It was what Doc had promised, and there began to appear every predictable pleasure.
I refused to join, not wanting anything more than to enjoy the sea and the stars, and not sink any further beneath the waves.
“You’re not coming to the party?” Doc asked.
“Not after last night.”
“Why not?”
“I broke my code.”
“Your what?”
“My code. There is a right way and a wrong way of doing everything.”
“And that is your code?”
“Yes.”
“And you broke it?”
“Yes.”
“So you have sinned?”
“I have no God. I only have my actions over myself.”
“Even better. You have sinned boldly. Now you are free. So you broke your code. What happened to you? Nothing is what happened. You did not go to hell. The world did not become any worse or better, except to the extent your own sufferings were added to it. Or were they alleviated? That is in you to decide. You say whore. I say the Magdalene. Jesus’s wife.”
“That’s a historical misreading. Mary Magdalene was conflated with two other women in the sixth century.”
“Do you ever let up?”
I knew he meant to be helpful. But I did not know how to let go. How to float in the hands of fate as he seemed to do. Was afraid of what might happen if I did.
“Let yourself make mistakes,” Doc said sympathetically. “Let other people make them. Trust the universe a little. You are free to take up your code, or drown it in the sea and make a new code to live by as you wish. Only stop flagellating yourself. You have done it since we met. It drives me crazy. It drives you crazy. First you wear one mask, and so what if then you wear another. They are only masks. But the universe makes everything, and allows all things. The difficulty is only understanding what portion of it all He allows to you. Now did you do something wrong, or only forfeit your imaginary right to judge Schoeller and Freddo? That is for you to answer, for my part I absolve you.”
“You’re a doctor, not a priest.”
“I’ve been ordained, by the Church of Universal Life, for the wedding. Besides, in my tribe who heals the body also heals the spirit, so if you wish to be in thrall to some rule outside yourself, by the powers of the Church of Universal Life, I hereby absolve you of all sin. Here is your brain, your heart, your courage. Now what happens when you sin again?”
“I will not.”
“Poor Protestant. It is part of the journey. The hero’s heart is bound by an evil force, he is stuck in Casablanca, trapped at the bottom of the well, and only love will alleviate it. Or else he goes off on a journey, without knowing why, for something mysterious and impossible as the lost ark, which has a hold over him he cannot explain. Somewhere along the way he falls off the path, Siddhartha at court, seduced by the world, or betrayed by his own sad little ego, and has to be helped back onto his path, but broken now of the sin of judging, and off he goes again, in search of his ark, which he now knows is not whatever shadow first set him off, but love itself. Always love. And beyond that, of course, himself. So he is allowed whatever he chooses, so long as it comes from his joy, and not childish conscriptions of what you must not do. It will increase his path, and is the only way forward. The path itself flows from that. Maybe she’s the woman you were supposed to marry, but you could not see it because you had in your mind some received idea of who you should be with. Suppose now you go back the other way and find someone who checks every box on your list and you get married, then seven years into it you have been having the same fight for all of eternity, and you wake up one morning and understand you are not in love. Will you abandon your wife, or will you find the part of yourself that is connected to her, not because of what you have in common with her, but because of what you have in common with all humans? What if only then do the true depths of love open up.”
“Anything else I should know?” I asked sarcastically.
“That is all of it, except there is worse falling in this world than yours, so don’t privilege your own. Heaven has always and ever belonged to the blasphemous, who stray and somehow find their way again. Even the Buddhas have to pass through that, and only a fool would think to escape it. Embrace it, until you are done falling. After that fall no more, my friend.”
It was well-intentioned advice, however the sadness I felt was not repentance for doing something wrong, rather it was exactly for the freedom he spoke of. The terrific burden of knowing the heart was the only god of right action, and like any god it divined but did not discriminate, meaning if I gave up my rules I had no way of knowing where I would be led. Because my heart did not trust how radiant it was.
All I did know was what I thought I knew before no longer seemed true. I had no more earthly idea what I was doing.
BOOK III
21
On my return to New York I swore off meat, alcohol, tobacco, and sex in a fit of remorse. But nothing I did put me at rest, or made me feel any better. I even went to see Dr. Glass, but talking about my dreams seemed like a waste of time. My parents I had little to say about. My father because we had barely spoken to each other for as long as I could remember before he died. My mother I had no memory of at all.
I realized it had been more than a year since I had seen my Aunt Isadora, and went for a visit, hoping it might make me feel more grounded. But afterward, when I returned to my apartment, I was met by the same gloom. I realized then there was no need for me to be there. If I was ungrounded, I was also unbound and could do whatever I pleased.
The rhythm of life and sense of possibility in the south attracted me, so when my friend Drew suggested I spend some time down in Farodoro, I decided to make an extended stay of it.
In addition to Drew, it turned out I knew several others in the city. When I settled into my rented apartment, in fact, I soon realized the country was festering with expatriates. Some were there for the exchange rate, others for business; several claimed to be helping the world; but in reality all were taking advantage of the special status those from rich countries received in poor countries, unaware of the hidden cost they paid for the illusion by which the middling was called large, and the large declared great.
The only thing less sufferable were those intelligent enough to be aware of it, yet still happy for their different deals, because without that they would be what they were at home: industrious but second best, or talented but lazy. The natives did not complain. They accepted it as the way the world spins.
Yet nothing could mask the fact it was a place for the lost. Those who had let go the thread of their way, uncertain where they should be headed; what path had brought them here; whether they had it within themselves to push forward again; and, for the worst cases, whether forward was a virtue at all.
The things they saw and told themselves were shared delusions, referring to nothing but the world in front of their eyes; their own egos and insular experiences, subject to no other standard but what they themselves knew. These mirages displacing reality were tokens of the things they sought, but never possessed, which pulled them in ever deeper — not into that country, which they never saw — but into their own fantasies, and delusions of their place in the world, so that reality was left ever further behind.
For the permanently lost among them, those who had no meaningful place in that world, and no place in the one they had left, it was where they ended up when the illusion they nursed — that purpose could be instilled from without — finally ran aground. Here they would idle indefinitely.