8

Sunday afternoon was Peter’s last chance to have a hot tub before his workshop began. After several visits, the sulphurous stench of the baths had gradually become delicious. Associated with unknotting muscles, heavy eyelids and blameless drowsiness, the atmosphere of rotting eggs now assailed him with an invitation to pleasure. The nudity no longer disconcerted him either; he even enjoyed watching the subsiding thermometer of his self-consciousness.

As he soaked in the tub, purgative sweat started breaking out on his forehead and trickling down his cheeks. He sank lower in the water, allowing it to cover his shoulders, and rested his back against the gritty wall of the bath, sighing with relief. Slipping his head under the water, his heart pumping hard and his cheeks swollen, he felt his hair sway, like seaweed in a current, in the current of his paddling hands.

As he broke the surface and gasped for air, he saw her stepping into the bath. Politely refusing to linger on her slender legs or try to make out the colour of her pubic hair in the murky light, he shifted into the corner.

She smiled at him. He knew it was not seduction but ease that made her smile, ease that was more seductive than anything. Holding her nose, she arched backwards into the water, her belly gleaming for a moment like the back of a diving whale. He noticed the ring in her navel and wanted to reach out and touch it, touch it with the tip of his curving tongue.

Where was his loyalty to Sabine? Maybe she had been the pretext for launching him on a quite different adventure, Peter reflected. He might be better off with this sexy girl opposite him in the tub.

Mad thoughts, fainting heat, sulphurous fumes. Peter clambered out of the bath and steadied himself for a while. He wanted to go over to one of the massage tables and cool off.

Sitting down naked in front of the Pacific, cross-legged on a padded white table, he watched the sea foam violently below. As it broke over the black and orange rocks, it yielded flashes of purple, like liquid sparks. He looked further out and saw waves unfurling southwards along the curve of the bay. Under an inky sky, silver streaking the horizon, an opening in the clouds conjured up a floodlit stadium far out to sea. He half expected Prospero or the Grateful Dead to come splashing onto this aquatic stage. The air was already electric with the promise of a storm.

The stage faded again and he closed his eyes, feeling dizzy as his body cooled off in the breeze. He let loose a deep staggered sigh, as if he’d exhumed himself from a long burial, and suddenly his chest seemed to burst open like a torpedoed ship and flood him with nameless emotion. From behind the double darkness of lids and clouds, his eyes swivelled searchingly like the restless upturned eyes of the blind, and his mind disappeared by flashing too brightly, like a sword catching the sun. Between his pounding heart and the pounding waves, between his hissing blood and the electric air, between the spinning galaxies of his molecular structure and the spinning galaxy which his molecular structure inhabited, the membrane of his skin grew translucent and all distinctions dissolved in the light of their resemblance.

What was happening to him?

He felt a moment of pure bliss, and then as he clutched at it, trying to repeat the mental process that seemed to have led there, he watched it recede. He was almost grateful for the disappointment, feeling that the filament of his sense of self was not designed to carry such a current.

What had happened to him? Words and explanations rushed towards the emergency of an incomprehensible experience, their sirens wailing. It was the change of temperature; he had been ‘enlightened’; he shouldn’t be eating so many salads; his mother was right, he was cracking up; he had suddenly been liberated from a false model of himself he’d been carrying round for years … but none of these paramedics could perform the vital operation of describing what had happened. Changes of temperature usually gave him a cold, and ‘enlightenment’ raised more questions than it answered. The experience preserved an exciting mystery, it was a flash of something other which he must protect from the glare of analysis. Shivering now from the cold, he hurried back to the hot tub.

‘Are you all right?’ asked the girl with the navel ring. ‘You look kinda stunned.’

Oh God, not conversation, not after that. Like a man hurrying out of a curfewed city with a hungry infant under his cloak, he was not inclined to chat with strangers. Still, he’d never been good at lying, despite countless attempts, and he’d fallen into the habit of answering questions honestly.

‘Well, I was sitting on the table and I felt very, um … open.’

Open? Open? A door could be open, a shop could be open, a public lavatory could be open. How could he force what had just happened to share a descriptive label with these achingly trite situations?

She smiled at him encouragingly as if she knew exactly what had happened, despite the thinness of his adjective. She was pretty too, and maybe she knew where he could find Sabine. Maybe she could replace Sabine after all this time. He cancelled the thought hastily, but it drifted guiltlessly back into his mind.

‘Are you here in a workshop?’ she asked.

‘Ya, I’m in the Martha Goldenstein workshop tonight.’

‘Oh, too bad we’re not in the same group. I’m doing Dzogchen meditation, “A Week of Noble Silence”.’

‘That sounds perfect,’ he said. ‘I wish I was facing a week of noble silence instead of what will no doubt turn out to be a week of ignoble chatter. Ever since I can remember I’ve been trying to avoid making a fool of myself in front of groups of strangers; now it’s become a way of life.’

She laughed. She was really adorable, he decided.

‘How come you booked for a week of ignoble chatter?’ she asked.

‘Well, to be honest, I didn’t really look very carefully at the catalogue. I just wanted to stay on here for another week. It’s a long story…’ He paused.

He felt excited and confessional but the strategic part of his mind threw up a few flimsy barriers to a full disclosure. What sort of buffoon would she think he was if he told her that he’d given up his job in order to spend three months pursuing a woman he’d only known for three days?

‘I’m looking for a friend of mine I’ve lost touch with,’ he said. ‘She used to mention this place and I thought I might find some traces of her here.’

‘Is this someone you’re totally in love with?’

‘I suppose so,’ he said cautiously, and then decided to play the role of the wry Englishman with which he had had some success during his travels. ‘I mean I was in a fairly gloomy state about the whole love business. I thought, “I won’t bother with romance or marriage any more, just find a woman who hates me and buy her a house.”’

‘Sure,’ she laughed, ‘but you still have to find the right woman.’

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Crystal’

‘With a C or a K?’

‘A C.’

‘Well, I’m Peter with a P,’ he said. ‘The thing about Sabine,’ he added, ‘is that I saw her so briefly, and haven’t seen her for so long that perhaps I’m no longer pursuing her so much as the hope she gave me.’

He’d never said this before, but didn’t want to give this charming woman the impression that he was completely unavailable.

Some new people started to climb into the tub.

‘Hi,’ said a white-haired man with glaring blue eyes that seemed determined to defy insincerity even in the gathering darkness.

‘Hi,’ said Crystal.

Stepping into the tub behind Blue-Eyes was a woman whose blonde hair, tortured into the tightest curls, seemed to be a homage to Africa, and a whimsical gesture of regret at not being black herself. Peter was shocked to find himself irritated by Crystal’s friendliness towards the newcomers. Although these people had as much right as he had to be in the communal tub, they were interrupting his conversation with her.

‘I did a past lifetime thing,’ said the African Queen. ‘I didn’t really know what to make of it, but it made a lot of sense. I’d been a slave at one point and suffered a lot.’

Peter instantly hated her. She was paying huge hair-dressing bills to create a cosmetic continuity with a former lifetime of abject suffering in the hope of justifying the overflow of her self-pity.

Whatever had happened on the massage table, it had done nothing to make him more tolerant.

‘What I don’t understand about Chinese and African cultures,’ said Blue-Eyes, ‘is that if reincarnation is true then we’re our own ancestors, and really we’re worshipping ourselves.’

‘Maybe it’s like you’ve got to worship yourself before you can worship anything else,’ she suggested.

‘Sounds good,’ he admitted. ‘One of the coolest things I ever heard,’ he added, turning the full glow of his innocent and sketchy features towards the African Queen, ‘was that religion is for those who want to avoid hell, and spirituality is for those who’ve already been there.’

A real little fount of wisdom, thought Peter.

‘Cool,’ she affirmed.

‘I think Deepak Chopra is going too far when he says that the water you drink is also the water Christ bathed in, and so the whole body of water is sacred.’

‘It’s a lovely idea though,’ she said, as if she were looking at the brochure for a Caribbean holiday.

I think I’m going to be sick, thought Peter, sinking quietly into the steaming water. When he emerged again, Blue-Eyes was still pumping out the wisdom.

‘North or South, they both lead you to the same place. I didn’t say that, Suzuki did.’

He’s unstoppable, thought Peter, I’ll have to leave. He looked over at Crystal. She answered his look and, although there was complicity in the way she smiled, there was somehow no condescension towards the others. Peter was troubled by the contrast between the delicacy of this position and his own fermenting irritation.

‘Martha Goldenstein says that every moment is a gift,’ said the African Queen, ‘and that’s why it’s called “the present”.’

Peter surged noisily out of the water and grabbed the standard-issue pink towel that was just too small to wrap around a human waist.

‘See you later,’ he said to Crystal.

‘I hope so,’ she said.

*   *   *

Peter didn’t have to wait long to see Crystal again. He found her a couple of hours after they had met in the tubs, queuing up for dinner in the lodge. Her short T-shirt left her belly exposed and he saw the navel ring again, the skin a little inflamed where the ring pierced the lower edge of her navel.

‘Hi, Crystal,’ he said, picking up a plate and following her down the line of salads.

‘You’re staring at my ring,’ she said.

‘Yes, I’m afraid I was,’ he said, transferring his gaze to the sliced cucumbers.

‘Don’t be afraid, at least not of that,’ she laughed. ‘When they put this ring in, I had an orgasm right there in the shop, it was wild. The guy said, “This is definitely your energy centre.”’

Peter was silenced by this information, but recovered in time to say, ‘Does it still have that effect on you?’

‘Sure, that’s why it’s there.’

Gosh, thought Peter, these California girls are amazing. He felt his own Englishness and stiffness and inability to decipher Crystal’s candour. If an Englishwoman told you about an orgasm the second time you chatted together, you knew that she either wanted sex straight away, or that she’d been educated at a convent. Over here, one had no idea what it meant.

Peter wanted to ask Crystal to sit with him, but in the communal dining room he felt the usual sense of personal and social meltdown known locally as ‘lodge psychosis’. Instead of the sense of community it was designed to promote, the lodge shipwrecked its occupants by presenting them with a series of treacherous whirlpools and rocky dilemmas. Acquaintances imagined they were friends, friends turned into strangers, seminarians were looked down on by residents, and residents exploited by staff, teachers appeared to be available to students but were suddenly ringed by jealous lovers and competitive sidekicks. Anyone at any time could come and ‘process an issue’ with you, however turgid or trivial, whether you could remember meeting them before or not. The person to whom you told the secret of your mother’s mental illness the night before might not remember your name by lunchtime the next day. The permissiveness that made sex seem pleasingly inevitable made you realize more sharply the internal constraints that prevented you from approaching the object of desire, but the same permissiveness could not stop the bore you most dreaded from bearing down on you with greedy tactlessness when you were deeply engaged with someone else. Like the place as a whole, the lodge made a partial transcendence of the formalities and hypocrisies of ordinary social life, but at the same time generated a longing for the good manners and the privacy which those formalities, until they became corrupted, were designed to protect.

Psychologically bleeding and half drowned, but still hoping to preserve an air of purpose and self-possession, Peter had often wandered back and forth in the last three days, plate in hand, meeting or avoiding glances he was no longer calm enough to interpret accurately, or being dragged with a fixed smile on his face to a table of people he had no reason to spend time with.

‘Shall we sit together?’ he murmured almost inaudibly.

‘Sure.’

What a miracle. She hadn’t promised to spend the whole of dinner ‘processing’ with some deluded monster. He knew that she was doing a meditation workshop and wanted to ask her about what had happened to him on the massage table. Was there such a thing as spontaneous meditation, like spontaneous combustion but less messy?

‘You’re doing this meditation thing, so you might know: do you think one can start meditating by accident?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, do you think that someone who wasn’t trained could start doing it spontaneously?’

‘Oh, ya, I think people bliss out spontaneously without meditating. Meditation is just a bunch of techniques for getting you into that reality.’

‘Is that reality with a capital R?’ asked Peter. ‘I mean, do you think this “blissing out” is an insight into some fundamental truth, or is it just another state of mind to add to a menu which already includes guilt, boredom, anguish, despair, hatred, longing, nostalgia, and so forth?’

‘Great menu,’ laughed Crystal. ‘You should join our workshop. Those are the kind of things we discuss when we’re not observing “noble silence”.’

‘How many kinds of silence are there?’

‘You’re the expert on lists. I guess there must be guilty silence, nostalgic silence, despairing silence … but the only kind you have to worry about this week is the noble type.’

‘Can I really switch workshops?’

‘I think you’ve got till tomorrow evening to switch.’

‘This place is so strange,’ said Peter. ‘You’re in an ego-dissolving workshop and I’m in an ego-building one, and here in the lodge there’s a convergence of the cool and warm currents.’

‘I guess you’ve got to have an ego before you can dissolve it.’

‘So, do you think that some people set about trying to eliminate a sense of self they don’t have in the first place?’

‘That can happen but it’s really more like trying to awaken a sense of self that you don’t recognize in the first place. It’s just there … you just have to turn the mind back to that source.’

‘Hi.’

Peter looked up and saw a square-jawed woman he could vaguely remember talking to for a few minutes on the day he arrived.

‘Oh, hello. Crystal, this is … um.’

‘You’ve forgotten my name. It’s Flavia,’ she snapped.

‘Flavia, of course, I’m frightfully sorry.’

‘Don’t you hate the British?’ Flavia asked Crystal, sitting down with a plate of vegetarian chilli. ‘They apologize for everything and then when they really have something to be sorry about, they sound like they just bumped into you by mistake in the street, “Oh, I’m so awfully sorry to have destroyed your life”,’ she sneered in a dreadful English accent.

‘Well, I’m sorry you don’t like the English,’ said Peter, crashing down the nearest manhole.

‘Oh, I’m so awfully sorry you’re awfully sorry,’ said Flavia.

‘I’m just going to get a drink,’ said Peter. ‘Excuse me a minute.’

‘Off to get a cup of tea,’ chimed Flavia in her grating accent.

Peter retreated to the tea counter. Behind him he could hear Flavia saying, ‘Black tea is dreadful. It’s just tannic acid and caffeine. That’s why the British are so fucked up: they drink too much tea.’

After helping himself defiantly to a bag of Earl Grey, Peter returned to the table. He listened distractedly while Flavia told them about her mother’s schizophrenia. He was bored and annoyed by this second intrusion, but at the same time felt elated just being near Crystal.