Goddamn Useless Buddha

There was an echo on the line, an intermittent terminal roar. We kept cutting each other off, stilting your coup de grace. You took the next eastbound plane.

Months passed. You didn’t call again. You sent postcards.

Your postcards were essentially speechless for the little news they held. What did they explain? That you left me to pursue the way of sending postcards? The pictures were of smiling, bald monks in orange robes. Monks on scooters, monks on bicycles. Crowds of monks praying in temple after temple, monks on city stairs, sleeping, orange and serene as temple cats. Nothing in the cards indicated the meaning of being in that world, only that it was hot and you were still moving.

In time, you began to flicker, a star but a distant star whose dim, persistent light I worshipped, in my confusion, as if you could ever light the way.

You told me, when you called from the airport, that you needed to know peace. Were they sent in peace, those postcards? You might have been distressed to know the pain they caused me. Where you were, at least it was sunny. I like to imagine that a bright sun makes the peace easier to find, or at least, if it’s warm, you can have a nap with the monks.

When you were first gone, I walked around in a skin that hurt and lungs that never quite got air. I cried a few times in awkward places. In the photocopy room, in a cab. I got drunk every other night. At first, what hurt most was not the absence, but the certainty of belief that you were coming back.

While you were on your journey, I learned a few things.

I learned that separation causes pain. I don’t think any two things in this world, once they’re used to being together, can just drift away unchanged. In a forest, you can chop down a tree and the one next to it will reach out, over time, to claim the space you made. We grow through loss.
Call it suffering, as I expect you did on your postcard path. I wish I knew whether, for you, the concept was real or abstract. For me, it was real.

From time to time, I called our friends. You kept us in the dark, but from our collection of smiling monks I pieced a few things together. You were going to Burma to a monastery. You would take a silent retreat. But your passport had been taken. You were stuck on the border.
I remembered you in New York, the time your suitcase was stolen. You paced the hotel room with your fists clenched. When the manager arrived, he had to ask you to calm down. I was a little afraid you might hit him. There was nothing anyone could do. You lost two days’ worth of clothing and your shaving kit. The manager replaced it all but could do nothing for the tear in my heart, rent by a little worm of fear. The fear was for you and also from you.

As long as I knew you, you lived in a fortress, not of walls, but of water. You were liquid; you wouldn’t stay put. Arguments flowed through you. One night I raged at you while you stood smiling in the living room. In your head, you were humming along on open ground.

The day before you left, you gave me a copy of Sun Tzu, The Art of War. Unconscious of the irony, you inscribed it “with love”.

Your last card said your passport had been returned and you were going north into remote highlands. I tried to follow you by bookmark – the foreign affairs report, the travel sites, a blog I found, someone who’d passed through months later. I went to work in the morning and spent whole days searching out digital traces of you. In message boards that your eyes might well have passed over you were never mentioned.

Another lesson is there is a pattern in all things. When we first met, that first dinner, you drank like a hero and told me about growing up in the woods. How you hated it some mornings, chipping ice off the well with your hands bleeding from the cold. How you stayed so many nights in town because the road home was so dark, and you feared coyotes. Roaring drunk, your father chased you along your own trap lines where in winter you set snares to catch rabbits.

Maybe you missed something in the postcards you sent me. Those are quiet men who can look directly into the lens with no fear of losing their souls. But in the pictures I have of you, you are looking under, over and around. My favourite shows you in the kitchen at fourteen years old, seeing perhaps a ghost over my left shoulder. It is a hopeful ghost, one with a lantern whose light is in your eyes. (When this photograph was taken, you were mere days away from running. There is a pattern.)

Third lesson: to live in the world is painful. Even now your hand brushes my stomach as I sleep.

In Cuba you got drunk and made a speech about brotherhood. When the waiter came to refill your glass, you clasped his arm and asked if he agreed. Well, naturally, he did. But he didn’t drink with you. Duty comes first, hermano. You floundered a bit in your warm, drunk pool, and then paid for a round of mojitos. I didn’t say a word; I was planning to sleep that night, but the waiter got a five-dollar tip.

It strikes me that men take evasive action when the truth comes barreling down. Armies are jammed with hard, mute boys, locked up and rigid with bone spurs. The monks don’t tell, but I know where you went! Like all warriors, to the company of silence. Do they punch each other in the shoulder, way up there in the mountains? Is that why their orange robes leave one side exposed? Who, I wonder, kept you packed so tight among those sleepy, smiling monks?

I suppose I had begun to wear you down. I got into the water with you. I rolled in slowly, a boulder sliding from the ledge to dam the bed. You couldn’t get around me. That time I left you to spend a week on someone else’s couch, the house must have flooded to the rafters. When I came back, your stuff was everywhere, boxes dragged up from the basement, spilling over the furniture. It looked as though you had been burrowing, searching out a dry place among your scraps of writing, your beach stones and bent feathers and bowie knives. I cut my foot on the rosary you abandoned on the bathroom floor.

The last postcard you sent shows young monks flying kites in a river. The water seems khaki and slow, anchoring the boys to the bank. One reaches out with both hands to reel a paper dragon. Your temple, you wrote, lay far up this river near the northern border. At night, the forest rang with gunfire to ward off tigers, and at dawn, you went out with your bowl to eat rice. You practiced walking meditation.

Meanwhile, I got a new mailbox and a cable modem. All summer long, taxis cutting from downtown to the park roared under my open window, keeping me from sleeping. On our street, people don’t let their cats out at night. I drank all the Beaujolais from the basement.

Spring, summer, fall, and winter. A few days ago, I took a walk out on the headlands. It was almost too cold; there were harbour seals on the reef. The water would likely stop your heart. But I sat in the lee of the rocks where the January sun could reach me to kiss my face through winter glass. With my eyes closed, seeing orange spirals, it came to me that this couldn’t be the same sun that hammers away at seven heavenly roofs to beat you into silence.

I took the letter from your mother, telling me all she could bear to tell. She sent me the journal in which you played hangman and wrote limericks and stashed all the letters you wrote to me but never from your fortress sent. Whether you meant it or not, under that blazing sun, under those seven roofs, your death was mythic. Yet all I want to know is, were you alone at the end, shaking and prostrate at the feet of your goddamn useless Buddha?

Here on the winter headlands, atoms crash around in a fury. The noise is extreme. It’s a huge ragged hum, the pop and sputter and roar of the world, water against rock and blood against bone. The last lesson is there no such thing as silence. There’s just a gap in the wave; the wave still crests. It still breaks. The wave inside, blood swishes and boils. It fires our arms and legs, compelling us to surge forward, to fall back and to be still.