“That’s enough!” Glouchenko says. “If you want to scare someone, go find another victim! Babloïev or not, leave me alone!”
He slams the receiver onto its stand. The telephone jingles. The communication is finished.
Exactly at the same moment, the echoes from the religious ceremony return. Horns, gongs, buddhic mutterings. When they reach our ears, they seem exhausted from their long journey.
Glouchenko perceives nothing.
“Those bastards are trying to scare me,” he says between his teeth. “It looks like they don’t know who they’re dealing with.” (A pause.) “Hey, boys! If you’re looking for another gullible village idiot, you’re barking up the wrong tree!” (A beat.) “I’m going back to sleep.”
A beat. He starts shouting again.
“Glouchenko’s not the idiot you’re looking for!” (A beat.) “I’m beat. The bastards’ve really worn me out.”
Babloïev is no longer expressing his thoughts. Let’s say that he’s not on the other end of the line anymore. Let’s say that he’s not anywhere anymore. If everything is nothing but an illusion, Babloïev has no reason to continue communicating with Glouchenko.
“Since there’s nothing to do here,” Glouchenko announces, “besides sleeping and waiting for something to happen. If they hear me snoring, maybe they’ll decide to stop fooling around.”
He doesn’t start snoring immediately, but he does doze off without delay.
He is surrounded by stray deep notes, murmurs he can’t distinguish. The officiant’s voice travels to him, but he doesn’t hear that either.
“Oh noble son,” says the voice, “soon you will be in the presence of a magnificent green light, an extremely rich emerald green, whose splendor cannot be described. Do not fear this light, take refuge in it. Renounce everything, do not be attached to what you still believe to be your memory or consciousness. Leave that behind, abandon it. Accept dissolution in this radiant green, join the light in which you will finally be no more. . Do not hesitate, Glouchenko. . The moment of your dissolution has come. . Plunge into that light to extinguish yourself. .”
A beat.
The voice is nothing more than a miniscule vibration. Then it vibrates no more.
Then, close by, the crackling of an acoustic system breaks the silence. Mario Schmunck is with us once more, and when I say us I count myself as well, obviously. Mario Schmunck the special correspondent, the commentator, the journalist on a mission.
“Studio One-Five-Zero-Nine, do you copy?” asks Mario Schmunck.
I had returned to the scene, also known as the Bardo. I continued my report for the Off-Shore-Info Broadcast, and, after a break, I spoke once more from the intermediary world. The radio silence had lasted for just an instant, few listeners had noticed it, but, in Glouchenko’s existence, two whole weeks had flown by. In my own, that is to say my existence, I don’t know. I’m ignorant on the subject of which system of measurement I’ve been hooked up to since I started my broadcast. I possessed among my meager special-envoy equipment a glow-in-the-dark calendar to keep track of Glouchenko’s time. Fifteen days had already passed for Glouchenko. But time was vaguer on my end. Was it fifteen days for me too? Or a few minutes? No one had told me before I left. I was about to ask about my union rights, and maybe even complain some, when management warned me that I was live on air. I swallowed my doubts, my demands. After all, the difference between days and minutes hardly mattered to my well-being.
“Mario Schmunck here,” I said. “Ladies and gentlemen, listeners of Off-Shore-Info, thank you for tuning in. I am speaking to you once more from the Bardo, the floating world awaiting the deceased. Glouchenko is now about thirty-three days away from reincarnation. The shadows around him are atrociously thick. This is the stage on which Glouchenko performs. Hmm. . perform? Actually, he’s been moving much less now. He’s less agitated. He’s sitting next to the phone and spends most of his time sleeping. That’s how his days have gone. Day fifteen. . Sixteen. . There’s a stopwatch grafted to my wrist. . Seventeen. . The days pass. .” (A beat.) “Not long ago, there was another guy nearby named Babloïev, an old army buddy. They’d occasionally talk to each other.”
I got a call from the studio. I was being received poorly. I was asked to articulate better.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll continue. Babloïev got in touch with Glouchenko over the telephone once or twice a day, but Glouchenko eventually couldn’t bear Babloïev’s explanations anymore. After a while he stopped answering.” (A beat.) “Glouchenko is a typical dead person, all in all. Someone is trying to guide him, read him instructions, drown him in advice. And he remains deaf. He doesn’t obey. So then someone arranges for him to have an interlocutor on his own level, a companion in the dark to dot all his i’s. . What a waste! He’s a typical dead person, stubborn, narrow-minded, dissatisfied with his lot, and, of course, unable to utilize the knowledge he received while alive. Even though he learned quite a lot about death when he was in the monastery! He was told about it day and night. But he. .” (A beat.) “See, I have some ideas about Buddhism too. . I’ve read the Bardo Thödol, like everyone else. . Now, knowing exactly what I’ve retained. . If I were suddenly in Glouchenko’s place, I wonder if. . Hello? Yes, is that you?” (A pause.) “Yes, okay.”
I’d been interrupted by the head producer. He urged me to return, post haste, to my role as objective commentator. The states of my soul with regard to tantrism had nothing to do with my reporting. I was sent there to talk about Glouchenko, not myself.
“Okay,” I said. “Got it. No personal commentary.”
Silence.
Long silence.
The sound of a gong pierces the shadows.
“Day twenty-two on the control calendar,” says Mario Schmunck. “Day twenty-three. The weeks are flying by. A limitless black thickness reigns here. Day twenty-four. Wait, there’s that gong again. It’s a safe bet that the officiant’s voice is about to break through the shadows.”
“Oh noble son!” resurfaces Schmunck’s distant voice. “The soldiers carried your body away nearly a month ago, and I have sat every morning in front of a photograph of you to speak to you. I have addressed you with patience, while you have continued wandering through the Bardo like a frightened animal. You have continued walking aimlessly, as if you possessed neither intelligence nor intuition. You did not recognize the Clear Light when confronted with it. You have not benefited from my counsel. .”
The voice, harmonious and convincing, weakens. The rebukes are non-stop, but lack power. It’s a shame, because the intonation is really quite nice. Anyone would listen to it willingly for the simple musical pleasure. Glouchenko, for his part, understands nothing. From the start, he has remained unmoved. Schmunck’s criticisms do not reach him.
“You are still locked in the heavy and painful chain of cause and effect,” the voice continues. “It is high time that you liberate yourself, Glouchenko! Make an effort, Glouchenko!”
We hear a gong again, but the sound is so diminished there’s no way of knowing whether or not we merely dreamed it.
“I’m going to stick to the facts,” Mario Schmunck says. “Glouchenko is hunkered down a short distance away from the telephone. It is, let’s see. . My calendar is telling me that this is day twenty-nine. So, Glouchenko’s been dead for four weeks already and still doesn’t know it.” (A beat.) “Between naps, he still believes the darkness is due to a power outage. . He has truly closed off all other avenues of thought on the subject. He’s waiting for his barrack mates to give up on their prank. . From time to time, he wakes up and grumbles a few severe judgments about his army brothers. He might just stay in one place forever, dozing and muttering like an idiot. .” (Distant gong.) “In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the monks describe in detail the visions that assail every deceased person for forty-nine days, during the laborious crossing of the Bardo, but they didn’t predict that Glouchenko would sleep near an old telephone, not walking, not going anywhere. .”