My mother and everybody.
He looked at her. Well, he wanted to ask, if they need you so badly then why the hell were you heading south in the first place? But he didn’t ask it. What’s changed? he wanted to ask. Did Rigel put you up to this? Who put you up to this? Do you know what’s going to happen to you back there? Is this some kind of suicide? My God, Lila, you haven’t done one single solitary smart thing since the moment I met you, do you know that? When are you going to start?
But he didn’t say all this. He just sat there like a child at a funeral, watching her.
There was really nothing more he could say. She wanted to go back; there was nothing he could do about it.
You’re absolutely sure? he said.
Lila looked at him for a long time. He waited for a flicker of doubt to appear and waited some more but she just sat there and then she said it so quietly he could hardly hear it… I’m all right… Then he thought for a while longer, wondering, in what he knew would be the last chance, if there was something missing that he should say.
He couldn’t think of anything.
Finally he got up and said, OK.
He climbed up to the deck where Rigel was standing. He said, She wants to go… When are you leaving?
Right now, Rigel said. She wants to leave right away and I think that, under the circumstances, it’s better.
As Phædrus watched him start up his boat’s engine he felt somewhat dumbstruck. He crossed over to his own boat, helped Rigel cast off the lines and then watched with a strange sort of paralysis as Rigel’s boat turned and then headed back north across the bay.
32
It was going to take a while to get all this sorted out.
An hour ago he was planning to spend the rest of his life taking care of Lila. As of this minute he was never going to see her again. Wham. Wham. Just like that.
His mind felt like the beach out there, all full of old tires and derelict hulls and bleach bottles after the hurricane had passed through.
He guessed what he needed now was some time and silence to get back to where he was before.
All these events seemed to have completely cut off his past. Whatever was, was gone. It was really behind him. The ocean was right here now, just on the other side of this sand barrier. Here, now, this was a whole new life starting. Soon there’d be no trace of his ever having been here.
The boat swung a little in the breeze. It seemed empty now. Silent. He was all alone again. It was as though Lila had never been here…
He supposed he should be overjoyed. He didn’t know why he felt so let down. This was what he wanted. He should be celebrating…
But it was really sad that she had to end it like that. Why did she tell Rigel he was trying to kill her? That was really bad. She knew he wasn’t trying to kill her. Her whole attitude when she talked to him wasn’t the attitude of someone who thought that… Of course he never heard her say he was going to kill her. He just heard Rigel say she said it… But Rigel wouldn’t have lied about something like that. She must have said something of the sort… What made it so sad was it was the first really immoral thing she had done to him in all that time he was with her. Sure, she called a him a lot of bad names and stuff. But that had been more a defense of herself than any overt wickedness. She had just been trying to tell him the truth. But this time she was lying. That’s why she wanted to get out of here so fast.
It was the first time he’d ever seen her look down like that. That was what was so sad to see. The thing that was most attractive about her was that straight-forward, eyes-ahead look of someone who’s honest to themself, whatever others might think. Now that was gone. It meant she was turning back to the static patterns she came from. She’s sold out. The system beat her. It’s made a crook out of her at last.
It was as though she had just one more step to take and she was out of hell forever, and then instead of taking that one step she turned back. Now she’s really done for. That bastard will commit her for life.
Anyway, Phædrus supposed he would have to get busy and get ready to leave tomorrow. He’d get everything set to head out at daybreak. Possibly he could make it all the way to Barnegat inlet if he could get in there. He’d have to look at the charts again.
Somehow he didn’t feel like moving. He didn’t feel like doing anything… He supposed he shouldn’t be too hard on Lila. What had happened to her was very scary stuff. If she wants to go back to some place she thinks is safer who’s to blame her?… The funny thing was that when she said he was trying to kill her, that was insane — but it wasn’t entirely incorrect. He was trying to kill her — not the biological Lila, but the static patterns that were really going to kill her if she didn’t let go.
From the static point of view the whole escape into Dynamic Quality seems like a death experience. It’s a movement from something to nothing. How can nothing be any different from death? Since a Dynamic understanding doesn’t make the static distinctions necessary to answer that question, the question goes unanswered. All the Buddha could say was, See for yourself.
When early Western investigators first read the Buddhist texts they too interpreted nirvana as some kind of suicide. There’s a famous poem that goes:
While living,
Be a dead man.
Be completely dead,
And then do as you please.
And all will be well.
It sounds like something from a Hollywood horror-film but it’s about nirvana. The Metaphysics of Quality translates it:
While sustaining biological and social patterns
Kill all intellectual patterns.
Kill them completely
And then follow Dynamic Quality
And morality will be served.
Lila was still moving toward Dynamic Quality. All life does. This breaking up of her life’s patterns looked like it was part of that movement.
When Phædrus first went to India he’d wondered why, if this passage of enlightenment into pure Dynamic Quality was such a universal reality, did it only occur in certain parts of the world and not others? At the time he’d thought this was proof that the whole thing was just Oriental religious baloney, the equivalent of a magic land called heaven that Westerners go to if they are good and get a ticket from the priests. Now he saw that enlightenment is distributed in all parts of the world just as the color yellow is distributed in all parts of the world, but some cultures accept it and others screen out recognition of it.
Lila probably will never know what’s happened to her and neither will Rigel or anyone else. She’ll probably go through the rest of her life thinking this whole episode has been some kind of failure when in fact what had happened might not have been failure, but growth.
Maybe if Rigel hadn’t shown up she would have killed all the bad patterns right here in Sandy Hook. But it’s too late now to ever know… Strange that she’d come to Kingston on a boat called the Karma. It was unlikely anyone aboard knew what that word really meant. It was like naming a boat Causal Relationship. Of all the hundreds of Sanskrit words he had learned so long ago, dharma and karma had hung on longest and hardest. You could translate and pigeon-hole the others but these never seemed to stop needing translating.