Gautama gave a wry smile. “Since when did you become so cruel?” He fell back onto his pillow. She was right; he wasn’t strong enough to be helped into the sunlight yet. “Are you still marking the days?”
Sujata glanced at a piece of bark nailed to one wall; it had twenty X’s scratched into it. “There, see?”
“You must have left out quite a few. Has it been a month, maybe three months?”
Not wanting him to know that he had been ill for five weeks, Sujata defended herself. “I’d have no fiancé if you stayed three months. It’s bad enough already.” She began to feed him a mixture of boiled rice and lentils. She wasn’t complaining. Her good-hearted husband-to-be didn’t mind waiting a while longer; they had been engaged since she was eleven.
“Will you go home when you’re well?” she asked.
Gautama turned his face away, avoiding the next bite of food. “I’m sorry,” Sujata said. “You’ve taken vows.”
He gave her a serious look. “Would you respect a man who would keep a vow even if he died?”
“You mean you?” She shook her head. “No.”
Gautama didn’t mind that he was as passive and dependent as a baby. All he basically knew how to do was be still. There wasn’t a scrap of enlightenment left. The gods had had their joke. Now he was just another starving wretch who had been found, addled and lost, wandering in the forest.
Because his healing was so slow, time slowed down with it. He’d idle an hour watching a sunbeam move across the floor in the morning. Specks of dust floated hazily in it, and a holy verse came to mind. “Worlds come and go like dust motes in a beam of sunlight shining through a hole in the roof.” He used to think those words were beautiful; now they were flat. He got stronger every day, but inside he never lost his horror. Nature’s blank face continued to stare back at him wherever he looked. His eyes would move from the sores on his skin to the sun shining through the open window, then to Sujata’s face and the sal blossom in her ear. They were all the same dull nothing.
“Starting tonight, I’m going to feed myself,” Gautama announced. “And tomorrow I’m going outside, even if you have to carry me.” Sujata smiled. “You’ve gotten too fat. I’ll drop you.”
Because he couldn’t stop himself from speaking his mind, Gautama said, “Do you know how beautiful you are?”
“Oh!” Sujata had picked up a broom to sweep the packed-mud floor. Her hair was roughly tied back; she was too poor to own any makeup, and she rouged her cheeks with berry stain when she knew her fiancé was coming. “Why do you talk like that? You said you took a vow.” She looked embarrassed and displeased.
“My vow must be very powerful. I can see that you’re beautiful, but I don’t care.”
Now Sujata looked more displeased. Turning her back, she swept the floor with a vengeance, throwing up clouds of dust. For half an hour they had nothing to say to each other. But then two monkeys fighting in the yard made Sujata laugh, and when she adjusted Gautama’s bedclothes, her eyes regarded him mildly, without a hint of resentment.
After that, as promised, he fed himself and was taken on wobbly legs out into the yard. He wasn’t a limp doll anymore, so he could be sat in a wicker chair instead of being propped against a tree. Sujata was surprised that he didn’t care where he was put, in sun or shade. One day she came out to find that he’d stepped on some foraging red ants, and now a hundred of them, fierce biters, were climbing up his leg. Gautama didn’t wince; he didn’t even look down at them.
Brushing the attackers off, and with them the blood from their bites, she said, “What are you doing to yourself? I didn’t pull you out of the woods so you’d care about nothing. Find something, and do it quick.” She turned away and began to cry.
“I’d obey you if I could,” said Gautama. “I owe you everything.”
His voice sounded humble and sincere, but inside he was as detached from her distress as from everything else. Sujata sensed this, no doubt. Otherwise how to explain the fact that he woke up the next day to find the hut empty? She left pots of food but nothing else. The door was locked, the floor still damp from being washed. Gautama took this all in and waited. He wondered, as an impartial spectator might wonder watching a stranger, if his mind would grieve or feel abandoned. When nothing happened, he went outside to watch the clouds, something he did every day.
Every day that he grew stronger, he felt more removed from that fiercely certain monk who had been willing to die for God. Gautama wasn’t a zealot anymore, but there was nothing to put in its place. He took his eyes off a camel-humped cloud and looked at his hands. They had fleshed out again, and so had his wasted arms and legs. He tried to remember how old he was. Thirty-five seemed right. Young enough to take up honest labor or return to the monk’s life, or even go home and become the good prince again.
It was time to choose one, since he couldn’t remain alone in Sujata’s hut. Choosing seemed impossible, though. He was a blank. At best he was a vaporous, drifting cloud, like the ones he stared at. After a while, Gautama decided to imitate a cloud by going nowhere in particular. He cleaned the hut of any sign that he had ever stayed there, shut the door behind him, and walked away.
When his sandals contacted the familiar packed dirt of the road, his gait settled into a mechanical tread. Soon he passed other travelers, but they didn’t look his way. Maybe he’d lost his presence too, or perhaps it was just his half-starved appearance. Gautama’s eyes saw the sights of the jungle-birds, animals, the light streaming in bright bars through the still leaf canopy-and he had the impression that every sensation was passing through him. I am water, he thought. I am air.
This wasn’t unpleasant. If he was going to spend the rest of his life as a blank, feeling transparent wasn’t the worst thing. He walked a bit farther, and he had another thought. I am not suffering. When had he stopped suffering? He didn’t know, because his body had been in pain for those weeks, which distracted him. Physical pain wasn’t the same as suffering, he realized that. Suffering happens to a person, and he was fairly sure he had turned into something new, a nonperson.
He stared at the sunset, its red-gold streaks breaking through tall white clouds. Over the jungle canopy he saw the crest of a tall tree and headed for it. The ground around the tree was soft and springy, free of fungus. He looked up and saw that this was a pipal or fig tree. The sky darkened quickly; soon it was barely possible to see sapphire patches between the black silhouettes of the foliage. Gautama sat down to meditate.
He wondered if a nonperson needed to meditate, and at first the answer seemed to be no. When he closed his eyes he didn’t sink into a cool, safe silence. Instead, it was like being in a lightless cave where there was no difference between having his eyes open or shut. But since he had nothing to do and nowhere to go, he decided that meditation was as good as anything else. He caught sight of the waning moon, which was three-quarters full. Vaguely Gautama thought it would be nice to be the moon. And then he was.
It didn’t happen immediately. He sat, and the waning moon turned into a sliver, then a hairline of luminescence in the sky, before it waxed again. He caught a glimpse of it only once a night; otherwise he had his eyes closed. Nothing was changing inside him. Only by the moon did Gautama realize when seven weeks had passed.
“I’m here. You can open your eyes now.”
Gautama was past having delusions, so the voice must be real. He opened his eyes. A yogi with long locks and a beard had found him and was sitting with crossed legs under the tree. The moonlight was bright enough to reveal the face of the doomed monk Ganaka.
“You don’t have to disguise yourself,” said Gautama. “I was expecting to see you, Mara.”
“Really?” The form of Ganaka smiled. “I didn’t want to shock you. I am, as you know, basically kind.”