The Man Within My Head (16 page)

I went with Hiroko down to the post office, and as we came out, after a short transaction, the whole suburb around us was black with coughy smoke. We looked up to the hills, to where our house and our far-off neighbors were, and all we could see were one, two, three slashes of orange angrily starting up across the slopes. We began to drive home and, switching on the radio, I heard that our house and the few up the road had been issued an “evacuation warning.” I turned into our little road and began driving up it, and the announcer on the local radio, frantic, said that the “evacuation warning” had been turned into an “order”: we had to leave now, or we would be forced out.

We drove the remaining five minutes at a crazy speed again, collected my mother, her dazed cat inside a little cage, gathered as many precious papers and photos as we could in five minutes and then tore down the road again, fire trucks coming past us in the opposite direction, plumes of smoke seeming to
rise from all the valleys and the crevices in the hills, the air so thick we were choking already and driving out of what seemed to be an oven, the huge flames cresting above our house as if ready to engulf it.

Now, barely twenty minutes away, downtown Santa Barbara was dreaming through another placid blue-sky afternoon, a miracle of calm; the angry smoke and orange burns to the north seemed to belong to another universe. We had to go about our life as usual—the next day would bring a fireworks display along the beach, for July the Fourth, and the day after that, I was due to perform a wedding ceremony for a college friend who was flying over from England for the occasion. We needed dinner, preferably in some inexpensive place not far from the house where we were staying while technically homeless (the same building that had housed my mother and me for four months after our house burned down before).

“There’s a story of the Buddha,” my mother began telling us now, perhaps to take our mind off the conflagration, and I listened to her, though usually all the wisdom that came from her, a teacher of comparative religions, I tried to block out because I was a son. “When his closest disciple, Ananda, asked him what was the greatest miracle,” she went on, “walking on water or conjuring jewels out of thin air, changing the heat of one’s body through meditation or sitting undisturbed in a cave for years and years, he said, ‘Simply touching the heart of another human being. Acting kindly. That’s the greatest miracle of all.’ ”

“The church of humanity, in other words,” I said, “like Graham Greene.” I didn’t care that I was citing the very writer my mother had liked when I was at school and I had mocked. (“You remember,” she said, not unexpectedly, “who it was who
told you to read Graham Greene?”). “It was what he always believed in, the human predicament, the possibility for kindness and honesty even in the midst of our confusions and our sins. He could never quite bring himself to believe in God; God was the Other with whom he played his incessant games of ‘He loves me, He loves me not.’ But in humanity he had the strongest, if most reluctant belief. In our fallenness lies our salvation.”

The other two looked at me blankly, nonplussed by this explosion. “He never could have much confidence in faith and hope,” I said, concluding a sermon that no one had asked for. “But charity was the one thing he couldn’t turn away from. Many writers try to take a journey into the Other. But in him it becomes a kind of creed, his version of religion, even when he’s just traveling into the Other in himself.”

What I really could have been saying was that we were now in the world he’d made so real to me in his books, at the mercy of much larger forces, pushed back to essentials, without a home. The only thing you could possibly do in such circumstances was see that so many others were in a similar predicament and reach out towards them; what you shared was not faith, usually, but unsettledness.

Up in the hills, meanwhile, the fires continued to blaze.

H
e was very sweet and modest,” said his friend and contemporary Evelyn Waugh, of Greene, though Waugh was never given to syrupy or benign pronouncements, “always judging people by kindness.” He had agreed to look at a much-rejected
manuscript called
Swami and Friends
in 1935, and gone to the trouble of finding a publisher for it, and become a staunch champion and finally a friend of its previously unknown writer, R. K. Narayan (born Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayanaswami Iyer, I later learned, the only member of our extended clan to have won a name for himself in English letters). In judging him unworthy of a Nobel Prize in 1950, Per Hallström, a member of the Nobel committee, had written that compassion in Greene is “the only way to achieve human kind’s and life’s inner meaning,” more or less the center of his religion. But Greene was reluctant, almost ashamed, to be seen being kind; it was only at his memorial service that Muriel Spark revealed that he had sent her a little money every month so that she could go on writing—accompanied by some bottles of red wine, so she wouldn’t feel like a charity case.

Greene often took up irrational hatreds in his life and never missed a chance to plague do-gooders and moralists; whenever I met someone who knew him well, the word that came up, in the midst of admiration, was “difficult.” With a tendency, as more than one acquaintance noted, to need to make conflict out of peace, as if to answer to some turmoil inside himself, he was so brutal on the unmet Noël Coward that Coward sent him a plaintive letter in verse, asking him what he’d done to deserve it (find success and avoid heavy-handedness?). He seemed to feast on confrontations, perverse or paradoxical positions, as if he would take any stance so long as it kept him apart from the crowd.

But if his books have one signal quality, it is compassion—the fellow feeling that one wounded, lonely, scared mortal feels for another, and the way that sometimes, especially in a moment of crisis, when we “forget ourselves” (which is to say, escape our thoughts and conscious reflexes), a single extended
hand makes nonsense of all the curlicues in our head. It can even make our terrors go away, for a moment.

“It’s not really an established church or creed,” I might have said, if my mother and Hiroko had not saved me over my pasta from myself. “He was an apostle in a church of one. But what he was laying down, in effect, was a code of right action. Not faith, or God, or even justice—in none of which he can really believe; just the possibility of a single decent action. For no reason at all.”

T
he next day, when Hiroko and my mother and I woke up in a strange house, in downtown Santa Barbara—odd to think we’d thought, in coming back here from Japan, that we could help my mother—I walked out into the parking lot to see what I could make out in the distance, where our house had been. The skies were black. It was as if a curtain had come down to separate us from whatever the rising fires were doing a few miles to the north. On the news, as ever, the reports said that the fire was less than twenty percent contained; hundreds of firefighters were being called in from across the country, and the governor had declared a state of emergency. The previous year, two miles from our house, the second largest fire in California history had wiped out 240,000 acres of land. The roof of my aging green Toyota was still splotched with permanent brown bruises from the ash.

We were stuck now in this halfway house, unable to return home; calls, e-mails were coming in from friends: “We just saw the map on the Internet. It looks as if the fires are a few hundred yards from your house.” “We heard on the news that
they have a fire truck stationed next to every house on your road. It can’t happen again, can it? Twice in less than twenty years.”

We needed to get away from this, I thought—all the human chatter, and anguish over what we could do nothing about—so I got into the little car, with Hiroko by my side, and we drove up to a monastery in the hills a few minutes away, several ridges south of our house, where often I went to collect myself, and to gain clarity and direction. It was in this same place, in fact, that I’d decided to pursue Graham Greene the previous month, though all sense and logic (like the contracts I’d signed) said I was meant to be addressing the much more attractive theme of Japan’s changing surfaces and life as a happily bewildered foreigner.

We drove up past the old Spanish mission, one of the most beautiful churches in California, with a convent next to its garden and courtyard, and took the steep road up along the hills, past the local reservoir, and then to the great open space that leads to hidden Mount Calvary. I’d discovered the place only a few years before, after thirty-five years in Santa Barbara; it had become my secret home, to be used whenever I could not visit the monastery three hours up the coastal road to the north, in the stretch of coastline called Big Sur, where I’d begun to stay seventeen years before.

Now, though, that monastery to the north was surrounded by flames, too; twenty-six structures in the area were gone, and the fire had been blazing there for almost two weeks. In Colombia one morning, the previous week, I’d received an e-mail from a nun friend saying that the hermitage we both loved was going up in flames, and I should pray for it, and our common friends there.

Today, ironically, the firefighters protecting my beloved sanctuary in Big Sur were being summoned down to Santa Barbara to protect our house and the ones around it. It was like some parable in which all the escape lanes in one’s head are blocked; wherever one turns, there’s a wall of fire.

We got out of the car at the top of the mountain, after following the narrow, empty road up through the hills and then turning into a tiny entrance that snaked around the dry brush for a few quiet seconds to the Santa Barbara retreat house. The air pulsed with silence around us. We could feel the stillness, the clarity in a place like this, as if murmured prayers, over years, unending, had polished the silence till it shone, the way workers in fancy hotels polish the windows and the wooden floors.

I followed Hiroko in through the main entrance, and we walked into a little sunlit courtyard. Sitting there, in a circle of light, in the silence, yellow and orange flowers along the borders, a makeshift crucifix in front of us, with skulls around it, we said nothing, letting the gathered tension of the last few days come out of us. There was a wooden bench, with a small plaque remembering a donor who had died; we might have been in sixteenth-century Spain, a place where fires in Santa Barbara had never been heard of and people lived their lives according to a calendar that had no dates.

“Remember the last time we came here?” I asked her.

“Two years ago?” (She remembers everything, keeping me honest.) “When you were going to Sri Lanka?”

“Right. I don’t know why, but I felt I needed blessings then, protection. I don’t even know if I believe in gods, but this was the only place to come to.”

“It’s okay,” she said, though forty-eight hours earlier, fleeing
the burning hills, she’d broken into uncharacteristic tears. “Everything will be fine.”

Just sitting in the silent courtyard made everything fall away. The days, our cares, the fact that we were staying in a house not our own, our belongings engulfed. The silence seemed to be a sifting mechanism, so that everything trivial and divisive disappeared—the setting, too—and all that remained was what was clear and impossible to argue away.

“You feel better?” I asked Hiroko, after perhaps thirty minutes.

“It’s calm.” Which wasn’t exactly a yes.

“Shall we go?” Just a short time collecting ourselves—recollecting ourselves—in such a place made all the difference; now whatever came at us over the radio, from thoughtful friends, from the furnace of our minds would have a frame around it, a background of unchangingness to set against it.

As we walked out of the main building, letting the heavy door close behind us, and walked towards my car, the unsightly puddles of corroded brown on its green roof recalling the fire of the summer before, I looked over along the hills to where I didn’t even expect to see our house. There it was, to my amazement, a tiny structure from this distance, impossibly frail, by itself on the ridge, huge plumes of smoke rising all around it. Then the thick black clouds descended once again, and I was sure that it was gone.