Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  Now this fantasy was so strong that it played like a movie loop in my head. And the more it played, the more I wanted to return to Poona. In fact, I was beginning to get paralyzed by not knowing what was real and what was fantasy. I was afraid that if I went back I’d run into all the same barriers again. And I tried to calm myself by telling myself that I’d do it one day. I knew I loved Meg, but I also knew that I needed to get back to a place like the Garden of Eden Club. I had to get through the fantasy or it would turn on me and make me crazy.

  You see, I was beginning to realize the mistake I made when I had my meeting with Rajneesh. I had been false. I had played some sacred and holy game with him instead of just coming out and telling him that all I really wanted was to get laid over and over again. I wanted to FUCK, and for some reason, perhaps because of the guilt I felt toward Meg, I needed his permission to do it. And here is the sad part: my fantasy workshop didn’t even come into my mind until I was all the way up in Kashmir with Meg. I began to feel tortured. I could not accept the fact that I was torturing myself, so I began to blame it on the guru. I mean, I began to blame it on Rajneesh! I began to think he had power over me and was torturing me for not accepting him. And this began to frighten me and make me nuts. “Unfinished business, unfinished business!” was the phrase that kept running through my mind. I was playing around with madness when I could have taken a risk and gone mad in a safe way in Poona. I was about to poison myself with regret. I was beginning to torture myself with the idea that I had to go back there to Poona to do it right, to go to him and say, “I want to get laid. I need to get laid.” Meg was not enough for me. I needed to lose myself and meld. I wanted to lose myself every morning and every evening in glorious, boundary-less sex.

  I didn’t realize how deeply I was into self-punishment, which, when you consider all the real hellish punishments in the world—well, you know, to punish yourself before the real ones get you has to be the ultimate system of control.

  But Meg could see that I was obsessing. It was obvious because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and was spilling out all over the place. I think she felt the cure for it was to keep moving and see more, particularly places the average tourist had never seen. Meg wanted to go to a special, out-of-the-way place that had not been overly explored. It was her idea to travel to Ladakh, way up north of Kashmir on the Tibetan border. Meg made all the plans and arrangements to leave her rugs behind and rent a jeep with a driver who would take us on the three-day trip to Leh, the capital of Ladakh, which was buried way up in the Himalayas. Leh wasn’t even a hip place to go in 1976. Nepal was still the hip place, and Ladakh was supposed to be one of those untouched places. The road there had only been open to tourists for one year. Until then it had been used for convoys taking the Indian army up to guard the border. What a preposterous idea, I thought, when we could go to Nepal and smoke hash and hang out with all the hippies! There was something frighteningly austere about Meg’s idea to go to Ladakh.

  As I look back at that very turbulent period, I see me, in my quest for a vacation, taking a very long fall from the top of the Himalayas all the way down into the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I fell from a place where I could look out over the surface of the planet to a place where I looked up at the vast layers of the inside of Mother Earth. It was a long and crazy fall that took a little over one year, almost ruined me, and finally ripped Meg and me apart. If you see any thread or meaning in it, so much the better. I’d have to call it some sort of penance. It was as though I felt compelled to create my own punishment, my own personal religion with its own sins and retributions. I was creating my own punishments for the fact that I hadn’t saved my mother. I was attempting to put myself through what she had gone through—a fast and total disorientation of the senses.

  So we rented a jeep and driver out of Srinagar, Kashmir. The driver was a very handsome Ladakhan, and either he spoke very little English or he was just the strong and silent type, but he didn’t do much talking. Meg and I had very little to say, either, since we’d been with each other for so long. Before, we liked to talk about the different people we met on the trip, but now there were no people, only this driver who didn’t speak. So we mostly looked at the landscape, while the driver slam-shifted through the five gears of that jeep like some sort of Buddhist cowboy.

  As I gradually took in the miraculous landscape, I realized words were worthless here. I was hypnotized by the constantly changing, sweeping vistas, the swirling dark weather broken by rainbows arching over deep gorges. It was unlike any landscape I’d ever seen before—this vast, brown, rolling high desert, with patches of snow melting on the bare dirt hills. No wonder the driver was silent. He was, I was sure, just empty—not stupid, but empty and all eyes. For a time, which is perhaps the most we can ask for, that landscape cured me of thoughts of my past and future. Like the sea, it washed all thoughts out of my mind; but unlike the sea, it did not overstimulate me in that sensual way. It was a dry, motionless sea; those arid rolling hills rose into mountains like waves suspended. My body was crammed into that little jeep, but my head opened up to the outside. Far below the road there were flashes of rushing rivers or bright shocking patches of green at some cultivated little oasis that surrounded an adobe home. Up and up we went, climbing to the top of the world. I loved Meg then, the way that she looked at it all. When I wasn’t looking at the landscape I was watching her. I was watching all the passion and wonder in her eyes as we went up up into this magic storybook place. We were on our way to heaven.

  All that changed when we arrived at Kargil. It was a dumpy little town. We ended up at a ratty hotel for the night, had a dish for dinner called mok-mok, which was something like flavorless chow mein, and sat there eating across from a truly eccentric couple: a German man and his traveling companion, who looked like an Oriental transvestite. He or she wore a long red wig and was really quite beautiful.

  The beds at the hotel were awful: mattresses stuffed with straw on ragged metal springs. I lay there rerunning images of the fantastic landscape that had filled our eyes, longing for the new day to come so that we could go out in it again.

  The next day was both more tedious and more frightening. The tedious part came when we got stuck behind a long convoy of Indian army trucks bringing soldiers up to the border. If it wasn’t for the view, it would have felt like being stuck in gridlock in lower Manhattan. But in order to forget our snail’s pace, we looked out and down. That was where the frightening part came. There were no guard rails, and we were climbing higher and higher. I was sure that our driver believed in reincarnation, so that he drove with one eye on the road and the other on his next life. As I looked straight down, thousands of feet, to those rushing brown rivers below, he geared down, then geared up, trying to squeeze past that long convoy of army trucks.

  On and on and up and up we went. Then, somewhere late into the second spectacular day, the jeep came to a choking, sputtering halt. Without so much as a swear word or any explanation at all, our driver got out and began poking around under the hood. Meg and I welcomed the stop because it meant we could get out and walk in the landscape instead of just looking at it. We decided to walk up the road a bit and let the driver pick us up when, or if, he got the jeep started again. As soon as we stepped out of the jeep, I knew that that was exactly what we needed.

  Meg and I walked side by side, like bride and bridegroom, into a wedding of silence. When we stopped, the sharp reverberation of our feet on the gravel stopped and we stood in an absence of sound. No sound of stones or water falling, no sound of insects, no distant voices, no bird cry, no distant thunder or endless whine of new construction, no mechanical river of freeway sound, no jet trail overhead—nothing. And though for a while the memories of sound persisted, they too passed, and left us standing there in the most complete silence; a silence of mind and earth come together in perfect oneness.

  I felt something go off in my heart, something like a small dam breaking, something that flowed into tears. Meg dove fo
r me and latched tight into my arms, and I think we both knew at the time, although we didn’t talk about it, that we were mourning the death of silence in our world below. Until that moment we hadn’t known pure silence on this earth, and so we hadn’t recognized that it had died.

  We walked on together holding hands for a brief time and then we let go, and moved on like two astronauts floating into silence without a lifeline. The silence was only broken by the sound of our sandals on gravel, which seemed enormous. As we came up over a little knoll, we saw an old woman walking with a bundle of dried sticks on her back. The bundle looked twice the size of her, and she turned to us and smiled and called “Julay!” which we took to be some Ladakhan greeting. It wasn’t so much her speaking that broke the silence, but her smile. Her smile was full and totally without cunning or fear. It was so incredibly open that for a moment I thought Meg and I had landed on a foreign planet. She was smiling at us with gold teeth. She was as old and beautiful and weathered as the landscape she smiled from. She was the landscape in motion, and that biblical phrase “from dust to dust” suddenly made sense to me. It was as though she had been shaped out of the very dust, clay, and rock that she walked in; and she was only a breath away from returning to it.

  Meg and I stood there and watched the woman walk ahead of us without looking back until all we could see was a giant, slow-moving bundle of sticks on little sandal feet, inching up an endless road.

  I have no idea how much time passed, because time there was only measured by the passing of light over rock. Perhaps it was the deeper, darker angle of shadow that made us both feel like Hansel and Gretel, in need of shelter for the night, and we decided we’d better head back to our driver and see what was going on.

  Our driver made it clear to us that the fuel pump had broken and he had to hitchhike back to Kargil to look for a part. With no apparent problem, he had made arrangements for us to stay at a nearby house, an earthen structure growing out of the brown hills. It looked like an American Indian dwelling: a simple square structure made of adobe, with a few small slit windows here and there. Our driver, who by now had told us to call him Jun-yang, deposited us at the house like some sort of lost orphans. Jun-yang simply told us to stay there until he got back, and that was that. With no explanation or introduction, he left us in the care of two smiling Ladakhan women. One was as weathered and old as the woman with the bundle of sticks, smiling a similar smile of gold teeth. The other, who I took to be the older one’s daughter, was younger and extremely beautiful. They both stood there smiling as I introduced myself and Meg. They stood there and smiled and then disappeared back into that labyrinth of dried mud, leaving us with the sunset on that sweeping, rolling, endless top-of-the-world landscape.

  Meg and I had no idea what to do. We decided to go back down the mud steps that led to the main entrance of the house and go out for a twilight walk. I think we both wanted to walk in that silence again and refeel it. So we walked up one bare, brown hill and down another until we felt like we were strolling in the landscape of some storybook, perhaps The Little Prince. When we got back to the adobe house it was dusk, and climbing back up the dry mud front steps, we again came out onto the little terrace, where what looked like the man of the house was waiting. His hair was long and shiny black; his face had a beautiful round, full-moon, Mongolian look to it. He was stunning, dressed in black, his black jacket tied in six places with sky-blue velvet ribbons. He wore elegantly cut baggy black pants and soft suede boots with long, faded leather laces. His outfit was so individual and rare in design that it could have been the source of today’s Comme des Garçons look. And what a carriage he had! There was nothing cocky or prideful about it. He was a humble black prince. “Welcome,” he said in English as we came up the steps. “Welcome to our home. Call me Raymond. My Ladakhan name is too complicated and makes most Westerners frown. I go to college in Rishikesh, and they call me Raymond down there.”

  We introduced ourselves and Raymond gave us a tour of his house. First he took us to a little slit in one of the mud walls and showed us his mother and sister, who were now preparing what we hoped might be our supper. One at a time, Meg and I looked through this crack in the wall into a barren cavelike room, where the two women squatted beside a little fire of sticks, stirring the contents of the iron cauldron suspended over it. The only light came from the fire, which lit their faces from below in an eerie, witchy way. There seemed to be no door in or out of the room, and it looked like they had been created in there like a ship in a bottle and had never left that place from birth.

  Then Raymond led us to what was to be our room for the night. It was all earth, a small square cave just like the room where his mother and sister were cooking, only without a fire. There were two straw mats on the floor and a little slit that looked out on the road to Leh below.

  It was growing dark. Lighting a candle, Raymond led us to the toilet. Crossing the terrace we saw the first stars appear over the distant hills, and it looked like Bethlehem just after Jesus was born. I couldn’t believe how clear and beautiful it was. Then that part of me, that dark, cynical part that wanted to withdraw from all beauty, got completely fascinated with the idea of the toilet, or what Raymond called the toilet, as we followed him by candlelight into the dark, dank, musty basement of the house.

  Meg and I walked cautiously behind as Raymond held the candle high to light the earth floor beneath us, and there it was—dark and round, like the very asshole of the house itself, a dark tornado funnel going down into the earth. There was no seat over it and nothing around it. There was, of course, no toilet paper, just this deep, dark hole that went down into the earth. And this hole gave off a sweet, pungent, and not wholly unpleasant smell, something like a horse stable.

  “This is the toilet,” Raymond said, without a hint of shame or apology in his voice, as he held the candle over it. Both Meg and I looked at each other with the whimsical recognition that we were about to become very constipated.

  Raymond led us back up onto the terrace again, and Meg and I looked up at the sky as if we were seeing the stars for the first time together. It was as vivid as that first LSD trip, only it was not seen through the medium of a drug. It was just seeing, and seeing was believing, and suddenly that enigmatic end to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” made sense, as it crossed my mind like a little ticker tape: “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

  As a protection against too much love for the place, I started poking around looking for imperfections, trying again to create them before they arrived. Trying to build realistic boundaries again, trying to ground myself in trivial conversation, I turned to Raymond and asked him what the winters were like. He said the snow often got so deep that no one could go out of their house for days.

  I was stunned. What a horror! It would be one thing to be snowbound in some cozy Vermont farmhouse with books and brandy and canned goods and maybe a TV or a stereo, but to be snowbound in this mud hole? How could one survive it? Remembering that Vermont had one of the highest suicide rates in America, particularly in winter, I turned to Raymond and without even thinking about it I asked him, “Well, don’t you have a lot of suicides here in the winter?”

  Raymond just looked back at me with a blank face and Meg laughed. I made my hand into the shape of a pistol, aimed it at my head, and, like some retarded Tonto, said “You know, suicide—bang, bang, people kill self.”

  “No, no,” Raymond laughed. “We have none.” Before I could question him further, Meg interrupted. She’d found the magic door to the one room we hadn’t seen yet. It was adjacent to the terrace and had a beautiful hand-carved wooden latch on it. She asked Raymond what was behind the door.