‘I did a past lifetime thing,’ said the African Queen. ‘I didn’t really know what to make of it, but it made a lot of sense. I’d been a slave at one point and suffered a lot.’
Peter instantly hated her. She was paying huge hair-dressing bills to create a cosmetic continuity with a former lifetime of abject suffering in the hope of justifying the overflow of her self-pity.
Whatever had happened on the massage table, it had done nothing to make him more tolerant.
‘What I don’t understand about Chinese and African cultures,’ said Blue-Eyes, ‘is that if reincarnation is true then we’re our own ancestors, and really we’re worshipping ourselves.’
‘Maybe it’s like you’ve got to worship yourself before you can worship anything else,’ she suggested.
‘Sounds good,’ he admitted. ‘One of the coolest things I ever heard,’ he added, turning the full glow of his innocent and sketchy features towards the African Queen, ‘was that religion is for those who want to avoid hell, and spirituality is for those who’ve already been there.’
A real little fount of wisdom, thought Peter.
‘Cool,’ she affirmed.
‘I think Deepak Chopra is going too far when he says that the water you drink is also the water Christ bathed in, and so the whole body of water is sacred.’
‘It’s a lovely idea though,’ she said, as if she were looking at the brochure for a Caribbean holiday.
I think I’m going to be sick, thought Peter, sinking quietly into the steaming water. When he emerged again, Blue-Eyes was still pumping out the wisdom.
‘North or South, they both lead you to the same place. I didn’t say that, Suzuki did.’
He’s unstoppable, thought Peter, I’ll have to leave. He looked over at Crystal. She answered his look and, although there was complicity in the way she smiled, there was somehow no condescension towards the others. Peter was troubled by the contrast between the delicacy of this position and his own fermenting irritation.
‘Martha Goldenstein says that every moment is a gift,’ said the African Queen, ‘and that’s why it’s called “the present”.’
Peter surged noisily out of the water and grabbed the standard-issue pink towel that was just too small to wrap around a human waist.
‘See you later,’ he said to Crystal.
‘I hope so,’ she said.
* * *
Peter didn’t have to wait long to see Crystal again. He found her a couple of hours after they had met in the tubs, queuing up for dinner in the lodge. Her short T-shirt left her belly exposed and he saw the navel ring again, the skin a little inflamed where the ring pierced the lower edge of her navel.
‘Hi, Crystal,’ he said, picking up a plate and following her down the line of salads.
‘You’re staring at my ring,’ she said.
‘Yes, I’m afraid I was,’ he said, transferring his gaze to the sliced cucumbers.
‘Don’t be afraid, at least not of that,’ she laughed. ‘When they put this ring in, I had an orgasm right there in the shop, it was wild. The guy said, “This is definitely your energy centre.”’
Peter was silenced by this information, but recovered in time to say, ‘Does it still have that effect on you?’
‘Sure, that’s why it’s there.’
Gosh, thought Peter, these California girls are amazing. He felt his own Englishness and stiffness and inability to decipher Crystal’s candour. If an Englishwoman told you about an orgasm the second time you chatted together, you knew that she either wanted sex straight away, or that she’d been educated at a convent. Over here, one had no idea what it meant.
Peter wanted to ask Crystal to sit with him, but in the communal dining room he felt the usual sense of personal and social meltdown known locally as ‘lodge psychosis’. Instead of the sense of community it was designed to promote, the lodge shipwrecked its occupants by presenting them with a series of treacherous whirlpools and rocky dilemmas. Acquaintances imagined they were friends, friends turned into strangers, seminarians were looked down on by residents, and residents exploited by staff, teachers appeared to be available to students but were suddenly ringed by jealous lovers and competitive sidekicks. Anyone at any time could come and ‘process an issue’ with you, however turgid or trivial, whether you could remember meeting them before or not. The person to whom you told the secret of your mother’s mental illness the night before might not remember your name by lunchtime the next day. The permissiveness that made sex seem pleasingly inevitable made you realize more sharply the internal constraints that prevented you from approaching the object of desire, but the same permissiveness could not stop the bore you most dreaded from bearing down on you with greedy tactlessness when you were deeply engaged with someone else. Like the place as a whole, the lodge made a partial transcendence of the formalities and hypocrisies of ordinary social life, but at the same time generated a longing for the good manners and the privacy which those formalities, until they became corrupted, were designed to protect.
Psychologically bleeding and half drowned, but still hoping to preserve an air of purpose and self-possession, Peter had often wandered back and forth in the last three days, plate in hand, meeting or avoiding glances he was no longer calm enough to interpret accurately, or being dragged with a fixed smile on his face to a table of people he had no reason to spend time with.
‘Shall we sit together?’ he murmured almost inaudibly.
‘Sure.’
What a miracle. She hadn’t promised to spend the whole of dinner ‘processing’ with some deluded monster. He knew that she was doing a meditation workshop and wanted to ask her about what had happened to him on the massage table. Was there such a thing as spontaneous meditation, like spontaneous combustion but less messy?
‘You’re doing this meditation thing, so you might know: do you think one can start meditating by accident?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, do you think that someone who wasn’t trained could start doing it spontaneously?’
‘Oh, ya, I think people bliss out spontaneously without meditating. Meditation is just a bunch of techniques for getting you into that reality.’
‘Is that reality with a capital R?’ asked Peter. ‘I mean, do you think this “blissing out” is an insight into some fundamental truth, or is it just another state of mind to add to a menu which already includes guilt, boredom, anguish, despair, hatred, longing, nostalgia, and so forth?’
‘Great menu,’ laughed Crystal. ‘You should join our workshop. Those are the kind of things we discuss when we’re not observing “noble silence”.’
‘How many kinds of silence are there?’
‘You’re the expert on lists. I guess there must be guilty silence, nostalgic silence, despairing silence … but the only kind you have to worry about this week is the noble type.’
‘Can I really switch workshops?’
‘I think you’ve got till tomorrow evening to switch.’
‘This place is so strange,’ said Peter. ‘You’re in an ego-dissolving workshop and I’m in an ego-building one, and here in the lodge there’s a convergence of the cool and warm currents.’
‘I guess you’ve got to have an ego before you can dissolve it.’
‘So, do you think that some people set about trying to eliminate a sense of self they don’t have in the first place?’
‘That can happen but it’s really more like trying to awaken a sense of self that you don’t recognize in the first place. It’s just there … you just have to turn the mind back to that source.’