The Braindead Megaphone

by George Saunders

  The mind is a machine that is constantly asking: What would I prefer? Close your eyes, refuse to move, and watch what your mind does. What it does is become discontent with That Which Is. A desire arises, you satisfy that desire, and another arises in its place. This wanting and rewanting is an endless cycle for which, turns out, there is already a name: samsara. Samsara is at the heart of the vast human carnival: greed, neurosis, mad ambition, adultery, crimes of passion, the hacking to death of a terrified man on a hillside in the name of A More Pure And Thus Perfect Nation—and all of this takes place because we believe we will be made happy once our desires have been satisfied.

  I know this. But still I’m full of desire. I want my legs to stop hurting. I want something to drink. I even kind of want another hot roll.

  Seven months, I think? The kid has been sitting there seven months?

  FORSOOTH, GET ME HITHER TO THE PALACE, AND DON’T SMACK INTO THAT COW

  We arrive in Katmandu just before midnight. The city is as dark a city as I’ve ever seen: no streetlights, no neon, each building lit by one or two small bulbs or a single hanging lantern. It’s like a medieval city, smoke-smelling, the buildings leaning into narrow unsquared roads. It’s as if the cab has been time-transported back to the age of kings and squalor, and we are making our way through the squalor to the palace, which is the Hyatt. A garbage-eating cow appears in our headlights. We pass a lonely green-lit mod ATM kiosk that looks like it’s been dropped in from the future.

  The Hyatt lobby is empty except for rows of Buddha statues: a maze with no takers. The Business Center manageress not only has heard of the boy but is also of the opinion that he is being fed by snakes. Their venom, she says, is actually milk to him.

  I go to bed, sleep the odd post-trip sleep from which you wake up unsure of where, or who, you are.

  In the morning I throw open the curtains, and there is Katmandu: a sprawling Seussian city where prayer flags extend from wacky tower to strange veranda to tilting spire-of-uncertain-purpose. Beyond Seuss City: the Himalayas, pure, Platonically white, the white there was before other colors were invented. In the foreground is the massive, drained, under-repair Hyatt pool, in a field of dead, dry Hyatt grass, and a woman tending to the first of an endless row of shrubs, in a vignette that should be titled “Patience Will Prevail.”

  I take a walk.

  The level of noise, energy, and squalor of Katmandu makes even the poorest section of the most wild-ass American city seem placid and urban-planned. Some guys squat in a trash-strewn field, inexplicably beating the crap out of what looks like purple cotton candy. A woman whose face has been burned or torn off walks past me, running some small errand, an errand made heartbreaking by the way she carries herself, which seems to signify: I’m sure this will be a very good day! Here is a former Pepsi kiosk, now barbed-wired and manned by Nepalese soldiers armed for Maoists; here a Ping-Pong table made of slate, with brick legs. I cross a mythical bleak vacant lot I’ve seen in dreams, a lot surrounded by odd Nepali brick high-rises like a lake surrounded by cliffs, if the lake were dry and had a squatting, peeing lady in the middle of it. Averting my eyes, I see another woman, with a baby, and teeth that jut, terrifyingly, straight out of her mouth, horizontally, as if her gums had loosened up and she had tilted her teeth out at ninety degrees. She stretches out a hand, jiggles the baby with the other, as if to say: This baby, these teeth, come on, how are we supposed to live?

  Off to one side of the road is a strange sunken hollow—like a shallow basement excavation—filled with rows of wooden benches on which hundreds of the dustiest men, women, and children imaginable wait for something with the sad patience of animals. It’s like a bus station, but there’s no road in sight. Several Westerners huddle near a gate, harried-looking, pissy, admitting people or not. A blind man is expelled from the lot and lingers by the gate, acting casual, like he was not just expelled. What’s going on here? Three hundred people in a kind of open-air jail, no blind guys allowed.

  I go in, walk through the crowd (“Good mahning how on you I am fahn!”), and corner a harried Western woman with several mouth sores.

  “What is all this?” I say.

  “Soup kitchen,” she says.

  “For…?” I say.

  “Anybody who needs,” she says.

  And there are many who need: two hundred, three hundred people a sitting, she says, two sittings a day, never an empty seat.

  This, I think, explains the expelled blind man: He came too late.

  Life is suffering, the Buddha said, by which he did not mean Every moment of life is unbearable but rather All happiness/rest/contentment is transient; all appearances of permanence are illusory.

  The faceless woman, the odd-toothed woman, the dusty elderly people with babies in their laps, waiting for a meal, the blind guy by the gate, feigning indifference: In Nepal, it occurs to me, life is suffering, nothing esoteric about it.

  Then, at the end of a road too narrow for a car, appears the famous Boudha stupa: huge, pale, glacial, rising out of the surrounding dusty squalor like Hope itself.

  WHAT IS A STUPA AND WHY DO WE NEED ONE?

  A stupa is a huge three-dimensional Buddhist prayer aid, usually dome-shaped, often containing some holy relic, a bone or lock of hair from the historical Buddha. This particular stupa has been accreting for many centuries; some accounts date it back to AD 500. It is ringed by a circular street filled with hundreds of circumambulating Buddhist pilgrims from all over Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, India: wild costumes in every hue of purple, red, and orange; odd piercings and hairstyles. A shop blares a version of the om mani padme hung chant over and over, all day. A woman with a goiter the size of a bowling ball gossips with some friends.

  The stupa is multileveled, terraced; people circumambulate on each level. Pigeon shadows flee across multiple planar surfaces, along with the shadows of thousands of prayer flags. Barefoot boys lug buckets of yellowish whitewash to the top level and sling these across the surface of the dome, leaving jagged yellow thunderbolts. The only sounds are birdsong and the occasional clanging of a bell and, in the far distance, a power saw.

  I do lap after lap, praying for everybody I know. For me, this has been a tough year: A beloved uncle died, my parents’ house was destroyed by Katrina, a kindhearted cousin shipped off to Iraq, a car accident left my teenage daughter sobbing by the side of the road on a dark, freezing night, I’ve found myself loving my wife of eighteen years more than I’d even known you could love another human being—a good thing, except that it involves a terrifying downside: the realization that there must someday come a parting.

  Today, at the stupa, it occurs to me that this low-level ambient fear constitutes a decent working definition of the human: A human being is someone who, having lived awhile, becomes terrified and, having become terrified, deeply craves an end to the fear.

  All of this—the stupa, the millions of people who have circumambulated it during the hundreds of years since it was built (in Shakespeare’s time, while Washington lived, during the Civil War, as Glenn Miller played), the shops, the iconography, the statues, the tangka paintings, the chanting, the hundreds of thousands of human lives spent in meditation—all of this began when one man walked into the woods, sat down, and tried to end his fear by doing something purely internal: working on his mind.

  As I’m leaving the stupa, a kid drags me into a little room to the side of the main gate. Inside are two massive prayer wheels. He shows me how to spin them. Three laps is recommended for maximum blessing. In one corner sits a midget in monk’s robes, praying.

  “Lama,” my guide says as we pass.

  On the second lap, he points out a collection of images of great Buddhist saints, stuck above a small window. Here is the Dalai Lama. Here is Guru Rinpoche, who first brought Buddhism to Tibet. Here is Bomjon, the meditating boy.

  The photo shows a boy of about twelve: a chubby crew-cut smiling little guy, shy but proud, like a Little Leaguer, but instead of a baseball uniform, he�
��s wearing monk’s robes.

  “Bomjon,” I say.

  “You are very talent!” says my guide.

  BAD AND GETTING WORSE

  Back at the Hyatt, I meet Subel, my translator, a kindly, media-savvy twenty-three-year-old who looks like a Nepali Robert Downey Jr. We take a terrifying ride through Katmandu on his motorcycle to a darkened travel agency, where we buy plane tickets by candlelight; Katmandu is under a program called “load shedding,” which, in the name of conservation, cuts power to a different part of town every night. The agent processes our tickets sac-ramentally in the light from three red candles tilted on sheets of newspaper.

  Given Nepal’s political situation, there’s something ominous about the darkened travel agency, a suggestion of bleaker conditions soon to come.

  More than ten thousand Nepalis have died in the past ten years in an ongoing war between the monarchy and the Maoists. Over the past three years, the new king has basically canceled the burgeoning but inefficient democracy and seized back all power. A week after I leave, he will arrest opposition leaders, and the most serious attacks yet on Katmandu will take place.

  Over dinner, Subel (like some prerevolutionary Russian intellectual, a Herzen or Belinsky, personally offended by the cruelty of his government) gets tears in his eyes telling me about a twenty-year-old Nepali woman who died in a distant airport, unable to get to the Katmandu hospital because the inefficient airline canceled all flights for three days straight; tells about the arrogant Nepali soldiers who pulled over two friends of his, singers, and made them sing on the street as the soldiers laughed at them. He doesn’t want to ever leave Nepal, he says, unless in doing so he can acquire a useful skill and come back and “make some differences.”

  The country is scared, wired, suffering, dreading an imminent explosion that will take a catastrophically poor country and turn it into a catastrophically poor country in a state of civil war. In Katmandu it seems everybody knows about the meditating boy, follows news of him avidly, believes he’s doing what he’s said to be doing, and wishes him luck. They feel him, you sense, as a kind of savior-from-within, a radical new solution to festering old problems. Political pragmatism exhausted, they’re looking for something, anything, to save them.

  A friend of Subel’s tells me he hopes the meditating boy will do “something good for this country,” meaning, to my ear, something good for this poor, beaten-down country, which I dearly love.

  TO GET THERE, HEAD IN THE DIRECTION OF POOR

  Next morning we fly to the southern village of Simra in a submarine-like plane that has, for a sun visor, a piece of newspaper taped to the windshield. The seats are webbed and metal-framed like lawn chairs, the floor made of carpetless dented metal. We pass, barely, over one-room farmhouses perched atop cartoonishly steep mountains, entire spreads consisting of just a postage-stamp-sized green terrace dug out of a gray mountainside. From Simra we take a jeep to Birgunj and spend a restless night in a Gogolian hotel where the bathroom lights buzz even when off, and I am perplexed by a mysterious panel of seven switches that never seem to control the same light twice.

  Next morning we’re off to see the boy.

  We head back through Simra by minivan and then beyond, through a swirl of the maddest poverty: Girls plod out of deep woods with stacks of huge leaves on their backs to feed some animal; a woman squats to piss, yards away from a muddy pond where another woman draws water; men pound metal things with other metal things; dirty kids are sniffed by dirty dogs as dogs and kids stand in trash.

  After a couple of hours, we pull off into a kind of gravel staging area overhung with red welcome banners. On a large billboard—the only one I’ve seen all morning—a personified condom gives an enraptured young couple some advice out of its jauntily tilted receptacle tip: “Please, enjoy safe sex!”

  “Is this it?” I say.

  “This is it,” Subel says.

  BUT STILL WE ARE NOT THERE

  Beyond the staging area, the road goes single-vehicle, double-rutted. I try taking notes, but the road is too bumpy. CRWLFF! I write, FHWUED??

  The jungle gets denser; a dry riverbed on the right disappears into the trees. Finally, we reach a kind of minivillage of crude wooden stalls. Boy-related postcards and framed photos and pamphlets are for sale, along with flowers and scarves to present as offerings. We leave the van and walk along a dirt road. Pilgrim-related garbage lines the ditches on either side. A TV on a rickety roadside table blares a Bollywood video: a woman so sexy she captivates a shipful of genial sailors. At a climactic moment, she drops backward into a giant cup of tea, causing a blind man to lose his treasured burlap sack.

  A mile farther on, we leave our shoes in a kind of Shoe Corral, take a narrow path worn smooth by tens of thousands of pilgrim feet. The path passes through the roots of a large pipal tree hung with pictures of the boy. A quarter mile more and we reach a tree-posted sign in Nepali, requesting quiet and forbidding flash photography, especially flash photography aimed at the meditating boy. Beyond the sign, seven or eight recently arrived pilgrims stand at a gate in a barbed-wire fence, craning to see the boy while stuffing small bills into a wooden donation box mounted on the fence.

  Though I can’t see him from here, he’s there, right over there somewhere, maybe five hundred feet away, in that exact cluster of trees.

  I step through the pilgrims, to the fence, and look inside.

  WHAT I EXPECT TO SEE, BASED ON WHAT I’VE READ

  Online accounts say that at night a curtain is drawn around the boy. This is presumably how he’s being fed: at night, behind the curtain. So I expect to see the drawn-back curtain hanging from…what? The tree itself? Or maybe they’ve built some kind of structure into the tree: an adjacent room, a kind of backstage area—a place where his followers hang out and keep the food they’re sneaking him at night.

  In my projection of it, the site resembles the only large-capacity outdoor venue I’m familiar with: a rock concert, with the boy at center stage.

  A SLIGHT REWIND, AND WHAT I ACTUALLY SEE

  I step through the pilgrims, to the fence, and look inside.

  The first impression is zoolike. You are looking into an Enclosure. Inside the Enclosure are dozens of smallish pipal trees festooned with a startling density of prayer flags (red, green, yellow, many faded to white from the sun and rain). This Enclosure also has a vaguely military feel: something recently and hastily constructed, with security in mind.

  I scan the Enclosure, looking for That Which Is Enclosed. Nothing. I look closer, focusing on three or four larger trees that, unlike the smaller trees, have the characteristic flaring pipal roots. This too feels zoolike: the scanning, the rescanning, the sudden sense of Ah, there he is!

  Because there he is.

  At this distance (about two hundred feet), it’s hard to distinguish where the boy’s body ends and the tree roots begin. I can make out his black hair, one arm, one shoulder.

  The effect is now oddly crèche-like. You are glimpsing an ancient vignette that will someday become mythic but that for now is occurring in real time, human-scaled, warts and all: small, sloppy concrete blobs at the base of the fence posts; an abandoned tree-house-like platform near the boy’s tree; a red plastic chair midway between the fence I’m standing at, and a second, inner fence.

  No secret tree-adjacent room.

  No curtain, and nowhere to hang a curtain, although there is a kind of prayer-flag sleeve about ten feet above the boy’s head that could conceivably be slid down at night.

  There’s nobody inside the Enclosure but the boy.

  And a young monk standing near the gate. The monk’s bangs appear bowl-cut. He’s wearing a St. Francis–evoking robe. There is something striking about him, an odd spiritual intensity/charisma. He appears very young and very old at the same time. There is a suggestion of the extraterrestrial about his head-body ratio, his posture, his quality of birdlike concentration.

  Between the gate and the inner fence is a wide dirt path leadi
ng up to where the boy is sitting. Only dignitaries and journalists are allowed inside the Enclosure. Subel has assured me we’ll be able to get in.

  I sit on a log. What I’ll do is hang out here for an hour or so, get my bearings, take a few notes on the general site layout, and—

  “Okay, man,” Subel says tersely. “We go in now.”

  “Now?” I say.

  “Uh, if you want to go in?” Subel says. “Now is it.”

  Meaning: Now or never, bro. I just barely talked you in.

  The crowd parts. Some Village Guy—head of a Village Committee formed to maintain the site and provide security for the boy—unlocks the gate. The young monk looks me over. He’s not suspicious exactly; protective, maybe. He makes me feel (or I make me feel) that I’m disturbing the boy for frivolous reasons, like the embodiment of Western Triviality, a field rep for the Society of International Travel Voyeurs.

  We step inside, followed by a gray-haired lama in purple robes. The lama and the young monk start down a wide path that leads to the inner fence, ending directly in front of, and about fifty feet away from, the boy.

  Subel and I follow.

  My mouth is dry, and I have a sudden feeling of gratitude/reverence/terror. What a privilege. Oh God, I have somehow underestimated the gravity of this place and moment. I am potentially at a great religious site, in the original, mythic time: at Christ’s manger, say, with Shakyamuni at Bodh Gaya, watching Moses come down from the Mount. I don’t want to go any farther, actually. We’re in the boy’s sight line now, if somebody with eyes closed can be said to have a sight line, closing fast, walking directly at him. It’s quieter and tenser than I could have imagined. We are walking down the aisle of a silent church toward a stern, judging priest.