Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“Coming,” Mike says in a stifled voice.

There’s never very much and I’ve almost done it, though my unit’s out and not easily crammed back in tight quarters. I crouch, knees-in to the door frame, piss circling my shoes. I cup my two hands, nose to the door glass the way Mr. Adile peered out from the liquor store window, and stare fiercely in with all my might — dick out, unattended and drafty. I’m hoping my posture and the unlikelihood that I’m actually doing what I’m doing will suppress all prowl-car attention, and that I won’t be forced by someone shining a hot seal beam to turn around full-flag and set in motion all I’d set in motion, which would be more than I could put up with. Warm urine aroma wafts upward. My poor flesh has recoiled, my heart slowed by the cold pane against my forehead and hands. The Book Nook interior is silent, dark. My breathing shallows. I wait. Count seconds…5, 8, 11, 13, 16, 20. I hear, but don’t see, the cruiser surge and speed up, feel the motor-thrill and the radio-crackle pulse into my hams. And then it’s past. Mike, my Tibetan lookout, says, “They’re gone. Okay. No worries.” I tuck away, zip up quick, take a step back, feel cold on my sweated, battered neck, cheek and ears. I might be okay now. Might be okay. No worries. Clear sailing. All set.

M ike sits in motionless, ecclesiastical silence while I drive us home — Route 1 to 295 to NJ 33, skirt the Trenton mall tie-ups, then around to bee-line 195, to the Garden State toward Toms River. Cold rain has started again, then stopped, then started. The temperature’s at 31, the road surface possibly coated with invisible ice. My suede shoes, I regret, smell hotly of urine.

Mike would’ve understood little of events at the Appleseed, only the last part, which seemed (mysteriously) concerned with him. And like any good Buddhist, he’s decided the less made of negativity, the better. For all I know, he could be meditating. Anger is just attachment to the cycle of birth and death, while we live in thick darkness that teaches that all phenomena (such as myself) have inherent existence, and we must therefore distinguish between a rope and a snake or else be a dirty vase turned upside down and unable to gain knowledge. This was all in the book Mike left on my desk after my Mayo procedure. The Road to the Open Heart. Giving it to me represents his belief that I basically appreciate such malarkey, and that one of the reasons we get along so well and that he’s become a fireball real estate agent is, again, that — due to my being “pretty spiritual” in a secular, pedestrian, all-American sort of way — we see many things the same. Namely, that few outcomes are completely satisfactory, it’s better to make people happy — even if you have to lie — rather than to harm them and make them sad, and we should all be trying to make a contribution.

The Road to the Open Heart is a big, showy coffee-table slab chocked full of idealized, consciousness-expanding color photographs of Tibet and snowy mountains and temples and shiny-headed teenage monks in yellow-and-red outfits, plus plenty of informal snapshots of the Dalai Lama grinning like a happy politician while meeting world leaders and generally having the time of his life. Supposedly, the little man-god wrote the whole book himself, though Mike’s admitted he probably didn’t have time to “write” write it — one of the lies that make you feel better. Though it doesn’t matter since the book is full of his most important teachings boiled down to bite-size paragraphs with easy-to-digest chapter headings even somebody with cancer could memorize, which was what the monks were doing: “The Path to Wisdom.” “The Question We Should All Ask Ourselves.” “The Sweet Taste of Bodhicitta.” “The Middle Way.” Mike left a bookmark at page 157, where the diminutive holiness talks ominously about “death and clear light,” followed by some more upbeat formulations about the “earth constituent, the water constituent, the fire constituent, and the wind constituent,” followed by another photograph of the very view you’ve just been promised — if you’re spiritual enough: an immaculate dawn sky in autumn. At this moment, the book’s in a stack on my bedside table, and on one of these last balmy autumn days I intend to take it down to the ocean and send it off, since in my view the Lama’s teachings all have the ring of the un-new, over-parsed and vaguely corporate about them — which, of course, is thought to be good, and a famous tenet of the Middle Way. What I needed, though, post-Mayo, was the New and Completely Unfamiliar Way. To me, the DL’s wisdom also seemed only truly practicable if your intention was to become a monk and live in Tibet, where these things apparently come easy, whereas I just wanted to go on being a real estate agent on the Jersey Shore and figure out how to get around a case of prostate cancer.

Mike and I did talk about The Road to the Open Heart in the office one day while combing through some damage-deposit receipt forms to identify skippers — although our talk mainly concerned my son Ralph and was to the point that there are many mysteries and phenomena that can’t be apprehended through sense or reason, and that Ralph might have a current existence as a mystery. It was then that he told me about young people who die young becoming masters who teach us about impermanence — which, as I said, I can buy, the Permanent Period not entirely withstanding.

Still, you can take the Middle Way only so far. Asserting yourself may indeed lead to angry disappointment — the DL’s view — and anger only harms the angry and karma produces bad vibes in this life and worse ones in the next, where you could end up as a chicken or a professor in a small New England college. But the Middle Way can just as easily be the coward’s way out. And based on what Mike probably heard back in the Johnny Appleseed, I’d feel better about him if he’d get in a lather about being called a coolie, insist we turn around, drive back to Haddam and kick some Lester ass, then head home laughing about it — instead of just sitting there in the reflected green dashboard glow composed as a little monkey under a Bodhi tree. East meets West.

I’m still feeling a little drunk, in addition to being roughed up, and may not be driving my best. My hands are cold and achy. My knees stiff. I’m gripping the wheel like a ship’s helm in a gale. Twice I’ve caught myself broxing the be-jesus out of my unprotected molars. And twice when I took my eyes off the red taillight smear and the shoe-polish black highway, I found I was going ninety-five — which explains Mike’s leaden silence. He’s been scared shitless since Imlaystown, and is in a frozen fugue state, from which he’s picturing the radiant black near-attainment as I send us skidding off into a cedar bog. I dial it back to seventy.

Today has gone not at all how I intended, although I’ve done nothing much more than what I planned — with the obvious exceptions of the hospital being detonated, having Ann ask me to marry her and getting into a moronic fight with Bob Butts. It’s loony, of course, to think that by lowering expectations and keeping ambitions to a minimum we can ever avert the surprising and unwanted. Though the worst part, as I said, is that I’ve cluttered my immediate future with new-blooming dilemmas exactly like young people do when they’re feckless and thirty-three and too inexperienced to know better. I wouldn’t have admitted it, but I may still possess a remnant of the old feeling I had when I was thirty-three: that a tiny director with a megaphone, a beret and jodhpurs is suddenly going to announce “Cut!” and I’ll get to play it all again — from right about where I crossed the bridge at Toms River this morning. This is the most pernicious of anti-Permanent Period denial and life sentimentalizing, which only lead you down the road to more florid self-deceptions, then dump you out harder than ever when the accounts come due, which they always do. It also suggests that I may not be up for controversy the way I used to be, and may have lapsed into personal default mode.