Could a person get over that fence without making any noise? he says.
I don’t think so, I say. I can hear it anytime anyone leaves the tent, even to pee. And besides, how does an earnest hyperreligious monk who dreams of a god telling him to flee his home become a boy who willingly and sneakily accepts food and water when he has publicly forsworn these?
Good point, says the Devil’s Advocate.
Doesn’t ring true, I say.
No, it doesn’t, the Devil’s Advocate says, and fades away.
THE LONGEST NIGHT IN HISTORY, PART III: FURTHER CRAZY TALK IN THE NIGHT AS MY ENERGY DROPS TO SCARY LEVELS
No light appears in the distance to signal dawn, not at all; it just keeps getting darker. I’m shivering, desperate for the paradise of that sad little gray van. I’ll put my feet up on the seat, have the driver crank up the heat! We’ll stop for tea; I’ll pour the tea down my freezing three pairs of pants! I hallucinate a Georgia O’Keeffe flower that opens and closes in megaslow motion while changing colors. I walk downhill into some sacred cave, part of a line of chanting Eastern Holy Men. One of the Holy Men asks a ponderous Zen question, which I answer in a comedian voice via some kind of fart joke. A laugh track sounds in my mind. The Holy Men are not amused. The boy intervenes: That is his way of being profound, he says, leave him alone.
I’m so tired, says the Devil’s Advocate, who has now come back.
Oh God, me too, I say.
Finally, I give up on getting comfortable, and this seems to help. It’s a strange thing, staying up all night in the jungle to see if a teenager pulls a fast one via eating. The pain I am feeling at every sensor is making me kind of giddy. Being beyond tired, beyond cold, completely stripped of control, I’m finding, has the effect of clearing the mind.
You know that feeling at the end of the day, when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away and, for maybe the first time that day, you see, with some clarity, the people you love and the ways you have, during that day, slightly ignored them, turned away from them to get back to what you were doing, blurted out some mildly hurtful thing, projected, instead of the deep love you really feel, a surge of defensiveness or self-protection or suspicion? That moment when you think, Oh God, what have I done with this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how must I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets?
I feel like that now: tired of the Me I’ve always been, tired of making the same mistakes, repetitively stumbling after the same small ego strokes, being caught in the same loops of anxiety and defensiveness. At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me. So what is stopping me from stepping outside my habitual crap?
My mind, my limited mind.
The story of life is the story of the same basic mind readdressing the same problems in the same already discredited ways. First order of business: Feed the trap. Work the hours to feed the trap. Having fed the trap, shit, piss, preparing to again feed the trap. Because it is your trap, defend it at all costs.
Because we feel ourselves first and foremost as physical beings, the physical comes to dominate us: Beloved uncles die, parents are displaced, cousins go to war, children suffer misfortune, love becomes a trap. The deeper in you go, the more it hurts to get out. Disaster (sickness, death, loss) is guaranteed and in fact is already en route, and when it comes, it hurts and may even destroy us.
We fight this by making ourselves less vulnerable, mastering the physical, becoming richer, making bigger safety nets, safer cars, better medicines.
But it’s nowhere near enough.
What if the boy is making this fight in a new way, by struggling against the thousands-of-years-old usage patterns of the brain? What if he is the first of a new breed — or the most recent manifestation of an occasionally appearing breed — sent to show us something new about ourselves, a new way our bodies and minds can work?
Could it be? Could it?
Part of me wants to hop the outer fence, hop the inner fence, sit knee to knee with him, demand to know what the hell is going on.
I get up, but just to take a piss. It’s so dark I can’t tell when I’ve left the trail. There are dim shapes on the ground, but I can’t tell if they’re holes, shrubs, or shadows. I think of snakes. I think: Bring them on. Then I think: Hoo boy, no no, don’t bring them on. I try to get deep enough into the woods that nobody will, tomorrow, step in my piss. When I do go, it’s Niagara-esque, so loud the boy must hear it, if in fact he’s still hearing things.
Sorry, sorry, I think, I just really had to go.
I look up into the vast Nepali sky. Night, I conclude, is a very long thing. Is he suffering in there as much as I’m suffering out here? I wonder.
If so, then what he’s doing is a monumental, insane feat of willpower.
If not, it’s something even stranger.
THE LONGEST NIGHT IN HISTORY, PART IV: I DON’T DIE
Hours later, at a moment that (in the quality of light, a slight shift in the ambient sound) feels like the Beginning of the Beginning of Morning — the colored lights appear again.
I struggle to the fence, trying not to tread upon any sleeping lamas. Scattered across the ground inside the Enclosure are thousands of snowflakelike silverish glittering flecks. I perform a test, developed back in my acid days: Are the flecks also on my hands? They are. Are they still visible when I close my eyes? They are. Therefore they are an optical illusion, albeit one I have never had before or heard of anyone else ever having.
Oh man, I think, I have no idea what’s going on here. The line between miracle and hallucination is all but gone. I am so tired. The center is not…What is it the center is sometimes said not to do? Hanging? Having? The center are not hanging.
The lights go white, then orange. Definitely orange. I visually compare this new orange bulk of light to the orange bulk of light I know is the fire back at the Committee Tent.
Again I conclude that the miracle is a campfire.
And yet.
And yet.
Undeniably, over an indefinite period of time, during which time continues not to pass, it gets lighter. The canoeful of lamas rises up, confers briefly, rushes off on a good-morning circumambulation.
I go to the fence.
The sun comes up.
The boy is revealed, sitting, still sitting, in exactly the same position as when I last saw him, at sundown. How did you do it, I think, in your thin sleeveless garment? All night bare to the cold, matless on the cold ground, in full lotus: no coat, no gloves, no socks, no hope of an early-morning rescue.
It seems impossible he’s not dead. He looks made of stone, utterly motionless, as impervious to the night as the tree he appears to be part of. Can I see his breath? I can’t. Does his chest expand and contract? It doesn’t, not that I can see.
Because this night was hard for me, part of me expects it was hard for him and won’t be surprised if he stands up and announces he’s quitting.
But then I remember he’s already spent on the order of two hundred nights out here.
I take what I know will be my last look at him, hoping for…I’m not sure what. Some indication that he’s alive, that he’s operating within the same physical constraints as I am: an adjustment of posture, a clearing of the throat, a weary sigh.
Nothing.
I feel, to gravely understate it, the monumental distance between his abilities and mine.
Pilgrims begin arriving. They step to the fence, gape in wonder, dash off along the circular path, chatting loudly, speculating on what he’s doing and why he’s doing it.