At 10:58, a jet passes overhead, bound for Katmandu.
At 11:05, I take the dirty sweatpants from around my neck, stand up, put them on over my khakis. I put the coat/shell on, drawstring it tight, tuck my chin down, so none of my face is exposed. With a rush of happiness, I remember there are two more dirty pairs of pants in my pack! I drape them like blankets over my legs and feet. What else do I have? Two pairs of dirty underwear, which I briefly consider putting on my head.
By 11:22, I can see my breath.
Even in my socks, my feet are freezing. I sit still; any move may cause an increase in Coldness, and any increased Coldness is, at this point, unacceptable. I remember a certain yoga move that involves tightening the rectum to get a heat tingle to surge up the spine, and do this, and it feels better, but not better enough to justify the exhausting rectal flexing.
At 11:55, dozing off, I wake to the sound of a woman’s voice, possibly my wife, shouting my name from near the Committee Tent.
Time slows way down. I wait and wait to check my watch. Three hours go by, slow, torturous hours. It is now, I calculate, around three in the morning. Excellent: Next will come predawn, then dawn, then the minivan, the hotel, America. As a special treat, I allow myself to check my watch.
It’s 12:10. Fifteen minutes—fifteen minutes?—have passed since my wife called my name. Dammit, shit! I find myself in the strange position of being angry at Time.
Subel stirs, gets up, says he’s going back to the tent: His feet are too cold.
I take out the flashlight, carefully write: If it gets colder than this I’m fucked.
It gets colder.
Soon I’m making no effort to stay awake or, ha ha, meditate: just trying not to freak out, because if I freak out and flee into the Nepali darkness, it will still be freezing and I’ll still have eight hours to wait (eight hours? Christ!) before the minivan returns.
At 12:15, time officially stops. My current posture (sitting up cross-legged) becomes untenable. I can’t help it. I fall over on my side. This is going to invalidate the whole idea of: Stay up all night, confirm no Overnight Feeding. Oh, fuck that, I think, have a feast, I don’t care. The ground is hard and cold through the thin mat. I ball the dirty pants up around my frozen feet. The drums start again, accompanied by the inexplicable smell of burning rubber. Wherefore burning rubber? I can’t figure it.
It starts to rain.
To say I fall asleep would be inaccurate. It’s more like I pass out: unwilled, involuntary, unstoppable. Out I go, totally, like a wino on whom a clothes hamper has exploded.
I would characterize the quality of my sleep as: terrified/defiant. I am think-dreaming: Hypothermia! People died out here last night, people who were probably wrapped in blankets. People are probably dying right now. This is serious; try and wake up, really.
I won’t wake up, I won’t, I answer myself. Because if I wake up, I’ll be back where I was before, trapped in that freezing endless torment of a night.
But finally I do wake up, with a start, shivering, colder than I’ve ever been in my life. I struggle back to a sitting position, find my flashlight, groggily check the time.
It’s 1:20.
I’ve slept an hour.
Shit shit shit, the night is still young.
It starts to rain harder. The flashlight makes a little hiss-pop and goes out—possibly, it occurs to me, the boy’s way of saying: Lights out.
Looking into the darkness, I think: Still there? Through all of this, and much more, so many other intolerable nights, before I even knew you existed? If Snake One bit you on a night like this, did you hear it coming? Did you think of bolting, screaming out, calling for your mother?
Poor kid is just sitting in the dark all alone. Tonight, anyway, nobody seems to have the slightest interest in feeding him.
Something powerful starts to dawn on me.
No one has entered the Enclosure all night. After a couple of early checks, the brother and his pal hightailed it back to the Committee Tent. The only entry, the front gate, has been locked since we arrived.
The fact that the Powers That Be (tonight, just the brother and his pal) let us spend the night with no advance notice argues against the existence of a Secret Feeding Plan, because any such Plan would therefore constantly be at the mercy of Drop-Ins, i.e., would have to be aborted anytime anyone showed up to spend the night. There could theoretically be days in a row, weeks even, when it would be impossible to perform the food sneakage.
A suave, logical Devil’s Advocate arrives in my mind.
Come on, think aggressively, he says. Don’t be a sucker. Is there any possible way they can be sneaking him food?
They could theoretically, I answer, be hiding food in the woods and bringing it in over the fence at a position far from the gate.
Could a person get over that fence without making any noise? he says.
I don’t think so, I say. I can hear it anytime anyone leaves the tent, even to pee. And besides, how does an earnest hyperreligious monk who dreams of a god telling him to flee his home become a boy who willingly and sneakily accepts food and water when he has publicly forsworn these?
Good point, says the Devil’s Advocate.
Doesn’t ring true, I say.
No, it doesn’t, the Devil’s Advocate says, and fades away.
THE LONGEST NIGHT IN HISTORY, PART III: FURTHER CRAZY TALK IN THE NIGHT AS MY ENERGY DROPS TO SCARY LEVELS
No light appears in the distance to signal dawn, not at all; it just keeps getting darker. I’m shivering, desperate for the paradise of that sad little gray van. I’ll put my feet up on the seat, have the driver crank up the heat! We’ll stop for tea; I’ll pour the tea down my freezing three pairs of pants! I hallucinate a Georgia O’Keeffe flower that opens and closes in megaslow motion while changing colors. I walk downhill into some sacred cave, part of a line of chanting Eastern Holy Men. One of the Holy Men asks a ponderous Zen question, which I answer in a comedian voice via some kind of fart joke. A laugh track sounds in my mind. The Holy Men are not amused. The boy intervenes: That is his way of being profound, he says, leave him alone.
I’m so tired, says the Devil’s Advocate, who has now come back.
Oh God, me too, I say.
Finally, I give up on getting comfortable, and this seems to help. It’s a strange thing, staying up all night in the jungle to see if a teenager pulls a fast one via eating. The pain I am feeling at every sensor is making me kind of giddy. Being beyond tired, beyond cold, completely stripped of control, I’m finding, has the effect of clearing the mind.
You know that feeling at the end of the day, when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away and, for maybe the first time that day, you see, with some clarity, the people you love and the ways you have, during that day, slightly ignored them, turned away from them to get back to what you were doing, blurted out some mildly hurtful thing, projected, instead of the deep love you really feel, a surge of defensiveness or self-protection or suspicion? That moment when you think, Oh God, what have I done with this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how must I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets?
I feel like that now: tired of the Me I’ve always been, tired of making the same mistakes, repetitively stumbling after the same small ego strokes, being caught in the same loops of anxiety and defensiveness. At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me. So what is stopping me from stepping outside my habitual crap?
My mind, my limited mind.
The story of life is the story of the same basic mind readdressing the same problems in the same already discredited ways. First order of business: Feed the trap. Work the hours to feed the trap. Having fed the trap, shit, piss, preparing to again feed the trap. Because it is your trap, defend it at all costs.
Because we feel ourselves first and foremost as ph
ysical beings, the physical comes to dominate us: Beloved uncles die, parents are displaced, cousins go to war, children suffer misfortune, love becomes a trap. The deeper in you go, the more it hurts to get out. Disaster (sickness, death, loss) is guaranteed and in fact is already en route, and when it comes, it hurts and may even destroy us.
We fight this by making ourselves less vulnerable, mastering the physical, becoming richer, making bigger safety nets, safer cars, better medicines.
But it’s nowhere near enough.
What if the boy is making this fight in a new way, by struggling against the thousands-of-years-old usage patterns of the brain? What if he is the first of a new breed—or the most recent manifestation of an occasionally appearing breed—sent to show us something new about ourselves, a new way our bodies and minds can work?
Could it be? Could it?
Part of me wants to hop the outer fence, hop the inner fence, sit knee to knee with him, demand to know what the hell is going on.
I get up, but just to take a piss. It’s so dark I can’t tell when I’ve left the trail. There are dim shapes on the ground, but I can’t tell if they’re holes, shrubs, or shadows. I think of snakes. I think: Bring them on. Then I think: Hoo boy, no no, don’t bring them on. I try to get deep enough into the woods that nobody will, tomorrow, step in my piss. When I do go, it’s Niagara-esque, so loud the boy must hear it, if in fact he’s still hearing things.
Sorry, sorry, I think, I just really had to go.
I look up into the vast Nepali sky. Night, I conclude, is a very long thing. Is he suffering in there as much as I’m suffering out here? I wonder.
If so, then what he’s doing is a monumental, insane feat of willpower.
If not, it’s something even stranger.
THE LONGEST NIGHT IN HISTORY, PART IV: I DON’T DIE
Hours later, at a moment that (in the quality of light, a slight shift in the ambient sound) feels like the Beginning of the Beginning of Morning—the colored lights appear again.
I struggle to the fence, trying not to tread upon any sleeping lamas. Scattered across the ground inside the Enclosure are thousands of snowflakelike silverish glittering flecks. I perform a test, developed back in my acid days: Are the flecks also on my hands? They are. Are they still visible when I close my eyes? They are. Therefore they are an optical illusion, albeit one I have never had before or heard of anyone else ever having.
Oh man, I think, I have no idea what’s going on here. The line between miracle and hallucination is all but gone. I am so tired. The center is not…What is it the center is sometimes said not to do? Hanging? Having? The center are not hanging.
The lights go white, then orange. Definitely orange. I visually compare this new orange bulk of light to the orange bulk of light I know is the fire back at the Committee Tent.
Again I conclude that the miracle is a campfire.
And yet.
And yet.
Undeniably, over an indefinite period of time, during which time continues not to pass, it gets lighter. The canoeful of lamas rises up, confers briefly, rushes off on a good-morning circumambulation.
I go to the fence.
The sun comes up.
The boy is revealed, sitting, still sitting, in exactly the same position as when I last saw him, at sundown. How did you do it, I think, in your thin sleeveless garment? All night bare to the cold, matless on the cold ground, in full lotus: no coat, no gloves, no socks, no hope of an early-morning rescue.
It seems impossible he’s not dead. He looks made of stone, utterly motionless, as impervious to the night as the tree he appears to be part of. Can I see his breath? I can’t. Does his chest expand and contract? It doesn’t, not that I can see.
Because this night was hard for me, part of me expects it was hard for him and won’t be surprised if he stands up and announces he’s quitting.
But then I remember he’s already spent on the order of two hundred nights out here.
I take what I know will be my last look at him, hoping for…I’m not sure what. Some indication that he’s alive, that he’s operating within the same physical constraints as I am: an adjustment of posture, a clearing of the throat, a weary sigh.
Nothing.
I feel, to gravely understate it, the monumental distance between his abilities and mine.
Pilgrims begin arriving. They step to the fence, gape in wonder, dash off along the circular path, chatting loudly, speculating on what he’s doing and why he’s doing it.
In short, a new day begins.
I rejoin Subel at the Committee Tent.
“I salute you,” he says.
“I salute you,” I say.
Both of us are in a state of sleep-deprived paranoia. It has separately occurred to us that the boy must be dead or in a coma. When Subel brought this up last night at the fire, the brother’s only explanation was that since the boy sits leaning slightly forward, if he does die, he’ll topple forward. Subel asks me how long it takes a body to decay. We try to remember: Didn’t Prem tell us that he goes to the ditch every morning and checks to make sure the boy is breathing?
We are relatively sure he did.
The family, Subel tells me, desperate to prove that this is real, is livid with the government and the media for not arranging appropriate scientific tests. They will do anything to help; their only condition is that the boy not be touched, since this would interfere with his meditation.
We experience the deep delight of putting our shoes on again. At one of the stalls, we stop for tea. We have breakfast at another. We are escaped from the boy, from his asceticism, like guilty holidaymakers, lowering ourselves back into the deliriously physical, the realm where any discomfort is instantly reckoned with.
We drive back to Birgunj. Subel is thoughtful: He came out here doubting this boy, he says, but now thinks there is something there, the boy seems to have some power….
An early-morning fog is on everything. In the heavy traffic, we have several gravel-crunching close calls. But soon enough, we’re sleeping through even these.
Back at the hotel, under every blanket I can find, including the reclaimed emergency blanket, I sleep all afternoon, a deep, dream-drenched sleep: more O’Keeffe flowers; more secret communiqués from the boy; finally, a series of impossibly detailed tangka-like patterns in reds and yellows, constituting themselves into being from right to left. The patterns are intricate, encoded, terrifying in their complexity, full of love and challenge and cocky intelligence, beautiful and original in ways I wouldn’t have believed possible if I weren’t seeing it right in front of me, with my own eyes.
EPILOGUE: WHEREVER YOU ARE, I WISH YOU WELL
Two months later, on March 11, 2006, I get an e-mail from Subel: “A very bad thing has happened. The Buddha Boy suddenly vanished last night. He is not there anymore. There are so many reports and stories, but nothing is certain. He might have shifted to another location, but no one knows. The Committee has no idea where he might have gone. They have denied the possibility that he has been abducted. They are all, including the police and the local administration, looking for the boy.”
I’m kind of blown away by this. It occurs to me that I’ve developed a faith in this boy, a confidence that, years from now, he’ll have just finished his sitting, and I’ll be able to come back to Nepal and ask him what he learned, what I should do, what we all should do, based on what he’s learned.
Over the next week, more rumors: The fence was cut. His clothes were left under the tree. He was seen by a villager, walking slowly into the jungle. The boy turned, placed his hands together in greeting, continued. Hundreds of people were out searching for him but had so far found nothing.
Then, on March 20, the BBC reported that the boy had briefly reappeared for a secret meeting with the Chairman of the Village Committee. He said he was going into hiding and would reappear again in six years. He asked that monks perform purification prayers at the spot of his meditation. He was quoted as saying, “I
left because there is no peace here. Tell my parents not to worry.”
So it’s a mystery, even more than it was a mystery before, when it was already pretty damn mysterious.
But I imagine him the night of his escape, making his way through the woods in the moonlight, weak on his feet from months of fasting and sitting, his eyes really open for the first time since May. The world, the beautiful world, is fleeing past, and he’s seeing it in a way we can’t imagine. He’s come so far and is desperate to get somewhere beyond the reach of the world, so he can finish what he’s started.
He hasn’t eaten in months, and isn’t hungry.
MANIFESTO
A PRESS RELEASE FROM PRKA
Now it can be told.
Last Thursday, my organization, People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction (PRKA), orchestrated an overwhelming show of force around the globe.
At precisely nine in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one. At nine thirty, we embarked upon Phase II, during which our entire membership simultaneously did not force a single man to simulate sex with another man. At ten, Phase III began, during which not a single one of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place. No civilians were literally turned inside out via our powerful explosives. No previously funny person was reduced to a baggy pile of bloody leaking flesh, by us, during this Phase of our operation. In addition, at eleven, in Phase IV, zero (0) planes were flown into buildings.
All of this was accomplished so surreptitiously, it attracted little public notice.
During Phase V, just after lunch, while continuing to avoid the activities listed above, we were able to avoid bulldozing a single home. Furthermore, we set, on roads in every city, in every nation in the world, a total of zero (0) roadside bombs, which, not being there, did not subsequently explode, killing/maiming a total of nobody. No bombs, cluster bombs, or rockets were launched into crowded civilian neighborhoods, from which, it was observed, no post-bomb sickening momentary silences could be heard. These silences were, in all cases, followed by no unimaginable, grief-stricken bellows of rage and loss. No sleeping babies were awakened from sleep by the sudden collapse and/or bursting into flame of his/ her domicile, followed by the tortured screams of his/her family members, during Phase V.