Driving deeper into the hinterland, the road grew more challenging. One of the cars in the motorcade peeled away as planned, dropping off like ballast. The subtraction felt organic, as if part of the logic of the expedition — to keep shedding our skin until we were newborns at the lost guru’s door.
We ate sandwiches from little coolers. Having a meal loosened his tongue.
“When ‘the American’ disappeared, Mogul Lane went wild… an ant hill stirred by the stick of a small boy. But this time the community reaction bore no relation to the period of mourning that followed the Great Guru’s death seven years earlier. The police brought their limited expertise to bear; the investigation was blasé, desultory, laissez-faire. They hung around the shop with long faces, laboriously filling out paperwork before moving on to the precinct where gendarmes lazily auditioned the raft of crackpots, ascetics and prognosticators who had come forward with visions of my guru’s fate — he drowned in the Ganga or repatriated to the U.S. or went up in a blaze of self-immolation, leaving only crystalline relics of the rainbow body behind, albeit in red, white and blue! As the spectacle wore on, my contempt for that conniving widow and her pack of jackals went off the charts. I never liked her but now I did nothing to conceal it; she unabashedly returned the favor. At odd moments I caught her japing, as if to gloat that ‘the American’ (she called him that too, but always with a sarcastic twist) had finally gotten his comeuppance. In a matter of hours, my guru was purged from history, having evanesced under a lurid cloud of suspicion. Within days, his portraits were removed from the walls and burned; the books of his satsang I helped publish were no longer available. Even pages of the Great Guru’s classic that bore the American’s name under ‘translated by’ were torn out and replaced.
“That horrible woman! No matter that she was his earliest champion, urging him to take the chair. Something hardened her toward him those last few years. She was getting on in age, and became careless in dress and tongue. A few days after ‘the American’ went missing, she invited me into the very den that my guru — and his — once used as a sanctuary to meditate and sing psalms. I thought surely she was going to ask me to step into his shoes! She talked my ear off for the better part of an hour, anxious to promote the theory he’d been ‘done in’ by an enigmatic consortium of power-hungry thuggees, the same men, she said, who once plotted to kidnap and murder her husband. Another possibility lay in the realm of the supernatural. She spoke of flying yogins, skilled in the dark art of ‘translating’ themselves through the ether… then went in for the kill. ‘Have you considered what I believe to be the very real probability that your American guru may simply have had enough? That he decided to return home, to find fame and fortune? He would not be the first of his countrymen to capitalize on the Source!’ O, she cast her meretricious net far and wide, tarnishing all the fishies in the sea! So base, and thoroughly contagious as well — the same cheap, haughty mannerisms and grating inflection cropped up in those dastardly aunties who were under her stern sponsorship.
“It came to me in a sickening flash: No one had understood a single word of my guru’s teachings! And Queenie, let me tell you, that terrifying insight gave me comfort. I sat with the damnable conclusion a while until I swear I caught a glimpse of the form of mankind’s ignorance itself. Diabolical! Could it possibly be true that I was the only one who understood that a saint had walked among us? I’ll admit he had many strikes against him. After all, he was American, which cost him the lion’s share of his followers from the git-go. I watched him assiduously win that share back, not through contrivance or campaign but sheer valence. The naysayers came to deeply respect him. Still, there were many, shall we say, opposing camps — it would have been naïve not to have noticed. I’m convinced the widow kept the conspirators’ fires burning… the Janus-faced ones who clambered to press his feet had for a while now worked most avidly against him, whispering that his seat was a fraud and a heresy. A blasphemy…
“The colder went the trail, the more determined, the more invigorated was I to solve the invidious riddle. And I had considerable resources — don’t forget those numbered accounts in Switzerland. I set up shop in a building a few miles from Tobacco Road. I employed a crew of ten — half a dozen locals with the rest flown in, individuals I absolutely trusted and had worked with before. Gaetano did a brilliant job of organizing the entire operation. I’ll spare you the innovative details… you already know how creative I can be when an important project is at hand, no? Suffice to say I went to great lengths, some not entirely legal, to find him.
“Weeks went by and my team made no progress. I grew distant from Mogul Lane. A strange time, to say the least… My guru, a bright sun that once shone down on me, underwent a disturbing eclipse. Something began to gnaw. I felt like a private investigator in one of those European novels that reviewers call ‘philosophical detective stories.’ A portrait of him over my desk seemed to leer. I wondered if the widow was right — she so often was! — and considered expanding my search to the States.
“Approximately eight weeks after the nightmare began, I awakened from a nap to find the screw had completed its turn. Try as I may — and try I did, my Queen! — I could do nothing to alter the belief that I’d been ‘had.’ This new poison burned my throat, seared my eyes and became a wildfire in my soul… Dear heart, the fickleness of the human race is a wonder to behold. One by one my troops returned empty-handed, and one by one I relieved them of their services until finally I was alone in a suite of empty rooms, with only his photograph’s sinister eyes following me ’round. I shambled about, trying to stave off what was coming — the heartbreaking realization I’d been administered a coup de grâce. His final teaching! O Lord. Lord… I’m ashamed to say I declared to myself and the world that the feet I’d washed, worshipped and worried over were made of clay. The doubts and paranoia I harbored while ill no longer seemed the stuff of fever dreams. I set fire to the portrait, burning in effigy he who once held an unimpeachable place in my heart, whose insights, energy and brilliance had sustained and transformed me. I stripped him of all laurels and medals, tarred, feathered and court-martialed him, pissed on his counterfeit spirit for eternity! I was in the grips of a kind of mania… deranged. A bucket of delighted, perverse fantasies watered the petals of my resentments that opened like a corpse flower in bloom: perhaps he had been abducted — kidnapped, tortured, killed! O be careful, my Queen, when the beast inside is unleashed! I hasten to add that a small part of me still remained true and watched the torch-bearing mob of Self with helpless amazement.
“But it gets worse, Queenie — far worse!
“In madness, I saw only monsters. Years of rigorous tutelage reared up like diseased horses running wild through remorseful, desolate fields. Remarks my guru had made during intimate conversation — moments I treasured, his words forming a garland I’d hoped to wear around my neck whilst crossing the final threshold of Silence — became nothing more than dirty jokes, the larcenous pitch of an obscene grifter. My guru knew the mystery of the pyramids… Ponzi’s! O, how foolish I felt! I mention Mr. Ponzi only in a figurative sense, as no fiscal malfeasance ever came to light. Just hours after ‘the American’ took a powder, I knew that embezzlement needed to be ruled out. A thorough forensic examination of house finances found them intact (if anything, there was more in the treasure chest than I initially thought). My first hope — of course, this was before I renounced him as my guru — was to discover a theft then ‘follow the money,’ a process that might lead me to a suspect or suspects, the working theory being ‘the American’ had stumbled across irregularities that certain parties feared he might soon reveal. I’d be lying if I didn’t say the widow was at the top of my list… Did I tell you about the ransoms? O my! The notes came fast and furious. Some claimed he was being held hostage, and demanded all manner of absurdities. Some were thrown right over the transom… All were deemed inauthentic.