Peter couldn’t help agreeing with Jason that the session should end at ten o’clock, but he also found himself embarrassed by Jason’s manners and more conscious, because he had been mercifully free of this consideration for some time, of how much he was conditioned to react to other English accents. If he couldn’t throw off this habit, the most superficial layer of opacity, how could he hope to see clearly? Perhaps all he could hope to do was to see clearly why he couldn’t see clearly — was that the limit to freedom? He refused to believe it, but then why had his wild mind-annihilating passage on the massage table left this sociological tic untouched?
He was suddenly revolted by the idea of England, like an impacted tooth collapsed on itself and rotting. The prospect of returning there filled him with depression and impatience. Leaving Martha’s workshop was an incentive, but he could do that by stepping outside and standing on the edge of that mysterious ocean whose other shore was China, under the named and the unnamed stars, the pulse of Crystal’s presence as unmistakable as spring in the branches of a cherry tree.
There was only a sleepy old man in a tracksuit left to play with, and so Peter went over to Stan’s side and smiled at him weakly.
‘One thing I don’t want you to know about me,’ said Peter, who was slightly smaller than Stan, ‘is that I think I must be a very superficial person because I keep falling in love with different women. One thing I don’t want you to know about me is that I had the most amazing experience this afternoon and I’m already murdering it with sceptical analysis, but at the same time I want to give the irrational an intelligible place in the scheme of things. One thing I don’t want you to know about me is that although my childhood wasn’t bad it was dull, dull, dull, and sometimes I worry that I must be fundamentally dull as well. There wasn’t any cruelty but there wasn’t any magic either; perhaps that’s why the sort of thing that happened this afternoon feels like an alien invasion. One thing…’
‘Swap!’ shouted Martha.
‘One thing I don’t want you to know about me,’ said Stan eagerly, ‘is that I’m impotent. One thing I don’t want you to know about me is that I sometimes wish my wife would take it easy with some of this New Age stuff. One thing I don’t want you to know about me is that, that, well, that I don’t wanna die. I’m not allowed to say that at home ’cause I just get an audio book about being over-attached to my earth suit, but I wanna say it now: I’m real scared of dying.’
Stan swayed a little on his feet, as if he’d been punched in the face by his own honesty. Peter was pierced for a moment by compassion.
‘Time’s up,’ shouted Martha. ‘Now listen up! We haven’t got time to process this work tonight, so I want ya all ta remember what you said and how it felt to trust another person. Trust is a real big issue for most of us and we’ll be looking at that tomorrow morning. At eleven o’clock we’ve got an appointment with some of the body work staff down in the baths. For those of you who haven’t been to Esalen before, nudity might be an issue for you, so if you wanna raise it in the group tomorrow I’d encourage you to do that.’
‘And also,’ said Carlos, ‘try to write down any dreams you have tonight. Remember your unconscious is your best friend.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ muttered Jason.
‘That’s right,’ said Martha. ‘And we’ve got a storm system coming in right now, so there’s gonna be a lot of negative ions in the atmosphere which means real exciting dreams.’
‘Finally,’ said Carlos, taking out his half-moon glasses and unfolding a piece of paper, ‘I would like to read you a very short poem I wrote about old age:
“Old age is when your back goes out more often than you do.
Old age is when the little old lady you are helping across the road is your wife.”
‘Or the little old man is your husband, um, if you’re a woman, of course,’ said Carlos.
‘Isn’t that great?’ said Martha, carrying most of the group with her in bleating acquiescence.
Peter glanced at Stan. Stan smiled fixedly.
Christ, thought Peter, old age is when you smile in terror because the idea of death gets in everywhere, like sand in the desert, whispering under the door, and snaking its way into the saddlebags.
As the group filed out of the Big House, Frank stopped several men, including Peter, with the words ‘Do you have a problem with your back?’ and, if they answered no, press-ganged them into helping shift Martha’s new white Range Rover from the rock onto which Carlos had driven it. When he heard why he had been asked about his back, Jason cried, ‘I think I’ve just slipped a disc,’ and staggered groaning into the night.
Frank, Carlos, Peter and Paul stood outside in the thick drizzling darkness.
Paul crouched down and peered at the chassis with an air of calm expertise.
‘Can’t see a damn thing,’ he said, still staring.
‘I can’t believe she bought this car,’ said Frank, the perplexed disciple.
‘Why not?’ asked Carlos.
‘It’s so big and ostentatious. In LA it’s a target car.’
‘Well, eh, don’t tell her that,’ said Carlos.
‘Oh, no, God, this is just between you and me.’
‘Maybe she’s influenced by the fact that I have the same car,’ said Carlos.
Each man felt he had to have a suggestion which would establish his mastery of mechanics, physics or engineering. The car remained immobile.
Peter couldn’t think what to say. Paul had already asked if the transmission was in neutral, the one thing Peter knew somebody always said on these occasions.
‘Perhaps we should wait until tomorrow to move Martha’s car,’ he finally blurted out, and then without the slightest effort added, ‘We could show that we were all prepared to collaborate as a group to overcome our individual problems.’
‘Sounds good,’ said Frank.
‘Way to go,’ said Paul, finally getting up from his crouching position.
‘Yes,’ said Carlos, ‘tonight we learned that play can be work, tomorrow we will show that work can be play.’
Peter was amazed by the ease and success with which he had learned to manipulate the new language at his command.
He was learning, he was definitely learning.
10
Crystal changed course abruptly and headed down the steps and onto the lawn. She was determined to keep up the noble silence of her Dzogchen workshop for at least one day.
If she overheard one more person say that light was both a wave and a particle, or talk about left-brain and right-brain activity, she was going to throw up. Who did they think she was? She had been turning physics clichés into spiritual metaphors before most of them had given up jogging for t’ai chi.
She had been a child of the alternative scene, amazing the questing hippies of her mother’s endlessly shifting and yet monotonous circles with the precocity of her questions. When she was nine, during her mother’s Zen phase, they had gone to Tassajara, a remote monastery in the hills behind Carmel.
‘When will impermanence end?’ Crystal had asked a balding student from the Bay area.
He smiled comically as if to say, Who will rid me of this turbulent child?
‘Are you attached to non-attachment?’ she persevered.
‘Quit bugging the man, he’s trying to be mindful,’ her mother said, bowing apologetically to the student and dragging her away.
It was at Tassajara, visiting the shrine of the monastery’s revered founder, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, that she’d had her first taste of that magical reality she had been pursuing ever since.
Standing in the clearing where Suzuki was buried, she bowed to the shrine and asked him with childish earnestness to teach her something about Buddhism. Mosquitoes clouded the air around her, landing on her face and whining in her ears. Too frightened of being bitten to stay in the clearing, she immediately ran down the path, flailing her arms and slapping her face to get the bugs off. Halfway down, she was overcome with guilt at having shown so little equanimity and given Suzuki no time to offer her an answer.