Blue Mercy: A Novel. (23 page)

"Sir, Ma'm, I really must ask you..."

"So don't forgive me if you don't want to, Zach, but know what you're doing, okay?" I felt like I was fighting for the life of a child. "Know that it's you making the mistake this time."

Still he stood.

"Sir?"

I took one of the business cards I always carry in my purse and wrote my home number down on the back of it. "Call me," I said.

He looked at the card. "Better World Café?"

"Or call in there if you'd prefer. Anytime. Come and meet my friend Marsha. You'll like her."

And she'd love him. I could imagine them, having long intense talks about how best to save a world that didn't think it needed saving.

"Sir, I really have to ask you to --"

"Just wait, will you?" I turned on her, hardly knowing what I was saying.

I turned back to him. "Zach?"

"Ah, go on, son," said a man from the line.

"If you don't, can I?" shouted another voice.

"Yeah, man, you crazy?"

"I'm out on a limb here, Zach. Look at me."

He looked, he let himself look. A spark jumped in his eyes, I saw it. Time tunnelled in closer. "Help me," I whispered.

He reached out his hand. I dropped my basket so I could take it. My feet were stepping towards him. He opened his arms to me and I half-stumbled into them.

"Yes!" cried the old man from behind, as if it was his embrace I was falling into.

I was locked against that white T-shirt, my cheek warming against what it felt beneath. His skin, his muscle, his bone.
Mine
. His hand came up to hold me there.

"Don't make me regret this," he whispered into my hair.

"I won't. I promise you, Zach. I promise."

I looked up at him and he was smiling. The people in the line behind us were smiling. The deli girl was smiling. And me, oh yes, me too. Even my pores were smiling.

Since Zach and I had last been together, he had got God. He didn't call it that and he wasn't aligned with any particular religion or tradition, but that was what it was. After Brown's, I brought him back to the café, enjoying the look on Marsha's face when she saw me swinging in with him, hand-in-hand. She sat him down in the corner table to share a pot of green tea and some get-to-know-you-time while I fixed up the tables. Then she insisted I take the rest of the day off.
 

I brought him back to my house, his first time there, knowing how he would appreciate that. I showed him around. The west-facing entrance vestibule where I like to write. The open-plan kitchen and dining and sitting room at the back, opening out onto the yard. Upstairs past the bathroom, which needed decoration: too frilled and flouncy for my taste now. Past Star's locked door, forbidden territory. Past the spare room for guests and Marsha, who often stayed over if she'd had too much wine to drive home. Slowly, slowly, each delay a sort of commitment to our destination: my bedroom.
 

"This is great," Zach said, almost wistfully. "I can see your life since we parted, here, all laid out."

"Settled and boring."

"Not at all but you're rooted now, compared to before," he smiled. "Solid."

"Solid? Charming. Makes me sound like a kitchen table."

I put my arms around his neck and gave him the full-on kiss I'd been planning to give him since Brown's. Now more holding back, I was all his. I smelled the tang of him as our lips met, his own, unmistakable essence.
 

"I think it's time this table was laid," I whispered in his ear, which made him laugh again.
 

Then he grew suddenly serious. "Mercy," he said, with a small frown. "I have a lot to tell you."

I stroked the crease the memory made, the know between his eyes.

"We've a lot to tell each other, Zach. But we've all the time in the world to tell it. First..."
 

I kissed him again.

"Mercy, Mercy," he whispered into my hair, and again, after we'd slid each other's clothes away and tracked pathways along each other's skin with fingers and lips and were reaching to pull the nakedness of each other in close, he said it again, "Mercy, Mercy," only louder this time, as if I was in danger. Or maybe
was
a danger. I don't know.

I was determined that everything was going to be fine. With my ambiguities and reservations out of the way, happiness would be ours, that day and forever, all the coming days.

"Stop," he said.

I lifted my head. "What is it?" Excitement was thrumming through me.

"Stop for a moment. Listen."

"To what?"

"Just listen."

I laid my forehead in the soft hollow beneath his shoulder, stopped the forward press of my desire for a moment, and listened. I could hear the thumping of my pulse, birdsong outside the window, the ventilator in the bathroom, two kids shooting hoops next door, a car driving past and the hum of my own blood, pressing against my temples... And yes, the silence wrapped around each of the sounds.

"That's better," he said and he kissed me again, with cooler, gentler lips, a kiss that lasted on and on and on until again, I was lost to sound and to anything except touching and being touched. I drew him down and we were together as we had never quite been together before, heartbeats knocking hard on each other's ribs. Two floating souls touching through heaving flesh.
 

Afterwards, after we'd slept a while, we talked and he told me about the years we'd been apart. Some of it -- his academic appointment and his publications -- I knew. Now he told me what lay under all that achievement.

"After you left me, I didn't want to live. I blamed you for the way I felt. And at the school there was all this wrangling and competition, first for tenure, later for advancement. I found myself anxious all the time."

"Anxious?" I asked, from the pillow beside him.

"Then, one night I woke with a feeling of intense horror. Everything felt so utterly without meaning. I hated the world and what I hated most about it was me. I lay thinking what I'd often thought before -- how could I bear this struggle any longer? Only death could bring me peace."

"Oh, Zach."

"I hope this isn't too heavy for you, Mercy. I hated myself. I thought myself the most loathsome person in the world. Why had I said such-and-such? What did so-and-so mean? Thoughts kept churning until I thought they'd drive me out of my mind."

He laughed and then kept on laughing, too long.

"What's so funny?"

"It is funny. That's what I did," he said. "Which was precisely what saved me."

"Sorry?"

"Out of my mind."

"Zach, I..."

"Bear with me. A thought that kept flashing across my head as I lay there was: 'I can't stand myself any longer.' I'd had this thought before but now, for some reason, I became aware of the illogicality of it. How could I not stand myself? Was I one person or two?"

He sat up on his elbow. "As I tried to solve this puzzle, I felt -- actually felt -- my mind stop its endless jabbering. I was awake, still wide awake in the dark room, but I wasn't thinking. A moment of peace. Then..." He paused, dropped his eyes, hesitating at the brink.

"Go on."

"Oh Mercy, I hope this isn't going to sound too crazy to you -- as if my stopped mind was an aperture, what felt like a surge of white light came rushing in. My head felt ablaze with white."

I kept my eyes open to him. To turn from what he was saying would be to turn from us. I knew that much.
 

"I could feel myself being sucked into it. What did it mean? I started to shake, all over," he said. "And then I heard a voice."

"A voice?"

"A voice," he said, firmly, but with a quick glance to see how I'd take it. "It seemed to come from my chest but it also seemed to be outside of me."

"What did it say?"

"It said: 'Bow to what is'."

Again he looked at me. I didn't take my eyes away. I didn't laugh, or frown. I didn't. I kept my face straight. Straight, straight, straight.

"So," he went on, "I let myself go. I fell, a long way, then I felt my heart growing warmer and then it was as if it was opening, like a flower blooming on fast-motion film."

"Sounds like an acid trip."

He ignored that. "I felt peace and wellbeing washing over me. After that, I have no recollection. I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I remember is waking, what felt like hours later, with light, early light coming in through my curtains. Light as I'd never seen it before."

His face was alight just talking about it.

"I got up and walked around my bedroom, the bedroom I had lived in for years, picking things up, a pen, a tube of toothpaste, a T-shirt, staring at them in wonder. They were so alive. Alive now seemed the most startling miracle."

A third time he looked at me. "Mercy?"

I needed to answer now. I needed to say something, find words that went beyond the half-frightened,
 
half-cynical sentences that were leaping around my head. Sentences I couldn't say. Let me out of here. Who are you? What a load of New Age mumbo-jumbo-nutty-freakery.

I couldn't say such things. I didn't know if I meant them. This was who Zach was, now. I needed to get beyond my own opinions, seek the heart of what he was saying. As soon as I had that thought, a new word rose unbidden in my mind, from a different source.

I was able to reach across and brush his cheek with understanding fingers and smile a gentle smile into his eyes.

"Rebirth," I said. "You had a rebirth."

"Yes. Oh, Mercy, you understand." He reached for me and pulled me tight against him. "You understand."

Zach's explanation of what happened to him that night was that his suffering was so intense that it forced his consciousness to withdraw from identification with the fearful self he'd become. As a result of which, unhappy and fearful Zach ("my false self") collapsed and he was left with consciousness in its pure state, consciousness that doesn't identify with form and therefore does not suffer ("my true self").

He'd had shifts in intensity of feeling but essentially had remained in the same state of bliss since his metamorphosis, he said. And metamorphosis it was. Out went the promising academic career: he no longer respected the work of the mind. Thinking, doing, getting, achieving: all these felt empty to him now. He mostly just wanted to
be
.

"But how can you be without doing?"

"Of course you're right. We have to eat and dress and so on. What I mean is that I want to change the emphasis, the balance. Less doing, less thinking, more being."

"Well we'd all like a bit of that," I said.

"I'm glad to hear you say it."

"I said 'a bit'." Now we were safe, I could tease him.

"Don't worry Mercy. I'm not going to ask you to join me on my park bench."

"Park bench?" My heart wobbled.
 

Yes, aside from some odd jobs, Zach had spent much of the past year on a park bench in L.A.

"Like a... hobo?"

"Not too many hobos are in a state of deep bliss. And only during the day. I had an apartment."

"I'm relieved to hear it." My right foot was sticking out from under the duvet and feeling cold. I tucked it under, wrapped my leg around his. "But how can you afford all this sitting around? Don't you have to work?"

"People ask me questions."

"Say again?"

"People ask me questions and some of them give me money for the answers. Or food. Or other stuff."

"What sort of questions?"

"All sorts -- Is there life after death? Why is love so difficult? How can I be free? Do I matter? Anything."

"And you've got the answers to all that?"

"It isn't about the questions, really. They are leading to the same answer."

"Which is?"

"My job, my purpose, now is to enable others to find their way out of the suffering created by too much thinking."

"You're a guru?" I laugh.

This made him sit forward off the pillows and turn to face me. "No, positively, absolutely not a guru. A signpost, maybe. A pointer."

It frightened me, the awesome responsibility (the damn cheek) of answering such questions. "Don't you ever worry you might be getting it wrong?"

"It's not me; it just comes through me."

That one would never stand up in a law court. And I didn't like this business of taking money from strangers.

"They need to give me something," he said. "I never ask. I don't care whether they do or don't. I just accept what comes along."

He sits up, takes my face in his hands thirstily again, for my understanding. "I operate from a different place now, Merce. I take my cues from the inner, not the outer world."

He fixes me with his eyes until I feel I'm falling into them, down a tunnel, like Alice, where the things of what he calls the outer world (what the rest of us call life) are floating free of gravity. Light and loose as the snow-grey flecks in his eyes.

"Anyway," he says, taking down his hands. "It looks like I'll be doing it more formally now. A group of philosophy student here have set me in various venues and are charging a small entry fee."

Word had gone around these students that he was a modern mystic. That's not how he put it but that's what was going on. "You should come along to the next one. See for yourself, Mercy. Put your anxieties to rest."

The event was in Sports Hall Two on campus and sold out, with a queue at the door hoping for cancellations. It was a strange experience, seeing so many people avid to see Zach, not just students but men and women -- mainly women -- of all types and ages and colors. He had no props or special lighting or any concession to stage management: just him and his words and his calm and radiant presence. He spoke slowly and carefully, in an intimate manner that made each person in the packed hall feel he was addressing them directly, and he had no problem connecting with the questions and finding answers that made sense. Nothing groundbreaking, just the concepts at the heart of all religion, stripped clean and put into clear, simple, modern words.

I was proud of him, agnostic as I was. Affected too. In that large hall, encased inside a silence so intense you could touch it, and a stillness so deep you could hear it, I sensed, rather than understood, what he was talking about. Peace was mine for those two hours, was there for all of us in that room.