Coattail Karma

by Verlin Darrow

  “I understand. You’re saying I should respond to Marco based on the not-okayness of his current behavior, not on the back story of how he developed the bad behavior.”

  “Is that a question?” he asked.

  “Let’s pretend my voice went up at the end of that sentence,” I said.

  “Sorry, it’s not your turn.” He laughed. “This is fun,” he added. “I like you.”

  I was screwing up my screw-up. “Wait a minute,” I said. “How long are we going to do this? I have to go to the bathroom.”

  He closed his eyes, grimaced, and then opened them again. “No, you don’t,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  He was right. “That didn’t count as a question, by the way,” I said. “It’s still my turn.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  Surely Rinpoche couldn’t be fond of this kind of arguing. Wasn’t I demonstrating another ordinary human foible?

  He continued. “Let’s let Baba’s old body decide,” he said. He turned to the crypt behind me. “Baba? If that wasn’t a question, speak up. If it was, stay silent like usual.”

  He held up a hand and cocked his ear. Then he tried to throw his voice like a ventriloquist. He wasn’t very good at it. “Let the kid have another one,” he said, pretending to be Baba.

  I felt a chill run up my spine. The voice he used was identical to the one in my Baba dream. That was exactly how he’d sounded, which no one but Ram could have known, since Baba had never talked to anyone else. It was eerie.

  “Do you experience Baba as a separate person inside of you?” I asked. “Reincarnation doesn’t work that way, does it?”

  “It doesn’t usually. And that’s not the best characterization. But we have an arrangement. These things are possible—they’re just rarely called for.”

  The two others came back into the tomb, Marco leading the way.

  “So how’s it going?” he asked.

  “Sid is acceptable to me,” Rinpoche said. “His energy remained strong and pure throughout the conversation.”

  I leapt to my feet and sprinted out of the tomb, knocking Ram to the side as I passed him. I’d had enough. More than enough. They could all go fuck themselves.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  My mind was now officially, totally blown. All the previous mind-blowing had been nothing compared to this. At the tomb, I’d been keeping it together to make my case. Now the crazy reality was asserting itself.

  I was going to run the planet? Administer mystery energy? And this trio of power-hungry maniacs was going to mess with me against my will—rearrange me even more?

  I kept running beyond the tomb complex. Really running. I was bathed in sweat after a few dozen yards. I headed down the far side of the hill, away from the pilgrim center, where I discovered a rough path heading toward some sort of stone ruin across a wide, plowed field. A human projectile, I hurtled down the rugged hill, one misstep away from a broken leg. I didn’t really think I could escape from Marco and the others, but I needed to try. Enough was enough.

  I was so weak, I could only jog shortly after joining the path. By the time I reached the low stone wall at the end of the field, I was reduced to walking fast. And when I reached the doorway of the old stone building, I collapsed to my knees and gasped for air. I felt much the way I had after swimming away from Tommy T.’s fishing boat. And about as wet. But here, no one can save me the way Marco had in his rowboat. How could I be rescued when all the qualified rescuers are the ones plotting against me? No ordinary person can stand against them.

  And what ordinary person would empathize with my frantic attempts to evade enlightenment, oneness, and power? These are universally valued across all cultures. Don’t we all yearn for these?

  I decided I didn’t care about any of that. I was sick and tired of the whole deal. Thinking about it was just renting out space in my head to these people—or whatever they were. Fuck them. Fuck them all.

  I wished Sam was with me. For days now, events had conspired to keep us apart—to keep me from discussing ongoing developments with her, to limit her loving presence and healing energy. Here I was, on my own, forced to handle—or not handle—the craziest part of the whole insane thriller plot that had become my life. It wasn’t just unfair. It was wrong. Deeply wrong. I craved a connection with Sam in that moment. She could’ve been my cable back to my essence, my truth. Without them, I was lost.

  I crawled into the ruined building. There was no ceiling, and the black, sooty floor immediately caked on my knees. More soot stained the simple limestone walls, and various animal droppings decorated most of the site. But somebody had swept a corner of the ruin recently, and there was no trash or graffiti.

  I sat down and began to lose consciousness, sprawling across the filthy floor. Holy shit. Is this a remote attack by Marco or Rinpoche? Am I still sick with kundalini?

  Then I dreamt. I was alone in a temple—the building I was in. It had been a temple. But it was new in the dream. Brass lanterns hung along the light-pink side walls. Brightly painted statues of Hindu gods and goddesses soared larger than life on a gray stone altar, which sat on a beautiful, green marble floor. I stood still, looking at the statues. I felt peaceful.

  “Hello, Sid,” a deep voice said from behind me.

  I turned around. It was Meher Baba. He wore a navy-blue doorman’s uniform with red trim, and he smoked a huge cigar.

  “Whimsical, aren’t I?” he said. He had a Brooklyn accent.

  “I guess so,” I said. “Aren’t you dead?”

  “Not necessarily,” he said.

  His accent was gone, and now he wore an LA Lakers basketball uniform with the infinity symbol on it. He stood about eight feet tall.

  “I’ll bet you’re a handful to cover in the pivot,” I said.

  “I don’t know what that means,” he said.

  Now he wore an orange robe and munched on a jelly doughnut. There was no transition between personas. “Here’s the main thing,” he said. “The others are all crazy. You can be spiritual and crazy. It’s a common combination. So you really do need to be the one to run this world.”

  “Seriously? Me?”

  “Yes. It’s not as simple as it sounds, though.”

  “Believe me, it doesn’t sound simple at all,” I said.

  He smiled. “It’s not my old job you’d be doing, you see, and it’s not exactly you who would be doing it—not this you. You’ll see.”

  “When? When will I see?”

  “Soon.” Now he looked exactly like the black-and-white photo of him that hung in the reception area of the pilgrim center.

  “Why me?” I asked.

  “You’re the reincarnation of Buddha’s son,” he said. “And you were my father.”

  Whoa. Could that be true? “Tell me what to do,” I said.

  “Just love,” he said, gazing at me with his compelling, loving brown eyes. “Love and then love more. Love everybody and everything. Love all the time. Love, love, love.”

  Then he vanished, and I woke up. Five dogs lay with me, surrounding me in a circle. There was an exact distance between each of them—about a foot. They were all skinny and black, with various white patches.

  Chris called my name. The dogs growled. I reached over and patted the nearest one. They stopped growling, and I sat up. All of the dogs sat up, too.

  “Whoa,” Chris said, ambling into the ruins. “Cool building. Cool dogs.”

  I watched him. It was difficult to reenter the ordinary world after the dream—or the vision, I guess. And I certainly hadn’t had an opportunity to assimilate the sudden appearance of the nearly identical dogs. Talking to a person was more than I could manage. I did feel much calmer after the conversation with Baba, though.

  Chris sat down beside one of the black and white dogs and patted its head. Then he looked at his hand. “I’ve probably got rabies now, or maybe some parasite that eats your brain,” he said.

  “Probably,” I parroted.

  “You know,”
he continued, edging away from the nearest dog, “the whole point of staying on the grounds of the pilgrim center is it’s safe there. There are a lot of bad stories about people who wandered away. This isn’t movie India. This isn’t a big city with lots of tourists. Come on back with me, Sid.”

  Three of the dogs cocked their heads and listened to him. The two nearest me continued to watch me intently. They all seemed unusually aware for dogs.

  “Did Marco send you?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He said you were wigging out. Since I’m so gentle and soothing, of course he thought of me. So get your ugly, dopey ass moving, Sid. I don’t know what happened in the tomb while I was chanting with fucking Nana and some old lady from Missouri, but you’re not accomplishing anything by sitting here with these mangy triplet dogs—who smell awful, by the way. Why the hell did I ever touch one of them?”

  It wasn’t like Chris to miscount anything—there were five dogs—but I let that pass. I was more focused on integrating the information Baba had shared in my vision. In essence, he’d told me to go back to the others—or at least to accept the position I’d been offered. But he also said that the reason I needed to cooperate was that the others were crazy. That certainly didn’t bode well.

  Maybe I’d manufactured the dream experience. Although it had felt like I really had met Baba, the subconscious is capable of amazing things.

  “I needed some time to process things,” I finally told Chris, mustering some cognition. “And it feels safe in here. This was a temple.”

  “How do you know that? It’s just a bunch of messed-up walls. Every ruin isn’t a sacred site, you know. Some of them used to be slaughterhouses or whorehouses.” He swept his arm across the room, such as it was.

  “That doesn’t matter, Chris. The thing is, I won’t be ready to go back until I figure some stuff out. You have no idea what they’re asking me to do.”

  “Who? Marco and the uncle?”

  “There was a Rinpoche in there, too—a Tibetan guy. Actually, I think you’ve met him.”

  “Sure. That guy is a blast,” Chris said. “Have you heard him laugh? He laughs at everything. So what do they want you to do?”

  “Pretty much run the world, I gather. Or be one of the people that does, anyway.”

  “Well, this planet is shit out of luck, then, isn’t it?” Chris said. “No offense, Sid, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “So how about you go away and come back in a while after I’ve had a chance to sort things out. I’ve got all these dogs here, too. I’ll be safe. Who’d mess with a holy man surrounded by big dogs?”

  “All right,” Chris said. “Marco’s not going to be thrilled about this, but that’s his problem.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Take care,” Chris said as he got to his feet and padded away.

  I tried to think clearly about my situation, but that wasn’t in the cards just yet. Instead, after a few minutes of muddled not-thinking, I decided to go ahead and feel whatever feelings were lying in wait.

  They rushed in and flooded me, but without the usual physical expressions—at first, anyway. Nothing clenched, nor could I detect any fight or flight response. My mind took the brunt of the feelings in a way that I couldn’t explain. Aren’t minds precluded from directly experiencing emotions?

  I still fumed, but my fear was preeminent. And I was quite bewildered. These formed a stew of sorts, with even more emotions embedded in it, like chunks of meat.

  I explored each of these, finding more and more, realizing I was simultaneously feeling every emotion I knew. Some were specific and situational. Others were more global. I now felt terrified of Marco, for example. And my endocrine system was back online. When I thought about him, my entire lower body clenched and my heart started pounding. I also felt disheartened—a lead weight squatted on my head and shoulders. Everything was such a mess, with maniacs running the show.

  But I was thankful to be alive and healthy. I felt dread, I felt trapped, I felt repulsed, I felt outraged. But I was happy the planet was so beautiful. And I also felt longing, tenderness, reverence, and a new appreciation of the absurd. After a while, the strongest emotion became a surprising love for the dogs who still encircled me.

  All five held themselves perfectly still as I jumped back up into my head. I couldn’t afford the luxury of exploring all this. A single emotion might’ve been helpful—a guide of sorts. Angry? Go change something. Fearful? Run away. Tuning into the full range of emotions? Useless.

  Unfortunately, I still couldn’t think very well. I decided to meditate. In the past, I’d felt energized and sharper after sitting—like pressing a Sid restart button.

  When I shifted position to begin, the same three dogs that had listened so attentively to Chris jumped up and trotted away. The other two continued to lie at my feet.

  In seconds, I was in samadhi again, and this time there was absolutely no experience to have and no one there to experience anything, anyway. Everything just went blank.

  I wasn’t asleep or unconscious, and the blankness wasn’t onerous or boring. There wasn’t an I, in fact, and the blankness wasn’t the absence of something. It was more like being in contact with something realer than anything I’d ever known—something so real, there was nothing to know about it. It had no attributes or qualities, nor did it have an absence of these. It was transcendent of the realm in which anything existed. It just was.

  I don’t know how long I stayed in this mode, but I woke up from it when the remaining dogs started barking. Or so it seemed. When I opened my eyes, the dogs were on their feet and their mouths were moving, but no sound came out.

  “Hello?” a voice called through the doorway. “Are you in there, Sid?”

  It was an oddly familiar voice—a voice from the past.

  A moment later, a sixty-year-old white man ambled into the ruined temple, accompanied by the other three dogs.

  Then I saw who the man was. It was my father. My dead father.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “I realize this must be a shock,” he said.

  Alan Menk—my adopted father—was a relatively short man with a wide face that somehow managed to look proportionate to the rest of him and render a captain-of-industry bearing. On this occasion, he wore wraparound sunglasses, which seemed odd. Other than being fifteen years older since the last time I’d seen him, he looked like himself, all the way down to his pressed khaki pants, white shirt, and black shoes. My mother had called this “the uniform.” I suddenly wondered if she was alive, too.

  Before I could respond, my father approached me and continued talking. “Your mother and I faked our deaths because we had to. I know it was hard on you.”

  He stumbled momentarily on the uneven floor, but the dog walking beside him provided an inadvertent hip-check, and he righted himself. Then he lowered himself to the ground and sat across from me with his legs stretched out in front of him, leaving all of six inches of space between us. The three dogs spread out, and the five of them formed another uncannily perfect ring—this time around both of us.

  “Wow,” was all I could say. Both my mind and body felt numb and useless. I felt like a zombie instead of a grateful son who was joyous to see his father alive.

  “The thing is,” he continued, “your mother’s been running RGP for many years—with my help. Before we took charge, it was a cult, basically—an eddy in the stream of consciousness.”

  As usual, Father never missed a chance to inject what he considered to be a clever phrase into a conversation.

  “Now, the organization is in a position to transform the world,” he continued. “And you’re part of that. But we have rivals—bitter rivals. If they knew your mother and I were alive, we wouldn’t be for long.”

  I nodded. I just couldn’t muster words. Mom’s alive, too. What the hell!

  “It’s fine if you just want to listen,” he said. “I need to tell you quite a few things.” He drew several labor
ed breaths before speaking again—was he asthmatic now? “You’ve probably noticed that your life and Shakyamuni Buddha’s share many parallels. This was not by accident. Your mother and I raised you to become a Perfect Master—a fully realized soul—a modern Buddha—a…”

  “Yeah,” I interrupted with an edge to my voice. “I get it.”

  He laughed quietly, a careful, small laugh. “Sid’s still in there, isn’t he? Your energy is impressive, and our people have been reporting your meteoric rise, but that was a classic Sid-ism, wasn’t it?”

  “Why don’t you just keep telling me things?” I wasn’t in a rush to restart a personal relationship with this resurrected ghost. I didn’t like that this was my reaction, but it was what it was.

  “Certainly,” he said. “Our disappearance was part of your preparation. It’s important that you understand that. You needed to experience loss and suffering on a grand scale. You also needed to live a more ascetic life—without the benefit of the family money.”

  “Is that why you left me practically nothing at all in your wills—why everything went to a foundation?” I asked.

  I’m sure my resentment was evident in my tone. I was surprising myself with my immaturity. I thought I was beyond this sort of behavior.

  “Partly, yes. But that foundation is RGP, and we’ve always been acting in your best interests all these years—from behind the scenes, of course. Remember that scholarship that came through when you were ready to drop out of graduate school? That was us—the foundation—RGP. And when you needed to fix up that horrible old Jaguar of yours to commute to your first real job? Did you ever wonder why that mechanic charged you so little to fix so much?”

  “No,” I said.

  “He replaced the engine and transmission, and you never even noticed,” my father said. “I painted black smudges and grease marks on the new parts myself.”