Contents May Have Shifted Page 8

  Here on Playa El Triunpho, a twenty-mile paddle down the roadless coast south of Loreto, there are no drunks and no dogs to protect us from them. There is nobody here but the dead pelican and us. Rori says, “You can share my sand-free zone if you want,” so I stretch out next to her, Orion right overhead, his shoulders, knees, and belt aligned perfectly with mine.

  We talk about men and poetry for hours while Orion chases the Pleiades over the canyon wall, Canis Major right on his heel, while Leo rises out the Sea of Cortez, his mane dripping water. We make a list—five each—of what Rori calls our dreams and dragons. My first three dreams: (1) Cross the forbidden border from Mongolia into Tannu Tuva, and (2) Be more generous, and (3) Find out if I still know how to navigate by the stars. I take a deep breath for the first time since Loreto, and realize that the real reason I have come on this trip is to meet Rori and to see the constellations, just this clearly, in just these positions, in this dark equatorial sky.

  Rori falls asleep, and on the back of the instruction sheet to my water purifier, I make a list of possible reasons why I don’t seem to be missing Ethan one-tenth as much as I expected that includes things like: (5) Figuring out a new passion like sea kayaking, and (9) I don’t want to get old feeling like I’m not good enough. Then I make a last will and testament on the bread-colored inside of an empty cereal box, in which I give the ranch to Fenton the human and my books and CDs to Cinder and all my future royalties to Kara, who no way will need the money, so I cross all of the names out and decide it’s not a very fortuitous time to die.

  I wake up just before first light and Scorpio, more brilliant than I have ever seen him, has taken Orion’s place above me, and Venus is our morning star.

  41. Benicia, California

  On the bridge over the river between Vallejo and Mare Island, I see something that at first I think are balls of colored paper, but on closer inspection turn out to be three tiny ducklings getting whisked along by the car-created wind; swept off their feet, really, between the concrete median and the single lane of nonstop traffic.

  To stop and help them would cause, at best, a ten-mile traffic jam, and at worst, an accident, and even if I decided to take the risk, to be sworn at, run over, bashed from behind, in what way might I help the ducklings that would not incite them to try to get away from me, running under the wheels of the cars that would inevitably try to get around me, plummeting to their death over the side of the bridge, or flapping over the median into the oncoming traffic.

  I try to tell myself that eventually, when night comes, the traffic will slow, and those ducklings, if they are very smart and stay tight to the rail, if they are not dead under the wheels of a car, or dehydrated to the point where their little duckling brains aren’t functioning, will figure out how to get back from the top of the bridge to the marshland below, and maybe even back to their neglectful mother duck. Far more likely, in the next thirty seconds they will err in the other direction and get sucked up into the engine of a semi.

  I know beyond knowing that the memory of these three ducklings and my failure to save them will not fade. I fight down a momentary rage at whoever invented the word duckling in the first place. The word duckling belongs to a world in which smiling policemen drive out to the Mare Island bridge and set up barricades, stopping traffic in both directions, a world in which those who have to wait fifteen minutes behind the barricades are glad to do it, glad to have a story to tell when they get home about the successful return of the ducklings to the marsh.

  Over the years my memory of those three scurrying creatures will become oddly cartoonish, Hughie, Dewey, and Louie, wearing little sailor suits, running just ahead of the tires, then veering warily together off the concrete median. I won’t ask myself how I might be using this portion of brain space if I were not feeling sad and ineffectual in regard to the ducklings. I will be certain, only, that this is not the world in which the word duckling belongs.

  42. Tsedang, Tibet

  The next morning Hailey and I wake up and the room is even colder than it was the night before so we get completely dressed without getting out of bed. Tsering is standing in the lobby wearing a woolen Scooby-Doo cap unironically. He says, “Good morning, my new friends. And how are you today?”

  We drive in the cold and silent dark to something Tsering calls a ferry terminal (though there is no building) and board a flat-top piece of wood with a motor for a twenty-minute ride across the Yalung Tsangpo to Tibet’s first monastery, Sayme.

  The great teacher Padmasambhava, the founder of the Nyingma school of Mahayana, the oldest school of Tibetan Buddhism, founded Sayme in 779 AD. Lunch is yak meat with chili paste and boiled eggs in a sunny courtyard, and after lunch we walk around everything clockwise about a million times.

  We’re trying to learn one Buddha from another, but it is slow-going, especially since I only understand four out of five of Tsering’s words, and Hailey understands about half of those. Tsering keeps apologizing for his poor English, which is hilarious, really, because he’s only using it to recount seventeen centuries of Tibetan history, and it took all day yesterday for Hailey and me to learn hello (tashi delek) and thank you (t’oo je che). Whenever he gets ready to launch into the history of, say, the Gelugpa school of Mahayana, or the complete biographies of the first seven Dali Lamas, he says, “Now I will give you a brief introduce to . . .”

  There is no way his tongue can get around the vowels in “Hailey,” so Hailey is fine with being Harry for now.

  Last night I talked Hailey into having a foot massage back at our hotel and the highlight was when the orange-hooded masseuse asked Hailey how old her baby was. Hailey said, “No baby,” and the masseuse said, “You?” and I said, “No baby.” The masseuse said, “Husband?” and we said, “No,” and she was incredulous.

  The masseuses didn’t really speak English so I did a ten-minute charades routine where I acted out our imaginary husbands saying, “Clean the house! Fix my dinner! What do you mean you want to go to Tibet! You have to stay home and take care of me!” The masseuses laughed and gave us raisins and we gave them blue nail polish, and everyone left all happy in that exalted, cultural-exchange kind of way.

  After Sayme, we get loaded onto a tiny bus with about a hundred pilgrims for the short trip from the monastery back to the ferry and I wind up shoved up against this fabulous-looking nomad with a gold furry cap, a giant knife hanging from his belt, and the best laugh lines ever, and I’m thinking despite what Tsering says about the government, there’s no way an entire race of people don’t flirt.

  The bus stops and everybody runs for the ferry and all one hundred of us pile on. About ten different Tibetans dust off places for Hailey and me to sit and the next thing I know the crinkly-eyed nomad with the furry hat is right next to me, and all these fabulous girls with turquoise in their hair are giggling and pointing to Hailey’s camera. She takes their photo, and I give them the banana that came with my hotel lunch and then I bow to the crinkly-eyed nomad and give him the apple, and the whole boatload of Tibetans laugh and clap. I keep my eye on Tsering to make sure I’m not doing anything that might send him to jail but he is mostly laughing along with us. No deportations, no recrimination, no PBS involvement of any kind.

  43. Davis, California

  In my dream, there’s this actor, sort of like Ricardo Montalban, but younger and with darker hair—kind of Ricardo Montalban meets David Byrne—and he is a therapist and I’m going inside an enormous house to see him. He says the therapy he’s recommending for me is very effective, but also very intensive, as well as expensive, and I will have to come back every day until we are done.

  He is wearing a robe of camouflage colored silk, a pattern of leaves and branches, and after making sure I don’t have questions, he lies down on the floor, self-combusts, and disappears. There is only a thin line of smoke for me to follow, and it leads me from room to room. In the first room there is a translucent wall, and people are reaching their hands through holes in the wall, but
the thick plastic distorts their features. They are reaching out their hands to me saying, I love you, I love you, and I am not sure what to do so I give them a little wave.

  Next there is a Serenity Room where the people are curled on the floor sleeping like dogs, and a Confidence Room where they are doing things with their bodies that display confidence like puffing out their chests, and striding around purposefully.

  That’s the gist of it. I go into a room, and the people demonstrate the good thing I am supposed to get from being in that room, and once I figure out the name of the room, it is like solving a puzzle and that trait has been incorporated into my being.

  At some point, though, I lose the whiff of smoke I am following, and when I start to look for it again I wind up back in the office with Ricardo.

  I say to him, “That was amazing,” and he says, “Well, you got to quite a few rooms. You missed quite a few too, but there are other days for that.”

  I say, “Who are all those people in the rooms?”

  “Ah, the actors,” he says. “It’s crazy, the only line that’s longer than the one at my front door is the one at my back door, and you know, I don’t even pay them. I pay my assistants and my secretaries, of course, but not the actors. They just do it for love.”

  44. Pueblo, Colorado

  “Don’t have kids!” the woman says, as I am lowering my backpack to the floor in the middle of her living room, ten seconds after I’ve walked in the door. My eyes adjust from the bright August afternoon to the gloomy insides of the low-slung B and B and I take in the woman, take in the room. She is squat, shapeless, dressed in a pink sweat suit with a cartoon character on the front screaming censored obscenities from a thought bubble.

  Then I notice the little statues, the same ten-inch-tall, baldish, bone-colored child in hundreds of poses, skipping, picking flowers, pushing a wheelbarrow, on its knees, eyes closed, hands devoutly folded in prayer. They cover every flat surface in the living room, end tables, coffee tables, every square inch of the floor-to-ceiling shelves.

  “What are they?” I ask the husband, who seemed normal enough when he shook my hand in the driveway, when he threw the ball for his German shepherd in the yard.

  “They’re called Precious Moments,” he says. “Violet’s a collector. We have over three thousand of them, but only room to display eleven hundred at a time. The rest we keep in a vault under the house.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” I say.

  Violet levels her wooden spoon at me and I can smell the sweet sticky batter that will be tomorrow’s cream-cheese-stuffed strawberry blintz breakfast.

  “I mean it,” she says. “Don’t even consider kids, if you value your life.”

  “I won’t,” I say. “I haven’t. I didn’t.”

  “I’m going to show this pretty lady her room,” the husband says, and reaches for the backpack that is still between my feet.

  “So I’m sitting right here and the phone rings,” Violet says. “It’s my son’s girlfriend, Alice.” She leans across the counter toward me; spoon first, as if offering me a taste. “They live down in Trinidad. Alice’s in a wheelchair, you know, and he helps her out.”

  The cartoon character on the woman’s shirt, I can see now, is the Tasmanian Devil, and it is Daffy Duck who is exclaiming about the devil’s despicability from a beak that has been twisted around to the back of his head.

  “So Alice says to me, ‘Are you sitting down?’” Violet says, “and I says, ‘Tell me one thing, and one thing only. Is my son dead?’ ”

  On the shelf above Violet’s head, one precious moment statue is watering a bed of tulips, another is baking cookies, another is being trailed by a tiny family of geese.

  “Alice says, ‘No,’ ” Violet says, “ ‘but when I tell you what I am about to tell you, you’ll wish he was.’ ”

  Violet pauses for dramatic effect. Her husband lets my pack sink back to the carpet.

  “‘Tiffany’s knocked up,’ Alice says to me.” Here Violet winces, and for one split second I’m allowed to see behind all her bluster, all her little cities of defense. “Tiffany is Alice’s teenage daughter,” Violet says. “She’s all knocked up, and guess who’d be the father?”

  “Violet,” the husband says, “you’re exaggerating.”

  “How’s that?” Violet says, narrowing her eyes at him, and I have to agree that paternity is a tough thing to exaggerate. The husband picks up my pack and we head down the hall, leaving Violet staring into her mixing bowl.

  The next day, in town, the librarian will ask me where I am staying and when I tell her she will say, “Did they tell you what else is in that vault under the house? An arsenal. Automatic weapons, grenades, some people say enough to blow up the whole damn town.”

  45. Lhasa, Tibet

  Today we visit the Jokhang Monastery, the most sacred one in Tibet, and since it is the fifteenth of the month—not our month, but theirs—thousands of pilgrims are here, prostrating and praying and pushing their way in. It is a little like the Who concert (not that I was at the Who concert) except everyone is saying Om mani padme hum while they are ramming into each other.

  They’re carrying yak butter lamps and prayer wheels and the monks are having a good time shoving everyone into one chapel door and hauling them out the other—I mean the full-body kind of shoving—the whole place alive and filled with candlelight and bodies wanting health, long life, enlightenment—the floor of the monastery slick with ghee—pilgrims throwing themselves on the ground with little hand protectors, short cropped gray-haired women who all look like Pema Chodron and nomads with their hair tied up in red and black cords like curtain pulls, babies in snowsuits and nuns who have wings like a Bavarian cuckoo clock, leather-clad merchants and schoolgirls in uniform, people who have come—some of them—from hundreds of miles away and prostrated on their journey—Tsering said—every third step, everyone chanting and shoving and staring at me and Hailey, and us staring right back.

  There are monks writing people’s names with golden ink for luck, there is a lama with a Walkman, a nomad with a cell phone, and a monk all in burgundy robes with a hat the exact same color as the robes, with a Nike swoosh that does not say—but implies—the Washington Redskins. There are firecrackers and little kids saying Hello! to us constantly. And us saying Tashi delek! back. There are pilgrims who stare and stare at Hailey’s camera but then say, “No! No!” when she puts it to her eye, so she takes it down and then they say, “Okay, now!”

  When we get outside, Tsering turns us loose, saying, “Today you may walk anywhere you wish,” so we take the long way round to Potala Square where the red-and-black-headbanded nomads are selling sides of yak to anyone who can carry one away. We see half-yaks balanced across four people’s heads, hanging out of the back of a tuk-tuk, suspended impossibly across the handlebars of a bicycle, we even see a side of yak in the open trunk of a Lincoln Town Car.

  The next day we return with Tsering to the Potala Palace, mother of all monasteries, four million square feet with walls sixteen feet thick, the only one Mao found too beautiful to smash.

  How many statues of how many Buddhas? There are a thousand in one room alone. We enter a chamber that has all of the lessons of compassion on one side, all of the lessons of emptiness on the other. I say, “In America, we have a hard time understanding emptiness,” and Tsering says, “In Tibet too, only the highest teachers understand emptiness. The common people, no.”

  In another room we see statues of Green Tara and White Tara—two of the very few girl-gods around here—sprung from a teardrop that fell out of the Buddha of Compassion’s eye. We see a statue of that Buddha, carved from sandalwood, but according to Tsering, no one did the carving. Which reminds me of the Tiger’s Nest in Bhutan that nobody built, which I guess, if you think about it, is the kind of thing most religions are full of.

  Tsering says, “If you come to Lhasa without seeing the Potala, you don’t come to Lhasa, and if you come to the Potala without seeing t
his statue, you haven’t seen the Potala.” In the room of the Potala that holds the Mandala of the Wheel of Time, Tsering says, “The Wheel of Time is where the Buddha resides.”

  I say, “Actually?” and Tsering rolls his eyes, points to his temple, and says, “Imagination.”

  We go onto the roof to see the Dalai Lama’s apartment, which is called the Eastern Sunshine Apartment, and we hear pigeons flying with whistles in their tails. There are beggars outside the temple and when we come out of the gate they say, “Hello. Money.”

  46. Newport, Oregon

  Goody Cable has just finished living the alphabet, two weeks per letter, for a whole calendar year. “You know,” she says, as if I might, “it started out at the coffee shop. We served apple tarts during the a weeks, blueberry tarts during the b’s. I started to ask my employees to see if they could answer the phone using only words that began with whatever letter. Before I knew it, it had bled over into everything.”

  I’m staying in the Herman Melville Room, while offshore hundreds of gray whales make their way to California. We are up in the attic doing a jigsaw puzzle, which may be the single fastest way one OCD person reveals herself to another. Things have gotten a bit competitive and here at the three-hour mark it’s clear we are going to take it all the way down to the final piece.

  “During the d’s I took a dulcimer lesson,” Goody goes on, “during the f’s I went fishing. Now that it is over, I’m not exactly sure what to do with myself.”

  “What did you do during the q’s?” I ask.

  “Well, I tried quilting, but I didn’t like it very much. So then I asked a lot of questions, and after that I practiced being very very quiet.”

  Last night, at the fancy hotel in Portland, I dreamed that Ethan was putting lotion on the bodies of two dark-skinned girls, in the space between the belly button and the pubic bone, but the lotion was too white and it didn’t sink in. Then Hillary Clinton, who in the dream was married to Mark Strand, was telling me not to take Ethan’s proclivities personally, to try to see them as an opportunity instead.