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

Big horn, he said to himself. Sports/Marine. Big horn. Sports/Marine. And for that moment, for that night, it became his mantra.

Bup-Bup-Bah

That was a problem, a growing problem, as the days wore on. The mantra, that is, because as the Buddha taught, life means suffering and the origin of suffering is attachment and the cessation of suffering is only attainable by taking the Bodhisattva path, and yet his mantra became mangled in its eternal repetition until other mantras, meaningless phrases and snatches of tunes, blotted it out altogether. Big horn lasted a week or more. And then one chill afternoon, sitting buttock to buttock with Fawn Greenstreet — Bodhi — on one side of him and Karuna on the other, staring through the long-nosed ascetic face of Geshe Stephen and digging inward, shovelful by shovelful, bup-bup-bah came to him. It was a musical phrase, from a tune of the great and towering giant of inwardness, John Coltrane, a tune called “Bakai.” The horns chanted it rhythmically, bup-bup-bah, bup-bup-bah, with a rising inflection on the first bah and a descending on the second. He tried to fight it off with Om mani padme hum, tried with all his concentration and practice, but it wouldn’t budge. It was there, bup-bup-bah, bup-bup-bah, like a record stuck in the groove, repeating over and over, repeating endlessly. And worse: his proximity to Bodhi on one side and his own wife on the other, given the day and the cold of the ground and the warm inviting odor arising from them both— bup-bup-bah —was giving him an erection.

Twins

Another note, this one handed to him by Lama Katie after the morning cleanup in the temple and the incantatory scraping of the baked-on oatmeal from the depths of the communal cook pot. Lama Katie, squat, big-breasted, her hair the color of midnight in a coal mine and her eyes even darker, gave him a smile of encouragement that radiated down the two deeply etched lines defining her chin and into the billowing plumpness beneath. She knew the contents of the note: she’d written it herself. According to the date marked on the calendar secreted in a chest in the back corner of her yurt, the twins — his twins, Kyle and Kaden — were due to appear this evening for the first of their biannual visits. He should wait for them half a mile out, Lama Katie suggested, so that the noise and presence of the rental vehicle their mother was driving wouldn’t impede his fellow aspirants on their journey down the Bodhisattva path.

It was mid-afternoon, the winter sun bleached white and hanging motionless overhead, when he turned away from Karuna, who was shucking a bushel of corn delivered to them via muleback by one of the Geshe’s more worldly followers, plucked up a prayer wheel and went on down the dirt track to wait for them. The desert ran before him. Birds visited. Lizards. He sat on a rock and stared off in the distance, chanting beneath his breath, his mantra beating as steadily in the confines of his skull as the heart beating in his chest, the Coltrane riff retired to another life in another universe and the Buddha, the very Buddha, speaking through him.

The car was unremarkable, but strange for all that, its steel shell, the glint of the sun on its windshield, the twin plumes of dust trailing away behind it till it was there and motionless and he could see his ex-wife’s face, a shadow clenched in distaste, as the two boys, nine years old now — or were they ten? — spun out of the doors in a flurry of leaping limbs. He caught them in his arms and rocked them round him in a mad whirl, their voices like the cries of birds descending to a feast. He showed them the prayer wheel, let them spin it. Sat with them and listened to their ten thousand questions (When was he coming back? Where was Karuna? Could they see his yurt? Did he have a pet lizard? Could they have a pet lizard?) He found that his mimetic skills had blossomed and he answered them with his hands, his eyes, the cast of his mouth and the movement of his shoulders. Finally, when the novelty had begun to wear off and they started to look round them for a means of escape — he could only imagine what their mother must have been telling them about their father’s mental state on the long flight and longer drive out here — he produced a pad and pencil and wrote them a note.

What he was doing, he reiterated, was seeking the truth, prajna, wisdom. Liberation from the cycle of rebirth in which all beings are trapped. If one soul achieves liberation, that soul can guide others toward achieving it too. They crouched beside him, staring at the pad in his lap, their faces numb, eyes fixed on the words as if the words had no meaning. I’m doing it for you, he wrote, underlining fiercely, for you, for both of you.

“Mom too?” Kaden asked.

He nodded.

They gave each other a look, smiles flowering, and in the next instant they sprang up in a sudden delirium of joy and ran to her where she sat in the car, carrying the note like a gift of infinite worth, the paper fluttering in the breeze their moving limbs stirred in the air. She took it, her face a simulacrum of itself behind the reflective windshield, then ordered them into the car. There was the abrupt thunderclap of the engine turning over, the screech of the front end as the car wheeled round, pale miniature hands fluttering their goodbyes out the open window, and then, finally, silence.

Rattlesnake

The rattlesnake was itself a shadow, pooled there on the trodden dirt floor of the yurt as if shadows ruled and light was abject. He didn’t see it until it was too late. Karuna, her hair released from the tight braid and exerting a life and movement of its own, was washing her face over a pan of water he’d heated for her on the woodstove and he’d been watching her idly, remembering their first night together after they’d realized to their delight — karma, it was karma — that they lived no more than half an hour’s drive from each other through the dense hilly woodlands of Westchester County. They were in Georgia then, the last night of the conference, and they’d lingered over beers, exchanging information, and she was so stunned by the coincidence that she’d slid away from the table in a slow sinuous dance, then taken him by the hand and led him back to her room.

When the snake bit her just above the ankle, where the swell of her calf rose from the grip of the heavy white sweatsock she wore as protection against the evening chill, it was just doing what it was designed to do. There was warmth in the yurt. It had come to the warmth. And she, inadvertently, had stepped on it. She didn’t cry out, not even then, not even when the snake snapped back into the shadows as if it were attached to a spring, but just looked down in bewilderment at her bare calf and the two neat spots of blood that had appeared there in commemoration of the puncture wounds. He didn’t think of what the snake’s message had been, not yet, not before Karuna stretched herself out on the bed and he twisted the tourniquet round her calf and her eyes fluttered and the fire hissed in the stove and the leg began to swell and darken and he took the air-horn to the door of the yurt and annihilated the silence in a single screaming stroke.

The snake’s message — and he knew it even as Dairo and Bodhi flew up out of the darkness with faces like white darting bats, Geshe Stephen and the others not far behind — was this: I am the karmic representative of the reptile world and all is not well among us. There is nothing inside and no cessation of pain. Hooray! Jabba-jabba-jabba!

Without Sadness

A tangle of hands moved like thought, juggling mute phrases and tracing the edges of panic. Everyone was gesturing at once, the yurt shrunk round them, the snake vanished, the fire dying in the stove. Karuna’s eyes had stopped blinking. She seemed to be in a deep trance, gone as deep as any soul can go, focused on the rising swirls of the ceiling and the circular hole that gave onto the night and the stars and the dead black face of the universe above.