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

His hands trembled as he gripped the pencil and scribbled a note for Geshe Stephen, who was standing stooped over the bed, looking lost. We need to get the doctor.

The Geshe shrugged. There was no doctor. There was no telephone. The nearest town was Indio Muerto. They all knew that — they’d all signed on with that knowledge and its implications implanted like splinters in their brains.

What about the car?

Another shrug. The community’s only automobile was a boxy white Prius belonging to Geshe Stephen, which was housed beneath a formfitting cloth out back of his yurt where its shape wouldn’t tempt anyone from the path or interfere with the business at hand. Its wheels were up on blocks and the Geshe, in a first-day ceremony, had drained the fuel tank and removed the distributor cap as a symbolic gesture while the gathered aspirants looked rapturously on.

We need to get her to the hospital! he screamed across the page in angry block letters.

The Geshe nodded. He was in agreement. He dipped his shoulders, produced a tight grin that tapered to a grimace at both corners of his mouth. His expression said: But how?

Into that silence that was fraught with the shuffling of feet, bare and slippered both, the faint hiss of the stove and the sub-aural racket of neurons firing in brains that were no longer in touch with souls, no longer calm and meditative, neurons nudged from the path and straining to find their way back, there came a deep harsh ratcheting cry from the figure on the bed, from Karuna. They turned to her as one. Her face was twisted. Her leg was swollen to twice its size. The skin was black around the wound. They all looked shocked, Bodhi especially, shocked and offended, wondering why she hadn’t stifled that human noise with a fist, with a knuckle stuffed between her teeth. The silence had been broken, and it was Karuna who had broken it, consciously or not.

What he wanted to say — to roar so that they could have heard him all the way to Indio Muerto and back — was Christ, what is wrong with you people? Can’t you see she’s dying? But he didn’t. Habit, conditioning, the reflex of the inner path kept him silent, though he was writhing inside. This was attachment and that sigh was the sound of truth.

Your Boat

Later, after they’d all filed uselessly out, he built up the fire and sat beside her while her breathing slowed and accelerated and finally caught in her throat for the last time. It might have taken an hour or mere minutes, he couldn’t say. Into his head had come a new mantra, a jingle from a commercial on TV when he was growing up as a child of baseball fields and macadam basketball courts with their bent and rusted hoops and the intense otherworldly green of a New York summer, a green so multivalent and assertive it was like a promise of life to come. The jingle was for a toothpaste and it made its own promises, and yes, you did wonder where the yellow went when you brushed your teeth with Pepsodent. The new mantra sang in his head and danced a tarantella, double speed, triple, and then it became a dirge. Just before dawn he found himself running back even further, reaching down to take hold of the earliest mantra he could recall as it marched implacably across the field of his consciousness, beating out its own tempo with two pounding knees on the underside of a metal desk in the back corner of a just-arisen classroom, Row, row, row your — Om mani padme hum — Gently down the stream. Row, row, row — Om.

At dawn he got up from the bed and without looking behind him pushed open the door and walked out into the desert.

Dragonfly

In the desert, he walked without purpose or destination. He walked past the hill where his wife had found the discarded water bottle, past the place where the green truck had appeared on the horizon, beyond the mountain where he’d gathered ironwood and down into the hot bleached plain it gave onto. He needed a mantra, but he had none. Into his head it came, the mantra the Geshe had given him, but he couldn’t sustain it, his mind swept clear of everything now. The sun was the eye of God, awake and staring. After a while his feet seemed to desert him and he sat heavily in the lee of a jagged boulder.

What he awakened to were voices, human voices, speaking aloud. He blinked open his eyes and looked up into three terrified faces, man, woman and child, their wide straw hats framing their skulls like halos. They were speaking to him in a language he didn’t understand. They said, “Necesita usted socorro?” They said, “Tiene agua?” And then one of them, the woman, went down on her knees and held a plastic jug of water to his lips and he drank, but sparingly, and only because he knew they wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t stop talking, unless he did. He didn’t need water. He was beyond water, on a whole different path altogether. He reassured them with gestures, thanked them, blessed them, and then they were gone.

The sun moved till the projection of rock gave up its shade. His eyes closed but the lids burned till he opened them again and when he opened them the dragonfly was there. He studied it for a long while, the delicate interplay of its wings, the thin twisting calligraphy of its legs and the perfect jointed tube of its thorax. And what was its message? It had no message, he saw that now. It was merely a splinter of light, hovering for just a moment — just this moment — over the desert floor.

(2009)

Saturday, just after two, the sun a hot compress on her shoulders and scalp, the shrieks and catcalls of the children as they splash in the shallows a kind of symphony of the usual. Behind her, the sharp thwock of the dense black rubber ball as it rockets from the paddle and slaps the wall, regular as a heartbeat till one of the men miscalculates and it freezes in cardiac arrest on the tail of a stifled curse. One beat, two, and here it comes again: thwock. She’s thinking she should have brought her straw hat to the beach with her because she wouldn’t want a thin red line of sunburn etched into the parting of her hair, but she’ll worry about that later — or maybe not at all. She hasn’t worn her hat in a week or more now — she hates hats, hats are a thing of her mother’s day — and her tan is deep, even at her hairline. She’s wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses new from the drugstore yesterday and last year’s black one-piece, which is maybe a little tight around the hips and waist, but so what? She’s not on display here. This is her beach, her community, her lake. These are her friends and neighbors gathered in their beach chairs and sprawled across their fluffed-up towels and beach blankets with their paperbacks and newspapers and Hebrew National wieners. This is the peace at the center of life. This, this Saturday in July when her mind runs free all the way up to the arch of the sun and back and her only worry is to shift the straps on her shoulders and gloss her lips to keep them from drying out.

In the house, which she could see if she craned her neck to look back over her shoulder past the concession stand and the paddleball courts and the big open grassy field where teenage couples are strolling hand in hand and boys playing pickup baseball, is the refrigerator, new three years ago and as cluttered as if it had been there a century. In its cool dark depths are the steaks in a covered dish of honey-ginger marinade, the potato salad and coleslaw she put up after breakfast and the Rose’s lime juice and vodka for the gimlets. All is well. And so what if the warm shifting sand beneath her feet has to be trucked in every other year at the expense of the Kitchawank Colony Association, its hundreds of billions of individual grains disappearing into the high grass, washing into the lake, adhering to toes and arches and tanned sinewy ankles only to wind up on bathroom tiles and beneath the kitchen sink? It’s as essential as air, as the water itself: how could you have a beach without it?