S.

by John Updike

  Really, it wasn't all that intimidating, because outside the little windows of the trailer I could see these other sannyasins going by laughing and looking so happy and peaceful and hugging and kissing each other whenever they felt like it. She gave me a speech about how work here was worship, and the harder the work the more fervent the worship, and she doubted I could do hard labor. I said I had been an active gardener in my old life—my old life, Midge! as if I already had a new one—and played tennis twice a week all summer, and would she like to arm-wrestle? It just popped out, a little like the things Irving sometimes says to us at the beginning of a session, to cleanse our minds and shock us into satori. I would never have been so fresh and aggressive in my normal life. Already I was liberated. The Arhat's love was in the air here and giving me courage. You could see Durga was stunned for a second, her eyes narrowed and this chin of hers, like Gary Grant's only of course on a woman not so eflfective, this chin of hers lifted a little inch, and all she said was I should save my internalized violence and hostility for the dynamic-meditation session. So that implied I was accepted, but, Midge, if I'd known what a dynamic-meditation session was I might have gotten back into my car, but they had taken my keys and driven it away, like valet parking, and in fact I never have been able to find out what happened to it, so tell Charles, if by any chance you see him, that I can't help whatever notices from Hertz he keeps getting—they're not my fault. The rest of that day was spent filling out forms indemnifying them against all sorts of damage and taking Rorschach and personality tests to see if I was mentally healthy , enough, for my own protection as well as theirs they explained, and having a really very thorough examination for venereal diseases—very disagreeably done—though when I asked for a Contac for my cold they said it was just maya and to ignore it.

  Oh God, I am tired. And now I hear people outside coming from the disco and I don't want them to hear me talking to you on this thing—people steal here, there's nothing really against it in the Arhat's philosophy, and they say Durga has spies everywhere and is really paranoid about betraying our secrets to the outside world—so I'll say good night and tuck you into my sweater. You and the other girls would hardly know me. I sleep in my clothes and pretty much stink of sweat and cement, but after a while you don't mind it, in fact you rather like it, your own smell. Here they all come, high as kites.

  Next day. Just a few minutes before I go and face the hideous dinner brawl. I really shouldn't say that; they do a wonderful job here organizing things, but the Arhat's spiritual magnetism has just overwhelmed the facilities—a setup designed for four hundred is being asked to house and feed nearly a thousand, with a lot of day trippers and curiosity seekers on the weekends. It's what Charles used to say of the hospital—no matter how many beds you put in, there's always one sick person left over. I've found a place to be by myself a few minutes, though some of our group leaders tell us a wish for privacy is very pro-ego and anti-ashram. I don't know—Buddha was always doing it, and the Arhat never tells us to go everywhere in a noisy smelly bunch like some of these sannyasins seem to want to. Obviously, you need to be by yourself just for spiritual sanitation now and then. When I think of all those days rattling around in my old house, going from room to room picking up, waiting for Pearl to get back from school or Charles from work or for somebody just to call or the mailman to come up the drive with his Laura Ashley catalogue—fourteen rooms and four baths and two and a half acres of lawn all for me—it seems obscene in a way and yet a kind of paradise. Isn't it funny how paradise always lies in the past or the future, never exactly in the present? Just last night in his darshan, the Arhat said there can be no happiness in the present as long as there is ego. He pronounces it "iggo." As lonk as sere iss iggo, the happiness—I really can't do his accent, he has the strangest, longest "s"s, different from any sound we make—sub happiness fliesss avay. Like sub pet bin and sub pet catt, zey cannot exists in ze same room. Ven sub Master doess nut preside, sub vun eatss se utter. I make it sound ridiculous, but in fact I could listen for hours, it's like a fist inside me relaxing, like a lens that keeps opening and opening to let in more and more light. Even when I don't understand the words—literally, from the way they're pronounced—something very beautiful is going on inside me, by orderly stages, the way something grows, a few more cells every day.

  For instance, Midge, I'm sitting out in the rocks about a half-mile from the Chakra—you know, where the Fountain of Karma plays—and there's a kind of natural bench—out here where I am, I mean—under what they call an Arizona cypress, with these drooping gray-blue limbs and little brown berries seamed like tiny soccer balls, and I wish I had words to say how charged it all feels, how pregnant just the rockiness of the rocks seems—the little silvery veins of some mineral, the little loose heaps of rosy dust, the parallel ridges showing all the millions of years of sedimentation—and then too the'breeze and the cypress with its resiny essence and the distant mountains like wrinkled tissue paper—how sacred, really, and the whole matter of whether God exists or not, which I always thought rather boring, is just plain transcended, it seems so obvious that some thing exists, something incredibly and tirelessly good, an outpouring of which the rocks and I and the perfect blue sky with its little dry horsetails are a kind of foam, the foam on the crest of all these crashing waves, these outpourings all through the aeons of time, and yet terribly still, too—I know I'm not expressing it very well. There is something in everything, its wness, that is unutterably grand and consoling. I just feel terribly. I feel—how can I put this?—like I'm carved out of one big piece of crystal and exactly fitted into a mold of the same crystal. Tell Irving I feel motionless. Ask him if this is samarasa. My happiness is deeper than I've ever felt happiness before. It's as if there is a level the sun has never reached before. He makes it possible, the Arhat, he permits it—his voice, his glow. God, I love him, even though he makes me suffer. Love—luff, he says—is agony. A-go-ny, Midge.

  A cute little lizard has just showed up. He's quite bright green. As I'm talking he stares at me with one eye. He really knows how to be motionless.

  I began to tell you about my dynamic-meditation session. It must have been a week ago, though it feels a lot longer. I wasn't nearly so secure here then, so plugged into the energy sources. About ten people, most of them younger than I, plus Fritz, whose name here, I must remember, is Vikshipta. A bit like "stick shift." Durga was there too, queening around with all her orange hair and a ton of bogus-gold bangles on her wrists and a big loose violet robe that didn't quite conceal how overweight her hips are. I bet she put him up to it: the boy who after we'd all settled into the lotus position in a circle shouted I reminded him of his loathsome mother, even though she didn't have a big black pussy like I did, and tried to hit me. I shouldn't say "tried," the little shit did hit me, right across the jaw so my back teeth on that side ached for days, and then tried to grab my arm to twist me down—you could see he was excited, if you know what I mean. We are all naked, I should have explained, except for the leaders, who keep their robes on. I was dumbfounded and numb, I initially went into what Dr. Epstein used to call my masochistic-recessive mode, of, you know, the good girl who retreats into the knowledge that sbe's not doing anything and somebody else is to blame. The few occasions when Daddy and Mother would get violent, over his drinking usually, I'd go into that mode, and in a way also when they bulldozed me out of Myron Stern, the boyfriend I had in college I know I've told you about, out of him and into Charles, who was just graduating from Harvard. Having all your clothes off in front of a lot of strangers makes you feel oddly detached. The meditation leaders in their robes weren't doing anything to help, just swirling around shouting "Who are you?" at people, or "Ko veda?," which means "Who knows?," and the other sannyasins were making a kind of moaning hullabaloo that wasn't any help either, and I looked up past this brat's shaved head—you don't have to shave your head here, but he was going all the way—and I saw this very Irish sort of Peg o" My Heart smirk on Durga
's big white chalky face and I just got mad, "Midge: you wouldn't have known me. He, the aroused boy, had me pretty much on my back by then, and I kneed him right where he was most interested, let's say, and then got a grip on his ears, since he didn't have any hair, and pulled his head this way and that, and wound up pounding it on the floor while Durga and Fritz, I mean Vik-shipta, were trying to separate us, which they hadn't been doing while be was on top. Somehow that boy, who you could tell from the few words he pronounced and the supercilious way he tipped his head back and tucked up his upper lip had had all the advantages, was that particular kind of boy I've always taken an irrational dislike to. You see them all the time, the sons of people you know and the kind of country-club kid who used to be hot after Pearl. They act so—what's the word?—entitled, screwed up or not, flunking out of An-dover or not, and if they don't rack their Porsches up against a tree or overload their little heads with cocaine will end up being a professional something-or-other just like their smug chauvinistic absolutely insensitive old-fart daddies. The language I used against this poor boy you wouldn't believe, Midge. It just vomited out of me, with all this suppressed rage. Tell Irving that meditation with him was never like this.

  I[I1] don't know what it was set me off, really. Nobody likes somebody trying to rape them, especially after insulting their pussy, but in a strange way it had to do with forces beyond that, with this boy's—Yajna, his name is, we've made up a little since, he even tried apologizing, he said his head was in a bad space that day, and I had to tell him it was all all right, I felt very motherly toward him, and his mother, wherever she is, no doubt loves him and is worried to death about his being here with what she imagines are terrible creepy people—as I was saying, with this boy's being a man and not being a man quite either, my brain waves or whatever they are oscillated between these two poles—his being and his not being, his maleness and his immaturity, his bully-power (I was terrified, remember) and yet his pimply shaved-headed callowness—and I just got more and more indignant. If I had had the strength, I would have torn him to bits and ground the pieces into the mat, the way you do a wasp that's been annoying you all afternoon, you know how in the fall they come out of the windows on the sills somehow on sunny afternoons and bumble around on the bedspread and the kitchen table so stupidly and into your half-empty coffee cup—I just bate it!

  Of course, we can't all go around all the time getting hit on the jaw and trying to tear somebody's ears off, but I must say it did wake me up. That's a phrase the group leaders and encounter therapists around here use all the time—"waking up." "Getting rid of the garbage" is another thing they say. That oscillation I felt inside my head got me to thinking about men in general, my feelings about them. It must all go back to Daddy, who just basically on weekends and bank holidays if he didn't go off to play golf at Brookline hid in the library reading Thornton Wilder or those dreary Metaphysicals. Maybe I'm angry, deep down, because, though I loved him and knew he loved me, he wouldn't come out. But then this rapist-boy did in a manner of speaking come out, and I don't seem to like that either. And then, even more confusingly, Fritz looked me over afterwards to see if I had been damaged and should go to the ashram infirmary, and on the way walking back to my trailer to get my jeans and sun hat and work shoes—this was all around nine in the morning, just beginning to get hot—we went to his A-frame and I slept with him. It was nice, Midge. Nice. Though with Germans there's a distance, they have difficulty showing their feelings. His eyes are so pale they seem transparent, you can look right through them into nothing. He told me what his name means: it's a modality of consciousness halfway between total confusion and total concentration. I love that part of it here, learning all these new things, and not just with your brain but your body, with your spirit and whole self—with your atman. You should have seen me, though, that afternoon: big blue swollen jaw and one eye half shut and a lot of stiffness around the neck and shoulders from when all the rage came out. I looked so dreadful they left me off from the artichokes two hours early—I think they do treat me with kid gloves a little, compared to some of the. younger, more trampy women—and next day I was told I had been transferred from fieldwork to construction assistant at the Hall of a Millionfold Joys—people call it Joy-Six-Oh, the Arhat likes jokes and encourages everybody to make them. The work is right at the Chakra, which makes it handier for me and Fritz to steal the odd half-hour. He's so efficient. I hadn't slept with a man except Charles for so many years—that thing with Ducky Bradford you were all so curious about never got past a few stilted luncheons downstairs at the Ritz, there was something missing, I'm not sure he isn't a bit gay, it would help explain why Gloria always seems so skittish when the girl-talk gets gutsy—for so many years, I felt a bit shaky at first, but so far, if I do say so myself, it seems to go just fine. I was afraid of seeming too old, but he's very complimentary about my figure and the ojas shakti expressed by my glossy hair—it's the supplements, Midge, vitamins A and E-complex and the zinc and that evening-primrose oil!—: and says he's bored silly with these twenty-year-old guru groupies, as he calls them. He says they have perfect bodies but no real spirit, and maithuna is above all a spiritual act. He himself is older than he looks, thirty-seven. He was with the Arhat in India, at the first ashram, in Ellora. He says he was really one of the founders—it was his idea to combine encounter therapy with tantric yoga. He shares this A-frame with only one other man, Savitri, who's out on the road a lot of the time, giving interviews and selling the Arhat's books and tapes and meditation aids, and there's a whirlpool bath, one of those you can sit in up to your neck, instead of just a trailer shower the size of a mailing tube where you keep bumping your elbows on the soap rack and treading in everybody else's germy wet towels that they just leave where they dropped them. Disgusting!

  I[I2] know you won't, but you mustn't tell Charles about Fritz—my hunch is he's going to start "suing me. Charles, I mean. About Vikshipta: a lot of the people here, actually, are well into their thirties and forties, with Ph.D.s and jobs they left in city planning or architectural offices or legal firms—they're not crazies, the place really runs, we really are accomplishing things. Joy-Six-Oh will be up by the end of the summer, with air-conditioning throughout and all the electricity solar-generated from panels on the roof. Is that what they call a zero-sum situation? Today, for the first time, they let me drive a backhoe. It's such a darling machine. It lifts this big obliging hydraulic arm with its elbow up in the air and instead of a hand it has a scoop or bucket they call it, with these four pointy fingers shiny from gouging at the ground—they're replaceable, I never realized that—and you sit there in this shaking cab scared to pick the wrong lever because this huge mechanical animal under you, that feels so gentle and plodding and patient, has so much blind power it could crush somebody just as easily as it picks up a boulder. I adored it, being allowed to run it. Its controls are all sticks, so it's almost more natural than a car. Everybody, including the foreman, who used to be a Mormon, said I was very good—J really have the touch. It's like I become the backhoe's spirit, its jiva.

  Forgive me, Midge, the way my mind is flipping around, but everything here is so energizing I said to Fritz I don't see how the Arhat does it, all of us feeding off him this intensely spiritual way. He said—Vikshipta, I must learn to use his real name—that's why he must conserve himself and needs all these women to hide behind, living so withdrawn you hardly ever see him except at darshan and when he drives by in his limo. We drink his silence the way he drinks Brahman's, Vikshipta said.

  How can I describe to you how I feel here? Tender and open as if I've shed an old skin, Midge. Everything makes such an impression—the rocks I'm sitting among, and the sunset in its love colors like some great slanted fragmentary walkway we're seeing from underneath, and a breeze that stirs up the resiny smell in the cypress and reminds me of a smell from my childhood, some deep secret kitcheny scent out of a grandmother's drawer, and this little lizard who's been keeping me company. He's like a
perfect little living jewel. He's been absolutely frozen as my voice rattles on and on. I'm getting hoarse. And just then, when I cleared my throat, up he stood and raced away on his two hind legs like a tiny man with a long green tail! He had a collar around his neck and for all I know a bow tie! He was—how can I say?—one with me, as the buzzards overhead riding the air currents home are one with me, and my birth and death, and you are one with me, dear Midge, and my lover is one with me when we can find a half-hour. Vikshipta's hair is nearly as long as mine and utterly bleached on top from being out in the sun. When he isn't leading therapy sessions he helps on the crew that's building a ring road to keep cars out of the Chakra, looking ahead to the time when this will be a real city of many thousands, a thriving alternative to the atrocious way people live now.