A Short History of Richard Kline (21 page)

He began to brood on the boy, Oliver. He felt that Oliver and the baby in his dreams were one and the same, that the baby had come to him in human form, as an idiot boy, and he had failed to recognise it. He loved his son – of course he loved his son; the test of Sri Mata's influence was whether he could love others, and he had failed that test. He was
uncharitable
. For the first time it occurred to him that he was lacking in love, not in the receiving of it but in the giving.

He began to feel an underlying panic. One night he dreamed that he was riding in a crowded old bus with its windows wound down. He had two babies in his care, and as the bus jolted along the potholed road he feared that one of them might fall out of a window. It was dangerous – so dangerous he had to get off the bus in the middle of the busy city and carry the babies awkwardly along the middle of a road congested with traffic – and the infants were so heavy, and what if he dropped one? He asked a man loitering in a doorway to call him a taxi. The taxi came but the driver protested that he didn't know the way. He became angry, he swore loudly in the street. Someone will have to come and help me, he shouted, and, clutching the babies, he strode off up the road, shouting and weaving through the traffic …

And woke.

He began to resent her. How dare she do this to him? Lead him to bliss and then hang him out to dry? Why didn't she help him more? Why had she brought him this far and no further? What was the point of meditation and the energetic connection to her that they called grace if he still behaved badly? He was worse off now than he had ever been, because now he was disappointed in himself for failing the spiritual course. He had always been a good student, always done well in whatever course he enrolled in, whatever project he took up. Now he was a dunce.

He gave up meditating. What was the point?

Zoe was shocked, alarmed even. He could see that, perhaps even more than him, she had become attached to the idea of her husband as a master's apprentice. It didn't matter which master; all that mattered was that he was a good boy, that he acknowledged his problem and made an effort, that he was a horse in some kind of harness. Well, fuck that.

Even so, giving up made him uneasy. He told himself that his unease was mere superstition. Meditation had become his voodoo, his rabbit's foot talisman, his lucky charm, his anxious ritual, like those obsessive-compulsive types who tap three times on the front door when they leave the house.

He became clumsy. His energy was rough, more abrasive even than before. He began to bump into things, into people. He was febrile, a scattergun. It was no special mood you could name – not anger, irritation or depression – just an off-centredness, like his internal scales had been tipped out of balance. Could it be that since he began to meditate he had arrived at a subtle equilibrium he didn't realise he possessed? It didn't mean that he had no moods or never lost his temper, but that the moods and the temper passed quickly. It was as if he walked now on the balls of his feet, or on an invisible tightrope.

It was early April and he drove to the airport and took a plane to Brisbane. He had a one-day conference at Surfers Paradise but had decided to hire a car and drive there after lunch with his sister, Jane, at her house in Woolloongabba.

They sat out on the big, wide deck at the rear, built up high on stilts like the rest of the house, and it was like sitting in the middle of a jungle: banana palms, papaya trees and a flagrant pink hibiscus poked through the derelict fence of the low-rent apartment block next door. The run-down apartments had token balconies that were all but obscured by an overgrown garden, luxuriant trees with branches laced together by creeper and spiderwebs.

Moments after Jane brought out coffee, they heard shouting. A skinny, shirtless man ran out onto one of the balconies, waving his arms. His brown tufts of hair stood on end, his grey beard was matted and he was raving. ‘The flies, the flies, they're everywhere, the flies …'

His sister pursed her lips. ‘Him again,' she said. ‘Last night he was hurling pot plants at the wall of the girls' bedroom.'

A police car pulled up, and then another, then a van. Suddenly there were nine uniformed police in the street. Three of them opened the iron gate to the garden and stood on the cracked concrete path, looking up at the balcony.

‘No arms, no weapons! No arms, no weapons!' cried the wretched figure. He was clearly terrified and dropped to the floor of the balcony like a ragdoll. ‘Look, look, I'm lying on the floor. I'm lying on the floor. No arms, no weapons.'

One of the policemen stepped back to get a better view. ‘You'll have to come down, sir.'

‘No, no, it's the flies, the flies, they're everywhere. You have to spray the bushes. I'm not coming down till you spray the flies.'

One of the policemen tried the door, which was unlocked, and the three entered. Before long they had picked the ragdoll up off the floor of the balcony and were frogmarching him across the road to the van.

Rick turned to his sister. ‘What will they do with him?'

‘What they always do with him. Take him to hospital, and after twenty-four hours they have to release him. And he comes back and he's quiet for a while, then it starts all over again.'

Yes, he thought,
it starts all over again
.

By the time he drove into Surfers it was late afternoon. He checked into his hotel, one of those white behemoths that line up behind the Esplanade, and he was too tired, too apathetic, to do anything but order room service. It was years since he had been to Surfers, and in the morning, before breakfast, he went for a walk through the seedy streets, past a whole arcade of empty shops plastered with ‘To Lease' notices. On a corner, outside the brass framed doors and glossy plate glass of a Louis Vuitton shop, a drug-raddled youth, whey-faced and reed-thin, was begging for small change, his eyes glazed, the palm of his left hand extended listlessly.

He turned and headed for the Esplanade, the great white beach, ever lovely with the waves rolling in like layered motion in series of eight or nine … two, three, four, five … And as they surged to the shore they broke simultaneously as if orchestrated, rolling crests of surf that gave off a muted roar and a sea mist that wafted across the Esplanade.

Already a portion of the beach was set with red and yellow flags, so narrow a space for permitted immersion, so limited a licence to frolic. The lifeguard was tall and lean and muscular but surprisingly old, in his forties at least. Or was it just that he had weathered into premature age? He had attached a resistance band to one of the steel columns of the lifeguard tent, and as he stood there, gazing out to sea and waiting for the raised arm that signalled distress, nonchalantly he worked the extender, in–out, in–out, first with his right arm, then with his left. The day had begun quietly. No-one was drowning.

Rick had an impulse to dive in, to swim, but he had no togs. And in any case he did not want to challenge the series of the waves, to immerse himself untidily in their rhythmic formation. The bodies in the water, between the flags, looked like flotsam. They did not belong; they trespassed and flailed. A lone surfer, outside the flags, pitched from his board, his body tossed into the air in an arc before folding neatly into the oncoming waves.

He walked on, past the Anzac memorial, a simple stone at the ocean edge of the Esplanade, its rigid, immobile form set against the relentless surge of the tide … five, six, seven, eight … He paused beside a bronze statue of a lifesaver, larger than life, a man in Speedo trunks, racing for the surf like a sprinter out of the blocks, eyes fixed ahead on the water. He read the plaque beside the bronze form. It said that this man died in his fifties. He was a world champion lifesaver, had won gold medals. But now, here he was, stalled in frozen motion. Forever on the cusp of rescue.

He looked at his watch. It was time to return. On the way back to the hotel he stopped at a shop that had opened early, and he bought a cap for Luke and a pair of crazy thongs in the shape of alligator paws.

In the hotel conference room the air was uncomfortably chill and they put on their jackets. He hated air-conditioning. Outside, the air was muggy, it clung to the skin, but in the artificial light of the conference room little draughts of icy air began to chill their shoulders, their forearms, the backs of their necks. They were at the mercy of controlled temperature.

Before dinner he went up to his room on the twenty-second floor, and sat out on its small, vertiginous balcony. Across the way a giant ferris wheel rotated slowly with a pulsating neon eye at its centre. The fairground looked fragile, as if temporary and constructed from Meccano. On the other side of the street was a new shopping plaza with a mock medieval tower and a clock that gave off soft musical chimes on the hour, like muted church bells heard from a distance. The boxy white towers of the hotels rose in stark outline against the blue mountain range in the distance. The ridges of the mountains rose in curved, flowing shapes that looked kneadable, as if made of a smoky charcoal dough.

Later, a small group of them dined at a yum cha palace on the Esplanade, desperate to escape the chill of the air con. After dinner, some went off to look for a bar, others sat on the ruffled sand, still warm, and gazed at the waves … five, six, seven, eight … He counted the series rolling in, the mesmerising order of it. Did he imagine it? Was he imposing order on chaos? The answer didn't matter, never would matter, for in his heart he knew suddenly that there was no chaos, anywhere, not in the commonplace sense of the word, and he was consoled by the knowledge of this.

In the burgeoning dark they strolled back along the sand to the street that turned off to their hotel, past the pandanus trees with their naked roots and their phallic growths hanging from the trunk, uncircumcised and pointing down to the concrete pavement.

Back in his room he watched the late news, thinking he should go outside again, should go out onto the balcony and watch the neon ferris wheel while it spun its slow compass through the warm, salty air. He opened the sliding door and settled onto a wrought-iron chair, so hard, so uncomfortable.

After a while he looked over to the wheel. It had stopped turning and its neon eye was dark. He got up, went inside, didn't bother to undress and lay on the bed, waiting for sleep. It fell on him, a depthless surge of something powerful, and he dreamed he was standing on the Esplanade, gazing at the waves, their exquisite unending series, rolling in …

When he woke there was an unbearable tumescence behind his eyes, and he felt grateful, not for anything in particular, just that he was alive. It was the dream; some resistance in him had dissolved. But why had that dream been so powerful? After all, it had merely repeated what he had already done that morning on his walk, when he had looked out to sea. But the dream version had been infused with a powerful presence, unsought, given to him as a gift.

Now he was awake, and the reliable Gold Coast sun was shafting through the heavy drapes, and he wrenched himself upright on the edge of the bed. He glanced at the bedside clock: it was late and he would miss his flight. He phoned down to the reception desk for a quick checkout, lurched into the shower, drowned himself in over-chlorinated water, dressed and packed his overnight bag. Then he drove out to the airport. There, brandishing a pair of alligator thongs, he joined the queue for home.

The very next morning he returned to his meditation practice, only he got up earlier, at five instead of six, and he meditated longer. He made no resolution about this, it just happened.

Now, truly, he began to feel as if nothing important was within his volition. He had had a dark night of the soul, had bumped into things, and he was meditating again. Stuff happened, and he was moved on. And where was ‘on'? He hadn't a clue. He felt like a knight that was being picked up and slid about on a chessboard.

What he needed was someone to talk to. He had a secret life, and he needed to make sense of it.

Sydney Park

I rang Rebecca.

No, I didn't want to join her chant group (I said this as politely as I could, making the excuse that I often worked late and she lived on the other side of town). But could she suggest someone I might meet with on a regular basis?

Well, she said, she knew of a Vedantin monk who lived in the inner west, not far from me, a man called Martin Coleby, who taught yoga and ran classes from his home.

‘I did a workshop with him once,' she said. ‘He's pretty cool. Not pious, or anything like that.'

Didn't monks live in monasteries?

‘Not Martin. He went to India when he was young, spent time in an ashram. Now he's a renunciate.'

A renunciate?

‘Celibate, vegetarian, all that.'

‘Where?'

‘In St Peters. In a crummy little terrace. He doesn't have much money, only what his students can afford to pay.'

I thought about it for a while and the idea was plausible. It would be private, no-one would know. I rang this Martin Coleby.

Martin suggested I come on a Thursday evening after one of his regular yoga classes and we could take it from there. Perhaps he had something to offer me, perhaps not.

As instructed, I arrived promptly around seven, just as his students were rolling up their foam mats and saying their goodbyes at the door. I waited to one side until they were gone, all the while observing Martin, a muscular man of medium height, lean and with a kind of tensile strength, as if he might once have been an athlete. He wore loose white drawstring pants and a grey t-shirt, and had a tattoo around his right bicep, an inscription in the alphabet of some exotic language. His head was shaved and bullet-shaped, with a long, narrow face, high cheekbones and hollowed-out cheeks. His eyes were a pale icy-blue but the most striking thing about him was the ugly red welt that ran along one side of his skull, as if it had been seared with a hot poker.

I must have stared a moment too long, for Martin smiled ruefully and said, ‘I had a tumour removed late last year. I think I might be onto my ninth life.'

I hesitated, wondering if I ought to ask politely after his prognosis. But I just stood there, feeling like the interloper I was, until Martin waved me across the threshold and into a dark living room, shabby and sparsely furnished. It smelled of incense.

‘Some tea?'

I nodded, though I never drank the stuff. He indicated I should follow him down the narrow hallway into a big glassed-in area at the rear of the house.

At one end of this space there was a small alcove of a kitchen, where he stood by the sink and waited for the kettle to fill, waited with a quiet focus that I sensed he brought to every task, no matter how menial.

When the water had boiled he poured it into two mugs and added a fine green powder. Then he handed me a mug and said, ‘Okay, Rick, tell me why you're here.'

It had been a long day at work and I hadn't yet been home; I hadn't thought of what I might say, had rehearsed no line of inquiry, had fronted up in a state bordering on irritability. But I opened my mouth and some words fell out. ‘I seem to have acquired a weird attachment to a woman I hardly know.'

‘Attachment?'

‘Well, you could call it that. She creeps into my thoughts, all hours of the day and night. It's like …' I sighed, conscious of deep fatigue. ‘It's like she inhabits me.' I might have been describing one of those office infatuations to which men of my age were supposedly prone.

‘And who is she?'

I said her name.

‘Ah.'

‘You know her?'

‘I know
of
her.' Martin gestured at a small fold-up table by the window and I pulled out a chair and set down my thick ceramic mug of tea. Martin sat opposite. ‘Tell me what
you
know about her,' he said.

‘I know some of her personal history, but not much. I know she lives just outside Chennai, and that she seems to have followers around the world, whom she visits every year. I've googled her and she doesn't have a profile. She's not a big name.'

‘No, she's a bit of a recluse. She pretty much works under the radar.'

‘Meaning?'

‘India has many sages, but few of them travel. It's only in the last few years that she's decided to emerge from relative seclusion.'

‘Yes, but who is she?'

‘She's a holy woman. A saint, if you can live with that idea.'

A saint. Saints in my boyhood religion were dead. I stared down into my tea, which I still hadn't touched. It looked green and unappetising. ‘I've never had any interest in this kind of thing, but now, for some reason, I'm drawn to it.'

‘Then you're lucky. It's your time.'

‘My time?'

‘You must be ready for what she has to teach you or you wouldn't be having this experience.'

Riddles. It was all riddles. ‘Yes, but what
is
this experience?'

Martin looked at me from over the rim of his mug. ‘You tell me.'

So I began, more or less at the beginning, to give an account of my experiences with Sri Mata. I tried to be matter-of-fact, almost to the point of sounding offhand, but the more I talked the more I doubted the wisdom of my being there; it all sounded limp and nonsensical. Finally I lapsed into silence, and ventured a sip of the tea, which by this time was lukewarm and made me feel nauseous.

Martin had listened with eyes closed and now he opened them. ‘That's it?' he said.

‘That's it.'

‘Okay.' He laid his palms flat on the table and looked down, like a cabinet-maker assessing the grain of a piece of wood. ‘Sounds like you learned to meditate because you were desperate. And when you're desperate you become open to change, which in your case was finding a teacher.'

‘I wasn't looking.'

‘You don't need to. When you're ready, they find
you
. That's how it works.'

‘It?'

‘The practice.'

‘The practice? You mean meditation?'

‘That and more.'

‘There is no more.'

Martin shrugged, as if to say: that's what you think. ‘You can't do it all on your own. Well, some people can but it's rare. Mostly we need a teacher, a recognisable form, someone we can relate to. When you go and see a being like Sri Mata, you're viewing the ultimate truth by proxy. You see that she's different. She seems to be in possession of something you'd like to share in. You're drawn to that.'

‘To what, exactly?'

‘Well, to begin with, her energy. She's at peace and yet alive, magnetic even. She's realised the truth and makes it visible to you through her bodily presence.'

‘What truth?' My tone was cynical, churlish.

‘The unity of the field, of all things. You had a glimpse of that, your experience in the bottleshop. But that's how she sees the world all the time. And that's how the world really is, only for most of us there's a film over it.' He raised his hand and lowered it like a curtain. ‘And she's like a light socket or a cable that plugs you into it,
it
being what lies beyond the appearance of material objects, a unified field of consciousness that pervades everything.'

I found I was holding my breath, perhaps because there was no logic here that I could recognise. ‘If it pervades everything then I'm already a part of it, so why do I need the connection to her?'

‘Because, like most of us, you're blind. You think you're a goldfish in a bowl, when really you swim in the ocean. But before you can strike out freely you need to develop your stroke, as it were. She is your life jacket.'

‘I'm inflated?'

Martin smiled. ‘With grace.'

‘Why me?' I said, and it wasn't really a question, more that I was thinking out loud. ‘I'm hardly a prime candidate for this stuff.'

‘Think of it this way: why not you?'

‘You said I was “ripe”. How was I ripe?'

‘You meditated, didn't you?'

‘That was stress management.'

Martin nodded. ‘For some people, yes.'

‘And why not for me?'

‘Well, obviously not for you. Because you're here, asking these questions. And because you left your family in the middle of a nice picnic and hitched a ride in a taxi.'

A
nice
picnic? Something about that word ‘nice' made me want to laugh out loud. Who was this man? Had he ever led a normal life? ‘I don't know why I left the park that day. It was out of character.'

‘You felt out of control?'

‘Not exactly.'

‘Then maybe this “character” you were out of is worth looking at more closely. Who is this Rick Kline?'

I was weary. I had come here for answers and all I was getting were questions. But what had I expected? Some kind of comfort, maybe? Instead, I was swimming in sand. I turned to look out the window, where it was still light. In the drab concrete courtyard there were pots of herbs and a bush of bright red chillies. On both sides of the courtyard rows of tall tomato plants were tied to stakes. They grew in a narrow strip of earth between the concrete and a high paling fence, and though the fences were dilapidated the patch of garden was neat and carefully weeded. The tomato plants were laden with green fruit, glossy, abundant and looking as if they were about to burst their skins.

I turned back to Martin. ‘I've never thought of myself as anyone's disciple,' I said. ‘I don't have the temperament for it.'

‘No, I can see that. But then, maybe you're not the person you thought you were.'

This, in truth, was a large part of what was bothering me. For years I had constructed a version of Richard Kline that now seemed beside the point. I was a snake that, instead of sloughing off an old skin, had retained it, and now I was forced to impersonate an old self while I grew a new skin underneath, and the two skins were suffocating me. I struck out on a tangent. ‘I don't like the group thing. I don't like the way people behave around her, they're like children. It's cultish.'

‘And yet you like to sit with her.'

‘That's one way of putting it.'

‘Is that devotion?'

‘It doesn't feel like it.'

‘Then how does it feel?'

Good question.
How does it feel?
Impossible to describe that feeling. A cluster of words and phrases swarmed in my head until, finally, one word fell out, one lame word. ‘Emotional.'

Martin nodded.

‘But not in the usual way,' I added, hastily.

‘In an unusual way?'

‘Unusual for me. I tend to choke up.'

Martin seemed to know what this meant. ‘And these are sad tears?'

‘No.'

‘Happy tears?'

‘No, not exactly.'

‘Then they're guru tears.'

‘Meaning?'

‘Meaning tears of recognition.'

Recognition? This was a striking thought. ‘Meaning I recognise her?'

‘And she recognises you. It's called
darshan
, a special form of seeing. It's a two-way thing. Relational. Not a passive viewing but insight, a direct vision of the truth. And a particular kind of truth, one we always knew but had forgotten. You see the truth in her and she sees the truth in you.'

‘Maybe.' I hesitated. ‘I don't know.'

Ah, but I did know. Or I thought I knew, at least for a while, but then that early euphoria had left me. More than that, my old self had returned, a feral dog dumped in the bush that had somehow managed to find its way home to lie under my bed and growl through the night. Now I experienced prolonged bouts of insomnia, was consumed by a restlessness that left me enervated. The initial glow of my romance with her had passed and I felt dumped, dumped by the guru wave. Back where I started. Yes, I was meditating again, but to what end? I thought of her often but I was not, after all, a changed man. The spark of that rare love was gone, extinguished. My meditation was empty, robotic.

‘It feels like I've been experiencing an infatuation, and now it might be over.'

‘I doubt that, Rick. What's over is the
honeymoon.
You've been too comfortable. Doubt comes, disappointment, and with it anger. This path is not a comfortable one. It's not meant to be some kind of poultice, it's meant to be a sword that cuts through your defences. So if you are pissed off, no longer in your comfort zone, ask yourself: are you willing to take the next step?'

What next step? Hadn't the sword already sliced into me, long before I encountered
her
? Hadn't my imagination always been an open wound?

‘No-one promised you it would be easy.'

‘No-one promised me anything.'

‘Didn't they? Think about that.'

By now it was dark outside, the last faint flush of summer daylight gone. Martin put his hand up to his mouth to suppress a yawn, and I saw that he was tired. My eye went to the ugly welt on his scalp; in fading light it looked like a black shadow.

I stood and said it was late and I had better be going.

Martin rose and walked me to the door, where he laid his hand on my shoulder. ‘Just go with what you have, Rick,' he said. ‘Be patient and think of the self as a laboratory. Whatever experience you are having, explore it, test it out.'

‘Well, thanks for seeing me.'

We shook hands but the mood was flat.

I walked out into the dark street, a leafy avenue lined with plane trees. I was a man who had strayed into a cul-de-sac. It was unseasonably mild, a humid Sydney night when the warm stillness feels like an embrace, a random blessing.

Soon I would be home, back to base, and then what?

Slowly I walked towards the car, and when I reached it I looked back to where Martin was still standing in the open doorway, leaning against the frame, the palm of his right hand resting on the dome of his head, a buddha in the porch light.

Suddenly he straightened up and stepped out onto the footpath. He waved, and called to me across the street, and pointed in the direction of Sydney Park, just a few kilometres down the road. ‘I go for a stroll every Saturday afternoon in the park, usually around four. If you feel like a walk, come by.'