Dinner with Buddha (12 page)

Fourteen

South from the junction of Alton's road and Nebraska 97 it was twenty-four miles to Tryon, which one might pass without believing one had seen a town. Over that stretch the landscape gradually flattened until it looked more like what I'd always thought of when I heard the beautiful Otos Indian word
nebraska.

Rinpoche drove with both hands gripping the wheel and his eyes locked on the winding tar strip. On those rare occasions—two, to be exact—when a vehicle passed us headed north, he stiffened and made a sound like “ay.” A pickup rode our bumper for a while and then, on a straight stretch, zoomed past. A young cowboy in the passenger seat rolled down the window and shouted “asshole!” as he went by.

Rinpoche waved at him. “I am doing okay?” he asked me.

“Fine. Relax a little, though.”

We crawled along. There was ample time to appreciate the scenery, to replay the past hours. “A genius like Alton,” I said to Rinpoche, trying hard to sound kind, “shouldn't he be living someplace where he can do more good in the world? I mean, he's raising a tiny herd of Angus cattle, living ten miles from the nearest neighbor, fooling around with inventions in his back room. He should be teaching at MIT, or running a big charity, or designing space stations or something, no?”

“No,” Rinpoche said bluntly.

“Don't you feel we're all born with certain gifts and we should use them?”

“Sure.”

“His gifts are going to waste then, aren't they?”

Rinpoche took his eyes from the road for one terrifying second and shot me a look. The look there was full of pity, not the first time I'd been on the receiving end of such a thing. “People,” he said, returning his attention to the road and jerking once on the wheel, too hard, “they move. One place to another, they go. Sometimes one place is right for a little some while, then not so right so they move. Could be one whole life, could be one years. Sometimes you go like Jesus for a little sometime into the desert. Jesus didn't stay in the desert, he went for a little some time, then he left. Buddha his whole life moved around.”

“You're speaking of yourself. You and Seese and Shelsa. You're finished with North Dakota, I can feel it. It was your time in the proverbial desert.”

“Maybe,” he said, and then, “Driving now, Otto.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

We were heading into the city of North Platte—famous for having the largest rail yard in the world, and for its citizens' hospitality to the many thousands of servicemen who'd rolled through town on their way to war in the 1940s. The city itself—we saw little of it, even at our snail's pace—offered nothing more than a pawn shop, a few old gas stations, and the typical chain restaurants. With great care, Rinpoche mounted the ramp and headed west on I-80, where the land beside the road was suddenly featureless. With the sole exception of a Ford SUV driven by a man in a maroon robe, vehicles raced along there in a rapid parade. A hundred years earlier the travelers had been on foot, and then on horseback or in a horse-drawn stage or wagon, content to make twenty hard miles in a day. These days, fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit signs were tacked up on the walls of secondhand shops, for sale as curiosities; Rinpoche was going forty-eight and cars were passing on both sides as if we were in reverse. “Why so angry?” he'd famously said on our first road trip. We'd been listening to talk radio then, a pastime I'd recently abandoned. Now I expected him to ask, “Why so fast?” When cars could safely go a hundred miles an hour, when jet technology advanced to the point where we could fly to Europe in two hours, we'd accept that as natural, of course. We'd embrace it. I had a friend who designed silicon chips and when I asked him where the industry was headed he answered with two words: “More speed.” The faster we went the more we could get done in a day, a week, a lifetime. We could manufacture more efficiently, send more e-mails, surf more websites, see more of the planet, renovate more rooms in bigger houses, compete with the rest of the world, which would be on the same treadmill. All fine and good, except that the advent of the microwave oven and instant Internet searches hadn't seemed to grant us any more time whatsoever. Nor any advances in the peace of mind department.

Plugging along at monk-speed, I couldn't help but wonder if it wasn't all some kind of trick we were playing on ourselves. Maybe the more we crammed into a day the less we actually experienced. Maybe the addictive hurry was all a kind of racing away from our existential predicament, as if we could outrun old age and death, as though, if we kept busy enough, kept moving, traveled farther, checked more items off the to-do list on any given day, then, like astronauts in orbit, we'd escape the bonds of ordinary time. Or escape, at least, the manic workings of our own minds. I turned on the radio and found some golden oldies. Creedence Clearwater was asking if you'd ever seen the rain and maybe the answer was no. We never stayed still long enough.

Big trucks, speeding cars, nothing to either side of the road but empty grazing land. “Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“Any question, anytime, you can ask, Otto.”

“When a rock-and-roll band has gotten famous, put out a lot of popular CDs or albums or whatever and been around a long while, sometimes right before they retire they make what people call a farewell tour. They travel around to different cities, give their final shows, say good-bye to their fans. I can't help but think you're doing something like that on this trip.”

Nothing. Rinpoche breathed in and breathed out, kept his eyes forward, his lips set in a tiny smile. He blinked.

“Well?”

“Waiting for the question.”

“Are you going on a good-bye tour? Is that what this is?”

“This is road trip with brother-and-waw. Talk in Colorado tomorrow.”

“Good to know. Where?”

“Lead Willage.”

“Okay, fine. But I feel like you're saying good-bye to America. The way you're talking, what you just said about people moving, staying in one place for a while, doing a kind of desert retreat. You and Seese really are leaving the Center, aren't you? For good.”

At that moment, still two hundred miles east of Denver, we passed a giant feed lot to our right, hundreds of cows waiting in the dirt to be slaughtered and eaten. It sat just off the highway, a dozen acres of mud and white fencing. The smell of it lingered long after we'd left the corrals behind, and for a while I contemplated the whole sad chain of killing that kept us breathing in and out. It seemed peculiar to me that, almost without exception, the animals we ate were the ones that lived on grains and grasses, the gentler ones, those that didn't depend on killing another living creature for survival. Wolves, mountain lions, sharks, bears, hawks—predators weren't part of the typical American diet. We ate cows, chickens, pigs, sometimes goats or rabbits or deer, lobsters and clams and scallops. For a stretch of bland highway it seemed a metaphor: Was it always the gentlest ones, the nonkillers, who were slaughtered? Was there, as some Buddhists and Hindus believed, a hierarchy of the reincarnational life? Insect to mammal to human. And then, within the human evolution, murderer to saint? Did we evolve toward peaceableness only to be cut into chops and steaks and cooked, nailed on a cross, or assassinated by Chinese secret police? Was that the setup?

Rinpoche wrinkled his nose. “What is smells?”

“Feed lot. The cows are getting fattened up there and pretty soon they'll be sent to a place where they're killed and cut up for the market, or made into hamburger patties and so on.”

He sniffed the air, twisted up his lips, moved the needle from forty-eight to forty-nine.

“You didn't answer about the good-bye tour.”

“I have a practice for you,” he said.

“Okay, fine, but—”

“Eating practice.”

“Okay. I've been trying to lose a few pounds.”

“Next time when we stop I show it.”

“Okay, good, thanks. No answer on the good-bye tour question, I guess, right?”

“Answer is yes,” he said, finally.

“You're closing the Center?”

“Keeping open the Center.”

“But moving.”

“Yes.”

“With Seese and Shelsa?”

“Of course.”

“Where to?”

“Finding out now, Otto.”

“Waiting for a sign?”

“Celia say to go on this trip and the sign comes.”

“And you believe her?”

“Always believing. Magical wife, your sister. Wery magical. Some people don't see it. Some brothers don't.”

I said, “Okay. Message received. Awaiting sign from God.”

I was holding Alton's dossier on my lap, afraid, really, to open it and take a look. I took out my magical phone and dialed my sister.

“My beautiful brother” was the way she answered.

“Everybody okay?”

“Yes. And you? And my husband who didn't call last night?”

“We were out at a strip club. He had a few too many beers. He's going to call a bit later on. Once he sobers up.”

“Your idea of a joke, I take it.”

“A bad one. He's driving, actually, and doing a beautiful job. We left your friend Alton's house a little while back.”

“Did you like him?”

“Honestly?”

“Of course, honestly. You didn't like him, right?”

“He seemed troubled. Difficult to talk to.”

“His father beat him as a boy, did he tell you that?”

“No.”

“Over and over and over again. He's been hospitalized, twice. Psychiatric hospitals. Not since he started meditating, but before that. I hope you were kind to him.”

“I tried. He's a hard guy to be kind to. But let me ask you something, Seese: Why did you send us out there? Rinpoche just told me he has a talk in Colorado. Nebraska's the other way. What's going on?”

“You had an extra day. I wanted you to see him, that's all.”

“I know that. The question is: why?”

“I wanted you to appreciate what you and Jeannie gave to the world by raising your children the way you did. I wanted you to see what gets bred in a person when there's too much trouble in the house when they're young. Sometimes I don't think you realize what you did. What you and Jeannie did. I know you think Tash and Anthony are great. I know how much you love them. But that's something different. I wanted you to take a little credit for that. Forty percent of the credit anyway.”

“I'll take thirty,” I said, and I heard my sister laugh. “It was a lesson, then.”

“Yes, are you mad?”

For two seconds a pint-sized puff of anger blew through me, a reflex, spurt of smoke coming off my burning pride. My sister was toying with me, giving me lessons. I breathed in and out. I said, “No.” And I meant it.

“Good, then. And I also thought he might benefit from seeing Rinpoche.”

“I'm sure he did.” I considered telling her about the dossier on the Chinese, but held back.

“Can you pass the phone to Rinpoche?”

“I'd rather not. He's driving and I don't want to distract him. I'll have him call you when we stop, okay? Or tonight?”

“Okay, tonight. Don't let him speed.”

“Not to worry.”

Fifteen

Northeastern Colorado was the bleakest of the bleak, the most featureless of the featureless, more arid, even, than the most arid land we'd passed through in the previous three days. There was a prison just off the highway—that seemed right. There were high-tension wires looping between massive steel towers and very occasional patches of what looked to be feed corn, growing in irrigated squares.

By the time he'd driven for a couple of hours, Rinpoche had had enough. He guided the car down an exit ramp and at the stop sign let out a long sigh. There was a roadside café just there, a mom-and-pop establishment that promised great things . . . until the food was served. How, let me ask, is it possible to mess up an English muffin with peanut butter? I don't know. It shall remain, for me, one of life's great mysteries. Maybe the coffee had been made with recycled water from the washing machine. Maybe the English muffin had been used in the seat cushions on the counter stools for a few months until the new padding arrived. Maybe the peanut butter was made with imitation peanuts and three-in-one oil. The service, sullen as a bull moose when rutting season is finished, matched the fare.

We sat at one end of the counter, a few yards clear of the only other sufferers, a mother and her two sons. The mother and her children—probably fourteen and twelve—made me look svelte and I'm not being cruel about it. I was certainly in no position to feel superior to them. It was just a sad thing to see, young boys already carrying around an extra thirty or forty pounds, an unwanted cargo that was going to hold their lives down like a barbell attached to a balloon. In school, in sports, with girls, in their own sense of themselves, there would always be this anchor. Changing the way they ate would be harder than giving up Marlboros after a two-pack-a-day decade. They sat in the ruins of the first of two cheeseburgers and big plates of fries, trading punches and quick slaps between bites, looking happy.

I think it was the way they were eating that worried me most. God knows I've had my share of cheeseburgers and fries in my life, and fed them to my children. But the boys were shoving the second cheeseburgers into their mouths like inmates of a just liberated camp where they'd been starved for years. A bite went in before the previous one had been swallowed. I wonder if Rinpoche somehow arranged that—implausible as it might seem—because the lesson he gave me was the other side of that same coin. He waited until the mother and boys had paid and left, and then he ordered two glasses of chocolate milk. “For the dessert,” he said. I'd never seen him drink chocolate milk. He took hold of his glass and gestured for me to do the same. “First, you look,” he said. “You see what it is that soon is going in your mouth, okay? Becoming part of your body.”

“Okay. Chocolate milk, it looks like.”

“Not too long, but you make sure you look at the food. Few seconds, maybe. Don't make the big show. Okay? You think, where did this milk coming from? The cow. You think about the cow maybe two seconds, okay? Then the chocolate—where comes from?”

“Okay.”

“Was the question. Where comes from the chocolate?”

“The cacao plant. South America probably, I'm not sure.”

“Then you pick it up like this, see? He lifted the glass to his lips and took a medium-sized sip, then set it down again. Now you. Okay. You taste the milk?”

“Yes.”

“Really taste it. You feel it in your mouth, then feel when you swallow.”

“Okay.”

“Not reading when you eat. Not looking at the phone or the computer. Eating, okay?”

“Sure.”

“That's the wesson,” he said. “All done. Now you lose the weight you want.”

“A chocolate milk diet?”

He looked at me, unsmiling, then shook his head. “Mister joke,” he said.

“Drinking chocolate milk seems a strange way to lose weight, that's all.”

“Not the chocolate milk, Otto! The way! When you eat, go a little slow. Really taste. Don't put the next one in before the first one is gone. Food, drink, the same.”

“Lunch will take hours.”

“Maybe a little bit more time now, yes. But maybe then you eat not so much. Just try, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll try it at dinner. I'll give it a shot.”

“Give a shot,” he said. “Good.”

We sat there sipping our chocolate milk for five full minutes. If nothing else, it took away the taste of the muffin and peanut butter. Rinpoche paid. We headed out to the car, yours truly ready to get back behind the wheel. But there was a dusty and beaten-up brown sedan parked beside us. Next to the sedan stood the mother and her hefty sons, looking bereft. Another few steps and I could see that the sedan's left rear tire was flat.

“Could you help us, sir?” she asked. She was an attractive woman, not yet forty, with lively blue eyes and a wrinkle of humor in the muscles around her mouth. The boys were carbon copies, face and body both, one slightly taller. But there was something in their eyes that was missing from hers—a devilish glint, a hint of past troubles or a promise of future ones.

“Of course,” I said. I hadn't changed a tire since a flat on the old Corolla we'd bought for Tasha when she went off to college. It would be, I thought, another piece of Americana for Rinpoche, part of our ongoing exchange. He'd teach me meditative eating; I'd teach him how to change a flat.

I am the son and grandson of farmers and so, while it's true that I've spent my adult life working at a desk, it's also true that I'm better than the average Otto when it comes to mechanical things. Tuning up the lawnmower, nailing neat rows of clapboards on the garage, repointing the mortar on the ancient stone wall at the front of our yard—these were the types of tasks I enjoyed on a warm Saturday morning. They formed a nice counterweight to a week of editorial meetings and the reading of galleys and submissions. I tried to pass on some of those skills to Anthony and Natasha. In doing so I usually relayed my father's advice: “The hands go slower than the brain, Otto,” he'd say, whether he was showing me how to sharpen a chisel or repair a barn wall. “When you're working with your hands, methodical is what counts, okay, son? Careful is what counts, not speed.”

It struck me, as I introduced myself to the woman and her children—Edie, Jesse, and Adam were their names—and set about getting ready to change her tire, that Rinpoche would have approved of my father's approach. In its own way, the farming life, the life of manual labor, has a meditative aspect to it. Slow, careful, methodical, free of a lot of extraneous thinking. At the office I could do several things at once—drink coffee, talk on the phone, check sales reports on the computer—but try doing something else when you're sharpening a chisel. It was exactly what Rinpoche had just taught me about eating.

Changing Edie's tire, however, turned out to be slightly more complicated than I expected. To begin with, there was something amiss with the lock mechanism on her trunk. The inside lever didn't pop it. She tried the key but the trunk stayed closed. I could see that she was becoming embarrassed—the old car, the flat tire, the helplessness—and I was glad when her younger son, Adam, got a running start, jumped two feet in the air, landed hard on the trunk with his ample rear end, and we heard a
click.
When he slid off, leaving a small indentation, the trunk magically opened. We laughed, Rinpoche louder than anyone.

The trunk was filled with . . . stuff. Half-empty bottles of antifreeze, old blankets, empty beer bottles, pieces of clothing, a case of soda pop, rags, two bottles of nail-polish remover, etc. I stood aside while Edie and her sons took everything out, piece by piece, and gradually got down to the place where the jack and spare tire were stored. I set one of the blankets down on the gravel lot, kneeled on it, and showed Rinpoche how the jack worked, where it fit on the underside of the car. While I did this, I could sense the three pairs of sky-blue eyes fixed on him. Edie and her sons, most likely, had never encountered a Rinpoche in the flesh. There he was, stocky, bald, not white, wearing some kind of maroon dress with gold along the edges, talking funny, laughing at things—the way a beer bottle rolled along the tar—that were decidedly unfunny to the rest of us. For a moment I wanted to explain everything to them:
This is my brother-in-law,
I wanted to say,
my sister's husband. He's a famous spiritual teacher, born in Russia, living in North Dakota, and running a place there where people come from all over the country to sit on cushions or in chairs, or alone in little cabins, and watch the wanderings of their mind. He's a Rinpoche. RIN-po-shay. It means “precious one.” He's been reincarnated so many times that he has a different view of life than the rest of us do. He's not afraid of dying, doesn't care about money, often skips dinner, usually rises at three a.m. to pray for a few hours.

But I decided to focus on the task at hand.

“Push down on this lever here,” I said to my companion. “It's like the old-fashioned well behind the small barn at the farm. Push down on it and see what happens.”

He shifted the folds of his robe to one side and knelt next to me, took the black metal stick in his hand, and pushed down once, violently. The car moved up half an inch.

“Not so hard,” I said. “A lever. Just push down on it not so hard about ten times and watch what happens.”

He did that. The car responded as I expected it would and he was amazed, stunned. “What is inside this, Otto?” he asked excitedly. “This chack?”

“Nothing's inside it. Keep going. We need to get the wheel clear of the ground before we can change it.”

Everything proceeded smoothly. The car went up, Rinpoche giggled, Jesse found the lug wrench, and the first four bolts came loose without much trouble. But then, as always seems to happen, the last one wouldn't budge. I tried. The car shook. The nut refused to move. Rinpoche gave it a shot with the same result.

“You wouldn't have WD-40 or something like that, Edie, would you?”

“Nail-polish remover works.”

“It does?”

A nod into the folds of her double chin. She retrieved a bottle, dabbed some on, splashed a bit of soda on top of it, I tapped the nut a few times, and voilà, the tire was free. In another two minutes the skinny temporary spare had been bolted in place, the pile of Dollar General objects thrown back into the trunk, and Edie was showering us with thank yous as if we'd waved a wand and changed the dented old Pontiac into a shimmering Mercedes. She fished around in her small cloth purse, brought forth two dollars and held them out to me. “No, never,” I said. “Thank you, but no charge. When you bring it in for a tune-up I'll charge you an extra hundred to make up for it, but today's work is free, ma'am.”

The boys smiled. Edie stood there confused, missing the joke entirely. For one moment I thought she would start to cry. A gust of wind blew across the barren plain, carrying a load of grit in its hot breath. Edie said, “Then I'd like you to come home with us and have pie.”

“No, really. It's nothing. It took ten minutes.”

“I'd really want you to.”

“We just ate, really, we're fine.”

“I seen what you ate. It wasn't good. I make a good pie and I, the boys and I, we'd like for you to come and have a piece, you and, I'm sorry—”

“Volya. My brother-in-law. My sister's husband.”

“You ought to come,” she insisted. “It's not far. We'd like you to.”

The boys were nodding, watching us, arms hanging at their sides, lips pressed together, half embarrassed by their mother, it seemed to me, but also half excited at making friends with two oddballs. I was still trying to figure out the glint in their eyes. They seemed alert and fairly intelligent, but at the same time there was something else going on, a reflection of devilry, a hint of twisted smiles. I wondered if they were about to play some practical joke on us. I looked at Rinpoche, though, really, I didn't have to. I looked back at Edie and said, “Okay. We can't stay long but a piece of pie would be nice. What is it, apple?”

“Cherry,” she said. “Vanilla ice cream.”

Rinpoche was nodding in a slow rhythm. I said, “We'll follow you.”

From the parking lot of the Worst Restaurant on Earth we turned left, crossed the Interstate, and were immediately on a gravel road running through Colorado nothingness. Less than a mile down that road we turned left again, onto a smaller road, hanging back a bit so as not to be blinded by the dust cloud thrown up by Edie's car. Another mile or so and we began to see a few homes to either side, trailer homes mostly, with the occasional one-story bungalow. There was a striking resemblance to Pine Ridge but this wasn't reservation land; the only sign we saw was for
AMALGAMATED METALS TWO MILES.

Edie turned left onto a short drive and pulled up in front of a trailer home. Rusted sides, tires holding down the roof, a short clothesline to one side where men's white underpants and a colorful bra waved at us in welcome.