June 2, 2009
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The Nepal Conclusion
“You’re an artist” she said to me as we were coming to the end of our Trek. I could see what seemed like the very same river in the distance that we had crossed in the beginning.
“What makes you think that?”
“I looked at your journal the other day and read a few pages. I thought that it was beautiful.” A spark of anger arose in me. A feeling of violation. Then it went away. I didn’t have anything to hide anymore. Not anything that I knew anyways. I wasn’t sure who the fuck I was so how the hell could anyone get mad at being violated when they weren’t sure there was anything there to be violated.
“You did?” I said. I thought about what I could remember writing. I didn’t think of it as beautiful but like gravel bits in my eye trying to make its way out. I tried to think that the Dutch Girl was being facetious but I didn’t think that she had it in her. No, she was, if anything, tryingly if also charmingly, sincere.Yeah. It was good. She said.
What did you like about it, I said.
Your descriptions. You made me feel like I was right there panning in and out on things that I would never notice. You made me more conscious of what I am thinking and looking at now.I think that is your masochistic nature showing, your submissive side, your probably read the direction too.
You know what I mean. You write with so much, “passion,” and right there I quit listening. I have no passion. Of all the things that I have in abundance one of them is not passion. I think of founts when I think of passion, of gouts of fire, but within me is just a long stretch of highway with maybe an old Saguaro cactus leaning here and there but other than that just a bunch of partially gray skies.“You are crazy too.” I heard that last bit. I looked at her.
“Crazy?”
“Yeah,” she said smiling as we came out of the jungle and saw a herd of people waiting for another overstuffed jeep to come by.
“That is what the artist is for. He is the lancing of the collective pustule, the heathen sacrificed up to the Gods of the great Chaos so that the rest of your son of a bitches can go about your breakfasts, lunches, and dinners and an occasional brunch. They get to see the Chaos and be succumbed to it by looking at it straight like a bunch of stupid idgits staring into the sun and then, presto, Rah strikes us blind and burns our frontal lobes to a cinder. “
“How long do you think it will take before the jeep comes?” she said totally unperturbed by my ranting, as if I didn’t speak.
Maybe I was going through one of those times again: and age of silence. That everything that came out of my mouth was mute.If I was mute I could say,
I love you. And it wouldn't matter. I could say, the earth could be shattered and each shard fly off into the great expanse. The sun could die, and it too could shatter, and even the dark spaces could crash and fall apart, but upon each cutting edge would be my love. Dear white girl. White Girl. Who could stand such a being, a boiling, roiling, strained pustule, boil, and aching.
I love you.“What do you want to do when we get back to Kathmandu?”
I slept next to the Dutch Girl and dreamed about empty places. It had no borders just an expanse as for as the eye could see, in fact, I did not even have the borders of my sight. It was a 360 degree sight, more, if possible, over and under. It was an appalling sensation to be bare to it all. I sat there more than naked, and an epiphany did not overcome me as I had heard the other pseudo hippies talk about in the smoky Tea houses. They spoke about becoming one with the universe and traversing the galaxies with their newfound tetherless state.
But I felt alone.
There was a remnant despite my site. An enlightenment without the illumination is what it must have been.
Instead of a oneness I felt as if I could travel anywhere, everywhere, but it was still me traveling. That I was aware of all the universes but it was still Me that was aware of it. I could see in all directions but it was my eyes. And instead of causing a sense of oneness and unity I felt alone. To have no more shadows and crevices for the Other to remain, for my Sister, or my Lover to be, and in all directions I just saw myself, an all knowing, seeing being with nowhere to hide.
I was alone.
I should not have killed that man. I shouldn’t have. I just thought it was the right thing to do. I just acted. No. That isn’t true, I knew what I was doing even if it was abrupt and without thought, I knew I was shoving a man down stairs. I knew it.
She said she would say that she did it
and I let her. I let her.
I left her.
Poor little girl
Alone.
I know what it feels like. Now. I thought I did before.
I know
Now.
I woke up and the Dutch Girl was gone. She left a note saying that she was getting some avocados, eggs, and milk. I found the stash of money that I had made myself forget stitched into the bottom of my backpack. There was seven hundred dollars left. I had around two hundred left, one more golden ring (one of a pair), and some gold bangles that I had stolen from a British Indian girl that I had fucked.
I left.
I sold the bangles and the gold ring and got another two hundred dollars. I came back home and the Dutch Girl was not back yet. I looked out the window and saw her walking down the street. Her hair was bouncing along with her. That blonde hair I had grown so used too. I wondered what it would be like if I stayed but knew I wouldn’t. I left a thousand dollars on the table, took my underwear and socks, a backpack filled with books, and walked out the door, down the hall and left a full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label (couldn’t afford the good stuff) in front of Sangpo’s door.**
Friendship bridge. Over a raging river. I sat in a café, if you could call it that, just a shack above a garbage smear that tumbled into the raging torrent of the Bhotekoshi. I arrived at night and when dawned arose I thought I was in Rivendell, the cliff sides rose up, and up, and up, and they were off into the distance rising still. All the way up to the Tibetan Plateau. It was subtropical there, the wet heat stuck to everything, everything was wet and growing: mosses tearing through cracks in the road just made from trucks, trees birthing out of the crags of the rocky cliffs, it was a great womb.
I sipped terrible coffee and watched things wash down the river; trash, a bloated pig, boulder, half of a house. It was like the Wizard of Oz’s tornado in liquid and supine form.**
Night came. I decided to save money and sleep by the river. The mosquitoes were out in force. I stopped killing them ages ago when Sangpo told me that only the females suck the blood and I had said that was, “apropos” and he said he didn’t know what that meant but that they did it because they needed the protein to give birth.
I thought that things deserved to be born if only to get a chance to figure something out. This whole unborn business the Buddhist go about seems to be ass backwards, or at least to me, one has to be born in order to be unborn so we should be pushing for a good Born before the unborn. I always thought.**
I missed the Dutch Girl. I miss her.
**
The night stretched long and deep when you are tired and hungry and covered in mosquito mama bites.
**
I crawled to the bridge for something to do. I thought about For Whom the Bell Toll’s ending pages. I thought about being shot out from under a horse. I crawled underneath the girders, and shimmied my way on them to the other side. The river below me almost made me fall. The sheer strength of it made me cower, made my asshole pucker like I was pinching a loaf.
Rats were making there way from the Tibetan side to the Nepalese side and vice versa the same way I was not paying any heed political boundaries. Or, maybe they were, and they were scurrying in the dark like so many immigrants. Like Me.**
Up a slope that mirrored the other side: sliding trash, sewage, and a pervading moistness. Onto a rocky road. Past trucks lined up at the border waiting for dawn. I looked like a local now: skinny, with drab clothing, and meandering with a purpose. No one paid attention to me making my way uphill toward Kasa.
**
Dawn rising. Spreading of light. Cliffs tower over me on both sides but now white houses sprout on them like mushrooms. The road has no guardrails and ventures out into the void. I walk on a thin strip of green grass that clings to the edge of the road. Trucks are now passing through quickly. I see groups of Men on this side with wads of Yuan’s buying them back from travelers coming off of the plateau for dollars. I move past them and they move aside without a sideways glance. I have become part of the background.
**
Up past the massage parlors with ‘hot steam baths’ plastered on the side in English. Women in little more than their underwear knit on stools. I want a steam bath but know I can’t afford their prices. I have a hundred dollars to my name. I stop at a café at one of the turns. It overlooks the river that no longer looks so intimidating but its roar still makes me cringes as it reverberates between the cliff faces.**
Finished a bowl of soup with greasy chunks of meat. Buying goods. Stole a trekking backpack from the back of a truck. Some ‘Masseuses’ saw me and smiled as I pilfered a full Northface backpack. Took out most of what was in it, film, journals, mountain climbing gear-and filled it with books, food, and a large jug of water. I kept a few things though, they had insulated pants and a good pair of boots that fit if I wore three pairs of socks, plus a jacket that said, ‘good till -50’ on the tag. They were reading, “Into Thin Air” and I almost threw out everything that that book had touched. I have no sorrows for those that bring their own doom on their own heads. That’s why I don’t feel sorry for myself. We have a purpose, we purposely seek our doom and call it something else, a thrill ride to our demise.
***
In the middle of the night I hug the far side of the road that sometimes cuts under the cliffs and makes and overhang. A few trucks careen down this narrow highway. It is slow going. I bed down behind a hanging sheet of moss that hides me from the road. A truck could burst through and kill me but somehow the mossy curtain makes me feel as if I am protected from the world.
**
Wake up before dawn, filled my water bottles at a small waterfall falling from a cliff above me. A guy on a overburdened bike passes me without noticing me. I try to yell a hello, maybe I did, he didn’t notice and peddle onward and upward. The river has followed me up the mountain side. It is rising now. It has been squeezed by the cliff sides like some clenched ass cheeks. The water is a torrent, a turbulent white. I don’t like it. It is eating the mountains, the plateaus. Crushing.
**
I am on the plateau now. I have moved off of the road. I can hardly make it out. It isn’t paved. I see a truck or a Land Cruiser at times passing by. They look small from here. Small children’s trucks pushed by some invisible child. Dusty. I never thought Tibet would be so dusty. I didn’t know what I thought it would be. My Mother and Father never told me it was dusty.
I remember her telling me about the fields and how, in the spring, they would bloom with wildflowers. And strangely, each valley had a particular color that it would bloom, one would be purple and then a few days later as they moved in their Nomadic rhythms another valley would bloom yellow. I liked to think that they bloomed for my Mother specifically. That they knew she was coming and opened up their petals for her enjoyment.
I don’t know if anything could grow in this dust. It reminds me of the ashes after a barbeque. The coals spent and turned into a beige pile with burnt meat juice puddles staining it.
**The water is almost gone. Strangely I am wondering what Sangpo is doing. If he drank the Johnnie Walker that I left him. If he was still happy that I was a pseudo-Buddhist. The sky is a purple blue. I can make out the moon even though dusk is hours off. It is like a white scar in the sky, maybe a wart? A faded wart. I saw one of those when I was a child on a girl, or was it a ringworm? I have forgotten. It looked like that though (as if a moon could look like a ringworm).
The last bottle of water. Why is it that Humans seem only to respect dearth? Maybe it is our mentality to starve, to seek starvation, maybe. I look at the bottle and even though I am thirsty I don’t drink. I look at it with a dry mouth and with a bit of dry happiness. The happiness of someone that knows what is to come.
**
One step in front of the other. I am walking like a nine month old child walking through the grass for the first time: head down, almost bent double, staring at their feet moving through the unfamiliar landscape only here, in this desolate place, there is no grass, just what seems like an inverted ocean: the sky, blue, deep blue, the Ocean it seems to me as seen from afar, and I trudge on the sand that has been battered down to a fine dust. I can see the earth curve. I am the tallest thing on the plateau, all five foot ten of me, even bent double I am the tallest-the mountains off in the distance just peaking over the plateau in their grandeur. I don’t count them in my measurements; they are too far away, like scientists standing at a (pretend) objective distance watching me meander through the dusty land driven only by my biological heart.Step.
The water is gone. I had tossed the bottle long before.
Step. I take one step in front of the other. I had found not too long ago the second tallest thing on the plateau and the third tallest thing. The first was a cairn of rocks put together to discern a path that I couldn’t see. It was all ashes. To me. And a discarded Pringles bottle that a stone had wedged upright.**
The night came and I laid down on the ground. The wind tore over me but I remained solid. I did not fly away. I think a fox sniffed me late at night, I felt a wet nose and when I raised my head I saw a glimpse of a tail that was close enough, and the stars were bright enough, that I could make out a faint auburn shade.I rolled over and watched the stars. The stretched out, one after the other, crowding the dark spaces of the universe with their intrusive fingers of light and I wondered that I could not make out an end to the sky even with my peripheral vision. I felt unanchored, floating, like some sort of ancient asteroid made up of, mostly, iron, maybe an S-type asteroid lurking in the Oort or Kuiper (more likely in the more staid but functionary named, Asteroid Belt-or Main Belt), tumbling, tumbling, but never knowing it is tumbling because it had no fixed point of reference, it was all chaotic, always, there was never an up and down, an unknowing tumbling through the ever shifting lights and depths of the Universe.
I licked my lips.
I lick my lips. No more water. Maybe up on the mountains there was snow to eat, but down here there wasn’t any, not to my eyes. There probably was a spring, or a rivulet from the snows but I couldn’t find it with my urban acclimated eyes.
The wind.
The stars.
And I thought of home, of my Mother, my Father, My Sister. I thought about a student crying in my office and telling me awful things, things of horror, but it was not the first. Why was it that one?
I think I see my Mother in a caravan of Yaks and goats. I see my grandfather that I never knew clicking encouragement to the beasts to walk in the direction he wants. I see horses and a gaggle of kids that would be my uncles and aunts. I hear the chiming of bells, I hear the clicking of prayer beads.I see my Mother
And She isn’t smiling. She is wondering why I am there. She is young and old at the same time. She knows me as both a premonition and a memory. But she isn’t confused by it. She brushes my face with her long black hair that is so thick it makes it like the end of a broom: pricking my face.“Why are you here?” she asks me and I can understand effortlessly. My Tibetan is perfected. A language of loss, of dying, of an invisible creep like the hyphae of fungus. That is this language. And she speaks it. I speak it.
I shrug my shoulders.
“Why are you here?” she asks me again, this time she crawls into my lap as a little girl. She looks up and I recognize my Daughters face hinted at like the shadow of a chick when the egg is put up against a light.
“I don’t know,” I say.
She snuggles up against me. The wind picks up. The caravan stops and I see my older uncles helping my Grandfather, the one I never knew, unload the pack animals. They are making camp.
I lick my lips.
They are dry.
Tumbling. Tumbling.
Fini.
