Rick Moody - The Diviners

“Tape my ankles, too, when I —” and he rolls onto his stomach, the bow pose, with one arm pinioned under him, left over from the binding, “and then you can sit on top of me and you can do a correction. On top of me.”

The instructor must know the shape of the cosmic being. The shape of the cosmic being is the guise of the star of the action film, star of distant light, star of the eternal cosmos, and the yogini is a drinker of the light of the cosmic star of the action film. And she kneels over him, reaches in through his shorts, massages his buttocks, as if he were clay and she the potter, and then she shoves his ankles together and starts circumnavigating these ankles with the standard-issue American masking tape, twice around, three times around. And then she yanks his workout shorts down, without even asking, there he is, the cosmic being, in the office of the False Guru, extremities taped, and his shorts around his ankles, and he’s a cosmic being who has a most fleshy lingam, and he needs something more, something, in order to perform the gesture of the lingam. It has to be real suffering for him to be able to do it, something that increases the wattage of the prana. And this is what he says to Nora: “Can’t you put some fingers up me? Could you maybe just put a few fingers up me or something?”

Which, as has been explained above, is the digital exploration of the mula bandha, root contraction, which conquers old age and death. It would be better, of course, if these things did not need to be explained. When the breath is held, the prana is still, and so the yogin holds the breath, and the prana is still, and there is the digital examination of the mula bandha, which is a part of the tantric exploration, which is the moving of the lingam without allowing the seed to fall. And so we have again the placement of the mouth of the yogin at the yoni of the yogini, which is the gesture of the beginning of the worship of the yoni, where a thousand petals crowd the mind of the yogin, and the deities dwell in the subtle centers, and what could be better, for the lingam once again desires to perform the lingam gesture, and the yogin thinks now of all the crowding images of humility that are upon him, on the carpet of the False Guru, under the tapestry with the mandala upon it, the image of humility in which he could perhaps be on the desktop of the False Guru, with his mouth against the yoni of the yogini, and then even more than this there is the expelled cleansing of the yoni, bahish-krita-dhauti, perhaps there could be an expelled cleansing of the yoni onto the yogin, for the yogin believes that his practice could improve significantly in the presence of this magnificence of the yogini, because the life force lies in knowing these things, in doing all things with the body of the yogini, the things that he has not yet done, or at least has not done recently, and what about gajakarani, or elephant technique, perhaps the yogini could teach him of this ritual cleansing, because if anything, the yogin needs cleansing, needs to be cleaned of the wastes, mucus, gas, and acidity, there is a shortage of cleanliness, and he presses his mouth against her, and there is the bellows breath. The yogini is practicing the bellows breath, and then perhaps the yogini is performing the humming bee breath, which stretches back to the centuries before the birth of the Buddha, the breath that is indicative of tantric ascension, and that is when the yogin asks about the amorali, reminding the yogini that we need not think of amorali as consuming something unclean, like solid wastes, because the practice of amorali, the yogin thinks, is about immortality, except that he uses more coarse language, to ask about it, and he asks about it, because the drinking of the urine will be of the midstream, for the midstream has no bile in it but rather hormones, enzymes, and other by-products that are a surfeit, a supplement to the harvesting that the body does, and therefore it will be —

“What did you say?” she asks.

The yogin asks again.

“Are you asking what I’m thinking you’re asking?”

“It’s not going to be messy,” he says. “I’ll be careful.”

“Are you kidding me? Who do you think —”

It’s so sudden! The way the yogini performs the pose known as smacking the face, after which she makes her exit. Drawing up her workout clothes as though she is shuttering her own personal lingerie shop. The class was going so well, there was so much admirable work being done by the yogin, who really is getting close to being able to do a split, and to be here making this completely admirable progress, and to be entirely willing to pay the yogini as much riches as she desires, and then to have her perform the smacking pose while he’s in the middle of an extremely demanding asana, well, it’s inexplicable, and it’s sad, and, moreover, the lingam is limp on the carpet of the floor of the office of the False Guru, and his limbs are all taped up, his limbs are bound, and he is wearing no shorts. His shorts are around his ankles. He is wearing a loosely fitting T-shirt, and the room smells as if it was sweated through by professional wrestlers, and he is having a little trouble getting onto his knees, and there are pens and pencils that he swept off the desk in his enthusiasm, and they are on the floor and he has made a real mess, as always. He needs to get to a pair of scissors. He’s sliding awkwardly to the floor and attempting to loft himself somehow onto his feet so he can reach backward with his bound hands. He uses his head on the seat of the desk chair to lever himself up. He hops several times, closer to the desk. He’s fervent in his wish that there are some scissors in the desk of the False Guru that he can use to cut the tape, and then he can be on his way.

This is what is called the after-loneliness of the Adulterous Union. It was loneliness that launched him upon this difficult pose and it is loneliness that will accompany him onto the street. He is lonely, enfeebled, not like a proper yogin, not like a proper star of the firmament. He is not like the wandering mendicants of yogic practice, who withstood loneliness for two thousands of years. He is not a meditator in a cave of loneliness. Why can’t an actor in matinée films with a beautiful wife withstand loneliness for even a day, for even twelve hours?

Once freed, having torn out a surfeit of wrist and ankle hairs, he flees past the front desk of the ashram, past the battery of attractive employees at the console, checking people in, and his cheeks are flushed as he heads east, on foot, into the East Village, waving off a guy on crutches, a true mendicant, who recognizes him from Single Bullet Theory or some other action film from his oeuvres complets. Thaddeus shouts a half-hearted hello to the mendicant and to Asian tourists on St. Mark’s place, “Hey! Thanks for your support!” until he is below the window of one Annabel Duffy, and it is dusk, in November, and he is yelling at the window of Annabel Duffy, “Come on down! Hey! Let me in! Let me in! It’s me! Let me in! I haven’t smoked in at least seven hours! I won’t smoke in your apartment, and I’ll be nice to your cat, and I’ll buy. . stuff! I’ll go home with you for the holidays! I swear!” But there’s no answer, no way in, as if the after-loneliness we have just mentioned is a condition of the improper practice of the hatha yoga, which is only exacerbated by the presence in the world of laundromats, shuttered television repair shops, half-abandoned shopping malls, feral cats. A neighbor calls out her window that he should please shut the fuck up, “And your movies are not good.” He can see the arm of the woman, the silhouette of her arm, as she backs away from the window and pulls the blind. The glimmer of a bracelet.

The cell phone rings as he’s heading back toward Avenue B. His agent. There’s a great opportunity here, his agent is saying, a really fabulous opportunity, in a picture that’s getting set up at one of the large studios, called Assassins. Big-budget picture. Set in the Middle East. He would get to ride camels and sleep under the stars in the desert and see a politically unstable part of the world, and it will be directed by that director of action classics, Waldo Schmeltz, the guy who made the one about the Amsterdam hookers who are informants during the Nazi occupation.