I told Grace about something else that happened at the teaching: A Dutch student had insisted that reincarnation is a fantasy.
“‘Fine,’ the Rinpoche told him. ‘You can believe, or not believe. Up to you! But if you believe or not, makes no difference. Reincarnation is a fact.’”
Grace smirked. “So much for lively debate.”
I shrugged. “Maybe it is blind faith, or maybe Chokyi Nyima has witnessed it firsthand. I’m sure there’s some pretty robust evidence out there. I hope so. Because, at the end of the day, I’d like to believe that our life-essence sticks around—and that no one we love is ever really gone.”
The body on the ghat burned steadily. The errant leg had burned clean and now hung across the logs at a ghoulish angle. The man’s face was clearly visible, a blackened and expressionless mask, the eyes and nose gone.
Grace walked upriver and sat on the edge of the second, clean-swept ghat. Her face glowed, illuminated by the fire. I stayed where I was, arms folded across my chest, awed by this direct experience of the human body’s stuff-ness.
“Come here,” Grace said, brushing a twig from the spot beside her.
I left the heat of the pyre and joined her. We sat together, watching the flames, our fingers intertwined. Neither of us spoke. There was the snap crackle popping of muscle and wood and fat, temple bells ringing from the distant Pashupati shrines, and an occasional scream from the forest of monkeys. Otherwise, the night was still.
Grace turned toward me. “Make love to me,” she said. “Here.”
It was breathlessly strange. We must have looked like the lovers in those Tibetan paintings: Grace on my lap, her strong legs around my back, our open mouths pressed lightly together. She moaned in a beautiful erotic cadence, her hips moving as if on a swing, her eyes open and wild.
As we came I heard a muted crack, like two cupped hands clapped fiercely together. Beyond Grace’s shoulder, a few yards away, a wine-red fountain rose from the corpse.
11
Meet the Artist
NEW ROAD IS one of Kathmandu’s oldest paved roads, built after the great earthquake of 1934. At the time it might have been a humble homage to the Champs-Élysées, filled with trendy shops and visited by royalty. Six decades on, it was a pastiche of sweet shops and tailors, opticians and dentists, goldsmiths and electronics stores selling gray-market TVs, speakers, and cassette decks. A hundred yards beyond the entrance gate—with its painted bas-reliefs of Shiva and Ganesh—was an ancient pipal tree, shading a small square that served as the city’s main newsstand and intellectual gathering spot. Dozens of newspapers and broadsides, from the royalist Gorkhapatra to Mahesh Regmi’s upstart Nepal Press Digest, lay in the dappled shade, or folded open in the hands of middle-aged men in topis, Tribhuvan University students, and local merchants.
But my rare visit to New Road had nothing to do with newsprint. Once in a while I got a craving for gundpak, a local snack as seductive as catnip for Nepalis. I didn’t know all the ingredients, but it was basically a loose, gritty fudge of sugar, boiled milk, salt, and flour, with a handful of broken cashews, chestnuts, coconuts, or raisins thrown in. The locals were crazy for it; five tiny shops were clustered in a one-block area. Gundpak Vendor, on a corner just inside the New Road Gate, was the oldest of the lot, though my attempts to learn its true age produced wildly varied results.
At eleven in the morning the stall was mobbed. I pressed in with the crowd, a 20-rupee bill waving from my hand. People of all ages strained forward with ragged notes to buy their daily fix of the thick, brown mass. It was one of the reliably wonderful things in the valley.
Gundpak had long been a staple for locals, but few tourists—or expats—were aware of its existence. When friends came to town, I brought them here right away. They were always reluctant to taste the brown goop, taking a tiny sample on their pinkies. Like Kathmandu itself, it was a bizarre, over-rich concoction that somehow worked. No one, once they’d overcome their initial aversion, could resist it.
EXCEPT, OF COURSE, for Jordan. He would be able to resist it—as he currently resisted everything that existed outside his small, rigorous sphere of approval.
I tried to remember when he’d changed. When had everything to do with sensory pleasure and the physical world become repulsive to him? Thinking back, it happened when I was in my midteens. Sometime in junior high, Jordan began to despise food: food, at least, as I understood it. Suddenly, apparently on a whim, he would eat nothing containing sugar or salt. He prepared his own Spartan meals in a corner of the kitchen as our mother dished up lasagna, veal cutlets, roast chicken, blintzes, and pound cake.
Despite my mom’s excellent cooking, dinners were an ordeal. There was little conversation, and we sat in silence to the awkward rhythms of mastication. Jordan mastered the art of racetrack dining. “Time me,” he’d demand, dropping into his seat. He could polish off a serving of brown rice, kale, and steamed broccoli in three minutes. The instant he finished, he shot to his feet and quit the table with a preemptive “excuse me.” A moment later, his door would bang shut.
He kept the red burlap curtains closed, which gave his bedroom the odd glow of a darkroom. When I dared to enter (after his barked command that I identify myself), I’d find him bent over his desk, the high-intensity corona of a gooseneck lamp illuminating the texts of German or Greek literature arrayed on his desk.
“What are you reading?”
“Heine,” he declared nasally.
“Is this a bad time?”
“You’d fare better interrupting me whilst I devoured a succulent peach, or pleasured a fulsome maiden.”
His eyes were eaglelike, with a focus that was almost frightening. This was the quality that best defined my brother: the ability to narrow his attention unflinchingly, with a raptor’s precision, on whatever prize he was after. Once, when he took a break from a survey of lyric verse, I leaned over his desk and examined the text, half expecting to see scorch marks.
Jordan’s aptitude with German blossomed into a love of all languages. Their study dominated his thoughts, and was one of few things that animated him. While I lusted for open spaces, dreaming of journeys to Monument Valley or Damascus, Jordan withdrew into the world of Hölderlin, Cicero, and Aristophanes. Their ethics became his ethics; their perfected language, his precise method of speaking.
Like the classical cultures, he placed a high value on fitness. Early each morning, before jogging to the high school track to run his daily miles, he’d descend to the kitchen and boil water. I watched him remove the Sanka jar from the cupboard above the sink, unscrew the lid, and extract a few grains of freeze-dried coffee between his thumb and index finger. He would drop these crystals into a cup, pour in hot water, and sip with contentment. I regarded his pale brew with disdain.
“It needs a strong cup of coffee,” he remarked earnestly. “A bold cup of coffee, to see a man through a winter’s morn.”
I snorted. “You can’t even taste the goddamned coffee.”
“A robust drink,” he continued, savoring the anemic bouquet, “against the cold morning. It’s all a man really needs.”
He would follow his beverage with a bowl of oats and a slice of whole-grain toast spread with a layer, one molecule thick, of margarine. After rinsing the dishes, he disappeared into the dawn.
His resolve and self-confidence shamed me. I faced the unsavory fact that my weird little brother—unlike my cool, rebellious friends—was the true nonconformist. I’d given up any hope of winning his admiration. But he possessed powers of discrimination that I lacked, and I sought his respect to vindicate my own sketchy behavior. This was not a prize given lightly. Thinking back on those days, I recall Primo Levi’s description of his friend Sandro in The Periodic Table: “He had the nature of a cat with whom one can live for decades, without ever being permitted to penetrate its sacred pelt.”
When Jordan was fourteen, our father confronted him. He opened the door of my brother’s bedroom, cigarette in hand, and de
manded to know what his son planned to do with his life.
“I plan,” Jordan replied curtly, “to be a philosopher.”
“And how will you make a living?” Dad asked sarcastically. “Open a philosophy store?”
Jordan smiled thinly, inclined his head, and closed his door. Years later, he would name that incident as the end of their relationship. I believe this is true, and our sister, Debra, concurs. As far as we know, it was the last time our brother and father ever spoke.
“HAJUR! LINUS NA!”
The rupee note was snatched from my fingers and a small parcel of gundpak—wrapped in a page from the Gorkhapatra—pressed into my hand. I was starting to feel like Billy Pilgrim, the hero of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, migrating from one timescape to another.
The memory of my father and brother seemed harsh—but that kind of alienation was practically a tradition in Nepal. The history of the ruling class in the Kathmandu Valley was a bloody saga of brother against brother, father against son. As I carried my gundpak down New Road, I glanced with amusement at a display of plastic gift plates in a shop window. There were two designs, featuring images of King Birendra and Queen Aiswarya. I wondered when there would be a portrait plate featuring Dipendra, the eighteen-year-old crown prince, whose exploits with drugs and alcohol—often in company of his wild cousin, Paras—were the subject of disgusted gossip and apprehension among Nepal’s upper and middle classes. It was hard to imagine what the prince’s relationship with his parents must be. I doubted there was much mutual respect, or a lot of lively dinner conversation.
My scruffy reflection in a jewelry store window reminded me that I needed a shave. There’d been a place on Kicha Pokhari, across from the old American Cultural Center—the Ramu Saloon. And here it was still: a bright, large shop painted mint green, with gold-trimmed lettering on the window.
Inside, five wood-and-leather chairs faced a mirrored wall. There was no waiting. The moment I walked in, I was steered to a chair. A fresh blue towel was tossed over my chest and tucked into my collar. My head was coaxed back.
“Shave only?”
“Haus.”
The barber squeezed an inch of white paste onto my chin and dipped a brush into a small silver bowl of water.
“New blade, please.”
He wagged his head, unwrapped an India-made stainless steel blade, and slid it into a bright orange straight razor holder.
There’s no sound quite like the rasp of a straight razor against your skin. The barber worked in quick, short strokes, briskly wiping the accumulated cream off the razor and onto the flat of his hand. When the first pass was finished, he lathered me up again and began the fine tuning: around my Adam’s apple and in front of my ears. He pinched my nose up and flicked the blade down my philtrum, an intimate and tensifying gesture that reminded me of Chinatown.
The sight of my reflection, chin lifted high, looking down at myself as if from a height, turned my thoughts back to my brother. At a certain point, I realized, he had made a deliberate decision to be an outsider. I thought again of Star Trek’s Spock and his irrepressible aura of superiority. But even that comparison was inadequate. The iconic Vulcan was smart, alright; but he lacked my brother’s gift for performance.
Jordan was one of a handful of students to receive perfect scores on his SATs, a feat that won him a small mention in the Long Island Press. He had his pick of schools, but accepted a scholarship to Deep Springs: a small, exclusive college and working cattle ranch near Bishop, in California’s high desert. The place was a good match for him. It was geographically isolated, barely accessible. During the two years he attended I rarely saw him—despite the fact that I’d moved to California myself and was completing my own studies at UC Santa Cruz.
Our separation, paradoxically, brought us closer. We began exchanging letters. His were salted with German verses, Greek idioms, quotations from Cicero, and words that, plain English though they were, had me groping for the dictionary: lycanthropy, ungulate, susurrus. He was wrestling, he told me, with a project that had obsessed him since the age of thirteen: a “calculus of language” that would make it possible to define once and for all abstract concepts like Truth and Beauty.
My brother’s academic efforts were admirable, but baffling. More accessible to me were his gutsy episodes as a prankster, an agent provocateur who continually courted disaster.
He had described his motivation (and the pranks themselves) on various occasions. Social intercourse, for Jordan, was a kind of mad experiment, and the human race supplied him with an ever-changing pool of subjects. He took insane chances with people: challenging them, mimicking them, deliberately confusing them in the hopes of drawing out spontaneous and revealing responses.
A favorite among his stunts was “Going Up,” which he performed three or four times during a summer job with a New York publisher. Jordan would enter an office lobby—the RCA building had the right kind of elevators—and wait gamely, pretending to sort through his documents. When a car had filled up with passengers and the doors began to close, he ran toward the lift: “Please! Hold that door!” The occupants usually complied, grinning with Samaritan satisfaction as Jordan squeezed in. He then nodded in acknowledgment and turned to face the control panel.
As soon as the doors hissed shut, Jordan immediately depressed his own button—for the highest floor possible. He then proceeded, with utter nonchalance, to pull out every other pushed button. The elevator thus rose unhindered, stopping at no one’s floor but his own.
Startled, electric murmurs boiled through the compartment as people watched their floors tick by. Jordan’s gaunt body blocked access to the panel. Elsewhere, he might have been murdered for such impunity, but his well-heeled benefactors were too stunned to move a muscle. Imagining my brother, rising toward the Rainbow Room in a sealed compartment of seething New Yorkers, I realize what he was: a kind of behaviorist Houdini. He viewed America as an arena of conditioned responses, and saw his pranks as a form of guerrilla theater.
He specialized in mimicry. He’d spy an individual with a peculiar gait (neither the elderly nor the disabled were spared his attentions) and move beside them, imitating their every nuance. A heavyset man in a fedora, with bowed legs and a penguinlike stride, would glance to his left—and for a moment, the annoyance of having his space invaded would cloud his recognition. Then the man experienced a vertiginous confusion, as if he’d caught a glimpse of himself, unexpectedly, in a mirror. As his disorientation passed, an incredulous anger would descend.
Jordan was invincible in these situations. What made him so—whether mimicking a petite Chinese woman or a drunken longshoreman—was his self-possession. He never broke character. He conducted his experiments with total conviction, neither scorn nor amusement crossing his face. Sometimes, though, when he mimicked the lame or elderly, his eyes would wince, as if he were experiencing their pain.
He wanted to experience it, I think. He knew little of human suffering, save the idealized behavior he had read about in classical literature. (He did not count our parents in this category, as he believed they suffered by choice.) Underlying his mimicry was an obsessive humanism: a desire to literally inhabit the skin of the people he studied on the streets, to feel what they felt. There was no one he respected more than the rare person who would invite him more genuinely into their world. One afternoon, a shuffling and overweight woman—laden with bags from Gristedes—saw Jordan huffing along beside her. She shook her head and handed him her bags. He carried them back to her apartment—not just that day, but once every week for two months afterward. This was the flip side of his social bargain: Any request for help, or charity, was answered. All one had to do was ask. Jordan did not shy from an outstretched hand, or from inviting a homeless person up to his apartment for a hot shower or cup of sugarless tea.
BY THE AGE of twenty, my brother was conversant in a dozen languages. Nothing delighted him more than visiting one of New York’s great museums and attaching himself to a
vacationing couple from France or Germany, Spain or Israel. He would shadow the visitors as they roamed the galleries. After ten or fifteen minutes he had focused his attention upon either the man or the woman—mastering that person’s accent, syntax, and inflections. At that point, the hapless tourists became unwitting participants in whatever odd theater my brother might devise.
One June afternoon, in New York together for a cousin’s wedding, Jordan and I made a visit to the Museum of Modern Art. This was a major concession. Contemporary painting and sculpture were my thing, not his.
Shortly after we entered, Jordan spied a well-dressed French couple. We tailed them through Cubism, watched them puff at Alexander Calder’s mobile, and hovered nearby as they navigated the chairs and lampshades of the Design Gallery. But they were fleet of foot and never gave Jordan an opening. He finally gave up, abandoning the couple as they loitered over Gitanes in the Sculpture Garden.
Before we left the MoMA, I suggested a brief stop in the temporary galleries. The exhibition on view was appalling, but our visit gave me an opportunity to witness my brother’s “art” firsthand.
Jordan entered the room, read the artist’s biography, and surveyed the work with contempt. A sculpture was mounted to the wall right before us. The piece consisted of a skunk pelt, bound with raw twine to a nest of leaves and sticks. Who had decreed this was art? Art, for Jordan, was the sinewy muscle of Michelangelo’s David, the chiaroscuro of Eugène Delacroix, the Poseidon of Artemision. Aside from some early Picassos and a few Expressionists, everything created since the 1860s was, in his estimable view, trash.
“If you don’t mind,” he muttered, “I’ll take my leave of this mortuary. And when I say mortuary,” he added, “I speak not only of this unfortunate weasel, but of Art. Art itself is buried here, in body and spirit; and here it rots, festering with worms while lauded by the masses as living. And not just as living,” he added pointedly, “as vibrantly alive.”
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