Impossible Vacation (20 page)

Meg and I had no idea what to do. We decided to go back down the mud steps that led to the main entrance of the house and go out for a twilight walk. I think we both wanted to walk in that silence again and refeel it. So we walked up one bare, brown hill and down another until we felt like we were strolling in the landscape of some storybook, perhaps
The Little Prince
. When we got back to the adobe house it was dusk, and climbing back up the dry mud front steps, we again came out onto the little terrace, where what looked like the man of the house was waiting. His hair was long and shiny black; his face had a beautiful round, full-moon, Mongolian look to it. He was stunning, dressed in black, his black jacket tied in six places with sky-blue velvet ribbons. He wore elegantly cut baggy black pants and soft suede boots with long, faded leather laces. His outfit was so individual and rare in design that it could have been the source of today’s Comme des Garçons look. And what a carriage he had! There was nothing cocky or prideful about it. He was a humble black prince. “Welcome,” he said in English as we came up the steps. “Welcome to our home. Call me Raymond. My Ladakhan name is too complicated and makes most Westerners frown. I go to college in Rishikesh, and they call me Raymond down there.”

We introduced ourselves and Raymond gave us a tour of his house. First he took us to a little slit in one of the mud walls and showed us his mother and sister, who were now preparing what we hoped might be our supper. One at a time, Meg and I looked through
this crack in the wall into a barren cavelike room, where the two women squatted beside a little fire of sticks, stirring the contents of the iron cauldron suspended over it. The only light came from the fire, which lit their faces from below in an eerie, witchy way. There seemed to be no door in or out of the room, and it looked like they had been created in there like a ship in a bottle and had never left that place from birth.

Then Raymond led us to what was to be our room for the night. It was all earth, a small square cave just like the room where his mother and sister were cooking, only without a fire. There were two straw mats on the floor and a little slit that looked out on the road to Leh below.

It was growing dark. Lighting a candle, Raymond led us to the toilet. Crossing the terrace we saw the first stars appear over the distant hills, and it looked like Bethlehem just after Jesus was born. I couldn’t believe how clear and beautiful it was. Then that part of me, that dark, cynical part that wanted to withdraw from all beauty, got completely fascinated with the idea of the toilet, or what Raymond called the toilet, as we followed him by candlelight into the dark, dank, musty basement of the house.

Meg and I walked cautiously behind as Raymond held the candle high to light the earth floor beneath us, and there it was—dark and round, like the very asshole of the house itself, a dark tornado funnel going down into the earth. There was no seat over it and nothing around it. There was, of course, no toilet paper, just this deep, dark hole that went down into the earth. And this hole gave off a sweet, pungent, and not wholly unpleasant smell, something like a horse stable.

“This is the toilet,” Raymond said, without a hint of shame or apology in his voice, as he held the candle over it. Both Meg and I looked at each other with the whimsical recognition that we were about to become very constipated.

Raymond led us back up onto the terrace again, and Meg and I looked up at the sky as if we were seeing the stars for the first time together. It was as vivid as that first LSD trip, only it was not seen through the medium of a drug. It was just seeing, and seeing was believing, and suddenly that enigmatic end to Keats’s “Ode on a
Grecian Urn” made sense, as it crossed my mind like a little ticker tape: “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

As a protection against too much love for the place, I started poking around looking for imperfections, trying again to create them before they arrived. Trying to build realistic boundaries again, trying to ground myself in trivial conversation, I turned to Raymond and asked him what the winters were like. He said the snow often got so deep that no one could go out of their house for days.

I was stunned. What a horror! It would be one thing to be snowbound in some cozy Vermont farmhouse with books and brandy and canned goods and maybe a TV or a stereo, but to be snowbound in this mud hole? How could one survive it? Remembering that Vermont had one of the highest suicide rates in America, particularly in winter, I turned to Raymond and without even thinking about it I asked him, “Well, don’t you have a lot of suicides here in the winter?”

Raymond just looked back at me with a blank face and Meg laughed. I made my hand into the shape of a pistol, aimed it at my head, and, like some retarded Tonto, said “You know, suicide—bang, bang, people kill self.”

“No, no,” Raymond laughed. “We have none.” Before I could question him further, Meg interrupted. She’d found the magic door to the one room we hadn’t seen yet. It was adjacent to the terrace and had a beautiful hand-carved wooden latch on it. She asked Raymond what was behind the door.

Raymond answered matter-of-factly that it was the household shrine, and asked if we wanted to see it. Meg and I both nodded at once and he led the way into a room that was as spectacular as the sky above it. In contrast to those other bare rooms, this one was an ornate jewel and at the same time splendid in its simplicity. There were two simple hand-carved wooden benches facing a little royal-red Buddhist altar with bells, paintings of Tibetan gods, and a small photo of some smiling lama in a handmade silver frame.

Raymond told us this was the altar to which they prayed every morning, and I realized in a sad flash that they had something going there I had never encountered before: an in-house, all-purpose, connected,
working religion, complete and without doubt. No TV or telephone on snowbound winter days, but infinite connection of mind instead. No one worshiped in that room alone. They worshiped with all of the snowbound Ladakhans scattered in their mud abodes. It was a giant connection through ritual and prayer, and this is when I had my first big dose of loneliness, as I looked back on America and saw that we were only interconnected by machines now.

After a dinner of rice and potatoes, we went to sleep on the straw mats. But some time close to dawn, which felt like the middle of the night, I woke up to the voice of a man calling from below. I staggered to our slit of a window to see Jun-yang, our driver, waving up at me. He had been able to fix the fuel pump.

We were off again, with no breakfast. We were off, driving farther up into that landscape, and once again our eyes were so filled with the beauty of that place, we hardly noticed our empty stomachs. There was nothing to make us feel the lack of anything, just complete empty space and a delicious poverty of objects; no road stands, no billboards, no diners, no mileage signs to tell us how far we were from Leh, only spectacular mountains and deep ravines. Only landscape without stories.

It was as though some gods had planned special effects of nature as we entered the capital of Ladakh. We were now on the highest plateau of the desert, and we could see the snow-capped Himalayas all around us. Dark clouds whipped up and broke and gave way to glorious shafts of sunlight. Then out of nowhere it was hailing. Great golf balls were beating on the hood of our jeep. And when the hailstorm passed, it left a spectacular rainbow arched over the entrance to Leh, as though the city was a long-sought-after pot of gold.

“Is that it? Is that Leh?” I called out to Jun-yang, and he nodded and said, “Leh.”

Entering Leh was like driving onto a movie set for an American western, only the town was filled with what looked like American Indians instead of cowboys. Leh was one dirt main street with little rickety shops and stores on either side. There were no movie theaters, opium dens, or strip joints. Yet there were soldiers everywhere. Most of the architecture was that British Colonial stuff we’d seen down in Kashmir: houses made of old wood and some brick. There were a few
jeeps on Main Street, no cars, and all these incredibly gentle, handsome people walking hand in hand. Even the Indian soldiers, who had been sent up to guard the border, were walking hand in hand.

Jun-yang took us to a rooming house, where they boiled up some water so we could take the traditional bath, pouring water from buckets all over each other. The two of us were feeling like little naked kids again, having a cleansing water fight. After our bath, I was able to procure a bottle of the local brew, a milky, bitter Tibetan beer called Chang. That did the trick. Two sips of Chang and I felt complete again. Buddhists everywhere say that the essence of all reality is
dukhka
, which translates as “suffering through incompletion”—the idea that nothing is ever enough. I experience
dukhka
most acutely when I smoke hashish or marijuana; but when I drink liquor, particularly at that elevation, it seems to eliminate all the
dukhka
for a while.

I’m not going to go into a whole lot of detail about what Meg and I did up there in Ladakh or what we said to each other. I don’t remember much of that anyway. What I do remember, though, is that I was suffering from scopophilia: I was caught in my eyes, looking and looking, looking at all these happy people everywhere, and I was getting very lonely because I knew that I was not one of them. Every morning all these happy people greeted me in the streets with their gold-tooth smiles, crying, “
Julay!
” They were not trying to hustle or sell me anything. They were just smiling, and they seemed to want nothing more than a smile in return. I think it would have been easier to give them money, the way we did in India. As they came at me that first morning, their simple beauty and innocence was almost too much to bear. Their hearty bodies were dressed in black, embroidered with beautiful reds and turquoises, framed by splashing clear snow water that played around them like liquid silver. They were coming at me out of the cobblestone street with their gold-tooth-spangled smiles, the glitter of snow water rushing by them, down ragged stone gutters, as they cried, “
Julay! Julay!
”

And all the time I had this dizzy vertigo feeling, like a kid on top of a giant globe about to teeter and fall. I had the feeling that we climbed to the top of the world just in order to slide down, to get enough momentum to roll all the way home, and because of this I was impatient to begin our return trip. That water rushing down at full
speed out of the Himalayas was pulling me down with it; all that happiness in the people’s faces was driving me away. The deprivation of the lowlands had made me feel fortunate, but the absolute abundance of joy here made me feel deprived.

When I wasn’t out walking alone and feeding my scopophilia until my eyes felt full to the point of bursting, Meg and I would take tours to the various Tibetan monasteries in the area. They looked like the buildings in all the old photographs of Tibet. It wasn’t entirely clear how the Buddhist monks felt about guided tours interrupting their services, but I wanted to sit in the middle of one and try to be a part of it.

Once we got past the wild dogs at the monastery gate, one of the head lamas would always lead us right through the service and into the back of the monastery to see some sacred icons or special gold Buddhas or intricate, dazzling wall paintings, but I really wanted to be with the monks while they were chanting. Meg was much better at dealing with what I call the museum factor, and she was fascinated by the wall paintings. At last, in the Tiksi monastery we got to sit and vibrate with the deep chants of the monks as they rolled off endless sutras and prayers from their prayer wheels. They would blow their long Tibetan horns and wink at us as they blew and then wink again between crashes of crazy cymbals. That was the best part—just sitting there vibrating with them. But the tourist guide moved us on to the next monastery and more savage dogs and another gold Buddha, and ancient leather-bound books in little libraries with the most incredible views that stopped time again. Everywhere we went, there were those gold-tooth smiles coming out at me from the glitter of snow water and that dizzy feeling would come over me again, of a child about to fall; and when this feeling came I would talk to Meg again about making plans for our descent. We had to set a date in order to get a seat on the bus, which left twice a week for Kashmir, and I knew that once I left Ladakh I would try to roll all the way down to New York City without getting caught up in any more diversions or temptations. You see, I had the feeling that in order to be happy anywhere I had to get back to America, to figure out what went wrong and why I couldn’t smile in the streets of New York and say “Good day, good day” to all the people passing by there. Let the people in Ladakh carry
on in their own happiness without me. I knew it was impossible to ever be a part of them.

At the time I had no idea that I would have to go through so much stupid confusion before I’d even begin to get to the other side; and in all of this confusion, water, without my knowing it, was really the ruling force. I wanted now to flow down with it, follow it down the mountain all the way to New York. I had no idea where it was leading me until I at last found myself at the bottom of the earth, lying naked in a cool stream. I had no idea about the long, dark, confusing route that would lead at last to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Had I known ahead of time, I doubt that I would have gotten on that bus in Ladakh at all. But one day in late June, Meg and I got on the bus and we started down. We started home.

We were the only Westerners on that bus, and we sat in separate seats. Meg sat in the center and I sat in the back next to the emergency door, so I could jump if the bus started to go over a cliff. The only problem, as I saw it, and I saw it most vividly, was that my side of the bus was the side that was always toward the edge of those giant precipices, and if I were to open the door and jump, I would simply be falling independent of the bus and without Meg. And to make things worse, the bus was filled with Ladakhans—all those smiling people again, who, because of their belief in reincarnation, had little fear of dying. They looked like adults, but they acted like children in a jolly kindergarten. They were singing and laughing all the time, and calling out to the driver the whole trip as we followed that rushing silver snow water. Down, down, down we bounced and careened like we were part of some ridiculous children’s storybook—like
The Little Engine That Could
, or
Couldn’t
, or
The Little Bus That Flew
. Down, down we went, with those child-men who kept opening their windows to grab handfuls of fresh snow from the melting snow banks on the right side of the creeping bus. They’d make snowballs and throw them around the bus, laughing all the time, their gold teeth flashing. I crouched in the back, an uptight curmudgeon, saying over and over again to myself, “This too will pass.” Then I will be sad and miss it, I thought.