“Oh,” he says, “I answered yes and yes. Then I applied to work outside the camp so I could take my family away from there. We lived in Iowa for a while.”
“What about the young men who answered no and no because of you? What happened to them?”
“They were sent to Tule Lake or other places like that.”
“You must feel pretty bad about that. ” Julie Chen says. “You encouraged them but they were the ones who got in trouble.”
“No,” Karl says. “I don’t feel bad. You see, I answered yes and yes and I was allowed to leave the camp. But the young men, the ones that had no wives or children yet, it was different for them. The ones who answered yes and yes, they were conscripted to the army. They were sent to Europe to fight. They were given very dangerous missions. Many of them were killed. But the no-no boys, as they were called: they had a hard time but at least they did not die.”
“So something good came of it,” Julie Chen says. Then she realizes how foolish this sounds. “I didn’t mean. ” she says. “I’m sorry.”
Karl shrugs. He watches her as she makes her notes. Inside him, he can feel a swirl of white and cold begin, and hear the lowing sound of wind, even though the day outside is bright and still. Here are the pools of arc light; the gray hunch of mountains to the east. He’s carried them around with him all this time. He can see again the man drawing his gun, aiming it. There is nothing he can do to stop it.
Guided Meditation
First, before we begin, find a comfortable position. You can be sitting in a chair or lying down on the floor or on a bed. You can be on your side or on your back or on your stomach. Whatever is right for you. Whatever you prefer.
Once you find your position, let your head rest easily and let your hands fall open. Allow your arms and legs to relax so that you can feel how they are supported by the surface beneath you. Release the muscles in your shoulders, your neck, your back. Relax your forehead. Let your breathing slow.
Is all this clear? Remember: this is about finding the pose that is right for your body. As long as you are comfortable, you can even stand up if you want. At least, I suppose you could, I don’t see why not, although that would be kind of unusual. I don’t want you to worry about it too much, and I certainly don’t mean to imply that something as trivial as the position in which you decide to sit or lie will affect your ability to get the full range of benefits meditation can provide. That isn’t how it works. I mean, do you really think that if there was someone who couldn’t lie down or sit in a chair because of a disability, that he or she couldn’t access his or her deeper states of consciousness? I think you should probably examine the prejudices that underlie that assumption as soon as you are finished meditating.
So whatever you would like: sit, stand, lie down. I suppose you could stand on your head if you wanted, although why you’d want to do that, I’m not sure. Once, I taught a guided meditation class at a local community center and there was a man who came every week, a young man with piercings and tattoos in Celtic-looking patterns all over his torso that you could see because he never wore a shirt in class, and who always arrived carrying the same courier bag covered with the logos of punk bands from the 1980s, bands that he could not possibly have been old enough to see live or even to have bought their music while they were still recording. Each week, while he was sitting on his mat waiting for the class to start, he would be smiling smugly to himself like he had discovered the secret stash of endorphins at the heart of existence, and then when class began and I would say that part about finding whatever position suits you best, he would — this is really true — flip up into a shoulder stand and stay like that the entire time.
Can you imagine how distracting that was for the other students? For me? I mean, he could not have found a better way to call attention to himself if he’d stood at the center of the room screaming “Look at me!” over and over. At least if he’d screamed, I could have asked him to leave but as it was I couldn’t really say anything because, after all, I had just told everyone that they were free to take any posture they wanted and I didn’t want to seem to have suddenly turned judgmental and hypocritical.
Every week, when time for class rolled around again, I’d hope that maybe he wouldn’t come, but he always did, regular as clockwork. Eventually, he started to unnerve the other students so much that the numbers in the class dropped drastically and the community center canceled it and filled that timeslot with Jazzercise instead. I lost my job, which was really terrible for a while, although I’m over it now that I’ve started making these recordings. All because of Mr. Shoulder Stand. Wherever he is now, I hope that one day he’s doing a shoulder stand and his neck gets stuck so his head is permanently frozen at a 30-degree angle to his shoulders and for the rest of his life he has to walk around looking at his own belly button. That would serve him right.
Anyway, once you are in your comfortable position, whatever it might be, close your eyes. Relax your eyelids. Feel your tension ebb away. Feel it draining down, as if it was water being let out of a sink, slowly spiraling toward the drain until it is gone. If you don’t feel the tension draining out of you, you really need to try a bit harder to relax. And don’t tell me that you don’t have very much tension to get rid of, because obviously you do. Otherwise why would you be doing this meditation? If you were just fine, if you had no stress or problems, you’d be out doing something more productive with your time, like brushing up on your Spanish or finally learning how to ballroom dance or volunteering to help the hungry or the homeless or some other group of needy citizens in your community. Or you might be reading one of those books that you still haven’t read even though it has been on your list of must-reads for years now, like War and Peace. But instead you are here lying or sitting or squatting or whatever because at some point you felt bad enough and tense enough to buy this recording.
I don’t claim to know what your particular problem is, of course. Maybe you have trouble getting to sleep. Or else you have trouble staying asleep through the night. You wake up in the early morning hours, in those dead-still hours before dawn when even the stray cats are silent, and you find your heart racing and your stomach doing flips inside you, and you are certain that there is some all-important thing that you forgot to do the day before and, though now you can’t remember what it was, you’re just as certain that your failure to do this forgotten, all-important thing will alter your life forever, irremediably, for the worse, and you lie in the dark with your heart flailing in your chest like a drowning person until finally after what seems like years dawn comes seeping underneath your blinds in a sad flood.
Or maybe that isn’t it at all. Maybe, instead of being anxious, you’re depressed. Maybe each day you drag yourself from bed feeling like someone has been scraping out the inside of your skull with a spoon the way that people scrape the rinds of their breakfast grapefruits. Maybe, as you move robotically through the hollow morning rituals of making coffee, showering, brushing your teeth, going to work, you feel like all you want is to crawl back into bed to hide. Maybe your bones feel like they are made of lead. Maybe you drink every afternoon at five to try to relieve the tightness in your throat that feels like a hand clamped around it, squeezing and squeezing without stint.