On the Edge A Novel (15 page)

Psychologically bleeding and half drowned, but still hoping to preserve an air of purpose and self-possession, Peter had often wandered back and forth in the last three days, plate in hand, meeting or avoiding glances he was no longer calm enough to interpret accurately, or being dragged with a fixed smile on his face to a table of people he had no reason to spend time with.

‘Shall we sit together?’ he murmured almost inaudibly.

‘Sure.’

What a miracle. She hadn’t promised to spend the whole of dinner ‘processing’ with some deluded monster. He knew that she was doing a meditation workshop and wanted to ask her about what had happened to him on the massage table. Was there such a thing as spontaneous meditation, like spontaneous combustion but less messy?

‘You’re doing this meditation thing, so you might know: do you think one can start meditating by accident?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, do you think that someone who wasn’t trained could start doing it spontaneously?’

‘Oh, ya, I think people bliss out spontaneously without meditating. Meditation is just a bunch of techniques for getting you into that reality.’

‘Is that reality with a capital R?’ asked Peter. ‘I mean, do you think this “blissing out” is an insight into some fundamental truth, or is it just another state of mind to add to a menu which already includes guilt, boredom, anguish, despair, hatred, longing, nostalgia, and so forth?’

‘Great menu,’ laughed Crystal. ‘You should join our workshop. Those are the kind of things we discuss when we’re not observing “noble silence”.’

‘How many kinds of silence are there?’

‘You’re the expert on lists. I guess there must be guilty silence, nostalgic silence, despairing silence … but the only kind you have to worry about this week is the noble type.’

‘Can I really switch workshops?’

‘I think you’ve got till tomorrow evening to switch.’

‘This place is so strange,’ said Peter. ‘You’re in an ego-dissolving workshop and I’m in an ego-building one, and here in the lodge there’s a convergence of the cool and warm currents.’

‘I guess you’ve got to have an ego before you can dissolve it.’

‘So, do you think that some people set about trying to eliminate a sense of self they don’t have in the first place?’

‘That can happen but it’s really more like trying to awaken a sense of self that you don’t recognize in the first place. It’s just there … you just have to turn the mind back to that source.’

‘Hi.’

Peter looked up and saw a square-jawed woman he could vaguely remember talking to for a few minutes on the day he arrived.

‘Oh, hello. Crystal, this is … um.’

‘You’ve forgotten my name. It’s Flavia,’ she snapped.

‘Flavia, of course, I’m frightfully sorry.’

‘Don’t you hate the British?’ Flavia asked Crystal, sitting down with a plate of vegetarian chilli. ‘They apologize for everything and then when they really have something to be sorry about, they sound like they just bumped into you by mistake in the street, “Oh, I’m so awfully sorry to have destroyed your life”,’ she sneered in a dreadful English accent.

‘Well, I’m sorry you don’t like the English,’ said Peter, crashing down the nearest manhole.

‘Oh, I’m so awfully sorry you’re awfully sorry,’ said Flavia.

‘I’m just going to get a drink,’ said Peter. ‘Excuse me a minute.’

‘Off to get a cup of tea,’ chimed Flavia in her grating accent.

Peter retreated to the tea counter. Behind him he could hear Flavia saying, ‘Black tea is dreadful. It’s just tannic acid and caffeine. That’s why the British are so fucked up: they drink too much tea.’

After helping himself defiantly to a bag of Earl Grey, Peter returned to the table. He listened distractedly while Flavia told them about her mother’s schizophrenia. He was bored and annoyed by this second intrusion, but at the same time felt elated just being near Crystal.

9

‘Now listen up!’ said Martha Goldenstein, resting on her crutches.

‘The way you language it up really matters, so part of our letting go and moving on process is to let go of some of the labels we put on things. The way of the warrior is a path of the heart, and this week we’re hopefully going to be trying to open up that chakra,’ she leant heavily on her left crutch, and spread her right hand over her chest, ‘and live from this part of ourselves.’

A frenzied smile broke out on her glazed face as if a cord had been tweaked behind the swagged draperies of her cheeks.

She was really pleased that they had five days together in what would hopefully be a very dynamic situation. She did weekends too, which could be very transformational, but a week gave them that much longer to get into the group process.

In the dimness of the large white room, thirty seminarians formed a rough circle. Sleepy after dinner and relaxed by the introductory nature of the meeting, they slouched, stretched or leant on huge cushions; some sat in a half-lotus position; others rested their chins on their clutched knees. Occupying the noonday point on this human clock, Martha and her assistant were languaging up the aims of their workshop. Outside, the sea let go and moved on with a fluency which even Martha must have regarded as an unobtainable ideal.

‘My name is Carlos,’ said Martha’s assistant in a Brazilian accent. ‘You may not be familiar with this name. Perhaps it will help you to think of C. G. Jung. The C stands for Carl, which is the same name.’

‘And Carlos Castaneda,’ said Karen helpfully.

‘Yes,’ beamed Carlos, pleased to find another famous person who had the same first name as himself.

‘He thinks he’s bloody Carl Jung,’ Jason whispered to Haley.

She narrowed her eyes at him to express contempt for his facetious tone.

‘My name’s Jason,’ Jason whispered. ‘It might help you to think of Jason and the Argonauts pursuing the Golden Fleece across the ancient world.’

Haley glared at him with renewed hostility, and Jason conjured up a chastened expression which competed unsuccessfully with his enormous grin.

Karen just could not get over the fact that Martha, like herself, had broken her ankle. It was another one of those unique little signs confirming that she was in the right place, and was meant to be doing this workshop. Stan had fallen asleep on the cushion next to her, but Karen was serene about that because she had heard somewhere that we absorb information even better subliminally than we do consciously. It was an amazing thought but Stan might be benefiting more than anyone else.

Peter was too happy to mind, but he couldn’t help feeling that the comparison with Jung was a bit pretentious. On the way over to the Big House, where this workshop was taking place, he had noticed Carlos struggling to get Martha’s new car off a rock on which he had driven it by mistake. Martha stood beside the stuck car on her crutches, and Peter wondered if these were the best-qualified instructors in the art of letting go and moving on.

When he was about to make this mildly irreverent observation to his neighbour, he saw Flavia on her other side and fell silent.

‘Doesn’t he look pleased?’ said Martha, indicating Carlos with her chin. ‘He loves it that you compared him to Carlos Castaneda,’ she said, nodding at Karen. ‘You know, one time I was here at Esalen, and I was out running along Route One, and there was a thick fog rolling in off of the sea, and suddenly, I don’t know why, I shouted out, “What are men?” And this voice came out of the fog, and it said, “They’re little boys. They’re little boys.”’

There was a murmur of appreciation for this anecdote. Many of the women nodded their heads resignedly, while many of the men shook theirs guiltily. Stan slept. Peter, absorbed in the excitement of meeting Crystal, withdrew from the room by concentrating on the sound of the sea.

‘And that voice,’ confessed Carlos, ‘I have to tell you, it was me!’

Mild laughter broke out among the seminarians, and Martha’s face convulsed with pleasure. Her eyes, astonished by surgery, looked as if they’d just seen a tiger leap through the window.

‘They’re little boys,’ she whispered.

Blue-Eyes looked towards Martha with an earnest desire to confess his part in the crime of his gender’s immaturity, but frowned from an equally genuine feeling that he was a whole and wonderful human being.

The African Queen wondered if she had been a man in a previous lifetime, and if this might explain the sticky patches in her own personality. Perhaps she had to grow up as a man in order to grow up as a woman. How was she going to integrate that awesome task with being a white African? God, life was complicated when you started to think about it.

‘OK,’ said Martha. ‘Do you wanna hear the good news or the bad news first?’

‘The bad news,’ groaned some stoical voices.

‘OK, this is the bad news: nobody is going to save you. And what’s the good news?’ She looked tantalizingly at the group.

‘We can save ourselves.’

‘That’s right,’ beamed Martha. ‘What’s life? It’s relationships,’ she answered, before anyone could advance a rival theory. ‘And what’s the most important relationship of all? Your relationship with yourself.’

She paused so that the full horror of this truth could blossom before the group.

‘The way you behave here is the way you behave in life…’

‘No it isn’t,’ whispered Jason.

‘You’re right,’ said Haley. ‘You’re even more of a git here than you are normally.’

‘Do you two have an issue you wanna share with us?’ asked Martha.

‘Oh, no,’ said Haley, embarrassed.

‘Like I say, the way you behave here is the way you behave in life. Perhaps the two of you can’t stop arguing at home and so you can’t stop arguing here,’ said Martha shrewdly. ‘You don’t listen to me, and so maybe the problem is that you don’t listen to each other. We’re all so busy talking, we forget that half the art of communicating is listening. When you’re a child, you’re full of “shoulds”. I should do this and I should do that,’ explained Martha, holding up one hand and then the other. ‘Being an adult is this,’ she said, leaning precariously forward on her crutches and mingling the frantically outstretched fingers of both hands.

‘In the office they said to me, “Martha, when are you going to give another workshop? You’re always doing this moving on and letting go,” and I said, “Moving on and letting go, what else is there in life?”’

‘Keeping still,’ someone suggested.

‘That’s part of the process,’ said Martha possessively.

‘Making out and running away,’ said a wag in the audience. Ostentatiously virile, his black T-shirt and tight jeans seemed unlikely to contain his rippling musculature for much longer.

Martha’s mouth shot open in a silent scream of laughter.

‘What’s your name?’

‘John.’

‘Well, we’ve all found out something about John,’ she cooed. ‘We’re going to have to move that kundalini life force past your diaphragm, which is a very big muscle, and into the heart space, which is the middle way, and then upward to your throat, so you can express it. I mean, someone like Hitler, he had a lot of fire down here,’ she pointed to her belly, ‘and he expressed it,’ she clasped her throat. ‘But he didn’t have anything here,’ she said, patting her heart.

Karen was very struck by the idea that Hitler hadn’t developed his heart space. What a world of suffering might have been avoided if only he’d had the privilege of attending one of Martha’s workshops.

‘Now listen up,’ Martha went on, ‘we’re going to play a game. You all like to play games, right?’

Compulsory games, thought Peter, please don’t make me play compulsory games. He didn’t want to be interrupted, he was thinking about Crystal and thinking about his perfect moment by the sea. If he concentrated, he could still feel the breeze sharpening his blood. The beauty and the terror of that self-annihilation had cooled with reflection and he imagined walking away calmly from his discarded personality like a woman stepping out of the crumpled circle of the skirt which has slipped to her feet. This vision merged with the thought of Crystal performing the same action, the ruby on her navel ring shining in the phosphorescent light of the churning ocean.

Get a grip, he urged himself.

‘Do you wanna pair up?’ asked the man to his left.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘We’re meant to get into pairs.’

‘Oh, right, yes.’

‘I’m Frank, by the way.’

‘Peter…’

‘Now, listen up,’ said Martha. ‘You’re four years old and you’ve just found some treasure on the beach, and you wanna take it home and hide it in your treasure box – you remember what it’s like to be four?’ she gushed.

Peter could remember loading caps into his toy pistol and being told by his father not to point guns; and breaking into a run and being told by his mother not to run; and trying to build a house out of pieces of toast and being told not to play with his food.

‘Who wants to be four again?’ he said to Frank. ‘You can’t even get a credit card in your own name.’

‘The shorter person in the pair is your best friend,’ said Martha. ‘They wanna see your treasure, but you don’t wanna let them see it,’ she lisped, stamping her good foot. ‘So, I want the best friend to do everything to try to persuade you to let her see the treasure, but you’re not going to give in and you won’t let her see it. OK? Has everybody got that? When I say “change” you swap roles and the taller person plays the best friend.’

Frank, who was slightly smaller than Peter, played the best friend.

‘Can I see your treasure?’

‘No.’

‘Please.’

‘No.’

‘I’ll pay you.’

‘How much?’

‘A million dollars.’

‘No,’ said Peter reluctantly.

‘But I love you and I’m your best friend.’

It was really absurd, thought Peter, if this chap was his best friend, not to show him the treasure. Why had Martha told them to say no? He was going to defy the rules, he was going to run if he felt like running.

‘You’re absolutely right,’ he said, ‘since you’re my best friend, I think you should see the treasure.’

‘Great.’

The two of them smiled vaguely at each other and relaxed. All around them two-stroke engines of pleading and refusal whirred on tirelessly.