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

Ashoka

His name, his former name, the name on his birth certificate and his New York State driver’s license, was Jeremy Clutter. He was forty-three years old, with a B.A. in fine arts (he’d been a potter) and an M.A. in Far Eastern studies, a house in Yorktown which now belonged to his first wife, Margery, and a middle-aged paunch of which he was — or had been — self-conscious. He’d met Sally at a week-long Buddhist seminar in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and she’d pointed out to him that the Buddha himself had sported a paunch, at the same time touching him intimately there. In his former life he’d made a decent income from a dot-com start-up, thepotterswheel.com, that not only survived the ’01 crash but had become robust in its wake. Money built his yurt. Money paid off Margery. Money embellished the Geshe’s grace. And the Geshe gave him his true name, Ashoka, which when translated from the Sanskrit, meant “Without Sadness.”

Ironwood

The second morning’s meditation session, like all the ensuing ones, was held out of doors on a slightly pitched knob of blasted dirt surrounded by cactus and scrub. There was a chill to the air that belied the season, but to an aspirant they ignored it. He chanted his mantra inside his head till it rang like a bell and resolved to bring a jacket with him tomorrow. Geshe Stephen kept them there till the sun came hurtling over the mountains like a spear of fire and then he rose and dismissed them. Bowing in his holy, long-nosed way, the Geshe took Ashoka gently by the arm and held him there until the others had left. With a steady finger, the finger of conviction, the Geshe pointed to a dun heap of dirt and rock in the intermediate distance and then pantomimed the act of bending to the ground and gathering something to him. Ashoka didn’t have a clue as to what the man was trying to impart. Geshe Stephen repeated the performance, putting a little more grit and a little less holiness into it. Still, he didn’t understand. Did he want him, as an exercise, a lesson, to measure the mountain between the space of his two arms extended so as to reduce it to its essence? To dirt, that is?

Finally, exasperated, the Geshe pulled a notepad and pencil from his pocket and scrawled his redemptive message: Go up to the mountain and gather ironwood for the winter fires in the temple. Then report — report, that was the word he used— to the temple kitchen to peel potato and daikon for the communal stew.

Flypaper

The days stuck to him like flypaper. The moment was all there was. He went inward. Still, very gradually, the days became unglued, loosening and flapping in the wind that swept the desert in a turmoil of cast-off spines and seed pods. Nights came earlier, mornings later. One morning, after group meditation, the Geshe pressed a note into his hand. The note asked — or no, instructed — him to meet the water truck that came bimonthly from the nearest town, Indio Muerto, which lay some thirty-five miles across the motionless plain.

The truck, painted an illusory forest green, appeared as a moving speck in the distance, working haltingly over the ruts and craters of what was once and occasionally a dirt road. He sat cross-legged in the infertile soil and watched it coming for what might have been hours or even days, all sense of time and the transient rush of things foreign to him now. There would come a moment when the truck would be there before him, he knew that, and so he spun a prayer wheel and chanted inwardly until it was in fact there, planted before him and obscuring the horizon as if it had sprung up out of the ground.

He saw that there was a new driver to replace the expressionless old man who’d come in the past, a lean monkey-faced boy of nineteen or twenty with tattooed arms and a cap reversed on his head, and that the kid had brought his similarly tattooed and capped squeeze along for the desolate ride across the waste. No problem there. Ashoka didn’t begrudge him. In fact, as he watched them climb down from the cab of the truck he couldn’t help remembering a time when he and Margery had driven across country together in a car that had no radio and how Margery had said afterward that he’d never shut up for one instant the whole way, singing and laughing and spinning out one story after another, because for him, at least in those days, conversation wasn’t about truth or even communication — it was there for its entertainment value, pure and simple.

“So, uh,” the kid began, startling him out of his reverie — or no, shocking him with the impact of those two syllables spoken aloud and reverberating like thunderclaps—“where you want me to pump it?”

He pressed his hands to his ears. His face reddened. In that moment, rising, he caught a glimpse of himself in the big blazing slab of the truck’s side-view mirror and it was as if he’d been punched in the chest. What he saw reflected there was the exact likeness of one of the pretas, the restive spirits doomed to parch and starve because of their attachments to past lives, his hair white as death and flung out to every point of the compass, his limbs like sticks, face seared like a hot dog left too long on the grill.

“Whoa,” the kid said, even as the girl, her features drawn up in a knot of fear and disgust, moved into the protection of his arm, “you all right there?”

What could he say? How could he begin to explain?

He produced a gesture to wave him off. Another for reassurance. And then, turning so gradually he could have been a tree growing toward the light, he lifted a hand and pointed, shakily, to the water tank, where it floated on wooden struts behind the two whitewashed yurts that housed Geshe and Lama respectively and rose like twin ice-cream cones from the dead blasted earth.

Air-horn

Everyone in the community, all thirteen of them plus Geshe Stephen and Lama Katie and including their nearest neighbors, the former Forest and Fawn Greenstreet (now Dairo and Bodhi respectively), had an air-horn. For emergencies. If there was an accident, an illness, a fire, the air-horns were to be used to summon help. He spent a long while each day in contemplation of the one he and Karuna had been given, for what reason he couldn’t say. Perhaps because it represented a link to the renounced world, a way out. Or because it had a pleasing shape. Or because it was the only object of color, real color, in the yurt.

Karuna was at the cutting board, dicing cucumbers. She’d lost weight. But she was firm and lean and beautiful, not that it mattered, and he was enjoying the sight of her there, her elbows flashing beneath her robes that pulled back to reveal the pink thermal longjohns beneath. Outside it was dark. There was a fire in the woodstove. Karuna’s elbows flashed. Earlier, she’d been trying to tell him something of her day, of what she’d experienced on her walk out into the desert, but he couldn’t really catch much of it, despite the fact that she was leagues ahead of him when it came to charades. Something about a hillside and a moment and something she’d seen there, tracks, he thought, and a discarded water bottle. He’d smiled and nodded, feigning comprehension, because he liked the way her eyes flared and jumped and sank back again, liked the purse of her mouth and the ghost of her breasts bound up and held tight in the thermal weave that fit her like a new skin.

These thoughts were unhealthy, he knew that. And as he watched her now, he couldn’t help feeling even more unhealthy — aroused, even — and so he shifted his gaze to the air-horn, where it stood on an adobe shelf like a work of art. And it was a work of art. The milk-white canister topped with a red rooster’s comb of plastic which was to be depressed in an emergency, the matching red lettering (SPORTS/MARINE, and below it, BIG HORN) and the way the sound waves were depicted there as a flaring triangle of hard red slashes.