Ten Days in the Hills (38 page)

He was not so unlike Stephanie in some ways. Or at least in one way—he had an unshakable belief in cause and effect. This belief, he knew, protected him from the dangers of revelation. He had come to think that there were two religious types. One of these was the type who enjoyed being struck by lightning, who gloried in the very unexpectedness of it, because that was what demonstrated the unpredictable power of God. The other type enjoyed shaping the vessel and making it worthy. That was his type. His type followed disciplines and progressed up levels and prepared the spirit and more or less put off the actual transcendent experience as long as possible. Each type had its advantages. The struck-by-lightning type lived in a more exciting way, courting danger and disintegration but also embracing the possibility of overwhelming meaning. If the meanings changed, so be it, the sense that meaning existed was satisfying in itself. His type, by contrast, often received no revelations at all, died, perhaps, in a state of frustration and spiritual emptiness, but created little fuss and no muss. He was temperamentally inclined to prefer nothing to a something that might scatter his atoms completely, and so he ate certain foods prepared in certain ways, he honed his counseling techniques, he systematically excluded negative thoughts, he developed his erotic skills, and he visited ever more far-flung and arduous holy sites. If he thought of himself as a vessel, it was a vessel that was getting cleaner and simpler in design, if, perhaps, smaller. Take the erotic, for example. After much practice, he had arrived, in Zoe, at the apex of most men’s erotic ambition. She was not only a talented, beautiful, adept, and famous woman, the best the world had to offer, she was generous and affectionate and more or less suited to his peculiarities. Even her occasional volatility didn’t bother him. She was far beyond the erotic fantasies he had had as a young man. But she had arrived in his life at the very time when he not only didn’t want to possess her, he didn’t want to possess. He didn’t want to say she was his, he didn’t want to be comforted by her continual presence, he didn’t want to have erotic feelings much anymore, and he felt no pride in her attachment to him. Embracing her was like embracing a ghost. In what he felt toward her, he could see that he really and truly had come to believe that all of the material world was illusory. The very palpable and physical sensation he had of her fragrance, and the pressure of her flesh against his, of her beauty and grace and the lovely sound of her voice singing a song, struck him more and more forcefully as not having actual existence.

There were other signs that he was actually achieving enlightenment: He could make light come into his body and make pain go away; he failed to notice things like money and power and influence. He could drive down the road in his little car and make all the lights turn green, intersection after intersection. For about the past year, he had noticed that all he had to do was think of something in order for it to occur. The first notable and specific occasion had been on Valentine’s Day the year before. He was walking on the beach with his friend Sophie, whose mistake had been to get a pug puppy. The puppy, named Pepper, had grown into a yapping, undisciplined monster. Because the dog spent the entire day while Sophie was at work barking at the front window of Sophie’s apartment, Sophie was about to lose her lease. Paul remembered thinking, “Someone else might like this dog,” and before he could add the “but I can’t imagine who” clause, a man had come up to them on the beach and said, “Oh, I love your pug! What’s his name?” And Sophie had said, “Pepper.” And the man had said, “I am such a pug man! How old is he?” And Sophie had said, “He’s two. Would you like to have him? He’s terribly yappy.” And the man had said, “I can deal with that.” And she had put the dog and the leash into the arms of the pug man, and she and Paul had walked away without a backward glance or a second thought. But that was only the most dramatic incident. His wishes, if only for the rain to stop or the sun to come out, continued to come true. On his pilgrimage to the seven holiest mountains in China, monks and adepts had greeted him everywhere. If he was standing in a crowd at an overlook or outside a temple door, he would be the one who was chosen to come in and participate in the prayers. If he was hiking up a trail and someone passed him, that man would turn out to be a holy man who would greet him without preliminaries and walk on with him as with a brother. Another thing had not happened to him in China that might have happened to him ten years ago—in each temple, he had looked upon the prayers and rituals with pleasure but felt no sense that maybe there was something in them for him, that maybe those prayers and rituals were more efficacious and worthy than ones he already knew. He had finally truly accepted the fact that you walked up the path because it was the path at your feet. You were not omniscient, omnipresent, or omnipotent. You were specific, and so had to take specific steps up a specific path, but any path was good enough—all the Cochrans would get to heaven in the end, even the ones who were wrong.

Still, on the cusp between a life of desires and a life without desires, Paul found he was awakening with a sense of dread more and more frequently. If not Zoe, what? If not Machu Picchu and Giza, what? Thirty more years of lotus position on the balcony of his apartment in West Hollywood waiting for transcendence to find him? That might have been the question he would have asked some of the monks up north if they had gotten there. But he had known instinctively that Zoe would have carried her cloak of visibility with her even into the monastery and the monks would have been confused. She had that effect, and it took time to wear off. Here, in fact, in this house with these people, might be the only place in the world where Zoe Cunningham left her cloak of visibility by the door. He put on his glasses. Oh, it was 3:19 a.m. He took off his glasses.

Out of the darkness, Zoe’s voice said, “Hi.”

He said, “Hi. You’re awake.”

“May I tell you my dream?”

“Of course.” He slid down in the bed and turned toward her. She cuddled comfortably against him, and though his body seemed to form itself around hers, his jaw suddenly throbbed. Was there a cause for that? She said, “I was at that restaurant with my old boyfriend Roger Rector, the one at the end of Sunset, right on the beach. It’s a seafood place with peanut shells on the floor. I can’t remember what it’s called, but we were out on the pier. I don’t think there really is a pier, but it was like the Santa Monica Pier, and I could see us talking and leaning over our food, and I could also see this huge wave, like a big curl, looming over us, maybe a hundred feet in the air. I wasn’t afraid.”

“Did it hit you?”

“No, it just loomed. I said, ‘Look, Roger,’ and he looked up from his breaded shrimp. Then it was over. It wasn’t a nightmare.”

“Roger Rector?”

“Yes, and his brothers were named Willy and Dick.”

“Do you think the parents had any idea of what they were doing when they named those boys?”

“Well, I have no idea about the mother, but Roger always said it was his father’s way of blessing them.”

Paul laughed, then he said, “I’m sorry if I woke you.”

“Did you? I don’t know, I thought my dream woke me. You know, one time when I was in my twenties, I was sleeping in my trailer over lunchtime, and I had a dream that I was in my high-school English class. We were all sitting around the table, and the teacher stood up and he said, loud and clear, ‘Okay, today I am going to tell you kids the secret of life.’ I leaned forward, and we all stopped talking, and he opened his mouth to speak, and right then, right at that exact moment, the PA knocked on my trailer door and woke me up. I mean, how did that happen? Was that just a coincidence?”

Paul rubbed his jaw because it throbbed again, and Zoe glanced at him, but she didn’t ask anything. He said, “My immediate response is that there is no secret of life, and so, whenever you think you are going to be given the secret of life just like that, you will back away from it.”

She looked at him, then smiled. She said, “I think of you as knowing the secret of life.”

“Do you? I think I know a few techniques with which I make adjustments and pass the time.”

“But you seem enlightened.”

“I seem patient. I am patient.”

“Maybe that’s the same thing.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it is.”

She inclined her head toward him and pressed against him. She said, “At any rate, it’s a rare quality, especially around here.”

His jaw throbbed a third time. That was the third time, he thought, in maybe a minute, but even so, as her affection radiated from her body into his, he felt himself relax. And so he slipped downward in the bed, under the covers, and rolled right up against her. It was comfortable. He thought, Was he immune to this, too, to such simple comfort?

Once, he had read an article about the physiology of sleep that said that there was a distinct shift, almost like a switch. You drifted down and drifted down, more and more relaxed but still in a state of being awake, and then your brain performed some function and you were asleep. After reading that article, he had tried to attend to those seconds and moments, until, eventually, he had learned to note the switch, just as he had learned to note the feeling of his brain thinking, of energy, in particular, passing from one side of his brain to the other, through the corpus callosum.

Her affection did comfort him, no doubt a hormonal thing, oxytocin, probably. Nice word, “oxytocin,” he thought, as his brain got closer and closer to flipping that switch that he did not know the name of. He felt her take a deep breath and let it out.

He was standing
with someone on a narrow parapet. He knew the guy’s name but couldn’t remember it. He looked like one of the stockers at Whole Foods. He was wearing a uniform, but it wasn’t a Whole Foods uniform, it was a military uniform of some kind. He knew that he had to look over the parapet, because the guy kept saying, “Look over the parapet,” but he could hardly get his eyes open enough to do so. The guy said, “Look at them. They’re getting out.”

He asked who was getting out.

“The prisoners!” Finally, he was able to look over the parapet. The yard in front of him was in black and white. It looked like a prison yard in a movie. It was empty. The guy said, “They must have forgotten.” Paul remembered that his name was Bit, though part of him, even in the dream, knew that wasn’t a name.

“Who?”

“The guards forgot to leave the doors open. They have to be reminded every day.”

“To do what?” He was not only sleepy, he thought, he was stupid.

“To leave the doors open! To leave the doors open!”

“Why do they want to leave the doors open? This is a prison.”

“Of course it is, but the prisoners have to escape! Didn’t you know that?”

Now the prison began to look a bit like the monastery. A beautiful green hillside fell away from the wall, and the sun was shining. Paul, in his dream, felt himself breathe deeply and have a sudden sense of joy. They were going to let the prisoners escape! Things were better than he had thought they would be!

“They have to escape so we can shoot them! We can’t afford to try them! We can’t afford to feed them! Where is your weapon? Have you lost your weapon? Here they come!”

Bit lifted his weapon and rested the barrel on the parapet. A few people came out into the yard. Paul in his dream didn’t recognize them. They looked around and smiled. They thought they were escaping. Bit shot them, one, two, three, four. Then another one came out. It was a man who turned into a dog as soon as it saw the corpses. Bit shot it anyway. He said, “Where’s your weapon? We have to shoot them all! They are escaping! They are guilty! It’s the best we can do for them. I am cruel only to be kind! Shoot them!”

In the dream, he was stupid, but he did recognize the logic. He also realized he would shoot them. But he cried out and woke himself up. He heard himself say, “We shot them on the film.”

“What?” said Zoe.

Paul took a deep breath and twisted his head one way on the pillow and then the other way.

“Were you dreaming of making a movie? You distinctly said, ‘We shot the film.’”

“Did I? I thought I said, ‘We shot them on the film.’”

“That’s not what it sounded like.”

“I dreamt I was on a parapet outside a prison in some country like Bosnia or Poland, and I was told that the prisoners were starving, so the prison doors were being left open for them to escape, except that as they escaped we were supposed to shoot them. I dreamt that I thought this was a good idea.”

“Don’t you remember? Stoney was telling that story after dinner, about one of those guys who want Max to make that movie. He said his grandfather did that with German prisoners in Russian prisons in World War II.”

“I don’t remember hearing that.” He took a deep breath and then another, hoping to accelerate the breakdown of adrenaline in his system that his dream had caused. He closed his eyes. He often thought that if he could really manage his own adrenaline, he could then more perfectly manage his own thoughts.

“Well, you must have. How odd. What a nightmare.”

“It was a nightmare.”

“Are you okay?”

“I haven’t had a nightmare in a long time. I usually don’t dream.” He stretched and shifted his position against Zoe. He said, “I’m sure this is my nightmare of the Iraq war, my fear that I’ll accept its logic, maybe. Or that I already do without knowing it.”

“You got an erection.”

“What?”

“You got an erection about five minutes ago. I was tickling your testicles and you got an erection, but then it went away before you woke up.”

“Why were you tickling my testicles?”

“Because they were there. Because I was awake. Because I had been tickling the insides of your thighs and before that I was stroking your chakras. I thought it might feel good.”

Paul turned this over in his mind.

“Do you not want me to tickle you when you’re asleep? I was just trying to—”

“Actually,” he said, “I think it’s good. I think there must have been some blocks in maybe the throat and the base chakra, and your tickling activated those blocks, and I had that dream. You know, for years I could only fall asleep if I was lying on my back with my left hand touching my throat chakra and my right hand touching my base chakra. When I started studying, one of my teachers said that those were my most blocked chakras, and I had to use my hands to open them up and connect them to everything else.” He took hold of his head and turned it once to the left and once to the right. He could sense his second and third vertebrae release.