Edward Aubyn - On the Edge

The reason she couldn’t find her way to compassion was the repulsiveness of the display. It seemed to be divorced from direct suffering and to spring on the one hand from a simple rage that Mother Meera was getting so much attention, and on the other from a veil of piety suggesting that only she, Wasserworks, understood the exact nature of the sacrifice the Divine Mother had made by descending into the charnel house of human incarnation.

Crystal tried to persuade herself that this was the core of suffering, the suffering of self-centredness, and that it too required compassion, but she only grew more exasperated. Wasserworks’s strategy of draining attention towards herself was bad enough, but the dissonance of her calamitous expression as she looked at darshan was like going to a concert with someone who stoutly whistles another tune during the performance. Crystal tried all the usual self-accusations to discover why she was so annoyed by this woman, but finally had to give up and be annoyed by somebody else.

Immediately behind Wasserworks, and in comic contrast, was Mrs Ecstasy, who had her hands folded over her heart and her head cocked to one side and a grin from ear to ear. She looked like a clown on a circus poster.

Crystal tried to stop but she simply had to accept that she was doomed to shuttle between passages of exquisite insight and blasts of annoyance and disrespect.

Ah, there was the liar, without his blue bonnet, looking shifty as hell. The Macbeth of darshan , whose victorious proximity to Mother Meera was utterly compromised by his means of winning it, was sweating on his throne. Whatever self-righteous pleasure Crystal might have taken in his punishment collapsed at the thought that she must soon present herself to Mother Meera. Who was she to condemn Blue Bonnet, or anyone else? What was so pure, after all, about her own state of mind?

She realized she was asking these questions in order to be able to look without malice into the eyes of what might be God, whoever she was, or an agent of the Paramatman light, whatever that was. The calculated nature of this correction made her feel even more phoney. She realized that any pretence would give way like so much sodden paper, and that this too was an effect of the context she was in. She exhaled and let it happen, finally coming to rest in the knowledge that she had come to Thalheim, however misguidedly, because somehow she wanted to be a force for good in the world. That was true. She could rest there.

She started wishing that they had been given numbers so that the timing of her own darshan could have been taken out of her hands. Instead, she found herself waiting apprehensively, half relieved and half frustrated by the constantly renewed line of kneeling devotees waiting in the aisle. Eventually deciding to treat the queue as a reassuring interval in which she could reverse her decision, she knelt in the aisle herself.

What could she bring to Mother Meera? The outcry of a lost child? The humble devotion of a pilgrim? The highest notes of her own consciousness? What were those anyway? In a blur of panic and indecision she staggered up to the waiting chair and watched the last darshan before her own.

Kneeling in front of Mother Meera, almost fainting with nervousness, she bowed her head until it was parallel with the avatar’s knees. Mother Meera pressed her thumbs gently on either side of the central line of her skull and Crystal felt, or imagined she felt, two rods of light being slotted into her head. They would dissolve over time, she decided, keeping her bathed in a state of illumination.

These thoughts gave way to a sense of flotation in infinite space, without images, and without speculation about the state itself. Mother Meera removed her thumbs and Crystal looked up, no longer wondering which gaze to use. Her awareness had briefly flipped from a point in space to being space, the pure category without the limitation of a viewer. She offered this transformation, not without scholarly enthusiasm, to Mother Meera, who instantaneously met her at that level, but met her with eyes that hinted, without reproach, that she could take it further.

Crystal left darshan with an unprecedented sense of devotional simplicity. It did not last.

Boris had picked up a pink-cheeked Englishman whom he was also driving back to Dornburg.

‘God,’ said Robin, ‘did you see that man who went up twice? He snuck up at the end and had a second bite … Can you believe that?’

‘The sari she wore tonight was really special,’ said Robin’s friend.

‘So,’ asked Boris witheringly, ‘did anyone achieve full realization?’

‘The way I see it,’ said the Englishman with an engaging smile, ‘is that we’re all realized already, we just don’t realize we’re realized.’

‘But isn’t realizing we’re realized realization?’ asked Crystal.

‘That’s what Mother Meera does.’

‘But she can only make you realize how much you realize at any particular moment.’

‘I think she can make it all happen at once.’

‘Maybe,’ said Crystal, ‘but you still can’t project it backwards…’ Why was she arguing? She could see that the leaves and twigs of logic were not going to dam up the flash flood of his conviction.

‘Apparently Adam Frazer used to have his own special slippers during darshan ,’ said Robin. ‘And when someone asked him to take them off, he said, “They’re not shoes, they’re slippers, and anyway, I’m allowed.”’

The memory of this exotic detail recalled Crystal to the present and her doubts about associating with Adam. She had left Thalheim dismissing fraud, but uncertain whether Mother Meera was wise to call herself ‘a divine personality’, a phrase which never entirely escaped the atmosphere of a Long Island cocktail party. Perhaps she was someone who had never forgotten the unity of the realm from which she had descended into incarnation, or a yogic master, or a good person with exceptional powers of transmission who had fallen in with the mythologies of her culture and the longings of her entourage. ‘Avatar’ was just a word from the treasury of hyperbolic spiritual claims. She chose not to get too hung up about whether to believe it or not, and to concentrate on the way Mother Meera had amplified her highest meditative state. There seemed to Crystal to be no enslavement inherent to the process, it was just what Mother Meera did. If that’s what you wanted, you could get it there, like gas at a gas station.

Sunday afternoon was Peter’s last chance to have a hot tub before his workshop began. After several visits, the sulphurous stench of the baths had gradually become delicious. Associated with unknotting muscles, heavy eyelids and blameless drowsiness, the atmosphere of rotting eggs now assailed him with an invitation to pleasure. The nudity no longer disconcerted him either; he even enjoyed watching the subsiding thermometer of his self-consciousness.

As he soaked in the tub, purgative sweat started breaking out on his forehead and trickling down his cheeks. He sank lower in the water, allowing it to cover his shoulders, and rested his back against the gritty wall of the bath, sighing with relief. Slipping his head under the water, his heart pumping hard and his cheeks swollen, he felt his hair sway, like seaweed in a current, in the current of his paddling hands.

As he broke the surface and gasped for air, he saw her stepping into the bath. Politely refusing to linger on her slender legs or try to make out the colour of her pubic hair in the murky light, he shifted into the corner.

She smiled at him. He knew it was not seduction but ease that made her smile, ease that was more seductive than anything. Holding her nose, she arched backwards into the water, her belly gleaming for a moment like the back of a diving whale. He noticed the ring in her navel and wanted to reach out and touch it, touch it with the tip of his curving tongue.