Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (24 page)

At the gate of the Dorje Temple I stopped the car and pushed the buzzer.

A female voice with a thick Bhutanese accent answered through the intercom: “Who is it?”

Just my luck.

“Claire DeWitt,” I said. “I’m here to see the lama.”

“Oh no!” the woman said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I don’t know about
should
,” I said. “But I am.”

“Why don’t you just go away,” the woman pleaded. “Just leave us alone.”

Just then I saw the lama walking down the road with two boys.

“Hey!” I called out to him. “Hey!”

He looked at me and squinted.

“Claire DeWitt,” he said. He stopped and looked at me, smiling. Then he noticed I was on the other side of the gate. He told the boys to go back to the garden and came over and talked into the intercom through the gate.

“It’s okay,” he said to the woman on the other end. “She can come in. I’ll keep an eye on her.”

Silence. The gate buzzed and swung open.

“Go park by the orchard,” the lama said. “I’ll be in the garden.”

I parked by an apple tree and walked over to the garden. The temple itself wasn’t much, but the grounds went on for acres and the living quarters, cheaply and quickly constructed, were ever-expanding. A few pre-fab houses were supplemented with trailers, yurts, and tents.

I walked over to the garden. The lama was watching a young woman, about twenty-one, teach a bunch of teenagers how to prepare a garden bed.

“Worms are your friends!” the teacher said. “Fungi are your allies!”

The teenagers putting up the garden, about ten of them, were dirty and smelled bad. Some of them wore ragged clothes and had hand-done tattoos across their hands and arms, some across their faces. They all did as the teacher asked, digging up the earth with little spades, keeping their eyes open for worms and mushrooms. One girl couldn’t stop talking, but she still did the work.

The lama saw me coming and came to meet me.

“Claire,” he said. “My biggest failure.”

“You never get tired of that line, do you?” I asked.

He shook his head, smiling. “Not really. I kind of love it. I feel really good when I say it. It makes me feel important. Tea?”

“Sure,” I said.

We walked toward the main house. At the door we ran into Jenny.

She looked an accusation at the lama.

“Jenny,” he said. “You have a long memory. People change.”

“Not her,” Jenny said in her thick accent. “She stays exactly the same.”

I shrugged. She was probably right.

“Jesus Christ, enough already,” the lama said. “Claire, whatever it was you did to Jenny, can you please just apologize already?”

“No,” I said.

Jenny sneered.

“Jenny?” the lama said.

Jenny snorted.

Jenny was a devout Buddhist. When she was younger she’d been a human rights lawyer who specialized in children’s issues. Fifteen years ago she’d come to work here, when the lama was just getting this place started. She’d devoted her life to taking care of the men, women, and children here.

My first time at Dorje Temple, she’d walked in on me having sex with a young monk-in-training in the toolshed and had called me a whore.

Neither of us was apologizing anytime soon.

Constance had sent me here to study with the lama nearly twelve years ago. They kicked me out after two weeks. But the people Constance introduced never gave up on each other, not entirely. We might take breaks, but we never threw each other away. Not even in the Kali Yuga.

In the kitchen the lama made us tea and we took our cups to a deck out back, where we sat in cheap plastic chairs at an old glass-topped table. Behind us the mountains rose up, jagged and solid.

We drank our tea in silence for a few minutes.

It wasn’t that I minded the arbitrary label of “whore” so much as the intent behind it. Although I guess you weren’t supposed to worry about that if you were a Buddhist. You were just supposed to deal with things as they were.

“How’s Terrell?” I asked.

“I can’t really tell you much,” the lama said. “You know that. I’m his religious advisor. But he’s okay. And I would tell you if I thought he was in danger.”

The lama had a prison ministry where he spent some time pen-paling with prisoners around the country who were interested in Buddhism or just needed someone to talk to and had no one but a stranger in Santa Cruz to listen. When I knew Terrell, the kid from New Orleans, was going to be put away one way or the other, I called the lama. The lama sent him letters, talked to him by phone once or twice or a month, sent him care packages, and just generally did what he could to make his life at the institution more pleasant. He was too good of a kid to rot away in a Baton Rouge treatment facility—not technically a prison but a home for whatever the polite name for the criminally insane was these days. Of course, a lot of kids were too good for whatever prison they’d been stuck in, but Terrell was the only one I’d put there.

The lama got us another cup of tea and sat back down. I wondered if I went to the bathroom if it would be obvious what I was doing in there—more drugs—and if it was, if that mattered.

“Did he say anything about Andray?” I asked.

“You did your job,” the lama said. “Terrell is doing his job. Andray has his own job to do. He’s doing okay.”

“You talk to him?” I asked. Apparently everyone talked to everyone, except me.

“Yeah,” the lama said. “We talk once in a while.”

“He alive?” I asked.

“He’s not making the safest choices,” the lama said. “But he’s doing okay.”

Stupid fucking lama. I realized my hand was pressed against my temple like people do when they can’t deal with something, when they’re about to say
I just can’t deal with this right now.

“Claire,” he said. “If you had let Terrell go, he wouldn’t be getting the help he needs now. And he is getting better. He has possibilities now,” the lama said. It sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “He can see a future. He didn’t have that before. He didn’t think he’d make it to twenty-one, and he probably wouldn’t have. Now he’s looking forward to whatever comes next. You saved his life, Claire.”

I wasn’t sure about that. I put my hand on my temple again.
I just can’t deal with this right now.

“You think you took him away from Andray,” the lama said. “And left Andray with nothing.”

I didn’t say anything. My head throbbed and I rubbed my temple.

“Maybe you did,” he said. “I don’t know. I do know that Andray is getting better. I talked to him a few times. He’s an incredibly smart kid. You start talking to him about, you know, the precepts or whatever and he just gets it, right away. And he’s finally left New Orleans.”

“Really?” I said. “When? Where?”

My hand pressed against my temple.

“A few months ago,” the lama said. “Shit. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that. But I see that you’re worried. He went on the road with his friend Trey. They’re hopping trains and seeing the sights.”

“So where is he now?” I asked.

The lama shrugged. “Last I heard he was in Kansas City.”

I frowned. I thought of Andray in Kansas City, nearly as dangerous in its own way as New Orleans.

“You know,” the lama said, “when you met Andray, you fulfilled a contract that had been made many lifetimes ago. You met each other for a reason.”

“So you think it’s all planned?” I said. “This was already decided, lifetimes ago?”

“Maybe,” the lama said. “I don’t really think so.
Planned
is the wrong word. Karma can’t be negotiated. But it does take interesting twists and turns. It’s like you’re given a series of words and it’s up to you what kind of story you fit them into.”

I didn’t say anything. I thought about other people’s lives I’d ruined. Pretty much everyone I’d met, it seemed at the moment.

“People think love is, you know, this spiritual thing,” the lama said. “This
feeling.
But that’s not my thing. In my book, love is a physical act. Love is not ethereal. Love is sticking by someone when they’re in the nuthouse. Love is when you keep calling someone even when they don’t call you back. Love is dirty and solid. Love is, you know, earth and shit and blood and hair.”

A bell rang. The lama smiled.

“Come and see the play,” the lama said. “The kids are putting it on. It’ll be fun, and they love having an audience.”

The “stage” was a raised grassy knoll near the woods; behind it someone had strung a clothesline and hung sheets painted with a gray city skyline. About ten kids were in the play and about twenty adults and older children sat in the audience. The kids were smaller versions of the kids I’d seen in the garden. They didn’t have the ratty clothes or the tattoos, but they had the same look in their eyes—scarred, damaged, but impossibly, somehow, open.

One kid, a boy about ten, took the stage.

“Thank you for coming,” the boy boomed to the crowd. Everyone cheered. “Today we are pleased to put on a production of
42nd Street
by the Dorje Temple players.”

Everyone in the audience cheered and clapped and stamped their feet.

The first group of girls came out in ragtag dresses and did a little dance. Everyone cheered. A different boy came out and started yelling at the girls.

“You call that a show!” he yelled. The girls tried to hide their giggles. “I want you to dance like you’ve never danced before!”

The girls did a different dance. This time the boys joined them. After the play I went over to the kids and told them how good they’d been. I told them it was the best play I’d ever seen, which was true, but they were already jaded and not one of them believed me. One little girl with white hair looked at me like I was saying it just to hurt her. The lama was busy with the kids and I left. But when I had my car started and in gear, the lama jumped in front of it to stop me. I put the car back in park and rolled down my window. He came over to speak to me.

“Claire,” he said. “You know you’re welcome here, anytime. Not just to visit. You want to chip in, even come stay for a while—our door is always open here. I mean, any friend of Constance’s. And the kids could always use another hand around here. Jenny, you know, she’d be cool.”

“Thanks,” I said. I put the car in gear again but the lama had a look on his face so I kept my foot on the brake.

“You know,” he said. “I wasn’t a Buddhist before I met Constance.”

“Really?” I said.

He shook his head. “I thought I was a detective,” he said. “I was confused. She hooked me up with this lama in L.A. and that kind of, you know, set everything in motion. So, you know, like I said. Any friend of hers.”

“Me too,” I said, and I drove away before we each had a chance to see how much we’d embarrassed ourselves.

I drove down into town to get a cup of coffee for the ride home. The girl making the coffee was about twenty-five and her arms and legs were already covered in tattoos. I told her I didn’t understand young people. What was going to happen when she turned thirty and wanted something new? She read the tattoos on my arms: a fingerprint, a magnifying glass.
QUESTION
AUTHORITY
EVERYTHING. BELIEVE NOTHING.
I dropped my jacket off my shoulders and she read
LIVE FREE OR DIE
across the top of my back.

“You know what they say about freedom,” she said, and I thought she was going to quote the Janis Joplin song but instead she said: “It’s the only thing worth living for.”

I could think of other things but I didn’t argue with her. I wouldn’t have believed it at twenty-five. She got off work and we walked down Pacific Street together, me with my coffee, and then down to the wharf. On the wharf we watched the sea lions for a while and then I bought her lunch at Stagnaro’s. She’d never been there before and I could tell she thought it was sort of fancy. After lunch we walked up toward town. At the top of the hill she kissed me.

I kissed her back. She wanted to go back to her place, a room in a share on the flats, but I got a hotel room instead. I’m too old to face roommates in the morning. The next morning I left quickly and quietly, while she was still sleeping, and hoped I would never see her again.

C
LAUDE FOUND OUT
where Lydia rehearsed. He got it from the drummer’s Twitter feed. It was a place people rented out by the hour in Bernal Heights. We could have just asked her, of course, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to include her in this particular line of investigation. Claude, testing his skills, had narrowed it down to three bands—three bands that possibly contained Lydia’s action on the side.

“So there’s, like, twenty bands that rehearse there. And she doesn’t date girls, right?” he said, hesitant. We were in my apartment, sitting on the big sofas and drinking a pot of white peony tea I’d made us.

“Pretty sure not,” I said.

“And I figure, she likes a certain type of guy, right?”

“Excellent,” I said.

“So I eliminated about half of them based on gender and looks and musical taste. I mean, I don’t think she’d date someone in, like, something hippie-ish, right?”

“Aces,” I said. I was proud of Claude, deducing away while I drove around at night doing nothing.

“I also eliminated hip-hop, jazz fusion, a yoga thing, and this band that was just kind of screaming. Sound good?”

“Sounds perfect,” I said.

“So we’re left with three bands with potential mates for Lydia. The first is a kind of punk band called Scorpio Rising, young for her but in the realm of potentiality, I think. The second is a—”

“Stop,” I said. “Stop right there.”

He looked a question at me, insecurity on his face.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “It’s the opposite. You’ve done everything right. But now you’re presenting me with three, when I think, in your heart, there’s one.”

He made a face like he didn’t know what I was talking about.

“One,” I said. “You have three. But you know it’s one. Our life depends on this, Claude. The ship is sinking and you are picking a lifeboat. There is a gun pointed at your head and one chamber is loaded.”