“Is there anything we can do to help him suffer less?” Sam asked.
The doctor clasped his hands together and placed them in front of his chest. Then he just stood there facing her. He closed his eyes and rocked back and forth for a few seconds.
“I think you know what to do, don’t you?” he said. “Although you have masked yourself, your kundalini was activated a long time ago, wasn’t it?”
Sam nodded.
“Why don’t we leave you two?” he said, looking at Marco. Then he gestured toward the door, and the two men left.
“How are you?” I asked Sam. She gazed down at me, tears in her eyes, and my heart opened even more to her.
“Shh,” she murmured, moving closer and placing a hand on my abdomen.
“Okay,” I said.
Sam gently moved her hand around and then settled on a particularly sore spot just below my navel. She closed her eyes, and a moment later, cool waves of something flowed through me, soothing and relaxing me. Then I slept again.
The next time I woke up, Chris was there. He was back to wearing a hideous shirt. This one was light yellow with multicolored birds on it. Most of them looked like they were having a hard day.
The travel alarm clock on my bedside table said it was eight in the evening—I’d been asleep for several more hours. I felt much better.
“Hey, Chris,” I said. “I think my fever’s gone.”
“Great.”
“But can you help me to the bathroom?”
“Sure.”
“Hurry!” I called a second later.
I endured yet another twenty-minute session of gut-emptying torture, but then I felt even better.
Chris and I sat on either end of my cot, and he said, “Hey, I heard Sam healed you or something. Is that true?”
“I think so,” I said. “I didn’t know she had any energy tricks up her sleeve. I may have been underestimating her in that department.”
“Maybe she’s just not a big braggy show-off like some nouveau superhero types I could name. What’s your special ability again? Crapping?”
“No. Vomiting,” I said. “Crapping is just a sideline. I moonlight as Crapman when Vomitman’s on vacation.”
Chris laughed. “So anyway, welcome back,” he said. “Fever Sid was useless. I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying. But this guy can keep up with me and even give it back a little. I’m digging it, bro.”
“Thanks. But let me ask you this, Chris. Do you know much about kundalini?”
“I do now. I’ve been researching it online. The good news is I concur with the doctor, although he’s kind of a jerk. Your symptoms are classic kundalini, and it’s a real thing, but the bad news is I think he’s full of shit when he says it’ll all be over in a day or two. There are people who have problems their whole lives from a sudden onset of kundalini energy.”
“Maybe the Baba-generated version is more benign than the online version,” I said, rocking back and forth. It felt soothing.
“Maybe. I hope so.” He looked doubtful.
“Have you spent time in the tomb?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I can’t feel much of anything happening in there. I try to go in when this Swiss girl who wears these baggy shorts is meditating. She sits cross-legged, she closes her eyes, and she doesn’t wear any underwear. I’ve decided to go after a different kind of peek experience than the other seekers—one that’s spelled with two Es.”
It took me a moment to get this, and he saw that on my face. “Never mind,” he said. “You look tired. Are you ready to go to sleep for the night? Do you want some rice or something?”
“God, no. More water,” I said. “And then more sleep. Thanks.”
“No worries, mate,” he said in a terrible New Zealand accent.
Chapter Twenty-One
I felt substantially improved in the morning, having slept the whole night through, despite a nearby pilgrim’s merciless snoring. A water shortage dictated that we could only shower every three days, so I used my shower credit and cleaned up. It felt great to shave, too.
I still couldn’t feel any spiritual energy. Perhaps the tomb knew I’d be overwhelmed by whatever it had done—whatever is currently going on inside me. I noticed my thoughts—“perhaps the tomb knew.” Really?
My intestines settled as I walked to the dining hall. Almost everyone I passed greeted me by name and asked solicitous questions. By the time I arrived, I almost felt normal. I was shaky, certainly, and ill-equipped to handle more stress. But I was in the ballpark of low-end normal—as if I were hungover.
The dining hall was bigger than it needed to be, with an altar just inside the entrance. Yet another photo of Baba sat on it, surrounded by large-petaled, red flowers I didn’t recognize. It was old Baba this time—shortly before his death. His eyes seemed to see exactly who I was and love me anyway. How could a photograph love someone? Did Baba look at people through the eyes in his portraits—from Baba heaven?
It smelled wonderful in there, which I took as a sign that I might be ready to eat again. I smelled eggs and a multitude of spices. I also caught a whiff of fruit or fruit juice. Mango? Guava? Something tropical.
The walls of the rectangular room were whitewashed and bare. The floor was smooth concrete that had been painted light brown. The simple wooden tables and chairs were arrayed in long rows and looked sturdy, but also uncomfortable. It was well-lit, with surprisingly modern track lighting suspended from the high ceiling, and a row of clerestory windows.
The spartan room looked even more so because it was relatively empty. There were only ten minutes left before the volunteer staff shut down the buffet; most pilgrims had already come and gone.
I spied Marco sitting by himself in the back corner, near the array of tin trays that constituted the modest buffet. He wore a brown T-shirt and tan shorts, and he needed a shave. His muscular legs reminded me of a cyclist friend. He waved me over.
“Good morning,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Much, much better. I think I can eat now.”
“Great. Try the things that look like pancakes.” He pointed at the remnants of his on the tin plate in front of him. “And I think the rice dish would work out for you, too.”
“Okay.”
I sidled over and put together a plate of lumpy not-pancakes and rice with indeterminate red and brown specks. There was a glass pitcher of purified ice water and a ceramic pot of tea. I brought over a cup of both as well and sat down next to Marco.
“Eat,” he said. “I want to tell you some important things.”
I nodded my assent and tried the pancake-ish things. Were they made out of turnips? Parsnips? It was definitely a root. I had to press down hard with my fork to make inroads.
“When Baba died,” Marco said, “his spiritual position—his job, if you will—fell to someone else. Not me. At any given time, there are various qualified candidates—advanced souls who are capable of regulating universal energy.” He watched me closely. Was he about to tell me even more intense things?
“I don’t know what that means,” I said. “Did Buddha do that, too? Is it something that comes with being enlightened?”
“I don’t know Buddha’s deal. Just being enlightened doesn’t necessarily mean you’re capable of running things at the core level. There are thousands of fully awake beings, but only a handful of spiritual administrators.”
“And you’re not one of them.” I shoveled food in my mouth and chewed self-consciously.
“No.” Marco shook his head and smiled. “They have too much overtime.”
I nodded. “They probably need a union,” I said, “but if they’re not management, I guess nobody is.”
“That’s certainly true,” Marco agreed, smiling. “So Baba had a successor—someone who stepped in and seamlessly filled that role. But in the meantime, the actual Baba reincarnated again.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “If Baba was enlightened—and then some—why would he ne
ed to come back? Didn’t he work through all of his—what do you call them—samskaras? The karmic gunk?”
“Yes. Good question.” Marco leaned back in his chair. “Sometimes enlightened souls come back purely to be in service—to help the world—not because they have any personal business.”
“Is that what they call a bodhisattva?” I asked. I tried the rice dish. It wasn’t bad.
“Exactly,” Marco said. “But the energy in Buddha or Jesus or Baba is something different than an ordinary bodhisattva’s. These incarnations only show up every eight hundred years or so to help keep things on track. None of these avatars has ever reincarnated right away before.”
“Hey, is it you? Are you Baba?”
“No, I’m too old. Baba’s reincarnation is forty-two.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m following you so far.”
“So the problem is now we have the Baba position-holder and Baba himself—in a new body—living concurrently. As I said, this isn’t how it usually works.” Marco swatted away a bug. I had the fleeting thought that it was the same one following him around for days.
“So are they working as a team? Are we better off because we’ve got both of them?”
By now, we were the only breakfasters left in the sweltering dining room. The heat had ramped up while we were speaking, and it was quite uncomfortable. Kitchen workers hauled buffet items out of the room, and one of them came by and took our empty plates and silverware.
“Next time,” the young African-American woman told me with a glare, “bring your shit up to the window.”
“Sure.”
Marco began speaking again. “You’d think the two could get along—that their teamwork would benefit us. But as it happens, the successor and the incarnation are in bitter disagreement over who should perform which function, and what should be done about the state of the world.”
“Really?” That didn’t make much sense to me.
“Have you noticed how chaotic the world has become? How we seem to be veering toward self-destruction as a species?”
“Well, sure.”
“That’s the result of two different hands on the world’s helm. Both of them have their own ideas about how to create and maintain the energy templates that precede physical manifestation. Are you familiar with these concepts?”
“Not really, but let me get the rest of this straight,” I said. “You’re saying that one guy does one thing and the other one undoes it or does something else entirely?” I wiped the sweat from my brow and then wiped my hand on the front of my shirt.
“Yes. They ought to be beyond this sort of behavior, but technically they’re still people. And they emerged from two different traditions, as well—Hinduism and Buddhism. That doesn’t help.”
“Is this why that new disease is out of control?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” Marco replied. “But life on this planet is not a viable system as it stands. All sorts of cataclysmic problems will keep arising if you and I don’t intercede.”
“Hold it,” I said. “It’s one thing to fight thugs or oppose crackpot religious groups. This sounds like something on an entirely different level. These guys are like demigods or something, right?”
He nodded. “But that’s not really the problem,” he said. “Don’t sell yourself short in the energy department, and I’d advise you to never underestimate me.” He turned to face me; his gaze was a laser.
I didn’t need a warning; I would certainly never underestimate him. “Okay,” I said, since he seemed to be waiting for a response before he’d continue.
“The problem is,” he said, “there isn’t a pre-existing energy template for this eventuality—for our intervention. We’ll need to generate it from scratch—out of basic, undifferentiated energy—and this is much more difficult. We’ll be working against the flow—against karma.”
“So we’ll be up against two spiritual heavy hitters and the resting inertia of the entire universe?”
“That’s right, Sid.”
I tried to mimic a movie trailer for some lame action flick. “And the fate of the world hangs in the balance?” I said in a booming announcer’s voice.
Marco took me literally, which scared me. “Yes,” he said.
I paused and thought for a moment. “And in the meantime,” I said, “we have to awaken people’s consciousness because the insomnia epidemic means that too few people will be sleeping to support illusion?”
“Right.” Marco smiled. “You can see why I need a partner. And it’s a good thing that Chris and perhaps Sam will be on board, too.”
“It sounds to me like we need a whole army.”
“You may be right. I’m sorry I couldn’t level with you sooner, but imagine how this conversation would’ve gone back on my island.”
“Even now, it sounds totally crazy.”
“It’s ironic that you’re a psychotherapist, isn’t it?” He tilted his chin up and watched me through half-closed eyes.
“Very.” I mulled over what he’d said. “I have a question,” I told him.
“Go ahead.”
“I’ve been thinking that this was all about Buddha, with a side trip to Baba’s tomb to get infused with energy. Now it sounds like it’s really about Meher Baba—or his legacy, I guess. Is Bhante full of crap? Are the Buddhists wrong about things? How do I reconcile all the competing points of view I’ve encountered so far? And how do I commit to whatever you and I are supposed to be doing if I can’t?”
“That’s up to you,” Marco said. “You have to sort through that for yourself. If something makes sense to you and it fits your experience, hang onto it. If not…” He waved his hand.
I saw the Italian in him in that moment. He could’ve been the ringmaster in a Fellini film or maybe a relatively benign Mafia boss in a Scorsese movie.
Marco continued. “Perhaps what I’m saying now makes sense to you. Perhaps it doesn’t. This is an example of what I mean. My role is to say things to you. You make of them what you will. I’m not here to argue, play salesman, or prove anything to you. There is a way to hold all this without experiencing its diversity as mutually exclusive or adversarial, but if you decide to walk away, there’s probably another way to save the world. If not, we’ll all just reincarnate on some other planet—in some other type of body.”
“Really? How many other inhabitable planets are there?” I asked him.
“About eighteen thousand in this universe.”
“How could you possibly know that? And what do you mean, ‘in this universe’?”
“Modern physics is right about the multiverse. There are an infinite number of universes, Sid.”
“My head hurts,” I reported.
“I assume you’ve been in samadhi by now?”
“Yes.”
“Do it some more. You’ll see for yourself,” he said.
I thought things over. Breakfast had gone down smoothly, and I could practically feel the calories firing up my brain cells. After a few minutes, I was just about ready to formally throw my hat into Marco’s ring. Then Chris careened into the room.
“Guys!” he called. “I’ve got news. That really old man with Burt is his great-uncle, and he’s some kind of spiritual capo, and he’s in the tomb. Even I could feel his vibe from way across the plateau, and there’s weird light leaking out from the windows. You don’t want to miss this.”
I looked at Marco.
“He’s the position holder,” he said. “Baba’s successor.”
“Really?”
“Yes. And the reincarnated Baba is here, too,” Marco added.
“So the shit’s going to hit the fan?” Chris asked.
Marco smiled. “It will be lively. Very lively.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
We headed back up to the tomb. With each step, the energy phenomenon that awaited us throbbed more strongly. It was a lot like the outhouse bench energy, but amplified a hundred times. When we climbed high enough, I saw a purple aura soaring
skyward from the tomb. I’d never seen anything like it before.
Surprisingly, I didn’t feel panicked. If I’d been on my own, I’d have been more concerned. But energy didn’t intimidate me now that I felt whole, and I walked and sweated with Marco and Chris by my side. We were a team. I guess I’d signed up after all.
Burt stood by the front door. His dark beard wasn’t as perfectly trimmed now, and he sported a multi-colored bruise on his forehead. I didn’t see the tomb keeper or any pilgrims.
“You can’t go in,” he said. “It’s a high-level meeting. My uncle has returned.”
“My friend is at that level, too,” I said, gesturing at Marco.
“Oh, I doubt that,” Burt said. “He is obviously an ordinary fellow. He is nothing like my uncle or the other man.”
Marco pointed a finger at Burt, and sparks flew out of his fingertips. It reminded me of my handshake with Paul back in Santa Cruz. Then he told Burt that he knew his favorite number—twenty-seven—and that Burt had wet his pants when he’d become lost in a crowd when he was six.
The Indian man’s eyes widened.
“And what about this?” Chris said, dancing around and snapping his fingers like an idiot.
“That I am very much unimpressed by,” Burt said. “But perhaps Sid and his friend should go in. The African man can wait out here with me.”
Marco went in first, and I followed. We dispensed with the traditional bowing.
A very old Indian man sat cross-legged against a side wall, his eyes closed. He reminded me of Ram—the yacht owner—but he was lighter skinned and more wrinkled. Also, he had hair—Ram had been completely bald. His nose and ears drooped as if gravity were getting the best of him.
He was moving his hands in complex, ever-shifting mudras, creating the purple-tinted energy that we’d spied from the hill. It bounced around the room, but it didn’t feel harmful. I sensed the visible component of his effort was just a side effect of what he was really doing.
Across the room sat a Tibetan-looking man in a maroon robe. He was in his early forties, and his round face exhibited a curious combination of compassion and despair, as though he’d started with one and then developed the other one later. I couldn’t say which came first.
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