Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

  Dad’s overactive mind, Anthony would have said.

  Like its Grand Hotel, the town of Kalispell had a welcoming quaintness to it, an aroma of the true Old West. Saloons, boot-and-belt shops, the feeling that the flat street might, at any moment, be flooded with herds of cattle up from Texas for slaughter—I enjoyed the atmosphere of the place, so completely different as it was from everything I’d grown used to. If I had to find words to describe the American West, they would be: ‘vast,’ ‘dry,’ ‘architecturally bland,’ ‘unhurried.’ But it all seemed too large for words, a leave-me-alone, can-do universe where open land was plentiful, ethnic food all but unavailable, and our pickup truck—powdered with roadside dust and carrying the carcasses of a million insects—served as a kind of safe-conduct pass.

  In the elevator Rinpoche had surprised me by asking to come along for dinner—that would make two nights in a row—and we ended up having a tasty Chinese meal at a Japanese restaurant called Genji. Another tattooed waitress (she told us the advent of casinos had sucked all the life out of the city’s cultural scene), another glass of good local porter (with an awful name, Moose Drool), another conversation that I’d return to many times in the months that followed.

  At Genji, Rinpoche ate almost nothing, a few bamboo shoots from my moo goo gai pan, two bites of rice. He was there, it seemed, mainly for the company. “I’m not a perfect man, Otto,” he said with an endearing simplicity, out of the clear blue.

  “I know that. I’m sorry I doubted you.”

  “No problem.”

  “It’s strange, though, isn’t it? Everybody who follows some kind of spiritual path, for lack of a better term, seems to need to have a perfect being at its center. Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, Moses—they weren’t ordinary guys.”

  “Ordinary,” Rinpoche contradicted. “Wery most ordinary.”

  “That’s not the story that’s making the rounds.”

  He smiled, reached over without asking, and took a sip of my beer. “The bitter I like now,” he said. “Getting used of.”

  “Used to. We say getting used to something. You’re getting used to the bitter taste of beer, in this case.” He looked across the table at me with an expression not of condescension, exactly, but something close to infinite patience.

  “What?”

  He watched me, waited, the skin of his forehead creased with three parallel lines.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Suffering under his patient gaze, I traced my way back across the conversation. Had I missed something? “All right, okay,” I said, when I’d understood. “The bitterness in beer is like the bitterness in life, right? Which the enlightened being eventually comes to appreciate. The bitterness in life is a reflection of our imperfect state here on this earth and the perfectly imperfect souls we choose to worship. Correct?”

  I expected another “Wery good, Otto!” accompanied by a pat on the shoulder. Yet again the Master had taken a profound lesson from the most mundane of everyday occurrences—a sip of beer—and I’d understood it this time, solved the Ortykian koan. But he kept looking at me, grinned, said, “You should maybe teach me now, my friend.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “What is this boll?”

  “You know what it is—an angry cow with horns and a penis.”

  “And why can’t you be the teacher, give Rinpoche a rest? You are ready now for a big change in your life, my brother-and-law. Big big change.”

  “I’ve had one big change in the past year,” I said. “That’s all I can handle for a while.”

  “Two big changes then, maybe,” he said, pushing me. “Maybe three.”

  “I can’t picture that. External changes—new job, new house, kids growing up—those things I can sometimes imagine. But what does a big internal change feel like?”

  “New eyes.”

  “The world looks different? I mean, physically looks different?”

  “Sure,” he said. “It goes all new, this whirl.”

  “Fine, bring it on. I’m ready.”

  “A little more help maybe, some small time, and then you are ready, yes. My father he always say that the oil is already inside the student, already there from all time. The teacher only has a match and makes it light, and then the student isn’t a student anymore, just a friend, going the same way down the dark road but seeing now by himself.”

  “I like the image.”

  “You have to believe your own oil is there, though, or nobody can lights it.”

  “I half believe. In good moments.”

  He laughed and looked at me the way he’d looked at all of us outside the Inn at Chakra Creek. You couldn’t ask for a more caring look than that. I understood then that on this broken earth you could never hope to have a friend who more sincerely wanted the best for you.

  “What happened to the special person we were supposed to see in Kalispell?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said.

  “Fine, good. I’m wiped. Let’s pay and get back to the hotel. I’m sorry again that I doubted you. You’re a good man. You’re my teacher. I’ll do everything I can to learn whatever it is I have to learn in this life.”

  He nodded and then, just as the waitress arrived with the check, he pointed one finger at me and said, “Bullshit.”

  21

  A night of dreamless sleep, a Kalispell Grand Hotel breakfast of cheese quiche, strong coffee, huckleberries of course, and sour cream coffee cake, and we were on the road again, my spiritual teacher and I. Rand McNally puts a line of small dots next to roads it considers particularly scenic, and the route we took south on that day, Montana 93, certainly deserved that distinction. Shortly after we set out, there was a sign by the side of the road announcing a pole-dancing contest at the Outlaw Inn. I was sorry to miss it. Then a sign for a livestock auction, another piece of Americana we’d have to forgo. To our right were open pastures and clumps of pine. To our left, after we’d gone a little ways, a thirty-mile lake with a bluish mountain range stretching north-south beyond it. The peaks were snow dusted in spots, with quilts of lavender clouds gliding over them. Gray stone at the heights, green forest below, and the blue lake stretching beside us, mile upon mile. Though it wasn’t radically different from the scenery of the afternoon before, it seemed, and I use the term guardedly, like sacred land. I looked over at Rinpoche.

  He was his usual contented self, leaning sideways a bit on the front seat, watching me shift gears, from time to time taking a deep breath and letting the air out slowly in a long, contemplative sigh.

  “Very special, isn’t it?”

  “Special, man!” he said.

  At the bottom of the lake we passed through the town of Polson, which I read at first as Poison. We skipped the Polson Bay Golf Course, skipped the Miracle of America Museum. I noticed that small, fenced-in areas stood in front of many of the trailer homes. Horse corrals instead of yards. This was the Salish and Kootenai Indian Reservation now, and the signs were in English and some other amazing language—Salish, it must have been—that looked like a combination of word and mathematical formula. Some letters were raised, as in Q to the Wth power. There were apostrophes and accents all over the place, high and low. It was a linguistic work of art. I’d never seen anything remotely like it.

  Farther along, in Ronan, came a sign in plain English: WE ARE ALL BROTHERS AND SISTERS. GOD LOVES YOU.

  At a rest area there I decided to stop and admire the view. Rinpoche sat on the open tailgate and meditated while I fell into conversation with Sam and Johnny, two well-tanned and tremendously friendly Montana Fish and Wildlife agents who were checking the towed boats of passing motorists for evidence of the zebra mussel. A young woman colleague of theirs joined them on the way to her car. I inquired about the language. She told me her boyfriend had grown up in Arlee and had taken Salish in school, “even though he‘s white.” She knew how to say “squirrel”, and demonstrated it for us, and it was easy to see why no ordinary combination of letters could capture that sou
nd. All shh and wha and hisses, the wind in the trees, swish of a furry tail. When she headed off, Sam and Johnny added to my knowledge of the place by telling me that “the bad grizzlies,” i.e., ones who’d attacked people in Yellowstone and elsewhere, were released up in the mountains we faced. “Passed one of ’em in the road on my bike not too long ago,” Johnny said. “She stood there straddlin’ the line. She wasn’t about to move, let me tell ya.”

  He was smiling as he said this, proudly, humbly, his partner nodding, both of them content to be something other than a member of the toughest species around. I liked them both.

  I walked back toward Uma and stood for a little while, staring up at the mountains and wondering what it was that felt different here. We’d encountered so much incredible scenery on our short trip; why did this view strike me at a deeper place? A wooden tourist information sign said Native Americans had gone into that range to fast and pray and have visions, and something in their blue and green majesty made that absolutely understandable to me. Though I’ve had a number of peaceful moments in nature—on a Cape Cod beach at sunset, in the mountains of Maine and Vermont—only on the rarest of occasions have I felt what I felt there, just south of Ronan and north of Arlee. What could it be? I wondered. What combination of color, light, shadow and shape could evoke this sense of the presence of another dimension of life? And what, exactly, had the Indians done up there on the steep wooded slopes? What kind of big interior step had they taken, and what did the world look like when they returned?

  When Rinpoche and I were on 93 again, rattling south, I asked him this question: How could the native peoples have been so unsophisticated by our standards—no lasting architectural masterpieces, no great libraries, no understanding of the history of the rest of the world—and yet so advanced spiritually, so much in harmony with the earth?

  “I ask the same question to you, backwards.”

  “You mean, how can we be so technologically advanced and yet so immature in regard to the interior life?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we’re an outer-focused people, I guess. We’ll have photos from Mars this summer. We’ll have iPad 3 or 4, electric cars, fracking. For better and worse we can manipulate the physical universe more skillfully than any nation that’s ever existed.”

  “Americans make so much good,” he said. “Many, many inventions.”

  “I feel another ‘but’ coming.”

  He chuckled. “Maybe the whirl now is ready for both parts, outside part and inside. All the wery good things from the West—special phones, some medicine, nice roads and buildings, air condition—you can maybe get now in the East. And maybe the East gives something back. An inside something.”

  “Via teachers like you,” I suggested.

  “Lots of teachers now. Lots of places to learn the inside world if you want to.”

  “But why don’t most of us want to?”

  “Scary.”

  “Sure, I’ve felt that. In some odd way, sitting still and quiet makes you more aware of life, which makes you more aware of death.”

  “Only at the beginning, scary.”

  “And later on?”

  “Later on, the scariness goes away. You learn to rest in the place that doesn’t die. Then what makes you afraid is only for other people. Then you don’t worry about yourself. You can live, you can die, you can be in the pain. No problem.”

  “And what, it’s all exactly the same? Rheumatoid arthritis and a hot-oil massage, no difference?”

  “Difference, sure,” he said. “Just doesn’t matter so much, this difference. You become small, wery, wery small, and then so your pain is small, your dying—wery small. What a nice feeling.” My odd friend chuckled at the niceness of this feeling and instructed me to take the next left.

  “Why?”

  “Take, take, Otto.”

  I turned onto it, Kicking Horse Road. “It’s gravel,” I said.

  “Your friend lives here.”

  “No, no, my friend is meeting us in Ennis. That’s tonight. We’re hundreds of miles away.”

  “Go,” he said, “go straight now. I will show.”

  I went along, not pleased at myself for having turned off the road, but thinking, still, about the nice smallness he described. I was beginning to have a feeling for it, to be able to imagine it, at least. It was beginning to seem to me that the real trouble in the world came from feeling you were large. Stalin and Idi Amin had been large, in their own minds, at least. All the haters—Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski—wanted to be large, to make their mark, have their way. Maybe the Native Americans had gone up into these grizzly-infested mountains to be as small as possible, and creation had risen up around them on all sides, a multi-molecular God, a comfort.

  I listened to gravel ticking up against the undercarriage and wondered what it felt like to be absolutely unafraid of death. We passed a five-acre lake with marshy banks and two men fishing from a boat. We startled a gaggle of geese and a small flock of black birds with white-tipped wings, creatures of pure elegance. There were dark clouds over the mountain in front of us now, and bad grizzlies there (the good grizzlies lived elsewhere), and I worried that, by taking this detour, we’d miss a gourmet dinner. But I went on.

  The road led us past one house—there was a white teepee in the yard, used by real Indians or one of the wannabe Indians who were said to move up here, I didn’t know—and then it narrowed and tilted gently upward with dense forest pinching in on either side. Two miles in, just at the point where I had promised myself I’d turn around at the next opportunity, we came upon a log cabin not much bigger than two pickups placed side by side. There was a woman sitting beside it in a lawn chair. “Your friend,” Rinpoche said. My friend, whom I had never set eyes upon in this life, raised a hand in welcome.

  I parked the pickup in what seemed an appropriate place—there were no other vehicles in sight—and the woman rose to greet us. I could tell at first glance that something was not quite right about her. She was dressed in old jeans and a blue T-shirt with AHS on the front, and she looked to be a year or two younger than Natasha. The body language was not exactly that of a young woman, however. Stocky, barefoot, she came across the dirt yard in a tentative way, as if afraid of approaching us too quickly, or as if there were hidden ruts or sinkholes beneath her feet and she was wary of stepping into them and disappearing forever. It wasn’t until we were only about ten feet apart that I realized she was blind.

  “Rinpoche?” she said. “Otto? I’m so happy you’re here.”

  She was holding out her hand. I took it in a polite handshake. Rinpoche did the same. There was an awkward few seconds during which I was waiting for Rinpoche to say something, and he seemed to be waiting for me to say something, and this woman, as yet unnamed, was expecting a word, an introduction, an apology.

  “I’m . . . this is Otto,” I said. “I don’t believe we’ve met, though Rinpoche here insists we’re friends.”

  She had a laugh that tripped along quietly, almost as if it wasn’t meant to be heard. This will sound strange, perhaps, but it reminded me of the small lake we’d just passed—not invisible, exactly, but hidden from the main road and the passing tourists, quiet, not quite still, beautiful in an understated way, indistinct at the edges. The essence of gentleness. “I’m Landrea. Like Andrea with an L, emphasis on the ray.”

  “We haven’t met before, have we?”

  “No, we haven’t,” she said, and I felt a wash of relief. I’d been sure, for a second, that she was going to say something like, “Oh, Otto, we’ve met many times before in the other dimension, many, many times!” I assumed, perhaps because of the “Are you going to Kalispell?” text from Cecelia, that this gentle woman was a friend of my sister’s, that they’d gone to past-life-regression school together, done hundreds of aura readings in one of the places Cecelia had lived before coming to call New Jersey her home. But Landrea was half Celia’s age, so that didn’t make much sense. She turned, felt around in the air f
or a moment until she touched the top of a fence rail, and, using that for guidance, led us toward the door of her house. I looked at Rinpoche for an explanation. He smiled and nodded, as if to say, “See? I told you.”

  The interior of Landrea’s home could not have been more simple. We could see all of it from the scratched-up wooden table at which she asked us to sit. A strip of kitchen counter with stove, refrigerator, and sink; what appeared to be a bedroom, the single bed visible through a half-open door; a bathroom the size of Anthony’s closet; and a wood-floored living room that held the table, four chairs, a woodstove, and a torn leather couch, color of the inside of a potato, on which an elderly mongrel curled. The walls were plaster or Sheetrock and painted a salmon pink; nothing hung on them. There was no clock, no television, no standing lamps. Landrea’s world was unrelieved darkness, but once we were inside she moved through it with a dancer’s ease, taking a pitcher of iced tea from the refrigerator and pouring three glasses, carrying them to the table on a tray, setting them there in front of us. I’d had little experience with blind people, none, in fact, other than offering help once or twice on the streets of Manhattan. They seemed, in those instances, to have gotten turned around, disoriented, and were standing near a street corner with cane or dog. I’d learned to approach them gingerly, never to assume they wanted help. Sometimes they said thank you, and other times they seemed to resent the offer of assistance, to resent their own need. And who could blame them? How could you live a life among the sighted and not finger the hem of bitterness as you tapped your way along an uneven sidewalk with taxis and delivery trucks, lethal and loud, a few feet from your shoulder? I couldn’t imagine how a blind person survived for more than about three days in New York City. You’d be a walking target for thieves, fondlers, teenagers looking to play a prank. How did you shop, find a toilet, get on the right bus, navigate the treacherous underworld of the subway, trust a cabdriver? And what did the lightless life look like? How was it organized? Why had they been made to carry such a burden?