‘There’s a symmetry there,’ he said, looking at her from within the parentheses of his sunbleached blond hair. ‘We have a viral relationship with our habitat and we become the habitat of the viral.’
‘But isn’t that like saying that AIDS is divine retribution?’ said Brooke, who knew it wasn’t but felt like beating up some fundamentalist white trash.
‘Not really,’ said Dave politely. ‘It’s just like saying that what goes around comes around. Karma is not retribution, it’s just the way things are. At another level, the reality we inhabit is a function of the paradigms we use to describe it. Most of those paradigms are way too reductionist.’
‘But isn’t there something real underneath it all?’ said Brooke, fascinated.
‘Sure, there’s the energy which takes the form of matter, light and everything else.’
‘But I don’t want to think of this table as an energy field,’ said Brooke, removing her elbows in mock alarm.
‘Why not?’ said Dave. ‘It’s cool.’
Why not? thought Brooke. She smiled at Dave. Dave smiled at her. She was learning so much.
Adam rose to his feet, tears streaming down his cheeks. Everyone fell silent.
‘The whales have AIDS,’ he sobbed. He had only learned this from Dave half an hour before, speaking across the gap of Crystal’s absence, but he had already appropriated it as his own tragedy. ‘What are we doing to this beautiful planet?’
He paused and made a visible effort to remain calm.
‘The people in this room, gathered here by…’ Part of him wanted to say ‘the Madame Verdurin of the New Age’ but the wine and the fire won over and he said, ‘our Eleanor of Aquitaine…’
Brooke, who had been expecting Guidobaldo, was lost for a moment, but could tell from the smiles that the comparison was flattering. She must get a research assistant to deal with Adam’s conversation, her poor secretary had enough to do already.
‘The people in this room,’ Adam shrieked, ‘are the only people who can save the world from utter destruction. This is the most important gathering that could take place at this moment in history. We are witnessing a new mystical Renaissance that is struggling to be born against terrible odds in the rubble of our dying civilization, and it’s up to us, scholars, poets, scientists, public figures, dharma teachers, to go out there and wake people up.’
And then he started to sing, pushing his thick hair back with the fingertips of one hand, and touching his heart with the palm of the other.
‘O just one word from Shams and I would gladly give my life,’ Adam warbled.
‘His life is before me, and through his
love my heart has become pure, my breast has imbibed every virtue.
One smell of his perfume and I walk light-headed on this path.’
Adam suddenly thrust his hand aside with a gesture of contempt.
‘O cupbearer, enough of your wine, I am drunk on the wine from his cup.’
Moses stood by, unsure whether to offer Adam some herb tea. He’d heard plenty of singing in his day and he felt that Mr Frazer needed lessons, as well as new material.
‘I hope I’m in good voice tonight,’ said Adam, audible over the small patter of applause.
‘Rumi is the supreme guide to our age,’ he continued with a new pedagogic calm. ‘He has a literary genius equal to Shakespeare’s, and a spiritual genius as powerful as Christ’s. He brings us eternal news of perfect being, and of the fire of transfiguring love. And,’ he concluded with a disconcerting rush of colloquialism, ‘he reminds us to get off our fat arses and sing.
“I’m tired of cowards, I want to live with lions,
With Moses, not whining teary people.
I want the ranting of drunkards,
I want to sing like the birds sing,
Not worrying who hears or what they think.”’
Moses, whose loyalty to Miss Brooke was unfathomable, nevertheless drew the line at being propositioned in public, and left the dining room with subdued indignation.
Adam sat down and smiled modestly, but soon resumed the luxury of his new torment.
‘The whales,’ he said to Kathleen O’Hara, like a child whose adored puppy has just been run over and is offering his inconsolable torment to his mother.
‘There,’ said Kathleen, instinctively maternal. What a lovely sensitive man, she thought, so in touch with his feminine side.
‘It’s terrible what we’re doing to the oceans,’ she said. ‘They’re our natural filter systems, the kidneys of the planet.’
Everyone was embarrassed by Adam’s speech. The idea of being the most important gathering in the world, and the excessive responsibility it brought with it, made them anxious to return home. Crystal’s arrival could only act as a small counter-current to the tide of departures. When Moses showed her into the dining room, Adam was talking excitedly to Yves, Brooke and Kathleen about the vividness of his spiritual life. He was feeling charming, as he often did once he had discharged the anguish and hysteria which haunted his nature.
‘Crystal, darling, we missed you over dinner,’ said Brooke.
‘And you missed a wonderful dinner,’ said Adam, getting up.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Crystal to Brooke. ‘By the time I knew the plane was delayed, your number was in the hold with my baggage.’
Brooke introduced her to the other guests.
‘You must have been the empty space on my right,’ said Adam.
‘Form is emptiness and emptiness is form,’ said Crystal in her Indian guru voice. Adam Frazer was a minor celebrity on the alternative scene and she wanted him to think she was interesting. There she was again, she reproached herself, still looking for approval from a powerful man. ‘The two are really one,’ she warbled.
Adam laughed. ‘Not being completely enlightened, I prefer this delightful illusion to the more austere one I had over dinner.’
‘You are tossed on the restless sea of samsara,’ said Crystal, shaking her head sadly. ‘Just turn your mind back to the source,’ she urged him, quoting the great Poonjaji.
‘Adam,’ said Yves, who thought that Adam might be having fun with somebody else, ‘it’s getting late.’
‘Oh, my love, are you tired?’ asked Adam. ‘We’ll go home this instant.’
‘Brooke, it’s been a wonderful evening,’ said Kathleen.
‘Here’s that thing we talked about,’ said Brooke, half-discreetly, giving Kathleen an envelope. ‘For the Foundation.’
‘For the lungs of the planet,’ said Kathleen compulsively.
When the others had left, Brooke took Crystal up to a guest room. It was so much cosier than sending her up with Moses. She sat on the small sofa at the foot of the bed and told her how welcome she was and to treat the house as her home while she was in San Francisco.
Crystal was touched and a little saddened at the same time, because the places where she had lived had been her homes for such fleeting periods, often under the precarious conditions of hospitality. Of course she had long inhabited the paradox of feeling at home with no home, and she tried to think of the glutinous satisfactions of property as a bribe it was noble to refuse. Instead of a memory oppressed by the tropical air of nostalgia, her memory had a swifter quality, as fugitive as the shadows of starlings flitting across the ground, but capable of delivering high notes; whole cities, whole atmospheres, whole passages of thought and feeling, as vast and suddenly present as the smell of the sea.
Brooke’s own wounded sense of home made her almost excessive in her hospitality, but the two women ended up both feeling moved by the rituals of welcome.