Rudolph Wurlitzer - Slow Fade

The next afternoon he went to see Byron. He found him in the backyard near the vegetable garden shooting a basketball at a hoop with a wooden backboard and no net. He was wearing sneakers and cut-off jeans, and he wasn’t as Walker remembered him. He had gained weight around the middle and his hair was cut short. Despite his labored breathing, he looked like he knew what he was doing on the court. Walker sat down and watched until finally Byron came over.

“Clementine’s brother?” Byron asked. “I thought it was you. Although you seem changed. But aren’t we all?” He held out his hand and Walker got up and shook it. “Did you see Yeshe down there at the shop or was he off somewhere watching the World Series?”

“I saw him.”

“You’re one of the few. He usually won’t see anyone. I suppose he recognized you.”

“I guess so, although I sure didn’t recognize him.”

“Well, no. He’s trying out something new. Cutting loose from the old ways. At least on the surface. If I wasn’t such an old, used-up disciple of his, he would have gotten rid of me long ago. He doesn’t even let me translate for him. But forget all that. I’m sorry about your sister. What happened to you, that you didn’t show up?”

“It’s too long a story.”

“Tell it anyway.”

“My wife died on the road and I flipped out and ended up in Benares stripped of everything and wandering around like some crazy American sadhu. Somehow I made it to Darjeeling and then up to Kathmandu, where I stayed in a Buddhist monastery outside of town. I just collapsed there, not doing anything but sleeping and eating. After six months I found my way home through Thailand and Hong Kong. I didn’t learn about Clementine until yesterday from Lama Yeshe.”

While Walker was talking Byron kept glancing at the upstairs window where his wife sat watching them. He waved tentatively but she didn’t wave back.

“She’s upset,” Byron said. “We almost broke up last night on account of you, or rather Clementine. A few weeks ago she stumbled on some letters from Clementine when she was up in the Kulu valley. Your arrival opened up the whole thing again.”

“But that’s yesterday’s news.”

“They were amazing letters. They exposed a capacity for intimacy in me that my wife didn’t know existed.”

He picked up the basketball and threw up a long one-hander which missed the basket and the entire backboard. “Both Clementine and I were going through separate crises. She was scared and isolated and having experiences that she couldn’t control or understand. I felt stuck and burned out with India and wanted to get back before I became too strange and out of touch. For a long time we were each other’s only witnesses.”

“Can’t Yeshe set your wife straight?”

“She won’t have anything to do with him. He doesn’t care, of course. It’s a mystery to me how I got involved with anyone who is so hostile to what I’m doing. But why go into that? I suppose you want to know how Clementine died?”

Walker nodded.

Byron put on a sweat shirt that was lying on the ground. “Let’s get out of here. I can’t stand to see her up there blasting me with her rage and suffering.”

They walked around to the van, and Byron directed Walker to a tavern ten blocks away. They ordered beers, and Byron told him about Clementine. It was the first time he had told any of it, and often he paused and stared down at the table or took a long sip of beer.

“Technically she died of pneumonia, but a lot of her systems had already given out and if it hadn’t been her lungs it would have been something else. There had been signals about her health before, but she had always ignored them. We even fought about it, and I accused her of being impulsive about death. And it was true, she was fatalistic and passive and totally unprotective toward herself, which got her into trouble when she went off alone, which she often did. She took all kinds of chances, eating anything, trusting anyone, going anywhere. Yeshe was always scolding her about being undiscriminating and having the wrong view about service and sacrifice. She was doing a complicated practice offering up her body to all the sacred sources of refuge. Part of the visualization involves severing your skull from your body and then placing the remaining corpse inside a skull cauldron and offering it up. Clementine went for it like she was literally going to offer herself up. She was like a moray eel. Once she started chewing she wouldn’t let go until she cut it right through to the bone. You almost had to sedate her to get her to stop. She had too much diligence, too much ambition, and she was as vain as a rock-’n’-roll star the way she set about trying to become enlightened. It was as if the more she believed all the brochures about Nirvana and all-encompassing wisdom-mind, the more knotted and twisted she became. I’ve been like that. One of those bushy-tailed pilgrims endlessly seeking until I got reduced by my own mind, which was inevitable, given my attachment to results. Since then I don’t take anything for granted. It’s just one step at a time now. One day at a time. This is a chair, this is a table, this is a hand, this is a story. It wasn’t like that with your sister. Nothing was ever concrete. Nothing balanced. Everything offered up. A kind of reverse cannibalism. She had so much self-hate, but why get stopped there? What was so ferocious about her was the way she was trying to be holy. She was always worried that she wasn’t authentic, that she was just another deluded seeker from the West strung out on spiritual materialism. Every morning before dawn she would go down to the river and buy all the fish that were half dead and set them loose in the river. She couldn’t get enough of lepers and mutilated creatures, as if she were trying to take on the afflictions. On top of that, she was losing weight and beginning to look consumptive and her responses to people were too intense and compassionate, if you know what I mean? She was also having out-of-the-body experiences. Anything would set her off. A sound. Her meditation. The flight of a bird. Making love. We had to pull back on sex because she would often disappear into some other zone. She had to be grounded by a meal or her period or something on her mind. And even then she was a bliss junkie. Any sign of unity and she was gone. Once I thought she had crossed over altogether and I had to slap her and throw cold water on her. She thought of taking vows, of perhaps becoming a nun or going on a three-year retreat. More and more she felt the need to live inside a stricter set of prohibitions. But there were other problems, too.”

Byron sat back and ordered another beer and then went to the men’s room. On the way back he put a quarter into the pool table and shot down a rack of balls while Walker looked out the window at the parking lot. When Byron finally sat down he drank his beer straight down and ordered another one before he began again.

“So when Yeshe told Clementine to stop taking herself so seriously she took that as a rejection and took off for Sri Lanka. She was always taking off but she always came back. They had a lot of misunderstandings. . Look, the thing is, right about then they started to get involved. It was very intense. He was Lama Yeshe in those days as well as being married, and it upset a lot of people. Including me, of course. I was jealous and several times tried to leave, but Yeshe refused. He simply kept me there. And he made us all look at each other without mercy. To leave I would have had to give him up as my teacher. Because there were a lot of other things going on as well. Yeshe’s relationship to his wife, Clementine’s spiritual crises, my own breakdown. Not to mention Clementine’s being so disturbed about your father. His rejection drove her into a very extreme place and she was consumed with guilt as well as real boneshaking relief for finally getting rid of him. I don’t want to run him down in some kind of ignorant way, but he did cut her loose like he was limbing a dead branch. To top it all off, she managed to get pregnant. She didn’t know whose child it was, mine or Lama Yeshe’s. There was no question about having it, given the precepts that we were all committed to, and Yeshe decided that she should go off to the mountains with me and we would all three take responsibility for the child and that we would think about it in a positive way. Clementine and I got into a terrible fight. I couldn’t stand Yeshe’s posture of holy omniscience and the way he kept shoving his equanimity in my face, although in retrospect I can see that he was having his own problems with his wife, not to mention the Tibetan community, which was properly scandalized. But I felt betrayed and hurt, and my whole relationship with him as my teacher was in question. I couldn’t see what benefit this soap opera had for any of us. And Clementine had given herself up to a holy mother role and that annoyed and isolated me even more. When I told her she was just another example of shallow mysticism, she went off and left again, going up to the Kulu valley for a three-month retreat.