A ripple of applause became a torrential ovation as the exiled head of state was led to the stage, surrounded by monks and bodyguards. His English was difficult to understand. Lisanne spaced out on Viv and Alf until half an hour later, when the Q & A began. Someone asked, “What is the best way to become spiritually pure?” His Holiness said he didn’t like the word best because it usually meant fastest, quickest, easiest. “That is wrong,” he said, sternly. “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” The cultivated mob laughed obsequiously. He went on to say that the answer to the man’s question was “everything I have been talking about tonight.” There was a testy, imperious edge to his words, and Lisanne thought: Good for him. It must be tough to talk to shits and dunces. Then some jerk-off wanted to know if he ever “just relaxed and enjoyed” himself. His Holiness smiled and said, “I am going to enjoy this cool glass of water.” With that, he dramatically hoisted the glass and took a long, steep drink while the mental midgets laughed, wept, and clapped. “And now,” he said, “I will enjoy going to sleep!”
He left the stage without fanfare. Barely an hour had passed.
As they filed out, Philip said, “What a pro.”
Mattie said, “Amazing.”
Philip said, “Short but sweet. He’s the Man.”
Mattie said, “We have to go to that Kalachakra thing.”
Philip said, “Where do they do that, in India?”
Mattie said, “Wherever. Sign me up, I’m goin.”
• • •
KIT AND CELA danced, drank, and smoked weed. Kissed and groped. He told her about Viv and Alf being a couple. She commiserated. (She’d already read about it in Entertainment Weekly.) He literally cried on her shoulder. She knew they were going to fuck tonight — that whole scene with the Super Size Hare Krishna girl had clinched it.
The motherfucker was in Vegas again. She didn’t even want to think about what he was doing. Why kid herself anymore? She’d done enough of that through the years. The dad had been a perverse aberration — Kit was her man. And now like some romance novel he’d come back to her. She would take him, any way she could. He wasn’t even that fucked up. Hell, everyone was damaged goods. And he was getting better every day. All Burke thought about was the money anyhow. Cela never thought about the money. If she could guarantee that Burke and the whole shitty world would just leave them alone by signing a piece of paper giving away Kit’s money, then she would. She sure-ass would.
He asked her to put on the “blockbuster,” World Without End. He wanted to fast-forward to the dance scene with Cameron Diaz. As they watched, Kit sensually mirrored his on-screen movements while Cela mimicked Cameron’s.
— Acceptable, Respectable, Presentable, A Vegetable!
At night…
when all the world’s asleep…
the questions run so deep…
for such a simple man…
He turns the volume up as loud as it will go, gyrating toward the sliding glass. Rain sheets crashing. Shirtless now, coiled and muscular, swaying to the beat, hands gliding over each other tracing wet forms, shadows of mutual tattoos, snaking into the downpour through mud-grass puddles, shoes off, wrestle-wriggling jeans over ankles, oblivious to torrents, no longer lip-synching but shouting lyrics full-bellow, eyes closed—
Won’t you please
please tell me what we’ve learned
I know it sounds absurd
please tell me who I am…
Something happens.
Stops singing.
Eyes open wide now, as if finally in complete awareness — the enormity of what befell him.
Lifts his head to the star-dead Riverside skies and yowls.
Cela, who is not finished with him, who cannot, will not leave him, never has and never will, Cela, who is not yet done with her epic love, love of her life, not yet done in this life or childhood life or life any other, sobs and sinks to her knees, holding, ballasting, rooting this tree that tears loose from its mulch, pointing with rent goblin’s thicket of caterwauling branches toward freezing (star-dead) Riverside skies: Cela bears him down, afraid he’ll loosen and ascend, forever lost, gasping with the horror she may not have what it takes to hold him, that her love will not be enough to make it so.
• • •
SHE SLAUGHTERED the pug — Philip’s pug, the one Mattie gave him for his birthday, the one he loathed at first but in three short weeks had learned to love — by hurtling it against the wall, then doing some eviscerating with a pair of antiquey, gilt-edged scissors that she got at Restoration.
The dog was an obstacle between student and teacher, novice and guru, between the Vulnerable Lisanne McCadden and H.H. the Venerable Kit Clearlightfoot. The dog came uninvited to the in-between, where only empty spaces may reside. That was a karmic violation — there was only so much room for official bardos. (The guidebook said there were supposed to be only six, but the dog made for a seventh.) That sort of thing had been studied and decreed for millennia and was certainly not beholden to the whims or policy makings of an errant pug. Lisanne was unconcerned about the implications of the killing. Hadn’t Milarepa, poet-warrior and student of the supreme phowa master Marpa, committed dozens of murders before his fated enlightenment? Anyway, it was a mu or moot point whether dogs possessed the Buddha nature. If this one did, she thought, it sure doesn’t now.
She used masking tape to cover her apertures, as the guidebook suggested. “During the practice of phowa,” she read aloud, “one must first block all the openings in a special way so that only the aperture at the crown of the head remains open. When the mind leaves the body through the crown of the head, one will be reborn in a pure land beyond samsaric existence where the conditions for practice are perfect.” She wanted to bypass the disintegration of the five winds and the dissolution of gross and subtle thoughts. When, through the Brahma-hole, her life-winds ceased at last breath and came the merging of red and white, of earth and sky, she wished to remain conscious and not panic. Otherwise she worried that she would have to endure the three and a half days of darkness and the gang of wrathful demons — the 100,000 suns and 100,000 thunderclaps. No: only the fourth rigpa would do. According to the guidebook, “The first sign of a result in phowa practice is that a strong itch is felt at the top of the head. Later a tiny hole appears into which a straw of grass can actually be inserted.” She needed one-pointed concentration in order to eject consciousness, “as a competent archer shoots the arrow from his bow.” She taped a sanitary napkin over her bottom holes before sealing navel, ears, and mouth. As she plugged her nostrils, Lisanne imagined blood and lymph leaking there, a classic sign to whatever monks were present (she wished some were here now) that recitations from The Tibetan Book of the Dead should begin. Finally, she covered up her eyes.