The campus security chief nodded as if this were the most normal thing in the world, his face a mask of stolidity, but Hazen knew he had just scored big with Chief Campus Doorshaker Chester Raskovich.
Thirty-Eight
The discipline of Chongg Ran, invented by the Confucian sage Ton Wei in the T’ang dynasty, was later transported from China to Bhutan, where it was further refined over a period of half a millennium at the Tenzin Torgangka monastery, one of the most isolated in the world. It is a form of concentration that marries utter emptiness with hyperawareness, the fusion of rigorous intellectual study with pure sensation.
The first challenge of Chongg Ran is to visualize white and black simultaneously—not as gray. Only one percent of adherents are able to move beyond this point. Far more difficult mental exercises await. Some involve simultaneous, self-contradictory imaginary games of Go, or more recent studious pastimes such as chess or bridge. In others, one must learn to fuse knowledge with nescience, sound with silence, self with annihilation, life with death, the universe with the quark.
Chongg Ran is an exercise in antitheses. It is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. It brings with it the gift of inexplicable mental powers. It is the ultimate enhancement of the human mind.
Pendergast lay on the ground, maintaining acute awareness of his surroundings: the smell of dry weeds, the feeling of sticky heat, the stubble and pebbles pressing into his back. He isolated every individual sound, every chirp, rustle, flutter, whisper, down to the faint breathing of his assistant sitting some yards away. With his eyes closed, he proceeded to visualize the surrounding scene exactly as if he were seeing it with his own eyes, spread out below him: sight without seeing.Piece by piece he assembled it: the trees, the three mounds, the play of shade and light, the cornfields stretching out below, the towering thunderheads above, the air, the sky, the living earth.
Soon the landscape had taken complete form. And now, having isolated each object, one by one he could extinguish them from his awareness.
He started with scents. He removed, one by one, the complex perfumes of the cottonwood trees, humidity, ozone from the approaching storm, the grass and leaves and dust. Then, sensation: he proceeded to extinguish, one at a time, every feeling impinging on his consciousness: the pebbles under his back, the heat, the crawling of an ant over his hand.
Next came sound. The trillings of the insects disappeared first, then the rustling of the leaves, the desultory tapping of a woodpecker, the fluttering and calling of the birds in the trees, the faint movement of air, the distant rumble of thunder.
The landscape still existed, but now it was a tableau of absolute silence.
Next, he suppressed in himself the very sensation of corporeality, that innate feeling of having a body and knowing where that body is in space and time.
Now the real concentration began. One by one, Pendergast removed each object in the landscape. He stripped it away, in the reverse order of its arrival. First the road disappeared, then the corn, then the trees, the town, the grass, the rocks, then the very light itself. A mathematically pure landscape was left: bare, empty, dark as night, existing only in form.
He waited five minutes, then ten, holding this empty fractal perfection in his head, preparing himself. And then, slowly, he began to put the landscape back together; but it would not be the same landscape he had just stripped away.
First the light returned. Then the grass rolled over the landscape, virgin tallgrass prairie dotted with prairie aster, wild poppies, cornflowers, rocketweed, and lupine. Then he piled back the bronze mountains of cloud, the rocky outcrops, the shady creek wandering free across the Great Plains. Now other things began to take shape: a herd of buffalo in the far distance; shallow water pans blazing silver in the late afternoon light; and everywhere an infinite array of wild grasses, undulating from horizon to horizon like a great rippling sea of green.
A thread of smoke came up from below. There were black dots of people moving about, a few ragged tents. Fifty horses were grazing the bottomlands by the creek, their noses in the grass.
Slowly, Pendergast permitted first the sounds, and then the smells, to return: voices laughing and cursing; fecund humidity; the whiff of woodsmoke and roasting buffalo steaks; the distant whinny of a horse; the jingle of spurs and the clank of cast iron cookware.
Pendergast waited, watchful, all senses alert. The voices became clearer.
Didier’s buckskin come up lame again,said a voice.
The chunk of wood on fire. Chuck’s about ready.
That boy wouldn’t know where to piss less’n his mammy aimed his dingus for him.
Laughter. Men were standing around, battered tin plates in hand. The scene was still vague, tremulous, not yet fully formed.
I can’t wait to get to Dodge and strip off this goddamned dust.
Use this to clean out what’s in your throat, Jim.
The late afternoon sun refracted through a bottle and there was the sloshing of drink. There was a clank, the sound of an iron lid settling. A gust of wind swept up a skein of dust, settled back down. A piece of wood popped in the fire.
When we get to Dodge I’ll introduce you to a lady who can clean the dust off another part.
More laughter.
Whiskey over here, amigo.
What’s this you’ve been feeding us, Hoss, boiled sheepshit?
No tickee no washee, Crowe.
Whiskey over here, amigo.
Gradually, the scene crystallized. Men were standing around a fire at the base of a mound. They were wearing greasy cowboy hats, frayed bandannas, ragged shirts, and pants that looked so stiff from dirt and grease they almost crackled as they walked. All had scraggly beards.
The hill was a dusty island in the sea of grass. Below, the land swept away, open and free. The thick scrub that then covered the base of the mounds cast long shadows. The wind was picking up, rippling the grass in restless, random waves. The clean scent of wildflowers drifted on the air, mingling the sweet smell of cottonwood smoke, simmering beans, unwashed humanity. In the lee of one mound the men had unrolled their bedrolls and upended their saddles, using the sheepskin linings as headrests. There were a couple of pitched pole tents, badly rotted. Beyond, partway down the hill, stood one of the pickets, alert, carrying a rifle. Another picket was on the far side.
As the wind picked up, more clouds of dust swirled upward.
Chuck’s ready.
A man with a narrow face, narrow eyes, and a scar across his chin stood lazily and shook out his legs, causing his spurs to jingle. Harry Beaumont, the leader. You, Sink, get Web and go relieve the pickets. You eat later.
But last time—
Any more out of you, Sink, and I’ll fish the crik with your balls.
There was some muffled laughter.
Remember back at Two Forks, that Lo with the giant balls? The javelina sure did fight over those, remember?
More laughter.
Musta had some kind of disease.
They’re all diseased.
You didn’t worry ’bout that when you went for the squaws, Jim.
Mind shutting the hell up while I eat my chuck?
From one side, a man began to sing in a fine low voice:
Feet in the stirrups and seat in the saddle,
I hung and I rattled with them long-horn cattle,