Voices in the Night (23 page)

The Western Gate
. The journey is broken off. For seven days and seven nights Gautama broods over the decay of the body. On the
morning of the eighth day he rides with Chanda through the Western Gate. Scarcely has he set forth when he sees a horse-drawn cart moving slowly at the side of the road, followed by people wailing and hitting their chests with their fists. In the cart a man is lying on his back, his limbs stiff as columns, his face empty as stone. Gautama looks harshly at Chanda. “What is happening?” he asks.

Seeing
. Gautama returns through the Western Gate. He speaks to no one. He goes directly to the quarters of the concubines, in order to find forgetfulness. Something is not right. The women smile at him, but their teeth are broken and brown, their breasts sag like sacks of dirt, their arms are crooked sticks. A naked girl lying on her stomach looks over her shoulder at him. A snake crawls out from between her buttocks. Her face is a grinning bone. Gautama flees into the bright afternoon. Overhead, the sun is a ball of blood. He looks at his hand. Cracks appear in the skin. A black liquid hangs from his fingertips.

The Northern Gate
. On the eighth day Gautama orders the Northern Gate to be opened. He must see the world as it is. What is the world? He will walk breast-high in blood and excrement, he will kiss the mouths of the dead. Not far from the gate he sees a man walking at the side of the road. The man is carrying a white bowl. He wears a simple robe and walks peacefully. His hair is cut close to his scalp. The whiteness of the bowl, the stillness of the arms, the serenity of the gaze, all draw Gautama’s tense attention. Chanda explains that the man is an ascetic, who carries a begging bowl. Once he was a wealthy man, head of a great house with many servants. Now he has nothing, which he calls everything. When Chanda turns to look at his friend, he sees Gautama staring at the white bowl with a look of ferocity.

In the Garden of Seven Noble Pleasures
. In the indigo night, King Suddhodana is walking in the Garden of Seven Noble Pleasures. The moonlight rippling over his arms like white silk, the dark odors of the rose-apple trees, soothe him and fill him with peacefulness. He can permit himself to feel a measure of calm, for the reports from Chanda have made him warily hopeful. The Prince has ridden out through all four gates and each time has returned quickly. He appears to prefer the familiar pleasures of the world within the ramparts to the difficult pleasures of the unknown world. He will never be a conqueror of kingdoms. Instead, he will rule from the Three Palaces and embellish the lands that his father has won. It is good. For there is a time of expansion, and a time of consolidation; a time of blood, and a time of wine. The soldiers will obey him, for disobedience is death. And after the reign of King Siddhartha Gautama will come the reign of Gautama’s son, who already handles his horse like a man and speaks with the easy authority of one born to rule. Rahula will take command like his grandfather before him, he will ride out and conquer new lands. The young boy fills him with pride. But then, there is no reason to rush things; the King himself is still strong. Only the other day he hunted from dawn to nightfall and later, in the women’s quarters, made a young concubine cry out with pleasure.

Leave-taking
. Outside the bedchamber, Gautama raises his hand to push aside the heavy curtain in the doorway. He hesitates and does not move. He can hear Yasodhara breathing in the marriage bed, with its high posts topped by carved lotus blossoms and its scarlet bed mat woven with a border of gold mandarin ducks. Through a second doorway is his son’s chamber. Gautama imagines himself bending over Rahula, who lies with his face turned to one side and his forearm
flung across his chest. He is a healthy boy, skilled in archery and wrestling, an excellent horseman, a leader among his friends. Never does he seek out solitary places, where there is no sound but the dip of a swan’s beak in the water. Now Gautama imagines himself bending over Yasodhara. The thin light of an oil lamp shines on her cheek. Asleep, she is like the swan under the swan in the dark water, vivid and shut away. He will step into the chamber and bend over her, he will whisper his farewell. As he stands outside the curtain, imagining himself bending over her and whispering his farewell, he feels that she is far away, though he has only to push aside the curtain and step over to her. Soon the doorway, too, will be far away. Something troubles his thoughts, and now it is growing clearer, now he has it, he sees it: even here, at the threshold of his wife’s chamber, where his hand is lifted before the curtain, he is already elsewhere. To push through the curtain is not to say farewell, but to return from a journey that permits no return. An irritation comes over him. Is he still so bound to pleasure? He turns away, toward the night.

Moonlight
. Chanda glances back as the great doors of the Northern Gate close behind him. Then he rides ahead with Gautama, each on his horse, along the moonlit path. Chanda is exhilarated and desolate: exhilarated because he is helping his friend escape from the prison-world of the Three Palaces, desolate because he knows that life without Gautama will be meaningless. It is Chanda who has secretly ordered the thirty guards of the Northern Gate to remove themselves to the other three gates, Chanda who has replaced them with six trustworthy attendants; it is Chanda who has prepared the horses and arranged the time of departure. The King will be enraged, he may even have Chanda arrested and flung into prison, but in time he will forgive him and in the end he will thank him. Gautama’s departure, the King will come to understand, could not have been prevented.
Far better that his son should escape with a trusted friend who can lead him safely through the dangers of the night to the border of the Great Forest. As they ride along the path, Chanda repeatedly looks at the Prince, who stares straight ahead. His long hair, bound in back, bounces lightly between his shoulders. Chanda suddenly imagines the future knife cutting off the proud locks, the coarse robe replacing the fine silk that ripples in moonlight like trembling water. The son of King Suddhodana will carry a white bowl. His long fingers will shape themselves around the whiteness of the bowl. So vivid is the image of the begging Gautama that Chanda is startled to see the Prince in his long hair and silk robe, riding beside him on a white horse. The trees have begun to thin out a little. At a fork in the road Chanda leads them onto the right-hand path, which turns away from the city on the river. Dark fields on both sides stretch into the night. Although Gautama says nothing and looks only ahead, Chanda can feel, flowing from his friend, a strange lightheartedness. And after all, why not? They are riding out on an adventure, a world-adventure, on a fine night in summer. They’re like a couple of boys, playing in moonlight while the grown-ups are sleeping. In the night of the bright moon all things are possible, for moonlight is dream-light, and may the night go on. To be alive! To breathe! And when the adventure, like all adventures, comes to an end, there will be others. Tomorrow, in sunlight, they will walk across the courtyard to the musicians’ quarters, they will laugh in the air of summer. But he isn’t thinking clearly. Tomorrow his friend will not be with him. His friend will never be with him again. An uneasiness comes over Chanda. The long night has tired him. He can feel the tiredness tugging at him from the inside. He has to stay alert, on this night that must never end. But already he sees the Great Forest rising up before him. How can that have happened? The forest is coming nearer, it’s hurrying to meet them. Shouldn’t he have been paying closer attention? Now Gautama has stopped. He is dismounting, he is delivering his horse to Chanda. From his arms
he begins to remove bracelets of jewels. Chanda wants to slow him down, to stop him forever, to explain that things are happening much too quickly, only moments ago they were riding along, two friends on a summer night. As Chanda receives the jewels, still warm from the Prince’s arms, he feels a trembling in his body. With a sense of deep violation, he falls to his knees and begs his friend to let him accompany him on his journey. There are snakes and wolves in the forest. The Prince’s feet, accustomed to swept paths, will walk on thorns. What will he eat? How will he sleep? Even as he cries out his need, Chanda is sick with shame and bows his head. He becomes aware of a silence around him and looks up in alarm, but Gautama is still standing there. Chanda hears a light wind in the trees, which seem to be speaking, unless it’s the night sky: “The time of sleeping is over.” He tries to understand, but he hears only the wind in the leaves. Gautama is pointing at the eastern sky. “Look. Daybreak.” Above a line of hills, a thin bar of dawn has appeared. A heavy tiredness comes over Chanda, like a weight of cloth. A yawn shudders through his face and runs along the length of his kneeling body. He bends his neck in weariness. On his shoulder he feels something. Is it the touch of a hand? He wants to shout out in wild joy, he wants to burst into bitter tears. When he opens his eyes he sees Gautama disappearing into the forest. Chanda waits, kneeling before the trees. The sky is growing light. A bird lands on a branch. After a while Chanda rises and, leading both horses, starts back along the path.

I
t was known as the Place. Even as children we knew there was something wrong with a name like that—you couldn’t get a grip on it, the way you could get a grip on JoAnn’s Diner, or Indian Lake, or the Palace Cinema out on South Main. It was as if whoever had named it hadn’t thought very much about it, or hadn’t been able to make up his mind. Later, as we grew older, we thought the very wrongness of the name was what was right about it. It was like an empty room you could put things in. Still later, we no longer thought about the name at all. It was part of what was, like summer and night.

It’s easy to get there: just head north toward the hill at the end of town. As you get closer, the houses thin out and give way to car dealerships, a retirement community, and an enclosed mall next to an outdoor shopping plaza, before you reach a stretch of fields and woods. On the other side of the woods the hill begins. You can drive a short way up, but you have to leave your car in one of the paved lots
and continue on foot. Half a dozen dirt trails start from the lots and wind to the top. It takes most people no more than twenty or thirty minutes to get there, though some like to rest on wooden benches scattered along the sides of the paths. If you don’t want to walk, a minibus will take you most of the way up, leaving from the main trailhead every half hour, nine to five during the week, ten to six on weekends. Everything’s shut down during the bad weather, first of November through the first of March. Radios and cell phones are strictly forbidden, but no one seems to miss them. You know it’s not like a trip to the shore of Indian Lake, two towns over, or to the picnic tables in Burrows Park. You know you haven’t come for that.

I remember my first visit, at the age of six or seven. I see myself holding my mother’s hand as we walk along an upward-sloping path, between fields of knee-high grass stretching away. I could feel the sun, warm on my arms. More and more sky kept appearing, as if we were pushing something aside that had been covering it up. I felt a familiar excitement, the kind I felt when we were on our way to the amusement park, with its wooden horses moving up and down on silver poles and its pink cotton candy shaking on paper cones, or the summer circus in the field by the river. I wondered whether the Place was a park with rides, or maybe a castle with a shop selling swords. “Here we are,” my mother said, when we reached the end of the path. I remember standing still and turning my head from side to side, with a kind of desperation, thinking: There’s nothing here. The other thing I remember is the change in my mother’s face. In those days I always had my mother’s complete attention. Even when I was apart from her I knew she was thinking about me, worrying about me, taking pleasure in my existence. But up there, at the Place, something had shifted. It wasn’t that she had let go of my hand, because
she often let go when she knew I was safe. It was that she somehow wasn’t there with me. I thought she must be looking at something, but when I tried to follow her gaze I could tell that she wasn’t looking at anything at all. Later, when she drew me to her side and pointed to the little town far below, I gave it a harsh glance and looked away. After a while I began kicking at a stone in the grass.

Sometimes a feeling comes. You’re walking along a sidewalk, some Saturday afternoon in summer. You’re passing through the sun and shade of maples and old oaks, past the familiar yards and porches of your neighborhood. Mrs. Witowski is kneeling on her cushion at the side of the hollyhock bush, jabbing at the soil with her weeder. The Anderson kid is lifting a two-pane cellar window from the back of his Honda; he’s going to fit it into the wood-framed space in the concrete strip at the base of the house, where you can see two wing nuts that he will turn to hold the frame in place. The lawn mowers are out; in the warm air there’s a smell of cut grass, lilac, and fresh tar. The sun feels good on your arms. All at once the feeling comes. It isn’t restlessness, exactly. It’s the unmistakable feeling, precise as a knife-cut, that you need to be elsewhere. The street is hemming you in, pressing against you, making it impossible to breathe. This is the feeling that tells you to return to your house, get in your car, and head out to the Place.

It’s difficult to describe what’s there. Unlike Burrows Park or the South Side Rec Field, the Place has no boundary, though it’s true
enough that the Place is located at the top of the hill. The hill slopes up to a flattish top that might be thought of as a plateau, with dips and rises of its own. Just where the top of the hill begins or ends, who can say? Up there, you have a good view in all directions. At one end you can see the woods and fields at the base of the hill, then the little red-roofed buildings of the retirement community, the country road, and, farther off, the town itself—Main Street with its shops and tiny cars, the roof of the Van Buren Hotel, the residential section, the pond, the park, all so small that it takes you by surprise. Beyond the town you can see other towns, a village with a white church steeple, twisting roads, a ribbon of highway, patches of farmland, a band of low hills. On all sides of the plateau you can see far-off places. The plateau is grassy, with stretches of bare rock, a scattering of wildflowers, small stands of oak and pine, a few blueberry bushes. Here and there you can find benches, the old-fashioned kind with wooden slats, which the town has seen fit to provide for tired travelers. The most striking feature of the Place is the dozen or so crumbling stone walls, about the height of your waist, that run for twenty or thirty feet, in different directions, along the grass of the plateau. The Historical Society says that they’re old property walls, erected by farmers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, though opinion is divided about whether crops were grown and whether any buildings once stood on the plateau. One historian claims that the walls are not farmers’ walls at all, but the remains of a Native American settlement dating back to the mid-sixteenth century. You can walk along the low walls, sit down on them, or ignore them, as you please. Sometimes you see praying mantises, field mice, a red-tailed hawk. The plateau doesn’t drop off sharply, but slopes gently down on all sides, so that, as I have said, it’s difficult to know where anything begins and ends. The appearance of the Place is what I’ve attempted to describe, but the attempt itself is questionable. It isn’t so much what the Place looks like, after all, as what it does to you.

Just as stories collect around old, abandoned mansions, so rumors swirl about the Place. Sometimes the rumors gather so thickly that you have to push your way through them, in order to find the Place at all. Some say the Place was once the site of an ancient monument to the Great Spirit, erected by the ancestral branch of a little-known tribe. Some claim that the Place has life-enhancing powers that cure disease, increase longevity, and reverse memory loss. The Place, some say, contains energy fields that allow you to perceive past events and to communicate with the dead. Although most of us scorn such rumors, which cheapen the Place and threaten to turn it into a psychic parlor, we understand that in some way the rumors are part of what the Place is: the Place summons them, calls them into being, as surely as it gives rise to yellow violets, prickly milkweed pods, and tall, nubbly spikes of mullein.

In the spring of junior year in high school I began spending time with Dan Rivers. He had moved to our town in December from somewhere in Colorado, and he was the kind of guy I had always avoided—handsome, sure of himself, easy in his body, easy with girls. Everyone liked Dan Rivers. Maybe because I made a point of being polite and distant, he began to seek me out. One day he walked home from school with me. He started coming to the house, where we played chess and talked books; on the sunny back porch he’d sit on one of the wicker chairs and tell my mother stories about small-town Colorado and listen to her tales of the Lower East Side. In the living room he’d sit in the armchair by the piano and talk to my father
about the problem of free will or the correspondence theory of truth. I felt in him a readiness for friendship, a desire to penetrate to the core of another temperament. We spoke about our ambitions, our dreams. One Saturday morning he drove over and said he wanted to see the Place. I hadn’t been there since the time with my mother. We drove out past the car dealerships, the cluster of attached retirement homes, past the mall and the shopping plaza, entered the woods, and came to the hill. We parked in a paved lot bordered by wooden posts and began our way up a curving trail. Field grass stretched away on both sides; the sun warmed my arms. I remembered walking with my mother, remembered the leather purse slung over her shoulder, the shadow of her hat on the upper part of her face. At the top of the path Dan Rivers and I turned to look at the view. Far off, in the little town, I could see our high school, the roof of the Equity Trust on Main, a corner of Burrows Park. I turned to Dan Rivers, who was looking at the same view, but I could feel something else in him, something that reminded me of the change in my mother’s face. I went off and sat on one of the walls. I could feel the warm stone pressing against the calves of my jeans. After a while I walked to the far end of the plateau, where I looked out at a brown river, a factory smokestack, blue hills. A few other people were strolling around. It was quiet up there; I was a talker, but this was no place for talk. Dan Rivers came over to me, sat down, got up, walked around. An hour later we headed back down to the car. The next day he went back to the Place alone. On Monday he didn’t come over to the house. He began driving out to the Place, day after day; he withdrew from his clubs, stopped going to parties, seemed preoccupied. He rarely came over to the house anymore, said he was busy. Once or twice, when we passed each other in the halls, he invited me to drive out there with him. Some other time, I said. When we did get together, now and then, he wanted only to talk about the Place, but at the same time he didn’t really want to talk about it. He said that it cleared his mind, helped him get rid of things.
What things, I wanted to know. Mind-junk, he said, and gave that one-shoulder shrug of his. I could feel a new hiddenness in him; he had stepped into himself and closed the door, shut the blinds. When I learned in June that he was moving with his family to Austin, Texas, in July, I felt that we had already said our goodbyes. The day after he left for Texas, I decided to visit the Place alone.

Though you might not think so to look at us, our town attracts summer visitors. We’re especially sought out by big-city people, who love the idea of getting away from it all, of escaping from the pressures of urban life into what they believe is a peaceful, simple existence. But we’re also well liked by residents in surrounding small towns, who are drawn to our outdoor cafés, our shops and restaurants, and our lively nightlife, with its dance clubs and jazz bars. The summer visitors stay at our two inns, with rooms decorated in period styles, at our renovated nineteenth-century hotel, and at a variety of bed-and-breakfasts and family-friendly motels, or they rent our homes by the month. Everyone likes our tree-lined downtown, with its small, locally owned shops and quaint restaurants, its shady wooden benches and its ice-cream parlors, though we also have our share of luxury boutiques and high-end clothing shops. Burrows Park, with its picnic tables, its stream, and its children’s playground, is always popular; there are outdoor concerts in July. Not far outside our town lies Indian Lake, where you can swim or rent a canoe or walk the trails; a little farther away you can find a wildlife sanctuary, a golf course, and a restored eighteenth-century village with craft shops and a museum. The summer visitors also come for the Place. They walk to the top of the hill, stroll around, admire the view, and go back down. Few return, especially when they learn that no picnics are allowed up there. The summer
people can irritate us, but we also find them interesting: they make us wonder what the Place must feel like, to those who can never be anything except what they already are.

I don’t know what I expected, the day I went up to the Place alone. I suppose I was hoping to discover whatever it was that had pulled Dan Rivers to it, time after time. It was a hot July morning. I walked around the Place, noticing again that it was no single flatness but a series of small slopes and declines, so that it was possible, even at the top of the hill, to find yourself in a shallow valley. I walked beside the low walls that ran here and there along the rises and dips, stepped through fields of grass showing traces of overgrown paths, passed a man sitting under a tree sketching with charcoal on a large pad that he held on his knees. After a time I sat down against a low stone wall, in warm shade, with the sun behind me. Farther down was another stone wall, broken in places; in the distance I saw blue-green hills. It was peaceful enough up there, though peace wasn’t what I had come for. I didn’t know what I had come for. In the warmth and shade a drowsiness came over me. I did not fall asleep, for I was seventeen years old and filled with energy, but I sat very still and imagined that anyone watching me would think that I had fallen into a deep sleep. I then saw a woman approaching my wall. She wore a white dress that came down to her ankles and a white sun hat tilted low on her face. Although there was nothing peculiar about her, except for the whiteness of her clothes, I had the sense that I was having one of those half-waking dreams, from which at any moment I might awake. She drew near without seeming to see me, then looked down at me from under her hat and began walking away along the wall, glancing back as if she expected me to follow. I rose without hesitation and
began walking after her, though with the sensation that I was still sitting there, with one hand resting on the grass, in the warm shade. She soon came to the end of the wall. There she began going down through an opening in the earth. I followed her down the rough stone steps, which changed direction from time to time, and when the steps ended I found myself in a high, narrow corridor, with doors on both sides. The woman in the white dress was walking swiftly along the corridor, toward a closed door at the far end. She opened the door and disappeared inside, but not before glancing at me over her shoulder. I passed through the open door and entered a vast room or hall, trembling with light. On both sides I saw immensely tall windows through which brightness poured. In the hall stood many long tables at which people were seated; their faces and arms were shining, as if illuminated from within. A stern, gentle man in a white robe led me along the side of one of the tables. As I walked behind him, I could scarcely make anything out because of the brightness. Then I seemed to see, on the opposite side, Dan Rivers quivering in the light. In another place I saw my mother, leaning her cheek on the palm of a hand. The man led me to an empty chair with a high back; it was difficult for me to climb onto the seat. Before me he placed an open book with pages so large that I wondered whether I would be able to reach far enough to turn them. The white room, the blazing windows, the open book, filled me with a sense of peaceful excitement, as if I had found a place I hadn’t known I was looking for. As I bent over the white book, which contained words that would explain everything, a stillness came over me, an inner ease, as if I had let go of something, slowly my body began to bend forward, and when my forehead pressed against the page I felt a yielding, a dissolving, I was passing through, at the back of my head a hardness was starting to gather, and I found myself sitting against the stone wall, in the warm shade. Instantly I shut my eyes and attempted to recapture the white dress, the stairway, the brilliant room, but through my closed
eyelids I saw only dancing points of sun. I stood up. I felt a new lightness, as if something heavy had drained away. Call it a dream, call it a drowsy sun-vision on a lazy summer day, but it had come to me from up there, it was mine. I spent the rest of the day walking to the far ends of the Place, in search of a white dress that I knew did not exist, though I also knew that the Place had somehow summoned it. It had me now. It had me. Before I left, I carefully examined the end of my wall, where I knew there would be no stairway. Only a few fallen stones among dusty blades of grass, only a yellow wildflower, and a heavy bee hovering above a blossom of clover.