The Hidden School

by Dan Millman

  I got up and retrieved Soc’s letter from my knapsack. Returning to the swing, I held it out. “Go ahead, read it. I think he’d approve.”

  As Ama turned the pages, I leaned back in the old swing. It was the first moment since I’d left Hawaii that I felt completely relaxed.

  As Ama finished reading, a single star appeared in the northern sky. She looked up, her eyes open wide. “Until now, I never knew whether the journal really existed. He spoke of it, but it sounded like something from a dream.”

  “Did Socrates say anything about where he might have left the journal? Anything more about what he might have written in it?”

  She looked toward the darkening horizon as though she might find an answer there. Turning back to me, she stood. “I’m sorry, Dan! I wish I could tell you more. I’ve enjoyed your visit. I have few friends with whom I can talk about such things.”

  “Other than Stalking Wolf,” I said.

  She smiled. “Yes, I can talk with Joe.”

  Dusk arrived. Class dismissed. We shook hands. Which turned into a brief, awkward hug. “Well,” she said, “I have some class preparation to do. . . .”

  I had preparations to do as well—homework assigned by my own teacher.

  SIX

  * * *

  I walked out into the darkening desert scrubland. The light from Ama’s classroom revealed an arid landscape that glowed faintly under a half-moon. I heard the hoot of a distant owl, the scuttle of a nearby lizard, and the chirping of crickets, shrill in the windless air. Out here and alone, I felt shadows of doubt that matched the darkening skies; the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I turned to see the figure of a man ooze out of the shadows. As he drew near, my face broke into a smile.

  “Abuelo!” I cried, seeing his gap-toothed grin. “What are you—?”

  “¡Silencio!” he said, putting his finger to his lips. “You want to wake the desert?”

  “It’s already up.”

  “It must be, with you clomping around! I thought a band of delinquents had come to do mischief,” he said, taking an exaggerated martial arts stance. Then, more seriously, Papa Joe put a finger over his mouth. “There may be other creatures whose attention you don’t want to attract.”

  I dismissed his antics as a flair for the dramatic until he said quietly, with a casual wave of his hand, “What if there were another man also looking for a something?”

  Despite the warm evening, I felt a chill on the back of my neck. I looked around but saw only sagebrush and the dark horizon. Another riddle? I wondered. What does he know?

  “If there were such a man, do you think that he might be deranged or dangerous?”

  “Perhaps,” Papa Joe replied, “but I no longer fear death, nieto—I wait for it. Death stalks us all, and is very patient. . . .”

  The sound of his voice faded for a moment as I thought again about the story of Samarra.

  “Anyway, I’ve seen my death, and it’s not by such a man’s hand. If he exists at all,” the old man concluded.

  I leaned against the wall, perplexed. Why would anyone else be seeking the journal after all these years? I thought. Unless my asking around in Old Town . . .

  “How did you find me?” I asked in a whisper.

  “Not important. What matters is that I’m here.”

  “But why? Is it because you have something more to tell me about Socrates?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. That depends on you.”

  Resigned, I sighed. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”

  He began: “Information can be as valuable as a precious gem. But is the information true? Is the gem real? How can you tell? Let’s say you’re given three sacks, each containing twenty identical gems. One of the three sacks is filled with impostors. The only clue you have is that the real gems weigh exactly one ounce each, while each fake gem weighs one-tenth of an ounce more. You have a scale. Not a balance scale with two trays—that would be too easy. Your scale has a single tray. In only one weighing, how do you discover which of the three sacks holds the impostors?”

  “Wait—that’s not a riddle, it’s a math problem!” (Math was never my strong suit.)

  Papa Joe said nothing.

  I closed my eyes and pictured three sacks. I imagined what my cousin Dave, a math teacher, would say. If I took one gem from each sack, I reasoned, those three gems would weigh a total of 3.1 ounces, since one of the gems would weigh an extra tenth of an ounce—one gem from each sack wouldn’t reveal anything useful, but . . . what if I took a different number—?

  “Okay,” I said slowly, following this thread. “I’d take one gem from sack one, two gems from sack two, and three gems from sack three. The number of tenths of an ounce—either one-, two-, or three-tenths over six ounces—tells whether sack one, two, or three has the counterfeits.”

  “¡Exactamente!” he said.

  Now I returned to my purpose. “I understand that you helped Socrates three decades ago, and that he may have told you about something he’d written in a journal. Perhaps where he might have hidden it?”

  Papa Joe’s face was thoughtful. “I must search my memory. For now, I’ve given you all that I can.”

  Frustrated, I toed at the dirt, turning away. “That’s not the deal! I solved your riddle. Now it’s your turn to give me something—”

  I was alone. He’d vanished into the inky darkness.

  My mood darkened as a gang of self-defeating thoughts assailed me. Papa Joe doesn’t really want to help me. The journal is probably hidden forever. Hopeless. I’m wasting time. I recalled when Soc had had me record every passing thought in a small notebook, a form of literary meditation, so that I could become aware of the river of thoughts drifting by. He’d said: “You can’t control random thoughts, and you don’t need to. Let ’em have their moment, then turn your attention to something worthwhile—like what you’re gonna do next.”

  Okay. So what next? I asked myself.

  As I drove back to my motel, an idea came to me. I’d need to pay another visit to Ama at the end of the school day tomorrow.

  * * *

  When I appeared at the door, I found Ama erasing the chalkboard. I smiled, seeing a streak of chalk on her forehead. Abruptly, I asked, “I have something I’d like to try—”

  “Dan!” she said, turning to face me.

  Her smile invited me to continue. “Would you be open to doing some trance work?”

  Brushing back her hair and leaving another white streak on her forehead, she said, “I’m sorry, trance work? You mean hypnosis?”

  “It might help you remember more about Socrates.”

  “I don’t think . . .” She took a step back. I realized that I’d been standing very close to her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling awkward. “I forget that we’ve only just met. I wouldn’t want a stranger to hypnotize me either.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve never been hypnotized before.”

  “Some experts,” I explained, “think that most people are normally in one or another sort of trance or altered state much of the time—watching a film, reading a book, meditating. Our brain waves change all the time. Mama Chia, a woman I met in Hawaii, worked with entrancement, guiding me through visionary experiences to transmit lessons at a deeper level than the intellect. She taught me that the subconscious mind, what she called the basic self, takes in more information than the conscious mind can access. If you’ll allow me to guide you into a trance state, I’ll ask your subconscious mind for impressions, even if they seem unimportant. Whenever you wish to return to your normal state of awareness, you can snap out of it. But it’s less abrupt if you let me bring you back.”

  Ama looked skeptical. Or maybe it was just the sun in her eyes, because she took a seat at one of the children’s desks and gestured for me to sit at another.

  “Shall we begin?” she said.

  “Okay, just get comfortable—that’s right, take a nice deep breath. Now let it out. Another. Good
. Feel your body grow heavy as you watch my fingertip, up here, just above your eyes.”

  A few minutes later, in response to my questions, Ama began speaking softly, as if she were talking in her sleep: “I’m sitting next to his bedside. I put a cool cloth on his forehead. His eyes open and he’s talking in a kind of reverie, saying: ‘I wrote two pages . . . five, ten, twenty . . .’ ” She crinkled her brow and her speech slowed: “ ‘It came to me . . . felt complete . . . hid it . . . I don’t know . . . a safe place.’ ”

  After swaying back and forth in her chair, Ama found a calm space, there in the infirmary of the past. “Now he’s sitting up. He looks around the room, then at me. He says something about drinking from the mountain. Or a fountain. I don’t know. I offer him water. He sips, then pushes it away. His eyes are open, but he’s not awake. He’s saying, ‘I need to find it.’ ”

  In the voice of a young girl, almost in a whisper, Ama added: “He looks directly at me but doesn’t see me. He says, ‘It holds a key to eternal life. It shows the way.’ ”

  She sighed, and there was a kind of longing in her voice. “Now he’s trying to get out of bed. He seems anxious. He says, ‘I might have told others . . . not sure.’ Now he’s tired, lying back, closing his eyes. Wait, something else . . . about Las Vegas, or nearby. Then he says again the word mountain and then water. Again I offer him water, which he pushes away and repeats mountain and water.”

  Ama sat up so suddenly I thought she’d snapped out of the trance. “A key. I see a key on a table. Then it’s gone. . . .”

  She went deeper, becoming Socrates, speaking his words, assuming his tone of voice: “ ‘Reminders of higher truth . . . self and no self, death and no death . . . trust in destiny . . . a leap coming . . . have to find it . . . don’t know where . . . where am I? Where am I?’ ”

  Silence. A furrowed brow. Then, “ ‘Wait! The sun . . . the sun . . . the sun!’ ”

  I had to presume she was still speaking for Socrates in a sort of empathic connection, dealing with the heat of the desert or the fever. Or both.

  It was time to bring her back to everyday awareness. She emerged preoccupied, her eyes wide. “Wait, wait!” she said, sitting absolutely still. Something was pushing at the edge of her memory, about to surface. Then she got it. I could see it in her eyes.

  “Dan, about ten years ago, not long before he died, my father’s short-term memory began to fail. But his recollection of the distant past astonished me. He had far more to look back on than forward to. So he told me stories when I visited him. Stories about his youth, and sometimes about his patients.

  “He recalled not only the feverish man who called himself Socrates, but another man as well—a man who had met my father and then become a sort of patient. . . .”

  Again Ama sat and waited, and listened, and searched her own recollection. “I can almost hear my father’s voice—how he told me that a few weeks after he had discharged Socrates, another man came to the clinic asking about him, and about some book. My dad couldn’t give the man any information, even if he’d known anything, because of patient privacy. So the man left. He seemed disappointed, even distraught.

  “That would have been the end of it, but a few months later the man returned, this time pleading with my father for anything he could tell him about the book or its location. To gain my dad’s sympathy, and to explain his interest, the man said he was a gardener by trade, had been driving to a job when he chanced upon a man stumbling along the roadway. He couldn’t leave anyone out in the midday sun, so he stopped and offered the man a ride.

  “He soon realized that the man wasn’t drunk but feverish. After accepting a few sips of water, the man muttered in a hoarse voice about a journal he had hidden or lost, and how it revealed a gateway to eternal life. This sounded crazy to the gardener. His impression was confirmed when the deluded man said his name was Socrates. And he claimed to be seventy-six but looked at least twenty or even thirty years younger. The gardener dropped the man off near my father’s clinic. That’s when Papa Joe must have found him.

  “A few weeks later, the gardener was having some odd symptoms and got a medical checkup at a hospital in Albuquerque. He was diagnosed with ALS—Lou Gehrig’s disease, a terminal neurological disorder. He was given a prognosis of one to three years. My father said he saw the gardener several times after that. He said he wanted a second opinion, which only confirmed the diagnosis. Then he made appointments just to talk, hoping to learn more about the man Socrates and the journal, clinging to hope. As my dad’s role shifted from healer to counselor, he offered what little he remembered hearing from that feverish patient years before. But mostly he just listened.

  “The gardener reasoned that if Socrates had stated his age correctly, he might really have found some key to eternal life. By then the gardener had come to believe that he’d been destined to find the feverish man, and that the journal was meant to be his.

  “The last time my father saw the gardener, he was frail and had difficulty walking. Now obsessed, he showed my dad notes he’d copied from library books about mystical paths of healing and the search for immortality. About an ancient Persian alchemist who sought to create a catalyst called in Arabic al iksir that was said to produce immortality. And Egyptians and Hindus who would ingest certain gems, then sequester themselves in caves or other dark places to wait for a rejuvenation process called Kaya Kalpa. The gardener now believed the journal might contain a map to the legendary fountain of youth or to a supernatural mushroom described in some Chinese book or to the philosopher’s stone referred to in one of Plato’s books, combining earth, air, fire, and water to transform humans into immortals. I recall my dad saying that, delusional or not, the man had done his research.”

  Ama paused again. “There’s something else—oh, yes!—when my father asked the gardener why he was so desperate to live, he said that he needed to survive because of his nine-year-old son. The boy was everything to him. And after his wife had died five years before, he’d raised the boy himself. I think there was an aunt, but . . . that’s right—he said the aunt worked nights and slept during the day. . . .” Ama sighed. “I don’t think my father ever met the boy, but the son must have witnessed his father losing the ability to make his own food or drive or walk or, at the last, even breathe.

  “Six months later, my dad learned that the gardener had died, never having found the man or the journal that he believed might have saved him. But while the gardener could speak, he must have told his son about the man Socrates, and the book that showed the way to eternal life. My dad believed the gardener’s son would remember. . . .

  “So that’s it,” Ama said, satisfied, as if she had released a weight from her mind. “The events of this sad story made an impression on my father. I think he told me this story more than once.”

  In her trance, I thought, Ama wasn’t saying “the sun, the sun!” but rather “the son, the son!”

  Socrates had indeed spoken to a stranger about the journal and what it contained. And the gardener had almost certainly told his son about his quest. But that was thirty years ago, I told myself. The trail has gone cold for decades. The boy has grown up, surely found a life of his own, and he might have moved away and put the past behind him. Probably. Maybe.

  Ama’s voice pulled me back to the present. “I thought you should know. It’s all I’ve got. Maybe Papa Joe can add something more. . . . He’s unpredictable.”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed.”

  “I think the journal is waiting for the right person—for you, Dan. I hope you find it.” We sat in silence for a few minutes more, because there was nothing left to say except good-bye.

  As I pulled away from the school, in the rearview mirror I saw two children out in the dusty playground under the oak tree doing cartwheels on the patch of grass. I pulled my eyes away from the mirror and gazed out into the distance, into the unknown.

  SEVEN

  * * *

  Sometime later I turned d
own the dusty gravel path to Papa Joe’s shop, intent on asking him about his recent comments and vanishing act. The shop was closed. I waited for nearly an hour before I left, determined to move on. It was unlikely that Papa Joe had anything else to share with me except more riddles. And I was now feeling certain that the journal lay one or two days’ travel to the west. Socrates had mentioned both the Mojave Desert and Las Vegas.

  After topping off the pickup’s oil, I drove west on Route 40 and Route 66, leading toward the badlands of Arizona and eventually the Mojave Desert near the borders of Nevada and California. As I drove, I could picture Socrates dozing in the passenger seat, his feet up on the dashboard. “So, Soc,” I said aloud over the rush of hot air through the windshield wing of the dusty pickup, “Am I heading in the right direction? Getting warmer?”—an apt question as the desert oven switched from bake to barbecue. I opened the window and stuck my arm out, but gusts of hot air brought no relief.

  The shimmering heat helped me empathize with a feverish Socrates seeking an isolated location to hide the journal well off the beaten path. But the what-if-I-were-a-delirious-Socrates strategy only succeeded in making me thirsty. As the miles rolled by, I passed mesas, cacti, and rolling land. The truck slowly climbed steep grades and then coasted down through a rainsquall in high country before returning to the arid lowlands. As I traveled through the vast spaces of New Mexico and Arizona, I thought of pioneer families making their way through this stretch of inhospitable land in covered wagons.

  Meanwhile, I had an eerie feeling that someone was watching me from a distance. I peered ahead through the pockmarked windshield at the long ribbon of road, then glanced into the rearview mirror and out the side windows at the passing scrubland. All I saw were infrequent vehicles and the occasional gas-and-food stop.