The Coffee Cantata

"Ah."

"Well," Martin sighed, pointing to the trail, "what's it going to be, Ben?"

And Asher looked at the trail for a while, then at the old Englishman, unsure what to do.

"Ben, you can walk back down the valley, about forty miles. There's a bus that will take you to a UN facility, from there you may call whomever you wish." Then Martin held out his hand. "Good luck to you."

"No."

And both Asher and Martin turned to Colonel Bao, to the sound of his voice. They watched as he took off his military clothing. His jacket, festooned with military insignia, was cast aside; his belt, with the Makerov in it's brown leather holster, dropped to the ground -- and he kicked it away. Then he sighed and took off his shoes and socks, left them in a rattled heap.

Then he turned to all his things on the earth and he scowled. "No," he repeated. "I can not go back to that life." Bao then looked up, looked at Asher, then at Martin. "I have talked with this woman for hours, and I may be mad but I have listened to her words. It is time for me to choose another path, and I choose this one."

They watched as Bao started across the dry riverbed, picking his way carefully through the stones, then they turned to Mai Ling. She had knelt to his things and was carefully folding Bao's trousers now, neatly folding everything -- except the pistol, which she left on the ground -- then she stood and without saying a word followed Bao across the riverbed.

"Well," Martin said, "I suppose there's nothing for it now. Let's go."

And when Martin started across the white stones, Asher followed.

When they were all on the other side they walked along the banks of the river until the outlines of a trail appeared, but Bao stopped.

A cobra lay in the path, it's head up, fanned and ready to strike. When Asher stopped, he looked at the snake, then up at monastery -- but the mountain was shrouded in cloud now -- and then it started to rain.

+++++

"A cobra?" Sophie said.

"Yeah. And Bao just stares at the thing. We're standing there in this heavy rain, and Bao just stares at this snake. Like he was communing with the thing -- then off it went, into the grass."

"Snakes can't handle the rain, cold rain, anyway."

"Neither could I, but the whole thing was so weird. Anyway, it took about two hours to walk to the ledge, but by the time we got out on the rocks the rain had turned to snow. The rock was icy in places, but there were trees along the way and we held on to them, and Bao was shivering like mad, I mean really cold."

"The woman didn't give him his clothes?"

"He didn't ask. I think it was like a ritual of some kind. Purification, maybe, because she walked right behind him, whispered what sounded like encouragement. It took about an hour more, but we came to this gate, and there was a little bell set inside the cliff, a little alcove, like a shrine set into the stone. Martin and I watched as Bao rang it, but Sophie, I was clueless. I had no idea what was behind that gate..."

+++++

Tschering looked at Lindsey's hands, her fingers, and he remembered the way he felt when she touched him. The little waves of excitement, the sudden, overwhelming tension. The enchantment he felt when he watched her play Bach, the utter peace when she sighed through Debussy. He would sit beside her in class and watch her hands while she took notes, the precision of her movements as she crafted her words -- big, egg-shaped letters, always in purple ink. He had wanted nothing more from life than to sit and watch her hands.

'The universe is right there, in her hands,' he thought, once. 'Everything I love about life is right there, waiting to explode into being.'

And one day, in one of the music rooms, he had watched those fingers until he couldn't any longer, then he had sat beside her and taken one of her hands in his, then he had closed his eyes and let the feeling of birth wash over him.

'To begin like this,' he sighed. 'To hold creation in my hands.'

And she had taken him then. Right there in the music room, beside the piano, on the floor. She had kissed and coaxed him, played with him until instinct took over. He entered her and felt the universe open up to him -- like the petals of a vast flower parting to reveal a deeper truth, a hidden life -- and when the clouds and rain came he felt he had broken free of this life and was destined to fly away.

He remembered the way she held him, her legs wrapped around the moment, pulling him closer, taking him deeper, and how she was slow to let go, after. She wanted him too, he knew then, but something kept her apart and away from that feeling, from the truth he thought they'd found..

As he looked at her now, in the sculpture garden behind Bunche Hall, she seemed so different -- yet curiously enough, still the same. He looked at her fingers, then at the curve of her neck -- where it turned to the shoulder -- and he felt the same insistent pull. Like a specific gravity between them -- inescapable, and most enduring. Something borne of physical recognition, he assumed, yet something deeper still.

"I miss your father," Tschering said.

She nodded, tried to smile, to hide from the pain in his words.

"How is your mother?" he asked, and he could see her recoil from images that washed over open wounds.

"We haven't spoken. She left after..."

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have..."

"No, that's alright."

"Portman said you had some questions? That I might be able to help?"

"Do you ever wonder what might have happened? If that night had played out differently?"

He sighed. "Perhaps once a day? Maybe a couple of times a day?"

She laughed a little, then returned to her sorrow. "Me too."

"So, you have an academic question? About Buddhism?"

"Yes. You've read that, I take it?" she asked, pointing at her book in his hand.

"Many times."

"When I was walking, in China, I was struck by an apparent paradox, between urban workers and rural farmers. By a profound anomie in the attitudes expressed by factory workers, and a more relaxed state of mind in farmers. That's nothing new, but it got me thinking about this shift as a trajectory, of sorts, that almost all cultures have experienced as they've moved from hunter-gatherer to farmer/herder to urban dweller. I know we both missed it, but there was a saying in the sixties, 'turn on, tune in, and drop out.' It's the dropping out thing that interests me..."

"Said the writer with no small amount of irony..."

"I know, I know. Anyway, I started thinking about the old pre-Christian desert fathers, how they fled cities and retreated to the wilderness. To think about God. An unruly god, tired of being shunned."

"Guru Padmasambhava and the Taktsang Senge Samdup cave."

"What?"

"The same impulse was at work, in Bhutan. When a Buddhist teacher from the south came into the mountains to escape the forces you speak of. He flew to this cave on a tiger's back, meditated for three years, three months, three weeks, three days and three hours. I think we are talking about the same force."

"Yes, well, I'm thinking this is much more than coincidence."

"What are you thinking?"

"Yeah, that's the question. These inward treks tend to come just before an explosion of dormant evangelicalism, then a long period of religious rule follows. Existing bureaucracies are incorporated in the new religious order, long periods of repression and persecution follow, and this leads to periods of enlightenment."

"You remember reading Mann's Buddenbrooks?"

"Yes. Enlightenment leads to decay, decay to collapse."

"The Hegelian dialectic. It is everywhere, in every thing. Collapse leads to renewal."

"Maybe it's that simple, but that's what I'm not so sure of."

"What, then, if not renewal?"

"Maybe there will be a final collapse someday."

"But that is foretold in every religion, Lindsey. An apocalypse of some sort, an eventual reckoning. This is nothing new. Shiva, in the Hindu trinity, is the destroyer, yet destruction brings renewal to the universe. Harmony, the Zen concept of Wa. When an order grows imbalanced, the universe seeks to reimpose balance. Harmony, balance is the natural state of being. When an organism is in imbalance, the organism seeks to re-establish balance, or it..."

"Dies." She looked at Tschering, at the sorrow she had carried so close, for so long, and she wondered when it, too, would kill her.

+++++

Sara was finishing a roast when she walked in the shop, and the aroma was rich and heady, heavenly so. "It's your day off!" Sara said. "What are you doing here?"

"I wanted some coffee. Seemed like the place to go."

"Well, you're in luck. Jeff just delivered ten pounds of Jamaican Blue Mountain."

"Ah, that's what that is..."

"Want to try some?"

"I can't afford that, Sara."

"Bosh. Let's just sneak a little. Time to close, anyway. Why don't you go lock up and I'll make two cups."

They sat with their coffee and drifted, then Sara turned to her. "So? How much time do I have?"

"What?"

"You're leaving soon. I can feel it."

"You know, I haven't thought about it recently."

"Doug? Is that what's getting you down?"

"He's complicated."

"He's a disaster, Lindsey. He's like this tower of strength, but his strength causes everything around him to crumble."

"Buddenbrooks," she sighed, thinking about her conversation with Tschering.

"What?"

"I'm not leaving anytime soon, Sara. I have too many unfinished things to take care of before I can even think about leaving."

"How long will you stay? I only ask because you'll be so hard to replace."

"I doubt that."

"Are you writing again. I mean, really writing?"

"Yes."

"I thought so. I can see it in your eyes. You're engaged with the world again."

"Engaged? How do you mean?"

Sara sighed, then took a deep breath. "When you first came in, a few months ago, it was like your eyes were dead, almost lifeless. It's been like watching you come back to life, watching you watching customers, finding your way back among the living. Rediscovering yourself. But you always seemed to be like that, Lindsey, even when we were kids."

"Like what? Rediscovering myself?"

Sara nodded her head, took a sip of coffee. "That's right. Like when you and John broke up, then came to the prom together..."

"Sara, John is my brother."

"What?" she croaked, her eyes going wide.

"Ben Asher was my father."

Sara looked away as all the tumblers suddenly fell into place, then she just slowly nodded her head. "And no one else knows?"

"John does."

"Why did you tell me?"

"I don't know, really. Maybe you need to know."

"We were never really friends, you know. I used to resent you, especially after the book came out."

Lindsey nodded her head. "Maybe I knew that. Still, I always considered you a friend. You have been, the past few months. It meant a lot to me. You mean a lot to me."

Sara turned away, laughed a little. "It was mercenary on my part. I knew you'd bring in more customers."

"I still don't get that," Lindsey said, grinning.

"Oh? Well, look at me. We're the same age, but I've got a Michelin steel belted radial around my gut, while you still look like January's Playmate of the Month. My hair is gray, and my skin looks like crocodile hide. And you? You still look just like a goddamn Playmate of the Month. Red hair, no gray -- not one streak. Skin clear, not one goddamn wrinkle. You write a book then take off to walk around the world. You intimidate the hell out of me, because you're like catnip to men -- and you're fucking clueless. It's like you haven't noticed a fundamental principle of the universe..."

"Noticed? Like what, for instance?"

"Hell, girl, half the men come in here just to stare at your legs. I mean it. I've never seen anything like it. And Melody pointed it out to me. She's nineteen, and I thought cute as hell, but all these guys come in and ignore her...they ignore her because they're going all goo-goo eyed over you."

"You're exaggerating."

"No, I don't think so. On your days off we do half the business we do when you're here. Melody pointed that out to me, too, then I looked at the books. We do forty percent less business when you're not here. Because guess what? These guys know your schedule. They come here to bask in your glow, to say 'Hi!' to you, to see you smile at them and bring them their coffee."

"Are you...jealous?"

"Am I jealous? Fuck yes, you moron, I'm jealous as hell. It's been ten years since a man looked at me like they look at you -- every morning. Ten years, at least, since I got banged like these guys want to nail you, but then, oh no, wait a minute. Lindsey goes out and latches on to the most depressing human being in Los Angeles."

"Doug? Depressing?"

Sara snorted, looked away again. "You know about his daughter?"

"Only that she's hospitalized."

"For what? Did he tell you that much, at least?"

"Schizophrenia."

"You ought to go look her up, on Google? Or do you want this short version?"

"Sara, you seem angry about all this. Why?"

"I don't know. Maybe because the bastard hasn't told you."

"About his daughter?"

"Yeah," she snorted derisively, "about his daughter."

"What'd she do?"

"She tried to kill him."

"What? Why?"

"I don't know. Why don't you ask the bastard?"

+++++

Doug picked her up early, and they drove down Sunset Boulevard to the Pacific Coast Highway, then he turned north, heading for Ventura.

"Want to put the top down?" he asked.

"If you want."

He pushed a button and the hard-top danced and folded itself into little pieces, then stuffed itself in the trunk, and he seemed to wait for her to ooh and ah but she had leaned back and seemed to be staring at the sky.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Yes. Sorry, I was up late writing. Was I zoning out?"

"You seem distant."

"I feel distant. Far away."

"You sure you want to do this?"

"Yes. What can you tell me about what happened to her?"

"I don't know the whole story, and the trouble is I don't think even she knows the whole thing. She seems to inhabit a dream world one minute, then she's attacked by demons the next."

"Attacked?"

"Yeah. If she has one while you're there you'll understand. It's like she's being physically attacked, by beings of some sort, using knives."

"Beings?"

"What she's described to her doctors is surreal. Whatever it is she sees, they're not human."

"They attack her, with knives?"

"Yup. They cut her up, then throw her into fires, piece by piece."

"How long has it been going on?"

"Four years, almost five ago. One night she wakes up screaming, I mean real blood-curdling howls. A few minutes later the police were at the door, banging on it, getting ready to knock down the door."

"Jesus. Do you know what set her off?"

He sighed, put some heat on. "Let me know if you get uncomfortable."

"Okay."

"So. What set her off...well, the first thing that happened...she was with her mother at the grocery store and she was putting stuff on the conveyor at the check-out counter. This woman in the line ahead objected to Lacy putting things on it before she had finished unloading her own cart, and the woman really lit into her. Well, Lacy just crumbled, fell to the floor, then just sat their, almost catatonic. She wouldn't move, either."

"Wouldn't, or couldn't?"

"I don't know. Paramedics took her to Country SC."

"How old was she?"

"Fourteen. Anyway. Once we got her out of the ER we had an appointment with a psychiatrist, and she started seeing him regularly, but she just seemed to get worse after that. I mentioned it to a friend of mine here, a shrink at the medical school, and she wanted to know who Lacy was seeing. So, I told her and the next thing she wanted to do was examine Lacy. Then she hypnotized her. My friend had long suspected this other doc was molesting patients, very young girls, usually, and hypnosis revealed that. Not good enough to press charges, but she confronted the guy. And later that afternoon he killed himself."

"Oh, no."

"Lacy internalized all that, blamed herself, assumed she had seduced the guy so was, therefore, responsible for his death..."

Lindsey shook her head. "Was she ever promiscuous? Before that?"

"Yeah," he said, shaking his head. "She used to come into our bedroom when we were asleep, get up on the bed and straddle me, in my sleep. On top of the covers. She told me once that's what mommy did to the men who came over."

"I think I'm going to be sick...could you pull over?"

He flipped on the turn signal and pulled over to the shoulder, then helped her out. She walked away, taking deep gulps of air, then she stood and looked up into the sky...

+++++

Asher heard the morning call to prayer and shook his head, rolled off the pallet where he slept and walked outside, down the ledge to the privy, kicking snow off his feet before he went inside. He watched monks filing into one of the prayer rooms and smelled tea when he came out into the morning, and he walked to the kitchen, saw Mai Ling working her magic and smiled.

"Good morning, Ben," she said in her sing-song voice.

"Morning. How'd you sleep?"

She smiled, feigned pelvic discomfort and rolled her eyes, and he laughed. He had never seen two people fall so deeply in love, so quickly, and he was happy for her. For Bao, too.

She had only the simplest ingredients to play with up here, but she worked wonders with what she had and produced miraculous meals, two a day. A small breakfast and a smaller lunch. The monks eschewed anything but a simple vegetable broth after noon, so by the time morning rolled around Asher was ready to eat a yak. He said he was starving this morning, and Mai Ling handed him a plate with a little extra on it.

"Bless you, my love!" he crooned, and a moment later Martin came lumbering in.

"I think I slept on a rock last night," he said, stretching his back.

"Well, you sure slept like one," Ben said. "Only you were farting like a water buffalo."

Martin rolled his eyes. "Nonsense. I did no such thing."

"Oh? Well, you say so." Asher sniffed the air. "Or maybe you should go change your shorts."

"What ever are you talking about?"

"Well, you either brought a few along with you, or you've shit your britches."

"Bah!"

"Humbug."

Then Martin leaned over and whispered in Asher's ear: "Say, did you hear those two going at it last night?"

Asher nodded his head, grinned. "Eight rounds. She won by a knock-out."

Martin howled at that. "By God, I'm going to miss you. You're sure I can't talk you into staying and working for me?"

"Maybe in my next life, Clive."

"You know, it's funny you say that, but it's felt to me like I know you. Like I always have. Isn't that strange?"

"Clive? I think it's the methane. Breathing it in all night like that...I'm tellin' ya, it's fucking with your head."

Martin shook his head. "You're a miserable sod, you know that, don't you?"

"Yup."

"Well, even so, I'm going to miss your irreverent self around these parts."

"You going back to Laos?"

"No choice, mate."

"Why not fly me to India, fly home from there?"

"There's no way out, Ben. They'd find me in a week."

"We could get a raid..."

"Ben. If I'm not back soon, those girls will be gone. As in, forever. I let people know I'd be gone a few weeks. Any more than I have, and, well, things will become dangerous."

"Okay."

"Have you talked to the colonel?"

"Yup. He's staying."

"Mai Ling?"

"I can't see those two splitting up. Not now."

"She'll have to shave her head, too."

"I think I'm ready for that," Mai Ling said, putting a bowl of food down for Martin.

"Had enough war, have you?"

She nodded her head. "I've had enough of all that," she said, waving her hand to indicate 'everything' out there.