Dinner with Buddha (30 page)

I looked up into the blackness, dusted with stars, and I said, “Honey, if you can hear me, send me a little advice now. I'm fifty-two. I could live to be eighty or ninety and what am I going to do with myself for all those decades? No one wants to hire a fifty-two-year-old ex-editor, and I'm not sure I want to go back to working full-time in any case. I'd give anything to be able to sit down with a glass of wine and talk this over with you. I'm adrift. Help me out if you can.”

The stars glistened and shifted. Roscoe came by to say good-night. I scratched his ears for a while then went in and lay on my bed in the unelectrified blackness and soon fell asleep.

Thirty-nine

In the morning Rinpoche was not to be found so I enjoyed a serving of Joette's delicious sausage-and-egg concoction with my coffee and talked with her for a while about Mormonism. At its essence it seemed to me not so very different from the other associations human beings had put together in order to face the baffling predicament in which we found ourselves. There was a central figure/holy man—Joseph Smith, in this case. There was a story, embellished, perhaps, of illumination and struggle. There were rules set in place to provide some guidance, to suggest limits on the massive array of choices we all faced. There were even, Joette told me, culinary suggestions: that Mormons should eat lots of fruits and vegetables and only a little meat. She was a kind and friendly woman, and, just as I finished breakfast, she handed me a
Book of Mormon
as a gift.

Since Rinpoche was still AWOL, and since we had an hour before checkout, I sat in a straight-backed chair in our room and had myself a long meditation. Perhaps the only way I can describe the strange pleasure of that hour, the joy of the settled mind, is to contrast it with its opposite. We've all had times—often in the middle of a sleepless night—when the mind races and races, thoughts coming in a waterfall of words and images, a billion droplets of worry, fear, frustration, or desire. My meditation that day was the polar opposite of all that, a stretch of interior openness and ease. When I heard the scrape of Rinpoche's sandals on the porch and opened my eyes, I was shocked to see that an hour had passed; it seemed like minutes; or, truer still, it seemed as if time had loosened its grip on my life entirely. Yes, it churned steadily on. And yes, it wrought the unpleasant changes I could already see and feel in my body: hair growing where I didn't want it and not growing where I wanted it; aches; stiffness; the graying, the wrinkling, the once fine set of teeth turning not so fine. But, for a little while at least, those seemed merely like chapters in a book with no end, an interesting book, intriguing even, with painful passages and funny passages, always moving, yes, true, but not toward anything that stood still forever and ever. During that hour and the hours immediately following, death seemed like nothing more than a dip in a cold ocean. One resurfaced after the shock of it. One kept going, on and on, in a different form, no doubt, but the form didn't matter to me then.

In that state of mind I felt reconnected to my wife.

AT NINE A.M.
THE
great spiritual master and I loaded up the SUV and set out across the dry and rocky surfaces of Joseph Smith's state. According to the temperature gauge it was 65 degrees. In Tropic, Utah, we stopped for coffee at the Bryce Canyon Inn, a little oasis of sophisticated bean brewing set amid orange-hued hills. We cut across one edge of Bryce Canyon itself, where the stones were the color of salmon flesh, and as we left Route 12 for 895, with the sky brightening a bit, we passed a sign contending that Orderville, Utah, was
THE HOME OF THE HO-MADE PIES
(a choice slice of Americana I did not even attempt to explain to my traveling companion).

At the entrance to Zion National Park, beneath a suddenly darkening sky, we were informed by a ranger named Lance Cleaver, who bore an eerie resemblance to the Red Sox – turned – Yankee outfielder Johnny Damon, that the twenty-five-dollar entrance fee was waived because that day was the ninety-seventh anniversary of the founding of the national parks.

Zion greeted us with a mile-long tunnel, then a switchback road that led in downward curlicues into a cliff-ringed valley so grand, so king-sized, so surreal, that it was all I could do, on the hairpin turns, to keep my eyes on the rear end of the Winnebago in front of us. Rinpoche was literally oohing and aahing. Zion had been drawn on the scale of the giants, all greens and grays, massive. We pulled into the visitor center and hiked up the Watchman Trail in a light rain, Rinpoche holding an umbrella and yours truly wearing a waterproof jacket. It was like hiking through an anteroom to ordinary life, an enclave, a private,
U
-shaped, mountain-fringed wonderland. We went along a not very steep, slick, rocky path with the faces of cliffs rising to our immediate left and a hilly pastureland to our right leading to the base of another cliff. We saw a bighorn sheep picking its way through the rocky slopes there, and by the time we'd circled back to the car my boots were caked with red mud and Rinpoche was holding his sandals in one hand, the umbrella in the other, and carrying clods of earth on the bare soles of his feet. He laughed about this, of course, and I laughed with him. The rain was falling harder. We were doing the laughing meditation, washing feet and boots in a parking lot puddle, chortling like boys in some baptismal ceremony for the free-minded and slightly loony.

The whole day to that point had been suffused with the fragrance of a strange other life, so it seemed only fitting that, in rain that was now a true deluge, we discovered a Thai restaurant just beyond Zion's gates. On the wall hung a photograph of a decidedly androgynous Buddha, sitting in meditation and looking fierce, confident, all powerful, one who'd loosed the chains of suffering and death. Nearby stood a small altar on which the owners had placed offerings of fruit and candles. This, at the gates to an American National Park, really and truly. Pad Thai in rural Utah, honestly. Oh blessed day.

Soon, drying out slowly, we were in Virgin, Utah, where there was Virgin Books, Virgin Goods, Virgin Cactus Jelly, and so on. The rain eased there, just as we reached the town of Hurricane (I could not possibly make this up). There was a handmade sign for
RON PAUL REVOLUTION
and then a stretch of reddish stones topped with smaller black stones, like pepper grains on loaves of bread.

“You had, this morning, the special meditation,” Rinpoche said, without turning to look at me.

“How did you know?”

“Your face.”

“The world seems a bit different to me today, a bit surreal.”

“Like the dream, yes?”

“Something like that.”

“Feels like if you die it doesn't so much matter anymore, yes.”

“Yes. . . . Though I'd be sad not to see my kids get a bit farther into adulthood before I go.”

“You will see many things before you go, my friend, before you move across from this world. I see this. My good wife see it.”

“Some of the things she sees don't exactly work out the way she sees them, though, if you don't mind me saying so.”

“You be surprised.”

I left it there. On that day I was open to all mysteries, to an encyclopedia of unlikely outcomes. Having found good pad Thai in Utah, I supposed that all surprises were on the table. All my sister's wacky visions might turn out to be true. Ron Paul might be elected president and there might actually be some doubt, three years down the road, as to whether Utah would vote for or against Hillary Clinton.

In the city of St. George, there were McMansions on the buttes and a strip of the kinds of things we hadn't seen in a while—fast-food eating places, palm trees, landscaped developments surrounded by stucco walls, traffic. According to the news, 85 percent of Americans were against involvement in the Syrian civil war; we were approaching the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King's March on Washington; a group of people who called themselves “Sovereign Citizens” were putting false liens on judges, marshals, and sheriffs to ruin their credit ratings; and a five-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis, whose parents had had to fight a legal battle to get her a lung transplant, was going home from the hospital, not quite ready to cross into that next world. It was, in other words, the human circus, amusing or tragic, depending on your viewpoint and your place in the karmic parade.

We were gliding down out of the mountains now, with the Virgin River winding in and out of view and the faces of gray cliffs in shadow and sunlight. The descent went on and on, great dry swoops out of the high country, and then, at last, it ceased, and we were running across flat desert. The second we crossed the Nevada border we found ourselves in a different circus tent. The Eureka Casino. The Oasis Resort. And then,
PRISON AREA. HITCHHIKING PROHIBITED
. Las Vegas's tall, steely hotels lay visible in the western distance, covered by what seemed to be a fog of sin. There was the Love Store, open twenty-four hours. There was a billboard advertising
THUNDER DOWN UNDER
, some kind of Australian men strippers show. A billboard advising,
ARRESTED? LAWYER UP.
Another for
THE CHEETAH TOPLESS CLUB.
The next for
ULTIMATE FIGHTING
, and then, of course, one that read,
BE NOT DECEIVED—GOD IS
NOT
TO BE MOCKED
.

I asked Rinpoche if he could sense the difference between the state we'd just entered and the one we'd just left.

“Sure,” he said. “One lets you play the machines, and one maybe not.”

Forty

Strangely, however, when we'd located the Vegas strip and then the Monte Carlo hotel and carried our bags up to the twentieth floor (we'd requested two rooms and been given a suite for Rinpoche, a two-bed double for me), Rinpoche expressed exactly zero interest in visiting the casino. He wanted to swim, he said.

It was late afternoon, mid-eighties, a cool day for Vegas in August. Still, the extensive swimming complex was crowded, all the chaises occupied or reserved, couples drinking from thirty-ounce margaritas, a few kids watched over by lifeguards who might have worked as fashion models in their off hours.

The Monte Carlo swimming complex offered something called a “lazy river,” a form of entertainment unknown to me prior to that afternoon. Encased in cement, this chlorinated stream, six feet wide, four deep, carried its revelers in a large, irregular circle. Rinpoche and I rented inner tubes and waded in. The problem, it turned out, was how to mount the inner tube. After watching others for a moment, Rinpoche thought he had it figured out. He set the inner tube on the surface of the water, held it in place with one hand, and then leapt up and sideways, aiming, ass first, for the tube's center hole. He missed. Or partly missed. His weight landed on the inflated rubber ring in such a way that it ricocheted up and away from him, landing in the laps of two men and a woman who were sitting on the tiled edge enjoying what appeared to be their fourth or fifth margarita. They were not pleased. “Sorry, sorry,” Rinpoche told them once he'd surfaced again. “Wery sorry.” One of the men shoved the tire back at him; none of them spoke.

Rinpoche tried again. I observed, ready to intervene in case the inebriated trio completely lost patience with him. This time he managed to get into the center of the tube, but there was another problem: As he floated away I saw that one leg was stuck down in the donut hole, and the other hooked over the top. Off he went, one leg up, one down, making, in his pink Speedo, a magnificent fashion statement.

We spent half an hour like that, floating in circles past bikini-clad, huge-breasted women who might or might not have worked for the escort service we'd seen advertised on passing pickups; past drunken thirty-year-olds in small gangs; past fathers and mothers herding their children along. I was the oldest person there, and, except for the kids and Rinpoche, undoubtedly the most sober. The smell of chlorine, the squeak of rubber, the enormous drinks, the casinos lurking on the other side of swinging glass doors—what on earth were we doing here? Considering this question, I began to suspect some kind of trick. Seese and Rinpoche had cooked up another “wesson” for me, and just when things in the interior world seemed to have taken such a kindly turn. That was the deal, then: The motto of the spiritual life was No Rest.

I'd stay alert, I told myself. One step ahead of them. In this world of Thunder Down Under and Girls Who Will Come to Your Room in Twenty Minutes and topless clubs and bottomless buffets and twenty-four-hour hundred-dollar blackjack, I'd keep my sanity, hold tight to my new peace of mind, resist judgment and distraction.

Rinpoche paddled up close and grabbed onto my right big toe. “Later we play the machines,” he said.

And I said, “Sure. This is Vegas, after all. What would be the point of going to Vegas and not playing the machines?”

Something was afoot.