“Screw you, little driver, and screw me!” he roared into his palms, the smashed sound of his voice blasting hot back into his face. “Screw the nice little job you’ll prob’ly lose, an’ your nice wrecked bakery crap, an’ the cute little Mustang we obliterated!” Jamey screamed, his palms dripping tears and snot as the power tore and thrilled him. Because…because the Franz truck was leukemia, wasn’t it? And the parked car, pretty pink car, was Debbie, wasn’t she? But who was the birthday maniac who had shot, blind and uncaring, into the cross traffic? Who was the senseless terror on the inexcusably speeding bike? The answer to this was what sent the surges blasting through him—because the world’s most inarguable polarity had for once been reversed. The role of Random Havoc-Maker, Ruling Leukemia-and-Wreck-Bestower, All-Powerful Worldfucker, had been usurped, for a few shattering seconds, by Jamey himself.

  “See?” he laughed and sobbed into his hands. “You’re not the only One who can crush and maim and ruin!” Defiance fueled his implosion; the black energy billowed in on itself, and Jamey rode it blindly, letting the gyre spin him deeper down than most survivors ever go. He saw the bloodied driver, felt terrible guilt, kept gliding; saw his mother’s lovely face melt into yellow hospital ruin, kept gliding; felt enraged love devouring his guilt, felt his stabbed heart devouring his humanity, felt the dark power plunging in and in till it was no longer Jamey, it was Collapsed Blackness itself that turned to any Being who dared visit such ruin on a young mother’s face and shouted, “You! Come back here! Because see? Even I can destroy for no reason! It’s so easy! Sooooo easy! So screw You! You’re Nobody! Do You hear me? Nobody!”

  Ah, Jamey, the half-good son, keeping the Fifth Commandment by smashing the First. Honoring the gravitationally collapsed implosion that was once his blue-eyed mom. Showing any conceivable Holiness how much he adored her still. “Anybody can wreck, smash, and ruin!” he sobbed into his palms. “God! Shitheads! Nobodies on bikes and nobodies in heavens! So happy birthday to me and Mom, and screw You! Do You hear me? Do You hear? Come back here!”

  IV. Veda U

  (Seattle, 1985)

  Not by the out-breath nor by the in-breath does any mortal live. By a mystery immortal do we live, on which these two breaths depend. Come! I will show you this secret formulation!

  —anonymous Vedic rishi

  FOR HER FIRST eighteen years, Risa was an unusually bright but otherwise typical American child of TV, rock and roll, A.P. English and math classes; child of FM radio love songs inseparable from clogged Portland malls and sprawls and hi-speed girl chatter; child of parents whose dysfunctional marriage led to a divorce that simply chopped the dysfunction in two, bequeathing Risa two untenable homes instead of one; child increasingly aware, therefore, of the deep bewilderment of her parents’ generation and the binge consumption, binge investment, binge drinking, eating, sex, religiosity, to which bewilderment led; child who, from the age of thirteen or so, was virtually self-raised amid a circle of smart, irony-addicted peers desperate to at least make black comedy out of their nation-state’s willingness to sacrifice life, including children’s lives, in the name of global markets, global shopping, tumorous growth, global golf.

  But at eighteen a little Sanskrit sent some primordial magic into Risa’s life. The myths and texts of ancient India soon struck her not as tales of an “exotic East” but as legible maps and gazetteers leading toward a preposterously wonderful yet conceivably reachable home. Her concept of the Divine leapt from Kerouac’s adolescent “God, the Guy who ain’t a guy” to the Rig Veda’s “Unseen Unborn Guileless Perfection.” Her descents into sorrow became occasions not for despondency but for a sad/ṣad/ṣadness-fueled dive into “a space so calm, dark & spacious I not only don’t fear it, I fall willingly in, growing calm, dark & spacious myself.” Her nights, after long days of diligent study, grew haunted by Skrit repetition loops that played like music on the edge of sleep: Know the embodied soul. Though it hides in the hundredth part of the point of a hair divided a hundred times, it is infinite. Not female, not male, not neuter. What body it takes, with that it is united. It is the great in the sun, the food in the moon, the radiance in lightning, the sound in thunder, Indra in the wind, the fullness in space, the truth in waters, the resemblance in a mirror; it is the companion in a shadow, life in an echo, death in a sound, Yama in a dream, Prajāpati in the body, speech in the right eye, truth in the left. Though most of her fellow students seemed satisfied, amid the U Dub’s smorgasbord of intellectual goods, to have their brains filled like hard-drives by a sequence of professorial downloads, with Skrit as her ally Risa began to conduct herself more like a cagey barterer at a Rajasthan bazaar. Declaring an Art major and Asian Religions minor, she made Skrit scripture and mythology not her “academic focus,” but her living guide to her inner self and native land, and as a result became almost constantly happy. Migrating into the old wisdom texts as instinctively and completely as a salmon migrates up its home river, she grew less and less interested in keeping up with “modern America,” and ever more aware of the living continent and creatures upon which modern America remorselessly gorged. She studied Skrit each night as if her life depended on it, and by day the testimony of her senses pollinated the passions that bloomed by night. The marine light and vapor pouring in off Puget Sound moistened and localized the wisdom words. Mount Rainier and the peaks of the Olympic peninsula became a Himalayan realm of unmet gods. The meticulousness with which Dr. Kool and his rishis unpacked an ancient forest world inspired a meticulousness in Risa’s love for her own world. She began keeping field journals of careful drawings and notes, capturing “swinging doors” she hoped to convert to canvases. She bought beat-up North American field guides to birds, plants, trees, mammals, bugs, and beat them up further. Her dad bequeathed her an old pair of binoculars that turned vague vistas into perceptible places, high-flying specks into migratory birds, and the moon into an intimate new neighbor.

  She discovered certain Skrit words and teaching stories that telescope mysteriously inward, revealing ever more potent secrets the closer one looks. Remembering this as she poked around in a pawn shop one morning, Risa was drawn to an enormous old magnifying glass. The thing looked as goofy in her grip as Dr. Kool’s wooden pointer in his belt. She bought it for that very reason, lugged it everywhere in her backpack, and the world poured forth subtleties in response. She trained her lens on the life-rife soil under compost piles, on the sand under rocks on the Puget Sound tideline, on the back sides of rotting tree bark, gravel beds of streams. Every such nook and cranny turned out to be crawling with weird little unmet citizens. She met a bright crimson spider, the size of an average freckle, that could sprint almost as fast as humans walk, though its legs were nearly invisible. She found inert brown obtect pupae she’d mistaken for rat turds without her glass, out of which the preposterous beauties known as butterflies much later emerged. She found lumps on cherry tree leaves which, broken open, revealed teeming feedlots of pale blue aphids being bred, fattened, and milked by ants who were basically dairying, using the trees as farms.

  SHE MET A bumblebee she befriended for five entire days. The friendship began one fall morning as she was walking to her Roman history class as Seattle was getting pounded by a massive Pacific storm. Though most every pedestrian she passed was scowling, Risa couldn’t stop smiling. The storm-driven raindrops were showing off like birds, flying sideways and even upward in places, and the rush hour traffic had lost its internal combustion roar due to shoals of water the myriad tires kept displacing. When she closed her eyes to listen, each passing vehicle became the foam fingers of a wave shallowing out on a Pacific beach.

  As she was about to enter the history building she noticed a single autumn narcissus amid a bed of hundreds of motionless blossoms nodding vigorously, as if encouraging her pleasure in the storm. Imagining an invisible Vedic creature stashed in a subtle flower inside the ordinary flower, Risa returned the nods—causing her powers of reason to pull her over and issue a Woowoo Ticket. The fine was to get down on all fours, muddy her knees and the heels of her hands, and peer up into the blossom in search of the nods’ rational cause—and there was a being present: a bumblebee had crawled into the narcissus to escape the torrential rain.

  Risa reached for her magnifying glass and trained it on the blossom’s occupant. The bee’s hairy rump, bulging in the flower’s gold corona, looked like a chunk of garish shag carpet stuffed in the bell of a tiny trumpet, but six surrounding white petals prevented the rain from reaching that bell, insulating the bee in a double wall of dryness. “Ingenious!” Risa murmured. With which she went to class.

  An ordinary student wouldn’t have given this encounter another thought. But at Green Tea Hour that evening, as the storm continued to pound Risa’s dorm, an unseen thread flew from her interior, through the night, to the bee tucked in the narcissus. “Poor guy!” she whispered, grabbing her Field Guide to Insects to gauge her friend’s chances. The dense hair that covered the bumbler, she learned, was called pile, and its obvious purpose was to insulate, but a more surprising function was to help the bee gather food. As a bumblebee flies, its pile gathers an electrostatic charge from the air. Because flowers are grounded, the instant the bee lands on a blossom, pollen leaps onto its pile, electromagnetically propelled by the grounding. As Risa marveled at this, rain smacked her windows with the violence of a carwash. Before reason could stop her, she closed her eyes and spent a long time sending well-being down invisible threads to her bee.

  Two mornings later—after a Roman history lecture during which Risa’s prof struck her as clinically obsessed with Emperor Caligula’s spectacular gruesomeness—she checked the narcissus and found the bee still jammed inside the gold trumpet. “You okay?” she asked, lightly touching its pile. The bumbler remained motionless. Holding the narcissus stem to steady it, Risa blew warm breath into the little gold chamber. The bee responded with a whirring so faint she couldn’t hear it, only felt it in her fingertips. “Please help us!” Risa prayed to she couldn’t say what.

  The storm lasted four days. On day five, a Friday, dawn sent Homeric rose fingertips up into a blue sky. Thanking Surya the Sun, Risa set off early on her morning run and arrived at the narcissus shortly after the first solar rays struck. The ground had begun to steam. The bee was still in the blossom, but motionless. Taking hold of the narcissus, Risa breathed into the trumpet. When a weak whir again met her fingertips, a Skrit verse came to Risa. Into the corona she whispered,

  There is a path, extremely fine and extending far.

  It has touched you, you have discovered it!

  That beneath which the year revolves,

  the breathing behind breathing, the sight behind sight,

  the hearing behind hearing, the thinking behind thinking,

  the first, the ancient. With the heart alone, behold it!

  The bumbler didn’t move. The hands of Risa’s watch did. It was time to jog home, clean up, eat breakfast, and prep for more Roman Empire, post-Christ, pre-fall. But her bumblebee, she’d learned, was a Bombus terrestris. The Latin term and its small owner struck her as more interestingly Roman than anything likely to occur in class. She kept watch instead.

  And a quarter hour later—on a far better Friday for her bee than Good Friday was for Jesus—it finally backed out of its sepulcher into a shaft of sunlight. Its wings turned out to be blades of thinnest ice. Its back legs wore jodhpurs of orange pollen. Its pile shone black and brilliant gold in the morning shine. “Five days!” Risa marveled. “You broke Christ’s record!”

  Bzzzt, her small friend faintly replied.

  Balancing on the lip of a white petal, the bee cleaned its head and body with its forelegs, tested its wings with a few more bzzzts, and with no further ado flew up the shaft of sunlight till it disappeared through the trees—no extra credit, no grade, no tenure.

  But Risa stayed on in the same beam, gathering some kind of static charge, till she found herself whispering to an Unseen Guileless Unknown, “I can’t name You or see You. But You have touched me. With the heart alone I just felt it! Keep touching me. I’m coming to You…”

  MUCH AS SHE prized moments like this, Risa continued to throw herself not just into Sanskrit but into all her classes. She remained as capable as most of her professors and peers at asserting, denying, analyzing, explicating—attacking and deriding too, if necessary. She also continued to enjoy the hurly-burly of campus life—including a couple of hurly-burly boyfriends. Even so, the wall separating her inner and outer lives grew increasingly permeable, and her mental makeup began to change:

  There’d been a time when Risa, amid groups of intellectually amped peers, enjoyed flaunting her mental adroitness and caustic wit as much as any raucous young scholar. But when Skrit Lit cautioned her with statements like “Restrain the mind as the charioteer restrains his vicious horses,” Risa took the admonitions to heart. The difference between a stimulated mind and a frenetic one became obvious. Her behavior changed accordingly. She still enjoyed it when she and her classmates got amped up during a free-form discussion of, say, corporate oligarchy, or Milan Kundera’s take on women, or Camille Paglia’s on men, or Richard White’s on the American West. When the word slinging and idea spraying grew wild, Risa had a fine old time tossing her own rhetoric around—until the moment her brain began to feel frenetic. She would then hear the ancient echo (“as the charioteer restrains his vicious horses…”), feel a loyalty to deep forest and nameless rishis, rein in her mind-horses, detach from the hubbub, slow and deepen her breath, and sink toward a peace that “hides in the hundredth part of the point of a hair divided a hundred times, and is infinite.”

  She dubbed these shifts of consciousness “strategic withdrawals.” And her friends sometimes saw her make them. When this happened, they’d tease Risa, calling her “spaced,” “sleep-deprived,” “oversexed,” “undersexed,” anything to coax her back into the fray. But once she withdrew she was impervious to goading. At a time in life when most of her peers were only interested in making their mind-horses gallop, she was determined to learn how and when to rein her horses in.

  The effort bore immediate fruit. Her ability to retreat to a calm center, for starters, enabled her to stay focused amid the irritations of campus life right in the presence of the irritants. This contemplative triumph would have earned her an A+ had Isaac of Syria been one of her profs. Her ability to occupy a place of observant inaction amid frenetic action helped her conserve energy she had formerly squandered. Her intellectual endurance increased dramatically as a result.

  Strategic withdrawals also enabled her, in a genuine if temporary way, to drop out of college whenever she felt a need to do so. This in turn removed the pressure so many students feel to literally drop out, giving her even more focus and energy when she turned back to the college experience. The same brief but total internal retreats enabled Risa to grow less and less caustic, more and more patient, more capable of being kind, and more willing to risk revealing a childlike curiosity even in classes and in social groups. If her curiosity was then scoffed by the galloping mind-horses of a would-be cynic or sophisticate, another quick withdrawal enabled her to target the hurt caused by the scoffing, remove it like a silly hat the cynic had stuck on her head, and remain free of emotional stews.

  Another fruit of her strategic withdrawals: Risa could, when needed, confront other people so gently, justly, and helpfully that, rather than humiliate them into a combative stance, she frequently earned their gratitude. An example of the sort of diplomacy she learned to bring to bear:

  During her sophomore year Risa requested a note of recommendation from Dr. Kool to apply for a 400-level class called Intellectual History of the England-India Interface. All Dr. Kool ever told his students about the give-and-take between these nations was “India gave and gave and Britain took and took—until Gandhiji.” Risa figured the exchange must’ve been more intricate than that. A quick thumbing through a biography revealed Gandhi wearing Western suits when he lived in South Africa, looking the proper British barrister. And it was the Westerner Henry David Thoreau whose “Civil Disobedience” cross-pollinated with Gandhi’s beloved Bhagavad Gita and sent him back to India, and the astonishing life that ensued. Because of her equal loves for verities Eastern and landscapes Western, Risa loved instances in which the West had inspired rather than exploited the East and wanted to learn more about them.

  The Interface class, it turned out, was taught by a Dr. Hans Dybok, a prof whose former students characterized him as “hard,” “dry,” and “unbearably encyclopedic.” Though this sounded far from promising, Risa went to the University Book Store to peruse Dybok’s proposed reading list. And she did find it “unbearably encyclopedic.” But she also found an impressive list of the kind of positive cross-cultural East-West exchanges that fascinated her.

  So it happened that, during Dr. Dybok’s next office hours, she knocked on his door, heard him say, “Come in,” and encountered an exceedingly tidy, slight-of-build, bespectacled man looking dead serious behind a meticulously trimmed beard. Taking a chair at his bidding, she smiled and studied him until he, growing uncomfortable, asked, “How may I help you?” She then greeted the poor fellow with this:

  “My name is Risa McKeig. I’m an Art major and Asian Religions minor. England’s relationship with India is a big deal to me. So I’m really interested in your Interface class. But when I checked out the reading list, I saw that you assigned six thick books of mostly theoretical, scholarly prose.” She paused to shoot the prodigiously scowling Dybok an encouraging smile. He did not smile back.

  “I’m here for a strange reason, Doctor. The speech I’m now making, when it’s over, will have consisted of about three hundred words. I rehearsed it and counted. Weird of me, I know. But feel the effort needed to grasp all these words? Tiring, isn’t it? Yet, believe it or not, you’ve asked your Interface students to grasp roughly three thousand times more words than I will have spoken when I’m done. Imagine me running up to your office three thousand more times in the next ten weeks to deliver speeches as long as this one. I’d lose my voice! You’d lose your mind!”