Bruce Wagner - I Met Someone

She had an aggressively peculiar, somewhat archaic manner of speaking that both confounded and charmed. What was it about her — about both of them, really — that spellbound? It dawned on him that he was attracted to Devi physically. That occasionally happened with women; once or twice he’d even followed through, to mixed results. He wrote about the encounters in his journal, under the chapter heading “Miss Adventures & Other Ms.-haps.”

“We were interrupted in the park,” she was saying. “You didn’t think you’d hear from me again, did you.”

“That’s true. I didn’t.”

“If you had the energy — if you cultivated what you already have —you probably would have known we were fated to meet.”

“O-kay,” he drawled, sweetnaturedly.

“You might even have known that this restaurant happens to be very close to where my teacher and I are staying.”

“Interesting! And who is your teacher?”

“My guru!” she said, as if he were being silly. “My ‘Sir.’”

“And what does he teach?” he asked, playing a little game of pretend that the Scotsman wasn’t present.

“How to cultivate energy.”

“Oh, I see . Well, I’d very much like to meet him.”

“I think that can be arranged. He’s right here at this table.”

“I had a vague suspicion,” said Jeremy, smiling at the “Sir.” It was just the kind of bizarre back-and-forth he craved. He’d had his share of exotic encounters, back in his salad days.

“My name is Devi.”

“I know that!”

“My teacher says it is of utmost importance to state one’s name before one speaks… of certain things.”

The oversized gentleman was eating, which seemed to be his favorite (perhaps only) diversion. Using a tiny fork that looked positively dollhouse-scale in his hands — mitts so large, swollen, and slow-moving they reminded Jeremy of Mickey Mouse’s gloves in the Macy’s parade — he was daintily in the midst of removing clams from their shells. There was numinous glee in the extraction; the outré smile of a mystic never left him. He began to wonder if the fellow was retarded and the girl possibly dangerous. He decided he didn’t give a shit. It was all too deliciously outlandish and intriguing.

“I’ve been traveling with Sir for seven years now. My daughter would be entering puberty, if she had lived; more of that later. Myself, I was born and raised in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Father was a physician, Mother a housewife. I had a normal childhood, as they say. My single hobby was guitar. Laura Nyro was my favorite — I was a precocious student of the sixties! I was absolutely possessed by her ‘Wedding Bell Blues.’ I was all about the bells! (More of that later too.) I was extremely self-disciplined and drew consistently high marks. My plan was to enter medical school and join my father’s practice. I was completely devoted to him — devoted to them both.

“As I was saying, my childhood was uneventful. Nothing exceptional happened and nothing exceptional in middle school either. I never rocked the boat. I was prudent in my daily life, blessed with a cautious but cheerful disposition. On graduating twelfth grade, I was accepted to Loyola and moved to Chicago. Leaving home was hard but my parents insisted. They wanted me to have a fine education. As you may know, Loyola was a Jesuit school — I wasn’t at all religious and of course no demands were made in that regard. I was at the top of the honors list. I worked weekends in an E.R., helping the nurses as much as I was allowed. It was the happiest time of my life, until my second year of premed, when Mother died.”

Jeremy hadn’t expected that in the laundry list.

“She must have been so young!” he exclaimed, a little too eagerly. The strangeness of it all had gotten the better of him. “What happened?”

“A house fire. She was forty-five. If I’d known that her death was only the beginning of my misfortunes, I would have put a bullet through my head. But of course I didn’t know then what I know now .”

“And what do you know now?”

“That it’s the worst greed to yearn for a different destiny than what we’re given. It’s a sin, and the tragic flaw of man.”

Then just like that, her monologue ended, as if turned off at the spigot. The Scotsman stuffed his face, oblivious. Jeremy had to admit that “Sir”’s glacial uninterestedness, his not-thereness , was immensely appealing. On second thought, there seemed to be a great presence behind it.

At this time in his life, feelings of doubt concerning his own judgment pursued Jeremy with fair regularity, and it didn’t take much — say, impulsively inviting two freaks he’d met at the park to a fancy watering hole — to lead him to that most inane of philosophical questions, “Who am I?” (With its popular corollary, And what the fuck am I doing here? ) Perhaps he intuited that Devi had the answer, or at least might be inclined to point him in the general direction.

She must have uncrossed a leg because Jeremy heard the tinkle — more a hollow clank — of a bell. He used its declaration to deflect a looming discomfort. “What are those all about?”

“They were a gift from my Sir.”

“But they’re so heavy! I saw the marks they made on your ankle. And people stare…”

“Do you know the poem ‘The Bells’?” she interjected — as if to dismiss his inconsequential remarks.

“Poe?”

“That’s right. When I first read it, I nearly blacked out. I’d just turned twelve. Suddenly, into that very ordinary life I described, came something abnormal, unruly , something fabulous, forbidding, exalted! To say I memorized it would be the palest truth; I embodied it, it resided in every cell. I breathed those stanzas, they coursed through my veins! That poem was the prayer that set me off to sleep — I recited it in my sleep, and awakened to its words upon my lips. During the day it was uttered with each breath, as pilgrims do their guru-given mantras. But why ? I asked myself that just once and got no answer. For when one has a first love, there can be no interrogation.

“They told us in school that ‘The Bells’ was about a man who met his first love. He married her then witnessed her death by fire, and perished of grief soon after. The poem tells the story of what happened to my parents; it prefigured their deaths. I never thought of myself as morbid, but there’s darkness in all children and some of that Gothic metaphor took hold years before it came true. Something else mesmerized me, though, less earthbound — I was like a young shepherdess, following the sound of the bells of a lost animal, one she thought was hers yet belonged to nothing and no one. That celestial sound belonged to Silence! My teacher told me that the instant I encountered the poem, I unwittingly entered the world of the esoteric, for which I was well-suited and predisposed.

“I believe that if Mother hadn’t died, I would have fulfilled my goal and become a doctor, only to abandon the profession for the path of the seeker . (But by then, it may have been too late.) My Sir told me I was in search of one thing only since I was small—‘the only thing worthy of discovery’—Silence. He said true Silence resides everywhere, except in one place: the very bells that seekers insist upon ringing! ‘Bells entertain the monkeys,’ he likes to say. (He’s very funny, you know.) Many times my guru has told me that when he sees the energetic bodies of human beings with his third eye , they uncannily resemble the shape of a bell. The Source formed us that way — the Source, who delights in that first wild clanging of shrieks that pour from the throat when we’re born — the Source, who cries out joyously at life’s end too, when the scream of Self and its tintinnabulation of vanities, having rung, pealed, tolled, tickled, tinkled, and gonged its alarum on our breath for a lifespan, returns to the Silence whence it came. So you see, it isn’t at all true one can’t unring a bell. We are all bells, yearning to be unrung — monkeys craving Silence!