Vandal Love

by D. Y. Bechard

  The sky was barely blue, and tired, they talked quietly over breakfast. Harvey had recently considered Québec, that as a Catholic he might be like one of those consoling New York–Italian priests in the movies. It occurred to him that perhaps he had a family somewhere, a place where he would feel at home, where there were others like himself. He asked about his name, about whether François missed speaking French.

  François paused and looked at Harvey as if he’d just noticed he was there. Well, he said and took a deep breath. The sudden enthusiasm in his gaze was frightening.

  He started in on stories that Harvey had heard snippets of before and never cared for, though this time he forced himself to listen. François described the Hervé men who were the strongest of any around, who worked and fought and infested the countryside with proud illegitimates. He described the endurance of their lineage that had been among the first to colonize North America, and how his grandmother, in her search for him, had wandered the continent seven years, driven by love and faith. He repeated the stories she’d told him time and time again, of family and history and her visions, embellishing them himself, giving the Hervés a knack for business and a penchant for the sciences.

  I seem to remember her saying that one of our ancestors invented a certain kind of sail, François said, scratching his head. Anyway, they were seafarers.

  Where are they now? Harvey asked, perched on the edge of his seat, thinking that perhaps there was someplace he could visit after all, a few cousins who, being tiny, hadn’t been mentioned.

  All gone, I suppose, François replied, then seemed to catch himself. But, you know, I’ve lived my life that way, too. He went on to describe road trips, adventures crosscountry that he never quite completed so that in the space where he might have told something more, might have finished, a wistful look came into his eye, a sadness that Harvey wanted to understand, to find comfort in.

  François appeared unable to draw loose ends together. He backtracked, talking about how the Hervé men loved women and were restless and passionate. In a hushed voice, he told Harvey he’d lived with a prostitute. He conjured visions of buxom flesh, of a woman whose body moved with cold, indifferent perfection. Suddenly, Harvey realized that this family would hate him, that they would be ashamed of a sixty-one-inch descendant who would surely faint in the presence of a prostitute or out on the open sea for that matter.

  François noticed his reticence. What’s up?

  Oh, I was just thinking about how meaningless all that stuff is. Harvey tried to call to mind what mattered. He described his own interests, the importance of good posture and recent discoveries in nutritional healing. He hesitated, suddenly ashamed to hear himself.

  François probed his cheek with his tongue and looked away.

  A few weeks later, when it was time for Harvey’s departure, he’d seen his father’s disappointment too often. François sighed as they were saying goodbye. On the plane, after takeoff, Harvey took down the tray on the seatback. He put his head on his crossed arms. He’d read that in some ancient traditions each searcher believed he was completing the journey his ancestors had begun, carrying on a desire that had been cut short by death. But who, dead in the longing for light, for peace and a modest bliss, could he dream back to?

  As the plane bumped through the uneven sky, he wept. The hostess passed, then backed up and hovered over him. Sweetie, she said, are you flying without your parents?

  She held out a heart-shaped lollipop.

  College proved a poor substitute for the initiation of a prophet. That fall he attended classes nearby and lived at home. His mother didn’t ask him to work but gave him a credit card, which she paid. She bought him a secondhand Toyota that he drove sitting on a cushion. He was humiliated by her willingness to provide, her assumption that he couldn’t do it himself. She was now having an email relationship with an Englishman she’d met on the vegidate website. Occasionally, when she’d chattered too long about her mystic friends and the beauty of the New Age, Harvey skulked away and hid himself, afraid to admit that she might be foolish, that so much of him was her. And what did he know? Perhaps the world was simply more than he could handle. His grades were poor. The only assignment he’d found the least bit interesting was to research his name, and though a genealogy had been hopeless, he’d read about the Welsh and Breton saint Harvey, or Hervé, a blind man loved by animals and led by a wolf and whose presence made frogs sing. But this, too, finished in a big So what? He wasn’t blind and didn’t care much for frogs, which lived in mud, or for animals, especially dogs. Interesting, his professor had written with his red pen: C+.

  Once, after class, Harvey asked his slouching history teacher about Québec. The man was a collector of J.F.K. memorabilia. He had every documentary on the subject, the exact model camera that had filmed the assassination, and the same kind of rifle Oswald had used, which he occasionally brought to class, though he’d been obliged to remove the firing pin to do so.

  Québec, he said and nodded, hands in his pockets to accentuate his slouch. Basically, they all speak English but just pretend not to in order to be mean to tourists. You’d be better off going to France if you want to learn the language the way it really is.

  Late that December afternoon, when Harvey got home, a letter from the college was in the mailbox. It explained that he was to be put on academic probation. He read it twice, then walked into the withered field and stared at the exposed frame of the barn. Single flakes fell from the dimming sky, too solitary to be flurries, too conscious to be snow. The cold made his eyes stream. Harvey Hervé was no more than a random name, Vancouver or Virginia random places. If he stayed, he would never match up to the lives of holy men. No one would accept if he changed, not even his mother. He didn’t want to be part of this world.

  He went to his room and threw everything on his bedsheet then folded in the corners and hauled it to his car. His mind quieter than any meditation, he drove through the night. This was his first choice. Somewhere on the road he recalled his father’s stories. He felt bright, courageous, that François might finally be proud. He sat primly at the wheel, the rearview mirror casting into his eyes the dawn as it rushed up over the plains behind him.

  Bravery was a new thing. The indifferent earth seemed ancient, primitive, far from man’s disfigurements, bypasses and industrial parks. Tears welled up at the emptiness before him.

  In a spell of uncertain sleet he stopped at a budget motel. Sprawling parking lots rumbled with the bogged idle of semis, and distantly a Budweiser sign glowed in a bar window. He imagined creased dollar bills in the bathroom, truckers undoing flat buckles, waitresses with brown teeth, eyelashes like fishhooks. Perhaps the man at the desk had told them he was here. He got up often to pull back his curtain, to peer out at the terrifying asphalt.

  At the Wal-Mart in Amarillo he stocked up on provisions. Women with cumbersome hips moved with the staggered lower-body motion of TV dinosaurs. He called his mother. When her hysterics had passed, her only comment, which she repeated was, You don’t need to go so far away to be holy. Afterwards he found a list of ashrams in one of his books. Many were in New Mexico. He continued towards the sunset, atomic over desolate plains.

  The interstate rose into rugged desert basins. Silence hummed within him as if he were enlightened already, though he knew it to be fear, the poised listening of an animal. He gained altitude, the engine of his car sounding weedy, like a lawn mower. The big blue sky emptied of light. He slept at a rest stop. He thought of names he’d heard that he might someday put to the thing itself: saguaro and sagebrush, paloverde, piñon. Clouds blew past, a few swollen raindrops on the car roof.

  In the morning he called the ashram. It was just two hours away but had no vacancies. The woman gave him a number for a man who rented rooms in the nearby trailer park. Harvey dialled, talked a bit, thought the price okay. After the Oklahoma sleet, the Texan wind, he was pleased to end his journey in the high, cold sunlight of New Mexico.

  The sign
at the entrance read Dry Branch Trailer Park. Originally a commingling of religious misfits, he soon learned, it was built up near a sandy arroyo in the middle of a Martian landscape of dune-like hills and scarps. It had been there since the 1970s, and more than forty families as well as countless singles now swelled its ranks. Windows indicated plurality with Buddhas and dream catchers, blue Shivas, beaded gurus and prayer flags. Organic gardens gave lushness to a few patches between trailers though dust devils passed like spirits along the main road.

  His landlord, Brendan Howard, taught religion at the community college. He was a skinny white man with steel-frame glasses, a cardigan often over his shoulders, as if this were not the blazing high desert but a yacht club. He always introduced himself with his full name so that it sounded like a title, the effect being rather cultish. He lived in what appeared to be the library of Alexandria crammed into a trailer, no walls but shelves, books on tantrism and herbalism and voodoo. Nonetheless, he told Harvey that first day, it is the body that holds all truths.

  There were more than twenty-five ashrams, temples, monasteries and retreats within an hour’s drive, and those first months Harvey meditated, fasted, did predawn yoga and saw the clear emanation of sunrise as he practised deep breathing on manicured temple greens. But soon it became apparent that little had changed. Spirituality was mostly health, no better than his mother’s nutritional animism. Devotees discussed how young famous yogis looked. No one paid him any mind. He wished he had the courage to walk out naked, or mostly naked, along the road, disappear into a river and return in song, sleep in the roots of trees.

  A few Western Sikh families lived in the Dry Branch but remained involved with an ashram where, for thirty years, white Americans had attempted to live as in the Punjab of Guru Gobind Singh. They invited Harvey to a lecture at which the lugubrious old Sikh master talked of purity to a hundred students in white robes and turbans. Every step taken away from the soul must be taken back, he told them. They did a chant, almost an hour as they held their hands in the air, sweat pouring from their armpits, shaking, crying.

  Don’t be so impressed, Brendan Howard said after Harvey had described the power of his experience and the security of the community. Brendan Howard’s tone was not unlike that of a high-school counsellor going over colleges. He called the ashram a cultish offshoot of Sikhism. And regardless, he continued, religion is linked with anachronistic practices. In fact the Sikh turban has primitive origins and was merely intended to make the holy man resemble the inseminating organ in his approach to the womblike temple.

  At the Sikh ashram Harvey heard other arguments, that anything aside from an ancient path was New Age. Even yoga had been cheapened, though the ashram remained a stronghold of traditional practices. Not a few members had pursued higher education, been professors and psychologists but had seen nothing certain or stable in American culture.

  At first Harvey thought the ashram was a throwback, but he learned that even when the spiritual trends of the sixties and seventies had passed, the ashram had endured, incorporating, starting businesses, establishing yoga training programs, its membership still growing. The community now centred around several companies that skyrocketed returns by claiming non-profit status and paying devotees a pittance. Experts in everything from health food to surveillance, CEOs, copywriters and secretaries turned out in droves each morning in turbans and robes to occupy the stucco buildings at the edge of the ashram. Their success, they explained, came of their being spiritual householders, dedicated to raising families and living in the world and not seeking the ascetic’s path—what they considered sterile. Their clarity was tempting.

  After a brief application process Harvey got himself hired to tend the grounds and to clean up after the Chicano youths who performed lawn jobs and left gutted bags of trash. He also called the pound on strays. Members had made an effort to chain their own dogs as they had a tendency to run with packs of wild dogs and rabies was a concern. But though he bent himself to this new life, the ashram girls, buxom with ghee and chapatis, laughed when they saw him. Marriage was stressed, often young. It is the highest yoga, the master said, true purity. Harvey believed that eventually a girl would perceive the devotion in his heart. She would be small and incorporeal and ageless, like an elf.

  In his room in Brendan Howard’s trailer he worked into more strenuous postures. He practised intense meditations, hours at a time, holding his palms on his head and inhaling through his curved tongue. Soon he found he wasn’t so short of breath from the altitude. He read books on yoga and anatomy and learned to speak of his body in scientific terms. Sweating, holding postures, he felt primal, no longer the domesticated thing he’d been. He was proud of the dawns when he got up for selfless service, warming his car at three a.m. Even his suffering gave him pride, and though the master said that only the ascetic, the sadhu, takes pride in suffering and shirks the responsibilities of the world, Harvey worked for the good of the ashram. He loved the ancient practices, the robes and sense of tradition, the authority of the outmoded. Once, impressed by his newfound presence, he braved asking someone out, a diminutive girl slightly beyond his age range, blue flecks of acne scars on her cheeks.

  Sorry, she told him, I’m going chanting with friends tonight.

  Oh, he said and waited, but there was no invite. Back home he meditated on his breath, blocked one nostril to exhale from the other, the sound that of a punctured tire.

  You must resist thinking yourself through the suffering of life, the master told them in his weekly lecture. Spring winds howled over the hills. Everyone talked about ionic charges in the air, how traditional societies judged crimes more compassionately when committed in seasonal winds. The master’s dust and juniper allergies were rampant. His frazzled beard lay on his chest, and he blew his nose frequently.

  Listen to the wind, he said. Its chaos scares you. Your chaos scares you. Look at the world. Bonds are disintegrating. The future is shapeless. There is nothing to hold us. We have had chaos before, but nothing like this. Only the teachings can carry us through.

  Harvey had often heard the master say that history was a burden, that Americans were blessed to be slipping free. Ancient wisdom was timeless and would transform them. But who would they become? A new order—Jedi knights, the white-clad forefathers of Superman whose minds could move crystals? What of Harvey Hervé? Of Hervé-François Hervé? He thought of those stories, the brutal men, the enduring grandmother.

  Let go of your past, the master said, his eyes bugged out, his turban sloppy.

  The next afternoon Harvey drove into Santa Fe and went to the mall. He needed underwear but ended up walking for an hour, from store to store, pausing to watch music videos in Foot Locker, movies in Radio Shack. A Chicano girl, probably thirteen, passed with a fishnet shirt showing a black bra. He wished this would all burn away. He didn’t want to be like his father.

  As he started home, a storm was blowing up. Cars rocked at red lights. The wind scoured his windshield with grit, tiny tumbleweeds crossing the highway like terrified cats. Lightning punctuated the mountain horizon to the south.

  History, chaos, suffering? Did words mean anything within nature? Maybe even the ashram was too much, the ascetic’s life preferable—a cave or a monastery to protect him from judging eyes. But did he have the heart of a solitary? The master said you had to live in the world. The journey began with taking a name, but then what?

  When he arrived for the evening lecture, members had gathered outside. A few had on work goggles to keep sand out of their eyes. Siri Ram, a six-year-old whose husky mutt, Snowball, often ran with strays, had gone missing. They thought that the boy had left to look for Snowball. As search parties gathered, Harvey shivered in the high desert night.

  They advanced into the hills, blowing whistles, calling out, flashlights weaving in the dark. The wind buffeted them as if they were walking into surf. Junipers and all the cactuses and cholla of the desert waited for them to stumble. Brief and muted moonlight gave ridge
s shapes like sunken boats.

  A dog’s yaps came from below a drop-off. It yelped, then barked, as if wanting out to pee. They edged along the rock face until their flashlights found Snowball in the clouding dust. The wind had almost erased whatever struggle there had been. Bloody paw prints showed on the stone. A dry, bent tree in the hillside was broken, and Snowball stood beneath, head lowered, his panting, bloody muzzle to the dust.

  Boy Eaten By His Dog

  (NM). Last night, in the worst wind storm in decades, a boy was killed by his own dog … Authorities believe that the dog ran off with a pack of strays and, when the boy went to find him, joined in chasing him down …

  Wind rocked trailers and ruined meditation gardens.

  Master, he said. Will you give me a spiritual name?

  You will be Sat Puja. It is a powerful mantra. An offering to truth, you will be the true offering, a great devotee.

  Each dawn he meditated on his name.

  Harvey, his mother said over the phone.

  It’s Sat Puja, mata.

  Such a fanatic, she thought, calling me the Indian word for mother, and he, with a mix of pride and worry and curiosity at the odd mechanisms of self, thought the same.

  Why are you doing this? she asked.

  He wanted to tell her they’d been living an illusion, but would she be willing to change, or would it require her suffering?

  They waited quietly on the phone. Finally in a faint voice —I’m proud of you, she said. Whatever you do, I’m proud.

  New Mexico

  2006

  A week after receiving his name, Sat Puja took an indefinite vow of silence. It was too easy just to bide one’s time for a set duration, he told others before he began, in the days that he let everyone know he wouldn’t be speaking and made a few phone calls so no one would worry in case he chose to cease communicating altogether. Then, one dawn, when he awoke, he took a deep breath and blew through his mouth as if cleansing the palate of all the nonsense it had spoken. He’d read this was a proper beginning.