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[Breathlessly] O.K., Midge, here we go. [Noise. Amplified cloth and finger friction. Underlying rustling that may be heartbeat. Much ensuing silence and some unintelligibility. Female voices, difficult to distinguish. One male voice, indicated below by italics.] Shanti, guru.

Namaste, Master.

Namaste, my nayikas.

Come on, let's get the shit rolling.

Durga, don't be so rude. Just because you're uptight-

Oh listen to her now. Listen to the corn-fed princess. Easy for you to say don't do this or that. For you this is all one more space shot. I wouldn't be uptight either if I were you. When it all goes down the drain you'll go back to Cedar Rapids and have Daddy finance six weeks in Guadeloupe at an all-girl Club Med.

Oh dear, one of those days. Darling Durga. That's quite unfairr I'm as committed as you are.

"Why would it all go down the drain? How could it, when it's so basically splendid?

Committed to your own artha is what you are. Committed to your own kama and your little roommate's padma. Could you ask her possibly to keep her mouth shut where she doesn't know a bloody thing? She just got here, for sweet Jesus' sake.

She is not little. She is stately.

She knows plenty. She's been facing up to the mess Nitya left in the books, while you've been off with your great gift of gab telling that talk show in Phoenix what a shit every official in the state is.

I didn't say the state, I just said Dorado County. And I restrained myself from saying a blessed word about all the shits in the FBI and the INS.

I thought it was truly delicious. The lady hostess, the talk-show lady with her enamelled face and little microphone in her lapel, quite forgot her smooth talk. She suffered the shock of enlightenment before the eyes of her million viewers.

And while you've been off playing Ma Barker to those freckle-faced security kids up in the canyon, Satya and Prapti and I have been trying to cope with all these old wheezy guys from the county that keep showing up.

The building inspector says the whole septic system is illegal and must be dug up before it bubbles up. He says we're sitting on a volcano, so to speak, and obviously can't have outdoor plumbing on the A-frames, and that on the original application they were called "winterized tents." This other man, from the medical licensing board, says our so-called clinic'is simply a drug distribution center.

That must be libel. That must be legal slander. I have my licenses, everything is licensed and they know it.

It's the bloody nuisance value, that's all they care about. That's all any of them care about. They're shits. They're ignoramus cowboy fascist shits.

Well, you can see how it must all look to them. They're under pressure-

Shut up, you. Alinga, can't you shut your sweetheart up? Just because she's twice as old as you-

Why should Sarah shut up? She's been digging into facts while you just keep dealing in fantasies.

Let Kundalint speak.

I was just going to say, the county is under pressure from the state officials, who are under pressure from the ecology lobby and the newspapers and the nationwide media. The way they see it, we've made Arizona into a laughingstock. If we could just have fewer stories for a while, and be less confrontational with the other people in the county, who after all were here first-

You know nothing about these rotten shits. They carry shotguns. They're fanatic ruthless Protestants. You come here from some prettified Eastern suburb and you think making a Buddha Realm in the teeth of all this fascism is like throwing a tea party for the fucking hired help.

Maybe if we didn't keep calling them fascists. They're just Americans-

I can't listen to her any longer. Master, I can't. I can't stand her voice, that simpering Lady Bountiful voice. Look at the way she keeps patting herself on the chest, as if to say, "Oh, dearie me." I abhorred her emanations the day she showed up here-I knew she didn't understand us and never would, how we're trying to make something new here, and the new always has to destroy the old. The old ego has to be destroyed. She doesn't understand that. She hasn't listened to your wisdom. She's full of phalatrishna, full to her blooming eyeballs. I dare say she doesn't even know what phalatrishna is. It hurts me to listen to her, and that's God's honest fact. Physically hurts. Her smug voice goes on and on in my head like a buggering dentist's drill.

Honestly, Durga. You're the one who's going on and on. Maybe you should take a rest in the clinic along with Nitya.

There are no beds.-We are almost out of tranquillizers.

It means "thirst for fruits." Phalatrishna means the thirst for results satisfying to the ego. I am not that. I thirst only for the greater glory of the Arhat, that the peace we enjoy within his love may be extended to everybody.

Begob, listen to her! Like a bloody parrot!

I have said, Let Kundalini speak. What does she find in Nitya's books of accounting?

There are assets, still. But not what there should be, in view of the tremendous expenditures here. And not what they were. The sale of books, tapes, posters, and T-shirts are all off. The perfumed soaps and bath oils and incense cones are "holding up, but I'm afraid they were always a minor item. The worst thing is that a lot of the regional meditation-and-massage centers have simply gone out of business rather than conform with the centralization policies that have been handed down.

Those little centers were pits. They were cesspools. Some hadn't the foggiest idea what massage therapy was, or bioenergetics. They were plain and simple whorehouses.

Durga dear, you've become such a prude. You used to be fun.

Aye, your kind of fun.

Still, the staff were donating their services and shared their profits with the Treasury of Enlightenment, in exchange for using the Arhat's image. ' And his inspiration, Polly. Don't forget to parrot that. The example of his love.

Quite so. Work was their worship and they were happy, as we all are. Why turn them off? You went around terrifying everybody, demanding more and more, a bigger and bigger cut, saying they should rob their parents, pretend to illnesses they didn't have, smuggle dope-

I never told them to smuggle dope.

You told them to gather sweets where they could. The two sannyasins who were caught with cocaine down in Nogales said it was on divine orders and they had been brainwashed.

Of course the little twats would say that. Anything to save their little skins.

I am disturbed about the T-shirts.

Durga, I've beard you tell the sannyasins at darshan that on their visits home if they steal their mother's jewelry it would be doing her a favor.

We perhaps need another scandal to increase the sale of T-shirts. Always in America there is the danger of being forgotten. Fashion moves with a shameless speed.

I said it would help their parents spiritually, and in God's truth it would. What's happened to you, Alinga? This person has reinfected you with bourgeois values. This whole squabble is bourgeois. Am I the only man, woman, or creature here still trying to create the future?

That sounds like rather a bourgeois thing to be doing, if I may say so.

You looked as smug and sassy as she does, saying that. That same little cock of the head, the little complacent tucks in the corners of the mouth. Maybe you're the parrot.

Dear Durga, if you'd ever listen to our Master, instead of trying to become Master yourself-

Oh! That's too vile. That's too easy. That's shit and you know it.

I don't know it. How would I know it? Everybody in the ashram, everybody down to the flakiest sannyasin, knows you're trying to take over but don't have the touch. The touch has to be light, my dear. Light. You're heavy-handed. You're the fascist, not those poor cowboys and Indians and plumbing inspectors out there.

Ma Prapti. You heard this butch bitch. You heard what these harridans are saying to me. Say something.

What can I say? The spirit of our enterprise is changing. You might say it has been poisoned. Many of those who come to the clinic are unhappy. Formerly they were happy, even when they were very disturbed.

Order must be.allowed to emerge from disorder. To impose order is to create another layer of disorder.

You. Don't you start in on me now. Your foolish limousines. All those ostentatious jewels. No honest jivan-mukta needs tons of useless jewels.

Amitabba goes drenched in jewels through the Buddha Realms in the West. Millions of jewel flowers tremble wherever be walks, through the towering jewel forests.

Oh sweet Christ. Come off it, Art.

Art?

That's what she calls him.

She does?

Look, all of you. There's a conspiracy to destroy us out there. The state is suing us, the county, the Keep Arizona Clean crazies, the parents of that sannyasin who died of hypothermia coming back from the Kali Club-

And why are they suing, dear Durga? Because you're constantly provocative. Because you've turned this charming dream of a Buddha Field into Gestapo headquarters.

To maintain order. To maintain our privacy. So female leeches like you can go around with your wide smirk of a mouth and suck hold of the next new body.

Perhaps, were it to be announced that I have attained yet another level of enlightenment-

The press is bored with your enlightenment. They never believed it anyway. They want dirt now. Dirt and blood. That's what they always want, actually.

They want rajas. They want action. Ha.

Uh, not to be compulsive about detail, but there were some practical things I noticed, going over the account books. There's a great deal of long-distance telephoning from the Uma Room and the hacienda. Australia, Thailand, Scandinavia: It adds up terribly, even with direct dialling.

What's Polly saying now? We should all take vows of silence? We should give up being international and confine ourselves to converting the fascist shits of Dorado County?

And the travel expenses-

I have to make appearances. I have to solicit support. I have to contact these filthy regional centers you're so enamored of.

But the hotels you stay in, and the number of people you take with you on these jaunts-

They're not jaunts. They're raids into enemy territory. I need every soldier. Vikshipta makes a spellbinding presentation, and if people don't hear about the Way from a man they think it's just hysterical meno-pausal voodoo. Satya has a cunning head for details and contacts everywhere-without her, I'd have no visibility. Nagga is learning the ropes and enchants people; everybody adores her, even the most cynical. And who are^yoH that I have to justify myself? Alinga, Ma Prapti: why am I being challenged by this, this novice, this interloper? Were_yotf with the Master in Ellora? D'idyou have to suffer three years of dysentery and sixteen grill-ings by the Indian police? They'd never seen a redhead before, they couldn't get enough of me.

I'm" sure they couldn't.

. It's just that the sannyasins in the fields and the kitchen, the young people making the beds and building the ring'road, doing all the dirty work, are well aware-

Let them be aware! The snivelling shits. We're giving them the ride of their lives. No responsibilities. No guilt. Just fucking and dancing and saying Om and watching God go by in a stretch limo. And what do they contribute? Hardly enough labor to make it worth feeding them. It im't worth feeding them, in fact-the kitchen runs at a terrible loss, that's why I have to go around begging and making an impression all the time, to raise the contributions to keep these parasites in the bliss of living here. Spoiled Americans, they eat like pigs. They should be eating less. The meals are much too extravagant-sannyasins in India get by with a spoonful of rice and a raw locust or two. In Ireland they got by generation after generation on a potato a day and still wrote the greatest poetry in the world. Don't ask me to pity these greedy fat Yanks, they'd eat the world if the Russians weren't around. They're supposed to come here giving us all their worldly goods as the most basic spiritual exercise, the very bloody least they can do, and as sure as Harry's hat they've all got millions 'tucked away in bank accounts. Gob, right in this very room-

– are well aware, is all I was going to say, of the dreadful inequalities here. Of course they want the Master to have all the jewels he wants, as an outward sign of-

Say it! His inward grace! See! Sari and all, the bitch still thinks like a Christian! Like a stinking little Anglican!

This is too wild. I can't go on.

Good. Your humble servant neither. I've been humiliated and heckled enough for one day. I've absorbed enough shit from this person-this little Miss Priscilla Pilgrim here.

But Durga darling, what shall we all do? About everything.

Not only tranquillizers and antidepressants. We're out of antibiotics for venereal disease, the ones we can still treat, and lithium for the bipolars…

The chairman of the County Commission and-the sheriff have both written threatening to get warrants issued…

[Silence. Rustling. Heartbeat?]

you ladies are all looking toward me.

Not me. I've given fucking up on you, to be frank.

You are looking toward me because you have not learned your lessons well enough. You have not practiced your asanas. You have not destroyed your egos. Therefore you feel fear and you feel uncertainty. You are still full of garbage. I cannot release you from garbage. You must release yourselves. When you are klisbta, when you experience vairagya, answers will arrive. Money will arrive, or money will not arrive. People will come, or people will go. The county commissioners will screw us, or will be screwed. It is all one. It is all ofindifference. It is all of less matter than a blink of Buddha's eye.

Lord Jesus. And they call this a man.

Two great notions come to me. One, I wish to be on this John Carson show, as an amusing guest. I think be reaches many people of the night and thus he will re-energize our field. Also, be is amusing. This Ed McMabon. This supposed feud with Joan Rivers, and all this Hollywood wise talk. Ha. Two, let Kundalini stay with me, as you others go. We must discuss my jewels. Perhaps I must sacrifice them to her merciless accountings.

You do that, Art.

Shanti, Master.

You two be good now.

[Unintelligible voices, fading. Silence. Heartbeat.]

It is not so, when ugly Durga calls you little. You are tall.

Five eight. Five eight and a half, actually.

You are not young, but your skin is smooth. Your hair is dark and abundant. Your posture is excellent. That is why I called you Kundalini. For her to make the ascent up Susbumna, the spine must be held very straight.

My mother was a stickler for posture. Posture and what fork to pick up and how to leave your knife so the waiter will know to clear.

This mother. Where is she now?

Florida.

She must be very rich.

Not really, Master. In truth I believe she is squandering in foolish investments the small amount that my late father did leave her.

She would perhaps think our ashram a foolish investment.

It would be, for her. Not for me. I love it here.

You have a good friend in Alinga, perhaps. She is also tall, but not so stately and upright as Kundalini.

She is very beautiful.

In an imperilled way. The way of a flower. She has imbibed too much indifference, not the holy vairagya of the yogas but that of this country, of its flatness and muchness that drives its people to sarcasm and mass murder. I am thinking of your West. Your East is more like my India. It teems-is that the expression? One big appetite, with the energy of appetite. You have this appetite, this energy. Alinga does not. Already, she slouches. She slumps. Her hair goes unwashed. She begins to wilt. She is like a cut flower.

She's been very kind.

She has shown you new asanas, I think. But once you bad a husband?

I believe I still do. He was-is-a doctor. Rather handsome. Very efficient and work-oriented. An internist with an office at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Yet after some years with this technological marvel, you became bored. You took up yoga. You bad flings.

Not very many. I've always been a good girl.

And you are a good girl here. Your letters are excellent. You can balance the books. You do not yet seem to have the madness. , The madness?

As you notice, with Ma Prem Durga. After much valuable service to Buddha and to Vishnu, she becomes irritable. She becomes erratic and overflowing with grievance. She loses spiritual touch. It is this stress of maintaining a religious ideal, of bucking the trend. In the larger world, responsibility is remote. In our smaller world, responsibility is intimate. There is no Big Guy to which the buck passes. We are the Big Guy. It is heavy.

.For even you, Master?

Very heavy, I think, in my vasanas. All these operations-the agricultural workings, these therapies, the publishing bouses that make my image over and over, the bookstores selling these images and my darsbans with many typographical errors, the boutiques selling all clothes in the sunset colors that are also the colors of love, the natural-food stores and the massage parlors in these many places here and abroad that Durga must visit with such great expense-all these things run from my spiritual energy. You smile, why is that?

They stem from your'spiritual energy, they run on it-either would be correct.

So. These things run on me, as you say. English is strange in its little words. In German there is the same thing, the strange floating little words only the natives can dispose properly. I have often considered that language is stranger than it seems. It conveys meaning, we perceive that, yes, but also it makes a tribal code, a way to keep out others. It is of that intricacy which in paper currency is meant to defeat counterfeiters. The religion of the Hindus and even more of the Jains has this repellent intricacy, which to be ideal must be endless, which piles upon the mind until the mind goes blank and may receive enlightenment. I forgive you for smiling at your Master.

Also, I love the way you say "love." Lufff.

Kundalini is a cruel tease of her poor overworked Master. Even she runs on me. The beelike sannyasins in their long lines come in from their ten or twelve sunny hours of work as worship and imagine they are now saints entitled to dance all night at the Kali Club and sneak their drugs and have their bigbs, but why are they permitted to do this, bow have all these structures to ease their cbittavrittis arisen? They are running on me, my spiritual energy, my lack of ego. It is false to say all things have a material explanation. All things material have a spiritual explanation. What do you think, Kundalini, is the essence of the world, ofprakriti?

Its essence is illusion.

No. That would be too jolly. The essence of the world is pain. Is dubkba. Dubkba, and fear.

Oh dear.

Truly. " Ob dear" if the truth. You do not feel dubkba and bbaya because I am with you. But the pain and fear that is suppressed in you pushes over onto me, I have sucked it out of you, it comes into me as if into a vacuum. Dreadful terror. Only men and gods can bold such terror. With animals, death is over in an instant. With men, too, in actual misfortune, it is over in an instant-the animal numbness mercifully comes. But a man in repose, be can bang forever over this abyss of bbaya, this steep invisible terror that being alive brings. It is the clamoring of the million demons of death unleashed by Mara on the night of our Lord Buddha's enlightenment.

You mean-there is no release? There is no salvation?

There is for the disciple. Not for the Master. There is for the bees, but not for the queen bee. For by consenting to be a guru, I am permittingprakriti to contaminate my purusba, to make it heavy. I am trading on my atman. For this sin I have this horrible heaviness. Perhaps my energy is no longer fuelling our enterprise. Perhaps my oil filter is dirty. Can you smell it, my fear, my dirtiness? Come closer.

[Rustle.]

And you, do you not ever feel this dirty?

Oh yes. My mother-

Your sari fits you very pleasantly. You look Indian. You need only the pearl above the nostril, and the tikka, the third eye, between your brows. You have the eyes of an Indian woman. The beautiful dark eyes of ressentiment. In India women are worshipped and degraded. It is a good combination.

I would not think a jivan-mukta could feel'fear. In achieving samadhi he has put away kama and krodha, lobha and bhaya.

He is mukta, yes, saved, but also be isjivan, living. That is bis tension. That is bis duplicity.

Could you not withdraw deeper into purusha, to lighten and cleanse yourself?

Ab, Kundalini, I cannot. I am always, as they say, in play. I must inspirit the ashram. I thought to bide behind a screen of women, but as you see they quarrel, they make very bad vibes.

Women feel fear, too.

No. When they do, it is the man within them who is fearful. There is no fear in the woman herself. She is a goddess. To touch her is to feel fear vanish. Your hips are solid. Your husband, did be admire your hips? Did be seize them in the night, for comfort?

He-

Your feet look comely in sandals. Such long straight toes. So many American women, I thought when upon arriving in this continent, have ugly toes, from being squeezed inside the pointed shoes.

My mother believed in sensible shoes for children. We went barefoot all summer, especially in Maine, and when we used to rent a cottage on Martha's Vineyard.

A woman is flame. A woman is smoke. A woman is Radba, sweaty with love. Sweaty with rasa. Your breasts-

[Rustling. Louder heartbeat.] No. Not my breasts. Not today.

[Laughs,] Neti neti? Is there something wrong with your breasts?

No, people-I mean Charles-

Ab, this Charles. lie is in my path. I think you have not yet burned him away.

I'm sorry. I'm not inwardly prepared for-for thts step up. I must go and think. I must meditate.

Meditate well, Kundalini. You can help me.

How? Never mind. I suppose I see how.

Perhaps you do not see all. My desire, my kama, is to turn your body into spirit. I have this power. The adept man has this power. I promise what is called Paramahasukba-instant purusba.

It sounds like just the thing. Master, I must go.

Go, then. May you rise to Sabasrara. May your Sbakti merge with Shiva. OM mani padme HUM.

Oh Midge, I can hardly think, I can hardly talk, I never dreamed-I was so terrified he'd touch it, between my boobs. Now what do I do? I shouldn't even send the tape to you, but I can't have it around here-suppose Durga got ahold of it, or Vikshipta, they both hate me so much anyway. But it seems a blasphemy to erase it-I mean, when all is said and done, he is a kind of god, at least the closest we're apt to come to it. He didn't really strong-arm me, he seemed sort of fumbling, even, and rather pleased when I turned him down. It was sad. And the worst thing was-oh God, I could cry, I feel like crying suddenly, just to be away from them all, the relief-the worst thing was, I'm not attracted to him, I don't think, not in that way. I mean, I love him, the way you and Irving do-I adore him more than ever, now that I've seen him up close instead of on some fuzzy videotape or out-of-date poster and actually seen him breathe, and felt his personal energy-field. I've never felt anything like it, all other men by comparison are brutes or wimps. Though he's not especially handsome, not as handsome as the posters. He's really quite short-he keeps talking about my tallness when as you know I'm not especially tall for an American woman-Gloria's taller, and so for that matter are you-and he has a potbelly, and his front teeth have this cute space between-maybe it's something they do to Indian children when they're little, you know there's this story about his having been maimed to make him a beggar child-and I have the feeling beneath that twisted-wool turban he wears he's probably pretty bald, men with hair of that wiry type-you can see it beside his ears, where the turban doesn't cover, and his beard of course-tend to have that happen. But, my God, the gentleness of the force that comes off of him, it's like an oil bath, it's like the shot of whiskey we used to take working its way into our blood, all churned up, those first few minutes. And once he slipped out of-what can I call it?-his Masterhood, his cosmic distance, and perched forward on that big silver-threaded armchair he uses as a sort of throne to grab my ass, I had this incredible wave of pity, of wanting to open myself the way I used to to little Pearl, to become this brainless fountain of life. I mean, the vibe I got was not so much that he needed to fuck me as feed on me, the way he says we all feed on him. With Vikshipta there really was this sensation of his wanting to sock it to the whole world and I was there under him as a kind of delegate, and the joy of it all for me was my ability to "take it," to absorb the fury and make it into something positive-but with the Arhat there was just an utterly unaggressive neediness, when I thought the whole idea of being a jivan-mukta was that you needed nothing.

And though this will shock you-you mustn't let Irving or any of the others except maybe Donna, if it will distract her from her mourning, listen to this-I don't want him to come between me and Alinga. Between her and me there has been giving and taking both, and what he said about her being a wilted flower wasn't exactly the way I would have put it, though there is a way in which I, though I'm older, am younger in spirit-all that bourgeois repression and watered-down Puritanism has kept me fresh, you could say, in a way a lot of the very charming and gifted and committed people here aren't, quite-they give the impression even when they're just in their thirties of having run everything through already once and knowing that nothing is going to work, really, that all these therapies, the Rolf-ing and massage and dynamic meditation and rasaman-dalis and Primal Scream-though here they don't scream, they just say "Hoo!" over and over until they feel empty-are just a way of turning a sick person over in bed, of changing position, of having a "trip" though you're going to have to have another in a few hours, just like a meal or a nap or a crap (my language! I know) and the beauty of what the Arhat says he wants is to take us beyond all that, out of the cycles, and with Alinga, I guess is the point of what I'm trying to say-my heart is still racing, my thoughts are tumbling all over themselves, and they're doing something noisy with the vinyl panels out at Joy-Six-Oh so I can hardly hear' myself think-I had peace, I felt complete, completed, just watching her move around the A-frame lazily with the sunlight slanting in on her long hair and making the top of her brushed head shine and then, the way the A-frame is built, with not too many windows, just the few thin skylights high up, the next moment vanishing, Alinga this still is, all but swallowed in the shadows like some lanky drifting plant that grows in utter quiet under the water. A peace like no man can give. Men stir you up. They give you a poke. They always come on too strong or not strong enough, and emphasize the wrong things. They're always trying to find out, they don't just take things in. Maybe that's why I loved our group so much, nobody had to say anything except silly things and giggle when Irving tried to bend us all into pretzels.

Tell Irving you can't share this tape with him but it's nothing against him personally and I hope the insurance has covered all the losses in the shop. The good thing is he wasn't there, they might have killed him-just boys usually, stoned and scared out of their minds. It's the frightened people that do the damage in the world. In your next tape do let me know if you see Charles around town ever. I don't have the slightest emotional curiosity about him but I'm beginning to get these legal letters from his hired thug Gilman that make me, honestly, worry for his sanity. How can you share a man's bed for twenty-two years, picking his socks up every morning and trying to make them match when they come out of the dryer, and then find him so full of sheer malice and hatred? It's like these things in those newspapers you can buy in the supermarkets, I Married a Monster or Hubby Reveah'He Came From UFO. And you must let me know how the August boat races went. I'll never forget the year Pearl came in second in the junior division, the Rhodes 19s, with all these brave puffed-out sails thick as snowflakes flecking the horizon out by the far nun, and the biggest darkest most terrifying thun-derheads I've ever seen building up in the northeast, beyond the lighthouse on Ferry's Point, and my heart

[end of tape]

Dear Mr. Gilman:

I've been puzzling over your several letters for some days here in the desert. The ashram's spiritual routines make it difficult to focus upon the nasty worldliness that, evidently, still goes on. In my view, I removed from the accessible joint holdings of Dr. Worth and myself merely my proper wife's share-rather less, indeed, since most of our property could not be carried away or divided. I am confident that a divorce court, were we to come to it, would grant me no less and probably more. I would gladly consent to divorce proceedings whenever you can persuade your client to forgo such hurtful and inappropriate terms as "desertion," "adultery," and "theft," and to approach me not in a spirit of bitter adversary but one of sober, saddened mutuality as we lay to rest a partnership long shared, one to whose virtues and fatal defects we no doubt contributed equally.

Equal division of blame and assets does not seem to me a very radical principle. In fact, as of course all males know, and male lawyers doubly know, the'divi-sion can never be truly equal, since the man retains the professional skills and status to whose acquisition and consolidation the subservient wife sacrificed her prime years; he can rapidly earn his way out of any momentary financial setback, whereas the wife is forever financially maimed, and unless she leaves the marriage with enough capital to support her-which is rare and growing rarer in this day and age of misogynistic judges and shameless lawyers-will be thrown back upon the job market like a load of old laundry, fit for nothing but the rags and odd buttons of employment.

It saddens me, Mr. Gilman, to receive your blustering missives, on such nice creamy stationery, engraved with all those names of younger partners no doubt looking to you for some sort of moral example, and to read, amid all these physical signs of pomp and prosperity-engraving, watermark, dear little etching of your office building on Devonshire Street-these squalid threats of "prosecution" and "extradition" and "deposition" and "restitution." I scarcely know what the words mean; I feel I am being sent back to Latin class.

And I sadly marvel that my former (for so he already is in my mind, irrevocably) husband has the preposterous temerity to claim "damages to his mental health and professional reputation" due to my "desertion" (a tactful withdrawal, was how I felt it); and to sue for "alienation of affections" the utterly otherworldly man who passively allows his beautiful presence to shed divine light upon his disciples and who was known to me while living with Charles only as an image on a poster and a voice on a tape; and furthermore and most brazenly to list as "stolen property" flatware, a tea service, and candelabra which have been in a branch of my family since their initial purchase (and all, indisputably, monogrammed "P"; anything marked "W" Charles is welcome to) not to mention some precious old books that were the only luxuries my dear dead father allowed himself and that since my earliest girlhood I have often seen tenderly held in his hands. I cannot conceive of any judge who, however corrupt and woman-hating, would not dismiss these charges with the contempt they deserve. Honestly, Mr. Gilman, can you?

So, why are you, presumably hitherto a reputable man, consenting to play a part in Charles's psychopathetic farce? Do you have no wife or, as they say now with such cumbersome euphemism, "relationship"? Have you never had a daughter," or perhaps sisters? Surely you have had a mother, and were not discovered under a cabbage leaf like a slug. Consider even the poor female office-slave who takes your hesitant noises grunted and mumbled into the Dictaphone and turns them into the correctly spelled and grammatical letters which I keep receiving in all their impeccable masculine effrontery.

Think of the indispensable female presences in your life and ask yourself if you can continue to execute the commands of this crazed and vindictive client and to run, via registered mail (itself unutterably pompous), his demeaning errands. He at least has the excuse of wounded pride. He at least once shared my bed and still imagines, albeit falsely, that his abuse has some charm for me. But you have no such excuses. Come off it, Mr. Gilman. Go back to evicting the poor and defending rapists and leave good women alone.

Sincerely,

Sarah Price Worth

Dear County Commission Chairman Aldridge:

"He who does whafshould not be done and fails to do what should be done, who forgets the true aim of life and sinks into transient pleasures-he will one day envy the man who lives in high contemplation." Thus spoke our Lord Buddha, as recorded in the sacred Dhammapada. We are in receipt of your letters, documents, and diagrams. The nature of our offenses remains obscure. The wiring and plumbing arrangements that your inspectors discovered are inappropriate, you say, to "winterized tents," as the jargon on our initial permits had it. Then, let us call them "substantial dwellings," which more befits the condition they have grown into. When the sapling becomes a tree, or the bulb a flower, we do not cut it down because it is no longer what it was. You accuse that we applied for a permit for a "greenhouse" and that the greenhouse is now a two-acre assembly hall and an attractive vinyl-clad meditation center of fourteen soundproofed rooms. Is this not cause for rejoicing rather than official rebuke? Is this not the American way, to progress from the humble log cabin to the mighty skyscraper? And you say that our initial announced intent to form an "agricultural commune" of no more than twenty-five members has been played false by our present-day shopping mall, terraced A-frames, paved avenues, trailer parks, printing plant, fabrics factory, and population numbered in the hundreds. Our agricultural commune has prospered; shall it therefore be destroyed, as your Hebraic God destroyed with fire and brimstone cities too happy and serene to make bloody sacrifices to Him every day and twice on Sundays?

You assert that your statewide "land-use" laws were enacted by concerned environmentalists. It is our impression, instead, that such laws are the pliable tool of fat-cat ranchers owning tens of thousands of utterly idle acres, snobbish restriction-minded "snowbirds" from the teeming Northeastern states, and Los Angeles-based real-estate developers who have already transformed Phoenix into a smaller version of their nightmare metropolis. We are the concerned environmentalists, we of the ashram, who have taken an arid, abandoned environment and made it not only habitable but paradisaical. The technicalities you raise could be settled in an hour by men of true good will.

If our population exceeds that allowable without declaring the existence of a city, then let us declare it a city. We propose the lovely name Varunaville, in honor of Varuna, the heavenly encompasser. This celestial god placed fire in the waters and hung the golden pendulum, the sun, to swing above, regulating day and night. The rhythm of his order is the order of the world, called rta. In his mansion of a thousand doors Varuna sits observing all deeds; everywhere his spies survey the world and are undeceived. He is a glorious deity, appropriate to this sunny land and a county called Golden. But if you wish to give our city a more indigenous-sounding name such as Crusty Elbow or Flat Tire, please do. We will govern ourselves nicely, posting speed limits and route signs and all that. Already we have been constrained to create quite a large police force, due not to any derelictions within but to harassment from without. Perhaps once our legal status is clarified we can work with the law-enforcement officers of your estimable county to rid its territory of ruffians and rascals and rednecks and reactionaries. To quote once more the Dhammapada (which means "Truth-Path"): "Weeds harm the fields, passions harm human nature."

We future citizens of Varunaville look forward to hearing from you in a spirit of amiable cooperation in achieving our mutual goals.

Most hopefully,

Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.

Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat

/k

Dear Sheriff Yardley:

We of the Ashram Arhat are indeed sorrowful to hear of these two unfortunate young women, Rhoda Lou Pollitt and Phoebe Gellerman, who were apprehended in the act of intravaginally smuggling cocaine across the border at Nogales. A search through our records shows that two sannyasins named Bhanda and Gauri originally registered with us under these two state-imposed "Christian" names on November 19, 1985. They stayed here for three months, offering up to the Arhat, and to the aspects of Shiva made manifest through the' Arhat's overwhelming presence, worship in the form of work as chambermaids, kitchen assistants, and messengers on ashram business to the outside world. They were absent, singly or together, for various periods and were last in residence seven months ago. Notations on their records credit both Bhanda and Gauri with above-average spiritual energy and egolessness.

We of course greatly grieve to learn that, according to you, both women in their confessions have implicated the ashram not only in their reprehensible drug-smuggling activities but in numerous acts of prostitution and petty theft committed in three states and Mexico. But what, really, is meant by their claim that "they did it all for the Arhat"? The Arhat, even if omniscient (as many believe), cannot be held responsible, surely, for illegal acts committed by his misguided devotees. These former sannyasins claimed to you that, after their modest living expenses were met, all the profits of their various sordid activities were forwarded to our ashram. Sheriff Yardley, we receive many donations every day from those literally uncountable grateful men and women who have been brought closer to lasting peace and unalterable enlightenment by the teachings and example of Shri Arhat Mindadali.

You ask whether our records show receipts from these poor young women whom you have so cleverly apprehended in the act of bringing a controlled (for obscure reasons, since it is relatively harmless, except to the nasal membranes and the attention span, and certainly less corrosive and lethal than tobacco and alcohol, those brother poisons that powerful vested interests keep pumping into our national bloodstream with scarcely a demur from legislators and law-enforcement officers) substance to those that peaceably desire it for recreational purposes. Our policy is to pay all receipts into the Treasury of Enlightenment without any numerical notation that might encourage an ethic of competition and invidious comparison among our benefactors. The widow's mite (to use a phrase perhaps familiar to you) and the millionaire's largesse dissolve one and all alike in our Treasury, which has been likened to a vast white-hot cauldron that accepts all earthly scrap, be it in the form of pistols or clockworks or bracelets or ploughshares, and resolves this dross to a molten formlessness then poured into pure ingots of the Arhat's deep and serene intent.

So we most regretfully cannot aid your investigation, only ask your mercy upon the two accused. Their "crimes" are so labelled by a Puritanical and patriarchal society that seeks to punish its own dark cravings. How much better it would be to legalize drugs and prostitution and out of surfeit discover, as did the Lord Buddha, the middle way that leads to non-attachment and nirvana. To quote the Bhagavad-Gita: "Action rightly renounced brings freedom, and action rightly performed brings freedom." As you doubtless know, there existed and perhaps still exists in India the "left-handed" path (Vamachara) of tantrism, in which unspeakable orgiastic excesses, even murder and necrophagy, were performed as acts of worship under the rubric that "perfection can be gained by satisfying all one's desires." Certainly temple prostitution held an honored place not only in Hindu but in Hellenic religion, and is dimly echoed in the numerous scandals in Protestant churches today involving church secretaries, choir sopranos, etc. While we at the ashram hardly dare hope that these somewhat general considerations will deflect you from the enforcement of laws however stupid and unjust, I myself would feel remiss if I did not point out to you how frequently these life-denying laws pertaining to "vice" are used to afflict not the men who serve as both administrators and consumers of the prosecuted activity but-as in this case-the women whose only offense has been to satisfy the desire of others.

Sincerely yours,

Ma Prem Kundalini

Assistant to the Arhat

Gentlemen:

We are in receipt of your several inquiries as to our tax-exempt status as a religious organization. But we have never claimed to be such; in fact the Arhat and his spokespersons have repeatedly placed on record, in nationwide press and television interviews, his" marked distrust of organized religion in any form-Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem, Christian, Judaic, Shinto, Zoroastrian, or shamanist. Unorganized religion-the sort that each human being harbors inchoately, often without knowing it-is more our métier.

Our tax-exempt status instead rests securely upon our amply justified claim to be an educational institution. We administer courses in hatha-yoga, zazen, shiatsu, acupuncture, bioenergetics, dynamic meditation, pranayama, dance and aerobics therapy, the sitar, Hindi, Sanskrit, Pali, the Upanishads and related classics, arid-area irrigational techniques, intuitive ecology, vegetarian food-styling, solar-panel engineering, zero-sum mechanistics, spiritual. reprogramming, post-materialistic Marxism, subtle-body anatomy, and a host of other reformative subjects, not to mention tutorials in enlightened accounting and business techniques (as opposed to unenlightened, as practiced on Wall and Main Streets). Most of our instructors have advanced degrees from such bastions of conventional learning as Harvard, Yale, Duke, Kenyon, Utah State, and the University of Southern California. We ourselves award degrees ranging from the B.Med. (Bachelor of Meditation) to the D.Phil.Med. Our most recent catalogue is enclosed, along with completed or partly completed Forms 1023 and 990.

"Partly" because our extensive records have been left in some confusion by the sudden retirement of our former chief accountant, Ms. Nitya Kalpana; it has fallen to me, though bereft of any formal training in business mathematics or double-entry bookkeeping (in fact, I skipped math beyond plane geometry, being rather foolishly infatuated at Concord Academy with the French teacher, whose third-year class met at the same hour as trig and introductory calculus), to straighten matters out. If you have on file any previous tax returns filed for Ashram Arhat I would be grateful for them, to use as a guide. Rest assured of one thing, however, gentlemen of the IRS: religious or educational, tax-exempt or not, our organization owes you absolutely nothing for fiscal 1985, because we have been running at a terrific loss.

Voluntary contributions, our main source of income, have dropped catastrophically, due principally to basically uncomprehending reporting in the Arizona press, beginning with the Forrest Weekly Sentinel and spreading to the media nationwide, but also perhaps due to the ripples or eddies (vrittis) that occur within the cosmic spiritual currents. The fees paid for lodging and instruction by our sannyasins (permanent students) and by enlistments in our many short-term (two- to eight-week) courses or therapeutic programs are significantly lower, as are receipts from sales of books, posters, fabric and ceramic products, and agricultural produce. Meanwhile, the expenses of maintaining and expanding our ashram facilities to a level commensurate with our exalted aims have increased formidably. Our best estimate is that between two and three million dollars has drifted away within the present fiscal year.

Not, of course, that we expect the Reagan government to make up our losses. But we don't expect to be dunned for money we don't owe, either. During my attempt to fill out your forms, a number of questions arose; let me mention only the most nagging:

In Form 990, Part VII, yes-or-no Question 79 asks, "Was there a liquidation, dissolution, termination, or substantial contraction during the year (see instructions)?" As I say, there seems to have been a contraction, but how substantial relative to previous years I have no way of knowing with the incomplete information at hand. My sense is of a material contraction of some duration, amid a deceptive explosive spiritual growth. The instructions I am parenthetically instructed to "see" do not seem to be attached or included, or else I have not grasped what instructions (in your sense) are.

Re Schedule A of Form 990, Part II, "Compensation of Five Highest Persons for Professional Services (See specific instructions)": Does spiritual guidance delivered in platform lectures and darshans (informal teaching sessions, with questions and answers) and in the even less tangible form of physical proximity and meaningful silence and abstention from public appearance constitute a "professional service," and does compensation include limousines and bejewelled timepieces as well as cash? Again, what instructions?

Page 2029-8 of Form 1024 lists four columns of numbered types of Exempt Organizations and invites us to "select up to three codes which best describe or most accurately identify your purposes, activities, etc." Number 030-"School, college, trade school, etc."-of course is one. And even though we are not 001 ("church, synagogue, etc."), number 008-"Religious publishing activities"-is rather tempting, since our books are indeed-in the broad sense specified above-religious. But number 260 ("Fraternal beneficiary society, order, or association") also appeals to a number of us here, since fraternity (which I assume includes sorority) is our goal, not only for ourselves but for all mankind. Along the same lines, under "Advocacy," numbers 520 ("Pacifism and peace") and 529 ("Ecology or conservation") seem very much to the point, while others in the same "Advocacy" category, such as 522 ("Anti-communism") and 539 ("Prohibition of erotica"), do not. But no doubt just two or three code numbers are all you need, and I am being, as a novice tax accountant, much too conscientious.

Yours sincerely,

Ma Prem Kundalini

Temporary Accountant,

Ashram Arhat

Dearest Pearl -

I'm sorry to have been so slow to answer your letter. The truth is, darling, it hurt your mother's feelings a teeny bit. Of course I'm delighted that you and Jan had such a lovely summer in Europe-it was brutally hot here, and people, even the ones that didn't get heat stroke, began to act very testy-not Vikshipta, the vile-tempered German I mentioned before-he actually left in July and I've heard is trying to get a counselling job in Seattle or Portland or some other cool misty place, but my guess is he'll be back; there's even less of what he wants out there than in here-but the women I work with. The sannyasins call us the "godmothers," not entirely kindly I think. Perhaps women together all day and night are too much of a good thing-tHat female attentiveness begins to work on the nerves, one begins almost to long for a man, who doesn't notice anything-your own father certainly didn't have that among his faults, that tireless nervous susceptibility-I mean bursting into tears or storms of rage over each imagined slight or deviation from utter devotion. In the nature of my expanded duties here I've been spending more time with the Arhat himself, and one woman, called Durga, who still claims to be his chief executive assistant-though she does nothing these days bjit agitate and storm and sulk and consort with the security forces, young men full of guns-is jealous of me, and another, Alinga, my dear housemate, is jealous of bint, our adored Master. I used to think women were so prone to jealousy, because the patriarchal society denied them any power except that which they could extract from interpersonal relationships, but now I wonder if it isn't more biological than that-the women here have power enough: the Arhat in his total goodness and rather playful fatalism grants them all of it, really-and relates, at a wild guess, to the vigilance female mammals have to have in regard to their young when they're helpless, which continues even when no children are on the scene, except the infant we forever carry inside us, waiting to suck and be fondled. There are, as I know I already wrote somebody, a few children here, brought by single mothers or mated couples and even one or two born in the clinic since I've come, but by and large children are one area where the Arhat isn’t totally accepting and benign. He calls them "human tadpoles" and speaks of the overpopulation in India and parts of Africa and the starvation as a horror worse than Hitler's extermination camps because nobody's able to invade and stop it, and indeed the Western nations' efforts, shipping in food and inventing new kinds of wheat and rice, just postpone the problem and make it eventually worse-I think his own experiences when very young whatever they were were so horrendous that just the sight of a child is painful to him. The ashram keeps a little school up through sixth grade but older than that the children are bussed to the Dorado Regional High School forty miles away and come back as you can imagine with a great many conflicted and angry feelings from their contact with the children of the "Outer States." They are encouraged to drop out as soon as they legally can, at sixteen, which is in a way sad, since their parents here tend to be if anything owreducated.

All this as a prelude to speaking honestly with my own child, my lovely little priceless Pearl. I am glad as well as surprised that you found Jan's parents so delightful-their house in Amsterdam dating back to 1580 and on a lovely quiet canal, their country estate with its working windmill and squawking peacocks, their apartment in Paris, their twenty-meter yacht kept at a Turkish harbor, their fluent English, French, German, and Italian. I still don't understand why Jan's father is entitled to call himself a count if they come from this long line of innkeepers and beermakers, but I'm glad you found the brewery itself so thrilling-though of course everything is clean, dearest, otherwise their precious beer would taste of lint and cobwebs and cockroach feces. The whole dreary process has to do with bacteria-a rather hideous microscopic kind of farming. Frankly I have always found the idea of fermentation rather disgusting, and even in college when it was the thing to drink and I had no figure worries I hated that sour bitter burpy taste of beer. It has been really not the least of my blessings these last months to get away from your father's martinis and all those suburban cocktail parties and to be in an environment where the human vessel and its conduits are as much respected as those giant glass vats and shiny copper tubing you were so impressed by are. Think of where the beer goes then-into the ulcerated guts of drunken loud barflies and then vomited out into bathroom bowls and onto the sidewalks.

Most of your life stretches gloriously before you and of course part of it must be exposing your sweet and unspoiled self to all sorts of people, including these van Hertzogs, vulgar and yeasty as they sound. And it is no doubt beneficial to add new words like "flocculence" and "wort" to your vocabulary. But I am, frankly, offended at your report of their excessive curiosity as to my present situation and, more hurtful still, your own embarrassment in regard to it. Whatever can be embarrassing? Your mother is seeking truth, beauty, and freedom, and finding it-what is there to be ashamed of? Be ashamed, rather, of her previous twenty-two years of respectable bondage and socially sanctioned frivolity. Who are they, these brewers, living as they do off of human drunkenness and forced bacterial labor, to turn up their noses at a "cult" which is striving to offer the world a new model of human arrangements? With their alcohol they are 'anesthetizing sick Mankind; we are attempting a cure. These vain and vapid van Hertzogs' opinion concerns me less than that of a pair of their pet microbes-what saddens me beyond description is that my own daughter, the female child of my female womb, loved as much as any mother ever loved a daughter, appears to share the doubts of these square-headed Dutch folk. You ask me if I intend to stay at the ashram "till Kingdom Come," if I haven't already "got out of it" all I am going to "get." You speak of my renewal here as an "ego trip" when in fact the flight from ego is what I have undertaken, and you write the jeering words "group grope" when in truth the grope is all behind^me, in that pathetic suburban squirming in the closets and backstairs of respectability. The relationships I enjoy in the ashram, those that wound as well as heal, all transpire in the bright sunlight of amaya, of non-deceit. I regret even so much as hinting at my friendships here, since you seem to discuss them promptly with Jan and thence they are relayed, in the language of prurient gossip, to your-I shudder to write it-possible in-laws.

Dear Pearl, I literally did shudder then, and had to steady myself by getting up from my bench beneath the dusty airy box elder in our little rock garden and walking out to the front of the A-frame to look toward the hills that shelter us from the north. Dawn light lies on their lavender tips like crinkled gold foil. I woke up in the dark this morning, writing this letter in my head. Alinga is still asleep. She and I had a long good talk last night, and like all you younger people she forgets to put herself to bed. What we talked about I would confide to you but don't want it passed on to those nosy, judgmental van Hertzogs-I keep wanting to write "warthogs." You say Jan is "serious." Serious is the one thing he impresses me as not, from all I have been able to discern between the'lines of your cherished and pondered, though short and infrequent, letters. He is a floater, dear-a fleck of suds on his father's malodorous fortune. A generation ago he would have been rioting and making plastic bombs and wearing filthy floppy rags; ten years ago he would have been doing the disco scene and jetting to Bali with all the other children of inflation. In these more straitened times he comes to Oxford to study economics and just happens to make the acquaintance of an innocent golden American girl whom he of course wants to marry and not just incidentally thereby get himself his green card. They all love their green cards, these foreigners-Durga and Vikshipta have an incessant problem, and keep getting these badgering letters from the Immigration Service, and even our miraculous Arhat, who has brought so much wealth and profitable enterprise to the nation, became rather mysterious and irritable when I once asked him about his residency status.

But I mustn't mention the Arhat, as that offends you. You write rather wistfully of your father's visit this summer. You say he spoke fondly of me-as if that amazed you. You say he seemed in a forgiving mood-as if there was much to forgive. You write that he keeps our old home up, mostly by not living in most of the rooms, and has no conspicuous girlfriend-as if that will gladden my heart or shame me or do something to me. It does nothing. Nothing but make me feel a quite unnecessary estrangement between you and me. You write of him as of a lumbering fuzzy old bafflingly wounded teddy bear at the same time that he and this shyster Gilman he's hired are bombarding me with the most preposterous legal documents, all meant simply to terrify a defenseless woman, who has for a lawyer that wimpy if formerly superficially attractive Ducky Bradford; be is so preoccupied with coming out of the closet as a middle-aged gay and humiliating poor Gloria and then discovering that life out of the closet is no picnic either that he can hardly lift a legal finger. (None of this came directly from him but from Midge, who on her last tape painted a pathetic picture 'of Ducky slowly realizing that the only market for an aging American man is with American women and that he should have announced himself when he was young and slender or kept quiet forever-he's Grecian formula-ing his hair and wearing closer-cut suits, but it's not nearly enough.)

You write of what a tender and attentive father yours was when the sad truth is he hardly bothered to kiss you good-night most nights let alone read a bedtime story as you and he both seem to be fantasizing. Worse yet, even when you had a cold or mumps that time your face looked like a gourd, or that very odd fever up to 104.5" that had me so worried about possible permanent brain damage, your father the big Boston.doctor couldn't be bothered to doctor his own daughter but had me drag you over to the Beverly Hospital and sit there in the waiting room with the television turned up so loud and the air so thick with germs you refused to breathe and turned bright blue. Precious Pearl, make no mistake: / nursed you, / changed your diapers. I dried your tears. I sang you songs when you were nervous at night, on and on until my own eyes could hardly stay open. You sucked milk out of my breasts, took hold of life in my belly, not your father's. All he did was clumsily contribute his sperm (I had no climax when you were conceived; I rarely did in those virtually virginal days) and show up at your graduations (and in fact, having written that, I just remember that he missed the one from Miss Grandison's in the sixth grade-said he had a MSPCC board meeting-likely story!) and condescend to keep your picture on his desk (along with his boyish self in his Boston Latin baseball uniform and that one of me I always hated, in that foolish garden hat standing there tipsy and tense at one of the Hibbenses gauche lawn parties worrying that your father was going to lose the lens cap). Now of course that you're a stunning woman and he's a well-dressed man in his forties who hasn't let himself go entirely to pot it's all very cute for the two of you to trot out to the Queen's Arms or the King's Joint or whatever the most expensive restaurant in Oxford is and split a carafe of an amusing dry Beaujo-lais and discuss in tiddly cozy fashion how far poor old Mother has wandered off the deep end: but raising you was not an equal partnership, and I am hurt, dearest Pearl, by what seems to me not so much your divided loyalty-that perhaps is to be expected and is healthy-but what can only strike me as disloyalty. Be true to yourself, and you will be true to me. I did not raise my flaxen-haired darling to be her father's cat's-paw or for that matter some minor princess of malt.

On top of all this paternal interference, you say my mother has written lachrymosely to you. Of course you can see that what meager sense senility has left in Grandma's brain the sun and saltwater have quite vaporized. I do believe she has goaded your Uncle Jeremy into writing me a somewhat harassing letter as well. What do you all object to? I know the answer: my attempting to become anything other than your (plural) obedient servant and flattering social extension. Perish the thought that I and my shoeless friends" would for a moment cause a frown to cross the stately brow of the beer count where he sits enthroned amid his mighty vats of boiling mash! Not to mention his fat Katrinka of a countess and their wispy dilettantish son, who led you to waste a whole glorious English summer, the kind that Browning wrote about, on dreary flat soggy Holland-forgive me, I just get frantic fearing that Jan won't let you grow-that you'll allow him to put a permanent cramp in the ongoing splendid adventure of your womanhood just as your father with the connivance of my parents did to me twenty-two years ago.

Do forgive me. How your mother does go on with her "wiggles"! Think of these letters as what I do now instead of embroidery. But isn't it better not to pretend I wasn't hurt by the really very delicately but unmistakably challenging tone of your letter? I've been under some stress here, too, aside from worrying about my priceless elf-child. Pressures from the outside are producing shifting allegiances within. It turns out that Ma Prapti, a rather stern sad mustachioed soul whom I formerly admired, as a kind of Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa, has really been rather indiscriminate in her distribution of prescription drugs. Vikshipta left, it turns out, because he was convinced he was being poisoned, I was recently told (by Yajna, the boy about your age I playfully offered you but who for the moment seems to be involved with Satya and Nagga and their crowd of PR glamour girls, who really could be professional football cheerleaders from the uniform glossy look of them). There are days, especially after the cafeteria has served one of those cruelly hot curries that disguise every other taste, when people complain of wooziness and cramps and we all go about in something of a date-I've been blaming it on the heat, which even though we're almost into September has not let up. There is so much suspicion around in fact that I don't like to mail personal letters with the Uma Room mail but I must get this on the way and do hope it will still reach you at the Iffley Road address. If not, they can forward it back to Yale, which begins in less than three weeks! I will ignore your passing mention of Jan's wanting you to take the fall term off so you and he can go to Crete and the Greek islands in the familial yacht. I know taking time off from college isn't the end of the world like it used to be but skipping out of your senior fall term for a Mediterranean jaunt with a Dutch playboy would be-how can I say this without giving offense?-unspeakable.

Still love me? Here's some kisses:

XXX

Mummy

Gentlemen:

Enclosed find endorsed checks totalling $66,403.27 for deposit to my account, #0002743-911.

Thank you sincerely,

Sarah P. Worth

Gentlemen:

I am very interested in opening a credit-deferrable charge account with the Arhat Book and Gift Shop of Samana Cay. My understanding is that a balance in excess of charges will accumulate 6% interest compounded monthly, while a debit of more than thirty days' standing will be penalized at the rate of 12%, also compounded monthly. Though I am temporarily an executive assistant at Ashram Arhat here in Arizona, my account, I wish to emphasize, would be a personal one, for my use only. I look forward to receiving whatever information you can send, mailed to me in care of this motel, along with relevant currency and investment regulations in the Commonwealth of the Bahamas.

With sincere thanks,

Sarah P. Worth

le deux septembre 1986

Monsieur,

Je voudrais ouvrir, peut-être, avec Crédit Suisse un compte identifié seulement par son numéro, un numéro qui soit secret. Envoyez-moi, s'il vous plait, à l’adresse cidessous, les formules necessaires et les règles qu'il faut qu'on observe concernant un tel compte.

Agréez, je vous prie,

l'expression de mes sentiments distingues,

Sarah P. Worth (Madame)

Sep. 2

Dear Dr. Podhoretz-

I'm afraid an October appointment won't do either. Tell your secretary to put me in the inactive file. I'm still flossing, though. Do you think an occasional twinge in the left eyetooth means anything, or is it just the enamel wearing thin with old age? I notice it most with iced tea, though very hot curries set it off too.

Warm regards,

Sarah Worth

Dear Martin-

Well, I'm enchanted that my little postcard meant so much to you. Your generous response-longer, I fear, than I can answer in detail-was waiting for me here at the motel. I don't live here, I live forty miles away with a lot of other people seeking the inner peace that comes with the good life. When I wrote you that all the material world is a jail I did not mean to make light of your predicament or the terrible conditions of incarceration in Massachusetts but to offer a consoling general premise-that for any of us to be alive is to suffer pain and limitation. We are born into a certain body, with a certain sex and color of skin, etc., at a specific time and place, of parents who shelter us and damage us according to their capacities, and as we grow we attain a certain height and degree of intelligence we can't do" much about, and fall into some job or r6le-in your case, into drugs and burglary-and from a certain angle one could become intensely claustrophobic about all these circumstances, which are more constricting and harder to escape from than any cell. And then the body and with it the brain begin to age and malfunction and eventually to die and the constriction is very tight indeed. But there is a way out, the way of the spirit, of accepting that little unchanging viewpoint or "I" inside you as part of a larger spiritual reality, which we call purusba, in relation to which material reality with all its confining specifics is mere illusion, called maya, which also means deception. And there are exercises and disciplines which enable men called masters (gurus) to attain release (moksba) from the material world and the bliss of pure spiritual being, nirvana, which doesn't literally mean nothingness but "no wind"-we will get out of the wind, Martin, and exist in a place where everything is still and shining and eternal. The orthodox path to nirvana is long and tedious (you begin by thinking of a point just behind your forehead, at the bridge of your nose) but it is not the only way, there are shortcuts that suddenly open to people-even and perhaps especially to foolish and miserable people-and there is no reason why at least the beginning of enlightenment-a little fascinating pinprick-won't come to you in jail just as one came to me in my nice suburban home (which in moments of weakness I still miss). But you must look within for what is real. You tried to look within with drugs but what they gave you was not real, they just suppressed part of maya. There is a better way out, which does not lead to jail and early death. This Way embraces everything: it is the Way of striving and surrender, of action and inaction, of good and bad, of the senses and their absence. Whatever name you give this Way, whatever images you use to help you visualize the Path, it is the Way that we all seek and that makes all our seeking one.

My fond regards to little Eldridge and your mother. Tell Shirlee my hair is stiff and brittle as burnt toast here in this climate and that I have given up Clairol so the gray strands are poking through, and I cut it short in a kind of scruffy mid-neck flip just to get it out of my mind and concentrate on higher things, but for all that there are still some here who find me an attractive brunette.

Your friend,

Sarah Worth

Dear Mother-

Just the briefest note, to check in. They've given me more responsibilities here, and I'm up to my ears in legal and financial details. Of course I'm horrified to hear that you have cashed in all your CDs, even paying the fines to do so, and have sold those blocks of Daddy's lovely old IBM and AT &T, and put everything into the stock of this cosmetic company your admiral friend has heard is going to be taken over by Revlon. His grandson's being an investment banker doesn't mean a thing; or, rather, it does mean, if this is real insider information, that you and the boy and old Granddaddy will all go to jail. I recently received a letter from a man in jail and he says it's no fun-the toilet is in the middle of the cell and the white guards let the black prisoners rule by survival of the fittest and there's a two-yean wait for the course in computer science. If on the other hand it's not real insider information, then you're holding a big chunk of some stagnant company (Visage, Inc.-what kind of name is that, and who put on that absurd incorrect accent?) from Arkansas (Arkansas, Mother!) that will pay peanuts-not even that, peanut shells-for dividends and slowly sink into the swamp of what's left of Reaganomics. The CDs were safe, sure, and smart, as I told you before. You've obviously written me off as an adviser and probably even heir, but think of your own grandchild, pretty Pearl who adores you and who has let herself fall into the clutches of some loathsome Dutch pseudo-plutocrats because, no doubt, of financial insecurity. If she didn't have a grandmother who was squandering her eventual inheritance she might have the self-respect and self-confidence to stick with her education and independent development. She's even threatening not to return to Yale this fall! Isn't that incredibly self-destructive? Do phone her and tell her so, instead of commiserating with her over what a rotter I am and what a saint Charles is-she didn't exactly quote you to that effect but I can read between the lines. Your involvement with this alleged admiral I find, of course, alarming. He sounds like a typical male exploiter, hunting for a cook and a nurse to see him into the grave. Don't be conned, I beg you, and don't fell me how dashing he looks in a double-breasted blazer and old-fashioned cream linen pants with broad cuffs-I can't imagine what's come over you. After Daddy, this clown in a sailor suit? I don't think you realize how humorous and pathetic your description of his rapping night after night on your hurricane shutters is. I guess it's not in the nature of women to learn. Seduced and ruined by an octogenarian swindler-is that what you want your epitaph to be? I know you have been teasing me about this romance, egging me on to overreact, so I have tried to be circumspect. It is your life-just don't ever dare say a word of criticism to me again about anything. And don't get Jerry to write me any more platitudinous chummy letters. It was embarrassing for both of us-he didn't know what to say and I didn't either. My brother is part of me but I have no more to say to him now than to my own left foot.

But do sell that preposterous Visage and put everything into a 6% savings account. Even under your mattress would be better. Don't discuss money with this ancient mariner. Or if you do, ask about his money-find out if he has enough of his own so that he isn't after yours. Do take your vitamins, especially A to combat aging and brain-cell loss. Niacin can be very effective in reversing delusional thinking. A lot of Alzheimer's, they think now, is caused by aluminum salts in the blood. Aluminum turns out to be in everything-toothpaste, aspirin, water. And of course you cook with pots of it. I forgot-you don't cook any more, you and the Admiral eat out, champagne and oysters and chocolate cake every night. I told the Arhat what you were up to, and he laughed and laughed and said, "Women are the gods!" He joins me in sending you strivyatireka (love).

Sare

Dearest Alinga-

Tena tyaktena bhunjithah. I fear, my darling, we have reached our quota. These months living with you have been the happiest of my life, as far as cohabitation goes-the most harmonious, as if we were two upright notes, one blond and one dark, forming a single chord. No pulling and hauling, no serving and being served-or, rather, both, so carelessly and lightly blended that there was no knowing where the serving left off and the being served began. Our time together has in my mind a precious fine fragility, a crackled gold-rimmed right-ness, that makes me hold my breath as I try to set it down.

This break with you is, as I conceive it, a delicate one, scarcely perceptible but to us. We will still share the ashram, and our love of the Arhat, and our work in the Uma Room, and why not then some hours of private talk and even rasa as before? Do please keep thinking of me as your lover-your dark and stormy prince,-you once called me.

But I must feel free, to continue what let's call my ascent toward the unconditioned. I do not want to make you my prison warder as I did Charles-the guardian of habit, of limits, the enforcer, albeit for my good and out of affection-he was affectionate, I can admit that now-of a system in which my function is simply to bold still, to be the'same day after day. Durga's madness and the siege from outside have thinned the population of the ashram so that there are plenty of empty beds. Vik-shipta's old A-frame is vacant, though my moving in there risks stirring up ugly memories, like some dust rich in allergens. He wonderfully managed to make heterosexuality ugly and yet for me this hard, silent other (shunya = void = diamond = vajra = thunderbolt = linga) with whom we must share our species still retains the fascination of a challenge, the task set for us, the basic duty. In this sense perhaps I was always a bit unfaithful to you, harbored a bit of reservation, so that all we enacted together, gracious and blissful as it was, had a certain quality of foreplay, of something less than full seriousness, the seriousness that leads, biologically, to that tremendous bloody ego-splitting death-defying bearing of a child.

Now I fear I have set down the gold-rimmed vase with a crash. But honestly, didn't it ever feel to you as though I was nothing but a strangely weak man? Of course we must honor those who stand aside-the sexual saints, the little roundish men who would rather collect books or jade elephants, and the handsome Hepburnesque women not meant to be mothers-many of whom, so unfortunately (I think of my serenely selfish own), become mothers anyway. Actually, this ego-splitting I seem to extol doubles rather than halves our natural selfishness and selfish frenzy. Without a child, women are free to mother others-you, for instance, mothered me. And what a child I seem to be!-willful, needy, exhibitionistic, compliment-seeking, petty, jealous. Jealous, as we have discussed, of you and Durga in the time before I came here, when she was to you something of what you have been to me-an initiator, an apsaras, an avatar of Shakti. Even now as she in her drug-riddled fury brings down the paradise that the Arhat's beautiful energy crystallized, I feel in you a certain lackadaisical fondness for our Celtic destroyer, a passive willingness to "let it all go" as one more meaningless ripple of maya. Your energy exchange with Durga, in other words, still proceeds, though you find yourselves in opposite camps during all this scheming, feuding, poisoning, and mutual manipulation as the implacable outer world closes in.

This is not a complaint, but a halting explanation, much longer than I meant it to be. I know how you hate to read, how content you were to betrance yourself in front of our feeble old Zenith with its ghost images shuddering as if the mountains between here and Phoenix were always in motion. I love you. But not only you, so I can no longer accept your roof, your A-frame. I am writing you in the rock garden, and will miss this shady spot beneath the box elder-the nirgundi, you taught me it is called in Sanskrit-and the garden's crowd of funny little scrunched-up cactus-faces, like the rumpled faces of pug dogs or of whiskery cartoon cats. The tree's seeds spin down on me, the wings of the twin samaras not outspread as in the energetic flaming maples of New England but folded down, as if still asleep and dreaming of, instead of experiencing, flight. And the rising sun like a vast high press squeezes from the air that desert spiciness, that very fine powder in the air like the substance of purusha and like something-some dim closeted seasoning-I used to smell in my grandmother's kitchen in Medford.

Darling, it is nothing you have done-you can do nothing wrong, because in a deep and very soothing way you are beyond attempting to do anything right. You accept In the sthula sphere you were all padma and I the mani, the flawed jewel to your perfect lotus. The way you would let me brush your silky long hair on and on in the dark as the blue sparks flew about your head and my hands. And the way the top of your head would show an utterly straight parting, like a chalk-line, scalp-white, when in morning light you would shadowily kneel to give me a "tummy kiss." It is nothing you have done and nothing I am doing-it is Kali, dearest, time undoing and destroying so that the new weave can be begun. Kali who moves through all our passions, momentous as they seem, and tugs them toward the wheel's next turn. My worst fear as I write-how close I am to tearing all this up and sparing myself the pain of packing and saying goodbye to the rooms where, once frowny twitchy guilty Nitya's discordant note was gone, we made our harmony!-my fear is that you will shrug me off, you will shed me, that is what we do with one another, all of us, but it never seems right, never seems natural, though it is the most natural thing in the world.

Be a lamp unto yourself,

K.

Charles-

I am living alone again and unable to sleep tonight. Your barrage of Gilmanesque legalese has left me unimpressed. If you can arrange my arrest, go to it. Pearl can add to her distinctions that of her mother being put in jail by her father. Actually, you never hear of that, do you? Halves of a couple can murder and desert'each other easily enough but legally I believe we are somehow one and therefore have oddly little legal recourse. Anyway the courts are bored with couples. The whole world for that matter is bored with couples, and if a couple doesn't take an interest in itself no one else will. All these lawyerly threats and bluff I take to be your stiff and clumsy way of expressing continued interest in me. But I would never do as your wife again, having so wildly fallen. To my derelictions I have recently added a lesbian romance-delicious and comforting but rather, for my Yankee tastes, lacking in fiber. It did helpfully clarify what men see in women. The lady, in posture and offhand affect and even in a certain disarming flatness of accent, reminded me of Marcelene Rabinowitz-remember her? Women of course are divine energy-without Shakti, as they say here, Shiva is a corpse-but, so satisfactorily endowed by the cosmos, they tend to be conservative-reconciled to the cycle, hypnotized by the days, the days in all their rasas (shades, feelings, bliss). The days go on without you. I seem myself to be involved in an ascent, or at least moving down a one-way street. Women do tempt the pilgrim to rest and that is why holy men have tended to hate them. Holy men-not the gods. Zeus, Christ, Buddha loved women. But not their philosopher-followers. No? I see you, dear Charles, as something of a holy man, really, with your white lab coat and your hands chilly from their last scrubbing.

So truly you must consider me lost to you. When I left you last spring and wrote that long frightened letter on the plane it was like a prank I was carrying out under your auspices, under your giant parasol, and I was like the id in a dying body, that cannot admit it is dying. But now I can admit it: I was dying to you. Have you ever noticed, in all the dead people you have seen, how small they become? A dead face is no bigger than a dessert plate. I see you now clearly, reduced to your actual size. These legal pranks of yours are pathetic. Tell Oilman I will settle for half the value of the two houses as appraised for fair market value in today's skyrocketing New England real-estate market, half the New Hampshire land ditto, the stocks and bonds as I divided them, my Mercedes (I hope you rev the engine now and then), all the silver and furniture that came from my ancestors with their single insistent initial, and all my legal expenses. The more or less modern furniture we acquired together I grandly waive-your next victim can live with it, and worry about the slipcovers and the loose legs. I think I'm offering a good deal-most wronged wives get 100% of the primary residence at least. And I was wronged, of course. Don't make me interrupt my lessons in non-involvement by coming east and collecting depositions from a bevy of fucked nurses and other helpless inmates of your hospital harem. Maybe we can work up a scandal for the Herald or at least The New England Journal of Medicine. Midge suffered your affairs through with me for these last ten years-I see her, really, as my human archivist. I told her everything, back when I cared, through storms of tears. Gilman should contact Ducky Bradford when he and you are ready to talk sense.

And do lay off little Pearl. Try to think like a father instead of a strategist in the war between the sexes. I ask your help in warding off what I think is her very demeaning involvement with this gross Dutch bunch. They are everything Americans left Europe to get away from-materialist, class-obsessed, cruel in their smugness, and smug in their dullness. The boy naturally has an unearned sophistication that would dazzle our wide-eyed daughter-flats in Paris and Venice!-but once the tourism is over, the leaden weight of age-old sacrosanct male supremacy will descend. Europeans are always bragging how their pedigrees go back to cavemen, as if this entitles them to still think like cavemen. Behind that superficial savoir-faire they are cynical slobbering brutes, and nothing delights them so much as the destruction of a beautiful innocence like our daughter's. Pearl needs nice shy American boys, awkwardly full of drive and idealism, eventually; but for now she should be allowed to study, to soak in the great poems and novels of the past if that is where her atman feels itself expand. Her not going back to Yale is tragic, and I blame you. Through this effete Jan you are acting out your own fantasies of seduction-Dr. Epstein and I often discussed your scandalous incestuous flirtatious behavior toward her, even when the poor little soul was still an infant. You are using your paternal power over her to seduce her into "showing me up" by getting married just as I am getting Kwmarried. I feel you, out there, as a dark packet of wounded maleness spitefully taking any tack to "get at" me, even if it means ruining your daughter's fragile young life. I can only hope that this sensation of mine is paranoid.

It is not too early to think about having some fall fertilizer spread on the lawn-they say the acid rain makes it more important than ever. Lawn Craft makes a 10-6-4 mixture called Turf Food that should go on with the spreader set at notch 5-tell the boys to move briskly doing it, last year they left burned patches wherever they turned the spreader around. Also tell them not just to blow the oak leaves-they love pushing that big blower around, of course-into the bushes in the circle and the ivy over on the rocks-but to carry them down in those dirty old sheets we keep in the tool shed to the compost pile, and to dig them out from under the bushes with rakes-the little hedge rakes that look like children's toys are actually best for this purpose. You must get Mr. Kimball when he does the storm windows also to clean the gutters-otherwise all winter there are those dreadful orange stains down behind the drain pipes. Remind him to turn off the outside water at the underground valve behind the lilacs. I usually do it, and you need an adjustable wrench for the big nut that turns the lid of the standpipe, and a flashlight to see in, otherwise you grope forever with that long rod with the two-pronged grip on the end. Make sure he takes the windows out of the frames and Windexes-or uses a squeegee and ammonia water, which is actually better-both sides instead of just the outside, which is easy to reach from a ladder-he bates doing it and who can blame him but it must be done. Remember, those first years after we bought the house from old Mrs. Pynch-eon, so young and frightened that $56,000 might have been impossibly too much to pay, how we used to wash the windows together on a weekend, the warm early fall wind blowing the sailboats along on the dark-blue ocean with its whitecaps and the whole world so new to us and clean, clean, clean!?

Love,

S.

[tape]

Are you there? I guess it's working. Midge, you wouldn't believe the goings-on we've been having here! Maybe some of it has been getting into the Boston papers, but no doubt hideously distorted. Well, I'm not sure anybody can give an account that isn't somewhat distorted-even Durga, who is at the center of it, probably couldn't tell you everything, because she's been so crazy on all the drugs that Ma Prapti's been giving her and everybody, it turns out. I told you-or did I write it to somebody else?-how funny people have been feeling after some of the meals, and how Ma Prapti has been complaining about running out-of tranquillizers, out of Percodan and Valium and Demerol, over at the clinic-well, the reason she kept running out is it's all been being sprinkled into our vegetarian curry, like they used to put saltpeter into prisoners' food, to keep them from being too sexy-in our case the idea seemed to be to keep us all calm and passive, since Durga had this idea everybody was conspiring to take her power from her. It's true there's been a lot of complaining about things running downhill,' but her notion of a coup was quite fantastic and insecure, since the only real power-source around here is the Arhat's spiritual beauty and condition of moksha, which can't be stolen or changed. But the numbers of reporters and county officials and state cops and FBI men and men from the Immigration Service that kept filtering through made her feel she was losing control, I guess-it turns out that Durga, who as I must have said before is Irish, from one of these charming little villages in the western islands with muddy paths and stone walls where things haven't changed for a thousand years and people go about singing to their cows and sloshing down usquebaugh neat in pubs, was terrified of having her green card taken away and being sent back there, and also Vikshipta, who couldn't find a job in Seattle and is back here now, is from West Germany, and Ma Prapti from Rumania by way of England, and the Arhat himself of course from India, though funnily enough he's the only real Indian, the others stayed behind when they had to move the ashram out of this hilly remote place full of carved caves called Ellora-so this threat of deportation really hung over the inner circle in a way that those of us who happened to be American citizens and never thought much about it couldn't really appreciate. And so Durga was becoming more and more insecure, so that every official terrified her, even the nice little old electrical man who came around to inspect the wiring and stage lighting in Joy-Six-Oh, and when they'd offer these poor men-these really touchingly straight young guys from the IRS or the INS, usually Mormons with that intense religious background-who came around to ask some more official questions herbal tea or whatever, they'd put in something, heaven knows what-I don't know half the chemical names, and Ma Prapti was willing to try anything as an experiment, even ground-up mesquite leaves and creosote-bush twigs, to make them confused and forgetful, but it mostly just gave them terrible diarrhea two hours later. She's confessed all this to the authorities, she talks to them day after day now. I don't think she felt around here anybody ever listened to her. So now all these men, including the lawyers for the ranches and the land-use clique from Phoenix, which is entirely retired Northerners with nothing else to do, and a lot of petty bureaucrats hoping to get their faces on television-this state is so square, Midge, the governor is called Babbitt!-have been milling around and commandeering desks in the Uma Room and putting their feet up and trying to be friendly, saying we don't seem to be such crazies as they had thought and dribbling cigarette ash all over everything, and half the sannyasins that hadn't already left are leaving, and Durga and the hard core around her, Satya and Nitya and Vikshipta and Agni and the security-force boys, have headed up the Sachchidananda to where it becomes a kind of canyon and have holed up in the trailers that were there as a last-ditch security compound, with evidently a ton of weapons like Uzis and Galil assault rifles and even some bazookas to use for anti-aircraft. There're these government helicopters that have been flapping back and forth overhead for days but they never seem to land, just come down and hover, stirring up the dust and blowing all the leaves off the few trees we have. Funnily enough, though, now that the roof's fallen in in a way, there's a sort of up mood among those of us still around, a kind of, you know, prakhya feeling that a really immense amount of garbage has been finally disposed of. And I must say that Durga, the last time I saw her, looked terrific, in lavender jeans and denim ranch-hand jacket dyed to match and with a lilac silk scarf at her throat like a British paratrooper and, believe it or not, paratrooper boots as well, and this swanky big black revolver holster strapped to her hip. She's taken to smoking tinted cigarettes in a long ivory holder and the only thing she needs is a black eye patch. She has, I guess I don't have to remind you, this spectacular flaming red hair and pale-green eyes and one of those milky slightly freckled complexions that when I was little I used to envy so-my mother has one and always thought I was disgustingly dark.

Oob. What was that? Nothing, I guess. Distant shots. I've made myself this cozy nest in Vikshipta's old A-frame-he left his blankets, and a lot of Lowenbrau.in the fridge, and all this Freud in German that I can't read. And, Midge, I found a little whip, and some funny black leather outfits I can't even figure out how to put on, all straps and rings. Maybe he's supposed to put them on. I feel rather hurt, that he never shared this with me. I wonder if that's what he and Durga had between them-when he came back from Seattle he went straight to her and didn't give me the time of day. At any rate-

Uh-oh. There it was again. It sounded closer than way up the canyon, but then that's how sounds are out here-the spaces are so huge and the air so dry, it's hard sometimes to know if a sound is up in the hills or right around the corner. Anyway, this harness or whatever it is is held together by big brass buckles and rings with these designs that if you look-

Oh no. No. That was definitely footsteps outside, on the gravel. Now something's fiddling at the door! My God, Midge, what shall I do? Somebody's coming in!

[Amplified clatter and scraping as of drawer being opened and shut. Subsequent conversation faint and transcribed with, difficulty. Male voice in italics below as before.]

Master. It's you.

Who is with you?

Nobody. I'm alone. All alone. You scared me. My heart's pounding.

I heard your voice talking.

I often talk aloud, before I go to sleep. It empties the mind. It's like saying a mantra.

To whom do you speak, Kundalini, in this spiritual exercise, since God in the Occidental sense does not exist?

My daughter. My old friends back home.

They are still real to you?

No, Master, only you are truly real. It's just I have to relax my chittavrittis away from all this disturbance lately.

Let me feel your heart pounding, my dear. It is true, you are afraid. Whenever we talk, it is of fear. Yours or mine. We should attempt to talk of joy. When you speak in solitude, is it also to your husband, this Charles?

Rather rarely, Master. For years I didn't much interest him and now he doesn't interest me.

Perhaps you both self-deceive a little in this. You said be admired your breasts. He was correct. They are admirable.

I usually wear a nightie, but it's been so hot lately-

Kundalini blushes. Also she smiles. It is good, to be admired. I think despite your shyness you like being admired. I admire your smooth darkness, your old-fashioned upright way.

I find your kindness to me rather stunning, actually. I mean, I'm forty-two and just a former housewife-

Please. No fishing, Kundalini. You are magnificent. Your breasts are magnificent. Once, you did not let me caress them. You did not let me caress them like this.

Perhaps the context was different. Time has moved on. I was then in your abode, now you are in mine. You are my guest, one refuses a guest nothing. Master, why have you come to me?

I was alone. I was nervous. I thought of you, perhaps also alone. There has been so much disturbance but I am left alone, at the hurricane’s eye-is that an expression? Ma Prapti has the many reporters to fascinate with her horrifying confessions. Durga has her fellow-warriors to exhort and imbue with thirst for glory. In my solitude I enjoy samarasa, the divine immobility. But for the condition ofsabaja, of the non-conditioned and purely spontaneous, to reach that ofadvaya, of non-duality, and from this to attain Mabasukba, of which we once spoke, there must be yuganaddba, the principle of union, which implies an initial duality. I thought of you. My inkling has been that you, too, wish to confront the other, the opposite, and thus achieve advaya. It is perilous, because within it one loses the self.

You said you felt nervous. How can this be when you are a jivan-mukta, always in a state of samadhi?

I am Arbat, a follower of Buddha. The Blessed One did not leave the world, did not disengage himself from the confusions ofjiva and ajiva and withdraw into nirvana like your cowardly Jesus. He stayed upon earth, instructing and consoling bis disciples to the age of eighty. If we stay on earth, we stay inprakriti. If we stay inprakriti, we are subject to thevasanas and cbittavrittis of other men. We are subject to nervousness in the forms of lust and fear. This is the great sacrifice the enlightened make, out ofkaruna, out of compassion. Indeed you are smooth, as smooth as Hack Kali. As smooth as Satyavati after bathing in the river Jumna. As smooth as Radba upon the flower couch in the groves of Vrindavan. There is that faint oiliness which I much love. It makes an iridescence.

My father had dark skin. My mother is quite pale. She takes a terrible tan, but keeps trying.

Yes. Your rich mother. We discussed her. I think you are very close, mother and daughter.

Not really. We got off on the wrong foot somehow, when I was very little. About your fear. Is it that you are afraid of death?-of course not, how could you be?-or of the troubles in the ashram sending you back to India?

I am not so afraid of India. Perhaps I am afraid of non-India. I am afraid ofadvaya, of non-duality. Tor as long as there is duality, the spirit does not need to unrobe. I am not afraid of unrobing the body and will do so. But I am afraid, yes, of the spirit unrobing itself of the body. Ofjiva shedding ajiva. That is what I promised you, I think. To turn your body into spirit, to have the great bliss, the Paramabasukha.

Do you think I'm ready for that? Maybe to start with we could have just a little sukha.

Let us concentrate, Kundalini. That is stage one. We will let Durga have her shootout on the bills and the FBI men shoot back and the poor little sannyasins run for cover while we enact maithuna. Maithuna is not what is called in this coarse country "fucking. "It is cosmic play. It is lila. The soul's journey is lila. The emergence of prakriti from purusba is lila. From the truth of the body, bhanda, emerges by lila the truth of the universe, brabmanda.

I love it when you explain things. Would you like to touch me again?

That comes later, the touching. First is concentration, sa-dbana. We concentrate upon the beloved. It is best if she is parakiya rati-the wife of another. That is why I so much like your Charles. We need him. Otherwise you are apakva, unripe. Otherwise you are samanya rati, ordinary woman. We must mentally conceive you into visbesha rati-woman extraordinary, divine essence of woman.

Shall I concentrate on you, too?

It is not so necessary, what the woman does. But yes. I am nitya manus, eternal man. lam sabaja manus, man unconditioned, lam ayoni manus, man unborn. My linga is all lingas. My mouth is all mouths. My hands are all bands.

That idea gives me the creeps. I want them to be your hands, your hands only. When can you start touching me?

I am Krishna and you are Radba and we are in Vrindavan. Many flowering trees all about us. The smell of much mai-tbuna all about us. The sound of water running. Birds unseen singing. All things rank, ripe, deep. We gaze and concentrate upon the other.

Is there a next stage?

Smarana, recollection. I think ofKundalini as when she first came in her rented Hertz, in a checked suit too hot for the sun, with the bold manners of a woman who thinks well of herself.'

And I think of you as you were from afar, a brown face on a poster, on the label of a cassette.

Which cassette did you possess?

The one on yamas and niyamas.

Yes. That was a good one. An early one.

And then the one where you answer questions about the aham and the burning away of the vrittis.

I had stupid questioners that day. Stoned hippies and Vishnu bums. All squatting on the din floor in Ellora. Before the solid middle class discovered Buddha and pulled out their fat wallets.

Should we be proceeding with the ceremony? Should you have all your clothes still on?

It is not important that the worshipper be naked; only the goddess, the worshipped. Now comes aropa, the attribution of qualities. You are woman, nayika. You are tall. You are dark. You are smooth. You are splendid. You have limbs like thick luminous snakes. Your belly is waxen and long, long; under my eyes it has dunes and hollows like desert sands in moonlight. It has shiny stripes like veins of expensive mineral. Your navel is an eye without an eyebrow. It is elegant and long and was well cut by the doctor the day of your birth. Bless that man. He is present in your navel.

I was born in the war, in '44. Daddy was in the South Pacific on a destroyer. The hospitals were understaffed and the doctor on emergency was a black man my mother had never seen before. Our own doctor had collapsed; he hadn't slept for thirty-six hours, there were fights and accidents all over Boston then, the soldiers and sailors and all these jazz places. It was wartime. My mother said she was so terrified she vowed she'd never bear another child. But she did, four years later.

People forget pain. They do not so quickly forget bliss.

Oh, stop looking. I am so old. My poor saggy body. My poor stretched belly, that's what those marks are, from carrying Pearl. This Paramahasukha should have come along when I was twenty.

You were not ready at twenty. You were only ready for Charles.

I was ready actually for a boy called Myron Stern, but my parents disapproved so violently I was scared off. What a docile nitwit I was.

With this Myron, too, dubkba would have entered in. Life is dubkba. Dubkba is incorrectly translated "pain." Buddha did not say, "Life is pain." Dubkba is disenchantment. He said, "Life is disenchantment." He said, "Life is a letdown." With Myron, as with Charles, there would have been enchantment, there would have been disenchantment. Even with Arbat.

Not with you, Master.

Why not? I am myself or another.

No, you are you. You have attributes. Let me see you.

I am afraid to disrobe. I am afraid of non-duality.

Don't be silly. Let me help.

[Faint tumult.]

I am fat, yes. My telly is in layers like a cake.

Just cozy. So much nice soft black hair.

My linga does not reach the sky.

It's trying.

In aropa, flowers are offered to the nayika.Sbe is beginning to become a goddess. Heryoni is a lotus. Her mouth is a lotus.

You're so sweetly prim here. Like a little cactus. Without thorns. With a little bitter dewdrop.

Your breasts are fruit with tips the color of eggplant. Your shoulders are a silver yoke. Your jaw is a wing, beating slowly up and down.

Those are nice attributes. I like this aropa part.

When the nayika is not there, the yogi remembers her beauty. That is the fourth stage, manana.

Will you remember me?

Ah, your voice is dark and sad. That is the question women ask. They always ask, "Will you remember me?"

They want to know.

Their asking so earnestly plunges the lovers back into time, the sad time that does not exist in Vrindavan.

I think you have many nayikas to remember.

The visbesha rati is not jealous. She is Shakti and is all women.

How very convenient for Shiva.

You ridicule your Master. You are being wicked Kali.'

I'm getting sexually frustrated. How many more stages are there?

No need exists to rush. That is very Occidental, your need to rush.

Couldn't you at least kiss me? Somewhere. Anywhere.

The next stage is dbyana, mystic meditation, in which the nayika sits upon the lover's left and is embraced, not for the sake of bodily pleasure but for the enhancing of the spirit.

That may be too subtle a distinction for this old girl.

No. Not subtle. Love is for bodies only when the spirits are in harmony. Love is more than fucking only when the god in the other is saluted. That is why we say, "Namaste."

I love the way you say "luff." I always have.

That is why we say, "So 'bam." I am He.

I'm supposed to say something back but I forget what.

You say, "Sa 'bam." You are She.

Sa 'ham. I am Stye.

Great Kundalini, stand so I may meditate upon your body, each glistening particle, each cell of skin, each hair and gland. Think with me of your body cell by cell, as something greater than galaxies, greater than all the jewel trees. You are like a Bodbisattva standing in the Land of Bliss, in Sukbavati. You are infinitely tall, infinitely splendid. You are immeasurably radiant, amitabha. You are amitayus, forever enduring.

Mm. That feels nice. Tickly, but nice.

I am bathing you with my tongue. I drink your perspiration, your rasas. This is fuja, the sixth stage. The nayika is bathed as if she is a statue of the goddess. As I do so I repeat formulas in my head.

Must you go through this every time?

To make it holy, yes. To exalt us, yes. You may sit now. On my left. On the bed. The worship continues. Open your thighs.

That's nice too. Nicer, even.

Can you feel my inner concentration?

So that's what I feel.

I adore your yoni. I drink your rajas.

Don't stop. Must you stop?

Now the seventh stage. The adept lays the nayika on the bed and repeats aloud the sacred formula.

There is one?

Hling kling kandarpa svaha.

What does it mean?

Hling kling kandarpa svaba.

O.K. Pardon my asking.

Now sit on me.

It's too big. It has reached the sky.

This is stage eight, maitbuna.

Oh. It's not too big. Not quite. Not quite quite.

Kundalini was impatient for this stage.

Keep talking to me, please.

Concentrate. Think of ida. Think ofpingala. Energy is rising.

Mm.

Think of Muladhara to Svadbisthana. Now she leaves the belly and files to the solar plexus, to Manipura.

Mmm.

From Manipura to Anabata, the heart. Up, up, to beyond the heart.

Nn.

Beyond the heart to Visbuddba, the throat. There are many throats.

To Midge

Dombi dances in the sambbogakaya. The washerwoman dances in the throat. From Visbuddba-

[Unintelligible.] Oh. My God. Goodness me. Now you.

No. I do not do. You do again, Kundalini. And again.

Really? Isn't that unfair?

Unfair to you. It puts you into time. It puts you into the clutches of Kali, while I am in samarasa. I have the bliss of vajrolimudra. The energy of the suspended semen enters my spirit and makes me immortal. You die again and again. You are cruelly used.

If you say so. I keep going?

Keep going.

Mm. Nn. Oh. Oh yes, yes. God. How do you do it?

Advanced technique. It is called "ujjana sadbana," "against the current."// brings, through samarasa, sabaja. It brings the non-conditioned. It brings advaya. Sbakti and Shiva, vajra and padma, jiva and ajiva are one. You and I are one. What I will, you become.

Yes, Master.

If I scratch your fat rump, it is pleasure.

Pleasure.

If I slap you thus, that too.

That too.

Come once more.

Darling, I'm exhausted.

Come. Come, you sopping cunt.

[Click: end of tape, side one.]

Midge, that was the most magical thing of all, the way that side of the tape got used up just as I did. I think my moan drowned out the click in the drawer, but / heard it. I really probably should erase that side, but I have this feeling about it that it's bigger than I am somehow, that my personal modesty is totally unimportant and it wasn't me in any case but a kind of goddess actually and that what really is important is the Arhat's voice on tape, his fantastic capacity for love. I don't know how he held it but it stayed just as hard as a rock, only of course smooth-a jewel just like they say. He was the jewel and I was the lotus. It felt just like that, on and on into eternity. And it wasn't just that once, I've been with him a few times since. I'm not sure, though, you should play the tape for Irving and the other girls-only if you think they can take it in the yogic spirit and not as just titillation and gossip. It m«jf n't get back to Charles. I'll leave it up to you, I've been away so long now I can't be the judge of anybody's spiritual progress and maturity. Please keep it safe for me, 'though, so some day when I'm old and gray and sitting in some nursing home or Florida condo like my grotesque mother I can play it and remember the times when I was Shakti and Radha with the best of them. I wonder whose Radha she ever was, by the way. It's awfully hard to picture Daddy being Krishna.

What other news? I don't know what sort of stuff gets onto television back East-I suppose it depends pretty much on what the Russians and Iranians did that afternoon-but Durga and Agni and the rest of her hard core, mostly the guys from security and some of the younger women in PR, stayed up in the canyon a few more days, until their pills and water ran out, but when nobody came after them they began to dribble back to the Chakra and the cafeteria, looking dusty and underweight and sheepish. Durga had expected some kind of shootout, like they have I guess in Belfast with the British soldiers, but the IRS and Immigration don't work like that, it's more a matter of form letters with that dotty kind of printer that only the government still seems to use, these utterly machine-made-looking letters you can keep ignoring because it looks like junk mail until some morning months later the sheriff shows up with handcuffs. These shots I kept hearing were I guess Durga and Satya and the guys having fun, practicing with their infrared gunsights and these other fancy armaments that have been costing the Treasury of Enlightenment an arm and a leg. To avoid an ambush in the pass she came down the Sachchidananda on a rubber raft they had up there, and though there was her old kind of dash in that, she looks basically discouraged. She talks about deporting herself back to Ireland rather than fight the INS. We've had a couple of long talks, she and I, now that I use her old office in the Uma Room, and the odd thing is I'm beginning to like her, rather-though of course not the abso/«fely comfortable way I like you and Donna and Ann Turner and Liz Belling-ham. We have a language in common, we went to the same sort of schools and dated the same boys more or less and made the same klishta compromises, but a lot of the women here, frankly, are like people from the moon. It's like they skipped a beat somewhere, and really don't much care about either death or sex. Maybe it's an East Coast / West Coast thing, or a generation kind of gap, but I don't think so exactly. Maybe I've been standoffish. I came here, face it, to get close to the Arhat, and now that I couldn't get any closer except by crawKng up his asshole-sorry, that's the way he talks, once you get to know him, with almost a tough-guy kind of American accent, God knows where he picked it up-and now that I've achieved my objective and satisfied my really pretty deplorable phalatrishna, I'm able to relate to these people on more relaxed terms. Durga's always frightened me but she says now I frightened her from the start, and if you think of her as just this little Irish village girl you can see I might be frightening. She says she could see at a glance that I had the kind of energy the Arhat eats up. She says he eats people up, psychologically, without meaning to-it's just that his prana and mahat are so strong they suck you in and spit you out, he's so incredibly intuitive that he gets impatient, and she and Prapti and Nitya and Alinga and the inner circle were wearing out around him. So she sensed I was going to take over, though of course I haven't, I still don't know the half of what goes on around here. She said, Durga, to finish up with her, that she was raised with this terribly restrictive Irish Catholicism and hated it and thought what the Arhat was offering, this free-form Buddhism, would release her but she wonders now if it didn't actually make her more uptight, all these spiritual possibilities so she was constantly having to choose, and maybe the real way to be free is just to do whatever the priest or husband or boss or whoever says while deep inside scorning it-that this is real asanga, real detachment from your life, instead of coming here and trying to make a new social model and the desert bloom and so on. All I could tell her was that it's been wonderful for me so far but that I rather did doubt if I or any woman would ever be able to do vajrolimudra, because of the anatomical differences, and so would always be swept along by time. She kissed me then, this big white face of hers swooping down, she said I looked so sweet saying that, when I had just been trying to be serious. I mean, really kissed me, but it wasn't like with Alinga-I have the funny feeling Durga doesn't have much of a sex life in any direction. Her eyes get softest when she talks about Ireland and her mother and the two cows they used to keep in the village, the way their spotted big sides steamed just after it rained. She was some sort of artiste in Dublin -I don't know, do they still have music halls?-but it's the village and the cows that turn heron. The warm milk-that steamed, too.

I still love Alinga, by the way. I mean we don't live together like we did but that lazy kind of deep affection is still there. We're spending a lot of time in the Uma Room together lately, still trying to straighten out the mess Nitya left and to keep ahead of our mail. It seems everybody is suing us, we're like a whale that's started to bleed and every shark in the ocean has gone into a feeding frenzy-I love that new term, don't you? Feeding frenzy. They use it a lot on television now, not just the nature programs but the evening news. Not only are all these governments-local, state, and national-on our case but about three sets of parents are suddenly taking us to court for brainwashing their children-though I don't see how they can collect damages, since these children are legally adult and if they weren't here doing work as worship they'd be hanging around their parents' homes soaking up money and wrecking cars and running up psychiatrists' bills. Speaking of Nitya-Nitya Kalpana, you remember, our former accountant-she says her head is out of the bad place it was in and she can do with less meditation now-in fact, she wonders if she wasn't being overdosed in the clinic by Ma Prapti, who, even though she spilled the beans for days to the FBI and everybody, is still under a lot of indictments. The way Durga tried to explain it to me, when we had our nice talk, it was more a philosophical inquiry Ma^ Prapti was undertaking. She was asking. What is the mind? It can be altered by yoga, O.K., to achieve samadhi, but also by drugs, by alcohol, by fatigue, by hormones, even by things as innocent as the moon and sugar. So why not develop a purusha pill and get to nirvana that way? A lot of people do, of course-like Marilyn Monroe and all these teen-age suicides the TV commentators keep putting on long faces about. This question of course is very troubling to the old-fashioned rigid Christian philosophical framework but it doesn't bother Oriental thinking at all, where it's all maya anyway. Anyway, I really do resent Nitya's coming out of meditation with all this officiousness. I've pretty well got the accounts so I can deal with them and I don't want her confusing things again. I feel invaded. No matter where you are, or how much enlightenment is around, human relations are tricky.

Midge, that is too bad, what you admitted, or really more implied, about you and Ed. You two always seemed so solid. I used to envy you, in fact-you seemed so satisfied, so unquestioning. I mean, you weren't expecting the world, and you saw Ed's limitations, and I know his drinking aggravated you more than you let on, and that loudmouth know-it-all manner that bothered me less than it did Charles because if you listened Ed really did know a lot of things, especially about electronic security systems and how car engines work and how the insurance companies and pension funds control the stock market, but nevertheless you never betrayed him by wincing or making sardonic eye-contact like, say, Donna and for that matter Gloria used to do, and whatever your differences your house was a fun one to be in. Those lovely lawn parties you two always gave. People are selfish, of course, and when a couple we know breaks up it's one less port in a storm, one or two less parties a year, one more house in town that begins to look weedy and sad. When I left Charles that was one of my thoughts-how sad it would be for the rest of you, not to have us to swell the scene, as it were. Heaven only knows what Charles is doing with his spare time now-not that he ever had much. Those little nurses and receptionists he used to screw so happily when he had me as part of his baggage I dare say look (and talk) quite differently now that he's, so to speak, free. Real freedom is within, Midge. You and I know that. This morning in darshan the Arhat shared with us Buddha's last words. You know what they were? See if I can recite them, without the accent. "Be a lamp unto yourselves. Be a refuge unto yourselves. Seek no refuge outside of yourselves." Seek no refuge outside of yourself, Midge-that's what I'm trying to keep in mind in these hectic last couple of weeks and you keep it in mind no matter what the future brings for you and dear old Ed.

I mean, it's been hectic here and it's been not. There's a lot of positive energy around since the scene thinned out. All along there've been a number of not-so-desirable types showing up here in dime-store sunset colors saying they were sannyasins, thinking from what they've seen on the news that this is a real gravy train, but now that all the papers are blabbing how we owe everybody fifteen million, or maybe it's fifty, they've pretty well split, and some of Agni's lavender cowboys too, now that the real fuzz in One form or another is always in and out serving summonses and repossessing computers and earth-moving equipment and running fingerprint checks on people and chemical checks on the cafeteria lemonade and ripping out illegal wiring and I don't know what all else to protect us against ourselves. Some of these outer-state types are kind of cute in their way and, you know, curious about us, and more open-minded than you might think. I don't really think you can say the world has subdivisions any more-what with television and modems we're all operating on the same sattva, and my conclusion so far, after being six months out of our own little North Shore ghetto, is that the world is really slowly getting to be a better place, provided we can keep the population explosion from turning all the land into deserts and asphalt and if the destruction of the ozone by aerosol cans with the greenhouse effect doesn't melt the ice caps and flood every coastal city out of existence, not to mention the Bomb, which seems to be the least of the problems because at least people agitate about it and picket Army bases.

God, listen to the big philosopher. But one of the things the Arhat has done for me is encourage me to let it out, let out the feelings and thoughts both and get rid of the conditioning that had us trained to keep quiet while all these fathers and husbands and sons and lovers and lawyers and doctors and Indian chiefs talked. All this trying to. be not too smart, not too loud, not too sexy, not too wonderful or else we'd overwhelm men that we were subconsciously taught to do like children in Hong Kong apartments trained to live in two cubic feet of space-I say, "Fuck it." "Fuck it" is what I say now, Midge.

But what I started to say, about all the repo men and sheriffs aides that are crawling around here, is that among the equipment they repossessed was that at the dental clinic, which was run by an absolutely cool old saint called Ganesha, 'older even than me and here because his practice in Boise began to remind him of death, so when I went with this lower-right molar that's 'been slowly going funny ever since I absent-mindedly chomped down on a betel nut, he said it looked to him like a root-canal candidate, it had been "insulted" so often with old silver fillings, but he didn't have the X-ray machine any more so I better get it looked at in town. By "town" around here they mean this dusty strip called Forrest that I think I described ages ago when I first came, full of retired people and old ranch rats and a few stray Navajos and these born-again creeps that attack the Arhat whenever he shows up for a Diet Coke-I was surprised they even had a dentist there. So I have to go in there tomorrow, if I can find a pickup truck or limo with some gas still in it. We have this five-thousand-gallon tank buried underground but Mobil refuses to fill it until we pay our bill. At the same time they keep sponsoring these holier-than-thou ecological documentaries on saving the whooping crane and the Salt Lake pupfish on television. How's that for corporate doublethink? Save the pupfish and let people 'on the path to holiness go hang.

Well, what else? What have I left out? The beauty of it here, maybe, now that what they call fall has come. Not fall like we have it, of course-nothing like all that glory of the leaves, the maples and sumac and ash, and the smell of burning applewood out of people's chimneys, and the ocean turning that almost vicious dark-gray greeny-blue color under the heavy autumn clouds. ' Here it's more of a delicate change, like a piece of transparent, slightly brown film placed over everything. The nights are getting cold again, but the days are still hot. A few of the trees do have leaves that turn yellow and drop-there's the willow wattle, and Australian acacia, and a kind called shoe-string acacia-but by and Jarge they never had much in the way of leaves to begin with, since the trick of the desert is not to gather photons, of which there are billions and billions too many, but to hold in moisture. The smoke tree and the paloverde hardly have leaves at all, just these threadbare skinny things that show up in the spring before the flowering and then drop right off. So you get this feeling of vegetation that already lives in purusha, with just the tiniest delicate grip on the surface of prakriti, without any of the turmoil and violence of our Eastern weeds and bushes and vines battling it out with all of their egos on every square foot that isn't absolutely rock. Here it's mostly rock, red rock and sand, so you're very grateful and aware of the slightest living thing-a lot of the desert flowers are almost microscopic, the size of pin-heads practically. I love it, Midge. I love the freedom of the almost nothingness-the hills with nothing on them but wisps of golden grass, and the skies with only some jet trails and the highest little tentative horsetails that never seem to come to anything as far as the weather goes. We had an hour of rain the other night and everybody came out of the Kali Club and danced naked in it, though it was freezing, really. Where it's so dry, water evaporates on you so rapidly it hurts, you can't help but chatter and shiver and jump around.

My dreams, Midge. My dreams get more and more intense lately. It's frightening. And a lot of them are about, of all people, Charles. I've totally stopped thinking about him consciously-we've 'stopped communicating; let Ducky and this vulture Oilman communicate-but in these dreams we're making love the way we did the first years we were married. They say people in dreams are displacements and it must be that it's really the Arhat I'm dreaming about but it seems so vividly Charles-the flat hard body he had and still has, considering his age, and the way he did everything in silence and seemed a little offended if I made any noise myself, and certain little things I won't go into but that definitely identify him as Charles, a smell even, I know you're not supposed to smell in dreams, but he smells like the desert, or at least I wake up with the spicy musty fragrance all around me, and the moon on the tangled sheets, here in Vikshipta's A-frame. And be was another, come to think of it. Another severe man. Without wanting to be, I seem to be attracted to that type. In the dreams Charles and I are usually in a bare room, a room without furniture. Almost like an operating room, except there's not an operating table or the bright lights. There must be a bed, we have to be lying on something. He's pushed himself up on his arms and I see his bare shoulders and his chest, smooth and hard and almost hairless the way he was, just a few hairs that turned gray eventually over the sternum bone and around the nipples, the plane of his chest slanting down to where our bodies join, and I'm aware of his excited breath, the warmth of it, and this dry desert sweetness like the fragrance of mesquite pods, and I'm very young and tight and worried about getting pregnant, and at the same time I'm myself as I am now, and even know that sleeping with Charles is wrong, a betrayal of the ashram, but this sense of fatherly forgiveness and understanding enclosing me is coming from him, pouring from him like chakra energy from the Sahasrara lotus, so I know it can't be Charles really, since understanding he never especially was and forgiving he certainly is not now. It's strange. But I wake up overwhelmed. He seems just enormous, and flooding me with these spiritual waves. It must be a transposition of my experiences here. We're all just masks anyway, don't you think? I mean masks of the archetypes. My best to Irving and Ed if he and you work things out and Gloria and Donna and Liz and Ann and the others but absolutely-I trust you, Midge-don't let them listen to

[end of tape]

Dear Dr. Podhoretz:

Just a note to bring you up to date on my dental adventures. I think I mentioned some months ago the sensitivity, an elusive "punky" feeling, in the lower-right quadrant. The molar-it was hard to know which it was, under the crowns-has been getting slowly worse, but not so bad that I couldn't ignore it, blaming it vaguely on the general nervous and spiritual stress I've been under recently, or even on the altitude here, which I imagined might function somewhat as an airplane ride does when it gives you an earache or a sensation of pressure in the sinuses. But lately the feeling has become unignorable, and I've come forty miles to a dentist here in Forrest, the town nearest the kibbutz-like community where I now reside.

But this dentist, a much more gracious and efficient practitioner than I had expected, with a definite English accent, of all things-the British seem strangely attracted to this part of the world, the opposite of their own dreary climate, I suppose-said that I didn't need a root canal but that the crown had been badly designed and was occluding in a way with the upper teeth that was applying torque arid giving me soreness along the gums-voiid, the "punky" feeling! Well, of course I defended your crown, said you were considered among the very best in Swampscott, etc. But with this tranquil little supercilious smile he had me bite on a piece of red wax-paper and grind my teeth and then did some very delicate drilling (I didn't even have Novocaine) and I must say the trouble seems miraculously to have vanished! And he only-charged me $45 for the appointment, as opposed to the $125 that you have been asking. But of course a lot of the things you buy here are cheaper than in the East, except for what has to be flown over the Rockies, like lobsters and cranberries.

Just thought you'd like to keep abreast of my mouth and make a mark on my chart. You have several sets of X-rays; perhaps you can tell from them whatever it was you did wrong.

Happy Veterans Day,

Sarah Worth

Gentlemen:

Enclosed find endorsed checks totalling $157,634.26 to be deposited to my charge account with your book and gift shop. I look forward to visiting Samana Cay some day and using my accumulated credit to make some purchases and enjoy some leisure there.

Yours sincerely,

Sarah P. Worth

le 12 novembre

Monsieur,

Voici les formules et les renseignements nécessaires à ouvrir mon compte, et aussi un cheque, tiré de mon compte à la Bank of Boston, pour $200,000. Faites-ia mon premier dépot, s'il vous plait, et

Agréez, je vous prie,

l'expression de mes sentiments dévoués,

#4723-9001-7469-8666

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Enright-

We have been slow to respond to your several communications not because we have been taking them lightly but perhaps taking them all too seriously. Over the years a considerable number of properly concerned and loving parents have written us, threatened us, and even appeared at our gates with complaints such as yours; we are often besieged by lawyers and psychiatric "experts" and prejudiced journalists over these issues of "brainwashing" and "child abduction." Never mind that the "child" was as old as thirty-four in one case, and in almost all cases well above the legal age of consent. Never mind that "brainwashing" is a nebulous term that could with justice be applied to our elementary-school introduction to the history and the capitalist, "freedom-loving" values of the United States; or to the religious rubrics pressed upon the child not only by church, synagogue, and mosque but by home influence and certain sentimental strains of popular entertainment; or to the massive inculcation of consumeristic hedonism sought by the relentless barrage of television commercials and printed advertising. Not to mention the habituation to violence and vice that follows from even modest exposure to the televised dramas 'sandwiched between the insidious commercials; and the absolutely pervasive and irresistible rape of adolescent minds by the nihilism and eroticism of popular music; and the more specialized forms of brainwashing undergone in military and corporate indoctrination programs.

Our brains are there to be washed, Mr. and Mrs. Enright, by everything from elevator music to bumper stickers, and amid this polluted tide of bobbing, jostling, oozing propaganda a few souls elect to discipline their egos and follow the Master. Our way is not easy. Many fall away when they realize that the death of ego is the price of happiness. Many desert when they discover that cherished possessions must be sacrificed to non-attachment. Many have lately defected, rather than face the true richness of paradox which the Master has prepared for them. Openness and spontaneity are our watchwords, not control. Your son Kevin, or Yajna as we call him here, came to us freely and is free to leave. Though appreciative of all you have done for him, from nursery school to business school, he does not want to return to your big sandstone house in Saint Louis with the mansard roof and porte-cochere, on its archaic private street, though he thinks back upon it fondly, as we all should upon scenes we have outgrown. He is not brainwashed. He is adult, and at peace, and on the road to nirvana.

Look into your own hearts. Our Master advises you to consider this text from the blessed Dhammapada: "'These are my sons. This is my wealth.' In this way the fool troubles himself. He is not even the owner of himself: how much less of his sons and of his wealth." In demanding we return "your" son to you, you become "fools." A semantic misunderstanding lies at the heart of your confusion: when we speak of "our" or "my" son or daughter or wife or master, we are not expressing ownership but by a grammatical shortcut a certain intuitively felt connection: these persons or manifestations of enduring modalities have wandered into "my" sphere of apprehension, the possessive pronoun being used merely to locate the subjectivity. But people do not own people. Your son is not "yours" even though you carried him in your womb and paid for his extensive education, frat fees, auto insurance, etc. Though for a time he was "yours" to imprison within your Richardsonian mansion and perhaps to bully and beat and certainly to manipulate with the psychological blackmail at which the nuclear family is so adept, he is not "yours" now, to reflect creditably upon you in the eyes of your equally narrow-minded and proprietorial acquaintances, or to reverse the declining trend in the railroad enterprises that made your family fortune^ or to extend your genes and generations further into the void of maya; he is, instead, "his"-or, to put it more exactly, his ego or aham is at the service of his highest self, the atman, as it merges with purusha, the changeless and featureless spirit which at the beginning of phenomena allowed itself to be clouded with the emergence of matter and its complicated turbulences.

To make "your" son truly "yours," come join him and us in this besieged place of pilgrimage and study, or, if-you are too deeply mired in the illusory-too "brainwashed," so to speak-come join us in the sense, of making a generous gift to the work of the ashram, in the form either of a direct cash donation (in this last year of the full 50% tax bracket) or a gift of stocks, bonds, or property.

Most sincerely,

Ma Prem Kundalini

Executive Assistant to

Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.,

Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat

Oh my darling dearest Pearl, my only child-

How could you do so many vile things to your mother at once?

(1) You turned twenty-one-for this I cannot exactly blame you, though it means I have not even a vestige of a child now. I trust you received the sandalwood mala with the tinted miniature of the Arhat and the quite expensive snakeskin sandals that I sent off a month ago to make their way across the desert, the mountains, the plains, our good green East, and the blue Atlantic Ocean to you\ you didn't thank me in your otherwise news-laden letter. The snake is the Arizona coral snake, which has this remarkable alternation of broad red/ narrow yellow/broad black/narrow yellow/broad red etc. stripes, all so mechanically perfect it looks a little cheap and plasticky-one of those natural effects too good to be true. The snake itself is rather rare and shy and small (which makes the sandals both expensive and illegal) and highly poisonous, and has-all this from Alinga, who seems to have made quite a study of desert life in her years here-an endearing trick of, when threatened, hiding its head in its coils and lifting its tail and popping out its anus! That makes a distinct and alarming sound, she says. Really, prakriti is just so irreverent-it's all lila, as the Master often reminds us. (2) You say you are not only taking the fall term off but may likely never come back to Yale and finish your degree. I can't tell you how much of an utter mistake this is. Your doubts about your major-whether or not this M. Derrida and his deconstruction are actually anti-phallic and whether or not this Mr. Bloom twiddles too much when he lectures-are really beside the point; you can major in chemistry or basket weaving or home economics (which used to be a course seriously offered to young women-how to sew and cook, mostly-wifemanship with sex left out) for all I care, but you must get your degree. If you don't you can never hold your head up; a college degree is the invisible tiara a woman must wear now, otherwise people write her off as a bumpkin, an ignoramus, a throwback, an archaic creature. Look at Princess Diana, how people snicker even at her. Look at me, whose greatest mistake in life was to leave Radcliffe at the outset of my junior year to marry your father-bow I secretly suffered all these years, how I cringed whenever the subject of colleges came up in conversation. I vowed you would never make my mistake. Well, you did get through one more year than I did. So close! You say that in Europe it really doesn't matter so much and if so that proves my point that Europeans are at bottom grotesquely primitive cavepeople who believe that everything comes down to entitlement by birth. The ones who stayed there chose to hang back from the great spiritual adventure America was and is and I fear I can't bear to think of my Pearl wasting her precious life among them. The Europeans here at the ashram, most of whom have been deported or gone into hiding, were a fascinating study in how intelligent and attractive people could go through all the correct motions and yet all the time be missing the point. They kept trying to make a formal church or a military organization out of it all; the delicacy of our American reality keeps escaping them, the way our whole lovely nation is founded on the edge of a dream, on the edge of purusha. I don't include the Arhat; he is not European but Indian, an Aryan with something else added-sun, centuries of terribly much sun, and also something religious from the Dravidian South, with its murderous worship of femaleness, like a wonderful gluey dark honey poured into milk. Jan sounds totally milky to me, and his parents too, though they've curdled into butter-little square pats stamped with some phony armorial seal. Darling, believe me, not going through with Yale, however much of an awkward bother it seems now, will destroy your life-you'll limp forever, my dear tall-striding beauty.

(3) You tell me your father, who has flown over again, likes Jan very much and finds the van Hertzogs jolly fun and wholeheartedly approves of your engagement. Don't you see he's doing exactly what my father (whom I loved too-how can we help but love these fathers, the way the sides of their necks smell of sweat and aftershave when they pick us up off the floor and give us that squeeze that knocks us breathless?) did-pass you on like a manacled slave to another man? Men don't much like other men-all organic things intrinsically hate one another, except as food-but they're used to them and they're not used to free women-women standing upright and having ideas and walking up the middle of the sidewalk with unpinned hair bouncing and flowing behind, the way I've always pictured you. You can say I was trying to live my life through you in a way I never lived it myself; but that is what women must do when they knuckle under as I did through not knowing any better-and now as you are doing though knowing better and having other alternatives but spurning them. Of course your father would think it very cute having this bogus nobility with their unicorn and lion or whatever it is on every bottle as kin and connections over there so he can casually drop word to his posh surgeon pals of his jetting back and forth. New England snob as he is he imagines he always did have a foot still in the Old World. But what he really likes is that European dungeons are deeper, divorces are harder, and you are more securely locked in where he can get at you. There is no escaping Daddy once the van Hertzogs sink their claws in, and of course (you'll all say) poor Mother-she can't manage to leave her dreadful guru and always was a bit of a misfit… Sweet little Pearl, this is our goodbye. Those round blurry spots in these "wiggles" of mine (remember, your calling them that?), are tears, actual tears.

I'm making such a mess, I had to₍ lean back with folded hands and let them drop into my lap. The tears. I'm wearing the silk sari, in case the Master comes in. Water is bad for silk and saltwater must be worse. But it felt good to cry. The Master has given me so much of his own peace I'd almost forgotten how to manage a good old Occidental convulsion-a Schmerzfcst, a purgative déluge des lames cbaudes. So, then, to continue,

(4) You are pregnant. After wounding me in these various other ways you want to make me into a grandmother. White hair, trifocals, rocking chair, crewel work. 'Passing down wooden toys and family lore before winking out like a frosted light bulb. And I have never felt younger-the bride I was at twenty \vas a timid hidebound crone compaied with the womaq I feel myself now to be. And you've decided-though I don't see how anybody of your age and position, with all the contraceptive gadgets and creams and foams they have now, not to mention all the non-procreative ways of "getting off" that were terribly hush-hush and taboo in the dark age when / was young, could decide anything of the sort; you both must have been stoned or coked or whatever out of your fuzzy heads-to make me an ancestor, ashes and bones in a sacred urn, some yellowing photographs'in the family album, a filled-in slot in the genealogical chart, a sad old story buried amid the rubbish in the custom-house attic. I'm not ready, I'm still learning how to live, to be. I've reached the solar-plexus chakra and I'm still climbing. I'm having fun, honey.

People are supposed to rejoice at a pregnancy, however inconvenient it is. At least the Pope wants us to. I wonder why. You were always a healthy normal girl so this event physiologically is no triumph against the odds. You would have been able to pull it off at thirty, at forty even. Why so early? Naturally I blame myself. My running off-deserting my biological post-made you think you had to man-why isn't there a verb "to woman"?-the ramparts, the reproductive barricades. Or am I giving myself and the'old riddle of mother-daughter relations too much credit? Most pregnancies, like most wars, are totally silly, and aren't intended at all-they come about in a long blink while the mind is essentially asleep. With so many of these teen-age pregnancies now it's obviously a childish way of punishing the world. Consider me punished.

Consider me cheated of every woman's most harmless fantasy-to stage-manage a wedding, to be the mother of the bride. I suppose that the van Hertzogs and your father have the situation heavily in hand. By even the fifth month you might get by with an A-line tulle-and-satin gown, and if-it's only the fourth you could even have the dressmaker give you a bit of a waist. I love the look of a lace bodice, and a long stiff train, and a garland of real flowers that will wilt in an hour, and a veil with the bride's head obscured and vague like that of a goddess, a sacred statue, or a corpse-the menace of a bride coming down the aisle, to gobble up the quaking groom and, for dessert, his best man. It breaks my heart not to see my daughter married. But I disapprove so "thoroughly of this particular ceremony whereby your lovely erect and shining womanhood bows low to this callow spoiled Dutch boy (his finger in quite the wrong dike) and his obese parents that my presence there would create a spiritual irritant if not a vocal objection ringing off the scandalized church rafters. You don't say what kind of church the vain Warthogs favor; my intuition says not the sturdy Reformed faith that gave us all those gorgeous Rembrandt blacks and tidy tiled interiors but sneaky snobby Catholic, so watered down by these Dutch theologians one reads about being nearly excommunicated all the time that you've never noticed your in-laws' Papism until now that it's too late, and no doubt they'll want you to convert, smilingly assuring you that it's just a formality and doesn't mean a thing. Thus the Old World reclaims the New and rescinds its beautiful promise of liberty. What Catholicism means to you, my dear, is incessantly more pregnancies-Jan is himself the baby of six, you told me-until by mutual understanding your husband wanders off to deposit his sperm in the famous red-light district or else in some querulous but spermicidal mistress whose progeny are no priest's business. And you, my poor Pearl, where will you find happiness then, as the little warthogs swarm around you and their paternal grandparents, smelling of rancid hops, lower over you like two rainclouds and all around you the air is thick with the ugliest language in Christendom? If you ever seek to vary your entertainment as Jan does his, you have a world of flat-headed Dutchmen to choose a lover from. You will be saddled with respectability-respectability more oppressive and muggy than any form of bourgeois self-enthrallment that has ever taken root in America, where at least one can always go west or make a wisecrack. No wisecracks in Holland -just boors and beers and burghers and bores.

Let's hope I'm quite wrong. Have a lovely wedding. At some point in life a woman becomes her own mother and you have reached it sooner than I did. Even if I could stomach the jet lag and Lowlands humidity I by no means wish to encounter your father, who might slap a subpoena on me before giving the blushing and bulging bride away. He imagines all sorts of legal wrongs from his helpless old helpmeet. So let this be his circus, while I watch my gallant circus here slowly fold its tents and put its elephants to bed. The ashram's days feel numbered. Do drop a note to your grandmother to tell her she's becoming a great-. She is being romanced by some antique fraud the Navy let out of mothballs and may have some rude news of her own. For the baby's sake, take lots of vitamin B-complex and zinc-zinc for all life-changes that involve metabolism.

See? For all your naughtiness I am still

Your loving Mother

Dear Mother,

Your daughter has been most cruelly deceived! Thinking I was achieving vidya, I have been floating in a sea of avidya. My disillusion came about in this way:

There have been officials of all stripes and flavors hustling in and out of here legally picking the bones of our beautiful disintegrating Buddha Field. Prominent among them have been these men from the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the Department of Justice accusing us of immigration fraud. Our dear U.S., as you in South Florida know, has gone from being a global void that had to bribe people to come or else drag them here on slave ships to being a kind of last chance in a world of economic misery. Maybe the world has always been economically miserable-why would anyone work otherwise?-but people didn't use to know' it and now they do. Rather close as distances go out here is the border with Sonora in Mexico and apparently a number of our sannyasins were wetbacks of this utterly dry kind, since they've come in across the desert, smuggled in trucks and boxcars and some of them fried to death, poor souls. Also, from the India days, the ashram has a number of Europeans-mostly West Germans, Swedes, Danes, and Walloons-somehow Mediterranean Catholics don't need Buddha, maybe because they have the Virgin Mary with her sweet smile-who evidently pretended to be married to American sannyasins or who really were married but the INS claims insincerely, just to get by immigration. How they measure the sincerity of a marriage I'd love to know. So as all these people were being grilled and weeded out and tagged for shipment back to place of national origin I began to wonder why the Master himself, the Arhat, seemed immune from deportation even though he was from India, which I am sure is near the bottom of the list of the Immigration Service's favorite countries.

Well, I was with my dear friend Alinga-I think I wrote to you or somebody all about her: from Iowa, lanky, spacy, pretty in a willowy pale way, very supportive to me back in the days when I was being promoted from the backhoe and the artichokes-and I mentioned this minor miracle to her and the corners of her lips turned up in a provocative way she has and she said she'd assumed I knew by now. Knew what? Knew that the Arbat's real name was Art Steinmetz, and that he was from Massachusetts – Watertown, to be exact. Water-town, Mother!

Actually I make it sound as if she told me on the spot but it" took several days of campaigning on my part, playing it cozy and not pressing until we were really relaxed together and it could kind of slide out. Evidently he did go to India and did learn Hindi and Sanskrit and some Pali and study yoga but this was all from about 1965 and then all through the Seventies, but before that he was just one more bright good Jewish boy, who even put in a few terms at Northeastern studying sales engineering and business administration before the peace movement got to him and he took off. Just think, all those times I rode the Green Line out to the MFA to be ravished by the Impressionists once more I might have passed him in that crowd of sullen-looking students always clustering there on Hunting-ton Avenue! Though I've always revered him as this ageless rishi he's actually not quite my age, a year younger if he was twenty when he went to India-the year after I was married, which might explain certain things about our relationship-the way he somehow looked up to me as well as down, and brought out my mothering instinct as well as being my Master. I'm all confused. He's not even Jewish, technically, since his mother was Armenian-you know there's that big Armenian community in Watertown, just as you cross the Cambridge line along Mount Auburn Street, past the Cemetery-and that might give him that Asiatic quality I was so sure he had. Unlike Daddy, I never was much good at identifying ethnic types. Remember how he could tell all the way across a ballroom an Irishman from a Yankee, and spot Jews where nobody else saw them, without really being nasty about it (Daddy) but just factual, by his lights? I'm truly confused but as Alinga says, Ko veda? The Arhat either opened us up and got rid of our ego garbage or he didn't, and if he did (and he certainly did in my case) who cares about race or place of national origin?-it's all maya anyway. I know she's right intellectually but still I feel deceived. I gave myself to him totally and where I thought there was this great everything, this mahat, there was nothing-sbunya. Of course one of the truths of the Eightfold Way is that the void is the plenum and vice versa, but you probably don't want to hear about that. Maybe thanks to you and Daddy I'm such an incorrigible snob it's simply the idea that he's from Watertown -if it were Newton or Belmont or even \Arlington I might not mind half so much. But I can't believe I haven't burned away even that much petty prejudice in these seven months. I still love him, of course. Maybe it's the idea that in all our intimacy-I've been seeing him nearly every day, composing letters and consulting and lately just commiserating-he kept up this pretense and said everything to me in this funny high-pitched singsong accent. While I was responding with my whole heart, with my honest voice. I mean, how big a fool can your daughter be?

Now that I know, he does remind me a bit of Myron Stern, and that must churn up a lot of old rage and frustration in me. Not at you and Daddy any more-you were no more to blame for squelching that romance than a cat should be blamed for tormenting a mouse; it was just your creaturely nature, and I, I suppose, down deep wanted you to do just what you did. My anger is at myself, all the worse in that my recent attempts to squelch an infatuation of my daughter's have proved totally ineffectual, thanks in part to the transatlantic meddling of your groom-of-choice, the impeccable Charles. Did you and Daddy ever feel even the littlest bit guilty about nixing the love of my life? Maybe it would have been a sociological misfortune but a healthy cross of genes. You shouldn't interfere with natural processes-that's called pollution. Now that I look with vidya, the Arhat has Myron's wonderful little way of cocking his head back (I thought it was the itchy beard made him do it) and lifting off his heels like a bird preening and about to take wing: king of all he surveys, adding a cubit to his height, cock of the walk, whatever. And his hands-those subtle tapered fingers, formed by generations of watchmaking and counting gold and not being allowed to own land or farm-like trickles of warm oil on your skin. Though Charles had done all those million stitches and palpations, his hands felt always a little rigid and clumsy, and cold-I used to think in bed my skin would warm his touch in a few seconds but it would take minutes and by that time this anger would be rising in me and everything would be against the grain, as they say around here-there's even a word for it, pratiloman. It's what happens when you stroke a cat against the fur.

Forgive me, you don't want to know any of this. This is my garbage and you have your own life. Somebody said to me the other day that at some point a woman must become her own mother. But it's hard when you still have one alive and well. That is amazing about the Visage buyout by Revlon, and your making all that scrumptious money! But now do put it in some safe securities-utilities pay the best dividends of-course and are not apt to go down unless the company over-commits to nuclear power-or CDs and don't listen to another word the admiral whispers into your ear. You were lucky. It seems to me that if the SEC were to investigate you could both go to jail for that tip and his son. too. How old is his son? Forget I asked, I'm not on the market, but I can tell you entre nous it's only a matter of time until I am disparue from this place. The only people left are those with nowhere else to go, or those who did attain near enough to vairagya and samadhi not to give a hoot about their surroundings. Almost all the stores in the mall are shut down, and the Karuna Pharmacy is under a heavy indictment from the narcs, and even the sweet little Sachchidananda River has dried up-I guess we were depleting the water table, with the irrigation and all the flush toilets people insisted on having. It used to be called Gritty Creek and now we can see why. Even the days have turned unfriendly-the sun is bright but not warm and the nights are viciously cold and somehow frighteningly enclosing, like being inside a black crystal or a cage of stars. So many stars!-an impossible dust of them that you never see in the misty polluted East.

If you and your voracious boyfriend are going to keep eating out at Polynesian, Mexican, and Cajun restaurants every night you shouldn't be surprised by an irritated duodenum or even diverticulitis. What you need is bran and raw iron-rich vegetables (dark-green leafy ones-not iceberg lettuce) and eggs in moderation, and to cut out all grease and fatty meats, except maybe liver once a week for the iron. Don't tailor your diet to the Admiral's-he is a man and has altogether different needs, since he has a prostate and you don't and you have smaller bones. Men can absorb much more calcium than women, and you should never drink milk for a pre-ulcerous condition-milk, it turns out, is rather bard to digest. Try Gelusil-Maalox somehow has a bad aura, a faint vibrating violet glow like those public toi_: let seats that supposedly sterilize themselves. Please don't tease me about your marrying this sailor-boy-it would be much kinder to the heirs and save a lot of legal fees if you would just live in sin. Couldn't you find another condo, with an elevator and a peek at the sea? Or get used to the pool view from his, and ignore the rattle of the diving board and the sound early in the morning from the sprinklers? If you wouldn't wake up at four in the morning you wouldn't hear, the sprinklers. Have you ever tried wax earplugs? The best are made in Europe, Oropax-little fuzzy balls that go deli-ciously soft from your body heat-but Flent's from any old American drugstore might help you. Warm them in your hand before poking them in, otherwise you could break an ear drum. I'm sorry your know-it-all swain thinks the real-estate action is moving inland and that your place is depreciating. In Florida housing may be more like cars than in the North-new is best and almost-new is second-best and then it's all downhill. Also I suspect there's a subconscious pull away from the seaside now with the icecaps melting from these holes in the ozone. But what would the two of you do with a view of a golf course? Balls through the window, and electric carts being driven right through the yard. As I remember, you never liked men having fun by themselves. And think how you'd miss the little shops at the Palm Royal Plaza -you know you didn't like Del Mar Village near as well. We Price women need to see the sea. That was a rather funny cartoon from the Miami ^ Herald but men never wear those dots (tikkas) on their foreheads, and he never claimed to be a Brahmin, only an honest Shudra (the artisan caste).

Happy Thanksgiving, and even Merry Christmas. I don't know what will be happening to me. I have to confront the Arhat and do dread it. I waited twenty-two years to confront Charles and then it was by being out of the house when he came home from work.

Thanks for letting me cry on your shoulder about Wa-tertown, etc. You were a good mother, given the vik-shipta (scatterbrained) style of your generation. I guess that's all any of us can do, follow the fashion and trust biology to override culture-if we try to be better parents than our peers, our children will feel uneasy. I mean, children aren't entirely the point of a woman's life, are they? But if not, what is⁵ Tell me if you've learned.

Addled love,

Sare

[tape]

Namaste, Master.

My little Kundalini has been avoiding me these past days.

These past days have brought many duties and distractions.

And disasters.

Disasters only to those who have not yet disengaged from prakriti. Whose vasanas still harbor phalatrishna.

That is well spoken. You are wearing Western dress. It has sharpened your tongue.

Now that it is almost December my saris seemed thin.

Your sweater indeed appears bulky. It conceals the shape of your beautiful breasts.

I blush to hear you call them beautiful. Only Buddha and his peace is beautiful.

Within bisp'eace there are a million million jewels. It is one of the priceless insights of Mahayana that particulars do not cease in nirvana. They are simply at last freed from disturbing motion. The wind of decay no longer caresses them.

As executive assistant, I have a number of sorrows to report, and one cause for joy.

I wish to bear the cause for joy. Let our lawyers deal with the sorrow. Sorrow is their trade.

The joy is that Melissa Blithedale, after months of meditation and growing disenchantment with the Presbyterian Church and her mirthless financial advisers, has experienced a change of heart. In our letter of late May she was told she would be welcome back here. Now she wants to come. And to secure your benevolence she not only offers to cease demanding return of the loan she made three years ago but wishes to kick in another five hundred K. What shall I tell her?

Tell her of course to come. Write and say, "Come, ineffable Melissa! Be no longer buffaloed!"

She will find the puram much diminished since her last stay. Then, I believe, she was thoroughly coddled.

We will coddle her again, the good Mrs. B. We will take her into our innermost councils, which since Durga V departure are underpopulated. We will bouse her in high style, in her choice of abandoned A-frames. She will find spiritual advantage in the many challenges. You have never met her, Ktindalini. Her ashram name is Mahima, which means "the power to swell to enormous size and touch the moon." She is quite short and squat, yet with a charm, a monied bounce. She has that sexual confidence of rich women. She is of.an old San Francisco family. You will enjoy her. She is amusing. You and she will speak the same language, that of the manner born.

I am not sure she and I will speak any language.

How is that, my most precious? No. Don't touch me yet.

As you wish, my nayika.

When I first came here, my leader in dynamic meditation kept shouting at me, "Who are you?" Now I ask the same question of you, Master. Who are you?

Who do you think I am?

I think you are my Master and love and my living path to Buddha.

[Silence.]

But now I have been told that you are not a holy man from India but a Jewish Armenian from Watertown, Massachusetts.

[Silence.]

Which is true, Master?

Wherein is the contradiction? Why may not a holy man come from Watertown? Why may not the living path begin there?

Perhaps there is no reason.

And yet you feel one. You feel deceived. Worse, you feel mocked.

Yes, I suppose.

Our tantric lovemaking, the highly successful technique of vajrolimudra, now seems a mockery, a loss of your dignity because behind the mask and accent of the guru a pair of Western eyes watched, and a brain thinking with a coarse American accent?

Something like that. Let me hear your real voice.

I'm not sure I can still do it. Even my brain now, when it talks to itself, has the Arbat's voice.

When did this incredible imposture first occur to you?

I resent the word "imposture." I grew into it organically. It's a phase of my being, a karmic reality. In India I became Indian. I never applied for citizenship, but the rest of it-the diet, the clothes, the languages, the mind-set-just came and filled me in. But they didn't forget-the Indian authorities. They remembered, and when enough little embarrassments at Ellora bad piled up-injuries, bad trips, complaints from parents, complaints from neighbors-they kicked me out. The wogs deported me.

Why isn't this generally known?

I wasn't getting stateside publicity in those days. I was just one more guru obscuru. Coming to the States was Durga 's idea, and she was right: this is the place to score. This is the place where dubkba translates into money. Back in India, once I was gone, what did they care? To them, I was one more piece of foreign klisbta-as long as I left and the ashram dissolved, they were happy enough. Their dirty little secret was, our farm-bouse and its bit of land was where they were putting one of their cardboard-and-plaster bousing projects, with rakeojfsfor everybody. Our getting out quietly was pan of our price for not balking at their price. What you got to realize about India, it may be poor but it's a capitalist country. People are on the take. For peanuts by our standards, but on the take.

But how did you get into this country?

No problem. I bad my old passport. Dean Rusk bad signed it, that's Bow old it was. I went and got it renewed at the consulate in Bombay and walked through controls at Kennedy.

Welcome home, Mr. Steinmetz. I didn't even bother to put on a suit. Durga and Nitya andAlinga knew, but that was about it. Ma Prapti maybe, but I think not; otherwise she would have blabbed when she got to blabbing. Not everybody came in the same plane, remember. You stand in the fast line, they look up your number to see if you're on the feds' shit list, and bingo, if you 're not, you 're in. Once in, I'm the Arbat again.

But how did you become the Arhat in the first place?

The story of my life. O.K. I was born on Elton Avenue, of these two crazy mismatched people. There wasn't any religion around the bouse, my parents cancelled each other out. They must have had great sex, because nothing else showed. My mother was actually a kind of anti-Semite. She couldn 't stand my father's people, from over in the old West End, mostly. She thought they were pushy, greedy, slippery, and bad crucified Christ. And him and the Armenians-be called them barbarians, be called them gypsies. He'd say the Turks should have finished the job, she 'd say Hitler didn V have such a bad idea. I got nothing, 'growing up. No baptism, no bar mitzvab. My mother didn't even make cboeregsfor breakfast, she said my father could go out and buy himself bagels. People felt sorry for me. One of my mother's older sisters, Aunt Mariam, took me to church a few times at Easter and Christmas-to St. James locally and that new one they put up over on Brattle Street, right in Wasp country-but, Jesus, the services were endless, and all that incense and candle smoke did a job on my sinuses. Iwasone of those kids with tons of allergies. The desert here has been great for that, by the way. The same with you? I notice your nose runs a lot. O.K. Don't answer. Sulk. Make your guru squirm.

So: spiritually I grew up with nothing, just these ethnic slurs all the time and noises from the bedroom. But there was something-a blank little God I carried with me like a tiny teddy bear in my bead, this little curved shadow like a busk clinging to the underside of my brain. I mean, it was me, yet something more than me, something I could appeal to-and there wasn V just input, there was output. I was transmitting and receiving. I could feel it at night. But also in the day, in the middle of the afternoon, out on the schoolyard, this terrific joy, this gratitude that kept spilling and spilling out of me like thread when the sewing machine goes crazy. But it had no face or name; it bad no form. I was jealous and sore-my parents with their orthodox upbringings bad been given something, it was part of their energy, and the other kids in school bad been given the same sort of thing even if they took it for granted and didn V know diddledy-squat about it and even shut on it. The Catholic girls with the little gold crosses between their tits and the Jewish boys taking off a double set of holidays and even the Protestants, their faces would get a little stiff and guilty if the talk got too dirty-you could see some shadow coming from above, some message from way upstairs.

Well, not to make a sob story out of this, it got to be the late Fifties, the early Sixties. I read Alan Watts and Krisbnamurti and Salinger and Ginsberg. I read the Upanisbads and, right there, bit this terrific verse, where the King of Death says to Nacbiketa: "The Supreme Person, of the size of a thumb, the innermost Self, dwells forever in the bean of all beings." That was Him!-my old pal God, the size of a thumb, and with just that backwards curve, you know, that a thumb has. I was at Northeastern at the time, reading poli. set. and introductory psych., and a lot of other crap that was supposed to translate into some ass-kissing desk job at John Hancock or City Hall. Suddenly I was sick of competing with nerds. I could have been shipped to Vietnam but turned out to be 4-F-too asthmatic. I thanked old God and took off for India. Unlike a lot of the trash went there after the Beatles cruised Calcutta, I stuck. Whereas tbe imposture in that? 1 found peace, 1 gave peace. India made sense to me-Buddhism made sense to me-the way you can take as much or little as you want, the way even nothing is something. After fifteen years I was Indian. The people that came to that first ashram in Ellora-there on the edge of town, this falling-down tin-roofed lime-green bouse-were almost all of them Westerners. Why would they want to come to another Westerner? Subliminally, of course, what attracted them was that I was a Westerner-my vasanas spoke their language. I spoke to their hangups. But up front I bad to be strange-/ had to look like something else, afresh chance. So I gave myself an Indian childhood as a beggar boy in Bombay -what 5r the big deal? Maybe I once was a beggar in Bombay, a Sbudra gone to seed, and not good enough even at that, so for my sins I got shoved into the incarnation of a messed-up little Armenian just across the Cambridge line, across the line from all those botsy-totsy bits of ass like you. You 've been bliss, frankly. The way you talk in complete sentences, the way you bold your bead, your posture. Nice. I mean really nice. Now you begrudge me everything because of a little name-change. What's the point of living if you can V shuck skins?

No point, Art.

Come on, Kundalini. What's your old name? I've forgotten.

Sarah.

Come on, Sarah, put away that long face. Stop trying to lay a guilt trip on me with those big dark eyes. Guilt trips went out with the rest of the garbage.

Tell me. What is not garbage to you?

Purusba is not garbage. The eternal present is not garbage.

Don't touch my breasts. I mean it.

What's this protecting your tits again suddenly? We've been friendly-didn V you like it? Multiple o V, every time.

They were lovely but, as you said, partook of flux. Flux and duhkha.

Fuck flux anddubkba. Listen. I need a vacation. Everyman needs a vacation. For a man, a woman is a vacation. I need you to love me the way only you can.

I do love the way you used to say "love."

My luff for you wears a million guises. You are Sbakti, I am Shiva. I am Krishna and you are Radba, shlippery with your own sweat and rajas, your hair all in sbnakes and your clothes torn in delirious disbarray.

No, really-hands off, Arthur. Arthur Steinmetz.

My father used to say Steinmetz was a genius, my mother would say be was a dwarf. The brains behind Edison. The feeling of your ass in my bands, one cheek in each.

Darling, I'm not kidding. We've had it.

Why? Because of names? What does it matter, what name I have? Or you have? A little flick of karma, and I'm a centipede, and you 're a chestnut tree in blossom.

I can't exactly say why. For a woman to give herself-and it's utterly lovely, to give yourself-there has to be an illusion, or it's no good. Maybe "illusion" isn't the word, since everything is 'illusion. There has to be an appearance-a possibility-of progress. There has to be rectitude.

We'll make progress. We'll have rectitude. The garbage's gone, all that drugs and paranoia. Melissa's coming with her moola. Stay here and we 'II build it up again, along more classic lines. Hinayana this time instead of Aiabayana. Less group stuff, more one-on-one. Cut out all 'the commercial crap, keep off TV. Just the bow-to-live books and the less far-out tapes, and go for a more modest operation that won V make waves in the courts. Keep peace with the local squares. This is a great spot, if we don't abuse the water situation.

Why do you want me? In your philosophy, one woman is as good TLS another. We're all lotus to your linga. With this particular lotus, I fear the bloom is off. Though of course I do adore you. More this moment than ever; there're all these new layers of you to get to know.

But no rectitude. Who'd you ever know who bad rectitude? Your husband-what was his name? Charles. Charles the Worthy. Whenever you mention him you get prim and cute and arch your back. What's going on between you two? I get the feeling be and I exist in some sort of symbiosis. It 's making me jealous as bell.

Don't be ridiculous. I can't stand him.

You ask me why I want you. One, you 're a knockout, with these super knockers and a two-bandsful ass.

Keep your hands to yourself. Don't be so adolescent. I'm almost forty-three.

Ripe. That's nice. Two, you 're every inch a lady, and I seem to be a sucker for that. My own social insecurity, no doubt. Everything goes back to having a lousy childhood.

Mine wasn't that great, you know. My mother-

Three, you know the ropes here, and, frankly, I don't. I reach into myself and say what comes but the organizational part of it has always been over my head. There's always been women to do the-

The dirty work.

The nitty-gritty, the stbula side of things.

You would have to do with fewer limos.

Absolutely-that was just an image kind of thing. The humor of it appealed to me, being dragged along these dusty washboard roads like they were Fifth Avenue.

And the diamonds. They should be sold.

Sure, sell 'em-though you won't get half of what we f aid. Again, it was the symbolism, the Buddha Realm bit, the pan-nirvana part of It. It got people's attention; gave 'em a little shock. Stop people short for even a second, and you have that much more of a chance of enlightenment fighting its way past the abam and all that defensive furniture.

I understand the theory; but the practice has proved to be very expensive.

You may or may not believe this, but I really don't give a shit about any of this material garbage. It's all external, it's all just semiotics. I am non-attached, that's not just bullshit.

Then I, too, may be dispensed with.

To you I'm attached. Maybe not forever; as you say, I'm subjected to a lot of temptation. But for now I'd like you to bang around. I'd luff for you to bang around.

Don't do that to me. Say that word that sweet way.

Hey… Flash: Watertown boy confesses emotional dependency on North Shore matron! Ashram recovers, Arizona declares bank holiday.

Thanks, dear, but, truly, no thanks. I figure I've had as much sahasrara as I can stand. And if you or your other in-residence Shaktis try to keep me from going, I'll tell the world you're really Art Steinmetz. Now that would be a news flash.

Don't talk ugly, Sarah. We're trying to get back on an even keel, you and I. I don 't know bow good that is as blackmail-it might leak out anyway, if the media keep working me over, or Durga tries to make a killing on her story. It might not hurt so much. It might just stop people short for that second we were talking about and let in some light… You 've beard me at dar-sban-you can say it 's all bullshit and still they dig it. They think your saying it's bullshit is bullshit. Deep in Kaliyuga as we are, it's bard to come up with bad publicity.

Well, at the least you'd have to scrap a lot of T-shirts. I think you're a teentsy bit bluffing. I think you like being the Arhat.

All it means is "the deserving one." I deserve all I can get, after the lousy upbringing I bad.

What do the scriptures say of the arhat? "In character as excellent as the gods, in meekness as the ascetic, and in wrath as the thunderbolt."

That's me. Speaking ofvajra, let's lie down to talk. I got to get used to this idea of doing without my Kundalini. I'll miss those multiple o’s.

I'll miss them too. But I think they were just a stage.

Sure. Use me and throw me away.

We throw ourselves away. All of us. Isn't that what "you taught?

I forget what I taught. I get frightened, Sarah. All this spiritual responsibility is frightening. I need you to give me some structure. I need those big tits of yours to suck. I need to bold on to your ass.

Stop trying to sex me up. That's very chauvinistic, what you imply-that women don't get frightened too.

Buddbatvam yosbidyonisamsritam.

Oh sure. Women are gods. Women are dirt. It comes to the same. Women are just like men are-little bits of purusha caught in prakriti, lost and isolated in all that duhkha. Why did it happen? How did purusha get so 'polluted?

The explanation is, it allowed itself a moment, just a moment in all that eternity, of self-reflection. And, whoomph, everything clouded over. Bingo: maya. But fear not, Kun-dalini. A way out exists. The thinking brain-buddbi-can lead man-and woman, if you insist she needs an out-to the edge of awakening. When prakriti is recognized as itself, it flees the spirit, the Sankhya-sutras put it, like a dancer who has satisfied her master's desire.

And isn't that a chauvinistic image, by the way?

Come on, ease up on the gender politics. I'm trying to answer your question. People want to confuse purusha with the cbitta-vrittis, or with buddhi; but these are just the most complex and rarefied manifestations of prakriti. Prakriti, like purusba, is eternal, but it has a kind of incipient motion, a teleological instinct. Once it departed from its original state of alinga, energy appeared, monstrous amounts of it, called "mabat." And then evolution, parinama, took over. Come here, you sweet botsy-totsy. Let me check if Buddhahood still resides in your yoni. I'll eat the bastard out.

Don't be gross. What I've never understood about nirvana-

Yes, you little yum-yum?

How does it differ, from extinction?

Who says it differs?

All that Mahayana business does-but maybe that's just popular superstition, icing an originally austere cake. The same thing happened in Christianity. But I can appreciate how the popular mind works: why have all this religion to attain just what we're afraid we're going to get anyway? I mean utter death, utter extinction.

Cut it out, Sarah. You're frightening me. It was bad enough always having my parents threatening each other with genocide.

See? You're no help. You just reduce everything to the personal.

You haven't been a sannyasin long enough to understand. You haven’t burned away your ego, your pbalatrisbna. You must become sbunya. You must become emptiness. Sbunya also means a girl of low caste, a slut. When you become an utter slut, then vajra will shatter you. Buddha will fill you.

When does he fill you?

When be fills you.

Thanks a lot.

Baby, all your questions-they are optical illusions of the mind. They disappear in the right light. You still have that Christian capitalist me-first mind-set.

Look who's talking-Art Steinmetz, the pseudo-Hindu.

Steinmetz, the Arbat, Krishna, Buddha-you 're bung up on these secondary distinctions.

If your mind-set is so great, why do you keep saying you're frightened? Why are you begging me to stay?

Being a jivan-mukta, you 're still a person. You 're like the potter's wheel that keeps turning, though the pot is finished. I am not begging. I am respectfully inviting.

I respectfully decline.

We bad such super maitbuna.

We did, 'but funnily enough that's not a reason to stay. It's a reason to go.

Spoken like a man.

If you had spoken like a man you would have told me who you were.

I am what I have ever been.

A liar. A sham.

You know, you have gotten a bit butch since coming here.

I used to hear Durga call you Art and I thought I was mishearing her Irish accent.

So it's jealousy of Durga this is all about. She was in on something you weren't.

Shams. That's what men are. Liars. Hollow frauds and liars. All of them. You're the nothing, not us cunts. You're the shunya.

Ah, shit, Momma. Suddenly you're boring me.

[end of tape]

Dear Mahima-

It filled me with limitless joy to receive your letter announcing your rebirth as a sannyasin. The shanti of the Buddha penetrates everywhere, and will redeem every atom before the end. Your supplementary loan of five hundred thousand ($500,000) is hereby gratefully acknowledged and its instant repayment at your pleasure guaranteed. Its temporary repose within the Treasury of Enlightenment will go far to repair the damage in these past months done the ashram by its ego-ridden enemies both within and without, and to fuel the flame of dispassionate wisdom which we seek to set before the world. To quote the blessed Dhammapada: "It is sweet to have friends in need; and to share enjoyment is sweet. It is sweet to have done good before death; and to surrender all pain is sweet."

You will find many changes when you return. The security force, now called the Peace Patrol, has been much reduced, and no longer wears its lavender paramilitary uniform, with belting and epaulettes. Instead, our young protectors, no less healthy and vigorous than before, wear loosely fitting karate pajamas, and instead of Uzis and Galils arm themselves only with wands of hickory wood and attitudes of impregnable benevolence. Miraculously, the number of trespassers and spies they once had to repel has markedly diminished, and if you find the outermost sentry post deserted, have your driver himself swing back the de-electrified gate and serenely proceed.

You will find here a number of state-employed clerical workers and conscientious bureaucrats who are supervising the legal exactions made upon our properties. These alien personnel are non-threatening and, increasingly, sympathetic; indeed, a number of them have expressed interest in my halting preachments and in more than one case have succumbed to the inexorable appeal of the Eightfold Path. The Hall of a Millionfold Joys, whose foundations were merely a hole in the earth when you were led astray by the delusions of Presbyterianism, is now being dismantled because of alleged violations of the Arizona laws pertaining to zoned ranchland use, insurable electrical wiring, and required number of emergency fire exits. A small glassed-roofed shed, however, will be allowed to remain, in the position of the present entrance foyer, to be used as a combination agricultural greenhouse, tractor garage, and emergency meditation space.

The Fountain of Karma, which you will recall in all its multi-colored, round-the-clock glory, now plays for half an hour at dawn and at sunset, when the sannya-sins, passing to meditation, darshan, and aerobic exercises, may contemplate its symbolism of endlessly restless prakriti. The other twenty-three hours, it rests, and allows the Sachchidananda River to replenish its depleted flow. To quote the sacred Upanishads: "This earth is honey for all beings, and all beings are honey for this earth. This water is honey for all beings, and all beings are honey for this water." Although unusually severe climatic conditions this past summer reduced our anticipated artichoke harvest, our agricultural expert Hanuman has exciting new plans for acres of xerophilous, oil-rich jojoba and therapeutic mescal bean.

You will find a great choice of accommodations when you arrive. Many former pilgrims have deserted the Eightfold Path for the vanities of secular life. A number of others have been restored to their native lands. Commodious trailers and air-conditioned A-frames stand empty for you; I recommend that you take up residence close to my abode, and to the Uma Room, where you will be working to help administer the revised fortunes of the ashram. Our sister Alinga, our brother Yajna, our vigilant accountant Nitya Kalpana, the delightful and energetic Satya and Nagga and many others await your healing presence and guiding counsel. Above all I await you. We shall resume, dearest Melissa, your ascent to samadhi where it was regrettably arrested at the third, or Manipura, Chakra. Since this is the "gem center," the thought has crossed my mind that if you were to divest yourself of your own gems, secluding them within the impassive bosom of our Treasury of Enlightenment, you might be freed of the klishta they represent. Consulting your records, I am now inclined to believe that the burning sensation you often reported was the vain effort by your subtle body to remove this granthi with tapas, the cleansing ascetic fire. Lightened of the impure weight of personally retained jewelry, you should quickly rise up thesushumna nadi to the fourth Chakra, Anahata, whose element is air and whose principle is touch and whose presiding deity is Isha. After that, as the sages say, "Ko veda?"-"Who knows?"

Anticipation of the bliss that will be assuredly yours fills me with immeasurable satisfaction. My colleagues at the ashram are of like mind. Even our little river seems to play a merrier tune and once again to merit its name. To quote once more the invaluable Dham-mapada: "He [or she] who in this world has gone beyond good and evil and both, who, free from sorrows, is free from passions and is pure-him [or her] I call a Brahmin." I am eager to embrace you.

Yours most faithfully,

Shri Arhat Mindadali

Head, Ashram Arhat

/k

Cher monsieur,

Je vous envoie ci-joint un chèque pour cent mille dollars des Etats-Unis ($100,000 U.S.)-le déposez à mon compte. Ma nouvelle adresse suivra bientôt. Je ne me trouverai pas encore dans The Babbling Brook Motel.

Agréez, je vous prie,

l'expression de mes sentiments très amicaux,

#4723-9001-7469-8666

December 3

Gentlemen:

Enclosed find a check for $100,000 to be paid into my account with your bookshop. The address on this stationery will no longer be valid-in fact, I very much look forward to visiting Samana Cay in the near future, and perhaps taking up residence there. So you will know me when you see me-I am rather tall for a woman, with dark and abundant hair, touched with gray as yet but lightly, and with what has been kindly described as "a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale." Actually, I don't weigh a pound over one hundred thirty-five, which is still a bit heavier than perfection. I look forward very much to browsing in your store, drawing upon some of my considerable credit with you, and acquainting myself with your island and its idyllic (I have every reason to expect) climate.

Yours in keen anticipation,

Sarah P. Worth

Dear Jerry-

Please take this tape and put it in the safest place in Caracas-your lockbox at the bank if you have one, otherwise somewhere around the hacienda, maybe with your kids' rock tapes, like the purloined letter in that idiotic Poe story they used to make us read at Concord Academy. I don't hope ever to have to use it but there may.be unpleasant developments where its evidence could be useful. Don't listen to it-it won't make much sense to you and doesn't show your sister at her best. And Esmeralda might be shocked-she's such a Latin lady.

I've decided to leave the ashram. I think the winter here is worth skipping-they tell me it's brief but raw, and there's nothing worse to a New Englander than a winter that doesn't pack any kind of picturesque punch but doesn't let you enjoy the outdoors either. I'm thinking of an island-just being on the same continent with the men in my life makes me feel crowded and harassed. Charles has been rather quiet, but now that I know the reason why, it's worse than the harassment. I'll get over it, of course. People get over everything, and that's the secret of all the persisting religions-God or whatever they call it gets credit for our animal numbness and reflexive stoicism and antibodies and healing processes, or else we die and that shuts us up as effectively as an answered prayer.

I'm sorry, I don't want you to think you have a bitter sister. But one of the things you as a male will never have to know is how much a woman can suffer-jealousy, humiliation, panic, sense of betrayal-such a churning would shake a man to pieces; his nuts would come off his bolts, and all the studs out of his dress shirt. I've had some disappointments and reversals lately, but not along the lines of your scoffing jeering letter last summer. The Asian part of my experience has been perfect-a whole new vocabulary to frame the perennial problems in, and a way of looking at them that makes them almost vanish, like those holograms-remember, the postcards we thought were so risqu6 from that variety store in Roslindale?-that are somehow printed onto tiny iridescent ridges and show you different things or the same thing from a different angle when you very slightly move your head. Just as changing your head on the pillow gives you the strong sensation for a minute that you're about to go to sleep.

Mother, I've decided, is just beyond me. Why don't you fly up with some of the grandchildren? You could combine it with Disney World and Epcot Center. She's playing these wild games with Daddy's stodgy old blue chips and last month actually made a killing of sorts, so you can bet she's going to keep at it until she loses everything. I hope you weren't counting on much of an inheritance-I'm sure not. Some of the Price and Pea-body silver should be yours eventually but I'll keep what I have for the time being-at least it's not tarnishing black as lead like all that wonderful old Perkins stuff she has sitting around on her wrought-iron glass tables just drinking in the salt air and the acid rain from all those space shots that now at least they've stopped trying. Whether or not she marries this utterly senile-sounding admiral depends I think on how senile she becomes and how successful bis children are at preventing it. I think there are three, all in their fifties and no doubt with expensive habits and stalled careers. She ever so slightly mentioned them in one of her letters as being "rather materialistic," and I dare say they see Mother as a fortune-hunting vamp. Maybe she is, in this newest incarnation. We all have a number of skins, especially women I think, because society makes us wriggle more. Do you remember how she used to go on and on about the hateful Prices and how her mother-in-law had once commented about the décolletage of some dress she wore going out to some dance or dinner with Daddy before they were married-this must have been in the Thirties, but I don't think there was still Prohibition-being rather too "staring," meaning there was too much bare skin showing, and Mother never forgot or forgave it, and used to tell us over and over how that remark ruined not only that dress and that evening for her but the whole idea of ever going out with Daddy and having a good time, and how she always got excited telling us about it, saying the word "staring" with this terrible mother-in-law hiss? These odd little passing hurts that echo down through families like cannon balls. I've tried so hard not to raise Pearl, as I'm sure you have your six, your dear little ninos and chicas, so these petty old snubs and slights become grotesque be-alls and end-alls-the way, for instance, Mummy wouldn't let Daddy join his uncle over at Stillman, Ames, Han-nicker & Price because she didn't want him under the influence of-to be indebted to-his own awful family, and made him stay on as a trust officer at the 5¢ Savings Bank where you and I know he never was happy or his talents, really, appreciated-that lovely intuitive mind of his which had to make do with the Metaphysicals since no creative investment decisions were ever entrusted to him, just buttering up widows and second sons-all going back to her décolletage being possibly "staring," when of course if you remember Mother as a youngish woman that was a perfectly apt description-she was always looking for excuses to take her clothes off. Not just on the Vineyard with those Socialist nudists or up in Maine at Great-granddaddy's lake but I can remember her standing around in simply her girdle for hours before they were giving some party, so that these poor caterers' men dragging in these boxes and boxes of liquor had to keep averting their eyes, and as late as the Myron Stern days I remember him coming one time to the house for me and being embarrassed by this gray-haired-probably not much older than I am now, come to think of it-woman in that rather short terrycloth robe with no buttons, just a loose belt that kept coming untied, that she liked to sweep around the house in after having a bath, and his having to make some joke about it, to relieve his tension, out in the old blue Bel Air he used to borrow from his roommate. Now she's probably the oldest bimbo in a polka-dot bikini on the beach, giving herself skin cancer, and God knows how she lured this poor admiral into her sun porch. She said he kept tapping on her hurricane shutters but if I know Mother those shutters were up and all the lights blazing.

Didn't mean to run on nostalgically like this-the cassette's the thing. Guard it with su vida, as they say. You won't see this grotesque stationery with its faux-naive logo any more, unless I steal some when I leave. I'm actually staying the night, tonight, which feels strange, since I've been using the dreary lobby, full of gun magazines, off and on these past months as a place to conduct my business. Some four-footed beastie keeps snarling and scratching and whining outside my sealed window, but if you turn the air-conditioner up to high it pretty well drowns him (or her-why do we always think predators are male?) out. The whole town of Forrest is sinister, in fact-the flattened-out flatness of it, the stagnant brook with its cottonwoods, and then in the distance these abrupt wrinkled mountains that seem pieces of another world. Pearl seems to be committed to a foolish marriage to some foppish young Dutchman-but who can say what marriage is more foolish than another? All have their merits and demerits and wear out before we do. Except in your case, of course. Maybe the language barrier you and Esmeralda had at first has lent a permanent touch,of romance. It's really not wise for married people (or lovers) to understand each other too well-communication, I fear, is hideously overrated. An abrazo for the two of you, and six kisses to the little ones from their rather frazzled

Tia Sarah

Dear Ducky-

On the run, but I've been wondering how you're doing. I bet sometimes you long to be back in the closet. I know I do. Can you let Charles know ever so minimally, in that wonderful grunting way men have of communicating, that we're ready to talk if he is? As you know better than I, he is highly motivated now, and we can make the terms. I'll settle for half of everything but begin by asking for it all-the properties and securities, that is. On my alimony-would four thousand a month be too reasonable? I caught a cold in the Kansas City airport (semicircular, and drafty) and feel dismal. Let's have lunch again, when we're two totally different people.

Love (warmed over),

Sarah

Dear Martin-

The conch is a big food down here as well as a pretty shell. When I have an address I can give you, I'd love to hear if there's anything nice you can say about prison. Security? Lack of responsibility? Friendships forged in difficult circumstances? I meant to answer your last good long letter but was very busy.

My best wishes,

Sarah Worth

Dear Eldridge-

These are palm trees, common as telephone poles in^ this area. Their seeds are entire coconuts that ride across the ocean from island to island and take root. Isn't that amazing? The island I'm on is small but pleasant. I bet Boston is freezing now. But bells and lights everywhere! Merry Xmas,