Martin Kovan

God Realm Nostalgias 1 They camp in the old, high-domed chapel, where the late-summer reaches in with partial hands through the thinning trees. They have seen the bullet-scars still bit into the outside walls: the villa an Axis headquarters for most of the war. A man or two, maybe many, killed there, an Italian, a Briton, an American - no-one knows and there are no graves. The villa and its expanse of ground shudders, probably, with the disembodied, if someone could sense them. The dogs, sometimes, start barking for no reason, but no-one would think it is because of ghosts. Yet in the early hours one of the men wakes and yells and swears that there is a spirit-being sitting on his chest. A malevolence like Fuseli's monster on the breast of a girl, to be sacrificed: It's a naga! he yells. It won't let me go! St. Malo, the younger one, doesn't know how to take him seriously. In the light of the Tibetan butter-candles though he can believe him: these things are possible. The older man, though still young himself, is a stalwart normally, a good-headed German. He is a touch hypochondriac, he has a weakness for paid sex when he travels, like most spirituals he willingly takes on bizarreries. He laughs at the younger man because he thinks he has a vocation: a saint malgre lui. He has given the younger one the unlikely name. It's a place, he says. But now it's a person, as well. St.Malo is not really who he is, anymore than the older German is called Rainer. In their metaphysics there is no definitive person there, just processes - their names are only transparent flags signaling a temporary identity. Along with everyone else they want to shed the social skin, bury it in the Tuscan hills. The few hundred others of them, too, are already completely silent, passing each other on the blazing gravel walkways or dappled forest paths, waiting in the lunch queues with all kinds of faces. What they could say to each other they see already is in truth negligible. I am not a person, they all seem, silently, to say to each other. I am mind. Only mind, and mind is infinite. Where there is infinity there is no I am. Only: Mind. "It's a projection of your consciousness. Your own mind," the reluctant saviour says. "It doesn't really exist." "I couldn't sleep for hours last night - it bugged my dreams, it's real to me." The idiom in his English is comic; the accent which so easily summons military boots striking gravel, a whip flicked against leather calf-muscles, could be caricature. But it is still a new, 21st-century incarnation. Sixty years on the ghosts of the S.S. are slippery, serpent-like mythical beings out of Tibet or Nepal, that popular Buddhism believes are real. Nagas haunt places of ill-omen or psychic disturbance, where great evil has been committed. They don't like to be disturbed, must be pacified through ritual practice and gestures of generosity. The next night the naga will leave Rainer alone, though no-one will be able to know whether the German Buddhist has propitiated the spirit-being during his hours of practice, or whether the naga has merely tired of him and gone to haunt other, more vulnerable, minds. Gradually the dawn light shows up the inside of the chapel: thin pale filaments shooting down from the perfect circle quartered by bars at the highest point of the concavity. Multiple green-skinned goddesses swarm the inner surface of the dome, seated on cushions of lotus and air. A hundred years earlier apostles and pointing cherubs, painted by one of the provincial artists of the church. It's all gone now. In this version saints don't fall down, head-first, from heaven; they bob and suspend in a linked equidistance of complete ease. The Buddhist stories of the saints are rarely as dramatic as the Catholic: they inhabit postures of ready and limitless availability to appease, if so willed, the eternal round of human suffering. The landscape they pose in is yellow, green and saffron, a pebbled and jeweled diorama, faint pulsing mountains behind them, eternal streams passing by their feet, all their silk finery caught up in the electromagnetic display of something not wholly material, not purely mental. It is something, somewhere else, the place they inhabit - and it is right there, too, above their eyes. Slowly the fleshy light of the candles, beneath the translucence of the goddess-angels, burns into the equal air of the new morning. There is a gong calling from the building below them, the central hub of the old villa. It has a crumbling, ivy-strewn Tuscan wall facing the chapel slightly above it on a leafy rise. Beneath it the people congregate after breakfast, when the gong calls them there, again, three times. So they go towards it. 2 There is a vast white canvas tent already erected on a flat section of ground, positioned on a terrace lower to that of the villa buildings. When they pause before entering into its dappled insides, they can look out over fields of herbs and fallow earth and see the sea like shot-silver in the far distance. Not far beyond the coastline, when the days are clear, they can also see the twin islands rising up out of vapour - places of longing many of them hope to visit. There are myths attached to these islands, which could be separate countries, with their own towns and streets full of an unknown music. As the days pass in the grounds of the villa, many of them, of the women in particular, will begin to hear that music, imagine it as it could be - the music of an ideal exile. The teachings start very early in the morning. One of the senior monastics lead sessions of prayer that go on for as long as three hours. Before taking cushion seats on the ground, the three-hundred people who have woken early prostrate to the ground and the images of transcendence hung on the far walls, above the elevated throne, where the teacher will arrive every evening for the following four weeks. When he comes, others will arrive too, those who have not attended the prayer-sessions, those who have been sick or indisposed, they will come with members of the public, to crowd around the tent-entrances before being invited inside or politely moved off, to walk quietly in the villa grounds, light candles and pay their respects to small temples, or the old chapel up on the hill. It is their uncertainty that keeps them permanently on the outer side of the tent. For his part, the tiny, gnomic teacher expects a genuine surrender in all his students. He is their spiritual friend, but also their guide, and for many of them, their only solace. Many of the women sink to their knees or collapse in full prostration when he belatedly makes an appearance, late in the nights after most of the students have thought to go to bed. He creates this hiatus, many say, to divide the amateurs from the authentics, those who will endure any hardship or sacrifice to be finally granted the knowledge and the blessings the teacher is expected to bestow on them. But the teacher, like so many of his tribe, downplays his agency. "I'm only a simple monk," he says. "I can't do everything." A young woman waits for him, long before most of the others come to the tent. She is always alone, as if the world has decided that she should be, not because she has willed it. Her tall white beauty of pure angles, black hair and crimson lips subdues them into suspicious awe, they leave her alone. She is so tall and thin it seems incredible she can stay upright so long, sitting with a straight back and alert, deep violet eyes to everything the teacher up on his throne tells them. They have a natural correspondence: he is minute and walks close to the ground, wry and diamond-eyed. She floats above the earth, her eyes swallow people and normal desires and hopes with a galacial indifference. She is both frozen and other-planetary. But she can't be resisted, and does little or no work in the food-preparation or other labour under the terms in which she has come there. She has a personal symbiosis with the teacher which confers exception on her, keeps her more silent than all the others. When the teacher comes into the tent, she approaches and offers him wildflowers, dry reeds and fruit which he receives before anyone else can bring her back into the body of the group. She doesn't sing with the others; she looks either vacantly down to the ground like a mare curled round its own long legs, or directly at the teacher who she perceives as if looking from cold, alien light-years. "She's not completely human, I think," Rainer tells St. Malo, and they keep a running commentary on the physical betrayals of her psychology as the days pass. When she is absent for one of the nightly teachings, Rainer suspects an incipient breakdown. In the morning, at breakfast, St. Malo sees her strangely electrified and soporific, enbalmed in a lazy-eyed calm nothing is able to break her from. Someone drops a bowl of hot liquid which comes near to her feet and she laughs lightly like a girl, entranced by the damage and mess on the floor. On these mornings her eyes glow with a fathomless depth, she looks into and through everything, not a malevolence, but not human, with the sharp indifference of a wild cat. St. Malo believes she could devour everyone there if she chose to. "No, she's not human. She's visiting from some other realm. A death-realm, I think," he tells Rainer. "Those eyes have seen death, I know it," Rainer says emphatically, under his breath. He is a deeply romantic German. "They have been there and come back. I feel cold every time I walk past her." "Don't get too close," St. Malo says. "She might burn you. Turn you to ice." "But she's compelling," Rainer mutters still more quietly. "She's a vision, in fact." On a quiet afternoon when people are sleeping in dormitories under the high rafters of the villa lofts, or resting in the shade of trees after morning prayers, Rainer meets her on a gravel path, and she motions for him. They walk out of the property onto neighbouring roads and follow a dirt-path through long grass and under deep-green trees. She stops and shows him some bushes, suddenly pulls a handful of leaves off a branch and hands it to him, thin spiked needles with a musky odour. "Make it like tea - it's good for you. Treats the delusions." She suddenly smiles, and is a human being in front of him. He sees also that her hands are large and strong, and when she rolls a cigarette and smokes it, she does it like a working-man. She smiles and sweeps the long, raven's hair off her face and behind her neck, her upper teeth a little over her lip. Rainer sees then the stunning pale long of her neck, offered to him. She has twigs and flowers knotted into her hair, dreadlocks hatched in its ends. She laughs again at nothing and offers him a cigarette, doesn't tell him it is full of hashish before he smokes it. She asks him, "How long have you been doing this business? This spiritual business." Her voice is too young - it is only twelve years old. They can hear the gongs in the distance. The violet in her eyes eats the sun out of the air in a depthless hunger. His face moves towards hers until the lobe of her ear is in his mouth. "Yes, bite me, bite it off," she whispers in the too-young voice. He eats the ear, of a small bat on the body of a long arctic lynx. The white, hard hand goes into his crotch, and he is stung, a curious poison immensed in his brain, he is not certain how this happens. They swelter together under a dual sun of blood and ignorance, and leave that place, and go to where the gong has sounded for them. They move very quickly on a cloud of the crushed leaves he still has in his hand. Rainer barely wakes up from his fantasy, the stone hugging his brain; he even believes the sweat of her tongue is still on his pants, when they walk into the tent: everyone isolate and bending, bending over to offer worlds of mental plenitudes to the gods of freedom they cannot see or hear. Everyday it is the same. People drag out of themselves the last of the spiritual protein hidden in their blood, from morning to night, they give it all away. They have been in the realms of hell before, they still have faint memory of a flaying time so horrific it could hardly be real, except that the recollection hangs in the far depths of the inner-ear, is so profound in them they know they have been born with it and can't doubt it. When it is over for the night they are talking under the dome of the chapel that has become a place of refuge for them. The German arranges medicinal bottles on the floor, a traveling mendicant with snake-oil in the line on his palms. "I've never known love with a woman," he says. "I have loved them. Some have said they have loved me. Ones I didn't want. But from one heart to another love with any woman, never. My whole life." "No," St. Malo looks at him. "Neither have I." "Ah, you have time." "I don't have anymore time than you." Rainer stares blankly at the wall. He is beyond exhaustion, though not pleasure. All he can see during the day are the different topographies of women's bodies under their clothes. He has a fine-tuned attention for it; it is in itself, an achievement. "Is it bad then?" Rainer looks still at the wall when he speaks. "Not long ago I wanted to die from it. Selbstmord. I don't know why I stop myself." "It is against your social code. Your family. Expectations." "Yes, maybe that is it. That's all. Just a scruple, that stops you. Like when a woman bends over and all you want is to run your hand in her crack but you don't only because of social fear, shame, going to jail. Because you want to, very simple. You just want to. And she maybe wants you to, she enjoys it, and you both know it." "But you can't," St.Malo says. "Nein. Verboten." The staring is very easy, perhaps a more authentic meditation. Than all the sitting in a tent, in the cold or the heat, the pain in the rectum, that could be avoided. It is necessary to bleed from the ass, to become enlightened. They all did it, before, the great ones, trailing clouds of glory. Rainer doesn't tell his friend about the sortie with the succubus, the medicine she has given him, or the hashish. There is something more than disturbing in it, and only secrecy can contain it. They stare at the figures on the dome-ceiling. It isn't hard to detach from the sensation of bones resting dully on a smooth stone floor, disengage into light-realms. In the early darkness of the night they can hear finger-bells coming from the tents huddled under trees: solitary sojourners or couples trying for desireless love. Sometimes in the mornings, or after lunch, they can see the tents shuddering in that love, like circus playgrounds in incipient typhoon. They might blow away, these lovers, in divine coitus, leave everyone behind. St. Malo thought of that once: the ne plus ultra of sexual implosion, only a few fiery tender bits of smouldering charcoal left in the bed, and a small black smoke wending its way through stratospheres. Suicide and coniunctionis, old lovers themselves in human mortality. (He had already known the only woman to follow him as well - who had felt the heat too soon, the singe on her arms, and fled before the mystery. She sat at a hotel-reception now, getting fat in the long hours, the speculator husband employing her in his real-estate ventures. After everything there was still the triumph of the bourgeois, the Darwinian winners of all time. St. Malo sent her pornography on her birthday, like an omen, and a joke, and she never failed to not reply.) He had a quiet, unspoken wish that all the shuddering romancers would get AIDS, and crawl away, somewhere else, to die. 3 The teacher never fails them, though, every day. He comes when all of them, apart from the obsessive-compulsives, the manic and the fanatics, are arguing with sleep on their cushions. In these vestibule hours, when waiting has taken over, and everything refuses to happen, they slip into an amorphous selfhood. Something is happening here but whoever it is happening to isn't certain who they are anymore. It is like an invasion of the ego-snatchers, or a discreet veil of mild insanity that appropriates names and forms and passport identities. Rainer, as every night, can't see anything but the White Girl, sitting like an icon ahead of him. She is closer to the mystery, he knows that, his skin crawls with exquisite fear - the ice in his desire - every time she passes him. As the teacher intones monotones - it is a magic language, and he is not listening - he can only see her lifting up her skirt, and bending over. That morning he has seen her washing her clothes at the outdoor trough. The water is cold, and he stands and talks to her, watching her hands grow red. She offers him more of the happy smoke, and he says yes, yes, and can I lift up your skirt? Watching the wind rise up and press against her skeletal long limbs, the bowl of groin, and when she finally bends over to drag the wet clothes out of the black wells where she has been drowning them, the angular hollow of her haunches, somehow obscene and thin, so that he feels the shame of spying on an old, dying woman, or a little girl. She is a Kali to him, everything she does takes on cosmological proportions, the clothes that he helps her hang up now strung like illusions across points of the Milky Way, and the terrible gap of her netherparts a vortex that already has half of his mind in its lean-jawed grip. He wants to dive into it. "Come with me, tonight," he says, "back to the place we walked to." "Not tonight," she says with the infantile voice held up like a ransom card. "No. I'm meditating on the teachings tonight. There's something happening, inside. I can feel it." "Like a birth," Rainer says. "Maybe." She lights up. "Yes, a birth. But maybe," the mouth is grinning into his bones, he photographs the teeth of Kali with what is left of his mind. "Maybe of a monster." She sweeps away, after that, shaky on the long spindly legs, the wind lifting her away. He thinks he can hear her laugh. His insides gape, watching her go, he drifts inside to masturbate. She sees St. Malo though, turning the big brass prayer-wheel in the twilight, the day's sun still gleaming from his arms. He is a small man, not even a man, more of an imp, he seems to be chirping inside himself as he spins the wheel. She walks towards him and she has an image of him pissing all over the brass cylinder, as a monkey would, sticking his hands in his pants, and hooting, jumping, leaping all over the high turrets of the villa buildings. He leaves the wheel and grabs her arm, like a stick to swing from, when she passes under an awkward tree. There are some robed monastics, swishing by them, and he drags her closer into the shadow of the tree. "I know where you go at nights. I've seen you there, among the fucking graves." "I don't care what you've seen. Take your hands off me. I don't care about anything you think. Stay away from me." "What will you do? Cast a spell on me, do some voodoo - I dare you." He smiles. "You've got them fooled, they all think you're a witch." "Maybe I am." "You're a little girl playing with broomsticks and candles." "Wouldn't you like to know what I do with them," she leers at him. St. Malo immediately takes one of his monkey hands and jams it hard into her crotch. She knocks the side of his head, driving it into the tree, gangling awkward above them. "You bastard," she breathes, "take your hands off me." He does, and smiles again. "Are you going there tonight?" "Yeah." "I'll come with you." The path goes beyond the chapel, up towards the town. There is a woman they see, middle-aged, heaving in the semi-darkness, crying into her shoulder. St. Malo stops and nimbly leans and touches her hand, as if he can work miracles. They leave her in the gloaming, the sobs dwindling into violet hills, the silver olive-trees shimmering on their flanks. They can hardly read each others' eyes in that light. "So you have magic powers too, now. Are you some kind of saint?" "No. But I'm a good actor, like you. But Rainer thinks I am." "Who is that?" "The sorry guy who dreams of your heavenly cunt every night." "Oh. He is in love with me, I think." "What about me? Am I in love with you?" "You only love yourself." The cemetery is a real place though it could also be a film-set. Electric candles set into niches in sarcophagi burn all night, the roses and carnations are artificially profuse, and every grave has a photo-portrait set into the stone: sepia and black&white for the older ones, and lurid cheap colour prints for the younger. There is a specialist portraitist in the town who knows that many of his cut-price snaps, with the sea-blue backdrop, will finally flower in the sacred scrapheap yard, the stolid and reassuring Catholic dead smiling uncertainly into a plenitude of dark, indifferent nights. He even comes here, some weekends, with his family, to have a picnic and privately celebrate his handiwork, both sacrosanct, consecrated by its function, and modestly lucrative, too. A Gothic moon sticks sliver-slick above them. They hesitate in finding a place that in spreading out on a marble slab won't appear to an intruding guard too disrespectful. There is an old grave, where the photo-portrait has dimmed to a faded nothingness, the spirit has all gone out of it, and whatever presence that could remain has likely gone beyond a whisper - there is nothing to fear. But neither of them resist fear in any case, and the more disturbance they can provoke the more worthy is the game. The White Girl prepares a hash-pipe and St. Malo uncorks a bottle of red wine, the illuminated portraits, flowers and moon-stabbed clouds complicit in the small, trembling ritual. When she leans to offer him what remains of the first pipe, he notices only the wolfish rank of her breath, of something decaying from the inside, though her neck is white as phosphorous in the shadows, sharply pure. "How do you reconcile the drugs with the purification," he says in a slow undertone. "Do I need to?" It is a simple answer and he doesn't wait for anything more. It is clear in its obscurity. He drags at the pipe and also knows there is no needed answer to contrived questions. "Well, if the Lama knew how out of it you were, he might - " "He wouldn't." " - he would reject you - us - throw us out. Of the fold, you know." "His mind is my mind. I am his. He knows that, there's no separation." "He doesn't need heroin, like you do. He doesn't think you do, either." "It's only sometimes. That's why I smoke now. The other thing is finishing now." "That's why you come to the Lama. So he can save you." "No. You don't understand. I overdosed, maybe I was dead for a little bit. I went to hospital for a long time - and now I can see things. Look there - " she turns a casual finger to one of the Catholic portraits. A recent but blurry photo shows a young man, no older than the early twenties. There is a single flickering light under his young, wan smile. "He is dead from the same. I can tell. He was toxico." St. Malo can also see the boy just out of his teens, dead with a needle in his arm - 'toxico', as she says. The light flickers erratically in the still night. The White Girl leans towards St. Malo and plants her mouth over his: the smoke passes between them, a bowl of residual madness moving from the cavities of her ravaged body to his. She coughs from the dregs of her lungs and casually begins to undo the buttons of her thin blouse. The bones of her sternum push out, under her hard stained fingers. St. Malo is afraid to move his eyes from the dead boy, smiling in the flickering light. In the corner of his vision he can see her body emerge - the small hard breasts looking in opposite directions. "Put them away," he says. "No - come to me." She takes his head and pushes his face onto a bullet-black nipple, the hash in his mouth, the hard nub under his tongue. But he moves quickly away, though she tears the hair in her hands. "Here, on the marble. Fuck me here." The boy smiles at them bleakly, from his incomparable hiding-place. St. Malo can see the White Girl already slumped back with the blouse still open, her skin glowing more brightly in the artificial lights. He doesn't know if she is really alive, and doesn't say anything to her. In the next moment he sees the boy has closed his eyes, the photo-portrait smile is gone, it is only an abandoned face looking out at him. The face is a flat vacancy. He wants to shake the girl awake, out of sex or narcosis or whatever keeps her submerged in an inhuman weight. He leaves the place, alone. Maybe she'll sleep there the night, under the needle moon. In the chapel, before dawn, the naga is there again, but it doesn't attack Rainer. St. Malo, who says little, sees it in a dream, smoking a long cheroot, a snake dancing on hard, horned hooves with the White Girl, a waltz, all the way round the white, shaking tent. All the other spirituals, all three hundred of them, lie in haphazard postures on the ground. They are corpses, dead, finally, from their own enlightenment. It is impossible to see whether they are happy or sad. The naga and the girl waltz round and round, a Totentanz, flanking the bodies, and in the middle of it all sits the diminutive teacher, a lit-up creature, clapping his hands and laughing, laughing. 4 The Teacher begins to arrive much later in the evenings. He might be disappointed with his flock, who every day look more exhausted, demoralised, some of them even obviously disturbed. One woman spends hours sitting stock-still in front of a Buddha-statue in the Japanese garden. She is perfectly still but tears flow continually down her face, her eyes wide open, and wet her hands, her legs. No-one approaches her though though within a week she will be taken to the hospital, stepping into the front seat of a car, frozen and brightly smiling, as if there could be a crowd of paparazzi seeing her go. To most of them there, she has never even had a name. The Teacher says everyone must try much harder, must do more and more practice. But we need more sleep, they say, we can hardly sit up straight. They feel bad, though, when they witness the Teacher talking to them for eight straight hours, often past dawn, without relent despite his heavy eyes that seem neither asleep nor awake but swimming in a vacant denial of time. Rainer surrenders and drops on the floor where he is. St. Malo is drugged, again, his mind is a laser boring into the stultifying haze though its point is also blunted. When he joins the line of the hard corps who stay awake past dawn to receive the blessings of the Teacher, he wills the Teacher to catch him out, expose him to the entire audience and throw him out then and there. As he moves closer to the tiny man on a modest wooden throne, he finds the only honesty that is still hidden inside his organs, presses his palms to his heart, and goes to offer his disbelieving mind to the great man. But when he looks into those eyes, that had seemed to spit and trample all over time, there is nothing there. There is only a great laughter. The Teacher takes St. Malo's head between his hands, and blesses him. He knows the Teacher is only laughing at him, out of a great generosity, and he thinks he hears a word: Full, but it could be Fool, and as he moves away again that is what the hashish tells him. Fool. He is not a saint, he knows that, but he has never believed himself a fool. That is all he hears, echoing in a bodiless voice in his head: that he is a fool, that everyone can see it, in every moment. After then he says even less, and when the White Girl takes his hand, late, when people have given into sleep or sit like the frozen dead in the vast white tent, he goes with her, but all words are lost between them, and he searches for a language that begins to describe a new twilight, a half-world between the fool and his freedom. Rainer never knows where he goes - his medicines knock him out for a regulated German eight hours every night. But with rest his desire pushes itself more urgently on an object, and when he sees the White Girl washing her clothes at the trough again, he goes behind her and slips a couple of fingers between her legs from behind. She doesn't even raise her voice. She calmly turns around, presses her skirt flat against her thighs and lightly taps his cheek with an open hand. "You really are a baby, aren't you?" She doesn't dislike him. He wants to say he thought there was something, they understand each other, he doesn't want to hurt her. The only thing that comes out of his mouth is to say, "Please, please - give me something. Please." She smiles faintly and looks down on him from an infinite, white and spindly height. "I don't have anything to give you." Even the juvenile voice is no deterrence to him; he even feels himself hardening at the sound of it. "Please," he whispers through his teeth. She looks away from them down to the pile of clothes, wet and dripping, in her arms. She picks out a pair of underpants and tosses them to him. He is still despairing. "But they're clean," his voice is almost full of tears. "The best I can do. You'll have to make them dirty yourself." Rainer takes the underpants and wrings what he can from them. But even with a full night's sleep, his regime of Chinese medicines and a devoted daily practise of mantras and sutra-recitations, he falls into a deeper and more and more desperate depression. "There's nothing I can do," he tells St. Malo. "There's no answer, you know. Between desire and freedom there's no choice - I can't pretend to drop desire. But it brings no happiness. It's just an addiction, never satisfied. I would tear her apart, if I had the choice. I'd eat every last part of her. Ah God. God." St. Malo tells him to go to sleep. "Would you have her, if you could?" "Yes, yes, I would as well." "You would die for that, too - the sex? The ultimate gift of the goddess?" "Yes - I'd die for that too." But in the early hours, in the Catholic cemetery, they sit apart, as they have from the beginning, and he doesn't touch her, even to take the smoke from her mouth as he had at the beginning. They are disembodied siblings, in the moonlight, passing a pipe. The White Girl knows he doesn't love or want her, knows he wants no-one. She keeps the beautiful white lines of her transcendence under her clothes, where no-one can see them, and, in time, when he seems to be asleep in the shadows, brings out her pure silver kit. They are her precision-instruments: they show her the angels and the demons, the bodhisattvas and the nagas. And sometimes they show her her God. Rainer can't believe his eyes when he sees her in the mornings now and she seems to be floating on a holograph lotus of divine detachment from all the sorry human need around her - people rubbing their sleep-deprived eyes, queueing at the dining-tents like sheep at the trough, spiritual animals squirming in lines outside the rank and smelly portable toilets. The White Girl doesn't even seem to eat, and her emaciated, sculpted body seems to gather every day more of the blinding proportions of a work of the gods: she isn't human finally. He knows, without any doubt this time, that her sinews and lineaments are an inspired flight from everything bound to the hungry earth. "Her shit is my perfume," he says to himself, gazing at her among the files of survivors. It even becomes a mantra of sorts, but because no-one else hears it, not even St. Malo, there is no-one to tell him how much more a delusion it might be than all the others he works, so hard, to purify out of his consciousness. 5 That night the Teacher comes even later than usual, and takes some pause before speaking. It is easily past midnight, there are only a hundred or so now who can still go his distance, follow him into truth. There is not much more I can tell you, he seems to say, out of a slow indifference. You must practise, here and now you must practise, always, and still more. You are bowed down by desire, by craving, your mind demands so much but it will never be satisfied with everything you sacrifice to it. Much better to offer to the buddhas and bodhisattvas, who only want to help. It seems almost inevitable, that the old gods would send an emissary from the wind and sea to hijack the Buddhist presumption. Under the sopor of chanting and sleeplessness, cold or hunger, the internal scripts of need and distinction drift and float, pages tossed up in the air that rises from the sea, invades the depths of that belly of a whale. The white canvas tent shakes and shudders in that force, the wind threatens to knock out the big lights or the sound-speaker system. The whole assembly closes its eyes and listens to the wind. It is a vast ship, chains and links clanking against upright poles, the entire skeleton wheezing and exhaling, banging against itself, cataleptic. The Teacher is minute on his raised throne, talks, perhaps also mad, into the metal and the shock, up in a crazy mizzen-mast swinging, back and forth. His words are lost, but the depth-drone carries through, the most assiduous - bald men with ear-muffs - writing down every last word in emptiness. This is how Europe will receive its new gods - Stoic, ridiculous, scratching like Eskimos in invisible ink. It goes on for hours, the suspension and the tedium, the bowels accepting the confinement of earth, cold reaching up high into the vital organs. The young gods up the front, sitting in lotus-posture, are already teleported, hanging onto the captain's tower with ambitious fingernails. For them there is no fear of everything falling down, caving in, even when a sizeable group get up and stare woodenly at the hinges of the tent, crashing in the night, and leave the place on stiff legs. They're not dying there, not tonight, anyway. You think you want to leave desire, this desire-world, behind, but maybe this is only pretend, the Teacher tells them. It is very hard. Because you know how hard it really is, so secretly you still cherish this desire, and this self who desires: everything, man, woman, riches, success, fame, happiness, even humble happiness, even this desire for freedom. Even this self that wants freedom: it is still what stands between you and freedom itself, another desire. A real joke! It is maybe unfair, because though it seems maybe impossible, it is in truth something possible, this freedom. The only true thing. There is a man yelling under the pagan assault, many don't even notice the words - "You're a liar!" - bellowed out for the dull world to take in again. It is Rainer, who stumbles away from them, falling over prone bodies. "I don't believe you!" the honest German voice enthuses, an exit in high-comedy. "You're a fucking, fucking liar!" And it is true the Teacher has been silenced by the accusation, or by the sea and its wind of Neptune. All of those remaining sit and gaze at the Teacher and when a heaving surge batters the tent almost from the ground no-one moves to defect from his ingathered stillness. Some of them, at least, would be willing to die, with the Teacher, to be taken into a pure-realm with him, or failing that revisit once again those god-realms they have already, thankfully, fallen from. The Teacher has already told them there is no better place on the turning wheel of suffering than the human, that us and our waste and messy babies and gasping earth are nevertheless blessed with a fine and precise view into freedom, if only we choose it to the expense of all else. The way out, for the Teacher too, is a straight and narrow gate. A difficult manouvre, but a possible one. Rainer is already packing his bags - as before, he'll buy a discount airfare and within a week will be in Thailand, with his special friends. St. Malo secretly wishes him well, almost envies him the choice, which give or take some risk of overkill, is surely not a bad one. When the tent receives another surging attack, and opens up in a corner, so that rain as well as wind enter in, and the privileged ones sit in a depth of samadhi he can only pity, he almost feels like joining his German friend. The water gushes in from outside, an influx of cold ice from the open reaches of space, a reverse-birth of chilling amniotic flood inside the shaky house of the tent, still blowing wildly on its hinges. When one of the corner bases of the structure wrenches out of the earth and threatens to take off into a wide Tuscan sky, he notices her leave. No, she doesn't want to die after all. I could've tried to save her, but she can save herself now. All these others though, they're the victims, their lives at risk now, with the tent beating against itself, all the integrity has gone out of it, wobbly legs giving into gravity, the malevolence of sky will finally pull it to pieces. All compounded things, the Buddha has said, will of their nature always come apart again. There is no holding onto them. St. Malo watches the Teacher, when the tent finally starts caving in, sitting impassively in solid-state. He speaks his last word, in the middle of a new hysteria, broken out while his truth is conclusively offered them, so that none of it is heard. Better to stay still, then, and keep silence. The Teacher doesn't move when several people are injured in the falling metal beams, the white tent torn open like a shroud. With the last hangers-on, St. Malo flees the place and seeks refuge with the bodhisattvas in his old Catholic chapel. In the morning the damage is negligible, though he is the first to find the White Girl, spread-eagled like a fashion-shoot, under the awkward tree, with a syringe still in her hand. The flat ground where the tent had stood is deserted, not a trace of terror or destruction, just the flattened grass under an idle wind. In the far distance the twin islands are still there, growing out of the vapour, but the music of their unknown towns has been silenced for him. St. Malo doubts he had ever heard the music, the music of an ideal exile, in any case. It was more like something a storyteller had once impressed on him, so he had assumed it to be real, when it was always only a fiction, like so much else is. When St. Malo asks someone where the Teacher has gone, he's told the Teacher has already left, is flying to India. "To India..." he murmurs, and goes to see if the White Girl is still alive.

Home