On the Edge A Novel (23 page)

Further down the highway she came across a dead fox. Flattened by a car, it was alive with flies. The stench of its putrid entrails was overlaid by a much sharper smell, like the stab of ammonia. She drew the air unemphatically into her lungs and walked on. There was room for that too.

She saw the beckoning finger of a ‘symbolic’ interpretation, and saw how the provocation of a corpse could form a whirlpool in the stream of her perception. Opposite this whirlpool, another one was formed by the vanity of thinking, as so many seekers seemed to do, that the world had organized itself into a lesson for her benefit. The excitement of those times when everything seemed symbolic (‘
Tout devient metaphor
,’ as Jean-Paul had moaned all night in their tent in Utah, quoting some French author) now seemed a lower-order vision compared with this unimpeded clarity. There was no need to reject the fact that the fox was a
memento mori
, or that its death tested the resolve of her inclusiveness, nor was there any reason to become fascinated by it. The meanings of the fox’s death could not be exhausted: the appearance of the corpse, its chemical composition, its absent inhabitant, its affinity with all other corpses, its difference from all other corpses, the velocity of the impact, the mood of the driver, the hunger of the flies.

Back at Esalen, there was a party. To see if she would be distracted, she took on the music and the crowd and the darts of distrust and the grappling irons of desire. There was no essential change, just more perceptions to work with. She was seeing the Buddha nature in each person while at the same time seeing the personality that enclosed it. She was filled with extraordinary tenderness. She saw that every unhappiness was caused by the desire for happiness, and it prised open her heart. She had no trouble in operating on two levels at once, as she had always wanted to do. It was completely natural, but quite inexplicable, like being able to circle above an airport and meet someone in the lobby at the same time.

She danced in the crowd and when Peter came up to her she danced with him. When they kissed, they kissed. Nothing else could have happpened at that moment. She knew that Peter would become her lover, she knew that he would ask her to the Tantric workshop that weekend. She could see over the horizon of ordinary knowledge, rising on the natural thermals of her awareness. She saw no reason to imagine any limits to its widening perspective.

Nothing interrupts Nothing, she thought, and she was still thinking it now.

‘Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bhodi Sva

Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bhodi Sva’

Surya accelerated the chant.

‘Let go of the brakes,’ he urged.

The mantra became a syllabic blur, slowed down again to individual sounds, and then died to a whisper. Surya sounded the meditation bell and silence resumed.

Crystal remained in the same state of subtle and effortless generosity. The mantra couldn’t take her there or take her away from there. Chanting had been happening; now silence, charged by the chanting, was happening instead.

Peter felt himself fall into that electrifying silence, like a child jumping into the sea from a high rock and suddenly plunging into a cooler, denser medium, in a thrill of bubbles and slow limbs. The silence was his held breath, was everyone’s held breath. Kapow! he couldn’t help thinking. That was as good a mantra as any other, as long as it kept him feeling this lightness, this vitality.

The next time the bell sounded, it was the end of the session and time for lunch. Peter unlocked his legs and staggered out of the meditation room. He waited for Crystal in the hall, and passed the time by reading various quotations pinned to the notice-board.

Follow your breath right out of your nose

Follow it out as far as it goes.

You can’t think straight

And you don’t know who to call

It’s never too late to do nothing at all.

– Allen Ginsberg

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting
at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply
wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked,
it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

– Franz Kafka

Within that birthless wide open space, phenomena appear like rainbows, utterly transparent …

*   *   *

As Peter began to read this third quotation, the woman he had last seen buried under a pile of cushions in Martha’s workshop swayed towards him, as if to challenge the claims of transparency with her soft bulk.

‘Hi, how are you doing?’ she said.

‘Fine.’

‘You left our workshop, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s too bad. Martha and Carlos have completely changed my life. I feel like a great weight has been lifted off my mind.’

‘Oh good.’

‘But maybe you’ve found what you need. I hope so.’ She smiled and swished her way through the door.

A great weight
has
been lifted off her, thought Peter, remembering Carlos, Martha and Paul sitting stoutly on the cushions from which her stifled screams of protest could be heard.
I wanna live. Let me outta here.
And now she’s grateful. Why had he wasted his indignation on this useful therapy? How could he know what benefits it might not hold for someone whose life was already worse than being sat on in public?

He looked into the meditation room and saw Crystal stretching out. She sat on a cushion, her back arched forward and her head touching the floor.

‘That’s not necessary,’ smiled Surya.

‘Ah, Guruji,’ said Crystal, entering into the joke and bowing reverently.

Peter glanced back at the notice-board, and wondered vaguely whether you could get rainbow gridlock, with the phenomenal world arching iridescently in one direction or another. The rainbow marquetry of a place like Manhattan might represent a substantial insubstantiality. He decided not to carry on reading but to wait for Crystal outside. After retrieving his shoes, he went out onto the lawn and stood with his hands in his pockets looking at the flowers, and thinking he must look like lovers are supposed to.

When Crystal came out, they walked together to the lodge. Peter wanted to keep the silence they were meant to observe, but he was desperate to ask if she would join him that weekend. As they crossed the bridge over the waterfall, he pondered various hopeless ways of formulating the question.

‘Yes,’ said Crystal, as they started the ascent beyond the bridge.

‘What?’ said Peter.

‘You wanted to know whether I’d spend the weekend with you. The answer is yes.’

‘How did you know I was going to ask that?’

‘I don’t know
how
,’ said Crystal. ‘I just knew it was troubling you.’

‘I don’t know why I asked you how you knew,’ said Peter, after a pause. ‘I suppose,’ he went on, unused to talking after two days of relative silence, ‘I suppose it sounded like the next question, if you know what I mean. It’s not that it might not be interesting to look into, but I asked it then because it was the obvious thing to say.

‘It’s like earlier,’ he went on, ‘when I was waiting for you, I leant over and sniffed a flower, and it smelt of nothing, and I thought of the word “odourless”, and then I thought of the phrase “odourless, colourless liquid”. It was completely meaningless, except that the phrase was lying there like invisible ink, waiting for the heat of an experience to tell me what to think. I can’t bear it, it’s completely unfree, during that moment my mind was just a chain of words.’ Peter was surprised by the thoughts that were tumbling out of him. He felt himself becoming more real as he spoke.

‘Even when I was beating myself up about being distracted during meditation, I thought “I’m living in the past” – another chain of words – but I wasn’t living in the past, I was thinking about the past. Thinking about the past was my present experience. What stopped me from having it was that chain of words, that misguided self-reproach. Do you see what I mean? I’m rather new to all this, I’ve probably got it all wrong.’

She smiled at him and he knew that she understood. Her silence invited him to be silent. Did he need words at all? And when he did, why arrange them in a chain? They were not his enemies. He understood, and smiled back.

At lunch, Crystal and Peter found themselves next to a man from their group. With aquiline nostrils and an emphatic vertical crease between his eyebrows, he sat on the redwood bench, both hands planted on his thighs, looking at his salad bowl with the implacable concentration of a duelling samurai. He breathed heavily through his nose, a pearl diver about to plunge, and then with a sudden burst of speed impaled a lettuce leaf on his fork, thrust it in his mouth, replaced the fork, planted his hands back on his thighs and resumed his wakeful snoring. Chomping the leaf with reptilian equanimity, his half-closed eyes remained focused on the same spot. A minute later he repeated his raid on the salad bowl, bringing a piece of celery back to his ruthless mouth.

Peter looked on, lost between amazement and laughter. Glancing at Crystal to see if she was leaning in either of these directions, he saw a complex but relaxed expression on her face. She seemed to sympathize with his desire to laugh, without losing sympathy for the person who had caused it. She held his gaze and he felt himself slipping into the atmosphere she was inhabiting, where the mind’s dragging plumage could slowly spread to reveal the full glamour of its design.

14

‘I’m not angry with Jason,’ said Haley. ‘I’m sorry for him, I really am.’

‘I hate to say this,’ said Panita, ‘but what I saw in the car had all the classic signs of a sick relationship. I’ve been
really
worried about you, stuck somewhere with no meetings. I could just imagine Jason throwing your tapes out of the window when you were trying to get some sanity.’

‘He’s been humiliating me in our workshop,’ Haley confessed. ‘And now he’s started up with this woman who lives here. My self-esteem is at about minus ten thousand at the moment.’

‘You need a meeting,’ said Panita, once again relieved by her exclusion from the dangerous world of romantic love. ‘I’ll pick you up at the airport if you like and we can go straight to the Thursday evening Earls Court Women’s Group.’

‘Thanks,’ said Haley, suddenly breaking into sobs.

‘Let it all out, love,’ said Panita.

‘He’s such a bastard,’ sobbed Haley. ‘Why do I still want him to love me?’

‘That’s the disease,’ said Panita.

‘It’s not a disease,’ howled Haley, ‘it’s me, me and Jason. Can’t you understand, it’s the end of three years? Oh God, how can you hate someone and still feel closer to him than anyone else? It’s so horrible.’

Haley abandoned herself to grief.

Panita, shocked by Haley’s rejection of her generic diagnosis, was tipped into a free fall of unconfidence and hostility which made her ache to call her CoCo sponsor. Refraining from quoting her favourite slogan, ‘If you stick together, you’re sick together’, she hastily wrote down Haley’s arrival time, said goodbye and dialled the proleptically healing digits of her sponsor’s number.

After hanging up, Haley went on sitting in the wooden phone booth, glazed over and strangely peaceful. The solvent of her tears seemed to have disengaged her from the confusion of her recent life. In an hour she would be leaving Esalen and leaving Jason too. What was she wailing about? She should be celebrating. What was she doing in California anyhow? She was longing to get back to Clapham. She wanted to build up her business, and get proper offices, and advertise, and marry someone who had a really positive attitude to life. She was finished with her old life, completely finished. She didn’t even like Panita, and she wasn’t going to go to CoCo meetings either.

It was so Aries, she loved it. Just make a new start. No problem. Except that it would be no problem for Jason either. Little bastard.

There was a tap on the window. Christ, it was him.

‘Listen, doll,’ said Jason chirpily. ‘I was wondering if you could lend us a few hundred dollars. I’ll pay you back – I’ve been writing some great new material.’

Haley gave him her contemptuous look.

‘I’m not going to lend it to you,’ she said coolly. ‘I’m going to give it to you.’

‘Great!’ said Jason.

‘On one condition. You never call me, never write to me, and if you see me in the street, you keep on walking.’

She threw down two hundred dollars on the ledge under the phone.

‘I don’t keep walking for less than four hundred,’ said Jason in his John Wayne voice.

‘Oh,’ said Haley, picking up the money, ‘in that case, I’ll keep walking.’

‘No, you’ve convinced me,’ said Jason, lurching forward as Haley started to leave. ‘I’ll walk away.’

‘Too late.’

‘Don’t be such a mean bitch,’ said Jason indignantly.

‘You wanker,’ said Haley, striding towards her car with all the dignity that the word ‘wanker’ left in its wake.

‘You won’t be able to get away from me,’ said Jason. ‘Every time you turn on the radio, I’ll be there.’

‘I think someone’s done that song already,’ said Haley sarcastically.

‘Listen,’ said Jason, switching tactics as they got closer to the car, ‘Angela has been on these conflict-mediation workshops. Maybe we should try to end on a more, sort of … generous note.’

‘You mean four generous notes, don’t you?’ said Haley. ‘I don’t know how you can … I mean … you’re unbelievable.’

‘Thanks,’ said Jason with a grin. ‘That’s what Angela thinks too.’

Haley got in the car and slammed the door.

Jason watched her cerise Fiesta ascend the hill to Route One, unable to forgive himself for not taking the two hundred dollars. He really could have done with that money. He had used Haley’s unrefundable deposits and some of Angela’s cash to get them into the Tantric workshop. Now he was totally broke. He had not mentioned to the office that Haley would not be attending, nor had he warned Angela that she might have to pretend to be Haley if a list of participants was read out. Not a perfect start to a workshop for committed couples.