"You'd be justified in deporting me tomorrow," he concluded.
"Not now that you've changed your mind," she assured him. "And anyhow nothing you did could have affected the real issue. Our enemy is oil in general. Whether we're exploited by Southeast Asia Petroleum or Standard of California makes no difference."
"Did you know that Murugan and the Rani were conspiring
against you?"
"They make no secret of it."
"Then why don't you get rid of them?"
"Because they would be brought back immediately by Colonel Dipa. The Rani is a princess of Rendang. If we expelled her, it would be a casus belli."
"So what can you do?"
"Try to keep them in order, try to change their minds, hope for a happy outcome, and be prepared for the worst."
"And what will you do if the worst happens?"
"Try to make the best of it, I suppose. Even in the worst society an individual retains a little freedom. One perceives in private, one remembers and imagines in private, one loves in private, and one dies in private-even under Colonel Dipa." Then after a silence, "Did Dr. Robert say you could have the moksha-medicine?" she asked. And when Will nodded, "Would you like to try it?"
"Now?"
"Now. That is, if you don't mind being up all night with it."
"I'd like nothing better."
"You may find that you never liked anything worse," Susila warned him. "The moksha-medicine can take you to heaven; but it can also take you to hell. Or else to both, together or alternately. Or else (if you're lucky, or if you've made yourself ready) beyond either of them. And then beyond the beyond, back to where you started from-back to here, back to New Rotham sted, back to business as usual. Only now, of course, business as usual is completely different."
15
One, two, three, four ... the clock in the kitchen struck twelve. How irrelevantly, seeing that time had ceased to exist! The absurd, importunate bell had sounded at the heart of a timelessly present Event, of a Now that changed incessantly in a dimension, not of seconds and minutes, but of beauty, of significance, of intensity, of deepening mystery.
"Luminous bliss." From the shallows of his mind the words rose like bubbles, came to the surface, and vanished into the infinite spaces of living light that now pulsed and breathed behind his closed eyelids. "Luminous bliss." That was as near as one could come to it. But it-this timeless and yet ever-changing Event-was something that words could only caricature and diminish, never convey. It was not only bliss, it was also understanding. Understanding of everything, but without knowledge of anything. Knowledge involved a knower and all the infinite diversity of known and knowable things. But here, behind his closed lids, there was neither spectacle nor spectator. There was only this experienced fact of being blissfully one with Oneness.
In a succession of revelations, the light grew brighter, the understanding deepened, the bliss became more impossibly, more unbearably intense. "Dear God!" he said to himself. "Oh, my dear God." Then, out of another world, he heard the sound of Susila's voice.
"Do you feel like telling me what's happening?"
It was a long time before Will answered her. Speaking was difficult. Not because there was any physical impediment. It was just that speech seemed so fatuous, so totally pointless. "Light," he whispered at last.
"And you're there, looking at the light?"
"Not looking at it," he answered, after a long reflective pause. "Being it. Being it," he repeated emphatically.
Its presence was his absence. William Asquith Farnaby-ultimately and essentially there was no such person. Ultimately and essentially there was only a luminous bliss, only a knowledgeless understanding, only union with unity in a limitless, undifferenti-ated awareness. This, self-evidently, was the mind's natural state. But no less certainly there had also been that professional execution watcher, that self-loathing Babs addict; there were also three thousand millions of insulated consciousnesses, each at the center of a nightmare world, in which it was impossible for anyone with eyes in his head or a grain of honesty to take yes for an answer. By what sinister miracle had the mind's natural state been transformed into all these Devil's Islands of wretchedness and delinquency?
In the firmament of bliss and understanding, like bats against the sunset, there was a wild crisscrossing of remembered notions and the hangovers of past feelings. Bat-thoughts of Plotinus and the Gnostics, of the One and its emanations, down, down into thickening horror. And then bat-feelings of anger and disgust as the thickening horrors became specific memories of what the essentially nonexistent William Asquith Farnaby had seen and done, inflicted and suffered.
But behind and around and somehow even within those flickering memories was the firmament of bliss and peace and understanding. There might be a few bats in the sunset sky; but the fact remained that the dreadful miracle of creation had been reversed. From a preternaturally wretched and delinquent self he had been unmade into pure mind, mind in its natural state, limitless, undifferentiated, luminously blissful, knowledgelessly understanding.
Light here, light now. And because it was infinitely here and timelessly now, there was nobody outside the light to look at the light. The fact was the awareness, the awareness the fact.
From that other world, somewhere out there to the right, came the sound once more of Susila's voice.
"Are you feeling happy?" she asked.
A surge of brighter radiance swept away all those flickering thoughts and memories. There was nothing now except a crystalline transparency of bliss.
Without speaking, without opening his eyes, he smiled and
nodded.
"Eckhart called it God," she went on. " 'Felicity so ravishing, so inconceivably intense that no one can describe it. And in the midst of it God glows and flames without ceasing.' "
God glows and flames ... It was so startlingly, so comically right that Will found himself laughing aloud. "God like a house on fire," he gasped. "God-the-Fourteenth-of-July." And he exploded once more into cosmic laughter.
Behind his closed eyelids an ocean of luminous bliss poured upwards like an inverted cataract. Poured upwards from union into completer union, from impersonality into a yet more absolute transcendence of selfhood.
"God-the-Fourteenth-of-July," he repeated and, from the heart of the cataract, gave vent to a final chuckle of recognition and understanding.
"What about the fifteenth of July?" Susila questioned. "What about the morning after?"
"There isn't any morning after."
She shook her head. "It sounds suspiciously like Nirvana."
"What's wrong with that?"
"Pure Spirit, one hundred percent proof-that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation guzzlers indulge in. Bo dhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work."
"This is better," Will insisted.
"You mean, it's more delicious. That's why it's such an enor mous temptation. The only temptation that God could succumb to. The fruit of the ignorance of good and evil. What heavenly lusciousness, what a supermango! God had been stuffing Him self with it for billions of years. Then all of a sudden, up comes Homo sapiens, out pops the knowledge of good and evil. God had to switch to a much less palatable brand of fruit. You've just eaten a slice of the original supermango, so you can sympathize with Him."
A chair creaked, there was a rustle of skirts, then a series of small busy sounds that he was unable to interpret. What was she doing? He could have answered that question by simply opening his eyes. But who cared, after all, what she might be doing? Nothing was of any importance except this blazing uprush of bliss and understanding.
"Supermango to fruit of knowledge-I'm going to wean you," she said, "by easy stages."
There was a whirring sound. From the shallows, a bubble of recognition reached the surface of consciousness. Susila had been putting a record on the turntable of a phonograph and now the machine was in motion.