to the rise and fall of his bride’s soft rasping snores he couldn’t help wondering just what exactly the tarantula’s message had been: I am the karmic representative of the arachnid world, here to tell you that all is well among us, which is why I’ve come to bite your wife. Hooray! Jabba-jabba-jabba!

Geshe Stephen, who’d awakened them both with a knuckle-rap at the door that exploded through the yurt like a shotgun blast, was long-nosed and tall, with a slight stoop, watery blue eyes and two permanent spots of moisture housed in his outsized nostrils. He was sixty-two years old and had ascended to the rank of Geshe — the rough equivalent of a doctor of divinity — through a lifetime of study and an unwavering devotion to the Noble Eightfold Path of the Gautama Buddha. He had twice before sought enlightenment in a regimen of silence and he was as serene and untouched by worldly worry as a breeze stirring the very highest leaves of the tallest tree on the tallest mountain. Before the retreat began, when the thirteen aspirants were building their domiciles and words were their currency, he’d delivered up any number of parables, the most telling of which — at least for this particular aspirant — was the story of the hermit and the monk.

They were gathered in the adobe temple, seated on the floor in a precise circle. Their robes lay about them like ripples on water. Sunlight graced the circular walls. “There was once a monk in the time of the Buddha who devoted his life to meditation on a single mantra,” the Geshe intoned, his wonderfully long and mobile upper lip rising and falling, his voice so inwardly directed it was like a sigh. “In his travels, he heard of an ancient holy man, a hermit, living on an island in a vast lake. He asked a boatman to row him out to the island so that he could commune with the hermit, though he felt in his heart that he had reached a level at which no one could instruct him further, so deeply was he immersed in his mantra and its million-million iterations. On meeting the hermit he was astonished to find that this man too had devoted himself to the very same mantra and for a number of years equal to his own, and yet when the hermit chanted it aloud the monk immediately saw that the hermit was deluded and that all his devotion had been in vain — he was mispronouncing the vowels. As a gesture of compassion, of karuna ”—and here the Geshe paused to look round the circle, settling on Karuna with her shining braid and her beautiful bare feet—“he gently corrected the hermit’s pronunciation. After which they chanted together for some time before the monk took his leave. He was halfway across the lake when the oarsman dropped both oars and stared wildly behind him, for there was the hermit, saying, ‘I beg your pardon, but would you be so kind as to repeat the mantra once more for me so that I can be sure I have it right?’ How had the hermit got there? He had walked. On the water.” Again the pause, again the Geshe’s eyes roaming round the circle to settle not on Karuna, but on him. “I ask you, Ashoka: what is the sound of truth?”