The building shades our fire from the endless winds that meet no resistance out on the long plains. Half the roof is gone so that the smoke travels up into the night. I feel like the world is turned inside out, my viscera slung on the outside of my body. Everything is inside that should be outside, a whole ecosystem blanketing the walls.

  Little Bat tears apart an old desk with his bare hands and feeds the wood to the flames. Mun sits across from Uncle. In the silence, I feel a sudden fissuring inside my brother, a sinkhole opening in him that he must scramble to fill.

  Isn’t it weird how only Tibetan Buddhists believe in the reincarnation of their lamas, he says. He speaks as if this thought just occurs to him. I feel myself growing angry. Between the two of us his skepticism is one thing, but to talk this way in front of the Lotus of the Deep is another matter. Stop, I think. I think it so hard Mun shudders, his head filling with my rage. But he continues. No other Buddhist sect hunts down their reincarnations, he says, just you guys.

  I know where this is headed. Once at Yatuu Gol, Mun encounters an old monk from Nepal. The monk tells Mun ancient stories of great estates that prominent monks amass through their teachings. Gradually their followers gift them with treasures. In the beginning, these rich monks bequeath their estates to a nephew or a family member. But over time, the monasteries begin to institute a process by which to discover the reincarnations of these wealthy holy men. Essentially it begins as a way for a monastery to keep an estate under its control. As if to say, look—here is the same man born again in the flesh of this child. His wealth belongs to this child, who is one of us.

  In the firelight, Uncle’s face is a map of shadows. Yes, existence is quite a racket, he says merrily. In among the grime something goes scurrying from darkness to darkness.

  Do I Really Fly on a Magic Saddle Across the Himalayas?

  Don’t you ever doubt, Mun whispers.

  I am off by myself leafing through an old magazine I pull out of the debris. I keep another magazine folded over it, the outer one a nature magazine in Russian. Pictures of mountains and crystalline lakes, people in traditional dress. The magazine I am really looking at contains things I am never to see in this world. In one photo, two women lie inverted on top of each other, each woman straining with her tongue to lick the other’s darkness. I feel myself stir. Nobody looks my way. There is a lesson here, in the fact that the earth doesn’t open up and swallow me whole, but I am not sure I am reading it correctly.

  Do I ever doubt, says Uncle. He smooths the folds in his robe. Of course, he says. My lineage goes back hundreds of years. Am I really the man who defeats the Chinese in 1572? Do I really fly on a magic saddle across the Himalayas at the side of Guru Padmasambhava, the two of us leaving our impressions on the side of a mountain where we sit one afternoon to drink milk tea? Imagine, he chuckles, bum prints hundreds of years old!

  Mun doesn’t smile.

  It’s different for me, says Uncle. I’m found quite young. I’m barely three years old. I don’t remember another way. My whole life people prostrating themselves before me, touching my forehead to theirs.

  Don’t you ever think of leaving, asks Mun.

  Uncle takes a deep breath. The tradition is different in Bhutan where I’m born and raised, he says. Buddhism in Bhutan and the Dalai Lama’s Buddhism in Tibet aren’t exactly the same. One is the Drukpa Kagyu tradition, the other Gelug. They are similar enough that we move back and forth through each other’s worlds. Thanks to my parents’ wishes, I’m not taken away and raised in Tibet as most tulku are back then. I stay in the Land of the Thunder Dragon near my people. I come of age in a little mountaintop monastery a day’s walk up into the hills outside Punakha. I live with other monks, many of them my own age. The Principal is a kind man who understands that Bhutan cannot remain isolated forever.

  In his right hand, Uncle works a set of prayer beads. The way he nimbly slides them along, I wonder if they help him think. One day we receive word that one of the royal wives is coming to visit, he says. At our monastery there’s a holy relic that is said to cure any sickness imaginable if one only holds it in one’s palm. No one knows if the royal consort is sick, or if she’s simply out on holiday. One month later she arrives with a small retinue. She is robust and in unbelievable health after walking all the way from the capital, Thimphu, a journey of ten days.

  But that isn’t what you want to know, says Uncle. You want to know if I ever consider leaving. He stares into the fire as if for clarity.

  Pen, Butterfly, Milk

  The prayer beads click in Uncle’s hands as if time itself is being marked. The queen consort stays one week in our monastery, he says. It’s only a week, but as we are taught, time is an illusion. There’s a young western woman with the queen. Uncle winks. She’s from Canada on the other side of the world. She speaks both Dzongkha and Tshangla, has a wide-open smile, freckles vast as the stars. It feels odd to say it now, but until her, I never see a westerner, the color of her skin the same pale pink like a sheep if you remove its hair. All week I follow her around, this westerner in her early twenties. She teaches me my first English words. Pen, butterfly, milk. She says she’s from a small town on a great and icy plain.

  One afternoon she and I are walking through a nearby hamlet. The farmers are out working their paddies, at four thousand meters the main crop rice. It’s a staple of the Bhutanese diet. We eat it with cheese, with small green chilies. In the sound of Uncle’s voice, I can hear his happiness at the memory. Something about the farmlands of Bhutan always makes my heart settle, he says. Seeing the women with their short-cropped hair, a baby often strapped to their backs, and the men in the tradition gho belted at the waist. Yes, it’s true, back then it’s the national costume—it’s mandatory that everyone wears it. It’s the same with the houses—in Bhutan, all buildings must be built in the traditional style with the painted scrollwork, the white walls. Everything in harmony. It’s what makes the country so happy—everyone like everyone else.

  That afternoon the Abbot is with us, the senior monk who discovers me when I’m a child, Uncle explains. We’re walking toward an ancient stupa Carol wants to see. It’s the temple of the Divine Madman. In Bhutan but especially around Punakha people paint giant phalluses on the outer walls of their houses. Sometimes they nail wooden penises on their roofs. Uncle pauses a moment to let this fact sink in. The temple of the Divine Madman houses an unusual relic, he says. Carol wants to be blessed by it.

  I look up from my magazine. I know something of the Divine Madman. The Divine Madman brings Buddhism to Bhutan from Tibet. He uses unorthodox ways to enlighten the people, mostly women. He has sex with them, saying why shouldn’t sexual activity be a tool of enlightenment? His penis is referred to as the Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom.

  In the temple we’re headed to, says Uncle, there’s a small stupa built on the spot where it is said the Divine Madman once overpowers a demon with his penis and traps it in stone. There are a million stories of the Divine Madman’s sexual prowess taming the powers of darkness.

  We walk through the neighboring paddies and up the long hill to the monastery. Prayer flags adorn the way, a giant Bodhi tree at the top. The Abbot finds a young monk wandering the grounds memorizing his chants and sends him to bring the Principal of the monastery to us. We three are already in the altar room admiring the beautiful thangka when the Principal arrives. He looks startled at Carol’s presence, a white woman wearing the traditional kira, but when she greets him in perfect Dzongkha, he nods and walks toward the altar where the relic is kept. Carefully he takes it off its stand. The bow is said to be the bow the Divine Madman carries with him when he travels from Tibet. Tied to it is a ten-inch wooden phallus decorated with silver and bone. The Abbot instructs Carol to kneel. The Principal pours camphor water in her cupped palm. She sips it, pours the remaining drops on her hair. Then the Principal touches the top of her head with the phallus.

  But she giggles. Uncle smiles at the memory. She is being touched on the head by one of the most sacred objects in Bhutan and she giggles. With that laugh, I fall in love. I want to be with her always, says Uncle. She’s twenty-two. I’m fifteen. I remember as if it happens yesterday.

  There are others, says Uncle. A nun who lets me kiss her behind the altar. A laywoman who appears at my door one night with a bag filled with money, asking me to make her a mother. But Carol is the first to make my heart sing.

  Uncle folds up his prayer beads and slips them somewhere in his robe. You and I, he says, we don’t choose this life. But the ones among us who thrive, like His Holiness, at some point, we do choose it. We choose it with every breath.

  He looks through the fire and directly at my twin. But to answer your question, yes, I know what it is to doubt, he says. Imagine, I am a young monk from a country with no paved roads—today there are still no traffic lights in Bhutan. If you want to go anywhere, you have to walk. It can take a week to get where you’re headed, but there’s never any rush. The mountains, the forests, the rivers, the clouds that hover beside you as you walk, the land so high up, everywhere the beings of the sky like neighbors.

  My brother is waiting to hear more about Uncle’s crisis of faith, but Uncle rises, stretching his arms overhead as he moves off to find his sleeping bag. I struggle, I suffer, I move beyond suffering, from time to time I slip back into suffering, he says, yawning. This is the path.

  In my dark and far-off corner I am no longer looking at the rich images of naked women that I hold in my hands. My stomach hurts, as if I eat too much food too quickly. I pull the unfinished letter addressed to the Rinpoche out of the folds in my robe. I reread what is written:

  Esteemed Rinpoche, please know I have done everything in my power to serve you in a manner most befitting of one who wears the robe. But like a pond that is overgrown with moss, I find my heart growing turbid with doubt.

  I take a pen from my pocket and add a single line, then fold the letter back up and once again hide it on my body. I finally stumble onto the heart of the matter. All night as I sleep the words burning into my skin.

  I do not trust myself.

  Here in the Dreamscape

  Midnight and I am back in the garden. The silver hoofprints yet again leading onward to a river. The sound of music, of laughter, the smell of wildflowers garlanding the night air.

  Two figures coupling by the riverbank. Many nights my dream self stands here watching the act unfold. But instead of the slow and steady movements of love, this time the man is driving himself into her, a hammer pounding a nail into stone, the woman doubled over in front of him like a four-legged animal, the man like an overseer, his hand pulling her long black hair as if riding a horse, yet when the woman cries out at the apex of the moment, her cry is one of pleasure and not of pain.

  The two come apart. Together they lie in the grass. I walk right up to them. I want to know. It is only when the woman turns to face me that my heart stops. His arm lying across her naked breasts. The grasslands chirring around them. Even in the moonlight I cannot see his face in the tall grass, just his arm, a long dark scratch running up the skin. The woman grins at me, her teeth dark as if covered with blood. The four streams of the world shatter. I recognize them both, woman and lover, even in this moment of animalism, the woman with a dreamy quality in her eyes, like one who walks through puddles but remains dry, and the man and his forearm inked with words.

  Then Saran is gone and the landscape is changed. My twin is walking toward me with a knife in his hand, the tattoo gleaming on his inner arm. I know that he intends to walk past me and out into the night. I cannot see into his mind, his inner eye a blazing field. All the same I know I must stop him. That to do what he is seeking to do can set his being on a dark path for eons.

  Bazar is sleeping in the ger where we store food. My brother doesn’t want to go to the monastery. He doesn’t want to be the Redeemer Who Sounds the Conch in the Darkness. Here in the dreamscape he is eight years old, yet he looks as he does now, a grown man, his hair in braids. He doesn’t want to be told that he exists on this earth before, that his life is not his own. I pick up my grandfather’s old gun from the corner and race out into the night to stop him.

  In the moonlight Mun is standing out in the open grasslands. He does not walk toward the ger where our guest lies sleeping. I know this is only a dream as all those years ago he does indeed turn toward that ger and I do indeed stop him. Here in the dreamscape, I train the gun on him anyway. We are standing in an endless field of grass, the whole world rippling. I feel him lift the burning sheet in his mind only to reveal a second burning sheet. I steady the gun.

  I open my eyes just in time to see Saran pick something up off the floor. A bird wafts overhead. Sunlight pours though the ravaged ceiling. Though I am awake, it is as if I am back in the dream. I cannot tell her quickly enough. My mouth won’t work. I watch her curiously handle the thing, which is rusty and cylindrical, wondering where to put it now that she holds it.

  On the edge of my vision I see Little Bat rush forward, his shadow like a tree on the floor. Mun is sitting on his sleeping bag, eyes closed, his legs folded in the lotus position. His right hand moves hypnotically through the air as if ringing a bell. At first I don’t realize what I am seeing. My brother is meditating.

  The thing in Saran’s hand is old, parts of it jammed in dangerous positions. Her turning it this way and that is enough to loosen the rust, to awaken the object to its true purpose. Then the inevitable happens. The sound somehow both sharp and dull, quick and echoing. In the enclosed space the noise crashes off the walls before floating up into the air. Saran begins to cry.

  Mun is still sitting upright on his sleeping bag. Behind him a large hole is blasted in the wall, the hole right where his head would be if he is sleeping. The hole big enough for an animal to climb through. Debris hangs in the air. My twin opens his eyes, wipes loose grit off himself. He remains eerily composed. For the second time in his life a gun is fired at him, and he is once again left unscathed. Today he is not meant to leave this world.

  Uncle is sitting in his corner also in the lotus position. He isn’t roused by the blast. Inside each of us there is another world we can access through one-pointed concentration. In that space we are untouchable. Everything is forever all right. Despite the blast, Uncle continues his meditation for another fifteen minutes before he opens his eyes, fully refreshed.

  Grow Up!

  The first hour in the Machine and the air as if burned. My twin and I do not speak. Saran sits between us with that mysterious smile sketched on her face. I think of my dream of the night before, his arm lying across her naked breasts, skin inked, and Saran with her normally shy smile frozen in a grotesque rictus.

  Is it possible, or am I just imagining it?

  My twin sits behind the wheel, the white earbuds sticking out of his ears like plugs. I imagine them holding in his brains, that if I pull one out, the contents of his head would follow. Mentally I hurl question after question at him—nights do you sneak off to lie with her?—but his thoughts remain ensconced behind a wall of fire stretching up beyond the clouds. The air in the car thick with our mental electricity. All I can sense behind the flames is an air of bemusement, an occasional phrase. Grow up!

  I try to calm myself.

  O Thou of Diamond Body

  Whose wheel of speech benefits all beings,

  If thou wish me to remain in life

  Pray arise right now happiness.

  How dare he? And us on this mission of faith. I remember my twin’s first physical encounter, the woman’s hands on his shoulder blades. How I can only imagine the numerous women that follow that first one. True, I have no proof except my dream, but dreams are often more real than reality.

  And so we ride toward wherever the path is taking us. The Redeemer Who Sounds the Conch in the Darkness and his servant. All around us the silence as if ablaze.

  Many of Us Are on Facebook

  After a few hours, we hit a paved road, our first in almost two weeks. Large signs hang over the highway. It feels strange to be moving so smoothly over the earth, to not be jostled about. We drive into Kharkorin a few hours before noon. The modern town of Kharkorin has a main street with a few shops and cafés catering to tourists. We turn into a parking spot to stretch our legs and eat before heading out to the monastery. Mun pulls an inexpensive cell phone out of the glove compartment. He plugs it into the cigarette lighter and checks to see if he can get a signal.

  Little Bat grabs his day bag out of the back of the Machine. From one of the bag’s pockets Uncle produces an iPad. I see my brother eye it, can sense the sheepishness he feels at the inadequacy of his own device. Most monks have such things. I also have a phone, but it’s back at Yatuu Gol. Many of us are on Facebook, some of us with hundreds, thousands, of friends. Mostly we talk with other monks at other monasteries, some in other countries. We chat about monastic life, food, the European Football League. I have friends in Bhutan, a monastery located in the mountains of Punakha not far from where Uncle is born. The monks there like to watch western movies. They love the American wrestler known as The Rock. One monk, named Sangha, posts more than fifty images of The Rock on his wall.