Dinner with Buddha (21 page)

Instead, I waved to her in a gesture of apology and told Rinpoche we needed to leave the spa now, so we could make it to the dunes in time.

“Five more minutes, man,” he said. “You go take the shower. Rinpoche likes this hot water wery much. Makes my face push out the sweat. Take the shower cold, cold afterward.”

“People will think we're Finnish,” I said, and he gave me a puzzled look, and said, “Not yet,” and I headed back to the room to get ready.

Twenty-three

The road south from Joyful Journey was a two-lane tar strip lacking either shoulders or a breakdown lane. One second of inattention and you'd find yourself either crashing head-on into a tractor trailer heading north, or plunging over a six-foot levee into the high desert. The sun was setting, the sky turning various shades of pastel pink, orange, and blue, and Rinpoche was asleep. He did that sometimes, drifted off in improbable moments. No doubt the extra few minutes in the hottest of the pools had sapped him of his legendary energy, but I knew it would return. A brief nap like this and he'd be sprinting up the dunes with the zest of a teenager.

He slept solidly as we made a ninety-degree left at a place called Mosca then raced along another two-lane road, this one, if such a thing can be possible, even straighter than the road south from Joyful Journey. No one seemed to live on this land. Once you turned off the main highway, you covered a landscape of empty grazing fields, dusty stretches spotted here and there with small cactus and tumbleweed. We were losing light fast, and I worried we'd arrive too late for the moonrise. Would there be police on a road like this? Would it be possible to push the SUV up past seventy and not get stopped? That question was answered immediately by a pickup passing me as if Rinpoche and I were in a train traveling the other way.

Another ninety-degree left, a less-straight road, an empty booth at the entrance to the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, and then, in darkness, the parking lot. Rinpoche awoke. “Let's hustle,” I said, “we want to get up onto the dunes before the moon comes up.”

“When she coming?”

“Soon. Let's go.”

There was a stretch of flattish land between the parking lot and the actual dunes. Fifteen minutes of fast hiking before we started to climb. There before us, stretching thousands of feet into the purple sky and for what seemed miles to either side, was an agglomeration of sand the Sahara might have envied, hips and breasts and buttocks of sand, as if we were walking among a tangle of giants, all sleeping in the nude.

“This place!” Rinpoche exclaimed.

“Unbelievable, isn't it?”

We climbed the rounded spine of one dune then transferred to another, higher one, and kept going. Behind us I could sense the light subtly changing and I was surprised that no one besides a loud group of young people, far, far above, had thought to do this. By the first stage of the climb I was struggling, not quite gasping but struggling. I could feel a familiar burning heaviness in my thighs. Rinpoche, of course, was all but skipping along. Our feet sank in a couple of inches with each step, which made things harder. But it was a deliciously and—from what I'd later hear—atypically cool night. There was very little wind. We slogged and slogged, and finally, when I decided we'd gone high enough and that it wouldn't be wise to push myself deeper into the breathless zone, we stopped, turned, and sat.

The group far above us erupted in wolf howls—they could already see the moon from their perch. The sky over the jagged Sangre de Cristos moved from dark purple to charcoal gray and then we spotted the rounded tip of it, the year's largest full moon. A bit more. A little more. At last it cleared the peaks completely and sailed free there like some resplendent god-face. Rinpoche was quietly praying. I took out my phone, careful to keep the sand away from it, and dialed my daughter.

“Interrupting anything?” I asked.

“Nada, Dad. What's up?”

“The moon. Can you see it?”

“Wait a sec. Let me go outside. Warren's here. He says hi.”

“Hi back.”

There was the sound of footsteps, a familiar creak of a familiar door, and then, “Holy shit!”

“Something, isn't it? Rinp and I are sitting a few hundred feet up on a dune in the Great Sand Dunes National Park. Almost completely silent here except for a few college kids yelling farther up the hill. The dunes are half in shadow, very sensuous. You'd love it.”

“You should write, Dad.”

“Yes, my memoirs. North Dakota kid goes east, makes his fortune in publishing, sires two saints, retires young and travels. It would sell hundreds.”

“I like being called a saint,” she said. “That's a first. . . . Speaking of saints, I'm saying a prayer for Mom right now, Dad. I can feel her presence.”

“Still having the weird things going on? Not the Chinese visitor, I mean the other weird things, the déjà vus and so on.”

“More than ever. I wish Rinpoche were here to counsel me because I feel like something gigantic is about to happen, but I can say that only to you and Warren. It's a little scary.”

“Gigantic how?”

“Interior gigantic.”

“Here's the interior master, then. I'm handing him the phone.”

Rinpoche looked rather absurd with a phone to his ear. There was something in the way he held it, thumb on the bottom, middle finger on top, that made it seem he was measuring the side of his head for a sideburn implant. I watched him in the moonlight. He was listening, nodding, nodding, making a small humming sound. I could barely make out bits of Natasha's voice at the other end of the satellite beam. At last he said, “Okay. Have courage now like your father, okay?”

He sent me a quick look, of concern I thought.

“Make sense. We see you. No, nothing will . . . yes, okay. See you.”

He closed the connection before I had a chance to say good-bye and handed the phone back without looking at me.

“Something's wrong,” I said. “She's in danger. I can feel it.”

He shook his head as if it were suddenly heavy. “No danger now,” he said, as if implying there had been danger, or would be in a short while.

“What, then? Why is the courage needed if there's no danger? And what's this about ‘courage like your father'? Does she have some other father I don't know about?”

The look Rinpoche gave me had a trace of pity in it. He did that sometimes when I joked because he knew the kind of mindset from which the humor had sprouted. “Rinpoche needs now to think on it before I tell you, okay, but no danger. Not that kind of courage, okay, Otto?”

“Okay. What kind then?”

“Other kind. Something maybe not what I thought happening, not what Celia thought.”

“Happening to Tasha?”

“To us,” he said. “Maybe. Not a bad happening.”

“All right, but if it is a bad happening, you'd tell me, right?”

More nodding. He patted the sand beside him. “Sit now with Rinpoche. Listen me now. Watch the moon and remember what I said the other night. The madaphor. Make your mind quiet now, like the air. Take the one breath now, pretty big, slow, okay?”

“I'm with you, brother.”

“Now, listen me. Make the every cell in your body go quiet, all relax. Think about Tasha and Anthony and Jeannie for a little second then let the thought go up in the air away. Now. Feel the big world around you. World is turning just the right way, yes? Air is just the right way for us to live, yes? Moon is there. Inside all this you can now feel something else, some God word, some spirit that knows. You feel it now. Feel this world with no worry in it, okay? Things going like they supposed to go, the moon, Tasha, you. Now go quiet, quiet inside, no thoughts now. Okay. Stay here and you and me we meditate now, little while.”

We did that. From time to time the silence was disturbed by a muted shout from far above. Other than that, there was only a great interior peace, really like nothing I'd ever known. From time to time a little wave of thought moved across that dark inner water but it had no magnetism for me, did not carry me off. I could sense Rinpoche beside me. I believed I could feel the light of the moon on my face but I kept my eyes closed. Silence. Stillness. And then, as he had described it, I sensed something within that stillness, an essence of something, a pulse perhaps, or, better, a tone of energy. There was such a joy to the interior quietness, such a great vast pleasure. I wanted to remain there forever, truly. A blip of thought, then the beautiful energetic stillness that words could never capture. I could feel my heart beat and there was something un-taken-for-granted in that sacred mystery. Quiet, quiet joy, and then I heard Rinpoche move, and I opened my eyes, and he said, “Now we pray, Otto,” in a voice barely above a whisper.

“Great Spirit,” he said, “who turn this world, let Natasha's mind open out into you. Guide her now in the travel she takes. Watch her father and her cousin and her aunt and especially her great mother spirit now. Soak the love on us in this world spinning and let us go the road we supposed to go.”

I was quiet and attentive during this short prayer, still wrapped in the fine tendrils of my meditative peace. But then, at the mention of my beloved late wife, something changed. The peacefulness faded into wisps of memory and I had the powerful sense that there were, before me, pieces of a puzzle I was supposed to put together. Rinpoche's tone was subtly different. For once, he didn't seem to
know;
a troubled air surrounded him, as if he were wrestling with a complex spiritual algorithm, or assessing a chessboard on which the game could turn, quickly, either in his favor or against him.

“Something's going on,” I said.

He turned and looked at me and in the moonlight I believed I could see the confusion on his face. No,
confusion
is the wrong word. What I believed I could see was more like the dawn of some new understanding. It made me think, strangely, of a child on Christmas Day, hoping against hope that he was just about to be given the gift he'd asked for, but still not sure enough to celebrate.

“Maybe,” he said, looking hard at me.

A breath of wind sent a few sand grains onto the lap of his robe. He looked down at them, then back into my eyes. “When Jeannie die,” he said, and then he hesitated—again, so unlike him—“who she talk to, last thing?”

“Me.”

“What she say?”

“She said, ‘Bye,' like that, very calmly, almost as if she were just leaving to go to lunch in town. Why do you ask?”

“What she say to Tasha?”

“I don't know. Tasha was asleep when she died. I went upstairs and woke her and she came down and hugged her mother for a long time and wept.”

A somber nod.

“It would be nice now if you told me why you were asking these questions. It has to do with something Tasha just told you, doesn't it.”

“Now,” he said, and there was another pregnant hesitation. “Now, Otto, you have to wait, okay? You have to wait, my friend. If I tell you something now maybe isn't right, but when I know the thing sure I'll tell you. Please.”

Rinpoche had said many things to me in the years of our association, but never had I heard him say the word
please.
I looked into his face. I said, “Fine,” but it didn't feel fine, not at all.

If the college kids hadn't come tripping and sliding down the dunes just then I'm not sure what I would have done, but here they were, laughing and talking. One of them was carrying what looked like a miniature surfboard, or sled, or a skateboard without wheels. They skidded to a halt near us, two young men and a young woman. “Amazing, wasn't it?”

“Spectacular,” I said. “Were you . . . is that some kind of board for skiing or something?”

“We rented it,” the girl said. For some reason she held it out, not toward me, but toward Rinpoche, as if she intuited which of us would want to use it. “Try it, go ahead.”

The chances of Rinpoche saying no to this did not exist. Under the young trio's brief tutelage he sat on the board and pushed himself over the rounded edge of the dune. One more second and he was out of sight and we could hear him, “Ah-ha-yah! Oh-oh-oh!” and another two seconds and he came back into sight, a dark lump there flying down the slope. Fifty feet from the bottom of the valley that separated our dune from its neighbor, he lost his grip. The board went right, Rinpoche left. He rolled and tumbled in a moonlit mass of ankles and robe. One sandal—I hoped it was a sandal—went flying off and Rinpoche tumbled, grunting, until he came to a stop. Taking the hill on foot, at an angle, like a beginning skier, I hustled down after him, worried he was hurt. I heard what I thought, at first, might be a whimper, then it grew louder. Three more sandy steps and I heard the sound swell into his astounding laugh, a thunder roll of laughter, “Aha, aho, aho, aho!” And when I finally reached his side the sight of him made me think of a red-robed Gulliver, tied down there, being tickled by a million invisible Lilliputians.