Jacob Atabet (14 page)

His vision of that tower filled with spirals and his growing sense that the body will be remade: for 23 years it has been coming closer, this sense of how to do it. Compared our understanding to the Great Body experience of Buddhist literature and, metaphorically, with the Adam Kadmon of the Kabala. We talked into the morning hours about the different epochs of transformational discipline: most yogas, he says, transform “the eyes of the Adam Kadmon” (and the region above the head;, saints are “avatars of the heart.” Following the metaphor further, the world hasn’t seen a “yoga for the arms and legs” yet. Most yogis and mystics were “stuck in the lotus position or on their knees in prayer.” The modern impulse though—you can see it in the modern therapies and in sport and Western science generally—is to know and reown the entire body, all parts of the primordial Adam.

The Press goes amazingly well. Casey is doing such a good job that I have begun to think about selling it to her. But the book rests. Maybe my interest will grow again in another week or two. This new life is too pleasurable to interrupt with that much thinking.

During meditation this morning: a vivid experience of holes behind my eyes, holes that lead off toward distant horizons. I relate it to the burning sensations I have felt all week in my stomach and chest. Is there some kind of progression in these feelings? They seem to have passed from my chest to my feet, then up my back to my eyes. Is there an autonomous process at work, a kind of kundalini?

“P
SST! HEY
D
ARWIN!”
his voice came whispering from the shadows. “Now jump!”

I put one leg over the wooden parapet and lowered myself into the darkness. But my pants were caught on a nail. “Hey Jake!” I whispered. “Come help me quick! I’m stuck!”

There was no way I could pull myself up. “Godammit, come get me!” I groaned. “I’m going to fall!” Then I fell a couple of inches.

Through a narrow passageway I could see his silhouette and Kazi’s against the orange electric aura of the city. But as I went down the corridor they disappeared, and I groped through a labyrinth of chimneys and rooftop enclosures. A walkway appeared in front of me and I hurried down it, hunching forward in case someone was watching.

Now they were standing in silhouette some twenty feet above me. “Come up the stairs!” he whispered. “At the end of the walk!”

I stopped to watch them. They were tiptoeing out through the mist like a pair of acrobats, balanced on a rail just a few inches wide. “Hey, I can’t do that,” I hissed. “I’m going back.” But they didn’t hear me and I followed them on through the dark.

The railing was wider than it had looked from below, but on one side there was a drop to an alley—over sixty feet down to certain death. On the other side it fell to a roof full of chimneys and wires. I took one careful step, stretching my arms out for balance. If I could only think myself steady.

I took a second step, and waited.

Then a third.

And a fourth, sliding my foot on the slippery wood. If I just thought of balance . . . . But as I thought it I started to sway. Could I jump to the roof side? I leaned forward, then stood and leaned back. It was sixty feet down if I looked to my right. “Hey Jake!” I yelled. “Where are you!”

As I yelled they appeared, standing in swirling mist like two flying figures from Tibet. It was impossible to see what they were perched on.

“Godammit!” I yelled. “Can you hear me?” Apparently he couldn’t. I pressed on to the end of the rail, stepped down on a landing and turned to see what was happening. They were staring into the fog, their feet enveloped in darkness as if they were floating in air. Above them, Coit Tower rose through the night like an electric scepter. Kazi stared up its golden side. I found the ledge and went up to them slowly. They looked pale blue in the light from the tower, Kazi in a tattered army jacket and Atabet in a big Irish sweater and cap. They might have been a pair of thieves looking over a place they were going to break into.

“You’re doin’ good,” he grinned. “Let’s go!”

Now we were running and jumping from roof to roof—past chimney pots and picket fences, under clothes left out on lines, past an occasional startled figure. Through mazeways of landings and stairs we ran and skipped and dodged disaster until we came out in an alley near Telegraph Place.

“Look at you!” he slapped my back. “Look at him, Kazi!”

But Kazi was distracted. Peering back at the tower, he seemed not to hear. Atabet turned and we went up the street. When we got to his building I turned to see the Tibetan walking in a reverie behind us. His khaki jacket was unbuttoned now, revealing an undershirt and amulet that hung around his neck. Atabet turned and winked. “Come on up,” he said, and the three of us went up to his place.

The day before, he had added a couch to the circle of chairs around his stove. It was something he’d found at Goodwill, a leather thing just big enough for two people to sit on. I stretched out on it and draped a leg over one of its armrests. Kazi sat at the end of the table staring out at the roofs we had crossed.

Three weeks before, we had started to work out in the late afternoons, running on most days along the Marina green and the Bay to the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. I sank down in the soft leather couch. “Yes,” I said. “I’m getting in shape all right. Was that some kind of test?”

He struck a match to light a fire in the hearth. As the flames leaped up his dark eyes caught the reflection. “No,” he said. “Kazi and I need to do that every now and then.” He turned to his friend, who gave him an enigmatic smile.

“It’s amazing how fast the body’ll change,” I said. “Two weeks ago I couldn’t’ve done it.”

“Another month and you’ll run out to the bridge and back in thirty-five minutes.”

To do it in thirty-five minutes would take a six-minute mile pace—a feat for practiced runners. “If I can do that,” I said, “I might as well learn how to fly.”

“He fly!” said the face in the shadows. “Like the Garuda!” Then both of them laughed.

“Fly like the Garuda?” I asked. “What’s that about?”

“You know the Garuda,” said Atabet. “The sunbird the Vedic gods rode into heaven? That’s what your body’s going to look like.”

“Oh, come off it. What’s wrong with the way it looks now? Hell, I could’ve gone past you both up there.”

He laughed and there was silence. For a moment we gazed into the fire. “Yes,” he mused. “The Garuda. The thunderbird. In Tibet they knew what it was.” He then launched into a monologue about the Tibetan love of physicality and adventure. It was a rare kind of speech for him, part sermon and part incantation. Was he trying to give me a pep talk? Had he and Kazi decided to take me to another level of practice? “This body’s a magical tissue,” he said. “Spun from a hundred trillion cells. From atoms that dance to the vibes of Alpha Centauri. Or a loosely governed city—you’ve heard me call it that before—a Taoist anarchy that answers to rumors from all over the earth. And to rumors from other worlds—right? We’ve agreed that it’s mainly invisible. But it could spin out still lovelier stuff. It wants to find suns in your joints, and silver rivers in your veins. Darwin, you’ve sensed it so clearly. But imagine. Imagine that grotto at Bolinas, shimmering with all of those colors. Can you see it now, like you did when we were out there?”

Startled, I closed my eyes and an image of the grotto appeared. I could sense its walls pressing close.

“Now imagine a vista of cells. A world of membranes as far as the eye can see.”

There was an image of pounding surf . . . then something popped and a vista was spreading around me, a prairie of bright vivid cells. “Yes,” I said, “But my God! It stretches for miles . . .”

“That’s good,” he whispered. “And can you see how they might come apart?”

As he said it, I saw that the vista might change any moment. A streamer of vibrating cells was rising like birds in formation. And forming a new kind of pattern. Above the glistening plain, columns of radiant crystals were forming a lattice. Like a towering snowflake it started to pulse.

For an instant it loomed above me, then sped toward the distant horizon. But another was rising, dancing with color. And a third and a fourth . . . .

“The DNA,” I whispered. “Is this the DNA?”

“Just let them come,” he said. “Don’t try to name them.” They were forming in rapid succession, towering mazeways speeding past. I opened my eyes. The edges of things in the room were uncertain, as if everything was coming unstuck.

“It’s like peyote,” I said. “My God, that was strange.”

“Don’t compare it,” he said sternly. “It’s different than peyote. And different than your visions last summer. Those were only phantoms next to this.”

I half-closed my eyes and tried to recapture a sense of those towering forms. None of us spoke, and in the streets below I heard a siren coming past the building. He went to the sink and filled a kettle with water.

Kazi was watching intently, looking remote in the half-light. Somehow he seemed to have shrunk. “Were those my cells?” I asked him.

“That’s what we’re all finding out,” Atabet answered. “Now let’s try one more thing. Close your eyes and see if those forms’ll move you. What are they trying to get you to do?”

My left arm was beginning to twitch. “Go with it,” he said. “Can you find out what’s happening?”

The tremor was spreading . . . then the vista of membranes popped open. And blinked out. All I could feel was my body relaxing. In the wake of the tremor, each muscle felt as if it had been rubbed with balm or alcohol. I stretched out on the couch. The glow was spreading and an image appeared of a mummy, encased and embalmed at the bank of the Nile. Then an image of
kas
going forth, phantom bodies dressed in solar boats. “The grateful dead,” I whispered. “I’m floating with the grateful dead.” The image passed. There was nothing but darkness and this healing sensation.

“Just enjoy the feeling,” he said. “Sometimes this takes quite a while.”

I slid further down in the couch. An image of Casey arose, watching with suspicion. Then Morris Sills chopping onions on a wide wooden board. What would Casey think of all this? I wondered, after seeing her friends go crazy on drugs and Gnostic symbols? Then two naked figures making love on an altar, some kind of Satanic practice.

“Damnit!” I said. “My mind’s full of junk.”

“Wait it out,” he said. “What do those patterns want your body to do?”

The vista of towering lattices appeared for an instant, followed by an image of the sun. The sun on a cool winter day, rising slowly through the city hills while faces in the streets looked up. I spread my arms on the couch. The cool glow was turning into a feeling both ice cold and hot, and I saw that the sun could explode. Oriental faces were looking up at me . . . “Japanese faces looking up at the sun,” I said hoarsely. “A sun coming up through the ground.”

Kazi had come up behind him, and they were both watching me intently. “Just one more time,” Atabet reached down and pressed my eyelids shut. “Try this one more time.” He held his thumbs against my eyeballs, and I felt myself sinking, falling through empty spaces . . . then a quick hidden shuttle was weaving. What was there to see through the dark?

“Oh God,” I groaned and the darkness turned to light. A ravishing vista had appeared, a city of towers and diamond walkways in the sky. And Morris Sills again, chopping onions. I looked up to see what was happening.

“You came close,” he said. “Tell me what you saw.”

“Something shuttling, or weaving—I’m not sure. Then something through the dark, a dazzling iridescent city. And Morris Sills chopping onions.”

“Okay,” he said. “Just lay there and sense what was happening. I could tell you were getting down close.”

“A strange feeling,” I whispered. “Something hot and cold—something beautiful and terrible at once. And that city. That city. It was too beautiful to look at, but it only lasted for a second.”

“It doesn’t matter how long it lasted. Once you’re there, you’ve learned how to do it.” He went back to the stove and rubbed his hands for warmth.

“A city,” I said. “Yes, it looked like a city. And just before that there was a sense of something shuttling back and forth behind a curtain. It reminds me of something I’ve read . . .”

“Now wait,” he broke in. “Don’t compare it, to science fiction or fairy tales or anything else.
Try to see what it was.
”

“But it did look like something from science fiction stories. Remember those old Flash Gordon comic strips?”

“It might’ve
seemed
like that. But don’t compare!” He made a blade with his palm, as if he were cutting away anything I brought from the world of ordinary memory. “Don’t compare,” he said. “Just see it!”

I closed my eyes again but there was only a numbness as if something were strained. “I think I’ve pulled a psychic muscle,” I said. “I can feel it throbbing.”

“All right. That’s enough. You don’t want it overflowing into this space.” He was pouring water from the kettle. “You can see why we’re getting you in shape. Plunges like that take conditioning.”

“You mean jogging helps all this?” An excitement was spreading all through me. “Jake. You don’t mean to tell me that running conditions your mind for things like this. Kazi, the guy must be crazy!”

Kazi grinned. “Crazy like Garuda!” he exclaimed. “That’s why he fly!”

There was no use reasoning with
him.
Then the two of them started to chant, in what sounded like a Tibetan version of the Volga Boatman’s song. Atabet brought me the coffee. “Conditioning,” he said with a deadpan expression. “To see that city, you have to run the mile in less than six minutes.” The two of them watched me and grinned. Then they sang the song again. In the presence of this benign form of madness, I thought, it was wise to shut up and return their idiot smiles. But in the elation I felt, I knew that a new stage of our adventure was beginning.

And so we had run 150 miles this month—not a great sum for dedicated runners, but enough to make me wish more than once that this program had never begun. It was little consolation to learn that some runners covered 150 miles
a week
or that many middle-aged long distance trackmen considered forty miles a week an easy training schedule. I was only 33—young enough to double the miles I was putting in.