Chapter Eleven

Once we got on track, Marco requested silence again, so I watched the countryside pass by through the tinted window. I found that, for the most part, I could simply watch and not ruminate about anything.

Sheep littered the very green, gently rolling hills of the central part of the North Island. As we wended our way south toward Auckland, the open spaces between houses began to shrink, and the traffic picked up. More and more businesses and stores lined the highway as it expanded to four lanes and then to six for the final stretch. People drove fairly sensibly, but by the time we reached the airport parking lot, some of the civility had disappeared. Marco had to duel a pickup truck for our spot, and two other cars honked their horns at one another for no discernible reason.

“Where are we meeting Chris?” I asked after we’d parked and grabbed our bags out of the trunk. Lucy leapt out of the car but seemed disappointed to find herself in a parking lot.

“He’ll clear customs in about twenty minutes. Then our flight leaves two hours later,” Marco said. “Why don’t you greet him and tell him whatever you think will help orient him. I have some business here I need to attend to on my own.”

“Sure.”

“I’ll find you when it’s time to meet,” Marco said. He attached a leash to Lucy’s collar, and the two of them walked away from the terminal. She was in a hurry—probably to pee.

Like everything else I’d encountered in New Zealand, even the largest city’s international airport was on a modest scale, with only ten gates. There wasn’t the usual level of anxiety in the building, either. The most common phrase I heard around me was “no worries,” and I sensed that people meant it. My impression was the culture was markedly less neurotic and paranoid than the States. I wanted to bring a few of my most recalcitrant clients over for psychological rehab.

Chris and his enormous black backpack were the first ones to get through customs. He jogged the last few steps to where I stood and bear-hugged me. I was extremely happy to see him, and I hugged him at least as hard.

“So you’re okay?” he asked.

“Yes. Better than ever.” I smiled to back up my words.

He stepped back and looked me over. “You do look better,” he said. “Did you get a haircut?”

“No.”

“Lose weight?”

“No.”

“Read a good self-help book?”

“No.”

“Did you run off to Bumfuck without telling anyone and join a cult where the guru knows how to make dogs do weird shit?” Chris glared at me, but it might’ve only been for dramatic effect.

“Pretty much. If you change the ‘run off’ to ‘get kidnapped by a sports hero,’ and the ‘join a cult’ to ‘agree to be a fake Buddha.’ Turning Karma into a spelling champ is the least of Marco’s abilities, by the way.”

“One of the letters was kind of misshapen,” Chris reported. “I’m signing Karma up for remedial English Composition at the community college.”

I smiled at him. “Thanks for coming. I know this is strange and alarming.”

“You think?”

“Do you have my passport?” I asked.

“Your passport? Was I supposed to bring that?” He fumbled in his front pocket with a look of confusion on his broad face.

I glared at him, and he whipped it out of his back pocket and handed it over.

“Where is this Marco character, anyway?” Chris asked.

“I have no idea, but he’ll be back.”

“Would it be fair to say he dances to a different drummer?”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “And then some.”

“I’m hungry. Do they have pizza here, Mr. Buddha?”

“Probably. Let’s go see. I’ll fill you in while you eat. And you don’t have to call me Mr. Buddha. Sir or Master are fine.” I remembered what Marco had said. “Actually, let’s go with B-2,” I said. “For Buddha 2.0.”

“Yeah, right. You’re a fucking Buddha now. And like all the spiritual greats, you’re named after a software upgrade, and your nickname is a vitamin? Whatever happened to good old Sanskrit? I love all those Ks and vowels and shit.”

“I’m a modern guy,” I said. “In the movie of my life, I’d be played by a former cute-as-a-button child actor—a white guy, of course—who is computer savvy and saves the world by hacking into something or other.”

“Gee, that’s so original. You should write a screenplay, Sid.” He shook his head and grimaced.

Chris was the only black person I saw at the airport, and his Hawaiian shirt was by far the most hideous attire. This one sported big brown cows and even larger pink pigs scattered across a bright yellow background. They looked as though they’d been caught up in Dorothy’s Kansas-to-Oz tornado. The skinny, tattooed girl at the pizza parlor said she liked it, but she was obviously lying.

We found seats by an exterior window that overlooked the short-term parking lot. Chris propped his backpack on one of the plastic chairs, and I placed my antique suitcase by my feet. It was a very stylish piece—dark brown leather with a swirled pattern on it. It was small enough to use as a carry-on, too.

I told my story again while Chris ate, forgetting at first that he already knew the beginning of it. He interrupted me repeatedly to ask clarifying questions, which was annoying but likely to be helpful. I knew what mattered to me at this point—what I thought was worth telling. But Chris’s perspective might be a valuable reality check. What had I missed? What was worth investigating more deeply?

“Well,” Chris said when I’d finished. “I’d like to start by saying I’m totally in favor of saving the world. That’s where all the women live, for one thing. Second, if anyone else told me all that, I’d think they were making it up or crazy. But I know you, and you know people. And Karma never spelled out anything before. So my mind is officially blown. I believe you.” He twirled a corner of his bushy, black beard and frowned. He rarely engaged in self-soothing, but when he did, it was either his beard or his fingernails.

It hadn’t occurred to me that he wouldn’t believe me. “So what jumps out at you?” I asked.

“Well, if Bhante could con you, Marco totally could, too.” Chris kept twirling his beard, but now his face brightened. God knew why. “I don’t know why he’d want to, but obviously he could pull it off pretty easily. If he’d hired Frank and some Maoris, for example, then the invisibility hat deal goes up in smoke. There’s an ordinary-world explanation along those lines for almost everything you said. And I’ve read about gurus that do Shaktipat—send energy. There was Muktananda and Baba Neem Karoli, to name a couple. It means they’ve figured out how to play with energy, but Muktananda liked young girls and Baba Neem Karoli was kinda nuts. So you can have special abilities and still be screwed up. I mean, I haven’t met Marco yet. I’m just saying it’s possible.” His hand was still now. Spinning theories was apparently a more effective soothing strategy.

“Wait until you meet him, then see if that still makes sense to you,” I said. A woman brushed my shoulder with her butt as she walked by. I could tell by how squishy it was.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

I didn’t turn to look, but Chris watched her walk away. “Not bad,” he said. “Worth turning around for, bro. Yoga pants.”

“I’m kind of focused on this conversation I’m trying to have with you, Chris.”

“Okay, yeah,” Chris agreed. “The other thing is all this karate shit. The Jason part I understand. If he’s a professional athlete and he works as a bodyguard in a country with strict gun control…well, of course he’s gonna know how to fight. That makes sense. But why would a mind-reading guru kick butt? It’s anti-spiritual, right? Can you see Mother Teresa squaring off in the ring against the Dalai Lama or Gandhi?”

“She’d knock them both on their asses, I’ll bet,” I said.

“Yeah, well, what I’m saying is you hear about people getting way spiritual from doing martial arts, but that always seemed like a crock to me.” He stared at me expectantly as if my opinion about that mattered more than all the rest.

“What else?” The martial arts piece didn’t seem important to me.

“They could all be in this thing together. That’s another possibility,” Chris said.

“Who?”

“All of them—Bhante, Sam, Marco, Frank, Tommy T., Paul, the supposed clones, the parking lot attackers—the whole cast of characters. That would explain how people seem to know shit they shouldn’t know. Suppose everybody’s working for some James-Bond-type supervillain?” He grinned. Clearly, he liked this theory best. For Chris, the whole deal was still conceptual. I was the one getting knocked around in the trenches. I thought about sharing this perception, but it wouldn’t matter. Chris’s brain was a juggernaut.

“Do you mean Ram would be the villain, or are you just playing devil’s advocate?” I asked.

“It could be him, but yeah, I’m mostly just brainstorming here. I didn’t hear much doubt out of you, so I thought I ought to inject a little into the mix.”

“There were times when I was nothing but doubtful and confused,” I told him. “But now I seem to be past that. And I can’t believe Sam is evil. She’s the best part of this whole thing.”

“You know that’s what’s the most unbelievable, right?” Chris said, smirking. I’d never liked his smirk. It was markedly judgmental. “I can entertain the idea that you might be some new messiah or whatever, and maybe Marco has mastered time and space and knocking people down, but a really hot woman falling for you? Come on. Get real. And your feelings for her sound like pure lust, by the way. You don’t know her at all.”

“Do you think she has an ulterior motive, or are you just trying to insult me?” I knew he was joking, but I still felt hurt. A frown formed, and my gut clenched a bit.

“Well, does it seem likely to you? Why would someone like that have sex right away with anyone?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We did go through some pretty intense stuff together.” I watched Chris finish eating. It wasn’t pretty. He was a shoveler. “What do you think of what Marco said about the progression of energy experiences?”

“I guess it makes sense,” Chris said. “I dunno. I wonder if some of that energy would do me any good—if I go in the tomb over in India, I mean.”

“So you’re on board—you’re definitely coming with us?” I straightened in my plastic chair and let out a slow breath.

“Oh, yeah. I’m getting in on the ground floor, bro. The first few disciples in successful cults always get to live in the big house in the compound. Plus they get to boss people around and later commit crimes and then cover them up and have lots of sex.”

“I think we might try to do things differently,” I said.

“Ah, don’t tell me that. I just flew a zillion miles and ate bad pizza. I need an incentive. Where’s my spiritual babe with bare boobs?” He looked around as though she might be lurking nearby. “Hey,” he said. “There’s a giant Samoan-looking guy out on the sidewalk. Is that Jason?”

I glanced out the window. “Yeah. That’s him. He’s a specimen, isn’t he?”

Jason wore a pinstriped charcoal suit with a light blue shirt and a red tie. He looked as though he might be heading to a photo shoot for a magazine cover. Fortunately, he walked by without spying us.

A moment later one of my brothers strolled by, too.

“Whoa,” Chris said. “Look at that. That’s surreal.”

My doppelgänger spotted us and waved cheerily. We waved back. He kept walking.

“If you think that’s weird, just wait ten minutes for the next crazy thing to happen,” I told Chris. “Let’s see who walks by next. It’ll probably be your middle school girlfriend or a Beatle.”

It was Marco and Lucy.

“That’s him,” I said. “That’s Marco.”

“You’re in this country a few days, and now you know everybody that strolls by?”

Marco locked eyes with Chris through the window glass and smiled.

“Whoa,” Chris said. “I’m feeling all this shit in my chest.”

“Yeah. He does that.”

“Whoa,” Chris kept repeating every few seconds as Marco did whatever he was doing.

The waitress showed up with our check while he was still at it. “Is he okay?” she asked, gesturing at Chris with ring-laden fingers.

“He’s undergoing a spiritual transformation,” I told her. “Just ignore him.”

“Okay, no worries,” she said, ambling away.

By the time I paid with a few of the colorful New Zealand bills that Marco had given me back on the island, our mentor was gone. Chris still had the “whoas,” though. I wondered if I should slap him or something. It would have been fun, but he came back to himself before I got around to doing it.

“I feel more alive now,” Chris said.

“Yes.”

“I like it.”

“Yes.”

“It’s hard to talk.”

“Yes.”

“What’ll we do now?” Chris asked.

“Beats me.”

So we sat. Chris was quiet for once in his life. It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and we probably needed to check in for our flight soon. In a half hour, we’d rendezvous with Bhante or his people—probably Jason. I was a bit concerned that my brother had seen us and knew where we were, but it looked as though Marco would join us soon, and he could probably handle whatever arose.

He showed up a few minutes later without his beagle companion and sat down at our table. “Lucy will meet us in India,” Marco told me. “I like your backpack,” he said to Chris.

“Here’s my first question,” Chris said, suddenly coming back on line and staring at him. “Which came first—the chicken or the egg?”

“That’s what you want to know?” I asked. “That’s the first thing you want to say?”

“It’s a test,” Marco said. “He’s been saving this up for a long time.”

Chris nodded.

“Actually, neither comes first,” Marco said. “There is a mutual arising of all so-called events, which only appear to us to be sequential, given our inability to directly perceive the broadband of now in which all illusion emerges. So-called paradoxes and other logical dilemmas are simply particularly challenging iterations of what we are called upon to face in each moment—that there is a transcendental realm beyond our experience in which nothing is pitted against anything else, largely because there are actually no separate parts (or people) to play those roles. So truth embodies paradox. There is no time. There are no chickens. And there is nothing for you to wonder about because there is no you.”

After a few beats, while I was still working my way through that, Chris said, “Okay. That totally makes sense to me. Modern physics says just about the same thing, only with a lot more math. What about the meaning of life?”

“The word meaning is, ironically, a meaningless concept when one is attempting to summate that which is meta to the observer.”

“Hey, I never got answers like these,” I complained. “This is good stuff.”

“One size does not fit all,” Marcus said.

“Well, in human terms, then,” Chris said. “What’s the best approximation of the meaning of life?”

“Loving connectedness,” Marco said and smiled. “We need to get moving.”

There were no nonstops to Mumbai, but Marco had booked us on a flight with a brief layover in Sydney, Australia. We were flying first class, so the young man who checked us in—and almost broke his back dragging Chris’s backpack—offered us the refuge of the airline’s VIP lounge. It wasn’t far, and it was a much more comfortable environment than the airport at large.

“We’ll be safer here,” Marco said once we’d settled into three adjacent leather armchairs.

“What’s the plan for giving the car keys back?” I asked him.

“Chris will meet whoever’s at the information desk and say he’s me.” Aside from his more edifying answers, Marco also spoke with more animation around Chris than he had with me.

“Say what?” Chris said.

“It’ll be perfectly safe. I’ll be nearby, and I’ll intercede if necessary,” Marco said. “We can’t send Sid out there, or they might grab him again. And they don’t need to know who I am. That’s our ace in the hole.”

“Couldn’t they have seen you with us just now?” I asked.

“They didn’t,” Marco stated matter-of-factly.

“How do you know that?” Chris asked, cocking his head.

Marco offered up his customary enigmatic smile.

“Okay, whatever,” Chris said after a while. “But dude, I can’t pull that off. I’m just a chubby nerd. It’s true that I now know the answers to all of life’s mysteries, but that and a quarter will still get my ass kicked.”

“I sent you energy, and you can send it to them,” Marco said.

“Really? Cool.”

“Aim your right forefinger at whoever’s the scariest person you meet at the information booth,” Marco said. “Then say ‘Marco’s energy’ to yourself. The rest will take care of itself.”

“What’ll I say out loud, wordwise, to them?”

“Ask random people in the area if they’re from ‘Kasriti Sanganika.’ Say that back to me.”

Chris obliged. It took him three tries to get it right.

“That’s the secret name of Bhante’s organization,” Marco explained. “No one’s supposed to know it.”

“What does it mean?” I asked. I was dying to know.

“The Secret Path Society.”

“Hey, they should write a screenplay, too,” Chris said. “That’s the lamest secret name I ever heard.”

“Have you ever done any improv?” Marco asked.

“Improv comedy?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Pretend you have,” Marco said. “Here are the keys. Let’s go.”

So they left me in the lounge. I would’ve been nervous in the past, but I was fine. Whatever happened was just the next scene in this quirky movie that my life had become. I was interested in how it turned out, but I wasn’t attached to it in the same old way. In fact, I was able to close my eyes and take a nap in my cushy leather chair.

Chris nudged me awake some time later. “Oh man,” he said. “That was great. Those fuckers don’t know what hit them.”

“Where’s Marco?”

“In the bathroom.”

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

“So I got there, and there’s Jason and the guy who looks just like you by the kiosk. Jason’s got a crowd around him, and he’s signing autographs, but the other guy waves to me. I guess he recognized me from through the window of the restaurant. So I start throwing their secret name around, and they rush over. Jason is really fast, isn’t he? I wonder how he would’ve done in his prime in the NFL.” He’d been gesturing wildly, but now he held his hands together in his ample lap.

“These musings are not advancing your narrative arc,” I pointed out.

“Calm down, bro. We’ve got nothing to do until the plane takes off, right?”

“We still have to go through security,” I said, reaching down to pull up a sock.

“Whatever. So they’re really riled up. ‘How do you know that name?’ Jason asked me. I told him I was Marco, and that I knew everything. ‘Everything?’ he asks. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Ask me something.’ ”

“Chris, do you really think that was a good idea?”

“You bet. What do you think he asked me?” His expression was challenging. I needed to guess.

“The egg and the chicken thing?”

“Yes! And I remembered it almost word for word. So there we are in the middle of the airport, and people keep coming up to the guy and asking him for autographs while I’m blowing him away with my metaphysical knowledge. It was perfectly safe, too. It was totally public.”

“So you didn’t need to send any energy?” I would’ve liked to hear how that turned out.

“Well, I had to try it out, didn’t I? So I aimed it at your brother or whoever the hell he is.”

“Let me guess what happened,” I said, and then I described Pat the boatman’s response to receiving what came out of my finger.

“Yup. That’s exactly what happened. Then I handed Jason the keys and walked away.”

“So it was fun?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Marco ambled over and told us it was time to head to the gate, so we grabbed our bags and strode out of the lounge. On the way, I asked for details about Lucy. My understanding was you couldn’t just fly dogs across international borders like they were extra luggage.

“She’s traveling on her own. We’ll see her there,” was all I got.

“How did Chris’s impersonation help us become more affiliated with Bhante’s organization?” I asked next. “Wasn’t that the idea? We were supposed to hook up with them so we could use the clone scam to get the word out, right?”

Marco just shrugged. Chris got his questions comprehensively answered in concise, elegant language. I had to make do with shrugs.

The line at security wasn’t too long, and it moved along smoothly, but just after I passed through the x-ray machine, an older man in a blue suit told me to wait as the others moved ahead.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“We’ll need to go talk in another room,” he said, lifting my bag up off the conveyor belt. He was probably in his fifties, beefy with black curly hair and dark eyes. His badge said that his name was Vlad Goric. His parents could’ve been Croatian.

“I’m not going anywhere with you unless you explain what’s going on,” I told him.

“Sir, we believe your suitcase is made from an endangered species. We take that particular crime very seriously here in New Zealand. Please come with me.”