The Faraway Nearby (12 page)

The beautiful surgeon came in later, about a dozen hours into her workday, to tell me that everything had gone well under her aegis and to see how I felt. She summoned the nurse and upbraided her for my blood-stained gown, my missing call button, my poorly arranged equipment, the uneaten tray of food in front of me. Then Dr. Pam came with her fiancée and some more appealing food, and I threw up even the delicate things I had requested, repeatedly. It felt as though my stomach had been sealed and my system had not woken up again, and so I took nothing in that night. Later, Mario the night nurse took my blood pressure and found that it was astonishingly low, since I had had nothing to drink for almost twenty-four hours. He pumped fluid fast into my veins and woke me up every hour to check on me.

In the morning I endeavored to return to civilization, changing into the beautiful orchid silk pajamas brocaded with a pattern of phoenixes and dragons that I'd bought in Chinatown and Jane's old dove gray crepe de chine kimono whose long sleeves made a perfect receptacle for the wound drainage bulb I was going to have to secrete somewhere on my person for the next three weeks. It was stitched into me with black thread, a sign that I had been invaded and was now to be literally drained a little.

I also contained some temporary plastic tubing for drainage, some other manmade materials, and a small square of denatured skin matrix stripped of its DNA. I was in a minor way now a Frankenstein's monster too, containing a fragment of another's body, stitched into another lineage, and the artisans had done their work well. Somewhere in the maze of the hospital some of what had been me not long before was being inspected by pathologists, a book for others to read under microscopes.

A few days after surgery I realized there was a disk stuck to my back—a spongy circle with a metal snap—where the monitors had gone. It was strange to feel that I was so alienated from my body that this thing like a leech had been on me for days—and then I found two more, and then several days after that one last disk. They were reminders that while I had been gone I had become an inert object that others maneuvered, altered, and monitored. I was no longer I, and my body was not my own but something absent, inert, alien, waiting.

There is a serenity in illness that takes away all the need to do and makes just being enough. In that state I've only been in before with severe flu, there is no boredom, no restlessness, not much thinking about what should be done or what has been done. You are elsewhere than consciousness, than everyday life, than the usual bodily awareness and social engagement. We call it doing nothing or resting: the conscious mind does little but the body works furiously, under cover of stillness, to rebuild, rewire, recharge. I recognized that this state must be some of what produced Ann's luminosity, though she deserved credit for some of it as a state of grace, not just depletion.

A major illness or injury is a rupture that invites you to rethink, to restart, to review what matters. It's a reminder that your time is finite and not to be wasted, and in breaking you from the past it offers the possibility of starting fresh. An illness is many kinds of rupture from which you have to stitch back a storyline of where you're headed and what it means. Every illness is narrative. There are the epics, in which you will ultimately triumph over what afflicts you and return for a while to your illusory autonomy, and the tragedies, in which the illness will ultimately triumph over you and take you away into the unknown that is death, and the two are often impossible to tell apart until they resolve.

Then there are the enigmatic illnesses whose prognosis is uncertain, in which well-being comes and goes unpredictably, with the difficulty of a story without a plot, or with an unfathomable one. Doctors are forever being implored and pressured to read the future from the medical evidence in the present, to confirm the story, but early on they learn that the rules are rubbery: the near-thriving suddenly collapse, the person at death's door travels all the way back to rejoin the living, and the time line of death and likelihood of recovery remain unforeseeable.

I got better. Nellie's daughter got stronger and left the room of premature infants to go home. And Ann's end came. I visited her a week after my own surgery, taking the bus across town, and reading to her an essay of mine about Mexico and slowness and stories and snails, subjects I thought she might like even if she took in no more than the tone of voice and the attention. I talked to her about her own accomplishments and influence, and she beamed. The next visit I read her the “Garden of Live Flowers” chapter from
Through the Looking-Glass
. I told her about the paradise of blooms her sister had coaxed into being in her own back garden and some of the ways she was like a flower.

I had been naive about how tenacious she was, and how long life can live in a body that is so racked and weakened. She would look into my eyes directly, with tenderness. There was so little sense of separation, or embarrassment, that it was as if she was looking into the mirror, and perhaps to some extent she was. She was radiant for a while and then everything got worse. I went to see her when she was not conscious at all, but restless, vanishing, dreaming her way back into nonexistence.

And then, on a day of roaring, relentless winds that tore down branches and shingles and signs, she was gone. They asked me to write and deliver the eulogy, and so I did in front of a few hundred people while I was still feeling frail myself. I said Ann's words, her friends', and my own for her, and a couple of days later I got on a plane for Iceland.

W
hat's your story? There are so many ways to tell it. When the near capsized like a ship, the far swept me up. I flew over the untrammeled lands of the subarctic and then across the sea. From the air Iceland looked like a high-relief puzzle of dark stone and pale vegetation and blue water. It was as strange as another planet. In the calm, sparsely populated airport, Fríða and the regal Klara were waiting with a big car to bring me and my bundles of books and warm clothes past long miles of knife-edged lava upholstered in thick moss to the city of Reykjavík. In the city I wandered dazed and jetlagged and still convalescent and contemplated pale people, a stuffed two-headed lamb in a store window, and the view north across the blue waters of the wide fjord to the sharp mountains still clad in snow.

Luxuries and fine goods had been scarce in Iceland's penurious past, but one shop on a side street had teetering stacks of fine china from not so many decades ago. The plates, cups, and saucers were all painted in the soft blue-gray of an overcast day and adorned with gulls. Even these bits of domesticity on which families had eaten their best dinners recalled the cold sea and the birds that travel such distances across it. Beyond the city and the one person I knew in this country, far away from everything, was my temporary home. A couple of days after I landed, Klara drove me there through a hundred miles of rough terrain with big rocks and, occasionally, tiny trees.

The Library of Water, which had formerly been a library of books, was on a hill overlooking a harbor on a small peninsula jutting north off a big one extending west. Beyond the harbor was a vast bay or fjord, this one scattered with nearly three thousand islands from the size of a room to the size of a farm. On the other side of the Breiðafjörður archipelago were the mountains of the Westfjords, Iceland's remotest reach, white with snow in those first days of May. Seabirds flew between the islands and nested on them in great groups, secure in this land in which the only native mammal is the rarely seen arctic fox, thought to have arrived on ice floes from Greenland. The small islands lack even foxes.

Writing about that archipelago now makes me think of my friend Ann's last installation, her white plaster islands mounted on a white wall and connected by a network of red strings, though for that scatter of small Icelandic islands only bird flights and the occasional boat trip must have connected each to each. Ann's piece made as she was dying was a map of everything, of connectedness itself, like the neurons of the brain and the veins of the body and the roads of the country. You can speak as though your life is a thread, a narrative unspooling in time, and a story is a thread, but each of us is an island from which countless threads extend out into the world.

I have pulled out one thread from the tangle or tapestry of that particular time, and nothing in my account is untrue, except perhaps the coherence of a story, when really there were many stories, or the heap of events and details and imperfect memories from which stories are spun. One thread led to New Orleans. One thread led to Iceland. One to a raft on the Grand Canyon a year later. Another led to Burma or at least to contemplating Burma. Five days after my breakup, the day I was invited to Iceland by Fríða's phone call, I went home and called my friend Marisa. That evening, the two of us organized a demonstration in support of the uprising led by Buddhist monks in Burma.

Three days earlier more than ten thousand monks had marched through Rangoon and thousands more had walked through at least two dozen other Burmese cities, risking everything in that land of absolute repression. The photographs of long lines of bare-armed shaven-headed men in deep red robes flowing through their cities brought tears to my eyes, as did the later images of legions of citizens lining the streets to protect them. I think of them now as like the red threads that connected Ann's plaster islands or as the new red blood cells that constantly flow forth from the white temples of our bones. They came out in defense of life and in doing so risked death, as did the smaller population of nuns in their pale rose-colored robes.

Most of us try to avoid trouble, danger, and death, and here was this unarmed multitude walking toward all three for the benefit of others and maybe for, as Buddhists like to say, the benefit of all beings. It was breathtaking, and it made you want to walk with them, made you breathe the air of those moments of emergency when the personal falls away and with it the usual fears and timidities. It made you wish to be brave and maybe it made you brave, since emotions are contagious. There were few risks for most of us elsewhere, but we could at least walk with them from afar and stand up for them.

In this isolated, devout nation that had been ruled by a military junta for almost half a century, there were said to be exactly the same number of monks and soldiers. The monks and nuns acted on behalf of the impoverished majority who had been racked by hardship when the government abruptly increased fuel prices that August, and on behalf of monks who had themselves been injured at a peaceful demonstration earlier in September. These were minor incidents in the major trouble that was life under a brutal dictatorship. They acted because it was time to act, because hope had arisen and change seemed possible, because they had a degree of immunity in that devout, superstitious country, because one of the core principles of Buddhism is the nonseparateness of all things.

But the monks had separated themselves from the military. They had at the height of the uprising performed the rare and extraordinary rite known in Pali as
patam nikkujjana kamma,
the overturning of the alms bowl so that nothing can be put in it. Early every morning Burmese monks circulated through the cities and towns, each carrying a dark bowl. They lived in the trust that the bowls would be filled, that they would manage to eat, and they tested it every morning. The test had mostly succeeded for millennia of South Asian monastic life. The daily rite proved you could live without certainty or money in a beautiful interdependence with the rest of society.

To give to them was to gain spiritual merit, so the act of giving went both ways in those transactions. Overturning the bowls banned the military and their families from giving alms, effectively excommunicating them and denying them other religious rites of passage. The monks marched through the streets holding their bowls upside down, a denunciation made scathingly public. To refuse to accept the gifts was to refuse to confer the reciprocal gifts, to break the threads that tied those secular people to monastic life and to the life of the spirit.

Whatever tiny contribution I may have made to that doomed uprising was more than recompensed by what it did for me. The monks in Burma and the supporters in my own city and all over the world constituted a community of dignity and principle that was a refuge for me at that particular moment. It was astonishingly beautiful, these unarmed people standing up to a dictatorship that would eventually spatter some of their blood on the walls of the monasteries, murder some, disappear some, drive others into exile or out of the temples, and silence many more. The ordinary people come to protect them in the streets in those hopeful days were braver yet.

Two days after Fríða had invited me to Iceland, Marisa and I managed to get a few hundred people to come to our city's Chinese consulate, China being a major backer of the regime. Many were Buddhists, most were wearing red, or donned red fabric brought by the famous Vipassana Buddhist teacher who was a committed organizer during that crisis. He had lived among the monks of Thailand and Burma and everything happening in the latter country was vivid and personal for him. I asked my muralist friend Mona Caron to draw the eyes of the Buddha as an elegant elaboration on that old chant “the whole world is watching.” In pastel, on a piece of paper four feet high and eight feet wide, she made the eyes appear while Burmese émigré children watched, entranced, in front of the wall of the consulate.

They were huge, serene, sad, gorgeous, green, staring, and almost glaring, and where the third eye might be was a little image of the earth with Burma picked out in red. The curve of the earth hovered on the bottom edge, so that the eyes rose over the planet like burning green suns. The drawing, once I mounted it on heavier paper with sticks on either side, became the banner carried in the subsequent demonstrations. Marisa and I had moved faster than the established channels, and soon afterward the local Buddhist and Burmese communities began to organize together and we could draw back. But I never forgot that red river of monks circulating through the cities of Burma, and the connections that I made during that uprising lasted.

•   •   •

Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, “Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self,” but empathy, solidarity, allegiance—the nerves that run out into the world—expand the self beyond its physical bounds.

The familiar fairy tales map only limited possibilities in the end. After all, they're mostly about getting—getting affluence, security, a spouse, offspring, the usual trappings. Even nowadays people who lack the full complement of these particular goods are reminded, subtly and not, that they should have them or that they have failed. The idea of a life lived by another pattern and measured by another standard remains out of reach in these versions. What's your story? The goals matter. The foundation stone of Buddhism, the life of the Buddha himself, is a fairy tale run backward.

Twenty-five centuries ago, a man was born to aristocratic parents and walked out one night to become a seeker, a monk, and eventually a teacher, but we know only so much about this historical figure. The facts of his life were embroidered and embellished into the most perfect of anti–fairy tales, and that story is still with us, taught and reflected upon and retold all over the world. One version of the legend his life became was written down six centuries after his birth by a North Indian poet named
. His epic poem,
The Buddhacarita,
or
Acts of the Buddha,
contains most of the incidents in the versions told since.

A rendition of the poem copied out about eight hundred years ago on fifty-five palm leaves still existed in a Kathmandu library in the last century—it's half of the original Sanskrit story. The rest only exists in Chinese and Tibetan translations. The book was literally a sutra, that word that first meant palm leaves sutured together and then meant the teachings of the Buddha. The words on that sutured, sundered book of leaves was translated into flowery English prose in 1894 and again in 1936.

In
Buddhacarita,
all the legendary material is in full bloom: Siddhartha Gautama's mother's dream of a white elephant, his miraculous birth as his standing mother supported herself with a bough laden with flowers, his seven steps as he walked straight from his mother's womb and proclaimed, “I am born for supreme knowledge, for the welfare of the world—this is my last birth.” That it's a story a little like that of the Christ child is a reminder that both belong in the fairy-tale category of the remarkable birth, from Peach Boy to Thumbelina.

Like Sleeping Beauty's parents, Siddhartha's father attempts to thwart the fortune told for him at birth, or one version of that fortune. The Brahman told him that his son would become either a great king who would rule the world or a great spiritual teacher. The father tries to avert the latter destiny by confining the prince to a paradise of gardens, dancing girls, banquets, and other sensual pleasures in which nothing appears that would provoke questions or quests.

The prince is born into what the fairy-tale goose girls and beggar boys arrive at in the end, the luxury that in the
Buddhacarita
includes golden elephants, golden deer, real deer pulling golden carriages, and strings of gems like garlands of flowers. Grown up into a handsome young man, Siddhartha marries a lovely woman and has a son and heir he names, bitterly it seems, Rahula, or fetter. The child further entraps him in the palace and the life his father chose for him.