Vandal Love (30 page)

No, she murmured and blushed. Danny and Andy were in the other room, and Jamgoti kept up a patter of light questions. You go to school? Ah, no—finished? Have you given college any thought? Of course, it’s not for everyone.

I know, Juanita told him, that I’ll be perfectly happy raising my child.

Sat Puja considered that she said it as if it was the sort of thing she’d often thought about saying, as if she expected the kinds of questions Jamgoti was asking.

I have a guidance counsellor, she told him, who keeps calling. I had good grades, but it’s true—it wasn’t for me.

Do you know, Jamgoti said and smiled, that was my experience, too? We can’t all hope to be happy with the same things that others are.

Sat Puja cleared his throat. He’d been standing at the door. He had the impression that Jamgoti had said everything he himself might have liked to say in an introductory conversation. He was certain that there would never be another original introductory conversation again, if not on earth, then at least not here. His innards felt like a sponge being violently wrung.

Afterwards, as they walked out through the brittle grass, Jamgoti told him that they could sleep there again that night. Danny had said so.

None of this was what Sat Puja had wanted. Crossing the shallow river on stones, he considered what their journey should have been: a brief, clear fantasy of bathing in crisp water, of washing robes and laying them out to dry. But perhaps someone like the grandfather would have taken them for vagrants and run them out of town, or jailed them, tied them to fence posts and whipped them with jumper cables. Oddly, the tradition of being lost in America seemed right. It was old, venerable even, and made him proud when he thought of his family history. Perhaps his father wouldn’t appreciate the
specifics, but Sat Puja was of another time. And perhaps he might actually stumble upon some truth out here. He considered Juanita.

Jamgoti now appeared tired as they picked through sharp weeds. Sat Puja sensed something in Jamgoti he hadn’t noticed until then—what seemed like laziness or a lack of genuine yearning for anything beyond admiration. For the first time he saw a spark of authenticity in his own desperation. His gut calmed. Are you tired? he asked, picking up the pace. Jamgoti licked his lips and rubbed the back of his neck. Sun’s hot, he said.

They meditated in the shadow of a steep hill. Though their shelter was not as good as that of the previous day, they could see over the dry land to the river, even to the brothers’ farm and farther still to mountains like immense fins. A shadow occasionally fell past them, made by the ragged wings of a circling vulture. Jamgoti stretched his back and rolled his head. He sighed. Sat Puja gazed beneath his slitted eyes. He slowed his breathing, mind mirrored within stillness. Pinned by the sun, the landscape revolved, crags and mesas like eroding temples. A faroff tin roof flapped silver wings in a mirage of heat. Jamgoti had gone to sleep. Sat Puja was at peace.

Towards evening, as they returned, Jamgoti said they should be careful of dehydration. At the edge of the river, a farmer had built a bonfire of brush and trash, the breeze sweet with burning plastic. A rust-coloured
bulldozer was parked on the rise, treadmarks bandaging the earth and heaps of torn-up trees near the water.

Jamgoti had become watchful, tossing questions at Sat Puja to test his mood, asking how his meditations were or whether he wanted to give up. Jamgoti seemed to consider, then began laying the groundwork for an argument against turbans. He stopped so that Sat Puja had to give up his steady clip and come back. Sadhus don’t wear turbans, Jamgoti said. He pulled his off, then waxed on what must be done with the hair, shaving or matting, and finally decided that he felt closer to the Rastafarians than to the skinheads.

I’m keeping the turban, Sat Puja said.

It’s a crutch, you know.

With the smell of plastic came the suffocating odour of disturbed earth carried by the wind. Sat Puja had to slow his breath.

Weltschmerz
, Jamgoti exclaimed. It’s why we’re doing this? Because we can’t make the world match our ideals. We’re afraid of our portion of life. Our world suffering. Our
weltschmerz
.

Sat Puja decided then that no matter how eloquent and philosophical Jamgoti became, he would not be convinced.

Weltschmerz
, Jamgoti repeated and gestured to the land beyond the river, the bulldozer and the man swatting dusty gloves against his jeans. None of this is what we dream. In fact, the idea can be sentimental, the bitter sweetness of staying here. You know, the scriptures call our lives on earth the mud of time, but maybe the
people who wrote them were also fleeing. I mean, to me at least the world doesn’t seem so bad.

Sat Puja no longer knew where the argument had begun or how turbans related to sadhus and to their pie portion of suffering. He wasn’t sure whether he was being told to return to the world or to give up his turban and be a proper sadhu. The former it seemed until Jamgoti reached over and pulled off his turban and unfurled it into the dirt with the precision of a hoodlum sending toilet paper into trees. The material flapped a few times, grew heavy with dust and lay still. Then Jamgoti set out into the brush alongside the river, and Sat Puja hurried behind, branches whipping back into his face.

Long after everyone had fallen asleep, Sat Puja lay awake, furious. His guts felt hot and loose and gurgled frequently. Heat flashed along his skin, and though his lips and mouth were dry, he didn’t want to add water to the chaos within. Each time he calmed his mind enough to drift off, a mosquito homed in on his ear and he ended up thinking back to Danny’s story of his
abuelo
. He disliked that savage past, its brutal love and laws. He had no notion of violence or intensity, of where it might reside. He quieted his breathing and listened to the silence of his body, the empty spaces like dark matter around the amphibious patter of his heart. The mosquito neared again and he swatted.

The sound of radio static and a faint melody came from the far end of the house. He got up from the couch. Light showed through a crack in a door. The announcers’ voices
had a sober quality as in old wartime reels, the music exotic. Static buzzed between channels. He knocked.

Come in, Andy said. Sit down. He was fiddling with a boxy, military-looking radio. Sat Puja sat and watched the dial move along the lit face. A computer hummed in the corner, fractals unfolding on its screen. A workbench extended the length of the wall, covered in phials and pipettes, the various beaked and gourd-shaped glassware of an alchemist.

Andy plucked at his moustache. It’s a shortwave, he explained, saying that when he’d been sixteen, Danny had joined the army and returned four months later with an injured knee, a discharge and the radio he’d bought in a pawnshop as a gift. Andy said that he liked listening to it at night because it sounded different then. Sat Puja sensed this, the way the music swelled, tuned sharply—the voices, even the static, fuller, charged with the high, lonely distances. Shyly, Andy explained that it gave him hope somehow. He searched the channels, the talk in unknown languages, the English and Spanish news from around the world. Wind blew in along the dark, sand rattling the windows, and Sat Puja found that the faint static was as soothing as the voices, ice storms and floods and fires, new novels, illegal poppy crops, dance troupes.

It makes me feel like I’m at war, Andy said. Like I’m part of something important.

Why didn’t you join the army?

No way. After I saw Danny with his knee tore up and all skinny, I never wanted to go in.

Something about Andy’s observations touched Sat Puja. He thought of Jamgoti’s glibness, the way he uncovered the hearts of others as if they were nothing new. Was Sat Puja just the sidekick, the necessary element in every adventure? The occasion for Jamgoti to hear his own wisdom and be impressed? Andy found a broadcast of Asian music, a warbling stringed instrument with a sound like a woman’s mournful voice. Sat Puja felt tired. He wanted to absolve himself of all this, to be good and pure and make a few peaceful hand gestures, shoulders relaxed, face sunny. This had never been about adventure.

If you’re seeking God, Andy said, you should try some of that. He pointed to a corked beaker filled with fluid.

Sat Puja considered his readings on alchemy years ago, encoded instructions to make gold but that were in fact to transform the base soul into the essence of immortality. And now, here he was, in a drug shop in a blistered, alien world.

He sat with Andy until late, listening to the rhythms of other languages, the foreign laughter. The moment might have become simply another dose of that world pain, his
weltschmerz
, his desire for things to be a little better, sweet longing—wind at the windows, the cool summer night of the desert. But he was thinking now, listening no less, no less conscious of Andy’s quiet perceptions.

Do you think there’s anything in all that? Sat Puja asked Jamgoti the next day, meaning the drugs, the LSD—the potential for mystical experience. He loaded his voice
with insecurity, with perfunctory disdain and the longing to hear his wise friend speak.

In fact, Sat Puja, Jamgoti said, in fact I think there might be something to be learned.

A little later Andy told them, It’s on the house, boys. He took a Q-tip from a carton and dipped it in the fluid. Suck on that. There’s enough to take you through tomorrow.

Jamgoti did. Sat Puja, he said and smacked his lips. Your turn.

But the nervousness had gone out of Sat Puja. With his grime and matted hair and fuzzy chin, he looked like an old-world thief, cunning, weasel eyed, never quite more than a child.

Sorry, he said in a voice he didn’t recognize. You’re in this one on your own.

There was the way life had become a list. François had tried to make sense of it. He’d attempted to see it as headlines, as a miniseries or a how-to guide. He was just forty-nine but felt old. Whereas work had once been the only necessity, it now seemed an indulgence. Years collapsed to the form of an average day. Age came in hints, the softening of his features, the unfamiliar talk on dates. Exhausted, he slipped into old mispronunciations. An accent, he’d learned for all his tired will, could never truly be erased.
Whereas he’d once sought to forget, he now found himself trying to remember, to understand how he’d come to this place. He ate his meals alone, in hubcaps in his mostly empty restaurant, staring at posters of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe.

He began having night sweats. He came awake suffocating, hot, dizzy, a faint white powder on his lips, perhaps from gritting his teeth. He went to the doctor. He discovered that at different walk-in clinics they gave different prescriptions, all of which he took. He woke one night and stood at the window. Snow covered the rooftop and yard. Winter had been so much more intense in the prairies, a vanishing point of pale fields, flurries falling along distance. Then he realized he could make out weeds through the snow. It was June. This was moonlight. He had to go outside to get his bearings, to feel the warm air.

Soon after, he submitted himself to tests and X-rays. The doctor looked him in the eye. François listened, but the words didn’t come together to have meaning.

You’re otherwise healthy, the doctor said at one point, but this is all over the place.

François took the X-rays from the screen and left. In his car he almost reconsidered and went back, thinking he’d missed something, that there was a possibility the doctor had forgotten. Instead he visited Eduardo.

An X-ray held to the kitchen light, Eduardo studied it and said, True enough.

On the way home François had to swerve off the street for a bathroom. It was filthy, the light dead, the handle
punched from the metal door. A syringe cracked under his shoe. Whatever had burned through him, fear or cancer, was burning through him now. He’d seen the grapevine of his intestines as if his strength was boiling, bubbling up. Was dying now worth all those years of perfect abs? No doubt it had been that damned electric belt, as dangerous as Eduardo had warned. It could have even been his time as a guinea pig. Perhaps he was decaying from the inside. Just that morning he’d felt a cavity in his molar. He was sure his breath stank. He was still young. He felt power in his bones like the hot metal of an oven. He’d earned money, had watched friends drift away and become grandparents. His son was off seeking a life of bland perfection. Peggy had told him that Harvey had gone mad, joined a cult in the Southwest—cult even by her standards, mad indeed.

What would be a last meaningful action? A few days before, reading the paper at the bar, he’d run across an article on cryogenics. It had given a few round-figure prices, and in the realm of such things he’d earned nothing at all, was a small fry. But now, considering a future that wouldn’t include him, he understood the desire to be preserved, Walt Disney and Ted Williams in their cryogenic suspension, and many others, heads cut off and frozen, sealed in arctic air until new bodies could be grown from lurid slime and grafted on. He wanted to trust civilization’s most absurd dreams, but he wasn’t wealthy enough. His tear ducts felt tight, his eyes itched and just thinking about this, he felt the breath in his nostrils become brittle with cold. The cancer had spread
throughout his body. Survival was doubtful, and the prolongation of life, the doctor had said, though possible at his age, would be unpleasant. The only means of continuance François could imagine was in finding Harvey and setting him on a better path. He himself had taken years to discover his strength.

He sat more than an hour in the ammoniac reek of piss. He raged with disappointment at his body. Layer upon layer of graffiti showed faintly on the walls, in the darkness like vines on a trellis. He’d wanted a son in his image, and perhaps it wasn’t too late after all. But when he pictured himself now, the face was frozen, hard and unforgiving.

Those next weeks he sold everything, even his house and businesses. He didn’t want to risk all that he’d built becoming worthless in his absence. But his heap of assets weren’t what he’d thought, especially not when sold in a rush. He wrote up a will, leaving everything to Harvey with instructions, and he took out forty thousand American dollars in big bills that he zipped into the compartments of a nylon money belt. Those days, he slept often. He watched late-night television and saw a martial-arts film for the first time—the drunken master, the avenging understudy, the great warrior leaving a monastery’s silence. Discourses on concentration, wisdom and form—dragon, tiger, crane—and the way these bodies took flight reminded him of how natural it was to dream. He was suddenly exhausted. He turned off the television. For the last two days that the house remained
legally his, he stayed in bed. Then it was time. Cars were backing from driveways up and down the street, leaving for work. At a wedge of morning sunlight between two houses, they passed like camera flashes. He was no longer part of all this.