Coattail Karma

by Verlin Darrow

  He was about my height and coloring, but his hawk nose was much bigger and more chiseled than mine. In photos, he looked fierce, as though he were about to pull out a ceremonial dagger and carve someone up for eyeballing him. But in person he emanated a warmth and bonhomie that overrode all that.

  That day, he wore a pink golf shirt and dark khaki pants. He looked very out of place at the golf course, but then again, he’d looked equally out of place at the luxury hotel he’d managed when I was a boy. This was my sense of him throughout my childhood. From his name—Charles—to his house, his friends, and his career, he’d always seemed like a fish out of water.

  Charles hugged me. “Damn, it’s good to see you, Sid. Why did we ever lose touch?”

  I shrugged. Then my father introduced everyone.

  “The Jason Patariki?” Charles asked, shaking the Maori’s hand.

  “The one and only.”

  “What an honor. My brother was a rugger, but it was too rough for me. I played once, and then I ran back to the cricket pitch.”

  Charles reached out then and pulled my father’s hand off the table to shake it, reminding me again of his sightlessness.

  “Where are the dogs?” I asked my dad.

  “Charles said it would be better if we left them in the car,” my mother said.

  “He’s a heartless bastard,” my father added, grinning.

  The Sikh laughed. I’d forgotten his laugh; it was more of a bray.

  I thought of Spot. I’d forgotten about him, too. What was going on with me? The more I learned to live in the moment, the less I seemed capable of hanging onto the immediate past. Where would it end? Would everything not in plain sight in a given moment cease to exist for me?

  Spot appeared by my side and then immediately disappeared again. Maybe I could summon him by thinking about him, or perhaps he knew from his end when I needed a reminder.

  “Sid?” Charles said. “Could I speak to you alone in my office?”

  “Sure. Excuse us, all.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I followed him out a side door, down an external flight of stairs, and into a dark room under the dining room.

  “Sit, sit,” he said, gesturing at a well-worn office chair in front of a battered metal desk. I’d have thought that the general manager of a golf course would’ve had a nicer office than, say, an Auckland customs official. But this space was nothing more than a storage area with some old furniture in it.

  I’d assumed Charles wanted to talk to me about my dad—about his health, more specifically. But instead he began rather obliquely.

  “You know, Sid,” he said, “I’ve been a good friend of your family for a long time. And it was very hard to see you suffer when I knew perfectly well Allen and Andrea hadn’t died in a plane wreck.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “And I wanted to step in and rescue you from your suffering—to tell you about them, and also a few other things that might’ve helped you get through that difficult time.”

  I wasn’t sure where we were going with this. Was he apologizing—working off his guilt? Did he have something else on his mind?

  “Now it’s time to tell you,” he said and then stopped.

  Apparently, it wasn’t time quite yet. But I knew from my work that if I waited, it would come. Charles wanted to tell me something, and he was getting ready to do it. I watched his face. He seemed to morph from fear to sadness to shame to anger—at himself? He was all over the map. What could arouse this particular constellation of strong emotions? I had no idea.

  “So it’s time,” he said again.

  “Please,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  “I wanted to tell you before, but Andrea said it would impede your progress.”

  I waited.

  “So the thing is, Sid…” He took a deep breath and looked me in the eye.

  Then his phone rang. God dammit. Give me a break.

  Charles gathered himself again, relieved to be interrupted. He picked up the phone, said, “Yes?” and then listened for a while. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll be right there.” He hung up and turned back to me. “I’m sorry, Sid. This’ll only take a minute. Can you wait here for me?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you need to tell me first?” I suggested. “You’ll feel better, and you’ll probably be able to handle your business better, too.”

  “It’s an emergency,” Charles said. “The computers are down, so the registers aren’t operating.”

  He pushed his chair back and strode out, leaving me alone and frustrated in his crappy office. I decided to meditate for a few minutes to re-center myself. If Charles wasn’t back soon, I’d wait for him upstairs with the others.

  Just as I closed my eyes, though, I heard my name called. I looked around. There was no one in the room.

  “Sid! Over here!”

  The voice was coming from across the desk, but no one was there. I got up and walked over. Marco’s face was on the computer monitor. He winked at me.

  “Hi, Sid,” he said. “I’m sorry I can’t be there in person. Let’s talk.”

  I fell down onto Charles’s desk chair. “I think that’s the first time I ever heard you say you’re sorry about anything,” I told him. I was really just stalling to regain my composure.

  “It’s just a figure of speech,” he said. “I’m not actually apologizing.”

  “No, of course not. That’s not in the evil genius handbook, is it?”

  He smiled. It was probably impossible to hurt his feelings, assuming he had any. I felt very unintimidated by Marco, though—free to say whatever I pleased.

  “I need to tell you some things,” he said.

  “Of course you do. Everyone needs to tell me things.”

  “Are you willing to listen?”

  “Maybe—for a minute,” I said. “I’m in the middle of something here. But go ahead—I’m listening.”

  “People have started dying,” Marco said.

  “What?”

  “Let me explain. You’ve reached a certain status spiritually, so whoever has tried to harm you is now facing a karmic reckoning.”

  “They’re being punished?”

  “Not exactly. That makes it sound personal. It’s just how the universe works. It balances itself. Do you imagine that Judas or Pilate had fun lives after Jesus was killed?”

  “I suppose not. But how do we know it’s some instant karma deal? Maybe they’re just dying for the usual reasons.”

  “It’s the way it happens. Take Frank, for example—your Rat-Face. He returned to his scam in LA yesterday—driving around a fake paper-shredding truck and then selling people’s financial information to criminal gangs.”

  “That’s a creative crime,” I said.

  Marco nodded. “Frank was on the 405 heading south when a truck in front of him lost a crate of chickens from its load. He jammed on his brakes, skidded, and banged into a guardrail.”

  “So far, that’s only a little weird—LA weird.”

  “Frank had just taken off his sunglasses, and he had them on a lanyard around his neck. Can you guess why?”

  “It got cloudy? The sun set? Does it matter?”

  “There was a partial solar eclipse down there,” Marco said.

  “All right. We’re getting pretty random here,” I admitted.

  “They were sunglasses he’d stolen from a department store. They weren’t shatterproof. When the airbag in his truck inflated, it broke the frame of the glasses, and a metal piece drove a shard of glass into his heart.”

  “Ugh.”

  “The vehicle behind them happened to be an ambulance, and they could’ve saved his life, but earlier that morning a former employee had stolen a key piece of medical equipment.”

  “Okay. I see what you mean.”

  “Frank’s dead. Tommy T. is dead. Bhante’s been diagnosed with a rare type of blood cancer. One of your brothers fell in a sink hole and broke his hip. The other one is in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.�
��

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “I’m just fine,” he said. “I’ve never been your enemy.”

  “So you say.”

  “I do. Now Jason is a bit of a special case, but be aware that if you’re standing next to him, you need to stay alert. Keep your eye out for falling pianos. Or escaped lions. Regardless of what you currently think about me, the world truly does need you. Be careful, Sid.”

  “I will. But let me ask you this,” I said. “You say you’re not my enemy, but you lied to me, manipulated me, and put me through all kinds of psychological hell—not to mention you probably dosed me with an illegal drug.”

  “And are you the better for it?” Marco asked. “Have all these things been in your best long-term interest?”

  “The way I understand life now, everything is always in my best long-term interest. That doesn’t differentiate what you’ve done from anything else that happens. I know you’re an ends-justifies-the-means kind of guy, Marco. You told me that early on. But I’m not. And if we’re looking for harm that’s been done, what about that list of dead people you just told me about? Haven’t your actions led these people to their doom?”

  “Certainly not. Everyone determines his own karma. You’re still hung up on cultural and moral norms,” Marco said. “These things don’t matter. Not for you and me. Our evolution—our energy—has freed us from these human constraints. Now, each event that comes our way is a unique instance for which there is no textbook response. A skillful behavior will always fall out of us because of who we’ve become. We’re off the map. Surely you’ve noticed that your previous set of human responses are obsolete now?”

  “Well, my emotional responses certainly seem to be beside the point, and I’ve definitely become far less judgmental,” I said. “But I don’t know about the I’m-an-exception-to-the-rules part. That sounds like what you hear from a newcomer at an AA meeting.”

  “The man you were with—Charles Singh—is about to tell you something extremely repugnant, according to our cultural norms. Will you be repulsed? No. You will love him and hug him. You will heal him. This will be what is called for. So it is with me. I’ve done what was called for with you. I have no regrets.”

  “I’ve had enough,” I said. “I’m still vulnerable to this kind of talk. I need to protect myself. Goodbye, Marco.”

  I shut down the computer and the monitor, returned to the chair in front of the desk, and pondered Marco’s pronouncements.

  If it was true that fate was targeting my enemies, what did that mean? That karma was a mean son of a bitch? That I was responsible for a succession of bizarre tragedies? Perhaps Marco was killing people and framing Fate. Rinpoche had feared for his life. Should I?

  Charles returned. Presumably, Marco’s tech guys had screwed with the Seascape computers and had now released them back to the golf course’s control.

  Would Marco’s predictions turn out to be true? How could he know what Charles would do?

  “Thirty-eight years ago,” the Sikh began, “I was a very different man. It was because of what happened that I became the man you see now. Some things are sobering and make you realize that you must change your ways.”

  He paused and gave me a chance to respond. I did not.

  He looked down. “This is very hard for me,” he said. “I have lived with so much shame all these years, and now my shame is here in the room with us.”

  I waited.

  Charles took a deep breath and glanced up at me. “I’m not sure I can say this,” he told me. Tears welled up in his eyes. He looked down again.

  “Do you want to write it down?” I asked. “You could write it on a piece of paper and give it to me.”

  “Yes. This is a good plan,” he said.

  He scribbled on a notepad, tore off a sheet, and then slid it across the desk to me. His hand was trembling.

  The note read “I impregnated my own niece when her parents trusted me to watch over her in the States. She was only fourteen. She died in childbirth. I killed her with my penis.”

  Jesus. I looked across the desk at Charles. His head was bowed, and he was sobbing.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked. My tone was sharper than I’d intended. Charles was an incestuous pedophile, my mind told me. But my heart urged me to ease his suffering. “It’s the distant past,” I told him before he had a chance to answer. “Let it go. Forgive yourself.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. He stopped crying and looked me squarely in the eye. “You don’t understand what I’m trying to tell you.”

  I waited again. This was getting annoying. Tell me, or don’t tell me. Charles finally got it out.

  “I’m your father,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  So there it was. My lifelong quest to know my birth parents was finally over. Now I knew who I was—or who I had been, I guess. I felt surprisingly unsatisfied. I’d much preferred the born-in-Nepal version that Marco had fed me back on his island.

  I could never meet my birth mother. I only existed because of a statutory rape. And I wasn’t about to drop everything to go on a fishing trip to get to know my new dad.

  I felt angry, but I also felt very sad. That poor girl. She’d never even had a chance to meet me—or my brothers. And for some reason, Charles felt he couldn’t be a father to any of us. Why had my parents kept his secret? Was it part of the give-Sid-a-childhood-exactly-like-the-Buddha’s plan? What about the other two babies? Were their fates simply subordinate to mine?

  Charles had reverted to sobbing again. Periodically, he tried to force out words, but his grief overwhelmed him. Finally, he managed to say, “I’m so sorry, Sid. I’m so sorry.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why give us all away? We were triplets, right?”

  He nodded. “Yes. I couldn’t cope—not with three infants. I was a selfish alcoholic. And I had a family already—a wife and a daughter. Andrea and Allen were happy to take you—it was their idea—but they insisted the other two boys be sent overseas for adoption. That was their offer, and they wouldn’t say why until just last week.” He paused and watched my face.

  “Did you give them the pick of the litter?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  Charles was still studying me intently. I became aware he’d been waiting for decades to find out how I was going to react to his news. So far, I’d asked questions and confused him with inappropriate humor. I needed to do better. After all, he was a fellow being who was suffering intensely—whatever he had or hadn’t done. When I realized this, love filled me.

  “I forgive you,” I said. “I love you.” And I did. My desire for more answers—more explanations—was swept away by the waves of energy that cascaded inside me. For a moment, I remembered Marco had predicted all of this, but then that was gone, too.

  I walked around the desk, pulled Charles out of his chair, and hugged the crap out of him. What else was there to do? Only love could heal something like this.

  My energy surged out to him, bathing him, washing away his guilt and shame. What little of these I had left markedly diminished as well. For the first time, I understood that whenever my energy benefited someone, it blessed me, too—in exactly the same way.

  I had to hold Charles up after a moment. He made gurgling noises at first, and then he began humming—kind of like a cell phone set on vibrate. Once the energy settled down, I lowered him back onto his chair. He was still humming, but it wasn’t as loud now. His eyes were closed, and his face at peace. He wasn’t asleep, but he wasn’t awake.

  As I stood beside Charles, I felt the new energy in him—what I’d sent—connecting to his own, merging into something more. I could sense that he’d be fine—he’d thrive, in fact. But I could also tell that if he were awake during the ongoing reconfiguring process, he’d get in his own way.

  I moved over to the other side of the desk again and sat down. I was in no hurry to get back upstairs. Once again, things were
coming at me much faster than I could process them.

  I considered what Marco had told me first. Suddenly, people were dying. Or getting cancer. Or falling down. I’d never thought of karma as something so negative—so punitive. Despite Marco’s explanation, it still felt counterintuitive that the universe would dole out instant, drastic payback to anyone. And all of this was supposed to be because of me? Because of who I had become?

  Of course, Marco could be fabricating the whole thing. But why would he? His goal seemed to be to warn me—to get me to be vigilant around Jason. Did he need to lie so outrageously to motivate me to stay safe? It didn’t seem like it. It had also felt true as he was telling me.

  So how can I protect people from this phenomenon? Should I tell everyone not to cross me? Maybe I can figure out how to settle disputes faster than the universe can nail my adversaries. But would that really be for the best? Who was I to second-guess karma? I know what alarms me—what feels wrong—but what does that have to do with the price of bananas?

  I tried to think about being Charles Singh’s son—making me a Sikh by birth, I guess—but this went nowhere. I simply couldn’t get my mind in gear about it. Was it too much to absorb? Too irrelevant now? Perhaps I just wasn’t in charge of my mind anymore. Maybe the energy or karma or whatever it was didn’t think it was a good idea for me to ruminate on the subject. I didn’t know.

  Once I understood I couldn’t think about it, I walked out of the office and back up the stairs to the dining room. It was empty; everyone was gone.

  The bartender strolled over, an older woman dripping with Native American silver jewelry—rings, earrings, and noisy bracelets.

  “Are you looking for your friends?” she asked in a gravelly smoker’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  “They went out on the terrace to have dessert. Would you like anything?”

  “Sure. Pie?”

  She rattled off a long list of choices. Were golfers big pie eaters? I settled on blackberry.

  “There he is,” Jason called as I stepped onto the expansive back deck of the clubhouse. Spot sat upright in the Maori’s voluminous lap. Jason didn’t seem to be aware of him.