You Are Not Who You Believe Yourself to Be

Eventually the fire burns down and we prepare for bed. The others sleep in two separate tents. On occasion Little Bat drags his sleeping bag out in the open under the blanket of stars, his snores the night music of a big man with the yak’s five-chambered heart. The first few nights of our journey Mun and I both sleep in the Machine, but mornings we rise more tired than when we lie down. The proximity to each other’s mind at day’s end is exhausting, the constant straining to discern which thoughts are mine, which his. Now Mun takes his sleeping bag and crawls under the car. In the morning he often smells of oil, but it is enough to keep our thoughts apart.

Tonight before Mun shuts the car door, he pauses. He is wearing a headlamp, what Uncle likes to call his third eye. All around us the world is dark and strange. Then something unexpected arises. I can feel my brother extinguish the fire in his mind. Tentatively, like a miner intuiting his way along a dark vein deep in the earth, I feel my way into my brother’s thoughts.

We shouldn’t be doing this, he thinks. We shouldn’t be out here looking for some poor kid to pile all our problems on. For a moment I rummage around in his inner life. Among his doubts I feel something I do not expect. A glimmer of guilt.

Have courage, brother, I whisper out loud.

Forget it, he barks, shaking his head, and slams the door shut, angry at himself for allowing this moment of intimacy between us.

He’s right, of course. I can never know the anguish of being told you are not who you believe yourself to be. To be handed a photograph of an old man and told this is you in your last incarnation. That everything about who you are is already established. That you are not original.

The sound of the car door slamming shut hangs in the air. I want to lift the icy sheet in the back of my mind and let all my doubts come rushing forth. To speak of my anguish with my twin who knows better than anyone what is lost when one renounces the body. I want to find out I am not alone in my loneliness, in my hunger to know the passions of the flesh. But the moment is gone. I do not know if it might ever come again.