I walked down Third Avenue away from the restaurant and felt lonelier than I had in weeks.
DAILY AFFIRMATION:
My worth is not defined by what I am paid.
At this point I started wondering if I should quit my job. I hated it, and I would be more easily able to avoid Amaya if I found something else. In a moment of distracted contemplation, I floated the idea to Dana.
“What would you say if I wanted to quit my job?” I leaned over and asked her after her alarm went off. I had been awake since three in the morning thinking about everything. She hadn’t had her coffee yet, so I knew she would give me her unvarnished opinion.
“I would tell you to go fuck yourself,” Dana said. It was so over-the-top harsh, at first I couldn’t tell if she was joking.
“Are you serious?”
Dana sat bolt upright, her face expressionless. “I’m completely serious. I’m not about to be married to some no-job loser. We’re too old for this shit, Ethan. Grow. Up. Stop being such a pussy.” She threw a pillow into my stomach, got up, stomped to the bathroom, and slammed the door.
I sat in bed, my mouth agape. When did she become so soulnegative? I just sat there until I heard her come out five minutes later. She’d washed her face, but her eyes were red.
“Ethan, I’m sorry I snapped at you. But I don’t know where this is coming from. I thought we had a plan for our future.”
I wanted to say You mean you have a plan for our future, but instead I told her, “It’s okay. You’re going to be late for work. We can pick this up later.”
“Okay,” Dana croaked, her voice shaky. “I am just really sick of going through this with you. We’re at a good place to settle down, and I feel like you keep wanting to unsettle us.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I was fundamentally unsettled in a way I didn’t think she cared to understand. So I just gave her a hug and said, “I’ll go make you some coffee.”
DAILY AFFIRMATION:
Moving forward in the face of uncertainty is the definition of courage.
My mind was ricocheting back and forth from week to week. After I saw Jason I was more determined about my study with Yoni—my problem was unsupportive brethren like him, not my newfound knowledge. Then, after Dana freaked out, I thought I wasn’t going to go back to the ashram. Ever. I really wasn’t. That week I thought, even though I had been learning so much from Yoni, I had made a commitment to Dana, and that commitment still meant something deep and abiding. When I thought more about Jason’s reaction to my recent life changes, I went from defensiveness to ambivalence. Was my spiritual fulfillment worth making a break from everyone I knew and loved?
Amaya could sense my evasiveness; it was like she saw the chaos in my soul from afar. She cornered me in the break room on a Friday. I was reaching into the fridge for a Coke—one of the few perks of our fluorescent nighttime prison was free beverages. I was usually able to resist them because of my commitment to clean eating, but that night my spiritual mess drew me to all that sugar. Amaya caught me and poked me in the ribs. “Indulging in a little high-fructose corn syrup? Not very Zen,” she said, smiling at me.
“Well, we all have our vices,” I said, guilty. “How are you?”
“Fine. Missing you at the ashram. Yoni keeps asking where you are.”
“I’ve been busy, seeing old friends.” I was trying to resist my new transformation, even though the deepest parts of me wanted to change. I was like a seedling struggling to burst through the chaos of tilled soil.
“Well, your new friends miss you,” Amaya said. “Actually, Yoni wanted me to invite you to a special vernal equinox ceremony he holds every year on March twentieth.”
“I’m not sure I can go,” I said automatically. What a fool I was.
“I haven’t even told you when it is. I don’t think you understand the importance of this invite. Lama Yoni only asks one new person every year to this ceremony. It is a marker of acceptance at the ashram. Hundreds of students vie for this invite every year, and he’s bestowing it on you.”
“Wow,” I said. I didn’t think I had made that much of an impact on Lama Yoni. I felt like we’d had a serious connection through our eye contact earlier in the year, but I figured he had those sorts of connections with a lot of people. He’s so open—it’s like chemical bonds are at play, drawing others to him.
“So you’ll come?” Amaya asked, looking me in the eye. “I’ll write down the address.” She took a pen off the counter, grabbed my hand, and scribbled an address on my palm.
“Herkimer Place? Where’s that?”
“It’s in Brooklyn. Arrive promptly at sunset. You can check the almanac for the time. Don’t worry, you won’t regret it.”
Over the weekend, I convinced myself not to go. Dana was being really lovey and sweet. She agreed to watch Samsara, a documentary shot in twenty-five different countries that a fellow at the ashram said would really further my meditation practice. I told Dana I wanted to see it because I wanted to indulge my travel bug. Usually Dana is dismissive about this kind of thing, and with a flick of her hand would have said, “I hate that kind of shit.” But that Saturday she said, “Whatever makes you happy, hon,” and snuggled into my side as we watched it on my laptop in bed.
But as Wednesday rolled around I found myself checking when the sun was supposed to set that day, and looking up just exactly where Herkimer Place was, and plotting how I would get there, and somehow, almost outside my own volition, I was dialing my boss’s number on my phone and affecting a throaty nasal growl to convince her I was sick and needed the night off. I knew I couldn’t miss this opportunity for spiritual growth—it was so much more important than any of my capitalist commitments.
I left my apartment around six, knowing that the sunset was shortly after seven and not wanting to be late. On the A train out to Nostrand Avenue, I felt so many conflicting feelings about heading to an unknown—to me—corner of Bed-Stuy. The guilt of gentrification, the fear of danger, and the excitement of transgressing were all tumbling about in one anxious stew.
I got off the subway with a crowd, since it was the middle of rush hour, but as I neared Herkimer Place on Nostrand Avenue the group thinned. When I turned onto the street, it had a bleak, postapocalyptic feel. The buildings were mostly boarded up, and the shrubbery was limp and sad.
Number 8 was my destination. The door wasn’t boarded, but the windows were covered with dark blackout curtains. The building looked at once sinister and industrial, like an abandoned factory that used to make doll heads, but not doll bodies. I started shaking as I lifted my finger up to the doorbell, which chimed softly.
Amaya opened the door. She was wearing a sheer white robe, through which I could see plainly that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. I would learn later that underwear is only an unnecessary barrier, concealing the most sacred parts of our body from the natural world. I tried to keep my eyes level as she bowed toward me. Her hair was wrapped up on her head in an intricate woven pattern.
Without speaking, she turned away from me and started to walk away. I said, “Amaya, where are we going?” but she would not turn around and look at me. I followed her down a narrow, dark hallway, until I could no longer see the back of her dress. I heard the clomping of her shoes up stairs, and so felt my way gingerly behind her in the nearly pitch-black. Her refusal to look back made me feel like Eurydice. Would I be barred from the upper world if she turned around and saw my face? Finally I heard a door open.
I crouched on my hands and knees and felt my way upstairs and into a narrow tunnel. I was on the verge of hyperventilating, so I tried to practice some kapalabhati breathing to calm myself down while still moving forward. My head thwacked against a door handle, so I pushed down on it. The door opened up into a cavernous room where a group of figures were standing up against a multisided structure with a dome. It looked like something out of a kid’s science museum, like there was something inside that would teach me about physics.
Th
e domed structure was lit from the inside. I could see light projections of flowers and zodiac signs coming up through the dome, like in a planetarium. As I got closer, I noticed that each of the sides corresponded with a different sun sign. The only side that was empty was my own sign: Libra, the scales. As I got even closer, I noticed that the figures were only men, and that all of the men were naked.
The moment I noticed they were naked was the moment my mind and body split. I can’t say more about what happened without violating the sacred bond I have with Yoni. But I can say that the experience changed the entire course of my life. Mentally. Spiritually. Physically.
Dana
The sheriff’s office was in the middle of a barren, dusty street in Ranchero, Sagebrush County’s only town. There were two other buildings near it. One was a tidy-looking trailer surrounded by plastic flowers stuck into the dirt. The other was a low-slung stucco house with the carcasses of at least two cars and three major appliances in its front yard.
Compared to those two heaps, the sheriff’s office was palatial and kempt. It was a standard two-story brick municipal building, with wall-to-wall beige carpeting inside. There was a single receptionist in the otherwise empty waiting area, and she led me right in to see Sheriff Lewis. I sat at the sheriff’s school marmish wooden desk in an uncomfortable but sturdy wooden chair, waiting for him while he was in conference with a man who seemed to be his deputy outside the fairly soundproof glass of his office. I could hear the pitch of their voices, but not the content of their conversation.
I had Ethan’s book in my purse. It still took a tremendous amount of personal restraint not to throw it away, or just put it back on the shelf to languish in the retreat’s library. I hated reading about Amaya’s moves on Ethan, and how much he enjoyed them. And even more than that, I hated reading about how nasty I had been to him. I actually winced—my whole body retracted—when I read what I had said to him when he floated quitting his job by me. I couldn’t believe I called him a pussy, but I knew it was true. In the years after he left, I had forgotten a lot of the memories that made me look bad—just as Ethan seemed to have left out a lot of the memories that made me look good when he wrote his book. Our memories have their own agendas.
In spite of myself I was starting to feel something approaching sympathy for Amaya. First of all, she was dead. It wasn’t really productive to have total hatred for someone who didn’t exist anymore. And I had to concede that she never promised me anything. She didn’t even know me. I believed she really did help Mae through a terrible time in her life. I couldn’t get a hold on who Amaya was now. After years of pure spite it was profoundly unsettling to have to reevaluate her.
For one thing, she must have seemed like a relief to Ethan after the way I treated him. She was so easygoing and so aware of his emotional life. But she also seemed insanely obsessed with Yoni, and she had been since she was barely of drinking age. I felt sorry for her; I wondered if she’d ever developed a sense of self outside of Yoni and his beliefs. Did Ethan like that about her? That her only demand of him was that he believe in the same spiritual claptrap that she did?
It was wounding to read about this vague naked party, even without any specific details. Group sex was something Ethan never mentioned being interested in. Not that I would have done it, but I did want to know about his fantasy life. I wanted to know him. Was that what he really wanted? Or was it just that he wanted Amaya, and this—not just the sex stuff, but the love of Yoni—was how he could get her?
The conflicting emotions had left me numb by the time Sheriff Lewis entered the room. “I’m sorry I kept you waiting, ma’am,” he said, sounding genuinely contrite. He sat down and stuck out his hand. “Matt Lewis.”
His hand was large, warm, and dry. “Dana Morrison. Formerly Dana Powell,” I said. “I just want to emphasize up front, again, that I don’t think Ethan was capable of killing anyone.”
Before I could continue, Lewis put his meaty hand up to stop me. “We’ll get there,” he said calmly. “Can I get you some coffee or water before we begin?”
“I don’t want anything!” I said. The voice that escaped was sharp and shrill.
“I know this is a difficult thing to do,” Sheriff Lewis said, his eyes meeting mine. “I appreciate your coming down here.”
His steady gaze settled me. “You’re welcome, I guess.”
“So let’s start at the beginning. I’m going to record this, if that’s okay.” He took out a camcorder that looked like it had been purchased when Michael Jordan was still playing basketball and put it on the table facing me. He also took out a pad of paper and a pen.
“That’s fine,” I said more tersely than I wanted to. My emotions were so all over the place that I was having trouble modulating my voice. I wanted to reach out and catch the words and stick them back in my mouth so I could try again.
He pressed Record. “When was the last time you saw Ethan?”
“June 5, 2007,” I said quickly. The date had been seared into my brain. I saw the sheriff write it down.
“And what happened the last time you saw him?” He looked up at me. His face was open but free of emotion.
“We had a huge fight about money.” Even after all this time it still hurt to say it aloud. I wanted to stop making eye contact with the sheriff, because I thought if I kept looking at him, I would cry. But more than that I wanted him to believe what I was saying. I knew from watching years of Law & Order that cops are analyzing your body language and behavior when they’re talking to you, like shrinks with guns. So I held his gaze.
“I’m sorry about that,” the sheriff said. He waited a respectful beat before asking, “Can you tell me about that day a little more specifically?”
I exhaled all the breath inside me. “Yes. I had been going over our finances. After I had paid all our bills for May, I realized that we had about twenty thousand dollars less in our account than I thought we should.” I remembered sitting at our kitchen table and looking at the same bank statement over and over, as if the numbers would somehow change. We had three accounts—one joint account, and we each had our own checking accounts, which I thought was a brilliant idea. I had set it up that way when Ethan went to work at Green Wave.
“This gives us both some privacy,” I remember explaining to him. All the big expenses, like rent and groceries, came from our joint account. The fun stuff—massages for me, video games for him—was supposed to come from our individual accounts.
“Why hadn’t you noticed the discrepancy earlier?” the sheriff asked.
“I didn’t keep super-close track of our money. I’m a lawyer and my salary went straight to the joint account. There was always more than enough in there, so I didn’t sweat it.” I wondered if this would make the sheriff think I was some sort of rich New Yorker, but his face still looked sympathetic. “I assumed there was some kind of mistake, so I started tallying up where all the money had gone. Some of it had been funneled into Ethan’s private account. Some of it had gone to a company called Enlightened LLC. I did a public records search of that, and it turned out to be the holding company for the Urban Ashram.”
“And what’s the Urban Ashram?” The sheriff pronounced ashram “ay-shram,” which made it sound shabby and silly. I couldn’t tell whether he really didn’t know what it was or was trying to see if I knew anything more about it. If he had never heard of the Urban Ashram, that meant he really hadn’t done any research about Yoni or the Zuni Retreat’s past. I didn’t believe he hadn’t. He seemed too sharp to slack on his homework.
“It’s Yoni’s old yoga studio in New York. He must have sold it, because I walked past it at some point after Ethan left, probably a year or two later, and it had become a Pret A Manger.” I recalled feeling a perverse pang of sadness when I saw that the yoga studio was gone. It seemed like all evidence of Ethan’s existence in my life was disappearing. That should have made me happy. But now I saw that I enjoyed clutching the scraps of him.
“Gotcha,” Sheriff
Lewis said, scribbling again. “So you found out the money was going to this yoga studio. And then what happened?”
“I confronted Ethan about it.” It was the worst conversation of my life. I had stayed up all night waiting for him to come home from his shift. I remembered pacing the floors, trying to both exhaust and entertain myself. Our downstairs neighbors must have wanted to kill me. When Ethan finally got home I asked him about the missing $20,000.
“And how did he respond?”
“He fed me some bullshit about how important the ashram had been for his spiritual and physical awakening. I don’t remember the specific details, I’m sorry. He was upset . . .” I trailed off. That night I was so tired, and so furious. After Ethan left and didn’t return, I tried replaying the night in my mind a million different ways, but there were huge holes in my recall, like that evening’s mental film had been eaten by moths.
I found my voice again. “We had a fight, and I left to stay with my sister, Beth. I came back two nights later, and his Dear John note was there. I never saw him again.” I was suddenly exhausted. Resurrecting these memories in this circumstance was really awful.
“What did his note say?” the sheriff asked.
“It said that I didn’t understand him anymore, but that Amaya did. He said he was leaving to be with her because she existed on the same ‘spiritual plane.’ I still have the note, if you want to read it.” I could have recited it verbatim, too.
“That won’t be necessary, ma’am,” the sheriff said. “And that was the last time you had any communication?”
“Yes. Well, I tried to reach out to him after he left so we could get a divorce, but I couldn’t find him. It was like he had evaporated. I didn’t even know he was in New Mexico until I read about his death.”
Soulmates Page 8
