*
He’d been sick not for a week but for thirteen days. He hadn’t said anything to Larry at first. One morning in a guesthouse in Bangkok, Mitchell had awoken with a queasy stomach. Once up and out of his mosquito netting, though, he’d felt better. Then that night after dinner, there’d come a series of taps, like fingers drumming on the inside of his abdomen. The next morning the diarrhea started. That was no big deal. He’d had it before in India, but it had gone away after a few days. This didn’t. Instead, it got worse, sending him to the bathroom a few times after every meal. Soon he started to feel fatigued. He got dizzy when he stood up. His stomach burned after eating. But he kept on traveling. He didn’t think it was anything serious. From Bangkok, he and Larry took a bus to the coast, where they boarded a ferry to the island. The boat puttered into the small cove, shutting off its engine in the shallow water. They had to wade to shore. Just that—jumping in—had confirmed something. The sloshing of the sea mimicked the sloshing in Mitchell’s gut. As soon as they got settled, Mitchell had begun to fast. For a week now he’d consumed nothing but black tea, leaving the hut only for the outhouse. Coming out one day, he’d run into the German woman and had persuaded her to start fasting, too. Otherwise, he lay on his mat, thinking and writing letters home.
Greetings from paradise. Larry and I are currently staying on a tropical island in the Gulf of Siam (check the world atlas). We have our own hut right on the beach, for which we pay the princely sum of five dollars per night. This island hasn’t been discovered yet so there’s almost nobody here. He went on, describing the island (or as much as he could glimpse through the bamboo), but soon returned to more important preoccupations. Eastern religion teaches that all matter is illusory. That includes everything, our house, every one of Dad’s suits, even Mom’s plant hangers—all maya, according to the Buddha. That category also includes, of course, the body. One of the reasons I decided to take this grand tour was that our frame of reference back in Detroit seemed a little cramped. And there are a few things I’ve come to believe in. And to test. One of which is that we can control our bodies with our minds. They have monks in Tibet who can mentally regulate their physiologies. They play a game called “melting snowballs.” They put a snowball in one hand and then meditate, sending all their internal heat to that hand. The one who melts the snowball fastest wins.
From time to time, he stopped writing to sit with his eyes closed, as though waiting for inspiration. And that was exactly how he’d been sitting two months earlier—eyes closed, spine straight, head lifted, nose somehow alert—when the ringing started. It had happened in a pale green Indian hotel room in Mahabalipuram. Mitchell had been sitting on his bed, in the half-lotus position. His inflexible left, Western knee stuck way up in the air. Larry was off exploring the streets. Mitchell was all alone. He hadn’t even been waiting for anything to happen. He was just sitting there, trying to meditate, his mind wandering to all sorts of things. For instance, he was thinking about his old girlfriend, Christine Woodhouse, and her amazing red pubic hair, which he’d never get to see again. He was thinking about food. He was hoping they had something in this town besides idli sambar. Every so often he’d become aware of how much his mind was wandering, and then he’d try to direct it back to his breathing. Then, sometime in the middle of all this, when he least expected it, when he’d stopped even trying or waiting for anything to happen (which was exactly when all the mystics said it would happen), Mitchell’s ears had begun to ring. Very softly. It wasn’t an unfamiliar ringing. In fact, he recognized it. He could remember standing in the front yard one day as a little kid and suddenly hearing this ringing in his ears, and asking his older brothers, “Do you hear that ringing?” They said they didn’t but knew what he was talking about. In the pale green hotel room, after almost twenty years, Mitchell heard it again. He thought maybe this ringing was what they meant by the Cosmic Om. Or the music of the spheres. He kept trying to hear it after that. Wherever he went, he listened for the ringing, and after a while he got pretty good at hearing it. He heard it in the middle of Sudder Street in Calcutta, with cabs honking and street urchins shouting for baksheesh. He heard it on the train up to Chiang Mai. It was the sound of the universal energy, of all the atoms linking up to create the colors before his eyes. It had been right there the whole time. All he had to do was wake up and listen to it.
He wrote home, at first tentatively, then with growing confidence, about what was happening to him. The energy flow of the universe is capable of being appercepted. We are, each of us, finely tuned radios. We just have to blow the dust off our tubes. He sent his parents a few letters each week. He sent letters to his brothers, too. And to his friends. Whatever he was thinking, he wrote down. He didn’t consider people’s reactions. He was seized by a need to analyze his intuitions, to describe what he saw and felt. Dear Mom and Dad, I watched a woman being cremated this afternoon. You can tell if it’s a woman by the color of the shroud. Hers was red. It burned off first. Then her skin did. While I was watching, her intestines filled up with hot gas, like a great big balloon. They got bigger and bigger until they finally popped. Then all this fluid came out. I tried to find something similar on a postcard for you but no such luck.
Or else: Dear Petie, Does it ever occur to you that this world of earwax remover and embarrassing jock itch might not be the whole megillah? Sometimes it looks that way to me. Blake believed in angelic recitation. And who knows? His poems back him up. Sometimes at night, though, when the moon gets that very pale thing going, I swear I feel a flutter of wings against the three-day growth on my cheeks.
Mitchell had called home only once, from Calcutta. The connection had been bad. It was the first time Mitchell and his parents had experienced the transatlantic delay. His father answered. Mitchell said hello, hearing nothing until his last syllable, the o, echoed in his ears. After that, the static changed registers, and his father’s voice came through. Traveling over half the globe, it lost some of its characteristic force. “Now listen, your mother and I want you to get on a plane and get yourself back home.”
“I just got to India.”
“You’ve been gone six months. That’s long enough. We don’t care what it costs. Use that credit card we gave you and buy yourself a ticket back home.”
“I’ll be home in two months or so.”
“What the hell are you doing over there?” his father shouted, as best he could, against the satellite. “What is this about dead bodies in the Ganges? You’re liable to come down with some disease.”