Children of the New World Page 6

  “No, no, I want Moksha,” Abe said. “Seventeen.”

  “Seventeen no good. Moksha use too much electricity, very expensive.”

  “Yeah, but my friend bought Moksha for fifteen thousand.”

  “This store?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Not same quality. Your friend only find lower stages of enlightenment. Here we have total enlightenment, better quality.”

  “No, my friend said he was totally enlightened,” Abe said, though he had to admit, for all his talk about kundalini, Jeff from the co-op hadn’t really seemed that enlightened.

  “For you: twenty-three thousand. Best price. We go lower and I lose Moksha. Come.” She rose from the stool and led Abe through the back of the store, which opened to a courtyard, and then into another building and up a dark, wet stairwell to knock at a closed door on the second floor.

  Behind the door were the sounds of shuffling and the distant chirp of dial-up connection. Then the door opened and a spiky-haired kid, no older than sixteen, stood in the doorway in a stained Bob Marley T-shirt. “You wait,” he said, and closed the door. There was more shuffling; then the door opened again, and a white kid, his blue eyes shining, emerged with the light of rapture. Upon seeing Abe, he wrapped his arms around him for a long moment before whispering into Abe’s ear, “Yes, brother, yes,” and disappearing down the stairwell.

  “You, Moksha, next,” the spiky-haired kid said.

  * * *

  LONG BEFORE HE bought his ticket to Nepal and dropped out of the dumpy state college, he’d met Sandra. They’d seen each other in the basement of a record shop, at an underground dharma class run by some renegade Anthropology students. Abe and Sandra drank sake and talked about Zen Buddhism until the shop was raided and the university expelled the leaders for practicing walking meditation on campus. Later that winter, she’d told him how much Moksha scared her. Her father had become addicted when she was in middle school.

  “He stopped talking for days at a time,” she confided from beneath the sheets in Abe’s dorm room. “He’d just sit on his cushion, wired up to our old Xbox, whispering om mani padme hum.”

  Abe took a deep breath, held it, and let it out slowly. “So, you don’t want to go to Nepal and become liberated?”

  “My dad wasn’t liberated; he thought finding enlightenment was more important than his family.”

  “Maybe he’d transcended attachment.”

  Sandra got up and dressed. “Whatever. Go to Nepal; become a self-centered asshole like my dad. I love you, but obviously that’s not enough.”

  Abe had watched her, concentrating on his pounding heart to keep from speaking. After she left, he consoled himself with the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Sandra was just a hungry ghost, he told himself, offering the kind of love that kept people bound to the cycle of rebirth. All the same, he couldn’t shake the fact that he’d probably never again wake with her in the small concrete-walled dorm of that unenlightened college town. That, and he wished they’d had sex before he’d talked about liberation.

  * * *

  “OKAY,” THE SPIKY-HAIRED boy said, “You sit there.” He pointed to a corner in the darkened room.

  The room was filled with gutted laptops, stray mice, and a cluster of computer towers interconnected by cables. There was a beauty salon chair next to the towers, an old model from the seventies, and the cables had been fitted into the blow-dryer crown. In the other corner of the room, near the blackened windows, two old men sat on the floor eating chal bhat and smoking cigarettes.

  “Okay, Moksha,” the kid said. “Get in.”

  Abe hesitated. Until now, he’d imagined he’d never find enlightenment. Faced with the beauty salon chair, he wasn’t sure he was ready. What if, like Sandra’s father, he became one of those modern-day sadhus who ate only raw food and talked about kombucha? He asked if he needed to do anything to prepare. Meditate? Breathe properly?

  “No, just sit. We take care of Moksha.”

  Abe nodded and lowered himself into the chair. The kid dropped the blow-dryer cap onto Abe’s head, logged on to the laptop by the side of the chair, and hit Enter.

  The jolt of Moksha was immediate. One moment Abe was sitting in the chair, watching the men eat chicken curry, and wondering what enlightenment would feel like, and the next second their bodies transformed into bands of light. Where Abe had seen a dark cluttered space, it became apparent that the configuration of computer boxes, the pile of plastic water bottles, and the mess of disemboweled laptops formed a sacred geometry whose mandala spread outward past the walls. Abe could see through the bricks to perceive the entire city. Every shop shone brightly with its display of a hundred bronze Buddhas, and the taxis that cut their way through the crowds sent a chorus of honks into the air like birdsong. He saw the kids playing in the bricks, the white kid who had hugged him standing on the corner haggling for a yak blanket, the words leaving the kid’s mouth as illuminated air currents. He saw the light of their hearts beating beneath their skin while above, and around, and inside them was a force so bright that to look at it directly was blinding. He told himself to look away, but it was too late; his limited ego that tried to hang on was of minuscule value in comparison to the illumination of the infinite. Abe turned his inner eyes to the blazing light, and in that moment there was nothing left: no Abe, no Kathmandu, no Buddha; all names burned in the fire, leaving only a vibration that could best be described as love.

  Abe was certain he had died, but then he heard the kid’s voice from far off. “Okay, all done.” He felt the dryer lift from his head and found himself back in the room.

  “Oh my God,” he uttered and grasped the boy’s arm.

  “Yeah, okay, goodbye now. Next customer waiting.”

  Abe was lifted to his feet and he stood wobbly, feeling a great urge to hug the young boy, who was already leading him to the door. On the other side stood a frazzle-haired girl in yoga pants wearing dozens of beaded necklaces. Abe saw the Western pain in her eyes, and his heart blossomed. He threw his arms around her.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered. “You’ve already got it. We’ve all got it.” He would have hung on, but he felt her fear, so he released her and made his way down the dark, wet staircase with his palms open to the world and the glorious sunlight of Kathmandu.

  II.

  ENLIGHTENMENT, IT TURNED out, didn’t last long.

  By the next morning, Abe could already feel the hooks of samsara tethering him to the bed. He worried about his return to the States and his menial job brewing lattes at the co-op. He found himself irritated by the noise of Kathmandu, the dust, his dirty clothes, which stank of sweat, and the humidity that already drenched his body. And so he dressed and returned to the small shop to pay his twenty-three thousand rupees. He tasted Moksha again, only to come crashing down later that evening, realizing with deep terror that, at this rate, he wouldn’t have enough money to last him until the end of the month.

  That evening he ended up drinking at a rooftop bar, where he poured his heart out to a Dutch tourist with enlightened eyes and a Ganesha tank top. “You can’t find real enlightenment in the city,” the Dutchman said. “You need to go to the Muktinath temple in the mountains.”

  “And they have M at the temple?”

  “No, it’s just an old temple. But find the Muktinath Guesthouse. Amazing M, much cheaper than here. Good masala tea, too,” the Dutchman promised. And Abe, who had begun to sense a kind of spiritual emptiness, felt hopeful again.

  To get to the fabled city of Muktinath proved difficult. It required a ten-hour bus ride, followed by an early morning flight into the Annapurna mountains. From there it was another three-hour jeep ride and finally a half-mile walk through the dusty mountain village to the Muktinath Guesthouse—a damp, rotting wood hostel filled with stoned backpackers carrying ukuleles.

  Up here, far from the watchful eye of the CIA and Kathmandu police, things were more lax. The Moksha Room was full of computer stations, where old and you
ng alike reclined day and night, getting data shot through their crown chakras for five thousand rupees a pop. The guesthouse had upgraded its equipment, allowing users to add music to their enlightenment sessions. Abe could choose from acid jazz, Afrobeat, and dub reggae, the music crescendoing as his ego was peeled away, and he would emerge onto the upstairs balcony, beneath the starry sky, to find fellow Moksha-fueled backpackers giving impromptu lectures on the Bardo realms of reincarnation and the benefits of coconut water.

  The guesthouse proved to be the kind of communal ashram that Abe had always imagined. He, who had read a contraband, alligator-clipped, Egyptian Book of the Dead beneath bedcovers in high school, was now lounging with international backpackers and smoking hashish on the outside deck; drawing diagrams of the chi meridian system in the back of Lonely Planet guidebooks; and singing devotional songs to Shiva.

  It was true, Abe admitted to a beautiful young woman from Santa Cruz, Moksha was the best. “Have you heard of Satori?” she asked. Abe hadn’t. “You can only get it in Tokyo. You use goggles and totally perceive nothingness. Kind of like Moksha but black-hole style, if you know what I mean.”

  “Cool,” Abe said, though he wondered if he fully understood. While most of the guests at the lodge spoke about nothingness, Abe increasingly found himself returning to a deep something he couldn’t shake. Perhaps it was the spotty connection.

  “Moksha’s fun but kinda boring. I mean, compared to Sufi Trance, there’s no comparison. I would do Trance any night. You just spin and spin and spin,” she said.

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, it’s super sexy.” She took a drag of her cigarette, the wetness of her lips catching the moonlight.

  “You know, I really like you,” Abe said.

  She kept her gaze focused on the moon. “That’s sweet,” she said, “but I only go for saints and sadhus. It’s nothing personal. You’ve just still got a long path to walk.”

  Abe wished she’d say more, but she didn’t. They were in the post-Moksha space, where words were superfluous and creation reverberated in his ears with the echoes of dial-up. So Abe consoled himself with the knowledge that they didn’t need to have sex to be eternally connected as sacred partners, and this turned out for the best, as she left the next morning to catch a plane to Goa, where she’d heard there were really amazing Trance raves.

  III.

  ON THE DAY of his departure, Abe had precisely enough to pay for his lodging, the travel back to Kathmandu, and finally a taxi to the airport. It was clear: there’d be no more Moksha. He folded his dirty laundry into his backpack and bowed namaste to the bedroom with its itchy sheets and spotty electricity, then went to pay his bill.

  Besides the clerk at the desk, the guesthouse was silent, and Abe emerged onto the dusty street without a farewell. Looking up the road, he could see the temple high above. It was said there were 108 spouts at the highest peak of the temple, which poured mountain water upon the heads of willing pilgrims. You could undress and pass beneath the rushing water, full of the scent of earth, and in doing so finally experience true liberation. He’d never made the trek to see it. No one at the guesthouse had, it seemed; they stayed on the porch smoking joints or sung by the fireplace. Garuda, a self-proclaimed Mahavishnu from New Jersey, had scoffed at the idea. “All you do up there is turn prayer wheels and light incense,” he’d said, and Abe had felt incredibly foolish for asking. But here, in the morning light, Indian tourists in their dhotis walked by, bringing with them aunts, uncles, grandparents, and children. They looked sincere and hopeful with a levity Abe couldn’t place. They were families, human in their unenlightenment, but happy. Abe watched the pilgrims passing, and then he joined the group, heading past the street vendors toward the temple above.

  The day was already warm and, with the weight of the backpack, Abe was sweating by the time he reached the zigzagging path that led to the temple gates. Ash-covered sadhus sat by the entrance with their chillums and begging bowls, surrounded by white mountain rocks and wind. On the other side, the world was green. A great river ran through the temple, and from its banks bamboo rose tall. Prayer bells hung along the path, and far ahead were the large bathing pools. Men and women were in various stages of undress, some entering the soaking pool, others climbing the final steps to the spouts carved with the faces of Gods. Abe took off his shoes and socks, and stripped off his pants, and stood in line in his boxers amid the burning incense.

  Soon he’d be back on a plane, surrounded by pressurized air and bland airline food. His parents would be upset with him when he returned home; they’d lecture him about dropping out of college and wasting his money. But they’d be happy to see him, and he could tell them about liberation. The line moved forward. Mostly, he’d just be happy for a soft bed. He thought of the guesthouse’s bedroom—how it had smelled of fryer oil and the sweat of previous guests—and then about his old dorm room, where Sandra and he had spent their nights. He would call her when he got home. It was likely she wouldn’t want to talk. If she did, she’d remind him how all he’d ever spoken about was Moksha. But if she let him, he’d tell her about the vision he’d had so many times after his enlightenment sessions. A memory of a late afternoon when they’d walked across campus to her dorm room to make love. They’d leaned against one another as they walked, and he’d noticed the sound of the leaves around their feet, and the air that was cold with winter, and he’d felt her love surrounding him. Abe would tell her about how he’d be happy just to be back on campus together with her, taking a walk. The line moved forward again. Who knew, maybe these fountains would liberate him from such desires, but maybe he’d simply be happy to be beneath the blankets in her dorm room, watching a movie and eating popcorn as they’d done back in the days when he was unenlightened. It was his turn. Abe closed his eyes and bowed his head and stepped forward.

  The water, it turned out, was freezing.

  CHILDREN OF THE NEW WORLD

  SOMETIMES, WHEN EVENING comes and the light hits our home in a way that reminds us of that other life, we’ll talk about them. What their faces looked like, the feeling of their weight in our arms, the way our youngest would crawl onto my back. I’ll see Mary sitting alone in our living room, the sun gone, just the reds of dusk outlining the trees, and I know she’s remembering them. I walk over, put my arms around her, or kneel by her and place my head in her lap, and we’ll stay like that, holding one another’s pain, wondering whether we are truly monsters.

  They weren’t real, we say, looking for confirmation. Right?

  Right.

  Then we get up, start dinner, and move on with our childless lives.

  * * *

  FOR THOSE OF us who became parents in those first years, we remember the awe and beauty of the New World. To lie down in the darkness of the compartment, adjust the pillow beneath our heads, and log on was tantalizing. The chamber’s darkness gave way to the light of the other world, the white walls of our online home appearing before us, filling our teeth with electric joy. We recall the first steps we took in our new house. To reach out and touch the world was to be illuminated, and we walked outside to see the homes lined up along our street shining and new, other users emerging from doorways, waving as they crossed their lawns to make introductions. Isn’t this incredible? Where are you using from? Las Cruces, Copenhagen, Austin. We were like babies. Like Adam and Eve, some said. We reached out toward each other to see how skin felt; we let our neighbors’ hands run across our arms. In this world, we seemed to understand, we were free to experience a physical connection that we’d always longed for in the real world but had never been able to achieve. Who can blame us for being reckless?

  Perhaps such thoughts seem childish now, in light of all that happened; yet it’s often those first weeks of usage, when the world was still new, that Mary and I speak of most when we remind ourselves that life was good. It was just a beautiful illusion, we tell each other, a fantastic electronic diversion. Right? Right, we say.

  * * *

>   MARY’S PREGNANCY TOOK us both by surprise. She had gone through menopause a decade earlier and we’d resigned ourselves to living childless lives. We’d waited too long, had debated the pros and cons too many times, had placed our jobs first, and then it was too late. It was only when Mary’s belly began to swell that we accessed the FAQ tab. It was all there, no great mystery: pregnancy worked the same as in the real world, fully explained in the tutorial. We had planned to watch the walk-thru at some point, had gotten as far as the instruction to roll our thoughts to the left to select our tattoos and piercings, up and down for musculature and age, but then we began playing with landscapes and playlists, and before we knew it, we had the basics of navigation down. This is how you upload music to the home speakers; this is how you project your photos onto the living room wall; this is how you place one hand on your wife’s hips; this is how she puts her hand behind your neck; this is how you kiss. And then she was pregnant.

  The FAQs informed us we could remove an unwanted pregnancy as easily as dragging a file to the recycle bin, but we were curious. Here would be another being formed from the combination of our genome preferences. The birth promised to be as quick and painless as a download. So we held each other, scrolled through online baby names, and agreed to bring new life into this world.

  In the New World, Mary and I proved to be a completely different couple. Our bodies became freed from habit, independent of hormonal changes. We grew hungry for the electric hum of each other. Mary soon became pregnant again and our lives were illuminated in a way we’d thought impossible in the physical world. Online, with our new family, we had found joy.

  * * *

  JUNE HAD JUST turned three, Oscar two, when Mary and I began to explore the borders of the New World. By then most everyone had heard of the Dark City. It was there on the horizon, out over the tree line of our neighborhood, a brown glow in the distance. It was common knowledge you could travel to the city to spend a few hours, days even, among its pleasure domes and massage parlors. When I’d log off and go to work, the other men at the office made jokes about their weekends, a delicious guilt within their laughter. Smoothest bodies you’ll ever feel, they confided. It was said there were parlors where air currents tickled the body to the edge of orgasm. There were morphing temples where skin became ecstatic mounds of quivering jelly. We were intrigued. I’d go if you went, we agreed. So, one night late in January, after the children had fallen asleep, we left them with an online babysitter and headed for the Dark City.