The Furthest City Light (37 page)

***

One morning when I reached the bay (I always got there early, around seven thirty), I was surprised to see another person sitting at the water’s edge. Until then, I’d always had the place to myself, at least for the first few hours. The American and European tourists generally showed up around ten, lugging one or two kids, a few chairs, large woven mats and brightly colored beach umbrellas. The Mexican tourists, on the other hand, preferred the afternoon, arriving around one thirty or two in parties of ten or more and carrying boom boxes and huge Styrofoam coolers. The townspeople, of course, straggled in at the end of the workday and stayed to watch the sun go down, a spectacular show that often elicited applause.

The person was alone and sitting cross-legged on the sand. I watched him for about five minutes, waiting for him to move, to turn slightly and acknowledge me. I stood and waited, but he remained motionless. Curious, I walked a little closer and could see that his eyes were closed and that his hands were resting on his thighs. He was a few years older than me, had obviously once been handsome, but was now a little too soft and pudgy. His clothes were classic—faded tie-dyed T-shirt and khaki pants cut off just below the knees. Although he had long blond hair that he wore in a neat ponytail, something about his bearing suggested he was more than just an old hippie living in a bus nearby. As I edged even closer, I noticed that his face was badly sunburned, especially the top of his forehead where his hairline had receded.

Despite his rigid posture, he looked extremely comfortable as if he could sit like that forever and without any outward sign die in the same position. Nothing seemed to affect him, neither the sun on his sunburn, the wind ruffling his hair, nor the waves crashing irregularly a few feet away. He seemed immoveable, like a rock. I stood on the sand and watched, feeling more than merely curious. I was intrigued. No, I was envious. Whatever he was doing, I wanted it.

Finally, about ten minutes later, he turned his head and nodded. “I thought someone was there.”

I took a step backward. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

He laughed as if I’d uttered an absurdity. “Not at all. You were very quiet, very respectful. I just felt your energy, that’s all. It was nice.” He had a lovely speaking voice and I wondered if he was an actor or some kind of professional speaker. I might have guessed a lawyer, but not with that hair.

I walked over to where he was sitting and we introduced ourselves. His name was Daniel Morrison and he’d arrived a few days ago from California where he taught physics at Stanford.

“I get to look like this,” he said, smiling, “because I have tenure.”

I told him I’d been living here for a couple of weeks, and before that, I’d spent some time in Nicaragua.

He made a sympathetic sound. “That must have been heavy.”

“It was,” I said.

“Do you meditate?”

I shook my head. “No, but I’d like to. Is it difficult?”

He looked me up and down, assessing me in some way. “What do you do for a living?”

“I used to be a criminal defense attorney.”

“Ah.” He nodded and then patted the sand beside him, motioning me to sit down. “Now then,” he said, clearly in lecture mode, “there are many different meditation techniques, but the one I most often practice is a very simple one. And for people like us with great big unruly minds, the simpler the better. Eh?” He waited until I nodded, and then continued. “So, with this practice, you close your eyes and count your breaths. When you get to ten, just start over again.” He smiled and shrugged.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“Pretty much. When you become lost in thought, which will happen over and over again, simply note that you’ve been thinking and then go back to counting.” He paused. “Would you like to try it?”

“Sure, how about thirty minutes?”

He hesitated. “Well, it’s not quite as easy as it sounds. Let’s start conservatively with ten minutes.”

“Okay,” I said, and copied the position of his body—legs crossed, back straight, hands on thighs. Piece of cake, I thought.

“I’ll tell you when the time is up,” he murmured.

After a while, I figured he’d changed his mind and decided to go for the full thirty minutes. Later, when my legs were numb and my back was beginning to ache, I figured he was testing me, waiting for me to cry uncle. No way, I thought, and resolved to keep going until I fell over. Eventually, I wondered if he’d fallen asleep and took a quick peek at him. But no, he was still meditating, still oozing that peace and serenity I coveted. I went back to counting my breaths. One, two, three, fourteen… Finally, he tapped my arm.

“Time’s up,” he said.

“Whew! How long did we sit?”

He looked down at his watch. “Twelve and a half minutes.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said, and we both laughed.

He stood up. “See you tomorrow?” he asked, reaching out a hand to help me to my feet. There was nothing flirtatious in the gesture; he was looking for a friend, not a lover.

“I’ll look forward to it.”

Since then, we’ve been meeting every morning at seven thirty. It took me a week to build up to thirty minutes. Lately, we’ve been sitting about an hour. Occasionally, I’ll have a moment, no longer than a couple of seconds, when I feel the kind of peace that I’ve been chasing.
Gotcha
, I’ll think, and then of course I’ll lose it. The trick, I’m beginning to understand, is not to hold on to anything, even if it’s exactly what I want. Better to just watch it all go by.

Often, after we’ve finished sitting, Daniel and I will talk about our lives. At first, I told him only general things about Nicaragua, the current situation, the brigade I’d joined, the people I’d met in the
barrio
. He was a good listener, asking questions only for the purpose of clarifying something he didn’t understand.

One morning, I ended up telling him about the explosion on the road to Jalapa, what we’d seen, and what we’d done to save the surviving soldiers.

“It’s the last thing I think about at night before I fall asleep,” I said.

We sat quietly and watched a squadron of brown pelicans diving for their breakfast, their low hoarse squawks as soothing as a lullaby. It was a beautiful peaceful windless morning. After ten or fifteen minutes, Daniel said, “The last thing I think about at night is the first thing I think about in the morning. Gin.” He paused, waiting for a reaction. When I simply nodded, he made a face and I guessed he was debating whether to tell me more.

“Hey, you don’t have to tell me anything,” I assured him. “It’s not quid pro quo. But in case you forgot, I was a criminal defense attorney for twelve years. There’s nothing I haven’t heard. Unless you sawed your wife’s head off with a Swiss Army knife in front of the children, I’m unlikely to have a reaction.”

Daniel started to laugh. “No, nothing out of the ordinary. Just the usual story you might hear a dozen times at a typical Saturday night AA meeting.”

“Well then,” I said.

Daniel had been a boy wonder since grade school and had graduated college at nineteen. By the time he was twenty-four, he had his PhD and was teaching physics at the University of California at Davis. By twenty-nine, he had become a full professor at Stanford. A few years later, he published a popular book about spirituality and the new physics and became well known and highly respected as a speaker at both academic as well as New Age conferences. From then on, until he was thirty-six, he wrote a book a year, each one more successful than the last. On his thirty-third birthday, he married a lovely professor of astronomy, who also taught at Stanford. Neither of them wanted children; they had their careers and each other. It was more than enough.

“Things couldn’t have been better,” he said. “My life was a dream come true.” He chuckled. “Except I kept waiting for everything to fall apart, for the whole ball of yarn to unravel. It was simply too perfect. Nothing stays the same although I wanted it to. Oh, how I wanted it to. But I knew it wouldn’t, that it was just a matter of time, so I kind of helped it along, gave it a little push, figuring at least I’d have a hand in destroying it. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

“Not really,” I said.

He eyed me sideways, not sure whether to believe me. “Anyway,” he continued, “I started drinking, and slowly but surely managed to lose everything I’d been so afraid of losing. My wife was the hardest; she stuck with me until a few years ago. Finally one Sunday afternoon, we went to a faculty party where I got plastered and dove into the host’s swimming pool. Unfortunately, the pool had recently been drained and I ended up in the hospital with two broken arms, a broken ankle and a fractured skull. When I finally returned home, my wife had packed her bags and left. She wrote me a note saying she couldn’t stand it anymore, that she hoped—for my sake—that my next suicide attempt would be a hundred percent successful.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said.

“Yeah well. Anyway, to make a long story short, I drank for another couple of years until one day about four months ago, my colleagues burst into my classroom, ordered the students out, and held an intervention on the spot. As a result, I was sent directly to a ninety-day treatment program and placed on an indefinite leave of absence until I’m able to convince the university I can remain sober for the rest of my life, or at least the rest of my teaching life. So, that’s why I’m here meditating. Mind-obedience school in the morning, AA meetings in the afternoon and evening.”

I was silent for a while, digesting everything Daniel had told me. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was aware that my three-month sabbatical from the public defender’s office was over and that I needed to call Larry Hanover and tell him officially that I wouldn’t be returning. “Do you miss teaching?” I asked.

Daniel shook his head. “Not really. I haven’t been very good at it for a long time. Entertaining, perhaps, but not very good. The truth is I’m happier than I’ve been in years. No, better than happy, content. Happiness is too tricky. The only thing I regret is how much pain I caused my wife. She’s about to get remarried and I hope this time it works out for her.” He paused. “As for me, I’m no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop. So I guess you could say I’m at peace.”

I stood up and shook out my towel. He stood up too, looking hesitant and a little shy, like maybe I wouldn’t want to be his friend anymore. I put my arm around his shoulder.

“See you tomorrow?” I asked.

He smiled and nodded. “You got a date, sister.”

***

A few days before I intended to call Vickie, I started feeling anxious and told Daniel I was afraid she might have already decided to end the relationship, that I didn’t want to talk her into coming here if that was truly the case, but that I also didn’t want to give up too easily.

We were sitting in our usual spot at the water’s edge and were about to start meditating. Daniel scratched the beard he was trying to grow and looked very uncomfortable, as if he had a crick in his neck.

“Well, since I’m the original nothing-left-to-lose guy, you definitely don’t want my advice.”

I sighed. “No, I suppose not.” Then I stared at him and shook my head. “You know, I’ve tried to get used to it, but I think you should lose the beard as well, Daniel.”

He looked surprised. “Too Robinson Crusoe?”

“Too crazy homeless veteran living in a Dumpster.”

“Oh. That’s not exactly the look I was after.”

I sat up a little straighter and placed my hands on my thighs. “I didn’t think so. Well, shall we meditate?”

He nodded. After a couple of minutes, he murmured, “If you do end up losing her, can you let her go?”

I sat quietly and thought about it. Eventually, I whispered, “Yes, I think so.”

“That’s good. That’s very good. Well then,
mi amiga,
see you in an hour.”

“A tout a l’heure.”

“Ooh, French, very fancy,” he whispered.

“Ssh, I’m meditating.”

***

For the next couple of days, I tried calling our house in the evenings, but Vickie was never there. I left simple messages saying only that I would try again. I could have paged her at the hospital, but I didn’t want to compete for her attention. Then I thought about her schedule and decided the best time to call would be around seven in the morning when she usually ate her breakfast. During the workweek, Vickie had trained herself to wake up every morning at five fifteen. After a quick cup of tea, she practiced yoga, then took a shower and ate a bowl of oatmeal. By seven thirty, she was out the door.

My next task was finding an available phone at that time of day. The only pay phones I’d seen were in the larger markets, none of which opened before eight. It took a while, but I discovered that the proprietor of Reuben’s World Famous Hamburgers, a nondescript little hamburger stand down the hill, tucked between two construction sites, owned a phone and for a small fee was happy to let me use it. Since Reuben and his wife Frieda have five little kids all under the age of ten, there’s no way they can sleep past dawn. Besides, if the kids don’t wake them, the roosters do. Unlike their slipshod cousins in Nicaragua, the roosters here are loud and extremely punctual. No one in the neighborhood needs an alarm clock. The birds start crowing at six and won’t stop until everyone is wide-awake.

The first time I tried calling her in the morning, Vickie immediately picked up the phone. My heart was racing, but I willed myself to sound calm and unaffected. Just don’t be a lawyer, I told myself.

“Hi babe,” I said.

“There you are,” she replied. “I was wondering when I’d actually get to speak with you. Sorry I’ve been gone in the evenings. I’ve been practicing my Eskimo rolls at the reservoir.”

I was standing at the window watching an old VW van narrowly miss two chickens wandering across the road. It took a couple of seconds before her words registered. “Eskimo rolls? Like in kayaking?”

“Exactly. I’ve got a bombproof roll on my right, but my left side is still hit or miss. It’s good enough for class two water, but in a couple of days I’m heading for the Blue which has at least a couple of class three stretches.”