Snake Lake

by Jeff Greenwald

  “I did not panic,” she insisted. “It was Buddha Jayanti. One best not be stingy.”

  Our food arrived: fragrant flapjacks and a gray slab of liver. I didn’t understand how Coal could eat water buffalo liver, much less for breakfast, let alone in Nepal.

  “Perfection,” he announced, pouncing on his cutlery and chewing each bite with pleasure. “I’m in a fine humor this morning. Sex with my wife, a run with my dogs, a brilliant idea over tea. I tell you, it doesn’t get any better.”

  “What’s your brilliant idea?”

  Clarice didn’t look up from her plate. “It’s a hare-brained scheme. I won’t let him do it.”

  “When we’re thick with rupees you’ll eat your words.” A waiter brought a dish of sour cream, which Coal spooned over his potatoes. “Where’s your sense of adventure? I wouldn’t be surprised if the king himself volunteered to . . .”

  “He wants to open a scuba diving school,” Clarice announced. “Ask him where.”

  “Where, Coal?”

  “Why, right in your own neighborhood. Your veritable back garden. Nag Pokhari!” I stared at him.

  “Where else? It’s big enough, it’s conveniently located, and there’s that small Ganesh temple, perfect for storing compressed air tanks.”

  “Coal . . .” I refreshed his coffee. “You’re a genius.”

  “You see?” He turned to Clarice, vindicated. “I’m telling you, it would be a sensation. Imagine the sign: a noble cobra, clad in a mask and snorkel. Coiled below, three words: Snake Lake Scuba. It’s an amazing place, really. Very mysterious. Are you aware that no one knows how deep it is? It may be part of a vast, subterranean aquifer. There’s a rumor it joins an underground cavern, stretching clear to Pokhara. Pokhara! Can you imagine? And if what they say about the nagas is true . . .”

  “The whole place,” I said, “will be lined with gems.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Butchering the goose,” Clarice warned, “for the golden eggs.”

  Coal sawed his liver. “Don’t be silly, my dear. We would leave their nagmanis untouched.”

  “Best you do,” she said. “Else they may go for yours.”

  There was a short lull in the conversation. Clarice looked at me briefly, furtively, as if she were about to say something, then turned her knife over a few times.

  “Which reminds me,” said Coal, clicking a pen and jotting something on a paper napkin. “Must fax Beijing for those jade buttons.”

  “My God,” I blurted. “I forgot. You’re off to China, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” Clarice nodded. “On Monday. For a full bloody month.”

  “A month? Seems like a long time.”

  She said pointedly, “It does to me as well.”

  “How will you entertain yourself?”

  “Oh, I’ll see the sights,” she shrugged. “Some friends from Africa are living in Hong Kong; I may spend a week or so there as well.”

  “Kathmandu won’t be the same without you guys in town.”

  “Ah, well. Sorry.” Coal addressed me theatrically. “You’ll be on your own. Footloose in Kathmandu.”

  “I’m sure Grace will console me.”

  Coal and Clarice looked at each other. Coal put down his fork. “Listen, old chap. There’s no easy way to tell you this.” He cleared his throat. “Grace is gone. She’s left Nepal.” I looked at him dumbly. “It’s true. She flew out Monday, on the Bangkok flight.”

  “Bangkok?” The information was huge and smooth, like a mutant apple; I couldn’t get my teeth into it. “You mean . . . on assignment?”

  Clarice was fishing in her daypack. “No. She’s on her way back to America. Michigan, I believe.”

  “Missouri,” Coal corrected.

  It wasn’t sinking in. I sat limply, a rhinoceros on my chest. Clarice found what she was looking for. “She left you a letter.” I took the envelope. It was a padded six by nine, made of lokta paper, with a lump in it. The eyes of Buddha were block-printed in the upper left corner.

  “Someone came to see her,” Clarice said. “Someone from home. Turns out she’d left a bad situation, and had more or less disappeared from sight. She made mention of an accident, whilst she was driving. It happened two or three years ago. She’s been on the run, dodging her friends, ever since. Can you believe it? Nobody, friends or family, knew she was here.”

  “Then . . . how did they find her?”

  “That’s the amazing thing,” said Coal. “They saw her on CNN and sent someone over to fetch her.”

  “Did she say . . .” I struggled for the simplest words. “Is she coming back?”

  “Don’t know,” said Coal. “We saw her but once, and briefly.”

  The back of my face, behind my eyes and nose, seemed to be liquefying. Clarice reached over and put her hand on my arm. “It’s extraordinary, isn’t it, the hidden worlds of people. Any people. All people. The people you think you know.”

  “Except for us, of course.” Coal speared a potato and loaded it with onions. “We’re just as we appear, old chap. What you see is what you get.”

  I SAT ON a wooden bench at the edge of Nag Pokhari. It was the same place we’d met on Shivaratri, in February.

  For a long moment I simply sat, holding the envelope, conjuring Grace. Her hazel eyes and girlish giggle. Her earlobes and hips. Just a week ago, I’d held her. Abruptly, everything had changed. Kathmandu felt pale, bleached of mystery. Nag Pokhari was a lifeless tank. My presence in this place, this country, seemed pointless.

  The nearby traffic clattered like static. I took a deep breath, and opened the letter. She’d written in red ink. The short, bulbous i’s and rounded m’s were a surprise; I’d never seen her handwriting before. There were two sheets of paper, and a small plastic canister. I knew instantly what was inside.

  Dear Jeff,

  Maybe this won’t come out so well, I’ve had a bottle of wine (cheap Australian stuff) and I’m in a state of shock. But I have to write to you.

  So what can I say . . . life is weird . . . I never thought I’d be writing this letter. It’s midnight Sunday, and I’m leaving tomorrow for Thailand.

  I couldn’t believe this, and maybe you won’t either, but it’s true. My friend Vanessa showed up at my door this morning. Dean’s fiancée. We were all in the accident together, and I didn’t think I’d see her again. A month ago, Vanessa’s mom saw me on CNN, and everyone knew I was in Nepal. Vanessa said she’d come here, with no idea how she’d find me. Who did she end up sitting next to on the plane from Bangkok? Larry Prince.

  The whole story is beyond belief. Dean was paralyzed from the accident, the doctors said for good, but he’s making a miraculous recovery. He’s actually walking. Now he’s waiting in Thailand with two of our other friends, and he wants to see me. I can’t say no.

  After Thailand they want me to go home to Missouri with them. It’s not just an idea. They bought me a ticket. I have a week to cancel . . . but it’s not really a choice.

  You are the only one I told about the accident, at least what happened afterwards. You know it was the worst thing in my life, and that I tried to run away from it. I ran to Nepal and didn’t look back. I couldn’t, it was like my life was out of control and I was hurting the people I cared about the most. I told you this. At first, when I saw Vanessa, I thought you had somehow found them and told them—but of course you didn’t, and I’m sorry I distrusted you that way.

  So now it all caught up with me. God bless CNN. At first I felt scared (I still do), but now I think it will be good, a liberating experience. It’s my chance to make things right. Like you coming back here for your brother. Not exactly, I know, but similar. I can’t move forward, with myself or with anything, until I put this to rest. There are so many people I have to see, and apologize to. I know that I still love those people.

  A few days ago you told me you loved me. I love you, too. Forgive me for saying this, and maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like this—meaning, our relations
hip—isn’t as important to you as you say it is. Does that make any sense? Because I think I’m the same way. Our work comes first. Maybe you’ll decide to leave Nepal in another month, or a week. I don’t know. Maybe I’m scared we’ll get really close again and you’ll leave again and it’ll be like last time, when you just evaporated. That hurt me a lot. But I’m not leaving because I’m pissed off, in fact I spent the whole day wondering if I should stay here, and leave for Thailand after you got back. But I can’t. I don’t trust myself to go. But I have to go—to Thailand and to Missouri, also. And I have to go alone.

  All my furniture is at Rhoda and Kunda’s. I’ll try to come back after the monsoon. Somehow I don’t think you’ll be here. Coal and Clarice have Vanessa’s address and phone number. If you come back to America maybe we can meet in a few months, in California or Missouri. That is if you don’t hate me for this. But I don’t think you will. I think you’ll understand. You understand these things.

  I hope and pray you find peace about your brother. I think I know how you must feel. I have so many ghosts of my own.

  Please call me when you can. I’ll miss you, naga-man.

  I love you

  Grace

  PS—don’t run out of film.

  I opened the black canister, shook out the roll of Plus-X, and left it, amid the other offerings, on the shrine by Snake Lake.

  39

  Nagi Gompa

  FIVE MILES NORTH of Kathmandu, well beyond the dusty ribbon of the Ring Road, an ancient and enormous statue of the sleeping Vishnu reclines on what appears, at first, to be a bed of snakes. On closer inspection, it’s a single snake: the cosmic serpent Ananta, king of all nagas, whose intricate coils represent infinity.

  I paused outside the open temple, wondering whether to enter and pay my respects. But my mission right now was elsewhere, and in a different spiritual tenor.

  The village of Budhanilkantha was quiet this morning. I continued through, on foot, toward the base of Shivapuri hill. A small group of goats stood tied to a post. By the edge of the dirt road two boys played with a top, spinning it on a square of worn cardboard. I stopped for a moment and watched them. Nepal’s unerring gift for synchronicity stunned me. The metaphor of a top—a simple, wooden top—had crossed my mind many times during the past few days. The trajectory seemed painfully familiar. Wind the string, and give it a good toss. For a while, it seems it will spin forever. But something always intrudes: entropy, gravity, a stray pebble. The spin becomes a spiral; the spiral decays. Any child can draw a picture of a top, poised and spinning. But who can sketch out those last few moments: that chaotic, spastic jig?

  I had wobbled through the long afternoons in silence, speaking to no one. Grace was a snapshot, an apparition, visible when I closed my eyes. But as difficult as the days were, the nights were worse. I lay in bed wishing I’d stayed in the mountains, where the clarity of the night sky put the size of the world, and the human condition, into perspective. If my trek had been short, it was because I’d had something to come back to. Would I have come back to Nepal at all, I wondered, had I known how events would unfold?

  But there was something else I’d returned for, as well: this morning’s audience with the Rinpoche.

  I left the boys and their top and continued up the road past a thinning array of butchers, tailors, and cold shops. A short walk brought me to the gates of the Shivapuri reserve, with its ramshackle entrance booth. From here it was an hour’s walk to the nunnery, on a steep forest trail lined with tattered prayer flags.

  NAGI GOMPA SITS on a flank of the valley’s northernmost hill, a blur of white buildings poised below the clouds. The forest rises behind it, ascending to the peak of Shivapuri and the source of the Bagmati River. The quality of light, as at Boudha, is wonderful. But here it has a cooler, slightly greenish tint, as the monastery is sheltered by trees.

  Half of Chokyi Nyima’s face was illuminated by the pearlescent glow of a nearby window. The other half remained in shadow. I shivered, approached, and offered him a kata. There was no joking about giraffes, none of our usual preamble about politics or the revolution. We sat face-to-face, alone in the dim altar room.

  “So. Very sad thing. Really terrible, to lose brother. How can I help?”

  “Rinpoche, you know that my brother took his own life. I need to understand something. How does Tibetan Buddhism view suicide?”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Suicide is very sad, a very painful thing,” he offered. “Life is precious, especially human life. We can help and serve so many beings, if we have good motivation. And we can help ourselves—to become a better person, wiser person, happier person. We can even get enlightenment, in this precious human life. We have so much positive power! And that is the reason we need to live, every moment. Very important. We should never waste, we should never damage, our precious human body.”

  “But do you think it’s even possible,” I wondered, “for a rinpoche, or a Buddha, to understand the depth of suffering that creates the motivation for suicide?”

  “Of course! When Buddha gave his first teaching, it was on dukka: suffering. He said, Please think well. There is a cause of suffering—and there is a method to be rid of suffering. These are two of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. So if someone want to know how be rid of suffering, it’s good to know the true cause of the suffering. Not only pills, or drugs, or alcohol, or sex.

  “Okay? Some other question?”

  “Yes.” I swallowed. I’d been rehearsing the question for days, but with the moment upon me I found myself struggling for words.

  “Rinpoche, I’ve come to your teachings and spoken with other Buddhist students. There’s a belief that if someone dies without embracing the Buddhist dharma, their human life is essentially—to use your word—wasted. They enter the Bardo without hope of liberation, without any tools for reaching a higher rebirth.” Now came the sticky part. “This really disturbs me. It makes the belief in Buddhist practice sound like absolution, like in the Christian church. Without it, there’s no redemption. If this is true, everything that my brother did during his lifetime was worthless. I can’t accept that.”

  I looked at the Rinpoche. His eyes were soft, but unwavering. “I refuse to believe it,” I continued. “My brother was a marvelous person. Difficult, but extraordinary. Even though he ended his life without any knowledge of Buddhism—in a state of despair—I cannot accept the idea that his life was wasted.”

  There was a brief pause. Chokyi Nyima coughed briefly, then cleared his throat. “Okay. First I explain the Christian idea, like you said. Then about your brother.

  “The Christian idea of absolution is actually quite good. Why? Because if someone can feel really sorry for any negative actions they have done, and believe that the blame for these actions has been cleared away, it is possible they can die peacefully. And even though just thinking away those actions doesn’t make them go away—since the karma of those actions will still be there—it does help. There is some definite benefit there.

  “In the same way, if one is a Buddhist, one can call upon all the buddhas and bodhisattvas to witness that one genuinely feels bad for anything bad that one has done, and ask for blessings to purify one’s state of mind. Again: One can die peacefully.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Now about your brother.” Chokyi Nyima looked at his lap, smoothing a fold in his robe. He appeared deeply pensive, yet tinged with regret, like a physician compelled to deliver difficult but incontrovertible news. “First, the act of taking one’s own life is never positive. There is always some negative consequence, some negative karma from that. There’s no way around it. I’m sorry. Sad to say, difficult to hear, but true.

  “But this, also, is true. Any positive state of mind that your brother had at any time during his life—any moment of good heart, of open heart—has its own effect. The positive karma generated during a person’s life is never wasted. It is never canceled out. No matter how he died, t
hat effect does not disappear. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. The Rinpoche’s words released a cascade of images, rolling across my inner eye: Jordan at Cornell, inviting a homeless man to sleep in his apartment; Jordan in Manhattan, carrying an old woman’s groceries; Jordan on the Santa Cruz campus, signing earnestly with deaf-mutes. When I sought for truth I could have moved the planets, and the stars. In all I did I kept to truth and courage. Was it not so? The quest for truth, in my brother’s style, had required amazing courage, and might have blossomed into a lifetime of compassionate action. He had certainly been capable of it—until his “abomination” cast him into a pit of self-loathing. His own mind became traitorous. If his noble intentions had soured, turned acrid, it was not the fault of his heart.

  Still, something continued to haunt me. It was the tired old theme, rarely questioned, of blaming the victim. I was surprised to hear that even Tibetan Buddhism, with its high premium on compassion, dooms the despairing suicide to a kind of damnation.

  “Not damnation,” the Rinpoche replied evenly. “We’re speaking of karma. Listen carefully; I will explain.

  “There are many good qualities of the human mind. But there are also some very bad ones. These include attachment, aversion, and ignorance: stupidity. Just so, the different reasons why one could take one’s own life could be out of anger, jealousy, hatred, pride . . . or ignorance. Stupidity.

  “Your brother’s suicide was caused by stupidity: ignorance of the value of a human life. Thinking that life is too much pain, too much suffering. Thinking that it is better to be dead, because then the pain stops. Thinking that death itself is just a pleasant, oblivious state.

  “That is very ignorant. Very stupid,” Chokyi Nyima said. “Because that is not the way it is. It is not damnation, not superstition, but fact. You cannot liberate yourself from samsara—from anything—by running away.”

  I stared silently through the window. The word stupid had never been applied to any aspect of Jordan’s life. It was shocking to hear it used so accurately. And yet . . . despite this assessment, I could not imagine a future in which my brother’s essence was not only redeemed, but rewarded. I had to believe that the universe had found a place for him: a simpler incarnation, where his soaring vision and proud solitude might find their most appropriate home.