Killing the Buddha Page 9

  The phone call came in early December: My mother had been admitted to the emergency room. A tumor the size of a lemon. Advanced stage of colon cancer. Spread to the liver. What can be done? Painkillers. At this late stage, when the cancer is so far advanced. She’s young, only forty-eight years old. However at this late stage, I have to tell you. There are very effective painkillers.

  I listened closely and carefully. I opened my notebook, and turning past the pages where I’d copied out a recipe for “Pear and cherry tart, serves 8” and a recipe for “Mussel and tomato soup, serves 4,” I made the following notes:

  CAT scan—cancer

  biopsy tomorrow

  cancer in uterus

  spread to liver

  and then I did my laundry and packed some things

  ink cartridges

  letter box

  atlas

  denim dress

  striped T-shirt

  tank tops

  and washed my hair.

  I went to bed, woke, and boarded a plane to San Diego.

  I pulled the hospital curtain aside and there she was, thinner than I had ever seen her. She sat up, and I leaned in to hug her. As I held her in my arms, all I could feel was my own panicked heart, racing.

  Her doctor came by and as he spoke to me, she listened, unblinking. Whenever he looked at her, she smiled. As soon as he left, she turned to me. “What is it? What did he say?” “I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m trying to understand.”

  On the plane to Singapore, en route to Vietnam, I sat beside a man from New York City. He was part of a group of people who were headed to Bali for a vacation. “Scuba diving,” he said. “Ever been?” “No,” I said, “though I’ve always wanted to.” Outside the window: clouds and night. “What’s in Vietnam? Are you from there?” “Yes. My mother.”

  Flying back from Vietnam, there was a long layover in Singapore. I floated in the swimming pool of the airport hotel. It was night and plane after plane took off over me, while a three-quarters moon hung high above, looking down as I looked up, neither of us blinking.

  It is close to two years now, but I seem to smell again the choke of bouquets slowly filling the house in Vietnam. I remember the chill of the blocks of ice delivered one at a time and placed underneath her coffin. Twenty-six blocks in all, before we took her from the house.

  The bus carrying the coffin overheated and stopped in the middle of the narrow dirt road, blocking the two buses carrying the mourners from continuing any further. The pallbearers pulled the coffin from the back of the bus and heaved it onto their shoulders. Aunts and uncles, siblings and lovers, children and childhood friends stepped off the buses and followed my mother’s body. We made our way up the hill, toward the cemetery. “She’s unhappy.” “No, she’s acting up, exactly the way she used to.” “She wants to be carried all the way up.” “Of course, she does. It’s gentler this way.”

  When we got to the cemetery, I stood at the head of the grave and looked out across the staggered gravestones, past the valley of small wooden houses, to the hills in the distance. It was 6:30 in the morning. We had been up since 4:00. The sky before us was pale blue and gold. But off to our right, there were dense gray clouds and the sound of thunder. Our party gathered around the grave, the young priest opened his mouth to intone about my mother, and it rained.

  Not a hard rain, nothing to run from, but rain nonetheless; yet another reminder that nothing was going as planned. My cousin turned to me and whispered, “Your mother wasn’t ready to go.” I thought about the conversation I’d overheard the night before, between my younger sister and her boyfriend, who had phoned from Bangkok. He must’ve asked her how she was doing. Either she said, “I am fine.” Or she said, “I am not fine.”

  One evening, shortly after I returned to the States, I accidentally knocked over a small water glass. Though there was time to catch it, I felt unable to do so. I watched as it rolled off the table; it seemed to roll very slowly. I thought, It will break. It will break. It will break. And then I thought, No, it won’t. It will roll like that forever. When it landed in broken bits at my feet, I burst into tears, surprised. Then I went on to break a yellow vase, and a beautiful blue dish. I would have gone on to break everything in the house, except that something in me said: Don’t play the fool.

  Time was like a muscle, expanding and contracting. Whatever had been storming inside of me came to a momentary halt. I sat on the floor and listened as the radiators stirred to life; they made strange, gurgling sounds that struck me as infantile, searching. Outside, the wind shook the trees and beat against the building. My two cats were hiding under the bed. The hyacinth on the windowsill gave off a mournful scent. I lay down on the floor, exhausted beyond reason.

  Two

  I envy the girl who seems to step forward from nowhere and becomes steadfastened to the woman’s side. The girl has lost a family, a husband, gods, but she doesn’t seem to care. So long as she is beside the woman, all is right. No harm comes to her.

  She is content to walk the length of any road the woman takes her on.

  She’ll lie at the foot of a stranger’s bed and feel secure, because the woman directs her to do so.

  She is better than seven sons and will give birth to a boy from whom a great and mighty king will descend.

  Who is this girl, who does not waver; who, from the moment we meet her, is resolute; who cries once, but never again?

  Ruth’s first conversation with Mahlon. They are both twelve. His family has just moved to Moab from Bethlehem. He runs from the house and hides behind a tree that she is sitting in. She calls down to him:

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “What happened?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Saw you running.”

  “Go away. I don’t want to be here.”

  Ruth and Mahlon, teenagers.

  “Who were you before I knew you, before I found you to love you like this?” she asks, pressing her palms flat against his chest. Mahlon says, “I was a boy, lying in a field, trying to get away from God, who, as my father kept saying, is king. Your hair smells good.” “Was God not in the field?” “Is. He is everywhere and in all things, Ruth.” “That’s your father’s voice.” “It’s God’s voice speaking through my father speaking through me.” “I like your voice by itself. Tell me about the field.”

  Naomi gathers the girls to her:

  This happens three times. The first time was when Ruth and Orpah married her sons, Mahlon and Chilion. As she embraced the girls, she saw how her sons stood close by, proudly looking on. Shame her husband was not alive to see this, Naomi thought.

  The second time was ten years later, on the day of the funeral. As Mahlon and Chilion were lowered into the ground, Ruth and Orpah both leaned into her.

  The third time was when Naomi set out for Bethlehem. Ruth and Orpah set out with her. She stopped in the middle of the road and turning to them said, Go back. They were all three widows, but she counted herself the only widow, because the girls were young—they were crying now exactly like children—and would one day remarry. She embraced them. She kissed them. Then she insisted that they go back.

  For a moment, they both remained in her arms, then Orpah, crying, slowly turned away. Ruth held fast to Naomi. The girl seemed barely able to stand. And yet, she made such declarations! Where you go, I will go. Where you sleep, I will sleep. Where you die, I will die.

  An unsent postcard, addressed to Orpah:

  These are the gates Naomi and I walked through. Naomi seems well, but I don’t know what I am doing here. Every now and then I’ll see two boys walking together and I’ll think Mahlon and Chilion, age seven and nine; or on my way to the gleaners’ field, I’ll pass by a group of old men sitting at these very gates, and I’ll think Mahlon and Chilion, now sixty and sixty-two; a man walks toward me on the street, tall and thin and somewhat sickly and I’ll think: Mahlon at forty, Mahlon at fifty.

  He is
not there and he is not here, either. What did I expect?

  There is a man here named Boaz. Naomi believes that he Naomi thinks that I

  How Naomi might characterize Boaz:

  Strong. Perfect.

  How Ruth might characterize Boaz:

  Not unkind.

  While Boaz sleeps on the threshing floor, Ruth lies at his feet, and practices whispering what she will say to him when he wakes: I am Ruth. Take me into your hands. Throw the cover over me. Cover me. Draw me nearer to you.

  Ruth remembers a shape she saw:

  After Naomi had lost all her men—first her husband, then her sons—she lay down on her bed and, curling her head to her knees, cried, “I have no one.”

  Ruth thinks of Mahlon and practices speaking of him in the past tense:

  He was. He was. He was.

  Ruth, Orpah, and the sun:

  As Orpah was walking away, the sun shone brightly upon her. It struck the clasp of the necklace that Chilion had given to her. A blinding spot of light. Whenever Ruth pictured Orpah now, it wasn’t her face or even her body that came to mind, but the back of her neck, with its burning center.

  Three

  We are approaching the second year. Then there will be a third year. When the third year passes, the happiness my aunts predicted, the happiness of the sort I have never known, may arrive. It may be something like the sadness of these years, sadness of a sort I have never known.

  In the late afternoon of this great day that my aunts speak of, I will be standing here, at the window, watching a woman with a red umbrella cross the empty parking lot below. The phone will ring and someone I have not seen or heard from in many years, let’s say ten, will be on the other end of the line. If I were Ruth, I would listen to his breath and think of Mahlon.

  The man is not unkind. He will ask, How are you? But before I can answer, he will tell me how he came across my name in the paper. How he looked at my name for a long time, how he ran his finger across the letters as if to tie them together. How he lifted his finger and there was my name. How he said my name aloud to himself, slowly sounding out the syllables, as if he was learning to read for the first time.

  I will wonder: What name is he talking about?

  If I am myself when the man calls, and if the rain continues to fall, I will take the rain as a good sign and say, This is wonderful! It’s as if the rain brought you. I may open the window and tell him, Listen, holding the phone to the sky.

  If I am Ruth, and I continue talking with this man, all the while thinking, Perhaps he is Mahlon, but he doesn’t know how to tell me, I may boldly tell him that I feel restless and wish that he could somehow come to me.

  An awkward silence will follow.

  As myself, in the silence, I will look at the sky, focusing on a string of clouds.

  To salvage the conversation I will say, The rain has stopped. The sun is going to set soon. It’s begun to turn the sky to rose. He will tell me about the weather in his part of the country. Maybe he is in Montana and they haven’t seen rain for months.

  As Ruth, I will imagine my fist against his chest or the flat of my hand—of both my hands—pushing against him, pushing him away while at the same time feeling the pressure of his leaning into me, the fact of his body nearer to me, and his eyes, his face, everything about him closer now. As Ruth, I will press my forehead against the windowpane and, studying the shape of my feet in the darkening light, ask the man if he is afraid.

  The man will tell me that he is not afraid; he is not a farmer; the drought doesn’t affect him as much as it does the others; imagine hundreds of acres of dry—And here the man will make what sounds like a strange inhalation of breath.

  Are you all right? I will ask.

  Oh, I’ve been lying on the floor this whole time and I just sat up to get a cigarette, the man will explain.

  You smoke now? This will be Ruth asking, incredulous, concerned. She will drop her gaze to a car passing by on the street below. With her eyes, she will follow the car as far down the road as possible.

  As myself, I will step away from the window and—cradling the phone against my ear—I will walk through the living room into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and pour a glass of water. The man will listen to the sound of my footsteps. He will guess—correctly—that my feet are bare. He will feel embarrassed, as if by thinking about my bare feet, he has crossed some line.

  As Ruth and as myself, I will not know what the man is thinking about. As Ruth and as myself, I will suddenly feel I have no idea who this man is. I will take a sip of water, put the glass down on the kitchen counter, and I will say to him, It’s strange that you should call today, of all days.

  He will say, Why is that?

  He will say, You know, you haven’t answered my question. How are you?

  And then, regardless of whether or not this person is at all connected to some happiness of the sort I have never known, as Ruth and as myself, I will look at the glass of water I’ve just poured and say, I’ve been swimming. And something I’ve noticed is that when I am doing the crawl, and I turn to look at people swimming beside me, they often appear to be swimming in place, especially if they are doing the breaststroke. It’s a wonder we get anywhere, let alone to the other side.

  A day to the year, two years, three years, four years, five years since my mother died. All day yesterday, as if in anticipation of today, I felt an intense pain at the very center of my back. It was as if I had been kicked there.

  But when I woke this morning, something in the air smelled like early spring. Grateful for this strange sweetness, and for the intactness of my own body, I looked at the ceiling and whispered to no one, “Here we are.”

  It is raining, but not hard and not cold.

  Just now, the wind blew, and each of those bushes lining the edge of the parking lot across the street seemed to shudder.

  Night. The heater by the window is whistling. A car passes, rain spinning off its tires. A man is standing in the empty parking lot, calling to a dog. The dog bounds toward him, its collar rattling as it runs. Closing time at the restaurant below; someone is emptying the night’s wine bottles into the recycling bin; glass shattering. Two women walking by. One says to the other, “Oh, I know.” And now they are both laughing. On this desk: a jar filled with sand collected from the cemetery in Phan Thiet; a small lamp illuminating a glass of water; and a box of matches I picked up from a café my cousin took me to the day my mother died.

  Outside, the rain falls at a slant from right to left, softly and almost without sound. Here I sit. Thrown across the wall before me: the twitching shadow of my hand as I move the pen across the page, from left to right.

  Let the words hold brightly, like a sunstruck clasp.

  Let the words splinter, as I imagine Ruth’s mind splintering after she has lifted sheaf after sheaf of wheat from the gleaners’ field and, drawing them to her, finds no trace of Mahlon.

  Let the words keen, as I refused to do during my mother’s funeral.

  Let the words lie so that when someone asks, “Where is your mother now?” I can say, “She is probably in her kitchen in San Diego, banging pots and pans around.” Or “She is on her way to the casino to lose money she doesn’t have.” Or “She is driving, without a license, to her favorite Vietnamese restaurant, in Orange County.”

  Let the words be humble, let them know the world did not begin with words, but with two bodies pressed close, one crying, and one singing.

  Myrtle Beach,

  South Carolina

  Our mouths were filled with laughter,

  our tongues with songs of joy…

  PSALM 126:2

  AS we left the church in Henderson, Billy Joe jogged after us into the parking lot. “Stop right there, boys!” he shouted. We did, even though we knew that should have been our cue to run. Charging toward us, his plumber’s fists pumping, just when we thought, He’s really going to hit us, he burst between us and past, knocking us aside like bowling pins. “I got
something in the truck you boys are gonna need,” he said and stopped short before a spotless metallic beige Dodge Ram with a king-size cab. He rummaged in the pickup’s glove box, then spun around with a postcard in each hand, pointing them like six-shooters. “You boys put these on your dashboard,” he said, “and you’ll never get lost.” We each took a card: miniature reproductions of the apocalypse paintings behind the church’s pulpit, everything from the crumpled cars and the twisted bodies to the tractor-trailer in flames, the airplane crashing into the skyscraper, and Jesus above it all like a sunspot on a Polaraid of the end times.

  “Thanks,” we said.

  We weren’t fifteen minutes back on the highway before we opened our windows and let the postcards fly into the wind.

  Dick’s Last Resort in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina was the last place we expected to hear folks talking about God; it was the kind of place where you were likely to find yourself seated under a bra stapled to the ceiling. Pastel stalactites of lingerie hung down in a semicircle around the bar, dangling evidence that real people had sat on barstools and unhooked themselves there; that lady golfers had said, “Can you help me with this, honey?” and then like magicians pulled cups and straps through their sleeves.

  Dick’s was also the kind the place where if you looked quickly at the crowd you might mistake them for hungry Klansmen at a KKK luncheon. A full half of Dick’s patrons, men and women, grandmothers and children, dug into their buckets of coleslaw and barbecue wearing three-foot-tall cones of white butcher paper on their heads, each cone’s pointed top rolled into a ball that resembled the reservoir tip of a condom. The waitstaff would routinely scribble on hats an embarrassing sexual factoid in black Magic Marker: “I shave my crotch”; “2.5"”; “I’d rather be eating her.”