“Hinduism predates Christianity by many centuries,” Dr. Nagaraj said at the table, without prompting. “You can find god Agni in Rig Veda, more than three thousand of years back. It is our path, our way of seeing the world, our consolation and salvation. Multiple functions and essential to Ayurveda.”
Audie asked himself again: Is he a real doctor? Is he a quack? And, Does it matter?
Dr. Nagaraj was still speaking, perhaps answering one of Beth’s questions. He had the Indian habit of monologuing, which was a gift for rambling on past all obstacles, deaf to any interruptions, indifferent to anyone’s boredom, as though no one present had anything worthwhile to say—which, Audie reflected, was probably so, since neither he nor Beth had much to add. Beth was intent on what had become one of Dr. Nagaraj’s stories. Or was it the same story?
“Elephants,” he was saying, “bearing down on my friend Sanjeev.”
Surely he had told this story before?
“But Sanjeev could not swim. He sank to his knees as big bull elephant approached. And elephant, too, fell to knees and enclosed poor Sanjeev between his great tusks.”
His teeth gleamed on the word “tusks.”
“And protected him from the other elephants,” Beth said.
“In beginning, yes, protection was there. Tusks were there,” Dr. Nagaraj said. “But elephant rose to his feet and withdrew. Sanjeev remained on his knees, head down. When coast was clear I went to that side and found that my friend was dead.”
Surely this was the same story, with a different ending?
“He had not been crushed,” Dr. Nagaraj said. “He somehow died of heart failure. I could not help him, yet I had brought the poor man to this place. Of course, I was devastated.”
“Did he have a family?”
“No wife, no children. But parents are there.”
“Life’s so short,” Beth said.
Dr Nagaraj smiled. “No, no. Life continues. It flows. There is no end.”
3
Mr. and Mrs. Blunden, Audie and Beth, lay in bed side by side, but apart, sinking into sleep by tumbling and bumping in the narrowing cave of consciousness, along the flowing stream of their vagrant thoughts. Sometimes they stirred in the shallows of embarrassed memory, often slowed and heavy in the eddies of the darker past, but always going down deeper, wishing for the gulping light to cease as they vanished into slumber and different images, twisting in the underground river of darkness, sleeping. Yet they were both awake.
They had said good night and “Love ya,” enacting their bedtime ritual, and kissed with dry lips like siblings. Some minutes later, still wakeful but numbed by the night, they breathed slowly, buoyed by their reveries, foundering, going under, but not deep enough.
The specter of death hung at the periphery of Audie’s wakeful-ness, pressing a bony finger to his lipless grin in admonition. The dead could seem like scolds. Never mind whether they were right or wrong, you couldn’t answer back; they had the last word, which was Told you so. Audie was thinking of the things he owned, his mind roving over the many rooms in his four residences, the accumulation of so many objects, having turned his fortune into the valuable clutter that filled his houses. He imagined collapsing, falling face-forward into the middle of it, like someone stifled in a closet of expensive furs, or toppled off a stylish but wobbly chair to expire on the floor, blood leaking from his head. Thinking of what he owned, he was appalled, for all he had was that sagging face that looked back at him in the mirror, the jug ears, the thinning hair. He was no more than his breath.
Not even the poor are more cynical than the rich, he thought.
Something more, something only a man of sixty would know but a girl of twenty smiling at a school of fish in a fish tank would not know, sustained him and kept him calm: the life force was the push and pull of repetition—a novelty at first, you were easily deceived into thinking that the next phase would be something new. And so it seemed to the young, but growing wasn’t progress, and all aging was decline. Audie had gone from a belief in experience to a realization that it was downhill all the way. His whole life he had been dying. Time passed and the something new, looked at closely, was something he’d seen before. Then it repeated, and occurring again it seemed trivial, even seedier, a mockery of his hopes. Feelings repeated and shamed him. Glittering objects appeared, and when he reached for them he was embarrassed by his gesture, for it was all a repetition—perhaps a new chair, possibly bigger, better upholstered, gilt or chrome, lumbar support, an original design, but no more than another chair, and he had more than he needed. And it, too, was one he could fall from and break his neck, and after his death the mute thing would still be there, to be auctioned for ready money by someone he hardly knew.
He wondered, Have I lived too long?
For if you live long enough, you see everything, and if you go on living, everything happens over again, just the same, even the women—especially the women. Earlier in his life he’d understood: a young woman wanted to be married, or a married woman wanted a nicer or richer husband, many women wanted to try again for something better. Who could blame them for looking to the future? But he, like most men, wallowed in the present and did not see farther than the foot of the bed. The women he’d known were, each of them, different, but what made them sisters was their same question, always spoken in the darkness, at a moment when he felt fulfilled and complete: Where is this going?
He kept the answer to himself, because it was devastating. He’d got what he wanted, and now he wanted to go home. They wanted more. He hoped for a night—not even a night, hardly a few hours; they wanted a life.
He did not know if he was like other men. That didn’t matter, a comparison was futile. But he knew his past and how his life of accumulation had deluded him. He had years more to live but knew in advance that there was nothing new for him. An older man looking for novelty was fooling himself, and was even more ridiculous than he knew. He was just a clown, a bumbler in a circus.
The remorseless symmetry of his life had become apparent to him since his arrival in India, his life of repetition, and anything that appeared new was what Dr. Nagaraj had told him was maya, illusion. Without putting the disturbing thought into words, keeping it an emotion that penetrated to the core of his body like the shiver of a taboo, he realized there was no point in being wealthy if you could still be deceived. To him, money represented privacy and comfort, but more than that, if it did not also allow access to the truth, then it was nothing but a deception. A rich man who was conned by a lie had no one to blame but himself. And there was no greater fool than a rich man who was self-deceived.
And here was the irony: the man who ran a great company; who hired the best people and ruthlessly fired employees who were perceived as weak in their jobs; who took a faltering firm and whipped it into shape, cutting costs here, eliminating a whole department there, walking into offices of old timers and saying, “I’m sorry, but I’m letting you go, clear out your desk”—getting rid of them in a day so they didn’t linger and stink up the place with their aggrieved indignation—that same scary CEO who nuked entire floors of workers would meet a young ambitious woman, greedy to be married, swift as a raptor, and the man would offer himself to be snatched. The man who could spot an unreliable employee a mile away could be possessed by the most transparent upstart. Not that she wasn’t presentable. She might indeed be beautiful, but that was all, and it was only afterward that the man saw how he had been fooled, how he had fooled himself. The big swaggering toughie from the boardroom found himself snared by someone he would not have hired to work the photocopier. Then the woman had a child and said either “I want stock options for Junior” or else “I don’t love you anymore,” and she got the penthouse, the plane, child support, and a meal ticket for life. Didn’t such a man ever say to himself, “Uh-oh, look out”?