Set beside the mandala of meaning that Rinpoche had laid out for me in the German restaurant, the ideas of the radio talkers seemed like nothing more than the clack and bubble of bickering hens, the oink and push of hogs. I looked at the stars. The world had not changed, not really. With all our impressive technological achievements—the book, the automobile, the airplane, the computer, the looping satellites bouncing TV shows into dry, well-heated homes—we were still the species described in the first parts of the Bible. Some of us murdered and stole and raped; some of us spent our lives chasing money or distraction or the so-called sense pleasures. The family, the village, the tribe, the nation—we still formed ourselves into units in the hope of escaping or softening or denying a kind of ultimate loneliness. And then, conversely, we still seemed to need to divide ourselves into “us” and “them,” liberal and conservative, black and white, native and immigrant, man and woman, believer and nonbeliever, Jew and Christian and Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu. We still laughed. We still faced death on a field of interior solitariness.
What if the secret architecture of it all was just as Rinpoche claimed: some cosmic unity there beyond our false identification with the individual body? a love beyond imagining that hid in the molecules of a trillion shapes, causing hearts to beat and rivers to run and lovers to find each other? What if the plain old Protestants had it partly right—that you could have direct access to that breath and pulse of love without the official intervention of the church fathers? More than that, what if, throughout history, there had been people—grand spirits in human form—sent to show us the route out of this mess, a way to embody that love, or merge with it, rather than simply touching it once in a while, with a handful of close souls, in our best moments? What if earth was just a violent stopping place on the highway to some saner, sweeter home, and there were teachers who saw that and had come to help us on the journey? And if there really were such people, what would be the consequence of ignoring them?
Through the open window I heard Rinpoche burp in his sleep.
My cell phone vibrated in my pocket, then rang. When I opened it and said hello, the voice I heard belonged to our daughter, Natasha, named for the Russian-émigré doctor who had guided her so skillfully along the dangerous passage from darkness to light.
“Dad?”
“Hey, honey! It makes me happy to hear your voice.”
“Where are you? You sound different.”
“Just into North Dakota. Where are you?”
“Home, Dad. It’s, like, late. Anthony’s passed out on the couch and Mom’s right here. She said you were supposed to call and when you didn’t we got worried.”
“I tried to, right after supper. There was no service where we were.”
“How’s Aunt Seese?”
“She stayed home, didn’t Mom tell you?”
Natasha didn’t answer for a moment and I could picture her standing in the kitchen, receiver held against her shoulder in a pose she’d struck from her earliest phone days, her pretty, freckled face turned toward her mother.
“Oh, right, sorry. I, like, spaced. So you’re driving with some kind of guru or something, or is Mom making that up? She says you’re, like, going to shave your head or something when you get home? She’s joking, right?”
“Sure she is. He’s a good guy, though, a monk. Volya Rinpoche is his name. Google him and see what you get.”
“Okay. . . . Dad?”
“What, honey?”
“Mom says if I come up with the money for the car maybe you guys could cover the insurance, you know, until I get a little older?”
“That’s the deal.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. The fine print is you drive during the day at first, decent grades, no fighting with your brother.”
A pause. “How about minimal fighting? Reduced fighting? How’s that?”
“Agreed.”
She squealed her delight into the phone, half child, still, and I felt something go through me. A jolt. A current. A line of electricity that came directly from the Great Spirit itself.
When I heard Jeannie’s voice I said, “How did these two creatures come to us?”
“We were good in a past life, must be.”
“Exactly my thought.”
“I take it you’re not in Bismarck yet.”
“Just west of Fargo. Another hour and a half, maybe a little more. Rinpoche’s asleep. Sorry I couldn’t reach you earlier. Yours truly had coffee after his beer and bratwurst, so all is well.”
“Good, I’m exhausted. Call us tomorrow, will you? When you get to the farm, call, okay?”
“All right. Sure. Here’s my love coming through the phone line.”
“I feel it.”
“Good, pass a piece of it on to the two troublesome miracles, okay?”
“Okay. Love you.”
When I started the car, Rinpoche woke up. I told him we were on the highway in North Dakota, less than two hours from the place where we’d spend the night. Less than four hours from my parents’ farm. He grunted, glanced out at the flat blackness, and said a strange thing: “The country of surprise.”
I looked at the flat, fertile fields—it was the richest farmland in the state here, and the most expensive—and saw only a few lights from farmhouse windows, set far back from the road. There would be a mile or more between homesteads, the occasional small cluster of buildings at the crossroads—gas pump, grocery store, grain elevators, train tracks. Nothing in the least surprising in this piece of the world, I thought, unless it was a pickup driven by a drunk running a stop sign in the middle of a February morning.
It was 12:17 a.m. central time when we pulled off the highway into Bismarck. Not easy to get lost here, just a straight shot south into the humble downtown, a left on Broadway Avenue, a right into the hotel lot. Rinpoche and I carried our bags into the lobby, walked up to the desk, and found that everything was in order: two standard rooms on the seventh floor, the plastic key cards in small folders handed across the counter by a perky young woman with blond hair and drawn-out vowels. When I thanked her she said, “Oh-h, almost forgot,” and handed me a folded sheet of the house stationery. My name was on the outside, and when I opened it I saw this, written in a familiar scrawl:
Brother!
Surprise! I flew on a plane, I actually did it! I’m in room 603, asleep probably, I was up all last night worrying about the trip but I made it, no problem! Call me when you get up, okay? Don’t go out to breakfast without me. Can’t wait to see you both!
Love,
Your Crazy Sister
FORTY-FOUR
You know how dreams are—the day’s thoughts seasoned with hope, fear, and memory, cooked into an illogical stew and served in an upside-down bowl. That night in my sleep I was walking someplace with Natasha, who looked like Cecelia, and then the vice president of the United States was a salesman in a used-car lot where we were shopping for a car and he was handing out free chocolate doughnuts by the dozen. Please, analyze it; I don’t care to. I am just reporting what happened. I slept the sleep of the road warrior, had that dream, and woke to the sound of a ringing phone.
“Otto? It’s Seese, I didn’t wake you up, did I? I’m in Rinpoche’s room and we were worried. It’s quarter of ten.”
“Seese? Quarter to ten?”
“I woke you up, didn’t I.”
“Sure, but it’s all right. Ten o’clock. Oy.”
“We’re waiting for you so we can have breakfast. Shall I give you a few minutes to shower before I come in and hug you? I’m right next door.”
“Yes.”
I took my time showering and shaving, not because I didn’t want to see my sister, and not really because I wanted to put off the visit to the farm. It was more than that. During the previous six days I had slipped free of my duties as senior editor, husband, father, brother, home owner. I had not paid a bill or washed a dish, not taken the car in for an oil change or Jasper out for a walk, not mediated
a dispute between daughter and son, not looked at a manuscript or had lunch with an author or sat in a meeting with marketing department honchos telling us what would sell and what wouldn’t. Now, with Seese’s voice on the phone line and Dickinson on the docket, I felt as though my real life was standing on the other side of the door, raising a fist to knock. I liked that life, loved it even. But the gravitational field of Volya Rinpoche and the American road had knocked me out of my usual orbit, and I needed to take a breath or two before re-entry.
Clean-shaven, clean-skinned, I hadn’t quite gotten my jersey tucked into my chinos when my sister’s exuberant tap tap tap-tap-tap sounded at the door. Bear hug time. Back massage time. When she at last released me and stepped away to arm’s length, I noticed yet again how beautiful she was—the clear eyes, the shining hair and skin, the wonderful smile. She would turn forty in a month, and looked ten years younger. Always a happy, upbeat soul, on that morning she seemed positively euphoric: She had faced her lifelong fear and gotten on an airplane. And, I thought, probably, most likely, she was in love.
“I talked to Tasha and Anthony yesterday,” she said, “just before I left, and I told them I was going to surprise you. I hope they didn’t spill the beans.” Rinpoche was standing behind her and just to the side, another happy face.
I thought back over Natasha’s phone call, her small slip. And I said, “These days, teenagers get CIA training at the mall. Not a spilled bean anywhere. When I got your note, I was stunned. Happy and stunned.”
“You’ve changed,” she said. “Your, you know . . .”
“You can say it.”
“Your aura is lighter. Isn’t it, Rinpoche?”
The Rinpoche nodded. It was obvious to all concerned. But I hadn’t changed enough to be able to talk about it with my sister.
“Well, your pal here is a good traveling companion, that’s all I’ll say for now. A good man. And I’m proud of you, by the way, for getting over the flying thing. That’s a real accomplishment.”
These kind and sincere words resulted in another lengthy embrace. If I hadn’t been hungry at the start of the embrace, I was certainly hungry by the time of my release, and I said so.
“I know a place,” my sister announced. “Two places, actually. Up for a short walk?”
It worried me, of course—another part that hadn’t changed—to turn over the choice of breakfast spots to Cecelia. Why not just sit down here at the hotel, I wanted to say. But I let it go.
We went out the door and along the busier side of Broadway Avenue, headed west, and all during our ten-minute promenade I was the old Otto. I imagined some New Agey emporium, ex-hippies in dreadlocks and tie-dyed T-shirts, serving up seaweed, teeth-breaking organic quinoa wafers, and bark tea. Or, more likely in these parts, a classic Dakotan white-bread-and-chicken-fried-steak Mom and Pop place with limpid coffee and a clientele of good-old-boy ranchers whose idea of conversation was three syllables grunted back and forth across the Formica over the course of half an hour. Was Rinpoche crazy, to think of founding a meditation center here? And not even here, in the relatively cosmopolitan capital, where you might find a soul or two who knew the difference between the peace of Samadhi and a piece of salami, but out where we had been raised, out in dirt-road-and-pickup country, where yoga was for pussies and always would be.
But North Dakota had changed, a bit, while I wasn’t looking. The place Seese took us to was an organic bakery that specialized in a sort of cinnamon-roll loaf you could smell from two blocks away. We bought three of the delicious beasts and carried them down to the next surprise—a coffee shop run by a nice fellow named Sia Ranjbar. Ten kinds of coffee, fifty flavors of Italian soda. Computers where you could go online and check your e-mail for a minimal sum. We sat at a table and feasted.
“Rinpoche told me you’ve been meditating,” Cecelia said. “Is that true, Otto?”
“I invoke my Fifth Amendment rights.”
“No, really. Have you?”
“Even last night a little before I went to sleep. And I was exhausted.”
She was beaming, giving off light. “Isn’t it the most wonderful thing ever?”
“After bohling,” Rinpoche put in, and we laughed. “After furniture golf.”
He had been almost completely silent since our talk in the German restaurant, but I felt that he was watching me, studying me, looking to see if his seven-day tutorial was going to sink into my flesh or be washed off by the tides of everyday life. I was watching him, too. There was almost no physical contact between him and Cecelia, no staring into each other’s eyes, hardly an exchange of words, and yet I sensed an intimacy between them, the kind of mind-to-mind or heart-to-heart understanding certain couples exhibit in each other’s presence. It’s something you can’t fake, and can’t describe, but clearly they had it. At one point he stood up to get more hot water for his tea, and hers, and when he returned to the table and handed her the refilled cup, his movements had about them a sense . . . I almost want to say a sense of worship, but that would imply something elaborate and staged, what my mother used to call “fussified.” Devotional is a better word for what I saw. In the religious sense. If his movements could be said to have a tone, then it was the tone of someone laying an offering before the statue of a goddess. I wasn’t used to seeing my sister treated that way, and I liked it. I wondered if Rinpoche’s famous father had treated his mother that way, if he’d grown up with that as his model for husband-wife relations. And my mind leaped from there to Mom bringing out a tray of hard German biscuits to Pop in the midst of one of his tantrums. And from there to the errand that stood before us on that day.
“We should go,” I said. Cecelia and the Rinpoche nodded. We thanked our new friend Sia, went back to the car, and started off for Stark County and all the ghosts that inhabited the landscape there.
FORTY-FIVE
In order to get to the two-thousand-acre Ringling farm, you take I-94 West from Bismarck, ninety-nine miles across sweeping, fertile countryside, and through the small city of Dickinson. From Dickinson, you travel south on State Route 22, then turn onto a gravel road. The gravel road comes to a T, you take a left on another gravel road, and bear right after another few miles, and this smaller road—our driveway, really—goes on for half a mile between gently slanting wheat fields, crosses a small stream (Seese and I always called it “Snake River,” but it has another name), and deposits you in front of a white clapboard farmhouse with outbuildings behind and old cottonwoods all around.
There is little, really, to distinguish this property from hundreds of others in central and western North Dakota. Two thousand acres is an average size for the farms there. My parents planted what everyone else planted: soybeans and wheat and sunflowers, a little corn, barley, or canola. Vegetables in the fifty-foot-square plot out the back door. There are two barns and three galvanized steel grain storage bins on stilts. In order to appreciate the place, you have to get out of your car and walk the fields—say, just after the wheat has been harvested and the hay rolled into bales as tall as a man. You might come upon a prairie rattlesnake under one of those bales (as Seese and I did one August morning), and you might see a scampering cottontail or two, and you’ll likely startle a covey of pheasant, partridge, or ruffled grouse in the sagebrush and wild prairie rose near the river. But mostly, if you stand quietly for a time, you’ll get a sense of the vastness of the sky and of the land beneath it, a great, rich, untroubled emptiness that feeds a good percentage of the world.
Not much was said as we made the drive. Rinpoche sat up front with me, as he’d done since New Jersey. Cecelia sat in the middle of the back seat and seemed content to take in the countryside, fingers spread out on her belly in some kind of new meditation pose. As we approached the intersection where my parents had been killed (there was no way to avoid it without traveling fifteen miles out of our way) I could feel the tension in her, and in me. She leaned forward and put a hand on the top corner of my seat, then on my shoulder. I slowed as we p
assed the spot, but did not stop. “This is the place where my parents died,” I said, for Rinpoche’s benefit, and I could see his beads and lips working, and I hoped—of course I hoped—that the system of helping he’d described was something that extended beyond the grave, that what he called “the not-physical part” of Ronald and Matilda Ringling existed, still, in some other dimension, and that his prayers and ours would give them some small comfort there. Cecelia leaned back and wept quietly for a few minutes, then she stopped and put her hand on my shoulder again. Soon, we were turning onto our road, raising a magnificent plume of dust over what had been our parents’ fields.
For all of that morning I’d managed to put out of my thoughts the notion of handing over this property to Rinpoche. On the one hand, it seemed patently absurd for him to start such a venture here, and for my sister to give away the only security that life would ever hand her. On the other, the land did have a certain unmistakable spiritual quality to it; or at least the Catholics seemed to think so: There was a Benedictine monastery not far behind us, in Richardton. For me, the question came down to this: What would my parents have wanted us to do? Farm their acreage, I supposed. But that was not an option. Next on the list would likely have been selling it to someone else who would do the farming, and making sure the proceeds of the sale went to the Ringling children and grandchildren.
“Almost there,” Seese said from the back seat, and I rode the last hundred yards through a circus of mostly happy memories—the smell of turned-over earth in spring, the Christmas sleigh rides, the first time Jeannie and I had brought Natasha and then Anthony here.
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