Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

  Just as I was musing on that theme, I heard this:

  “You’re not associated with them nutfucks out there, are ya?”

  “Not that I know of.” I had no idea what Rundy meant. I heard the slight hard turn in his voice but it didn’t worry me. We passed a sign: BISMARCK 177.

  “Them Muslim nutfucks.”

  The first hard drops slapped the glass. I rolled up my window and put on the wipers for a few swipes. I was watching the road, the sky.

  “They have some kinda mosque or something out there,” Rundy went on.

  “Near Dickinson? I’ve never seen it. I—”

  “They do,” he said, with certainty, and it was that certainty more than anything else that sounded a small alarm.

  “I’ve been there a lot. There are probably some Moslems, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen a mosque. Dickinson? You sure?”

  He was surer than sure about the Muslims, but “Maybe it’s some kind of prayer center or something, a camp. I thought somebody said mosque but that part could be off.”

  It began to rain in earnest. The wipers slapped. We passed through the spray of a string of eighteen-wheelers.

  I had a bad thought then, and was not quite able to keep it to myself. “You’re not talking about Volya Rinpoche’s retreat center by any chance, are you?”

  “That’s it.”

  “They’re Buddhists,” I said. “They meditate there. Don’t bother a soul.”

  “Not what I heard.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “Some kind of training place or something. Terrorists or something, could be. Who knows what. Muslim nutfucks.”

  It wasn’t easy, hearing that and trying to concentrate on the road with the trucks throwing up sheets of water and the tar slick and now the wind gusting from the southwest and pushing against the front left side of the truck. “Listen,” I said. “Listen to me.” I couldn’t turn my eyes to look at him. “I know those people. I know the whole family. They’re Buddhists, not Moslem, and even if they were Moslem, so what? They’re good, kind people who don’t cause anybody any trouble. They’re not nutfucks. They’re not even nuts. And there’s no mosque or militia or terrorist training or any of that.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been there. You haven’t been. You should stop spreading rumors like that.”

  “Sure,” he said. “No problem.” And then, two seconds later. “Pull over, would ya?”

  “For what?”

  “Just pull over. There’s a rest area up ahead. You can leave me there.”

  “It’s absolutely pouring rain. You’ll get soaked, number one, and the state troopers will pick you up for hitching there, number two.”

  “Number three, pull over,” he said. He’d been holding the knapsack on his lap but now he turned it so the opening was facing his right hand. He reached in and began rummaging around. I pulled in behind one of the tractor trailers and then saw the rest area, turned in, and stopped. From the knapsack Rundy drew a slicker. He wriggled into it. His head popped through, red in the beard, red lines in the whites of his eyes.

  “You’ll get soaked” was all I could think to say.

  “Appreciate the lift, nutfuck,” he said, and he got out, slammed the door so hard the glass rattled, and walked along past a parked school bus, in the direction we’d come.

  The rain pounded down, the wipers were on high. I caught sight of his back in the mirror for a few steps, then I merged carefully onto the highway and headed home.

  Farmland

  Dickinson, North Dakota

  35

  It was late by the time I got back to the farm. The clan was in bed, only the kitchen light on. I had started to rummage through the fridge, looking for something I might eat, when I heard the scratch of slippers in the downstairs hallway and saw my sister there, wearing a blue cotton bathrobe Jeannie had given her for Christmas the year she was pregnant. Her eyes were foggy, hair all over the place; it was clear I’d pulled her out of sleep. Against my vehement objections, Seese made me sit at the kitchen table and she prepared a late-night breakfast. German biscuit and ham, with a poached egg set on top. She asked if I wanted coffee and I said no, I would like a beer, though, and she’d gone to the trouble of stocking up on that, too, though neither she nor Rinpoche drank. She made herself a cup of herbal tea and sat at the table with me while I ate.

  “You’re too good,” I said. “Best sister I’ve ever had.”

  She missed the joke, thanked me, watched me eat.

  “No one could have gotten Shelsie into the water like you did,” she said when I was mostly finished.

  “Somebody did the same thing for me.”

  “It was amazing. The kids you and Jeannie raised are amazing, also. They have the auras of a spiritual prince and princess.”

  “I lose sight of that sometimes, but they love you and Rinpoche and Shelsa.” I was thinking about what Rinpoche had said—his dreams, his worries. As I had been for the past three hours, I was trying to understand if the hitchhiker and the people he listened to posed any real danger to my family, or if they were just part of that crowd of American haters, searching always for a new target. Black, gay, Mexican, Moslem—the targets moved this way or that every generation or so, but the hatred surged on. I thought, again, of Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini and Pol Pot, the Hutus, the Tutsis, the Serbs and Croats and Bosnians, the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, the Jews and Palestinians. I thought of the 92 percent of men who were said to be certified assholes, and the things I’d heard about women over the course of my long life. Where, I wondered, was the first spark of it? Before any violence was done, before any bad history, where did the hatred begin? In the thought-stream, Rinpoche would say. But how did it get into the thought-stream, and why did it thrive and fester in some and seem almost completely absent in others?

  Maybe human beings weren’t designed to tolerate differences. And if that was so, then surely it was a miracle, really, truly a miracle that a place as diverse as America had managed to survive for so long.

  “You know, Otto, I didn’t suggest to Tasha that she stay here. I never would do something like that.”

  “Okay. I believe you.”

  “You don’t sound like you do.”

  “I do. It’s hard. I had other ideas for her. She had other ideas for herself.”

  “She’ll live a long life,” my sister said, as if she knew that from a study of the creases on Natasha’s palm, as if there would be a multitude of opportunities to get a college degree, many, many chances for my daughter to be twenty-two years old. Celia toyed with the string on her tea bag and looked up. “Would you ever think of staying?”

  “Here?” It came out too harsh. I tried to think of a way to soften it. Too late.

  “What do you have now, in New York?”

  “What do I have in New York? My life, Sis. Friends, work, the house, Jasper.”

  She was looking at me with something akin to pity. “You could edit Rinpoche’s next book,” she said. “You could counsel some of the retreat visitors.”

  “I can’t even counsel my own self, my own kids. Counsel them how?”

  “I’m so far out,” she said, smiling. “And Volya is . . . well, Rinpoche. They feel he’s a million miles beyond them. You’re more like they are. You could talk to them about real life in a way we can’t. The spiritual lessons can be really esoteric sometimes. People get to a certain point, and they have experiences and it starts to seem crazy to them, like pretend magic, like something that could never be applied to the real world. You could help us with that part.”

  “Thanks, but I have a job,” I said. “And it’s about the one place left on earth where I feel qualified to counsel anybody.”

  She looked at me as if there were so many things I still didn’t know. I was glad, at least, that she hadn’t mentioned anything about helping Shelsa with the great work she’d come to earth in order to complete. I counted that as progress.

&
nbsp; “Have you had—” I started to say, and then I felt the way I’d felt on the interstate ramp, just after I’d put on the brakes to pick up Rundy. Celia was watching me, and the muscles to either side of her mouth tightened just slightly, as they so often did, ready to smile at a good word. “Rinpoche told me he worries sometimes about, you know, safety issues.”

  She kept looking at me, the green eyes, the quarter of a smile. I should have kept quiet then, but I was going to be leaving my daughter in this place, a place where at least some of the people thought of her as a terrorist-in-training. “Have there been any threats or anything? Stupid stuff like that?”

  The muscles unflexed; that was the only change. Celia’s eyes were steady, and what I saw there surprised me. Bravery, it looked like. Physical courage. I wasn’t used to thinking of her that way.

  “We went through a stretch where somebody was calling,” she said.

  “And saying what?”

  “Unkind things. We changed the phone number and it’s mostly stopped.”

  “Did you notify anyone, the police, the FBI?”

  She shook her head.

  “Rinpoche seemed to think it would be . . . people from other countries, but this sounds local.”

  She shrugged, already tired of the subject. “They persecuted Volya and his father back home. He expects it. He’s used to it.”

  “Imagining it, then?”

  “Not really. He’s had dreams. He’s told me about them. I think, probably, all this is a little ways in the future, but when . . . but all through history if there’s been someone like Shelsa, there have been hateful people who wanted to hurt her.”

  “You know, phrases like I think, probably aren’t exactly what I want to hear. And a little ways in the future means what, exactly?”

  She looked at me with a maddening patience. “I understand why you’d be worried, Otto, but can we talk about this in a few days? Would you mind?”

  “All right, fine. But I won’t let it drop.”

  I was tired then, more than ready for bed. The plans we’d made had me staying for the rest of that week and then flying back with Natasha, but now her ticket would have to be changed, and I didn’t know, until my sister spoke again, what we’d do to pass the hours.

  Cecelia stood up and put a hand lovingly on my right shoulder. I thanked her for the meal. “I’m glad you liked it,” she said, “and that you filled up. Because Rinpoche wants you to do a three-day solitary, and there’s some partial fasting involved. He’s going to wake you up at six tomorrow morning and tell you the rules and all, take you to one of the cabins. That’s why I didn’t want to keep talking. You should probably go to bed.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve signed on to this plan,” I told her, but she’d gone behind me and was doing the shoulder-massage thing again, ignoring me. I took a breath. “Seese.” I took another breath. “I agreed to sit with him. But I never said anything about a retreat. And fasting is absolutely out of the question. Crazy, for a person like me.”

  “I know,” she said. I felt her kiss the top of my head, and then she shuffled back down the hall and I heard a door close quietly there.

  36

  I suppose I could have objected more strongly. There would be moments in the succeeding days when I felt that I should have. Many moments. But several factors were at work. First, I’d seen so clearly of late how badly I wanted my son and daughter to be friends, and also how different they were, and I wondered if they’d learned, in some way, from my example with my sister. So I thought I might humor her for once instead of criticizing her in my thoughts. I thought that might be a step toward the kind of relationship I still hoped to someday have with her, a relationship of mutual respect that would serve as a good example for my children.

  Second, while I did not for a nanosecond believe Rinpoche when he told me I was on the cusp of some important interior realization, I couldn’t deny, except in my most cynical moments, that I’d benefitted from his company, his books, and from the regular practice of meditation to which he’d introduced me. At that point in my life I wouldn’t have characterized it, necessarily, as a spiritual benefit. It was more like substitute therapy, only much less expensive. Still, I’d noticed a change and, while the benefits had eroded with the stress of Jeannie’s illness, I was fairly sure the meditation practice had enabled me to witness the torture she’d gone through without going out into the back yard and shooting myself.

  Third, and this may be the hardest to explain, there was a way in which being around Anthony and Natasha—two wonderful athletes—made me realize that my life was almost completely lacking in physical challenge. When did I ever push myself these days? Over the summer I’d jogged a mile or a mile and a half with my son every Saturday and Sunday morning. In the winter I worked out three times a week at a health club—mostly so I could keep eating all the foods I liked without turning into one of those guys I saw on the train, middle-aged office-workers who lugged around a sagging stomach as if they were soon to give birth to a litter of walruses.

  But what I’m talking about here goes beyond vanity. I remembered, however vaguely, the feeling I’d had as a high school football player. Number 39 on the jersey, a skinny-legged tailback with a total career playing time of fourteen minutes, I nevertheless went to all the practices, ran myself to exhaustion on hot August days, and endured the contact and the scrapes, bruises, strains, and one broken little finger with a degree of stoicism. Since then, however, with the exception of my brief JV hockey career at UND, I’d opted for comfort whenever possible. Aside from the rare cold Atlantic swim and maybe one or two sets of singles tennis in the heat of July, I hadn’t really pushed my body in something like thirty years. Maybe watching bits of the London Olympics had had some effect on me, but I wanted to get back in shape, and I decided that a little fasting wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

  So that was my mind-set the next morning when Rinpoche tapped on my door. I wanted, facing him, to be tough again. Or at least tougher.

  My brother-in-law was in a jolly mood. Possibly that came from seeing his family, or from being liberated from my tiresome company, or from hearing that Shelsa had almost learned to swim, or from not having any idea what some of the people in Williston were saying about him. Whatever the reason, he hugged me warmly and said, “Otto will make a good retreat. I can see.”

  “All suited up,” I said, which, of course, meant nothing to him. “What should I bring along?”

  “Three days clothes and toothbrush,” he said, as if he’d said it to hundreds of penitents before me. He held out one of Seese’s all-natural grocery sacks.

  When I’d packed my small bag (sneaking in, I’m embarrassed to admit, three Mounds bars and my phone), Rinpoche and I headed out. From the front porch of our house, the morning sun in your face, you descend three old steps and find yourself in the gravel area where we park our cars and pickups. There are two barns behind the house and three galvanized-steel grain storage bins on stilts there. Close by to your left is a smaller storage building that was used for feed, fertilizer, rakes, shovels, and so on. Beyond that is a rutted farm road that led, in the old days, to what Pop and Mom always referred to as Blake’s Field. Who this Blake character was, no one seemed to know. Some early settler who’d put his name on the acreage, no doubt. In any case, Blake’s field, all hundred-some acres of it, had been allowed to go to grass, and there, among the fescue and locusts, the meadowlarks and pocket gophers and pesky moles, Rinpoche, my sister, and a local carpentry crew had constructed a string of three wooden cabins, well spaced.

  I followed my brother-in-law along the dirt road, carrying my luggage, studying the sway of his robe, and wondering if I was about to make another foolish mistake. It would be worse than the nearly crippling yoga class in Madison on our previous road trip. It would be a kind of violence done to my already half-ravaged soul. Fasting. Solitude. Empty hours. What had I been thinking?

  But we trudged along. The final cabin was only about a qu
arter mile from the house and the road led right past its door. The building was probably twenty feet by twenty, with a shiny metal roof, unpainted cedar siding, a window, a stovepipe running outside one wall. Standing there in the newborn sun Rinpoche turned to face me. “Now,” he said, “listen me.”

  “Listening.”

  “Today is Friday. You stay until Sunday just as the darkness is there.”

  “Sunday at sundown.”

  He ignored me.

  “For the breakfast, there’s food to make. Oatmeal. Some kind of the tea with no caffeine. Bread, yelli, some of the fruit. Plenty. For the lunch, somebody come here and bring you, okay?”

  “So far, okay. I’m waiting to hear about dinner.”

  He smiled. “Dinner.” He held up one finger and shook his head.

  “No dinner?”

  More shaking. The smile grew wider. In Ortyk, apparently, missing dinner was cause for amusement.

  “Can I snack on the breakfast food before bed?”

  “Tea, you can have. But wery important. You must go hungry to sleep and then you can have, in the morning, the Big!”

  “All I want.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “And what do I do when I’m not eating or thinking about eating?”

  “You have books. Four. Read wery good these books. You have the yoga mat. If you want you can take the chair outside and sit and look. When the person comes with the lunch you can talk a little while.”

  “I suspect there’s a TV with very limited reception.”

  He patted my arm. “Good you can make a joke, my friend. Wery good. But these three days are the wery most important time for you! Most important time for Otto, my friend! At the end, I will come get you. Okay?”

  “Anything special I should do?”

  “Sure. Meditate in the morning before you eat, then later after you eat, then before you eat the lunch, then after, then before you go to bed. Maybe four, five hours all together. Can you do it?”