Contents May Have Shifted

by Pam Houston

  Denzing runs outside to find an old person who can write our names for us in Tibetan.

  I say, “Why are you guys so nice to us?”

  Tsering says, “When you do something nice for somebody, it is just like walking around a temple. It is just like saying a prayer.”

  52. Durango, Colorado

  The ophthalmologist, whose name is Victor, says, “I want to say this in a way that makes you think I am a normal person. My daughter Penelope still sleeps with me. She’s twelve.”

  But I already don’t think he is a normal person. What he has told me so far is that his half brother is a nonfunctioning borderline schizophrenic married to another nonfunctioning borderline schizophrenic and his little brother committed suicide. His father has children with five different women and those are only the ones he will admit to. His stepfather was so abusive Victor left home at sixteen.

  He says he came back home to say goodbye to his mother on the night he was going into the Special Forces, and when the stepfather saw him he put a .357 magnum to his own two-year-old’s head and said if Victor didn’t get out that minute he was going to blow the kid’s brains out.

  Not that being abnormal is necessarily a bad thing.

  I look at my watch. I say the only thing I can think of saying, which is that I used to ride a horse named Penelope. We are exactly thirty minutes into an hour-long lunch date. Then he says, “I must tell you, I am attracted to athletic bodies, not necessarily skinny, but toned.” I look at his thinning hair, his stringy ponytail, watch him eat a date wrapped in bacon, watch a drip of grease run down his chin. I want to say, I’ll bet that twelve-year-old you sleep with is very athletic. I want to say, I can get toned if I want to but you’ll still be short.

  What I do say is, “Excuse me,” make myself walk as far as the restroom, turn right instead of left, push through the front door of the restaurant, and break into a run.

  The first night the CEO stayed at the ranch—in the guest room— I got an email from Fenton the human that said: RE: New Dating Plan. I recall your saying, and wisely, about the Rhode Island reverend that good-looking men were at some level all alike. I knew what you said was true, and I proceeded anyway (though, I’m glad to say, with some reservation). We never did the deed, thank God, but in the end, just as he’d led me on for six months or so, he took me out to a restaurant called, no kidding, The Last Supper, to confess that he’d met someone else.

  53. New York, New York

  In the alley in front of Freeman’s, there is a man staring at and praying—prostrating himself, to be more precise—to a life-size graffiti horse. The horse is gray, and looks a lot like the My Little Ponies of my youth, but the words written in fat letters across its back are Her Glory Always Reinstated.

  Mackenzie and I are staying at the Bowery Hotel, a place so new its rates are going to triple the day after we leave, a place so new that it has been artificially weathered. Both elevators look like people have had chainsaw fights inside of them.

  We are here to see Tom Stoppard’s play about the Russian Revolution, but we are also being girlfriends on a trip to New York. Mackenzie always knows the best places for everything decadent: double lattes, red velvet cupcakes, Gorgonzola with rhubarb chutney on the cheese board at the Met.

  Last night Kevin Bacon stood so close to us, smoking his cigar, I could have tripped him on the way back to the stage. So far today we’ve seen skinny Kirsten Dunst, and her even skinnier rock-star boyfriend; we have gone to Rice to Riches, the place that has twenty-five flavors of rice pudding such as “Sex Drugs and Rocky Road,” or “I’ll Take Eggnog for $200, Alex,” which they serve in these excellent reusable flying saucers; and Mackenzie bought a pair of white plastic shoes for a hundred dollars and forty-nine cents. We chat with a handsome guy walking two black Danes wearing spiked-out collars (even though they’re the sweetest peas) and he turns out to be Janeane Garofalo’s dog walker.

  Now that’s a celebrity sighting I can really get behind.

  I grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, and when I was a kid my mother would keep me out of school a day or two a week so I could go into Manhattan with her for her auditions. At the end of the day we would get Italian ices while we waited in the traffic line for the Lincoln Tunnel—she always got lemon, I always got cherry—and we kept the top down on the old Mustang both ways through the tunnel and never even thought about exhaust.

  Tucked into our Frette sheets at the Bowery, I report to Mackenzie that handsome Bucky Baxter recently said I was the most interesting woman in Creede, which I realize could fall under the category of damning with faint praise and Mackenzie smiles sweetly, and says, “Bucky wants you to be his next ex-wife.”

  At the Elks’ Fourth of July dance Bucky told me that now that he has turned fifty-two he has decided to only fuck women he really likes. Which was not to make me think he didn’t still fuck like an animal, because he could assure me that he did.

  I know I am supposed to only think this about outdoor adventures, but there is something about flying down Fifth Avenue in a cab, after dark, barely making lights, you know, like everybody’s life depends on it, maybe a fine coating of rain hissing under the tires, the driver screaming in Tigrinya into his cell phone, that makes me feel like I could round a corner and turn my life into just about anything at all.

  In Central Park yesterday there were no less than twenty-five birders, ganging up as they do on a three-inch Kentucky warbler, giant lenses jockeying for position between the hippies camped out at Strawberry Fields. Near Belvedere Castle we saw a couple who were walking either to or from their wedding. The man with shock white hair and shock white teeth, the woman in a long white dress carrying a bouquet of white tulips, neither of them a day under seventy, both of them as happy as two people have ever been.

  “Congratulations,” came tumbling out of my mouth before I knew I was speaking, and they were so grateful, so eager to smile back their gratitude, so humbled by their good fortune.

  “Did you see them?” I asked Mackenzie, just to make sure they were real.

  54. Creede, Colorado

  If there are twenty-nine points of matching, Dr. Carl, Dr. Neil, and Dr. Hans, then why do I keep winding up on coffee dates with men who have just finished reading Ann Coulter?

  55. Provincetown, Mass

  Class is over and I take a walk out to the breakwater: a million tons of granite in squared-off boulders laid end to end across the bay, from the place where town gives way to marsh out to Long Point, the very very tip of Cape Cod, curled back tight on itself like a fist. When the tide is running in or out it’s loud out here, the water rushing under the granite. If you come at night you can see the bioluminescence that gets created when aquatic glowing microorganisms get slammed into something solid like rock.

  Now it is slack tide, utterly still. A heron stands in the wide marsh between the nude beach and me. A seal turns lazy circles in the deeper water of the harbor.

  The night before I left Davis I stood in front of the old barn, the rabbit patch that will, by the time I get back, be turned into condominiums, and took Orion back from Ethan, gave it to Henry, the one who deserved it, took back the greenbelt and the bats and the whales.

  That day at acupuncture Janine had said, “You know, Pam, you are supported,” and I saw a pair of cupped hands, lined and fleshy, poised to receive, maybe water, maybe something water only stands for, and I said, “I do know,” because at least in that moment I did.

  A barn owl called from the hayloft and I had my toes in the water of feeling-good-without-doing. Also, there is nothing more real about the moments where you are denied love than the moments when it is all right there for you and you are truly in the center of your life.

  Now the sun is getting ready to set somewhere west behind Boston, and the sky’s gone all soft blues and pinks. “Okay,” I say, out loud, which at first feels ridiculous. I’ll admit that I don’t know who I am praying to. Something somewhere between ocean and God. “I think I am finally
ready for love.” I can hear the slightest trickle of tide starting up in the rocks below me. “But if you can’t do that, if you think I’m not ready, then maybe just a little romance to keep the conversation going.” The heron spreads his wings, gives a little hop. “And if you think I’m not even ready for that, then how about just a few more signs I’m on the right path.”

  Satisfied with my prayer, I train my eyes back on the heron. A dapper little man has been chugging down the breakwater, wearing short shorts covered in pastel fleur-de-lis, walking a westie, who is wearing a sweater, even though the day is warm. He doesn’t slow as he approaches—he’s got plenty of room to get by. He says, “Lovely place to sit and think, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “it sure is.”

  He never breaks stride, but smiles wide as he passes. “You’re a good person,” he tells me. “It’s all going to be okay.” I watch him retreat over the granite, the tops of the big rocks turning green and gold and purple in the dimming light.

  56. Leadville, Colorado

  On Friday the thirteenth, after we had dinked around in the cowboy bar; after we had agreed to exchange addresses, and then couldn’t find a pen; after we had gone up to Rick’s room, nothing salacious but he knew there was a pen there; after he became the fourth man in six months to say, “I want to say this in a way that makes you think I am a normal person”; after he’d told me about the couple who stood at the end of his bed some nights: the woman who had a face and arms but no body, and the man who had no face but was only a suit of clothes; after he pulled out of his briefcase a card with the very same hands I had seen in the sky over Davis; after so many hours had gone by that we couldn’t sit up anymore but we didn’t want to part; after I said, “Well how about this, we just lie down on the bed, no sex, and no clothing removal . . . It will be just like what we are doing now, except horizontally”; after he told me his favorite song and his favorite color and his favorite fishing hole and I told him my favorite movie and my favorite country and my favorite dog, and it couldn’t be more than an hour until the sun started creeping over the horizon, he said, “If you aren’t too sleepy can you please keep talking? It doesn’t really matter at all what you say.”

  57. Drigung, Tibet

  Tsering and Hailey and I follow an old lama to the top of a bald hill above the monastery in the cool morning air. We have been told there will be three corpses, a man, a woman, and a child, and that they are unrelated, though they appear to us like a little family, laid out on the platform, wrapped in their cotton shrouds.

  “We are very lucky,” Tsering says. “Many corpses today.” When he says corpse, it sounds like copse, as in pines.

  The man who will prepare the bodies arrives and begins to unwrap the first corpse. A little ways up the hill, roughly a hundred vultures jockey for position against a rope held in place by family members of the deceased. They are wild birds, but Drigung is the most accessible monastery practicing sky burials; the birds know to come at 11 a.m. for their almost daily feed.

  Tsering told us the bodies would be quartered, but the word filleted is the one that jumps to mind. He explains that the man with the big knife will make four incisions, one around the chin, one down the center of the torso, and two at a diagonal down the shoulder blades. They pull the skin off the bones, he says, because if they don’t give the vultures the bones first, they sometimes eat the flesh and leave the bones, and then the whole person doesn’t ascend together, and there is more work for the butchers to pound the bones into pulp. He hesitates enough over the word butcher that I know he is not quite happy with it, but he doesn’t know a better one.

  “These men,” he says, “that do the cutting. They are not allowed to marry. Their karma is very bad. Same with the men who butcher animals.”

  “Do you mean this job is punishment for their last life,” I ask him, “or that they will be punished for this job in the next life?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Also jewelers. It is the same.”

  “Jewelers?” I say. “Why?”

  “It is just what we believe,” he tells me.

  “Is it because they are wealthy?” I ask.

  “It is just what we believe,” he says again.

  All three bodies are cut into pieces, and I miss whatever sign the lama gives to the men who have been holding the rope. When the vultures run in the smell takes up all the air on the mountaintop, and as they rush past me I can see they are huge birds, each of them half the size of a man. There is squawking and shrieking, several birds go after one femur, another makes off with a forearm, the hand, with all the flesh still on it, bouncing along the stones at my feet. No fewer than six birds are pulling in different directions on a skull that is still attached to a spine that is still attached to one leg and the skull is laughing. The old lama plays tug-of-war with a vulture over a leg bone, and when he wins he lifts another vulture, this one nearly featherless, out of the melee and gives him what is left of the bone.

  “That is a sick one,” Tsering says. Every so often the butcher picks up an especially aggressive vulture by its head and hauls it off to the side.

  When there is nothing left but skulls and pelvises the butcher steps back in, and pounds the big bones into pulp with a giant mallet. Bone pulp flies all over the place and a huge wad of it lands on Tsering’s arm. In seconds a member of the family of the deceased comes over with a little bottle of alcohol and wipes it clean for him. His preparedness makes me realize this must happen all the time. Tsering smiles at the man out from under his Scooby-Doo hat.

  On the walk back down the hill Tsering says, “When I see a sky burial, all desire to have money and get more things goes away, because you see a man, then you see him dead in a ball, then you see him cut to pieces, and in twenty minutes he is nothing, it is like he never existed.”

  Tsering picks sage so that we can burn it in the little stupa back at the monastery. When we get there he shows me how to stick my whole upper body in so that I won’t take the bad dead-people-luck with me back into the world. When I can’t see or breathe anymore I pull my head out, but Denzing grabs me by the scruff of the neck and pushes me back in.

  “It is very unusual,” Tsering says, when Denzing finally turns me loose, “a Westerner, here, at this ceremony. Denzing is afraid that now the car will crash.” Denzing holds Hailey in the stupa so long I think she will surely asphyxiate. When he finally lets her out he talks with urgency for several minutes to Tsering in Tibetan and when he’s finished we ask what he said. Tsering thinks a long time and says, “Denzing says it is good to be happy all the time.”

  “Really,” Hailey says, “all those words?”

  “And,” Tsering says, after a pause, “he says it is sometimes also good to be sad.”

  58. Buena Vista, Colorado

  On the phone, Rick says, “I’ve got something I need to say and I want you to know that it is a considered thought. I know what it means and I know what it means to say it.”

  I can hear the table saws running behind him. Since that first night in Leadville, Rick has called me once a day from his shop in north Boulder, where, five years ago, when the pine beetles moved into northern Colorado, he and his four employees stopped making custom canoes out of Spanish cedar, and started turning beetle-kill lodgepole into what he calls the sweetest wood flooring known to man so lucratively that he’s been able to give 50K a year back to reforestation.

  I am on my way home from Denver, just past the Gunsmoke truck stop, about to head into the canyon of the Arkansas where I know the reception will get squirrelly, so I pull over near the little airstrip to hear what he has to say.

  “I love you already,” he says. “I know it to be true. I love you right down to the bone.” This, I think, is the difference between an activist and a carpenter.

  A little Cessna is practicing touch-and-goes and I watch it and wait for the But.

  “But I am forty-nine years old,” he continues. “We have gone so far in so quickly. I know what it means to g
o deep and I can go deep with you. I know I can do it, but I have done it at least once before and it hasn’t lasted.”

  I want to say, Yeah, but that was with a woman who moved to Boulder and changed her name from Sophie to Sofree. I want to say, Six days is not time enough to love me all the way down to the bone. I want to say, If I love you, then I will not have the opportunity to fulfill Cinder’s prophecy and break furniture with Bucky Baxter. But on the off chance I already love him back, I, for a change, say nothing at all.

  59. Tucson, Arizona

  I have not been on the property thirty minutes when I am lying on a massage table in a softly lit, frangipani-scented room with a person named Trevor towering over me.

  “I can see,” he says, “that you are doing a lot of spiritual work because look how far you are out in your hair.” His accent is vaguely South African, and he has the most impressive unibrow I have ever seen. “I do not read poetry,” Trevor says, “because I live poetry.”

  He picks my feet up and lets them fall back to the table. “May I ask you,” he says, “why the lower half of your body is perpetually standing in ice cold water?” He means energetically, of course, because the room is warm and my legs are dry. “And what happened here?” he asks, not waiting for an answer. He has his hand on my leg at the exact place where, when I was four years old, my father threw me so hard against a big oak wardrobe that I broke my femur. The bone healed forty years ago—I was casted from the tip of my toes to my armpits for months—but Trevor is not the first healer to be able to “see” what happened.

  “My father . . .” I begin.

  “I am not afraid of your pain,” Trevor says. “I am not afraid of your grief. I am not afraid of your terror. You want to know why I am not afraid of your terror?” I nod. “I am not afraid of your terror because I have gone inside the monster, and inside the monster is pure wonder.”