by Neal Pollack
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not in this timeline.”
What other timeline could there be? I wondered, but I decided not to press the issue. Better to let Brad Cohen work it out for himself.
“Now then,” he said to the train car. “Who wants to know the future? You? Me? Anyone? No?”
He turned to me and opened his arms wide.
“Shabba-doo!” he said.
THE NINETY-NINTH SERIES
MYSORE, INDIA
1993
The little portable alarm clock went off at 4:00 a.m. Brad didn’t care. He’d gone to bed at eight, like he always did, before the sun had gone down. Those were the only hours when it was cool enough to sleep here anyway. He knew, because he’d been here for six months. This round. There had been other runs at Mysore in previous timelines—a few months here, a few weeks there, the odd year or two when he didn’t have anything else going. It was hot. Then it was pleasant for about three weeks. And then it rained. Brad never noticed anymore.
Popping his lower back into place, Brad got off the floor, where he slept on a straw mat. He had few possessions: his alarm clock, a canteen, a teakettle, a backpack, a couple of shirts and changes of underwear, a deeply thumbed copy of The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali—a book he was thoroughly sick of—and his passport. Brad kept most of his money, of which he had a lot as always, in a reliable bank in Bangalore. Every month it wired a certain amount to the shala, plus a little extra. For the time being, at least until Madonna showed up in a few months and started preaching Ashtanga yoga to the West, Brad was still propping up the place. He was glad to do it; yoga kept his muscles taut and his mind relatively clear. It was the only thing left keeping him from running into the sea, a raging madman.
His room had no adornments save a fraying photo of Sri Krishnamacharya, who had emerged from a cave in Tibet nearly a hundred years previous with a system that would save us all. There was also a rusty mirror. Brad looked at himself; his hair was long and matted, his beard not much more kempt. He weighed maybe 150 pounds, probably less.
Brad pulled on a pair of loose-fitting pants. They were made of hemp. He’d bought them at a thrift store in Berkeley, which sold such things. His upper body looked skeletal, like he’d been on a hunger strike. But he just didn’t care anymore. He knew exactly what he needed to eat to survive. About one week a month he spent writhing in pain from amoebic dysentery. The rest of the time he subsisted mostly on a diet of dal and rice, one huge helping around noon. A couple times a week, he’d treat himself to a mango lassi in the heat of the afternoon. Sometimes he could still enjoy the sweet essence of things. Rarely.
He went downstairs to the courtyard and pumped well water into his canteen. Then it was back to his room, where he boiled it for tea. He kept a jar of that, strong-smelling and black, usually Darjeeling, on a wooden shelf in his room. He drank greedily, splashing the remaining water on his face. He took two showers a week at the public bathhouse, and he also got a hot-oil massage. A lot of the other students lived in proper hotels, or even houses, and had amenities—maybe not as many as they would have had at home but still plenty, way more than most people in India had. Brad could have afforded every luxury, but he’d had every luxury he could ever want in his lifetime, which at this point was getting very close to four thousand years long. He knew very well that human beings essentially needed nothing to survive, especially if they were only going to be around for forty years, the young and healthy years.
After his tea it was time for Brad to head to the shala, which was two blocks away. They didn’t open the doors until four thirty, but Brad liked to be there at the start. His practice took a long time. Ten years from now, he would have to be there early if he wanted a spot. He’d made that mistake in previous timelines, finding himself nose to butt with dozens of type-A Ashtanga trendoids from all over the globe. But in 1993 it was just him, a few hippies, and a couple of decimated rich ladies turned seekers. And none of them were as far down the path as he was.
He was there before Guruji’s bleary-eyed grandson unlocked the doors.
“Hello, Brad,” said the boy. Brad nodded at him ascetically, walked into the room, which was really just a room, almost totally unadorned save the usual portrait of Krishnamacharya and a couple of Ganesha figurines. The walls and floors were dark, cool clay. It was not a special place or a sacred place. In Sanskrit, the word shala means “barn.” It was a deadly serious practice, this yoga, at least the way the people who’d adopted it went about their business, but Guruji refused to give them a fancy setting for it.
Brad went inside. He was the first one there. No one else would show up for at least an hour. There had been an emaciated-looking Swedish woman who’d beat him to the mat a few times in April, but she’d long ago gone back to Stockholm, as Brad knew she would, because he’d run across her in his travels before. He also knew she’d be back next year but would pop a hamstring halfway through third series and quit in frustration. He had no idea if she’d be back again. He wasn’t God. At least not yet. That probably wasn’t where this was all going.
He unraveled his mat, the same one he’d slept on the previous night. Even though he washed it at least once a week, it still smelled like a landfill of shoes. By the time things got going in the shala, five hours of yoga sweat from at least a dozen people, it wouldn’t stand out at all. Even now it barely registered.
Brad sat on the mat, legs crossed. Guruji wouldn’t show up until at least 5:00 a.m. Not like Brad needed him for the opening poses anyway, which he’d been doing for, what now, 150 years? Two hundred? Brad didn’t remember and didn’t care. Guruji was doing his own practice at this hour, preparing himself for the rigors of guiding a select group of paying Westerners toward something that bridged the gap between penitence and enlightenment. For now it was Brad, alone, in a dark and quiet room. He could feel his breath move from the top of his head, his crown chakra, down through his body, through the central channel, the sushumna nadi, and out through his mula at the base of his spine. Or maybe it was all just in his lungs. Regardless, his mind was focused, his breath regular, his gaze steady, his body taut and ready. Brad chanted silently to himself, the opening prayer of the Ashtanga system, which Krishnamacharya himself had brought down from that Tibetan mountain cave.
Brad rose. He stood at the top of his mat, inhaled, and raised his arms above his head. It was time to begin.
Somewhere along the line there—was it his eighty-fifth incarnation? His eighty-seventh?—Brad Cohen started practicing yoga. His time period, 1970 to 2010, was actually perfect to take up the practice, coinciding with a boom in the West. He liked it immediately. After exhausting any possible mode of human experience that he wanted to try and then spending hundreds of years essentially ranting in the wilderness, it was the only thing he found that could calm his mind down at all. A couple of hundred years and several births later, he hooked into the Ashtanga practice.
That was the best bet for Brad, because a real Ashtanga practice chewed up at least two hours every morning and then left him feeling so wrung out and exhausted that he could barely even worry about the fact that he was trapped in an infinite time loop, doomed to wander throughout a limited period in human history. Some afternoons he was so exhausted that he could barely lift his head off his chest. It took everything he had just to gulp down a glass of water. And the practice never got any easier.
Ashtanga is divided into six series, and the practitioner isn’t allowed by his teacher to move on to the next series until he’s mastered the present one. Each one is more difficult than the next. Even if you master the sixth series—which almost no one ever does—you still have to do the first one sometimes. The process doesn’t end.
But Brad had mastered the sixth series. In fact, he’d arrived in Mysore almost all the way there, which led Guruji to say, “Have I taught you before?” The answer was, “Yes, but then my life repeated itself,” but instea
d Brad said, “No, I’ve just been practicing on my own.” Within two months he was fully conversant in the sixth series, at which point he’d asked Guruji what he should do.
“Do you know God?” Guruji had asked.
“Of course not,” Brad said.
“Then you must practice more. Practice, practice, practice, and all is coming.”
Brad was sick of hearing that. But regardless he kept at it in hopes that somehow he could see his way clear of this mess through yoga. He definitely felt calmer and clearer than he had in centuries. It wasn’t enough. He wanted out, but he couldn’t figure out the path.
By the time his guruji, Shri K. Pattabhi Jois, arrived in the shala a little after 5:00 a.m., Brad was already almost finished with the opening sequence, a group of poses that he’d done countless times, so often that they almost seemed innate, like breathing. Today was Tuesday, so that meant Brad needed to do the second series, what he called the “easy poses,” a series of inversions that included a half-dozen versions of headstand, meant to counteract the effects of the heavy, grounding first series that he’d plodded his way through the day before.
Pattabhi Jois, squat and bald and in his early sixties, walked around the room carefully in his T-shirt and shorts, looking like a yoga version of Mr. Clean. He was always in the mix, making adjustments, pressing down on people’s backs, threading their limbs through seemingly impossible gaps, but he had nothing for Brad Cohen. Brad had done the practice so many times. He knew all its intricacies.
By 8:00 a.m. he was done, and he lay on his mat asleep, as wrung out as a kitchen towel, while later-arriving students grunted and gyrated around him. It was a long savasana. Brad had nothing better to do. Finally, he snorted awake, sat up, and chanted silently to himself. Then he sat even more silently, his hands on his knees, and absorbed the sounds and smells around him, his thoughts and emotions all integrated into one long channel of universal awareness. And yet still the thought occurred to him: In fifteen years I will disappear. And then I’m going to have to start all over.
Brad stood, rolled up his mat, and headed for the door. Much to his surprise, Pattabhi Jois came up to him and touched his arm. He almost never did that and hadn’t since Brad had shocked him three lifetimes ago by finishing the fourth series in its entirety on his first try.
“You are done with the practice,” he said.
“I am?” Brad said.
“I cannot teach you any more.”
“I don’t agree.”
“Come to my house tonight,” said Guruji. “For dinner. At five o’clock. We must discuss.”
“Discuss what?” Brad said.
But Guruji had already moved on and was cramming an overeager German into kurmasana. Brad could hear the joints crackle and was glad he didn’t have to do it anymore. He had his invitation, maybe to enlightenment.
For the rest of the day, Brad wandered in a daze, as he often did. He drank his water, ate his dal, took a nap through the heat of the day, paused for a moment at a knife-sharpening spot to watch an artisan grind his blades, and then went to the bathhouse for his shower and rubdown. What great insight awaited him at Guruji’s house? He went back to his room, put on a clean shirt—the one with buttons—his hemp pants, and a pair of sandals. It was as close as he could get to formal wear.
It didn’t really matter. Pattabhi Jois lived next door to the shala, in a modest five-room house. His wife let Brad in. Guruji was sitting in an easy chair, watching TV. All of India was enraptured by a lavish adaptation of the Mahabharata, being presented in something like five hundred parts over a period of two years. Pattabhi Jois was no exception. He didn’t speak to Brad until the episode was over.
“This is the greatest story,” he said. “Next year, the Ramayana. Do you like?”
“Of course,” Brad said. He’d seen the whole production two or three lifetimes ago.
“We must talk,” said Guruji. “About your practice.”
Guruji was a deeply intelligent man, though his education had been almost entirely yogic, learned at the feet of the great Krishnamacharya in the palace of the maharaja of Mysore in the 1930s and 1940s. His English comprehension was good, but the speaking sometimes came out a little pidgin.
“OK,” Brad said.
“You have no more to learn from me,” said Jois. “How is that possible?”
“You won’t believe it,” Brad said.
“It is OK,” said Jois. “You can tell.”
Pattabhi Jois wasn’t going to understand. No one did.
Brad sighed.
“Guruji,” he said, “I have lived many lifetimes.”
“We all have,” said Guruji. “It is the cycle of karma.”
“No, I have lived the same lifetime over and over many times, never ending, always repeating.”
“Birth and rebirth, it is all sensation,” said Jois. “It is all yoga. We must work to focus the gaze and trust the breath. Practice removes samskara, eliminates suffering.”
“I get all that. I have done that work.”
“It is true,” said Guruji. “A true yoga practice requires many lifetimes. Practice, practice, practice, and all is coming.”
“Not for me.”
“Even for you.”
“But I’m caught in an infinite time loop.”
“What is that?”
“Some sort of weird temporal anomaly that causes me to repeat my entire life over and over again.”
“That is an illusion,” Jois said. “The ultimate samskara.”
“I wish that were true,” Brad said. “But I have memories, deep memories, of almost a hundred lifetimes. I am always born in Chicago, and then I do a bunch of stuff after that.”
“This is life,” Guruji said. “This is normal. It is all practice.”
“For what?”
“For death. For meeting God.”
“But I don’t die,” said Brad.
“Everyone dies.”
“Not me. I don’t even get old. I always disappear on the day before my fortieth birthday,” Brad said.
Guruji took a sip of tea.
“This,” he said, “is not normal.”
“What should I do, Guruji?” Brad said.
Pattabhi Jois pondered this for a moment.
“Maybe you should go see Mr. Iyengar,” he said.
Brad Cohen wandered through the world, hungry and alone, and ended up on the West Coast, where the climate was decent and he had plenty of company in the land of the lost. This was nothing new in itself. He’d done it dozens of times before. He begged for food but had plenty of money. Then he felt guilty about that, so he gave half of his money to an organization for homeless people in San Francisco. It didn’t matter. Everything he did felt old and useless.
When he got tired of city living, he went to a storage locker he kept in Oakland, pulled out some camping equipment, and took the bus north up to Sequoia or Yosemite or Tahoe, sometimes all the way to Summit County, Colorado, and he’d rent a site for a month, with just enough food to get through the day. For hours he’d sit under a tree and meditate. That’s what the Buddha had done. He’d sat and focused his mind, and then he realized the impermanence of all things. But the impermanence of Brad’s situation felt in itself permanent. Maybe that was the point.
Brad went to a campsite in the far reaches of Sequoia National Park. It was April, just the beginning of the season. He’d taken a bus, then hitched to the park entrance, and hiked in—not too far, maybe three miles. There was only one other campsite, where an Audi SUV backed up to an iron grille. A middle-aged couple and three kids, two boys and a girl, were playing in the stream, walking around, looking calm and happy, together, untroubled.
He tried to remember a time when he’d been happy himself. His memories kept going back to that crummy house he’d lived in with his wife and daughters, up the
re in the scrubby hills, way northeast of LA. But had he been happy? From what he could recall, that life had brought him nothing but sadness and dissatisfaction. They weren’t in that house now, and neither was he. His daughters didn’t exist. They hadn’t for hundreds, thousands of years. Yet he still longed to see them. Or at least longed to long to see them.
Brad sat. He wasn’t sure for how long. It could have been minutes or hours or days. He barely saw the difference between day and night anymore. He felt thirst, recognized it as such, and then went along, still sitting. It was cold—he registered cold—and then it was warm. There was numbness. Maybe he shifted position. He wasn’t sure, just as he wasn’t sure how old he was, what day it was, what year it was, or who he was in any way. Everything had broken down.
All his demons, everything accumulated over the centuries, roared before him, trying to bring him into their drama, to upset to worry, to force a reaction. But he just let them do their dance. This is what he’d been seeking, that visceral knowledge that his problems were temporary, even when it seemed like they weren’t. Everything flowed past like debris carried in a river after the storm, being washed out into the churning sea.
And then he remembered. It wasn’t much of a memory, but it was something. He and Juliet had taken the girls up to the Griffith Observatory, but it had been closed for cleaning, so they’d driven a little farther up the road, up near the Hollywood sign, and somehow there’d been no traffic, human or otherwise. It had just rained the day before, so the sky was blue and crisp, and the air was free of lawnmower noise. They’d parked the Prius and walked down the path a couple hundred yards maybe, about as far as the girls could go without whining. He had one attached to each hip, and he was holding Juliet’s hand, and she was smiling at him. Also, Brad was just a little bit stoned. At that moment the world had been perfect, his mind free and untroubled.
It could always be like that, he realized. It was always like that. No matter what, you could access that perfection. It just took a little serendipity, and in Brad’s case nearly two thousand years of near-relentless whining. The world is a shit dump, but it’s all we have, so we might as well treat our time and the people we encounter in it with a little tender feeling.
