Miss Buddha (64 page)

“He will?” said Roth.

“The fair thing to do,” said Ruth.

All eyes on him again. “I suppose,” he
said.

::
116 :: (Berlin)

Two weeks later to the day, the large square
and lawn outside the Grimm-Zentrum on the Humboldt University
Berlin campus had—with customary German efficiency—been converted
to an open-air auditorium to house the well over one hundred
thousand attendees that the school and the authorities
anticipated.

Earlier that morning—a cloudless,
mild-for-the-season winter day—a few stray technicians were putting
the finishing touches to the arrangements. Seats had been seen to
for the senior faculty and invited, important—as opposed to
student—guests, the chairs numbering two hundred forty-four in all.
In four perfect rows.

The PA system had been tested and tested
again, then again, just to be sure, and all was in working
order.

It was an important event, everybody seemed
to think so. So important that security had been stepped up beyond
the normal German attention to detail, for there were always one or
two crackpots in a crowd this size. No chances taken.

A little later that morning, under an
overcast, though not rain-threatening sky, the arrangers ran
through their verification checklists one last time, just to make
sure.

All was in working order, green lights all
around.

:

Two things Ruth had not expected: the size
of the audience, and that they would give her a standing ovation as
she ascended the short stairway to the stage and approached the
microphones—four in all, two sets for each bank of speakers (one
main, one for backup).

She had been told that there were well over
one hundred thousand people in the crowd. But that’s only a number,
the crowd itself, one that large, is a different matter altogether.
And all were there to see and hear her, and all standing up and
clapping now. It was a little daunting. But then again, this is why
she was here, to do her best to point the path.

She waved into the storm of applause in an
attempt to quiet it, but her wave had the opposite effect. So she
smiled, and smiled again, and then looked around her to see if
anyone knew how to turn this thing off.

No one did, so she simply stood there,
waiting for the storm to subside. Which eventually, after a full
two minutes, it did.

“If I were to build the perfect prison,” she
began. “How would I build it?”

Her words quieted even the residual murmurs,
and now there was utter silence. Even the birds and the trees (for
there was a slight breeze across the square) seemed to hold their
respective breaths so as to let her voice be heard by all.

“I will tell you.”

In the heartbeats that followed, Ruth took
in the broad carpet of humanity spreading before her, who almost to
a man, woman, boy, girl felt that she was looking right at
them.

“The best prison you could build, the best
possible, the perfect prison, would be a prison that the prisoners
would not want to leave.

“It would be a prison they would so enjoy,
where their confinement was so agreeable that only the very, very
few would even recognize it as a prison.

“Only the very, very few would try to escape
such a prison.

“And of these very, very few, fewer still
would eventually find a door, or a trace of one, and from this
search and from these discoveries of well-hidden doors grow our
various religions.”

Still no bird, nor rustle of leaves. Nor
voice. Nor sound.

“But all too soon,” she continued, “these
religions forget their founders and the true search for doors and
instead turn into good solid business or into comfortable and
guiltless living and in the end they choose to forget, all over,
that this planet of ours is indeed a detention facility, and as
soon as any soul still crazy enough to keep insisting that indeed
there are doors to be found and truths to be discovered has been
safely incarcerated and drugged or electro-shocked into safe
oblivion, that, as they say, would be that. You’d have the perfect
prison.”

A brief pause, then: “Lust is the bricks and
the mortar, the locks and the chains. Lust, and its gratification,
is what makes this prison of ours appear so wonderful.

“For even when shown a way out, even when
taken by the hand by an experienced and truthful guide, the many
would rather suffer the long waiting for the brief explosion of
lust and its blooming than leave this wonderful prison behind.

“To quote Thomas Jefferson
in a letter to John Adams. It was dated June the
1
^st
,
1822: ‘The cocks of the hen yard kill one another; bears, bulls,
rams do the same, and the horse, in his wild state, kills all the
young males until when he’s worn down with age and war, some youth
kills him.’

“Why do these animals kill each other? They
kill each other out of lust, out of jealousy, out of that truly
hard-to-comprehend and take-a-good-look-at urge to procreate, which
urge—in the final analysis, when confronted head on—is mostly
mental anticipation, the wish, the yearning for some drop or two of
the promised sensation.

“The natural historian has coined this
behavior, this compulsion, ‘natural selection,’ and sees it as the
way nature selects the strongest to pass on his genes, which—or so
the theory goes—makes for a stronger species, better equipped to
survive this dog-eat-dog existence. But this theory simply attempts
to explain, to rationalize, and does not try to understand the
almost inconceivable force and power of the urge itself, an urge
that we, as humans, certainly possess as well.

“Someone said, I don’t remember where, that
the average male thinks about sex at least once every ten minutes.
Perhaps that is an exaggeration, but perhaps not.”

Here she paused. Perhaps for effect, perhaps
to gather her thoughts, to decide where to go next.

“The Buddha once said that you—as body and
mind—already possess everything you need to attain full liberation.
That is certainly true. All the clues are there, all the traces of
how you came to love your prison are there. You only have to look
to discover and see them for yourself.

“But this looking, this clearly seeing,
requires unsullied and unified attention, and if most of your
attention is devoted to procreation, and all the pleasures and
worries that go along with that—and it sometimes seems that most of
the things we do has to do with those pleasures and worries—you’ll
never be in a position actually to look, actually to see.

“I am going to go out on a limb here and
mentioned that the Buddha once called sex the destruction of the
bridge to Nirvana. He referred to it as the one craving that could
not be refined to serve the path to holiness. He pointed out that
whereas other cravings can all be sublimated to support the path,
the sexual compulsion is so strong that we cannot master it, it
will, like an unbreakable spell, enslave us if we allow it entry,
if we fall under it.

“And how do we fall under its spell? We go
too near.

“We allow the smallest of fractures in our
armor, we let our guard down even the tiniest of fractions to allow
a single drop of that urge to enter, for that drop will fester and
explode into growth that will not be stilled until you claw your
way to relieve the tension, until you crest on the sensation we
call sexual release.

“Yes, I am aware that this is possibly not
what you came here today to hear. Yes, I am aware that the sexual
drive, and all its many, many, many sub-drives, if you will, make
up—if you study it closely—the better part of our lives. Am I then
telling you not to live?

“No, I am not telling you that. But I am
telling you not to be quite so human.”

Here, she paused and surveyed the small
ocean of upturned faces. There were people everywhere she looked,
on the lawn and square they were standing shoulder to shoulder.
Many were leaning out of buildings, others had climbed the trees.
The sun had now broken through and reflected off the many lenses
trained on her, recording every word. So unlike the discourses
delivered so long ago, where only the small lake of saffron-covered
monks would be faced in her direction.

The spread of faces maintained their
silence, clearly waiting for more. A little stunned perhaps,
shocked a few, both amused and bemused others. Well, that came with
the territory.

“I know that we treasure our humanness. I
know that we have treasured it for so long that it has become an
integral part of us, this veneration for all things human.

“And over the last century sexuality has
become a major study. Not in terms of how to subjugate it, mind
you, but how to live with it, how to survive as its slave.

“By the way, I am not advocating the
destruction of the species. I am not saying to shun sex altogether
and forever, which, of course, would have that as an inevitable
result. No, I am pointing out that intuitively man, through the
ages, and in most of his religions, have known to shun sex in order
to achieve spiritual purity or fulfillment. He has recognized that
the power of this drive was, and is, too great, too dangerous, to
take on directly, at least in our current state of spiritual
weakness.

“Lust is, as I said, primarily a mental
phenomenon. It is the constant anticipation of those few seconds of
sexual release that—quite irrationally if you ponder it for a
while—seem to make all the work, all the dating, all the fighting,
all the killing of younger horses, all the myriad of things that
make up the courting ritual worth their while.

“But do face it, please. The release of
sexual tension we call orgasm is only a matter of a few seconds, a
matter of a few seconds that some will toil and suffer through
uninterrupted weeks, months, or even years to achieve.

“Talk about impermanence.”

Each word, as it left one of the many
surrounding speakers in perfect German fidelity, seemed to stun the
crowed into a fascination deeper still. It was hard to tell whether
this was due to the unexpected message, whether it was due to the
spellbinding clarity of the voice, or to the startling contrast
between the beauty of the dark-haired speaker and the words she
spoke.

At this pause you could hear the birds
returning to their business, apparently having lost interest in the
subject. The wind, too—things to do now, places to go—had
resurrected as well, but the audience remained dead silent,
awaiting her next words, which were:

“I am not saying that sex as an activity or
as a sensation is inherently bad or harmful. It is a natural
phenomenon here on Earth. Neither good nor bad. It simply is.

“But I am saying that its danger lies in its
attraction, for it attracts, seizes, and holds captive so much of
your attention that you have none—or nowhere near enough—at your
disposal to look, to see, to discern the truth of our
situation.

“It puts blinders on us, blinders that we
love to call ours and that we love to wear.

“And as for value…”

The next moment was to be debated widely
over the next several days. All the videos shown on television and
liberally posted on the Internet show Ruth Marten standing up,
leaning slightly into the microphones, surveying the crowd as she
addresses it, now brushing a small river of hair out of her face
with her left hand as she says the word “value” and in the next
frame, the next moment, she lies flat on the stage, gazing out at
the crowd as if trying to find the source of the bullet that missed
her. Then she points to a building beyond the crowd. Then she is
covered by security guards.

But there is no falling down.

In none of the records of the event, is
there a falling down.

There is a standing up, there is a lying
flat, there is no falling motion, nor any time in which that motion
could have—should have—occurred. Standing up, lying flat. That’s
it. As if the falling had been edited out, not only out of the
record, but out of the actual occurrence.

Most of the commentary, and most of the
subsequent opinions, claim the footage simply had to have been
edited. So easy these days, just snip a second or two out of the
sequence, and this is exactly what you wind up with.

But another chorus of voices, many of them
belonging to professional television crews and editors, protested
their innocence: they had not, repeat not, altered the videos in
any way.

Impossible, impossible, cried commentators
and public opinion both, impossible. Someone should do something
about this incessant tampering with public perception. Impossible.
So impossible, in fact, that in this wind-whipped sea of opinions
Wolfgang Bauer was almost forgotten.

:

I felt rather than saw the steady, gloved
finger curl around the trigger, easing it to its resting point
halfway toward engagement. Then the deep breath and the slow exhale
to signal that the practiced finger had set out to complete its
journey for the kill.

I had no choice, there was no time to fall,
the bullet was already on its way and, I knew, with such precision
that my head would explode the next instant. I had to do it.

So, I un-stood where I was and re-lay on the
floor of the stage. To the mortal eye this happens in the one same
instant, in truth it happens in precisely two consecutive instants,
in two consecutive nows.

How long is a now? What width is the razor’s
edge of the present?

Let me say this: A fall from standing up
behind the microphones to lying prostrate on the floor of the stage
would span thousands of presents, many thousand nows. The bullet
would arrive in only a handful of these same nows, I had no
choice.

So, in one of these immeasurably small nows
I stood, in the very next I lay on the stage floor. I un-stood, I
re-lay. Not very human, but I can do these things.