“You see,” he whispered, “the great fear of the Tibetans was an untimely death! So they analyzed the death process. They found that there is a point of no return, a sinking down past recovery. There is a feeling of being unable to maintain one’s human form. A person panics. He feels as though he is falling. Dissolving. His bodily strength has slipped away. His cognition grows clouded.”
Bill read directly from the volume in his hands. As he moved into the light from the driveway, Janice read the title: The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
“All right,” Bill continued. “The next step. The warmth of the body fades. The eyes turn inward. The limbs tremble.”
“Bill, please! I don’t want to listen!”
“It’s what happened to Ivy, isn’t it? Listen, Janice. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Afterward, the cognition inverts, turns into miragelike flashes, and things come unreal, just the reverse of being born: the blood slows; this is called ‘the black path’ because the heart is dying. It’s the point of the worst panic. Vision is cut off. Memory dies. Breath is cut off. Now listen. ‘The mind that rides upon the wind leaves the central channel.’”
Bill looked up, triumphant.
“Do you understand that? ‘The mind that rides upon the wind’—the soul, Janice—‘leaves the channel of the body.’ Now follow what happens next!”
Janice, in spite of herself, was hypnotized by the rhythmic voice in front of her. Bill weaved slowly back and forth, his finger picking out phrases in the light of the rain and sleet behind him.
“‘Awareness,’” he read very slowly, “‘passes into the Clear Light of Death’!”
He looked up at her, frightened, yet gaining confidence when she offered no objection. He laughed hideously, uncertainly.
“‘The Clear Light of Death’! There it is! It’s mentioned everywhere, but here it is! Analyzed! And if the soul can pass into the light of emptiness, without fear, if it reaches a firm communion with the emptiness—that is, Nirvana—then it has embraced bliss! There is no return, no more return. It’s all oblivion… and peace…”
Slowly, as he spoke, Bill calmed down. The fire left his eyes. He became aware of the cold and shivered. The mania was gone.
“But if there is panic,” he said with a dull finality, glazed, “if there is no acceptance, then there must be a return, another life… who knows, a hundred more lives…”
Bill came forward, sat at the edge of the bed, and put his arm on Janice’s shoulder. He was sweating, his shirt damp, his hair moist over his brows. He looked into her face.
“In an untimely death,” he said simply, “there can be no acceptance.”
Janice moved slightly back, but his hand firmly held her shoulder.
“Even for somebody trained all his life like a priest, it’s almost impossibly difficult. But for somebody like Ivy—”
A hand went slowly to Janice’s mouth. “Or like Audrey Rose!” she whispered hoarsely.
He nodded slowly. “Did Ivy have a chance to prepare for death?” he asked simply. “No! It was too sudden. You saw what I saw, Janice. She was in a state of panic!”
Bill wearily stood. He seemed not to have the strength to move anymore. Dismally he watched the lessening rain, dripping with monotonous regularity in thin silver streaks at the window.
“Ivy could not have passed through,” he said gently. “She could not have passed through into the radiance… dissolving… into a circle of pure light.” Then, softly: “Hoover was wrong, Janice. Our daughter’s soul is not at peace. She’s back. Ivy’s come back.”
Just then the main room light suddenly went on, hurting their eyes, and Dr. Geddes stood at the door. He studied them both for a few seconds.
“How are you feeling, Bill?” Dr. Geddes asked.
“Oh, better. Much better. Listen, I feel pretty rotten about what happened. I promise it won’t happen again.”
“I hope not, Bill. It really wasn’t like you.”
Dr. Geddes smiled awkwardly, sensing he had broken something between Janice and Bill, but not certain just what.
“Would you like me to call down to the gate for a taxi, Janice?”
“Yes, please—”
When Geddes left, there was a momentary impasse. Bill made a few desultory efforts at cleaning the debris from the floor. Janice joined him by carefully, timidly, scraping together the sheets and note cards into neat piles.
“I’m going to need your help,” he whispered.
She stopped. “What kind of help?”
“I’ll call you at home. Now just keep picking up these papers. I don’t want Dr. Geddes to get wind of anything.”
They worked in silence until she saw the headlights of a taxi moving up the driveway.
“It’s the cab,” she said. “I’d better go.”
“Okay. Good. I won’t call you tonight. They listen to your calls around here, no matter what they tell you. I’ll find a way to call you in a couple of days.”
They heard Dr. Geddes’s footsteps coming. Janice stood up.
“I’d like to discuss your prescriptions,” Dr. Geddes said. “I mean, with your wife. So she’ll understand.”
“Sure, doctor,” Bill said, eager to restore a working relationship with Dr. Geddes. Janice embraced Bill. “I’ll call you. I’ll need your help,” he whispered in her ear.
Then he separated from her and smiled broadly.
“Good night, darling,” he said just a trifle loudly. “And thanks a million for coming down. I don’t know what happened. I just—just flipped out—”
Dr. Geddes drew Janice discreetly off toward the lobby.
“This episode with Mr. Borofsky,” he said uncertainly, “it worries me a great deal. I think you’ll agree that a visit home is out of the question.”
Janice said nothing. She turned slowly and looked casually over her shoulder at Bill through the open door of his room. He caught her looking at him and smiled.
“I think he knows he’s in trouble,” Dr. Geddes continued quickly. “I really can’t countenance a departure from observation at this time. Do you disagree?”
The sudden cancellation of Bill’s visit seemed to push the boulder back in front of Bill’s tomb. Janice felt an overpowering sense of relief.
“No,” she said, trying not to sound eager. “You’re right.” She hurried out of the building, over the slippery gravel, and into the taxi.
The train ride back into the city flashed by like a jagged nightmare, whispering voices, hissing insinuations, and the people waiting at the stations loomed like twisted piles of flesh, already decomposing.
7
During the next weeks, Bill telephoned almost daily. He wanted books. He read Janice the titles of pamphlets he needed. He wanted her to write letters to several authorities in New York, and to a psychiatrist in Berlin. Impatient for her replies, he began to call her at work.
He needed copies of articles from the encyclopedias of religion at the New York Public Library. Mailed special delivery to the clinic. When she visited him, he cross-examined her ruthlessly. He tried to trip her up to see if she had really made the telephone calls, really written the letters. Exhausted, she shoved the written replies in his face and he mumbled an apology.
Finally, at work, Bill called and demanded that during her lunch break she visit the Temple where Hoover had last been seen.
“I can’t go there, Bill,” she whispered into the telephone, her fingers angrily toying with her paintbrush on the drafting table.
“Why the hell not?”
“It’s where I went to the service for Ivy. I—I just don’t want to go back there.”
“I’ve got to know the answers!” he said loudly.
She held the receiver away from her ear.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” he said. “Look, just a few questions. I’m going crazy here. Geddes won’t let me out for another month.”
“All right, Bill,” she said, reaching for a pencil and note pad. “Read me your questions.”
“What do you mean, computations?” Janice asked warily.
“Never mind. Just go there. Ask the high priest or whatever he’s called. And call me back when you’ve found out.”
“Well, I can’t go today.”
There was a suspicious silence at the other end.
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve already had my lunch break and this will take at least an hour—”
“Then say you’re sick.”
“I won’t say I’m sick, Bill. I’m not going to cut out of work for this.”
“But you have to, Janice. I’m depending on you!”
“I’m happy to do the favor for you,” she said, trying to hold her temper. “But I’m not going to risk my job!”
“All right. Don’t get sore. Call me when you can.”
He hung up without saying good-bye.
The next day, Janice gulped a sandwich while riding to Greenwich Village in a taxi. She remembered the Hompa Hongwanji Temple all too well: the murmurs and chants, the smell of incense. She remembered a white-haired priest, called, simply, the Master.
The front of the Temple had been defaced by vandals, black spray paint over the door spelling out a code for the street gangs. Inside, several thin youths sat on a bench improbably donated by a neighboring church, and seemed to stare vacantly at where the altar should have been. Only there was no altar—simply a mass of flowers in white stone basins, sticks of burning incense and, nearly buried under the bright foliage, a faded color photograph of a yogi in cross-legged position.
It all seemed familiar, yet frightening. She clutched the list of questions in her hand.
“Excuse me,” she whispered, disturbing the tranquility of a short, young man with rimless glasses. “Is the Master in?”
“He’s in meditation.”
“Will he be through soon?”
“Not likely. Can I help you?”
She smiled. “I had some questions—”
“Yes, of course. We all do. Do you want a cup of tea? We can talk about them on the bench at the back of the room.”
“All right. Thank you.”
From a low table he picked up a small pot of tea, poured it into two perpetually stained cups, and offered her one. He waited patiently.
Nervously, she referred to her list of questions.
“My, er, husband,” she said, “would like to know some details about time. That is, time as it exists after death.”
The youth smiled.
“Your husband sent you here instead of coming himself?”
“He’s not well.”
“I see. I’m sorry. Please, sit down.”
They sat under a poster of the Taj Mahal, donated by the India Tourist Board. It too had faded in the sunlight from the windows, and the famous white walls looked surprisingly blue green.
“Time as it exists after death is the same as time during life. Time is like an enormous field on which the game of life is played. It does not change if a person dies.”
Janice briefly noted the answer with a pencil. It was a peculiar sensation, asking the questions. Once she would have needed to know the answers. Now she was asking for Bill, and she tried to remain detached. Yet something deep within her listened hard to every nuance of the disciple’s words.
“But if a person dies, the soul is on its own—” She faltered and began again. “If there is a time—I mean, space— between one life and the next—”
“An interval.”
“Yes. An interval. Is that experienced as an infinity of time? Or measured in weeks, months, and years? Or is there no sensation of time at all?”
“It is not measured in weeks, months, and years, because there is no ego to measure. It is experienced as infinite: neither infinitely long nor infinitely short, simply an unbounded expression of the void; only temporal, not spatial.”
Absolutely lost, Janice nevertheless dutifully copied down the answer.
“But if there is a return?”
“There is always a return,” he said, smiling gently. “Unless the soul has reached the final extinguishing: Nirvana. And that happens very rarely.”
“Yes, when there is a return to life”—the words echoed weirdly in Janice’s ears, a kind of thrill of blasphemy to be saying them, horrifying, yet suddenly obsessive—“can you reckon the return in weeks, months, and years?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“If a person dies on December the tenth, can you predict when the soul returns?”
The boy paused. His hand patted down on his head, where the blond hair was thinning. He frowned. He seemed upset by Janice’s question.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Surprised, Janice did not know how to respond. For a few seconds she thought he was going to walk abruptly away, his feelings hurt.
“You’d have to ask the Master,” he said brusquely.
“When will he be free?”
“It varies. Usually about midafternoon.”
“I see. But I have to go back to work.”
“If you leave me your name, I’ll present your question to him. If you come back tomorrow, I’ll try to give you his answer.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
She wrote down the question, along with several more from Bill. She even added one of her own. It was a fantasy she’d had from her own Catholic upbringing: Do the dead perceive, or even, in some way, “watch” events on earth? Janice felt silly writing it down; a child’s question, and yet she was curious what the Temple taught on the subject. She promised to come back tomorrow, midafternoon.
When she returned to the studio, there were three telephone slips. Bill had called three times.
“You didn’t get much out of them, did you?” he complained when she called him back.
“The Master was in meditation.”
“Listen. Go back there and speak directly with the old man. Don’t mess around with these small fry.”
“He seemed a perfectly sweet and reasonable young man—”
“Was he American or Indian?”
“American.”
“Forget him. He’s some wipe-out from too much dope. Get hold of the horse’s mouth.”
“All right, Bill,” she sighed.
Bill hung up, barely murmuring good-bye.
The next day, Janice grabbed a lunch at her work desk, and when 3:30 came around, slipped out to the Temple. This time the Master was sitting cross-legged among the flowers at the front of the room. He was evidently not meditating, because his eyes followed her as she hesitantly walked into the room, and he smiled politely.
He stood up and slowly, gracefully, pattered in his sandals to where she stood. With his white hair glistening, his skin looked darker by comparison, making his blue gray eyes almost transparent in contrast. He wore an orange robe draped loosely over his shoulder and tucked into itself at the waist.
“You are Mrs. Templeton?” he asked in a silvery-smooth voice.
“Yes. I was here yesterday.”
“So I was told. I’m sorry I was not available to answer your questions.”
“It was my own fault. I did not know your schedule.”
As he escorted her from the main room, she sensed the obedient eyes of the five or six disciples following them protectively, intensely. Alone with him in the cool of the garden, where, even as she watched, dead leaves fell from stunted trees by a leaning stone wall, she suddenly grew afraid of him. It was a vague similarity to the fear she had always felt in the presence of Hoover, even when Hoover was surrounded by cops and lawyers.
“It is more conducive to explanation in the garden,” he said, neither eager to push his doctrine, nor yet indifferent to her need to know. “You know that many
branches of one religion can differ on some points, so what I can explain to you is only our own interpretation.”
“I understand that, your…”
“My name is Sri Parutha,” he said, sensing her awkwardness. “I am called the Master. It is not that I am a master over them”—gesturing toward the disciples inside—“but rather that I have mastered myself.”
Janice visibly relaxed in the face of his modesty. He reminded her of an uncle she had known as a child, an uncle who had brought her tales of far-off Paris in a smooth, inwardly vibrant voice.
“The question as to prediction of the return is a division point among a number of sects within our philosophy. I myself maintain that there is a general limitation—let us say, two generations—within which the soul returns. Others maintain that the instant of death produces an instant of life.”
Janice jotted down the answer. The Master answered several more, and amplified his disciple’s answers of the previous day.
“And as to whether the dead observe, in some way, life on earth, I must say I am not in sympathy with this idea. It is natural for the bereaved to feel it is so, and no harm is done by imagining it, but the condition of the soul after death is so vastly different from earthly existence that to speak of ‘observation,’ implying eyes and ears, and an independent mind, would be to fabricate a whole mythology.”
“I see,” Janice said, feeling, much to her own surprise, a sense of disappointment, as though the child within her had been deceived by the priests and nuns of her old parochial school.
The Master smiled softly, neither with mirth nor yet with an irony.
“You have come out of a sense of grief,” he observed.
“Yes, how did you know?”
“One can tell after many years of observing human beings. Was it a child?”
“It was.”
“And if memory does not fail me, you were here once before. Almost a year ago.”
Janice blushed and said nothing. The Master himself seemed deeply moved by the memory. He was silent. For a long time the only sound was the rustle of dead leaves in the trees of the garden.
“But you have never come back since then,” the Master said.
“I found it too painful.”
For Love of Audrey Rose Page 10
