Day after day he maintained his regimen. He got up at six, took a shower, went into his study, shut the door, set the timer on his desk clock and sat. There was no mystique to it, no charm, no solemnity, nothing. Yes, nothing. In a curious way he felt he had entered into nothingness. And yet it was a ritual, a process, a frame; it was something.
And then one morning it came to him that he would do this every day, and that it would work. It would be his cure, and the essence of that cure would be silence and surrender. But the cure would be a long time coming. He must wait, and for the first time in his life he must have faith.
currawong
Over the weeks that followed I kept to my practice. And then, out of nowhere, I had what I can only describe as a visitation. The woman in white arose in my meditation.
It was almost eight by the time I got home from work. Zoe and Luke were at a school concert. The house was empty. In the wok there were the leftovers of a stir-fry, and I carried a bowl upstairs with the intention of eating out on the small cedar deck at the rear, after I had meditated. But I was hungry, and thought that for once I might cut my meditation short.
In the bedroom I paused to look for a cushion, and then unlocked the sliding glass door that opened onto the deck and the shade of an old plane tree. It was a perfect late summer evening, mellow and warm, and I settled onto the floor of the deck. By this time I had given up the straight-backed chair and taken to sitting cross-legged on the floor; I had always been flexible, and somehow in this position I felt more natural, less of a stone pharaoh. Because I was hungry I planned on fifteen minutes only but after a while my hunger faded and before long I glanced at my watch to find that forty minutes had passed and the deck was beginning to darken. Just five more minutes, I thought, and it was then that I felt a presence and opened my eyes.
The leafy clusters of the plane tree fluttered at the edge of my vision, and the lights in the houses opposite glowed in the ripening dark. I saw that a currawong was hopping across the deck, its beak glinting, its head cocked to the side, one yellow eye looking bold and quizzical. So it was only a bird. Staring back into that eye, I held its gaze for an hypnotic moment before the bird jerked its black head and flapped up onto the deck rail, where it looked back at me as if it knew me. And from nowhere a line came to me from Siddhartha, the book of my youth: ‘and the bird in my breast has not died’.
My arms and feet were warm in the humid dusk; I could feel the heat penetrating the fabric of my shirt; the jasmine coiled around the deckrail was heady … And how rare it was to sit becalmed, how soothing … I needed only to lay my head back and I would be able to doze comfortably for a half hour or so …
And it was then, as I closed my eyes, that the woman in white came to me, the woman I had dreamed of in the months after my brother’s death, the woman with her strange, blank-eyed baby in its white swaddling clothes. I felt rather than saw them, as if glimpsing a fold of the infant’s cloth out of the corner of my mind’s eye, but not in a way that evoked any feeling. There was none of the yearning or hysteria that had welled up in my dreams. I was merely an observer, aware that my heartbeat had slowed, and that the image of the woman had dissolved, leaving the baby to float across my internal eye.
And then I felt a buzzing in my temples and my mind began to brim again with random thoughts that zipped and buzzed across my screen like manic spermatozoa, while the baby, that luminous egg, wafted on the night air.
I opened my eyes, startled again by a sense of presence, of someone near me. But again it was only the currawong, perched on the rail close to my head. Brazen, fearless. What a strange creature to come so close. By now it was dark, the sudden darkening of a sub-tropical night. Possessed by a sense of some other self, I stood, and, glancing back over my shoulder at the bird, which was still there, staring at me with its yellow eye, I opened the glass door and withdrew into the house.
The next morning I stopped by Mark’s cubicle. Mark was on the phone, which wasn’t uncommon; lately he had been spending too much time on the phone, usually to some woman or other, and I stood, disapprovingly, making it clear he should hang up and give me his full attention. But Mark, insouciant as ever, continued to remonstrate in an urgent tone with whoever was on the other end of the line.
My temper rising, I made a conscious effort to distract myself (no more outbursts) and took to studying the rogue’s gallery on the wall of Mark’s cubicle, a space where the analysts pinned their notices, cartoons, photos of wives or girlfriends, children, wilderness scenes and whatever fantasy objects got them through their day. The centrepiece of Mark’s gallery had long been a red Ferrari and it was still there, in pride of place, but pinned beneath it was a small colour photograph of a woman in early middle age. Her skin was dark and she looked to be from the subcontinent. Her black hair was pulled back tightly from her forehead, and around her shoulders was a white shawl. Her eyes blazed at me.
Mark hung up the phone with a sigh. ‘Sorry, K, I’ve told her not to ring me at work.’
‘Who’s this?’ I pointed to the image of the woman on his cork-board.
‘A joke,’ he said, unpinning the photo and tossing it onto his desk. ‘Some guru that Phoebe – my girlfriend – goes to see. She put it’ – he nodded at the photo lying on the desk – ‘up there. She’s into that stuff.’
Phoebe, it turned out, had been a member of our meditation class. She and Mark had run into one another in a coffee shop near the office, and Mark, with a more than respectable excuse to strike up a conversation, had made a successful move.
‘So you meditate together?’ I raised an ironic eyebrow.
Mark’s smirk said it all. ‘Not exactly, K, not exactly.’
Later that evening I told this story to Zoe, who by then had met Mark and found him an amusing if feckless study. ‘So this is where you go to meet chicks,’ she said, ‘a stress management class. I suppose it’s a step up from cruising a singles’ bar. And when the relationship falls apart you can meditate to get over it.’
Zoe approved of my meditation. How could she not? In the months since ‘the incident’ we had behaved with a wary affection towards one another, but I could feel that in some deep part of her I was unforgiven. She was waiting. She would see.
So I was meditating, I was a good boy, but still the black shadow hovered at my shoulder. Winter came and it was cold, and harder to get up in the early mornings. There were many days when I was irascible and withdrawn. Sometimes I would sit in the dark before dawn and think: this isn’t enough. I thought of that benign field I had sometimes felt part of when I was a boy. What had happened to it? When had I lost my connection? Had it been a figment of my imagination, like an imaginary friend, or a belief in Santa Claus? Was it some kind of electromagnetic field, and if so, when had the circuit broken? And then an overwhelming sadness would take possession of me and the thought would come: no, this isn’t enough. I can’t do this alone.
It was spring, and a Saturday morning. Zoe, who never got sick, was in bed with the flu. I dropped Luke off at a friend’s place and continued on across the bridge to my office. I planned to catch up on some work.
Shoppers were out sipping coffee on the pavement or strolling the Chatswood mall. Unable to find a parking space near the office, I cruised for several blocks in the direction of a car park at the eastern end of the mall, and as I turned into its entrance I glanced across at the Chatswood Community Centre, a red-brick and glass complex surrounded by green lawn. A steady stream of people were making their way towards the wide front doors, and for a moment I thought – could swear – I caught a glimpse of Mark Paradisis among them, and yet this seemed unlikely, as Mark didn’t surface from clubbing until mid-afternoon. Still, I was sure it had been him; I thought I recognised the white shirt and embroidered vest, the distinctively cocky set of the head, the familiar swagger.
Inside the cavernous car park I found a place high up on the fifth floor and strode to the lift. It seemed to take an age to reach me. It appeared to b
e stuck on Level 3 and I felt the old impatience rising, that razor-like cut of irritability, and I thought, no, cool it, it’s Saturday morning. Once out in the bright sunlight I looked over to the community centre and saw a row of posters on the notice-board, and I crossed the grass verge to look, wondering if it really had been Mark that I had seen. What could he possibly be doing in such an uncool venue as a community centre at a time some hours before he would normally rise from his bed?
Up close, the posters showed the head and shoulders of a dark-skinned woman draped in a white shawl, and instantly I recognised her as the woman in the photograph on the wall of Mark’s office cubicle. So it must have been Mark.
I glanced at my watch. Plenty of time to look in. Perhaps I could catch Mark in some embarrassing posture, or see a side to him that as yet I had no inkling of, and I stepped up to the main doors.
As I approached I could see that the wide concrete terrace outside the doors was covered with shoes, left there by members of the crowd, a disorderly spread of cheap sandals and worn sneakers. Ignoring these, I pushed open the heavy glass door that led into the foyer; I had no intention of leaving an expensive pair of almost new Italian leather slip-ons in a place where they could easily be stolen. But as I attempted to enter through the inner doors, a middle-aged man with grey hair touched me on the arm and said, ‘Sir, would you mind leaving your shoes at the door?’
‘Why?’ I asked, sounding churlish.
‘Because it’s the custom,’ said the doorkeeper, ‘and for the purposes of today’s program the hall will in effect become a temple.’
A temple? The Chatswood Community Centre? I felt myself on the edge of rudeness, surprisingly so, since I had left home in a good mood. Still, that was the way it was then: hair-trigger. For a moment I considered leaving and then, glancing through the open door as an (unshod) woman pushed past me, I thought I caught a glimpse of Mark again. Damn it, I would go in, barefoot or not.
Frowning, I stepped back onto the top step and removed my shoes, being careful to place them in a far corner, in shadow, where they would not be obvious. I would just look in, confirm that it was indeed Mark I had seen entering, discover what cult fantasy he had got himself into, and either tease him about it if it were harmless or look out for his interests if it were not.
Inside, the hall was three-quarters full. People sat or stood around idly, with an air of low-key expectancy. In a quick scan of the room I could see no-one I recognised, yet I was sure it was Mark I had seen walking up the path towards the doorway. Perhaps he had looked in, thought better of it and left, in which case I would leave too, and I began to move back towards the main doors. Too late. Something was happening.
In an instant the atmosphere in the hall changed. A group of people was clustered around the entrance, and they began now to chant in a low, sing-song inflection, over and over with a kind of hypnotic rise and fall, in some foreign tongue I didn’t recognise. From the excitement by the doors I deduced that the main attraction had arrived. It could only be the woman on the poster.
The chanting intensified and grew louder. A bell rang and the back rows of the crowd surged forward towards the door, people standing on their toes and craning their necks to see, and I knew that she must be standing there, in the doorway. I couldn’t see but I knew that someone was there, or at least something had changed in the room, because at that moment I felt a wave of energy move towards me – or, rather, it both came towards me from some external source and at the same time it arose within me. The cavity of my chest filled with an intense pressure that shot up suddenly into my head in a column of heat. My face flushed, my vision blurred and I began to cry.
Right there, in the middle of the hall, I was weeping. Oh, my God: this was my first thought. Oh, my God, how embarrassing, thank God no-one here knows me. I turned my face away from the incoming crowd, which was streaming to fill up the chairs at the front, and I moved across to the far wall lined with wooden benches that were empty. I’ll just sit here for a bit, I thought, and pull myself together. I’ll get over this and then I’ll go. It must have been the chanting. Sometimes music could do that, could move me for no good reason, or make the hairs on my skin prickle. So I would just sit there, and take out my handkerchief and try unobtrusively to wipe my eyes, and then I would leave.
But the curious thing was this: the tears kept coming, and for no reason. I was weeping for no reason, no reason at all, and I kept saying this to myself, over and over, as if it were a mantra for my recovery. For no reason … for no reason … Finally, I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes.
After a few minutes I looked at my watch and saw that I had been weeping, silently, for forty minutes. Something had cracked, something had broken; I was dripping into my shirt, I was melting into the unyielding chair. Ah, so this was it, this was the crack-up. Here, on a Saturday morning, on my way to the office, in the most banal place imaginable. With no fanfare, no drama, not even a blaze of temper, I had finally lost it.
The dark-skinned woman – she whose entrance had provoked my unravelling – was sitting in an armchair at the end of the hall, in front of the stage. She was indeed diminutive, barely five feet, and draped in the gentle folds of a plain white cotton sari. Her black hair was pulled back in a large bun and she wore a thick strand of wooden beads around her neck. Her skin was unusually dark and tinged with blue. There was a glow about her, and her eyes were dark pools of reflected fire. She seemed to sit within a sheath of luminosity such as I had never seen around any woman, not even at my most besotted. And yet she was, to all intents and purposes, an ordinary woman. So why was I crying? What was this wave that had swept over me when she entered the room? Nothing could have been more mundane than this suburban hall with its plastic chairs, its fluorescent light fittings, its cork notice-board and its Anzac roll-of-honour. Yet here I was, in meltdown.
Around me, blurred figures came and went while I sat anchored to my bench, waiting for self-possession to reclaim me. I’ve been working too hard, I told myself, I’ve been stressed, the chanting caught me off my guard, it’ll pass. I’ll just sit here for a few more minutes, and in a little while I’ll be okay.
But I wasn’t okay. For a time I would subside into calm and the tears would dry and I would sigh with relief, and stand up in readiness to leave, to just stroll out the door … and then the aching pressure would return and my eyes would burn and the whole watery miasma would start up again. It was as if even by attempting to get up off my bench I had inadvertently activated some hydraulic lever, some cranial water flow, and I would be back where I was, and the bench would claim me again.
After a while I looked up at the big round clock above the door. Eleven twenty. I had been there almost two hours.
Two hours? It wasn’t possible. The jolt of this brought me back into real time and I was able to collect myself enough to look around the room. I could see that the hall was divided into two sides, and down the centre people were queuing to meet her. But the queue moved slowly so that they sat on the floor cross-legged, or cupped their arms around their knees and whispered to one another. Some sat with their eyes closed, as if meditating. As each supplicant reached her seated form, he or she rose up on their knees and she pressed her forehead to theirs and held it there for several seconds, then held them back from her, gazed into their eyes and flashed them a smile of tender recognition. I saw then that her body shone with a dark-skinned radiance and her composure was unfaltering. Sometimes she would laugh, as if all this – the hall, everyone there – was a tremendous joke.
Mark. He must be here, I thought, and once again I looked for him, this time through inflamed and bleary eyes. But he wasn’t there, although, of course, he might well have come and gone while I, hapless at the side of the hall, was trying to pull myself together. But I was okay now, I was bled out, and it was definitely time to go. In my socks I began to walk towards the main doors, and was almost there when I turned to look back at her one last time, to reassure mysel
f that this dizzying experience was real. At that moment she looked up, looked right at me, and gave an amused shrug that said, ‘What? Leaving?’ And there I was, in tears again, standing stock-still and bereft at the door, all six foot one and a half inches of me, tears coursing down my already soggy cheeks. In acute shame – or was it surrender? – I wandered across to the end of the queue, dropped to my knees and sat, cross-legged, in a daze.
By the time I had moved to within a few metres of her I was calm; I had given up all resistance. I no longer cared about the indignity of it. I would go through with this strange ritual, and then it would be at an end. I would get up, walk out the door, drive home and it would be over. No-one would know it had happened.
When I was within a short radius of her I began to feel a subtle vibration in my body. I looked down at my hands and saw that I was trembling, though only slightly, perhaps not even perceptibly, and anyway I was beyond caring. Someone behind pushed me forward and she raised her hands and held my head, and her palms were cool. She drew my brow to hers, forehead to forehead, and I caught a glimpse of her small brown feet, and then I was in a white haze, fighting back the urge to break into racking sobs. When at last I stumbled to my feet I tripped and almost fell. One of her attendants handed me a clutch of tissues and I wiped my eyes.
Outside, it was hot. The light was piercing. Somehow I made my way across the grass and back to the car. It was futile even to consider working in this state and I decided to go home, but for a long time I was in a trance, driving on automatic pilot. I was halfway across the bridge before I looked down at my feet and realised that I was wearing someone else’s shoes.
A Short History of Richard Kline Page 12
