“That is correct!” Mataji takes his hands. “Recognising the good that is already yours. In Buddhism we say: Enjoy the view, no matter what it is. This is wisdom, so be grateful for all things, including this illness, because it has deepened your soul.”
I don’t understand how to be grateful for my brother’s potentially terminal condition. I’m not developed enough – not spiritual enough, not Jewish enough, not Buddhist enough. Is Evan enough of all these things?
“So, Evan …” she is saying, “do you remember anything about the night you almost died?”
He nods.
“Can you tell me now, Evan?”
“I knew I was dying.”
“How did that feel?”
“It felt like there were sharp chicken bones sticking in my throat and I couldn’t breathe, as though my throat was being sliced open.”
“Yes?”
“I was frightened … I felt very alone, because no one could help me. And then I became aware there was—”
“What, Evan?”
“There was an angel sitting at the side of the bed.”
“An angel?”
“Yes. There was an angel sitting at the bed and I thought I was dead.”
“What happened then?”
“The angel was very beautiful, filled with a light that was spilling over her and into me and taking up the room. It filled me from the inside; it was warm … It felt like the light had an emotion. If I have to find the right word for it, it was as if the intangible quality of love manifested itself in the physical form of this light. She started talking to me, the angel, telling me about being on a beach. She took me swimming. We were lying on our backs in a warm sea, dolphins all around us. The sky and the sea turned orange. And then night came and there were clouds of fireflies, thousands of pricks of pink and green light.”
My mother and I are staring at each other from across the room.
“As I walked with the angel, water started wetting my throat and the chicken bones disappeared and suddenly I could swallow and breathe. It was then that I knew I wasn’t going to die.”
“Love saved you, Evan. I hope you understand that. I hope you can see that there is no need to be afraid. And in the end we all die. We all go back into the big void, which is itself a place of love. Can you hear that?”
He nods.
“You can live with fear or live with faith. In the end, those are the only choices we have. Life will never be as we wish it. If it was we would not develop as souls.”
I sit crumpled. If it is true that I brought in the angel or became the angel, that I was instrumental in helping Evan to live through that terrible night, she must be correct – what is there to fear? Evan’s illness has made me aware of how uncertain it all is and now this is all that occupies me. It’s a creeping nervousness inside me at all times, eroding me from the inside, like worms in wood, and everything once solid and reliable is being mulched into sawdust. It’s me gone wrong and expecting things to go wrong, because the big guillotine is no longer invisible; it’s over our heads. And nothing can be trusted. I am like someone who has just survived an earthquake and the seismic plates, always beneath one, once invisible sound, have suddenly been exposed as unreliable, liable to crash against one another and collapse entire cities, bridges, setting tsunamis in motion, those blue brackets that cross oceans at five hundred miles an hour, fast as arrows, to drown everything out – cities, suburbs, houses, lives, old, young, rich, poor, loved, hated, no matter – all gone! All vanished under a landscape gone to sticks, hundreds of miles of pick-up sticks.
I was lying in bed in Los Angeles; it was five in the morning when a big earthquake struck the city. The bed began to move. I stumbled outside to join the neighbours gathered around the swimming pool, all of us half-naked and vomiting out of our rooms in the shocked early-morning dark to stare as the earth’s movement was made visible by the water in the swimming pool. It sloshed out at the shallow end as the deep end tilted up, then ran in a racing wave to slosh out at the deep end. The swimming pool emptied itself right in front of us as it rocked from side to side, the sliding plates beneath us tipping that liquid blue oblong onto one side, then up onto the other.
For weeks afterwards everyone walked around haunted. I was finding soil from a potted plant in a jewellery drawer, or rice studded with lentils, nothing in its place. I was coming across shards of ceramic from broken plates in books, strangers were enquiring after each other, all ashen-faced. Suddenly, we no longer trusted the ground beneath our feet, unable to rely on what was once fundamental. And I feel the same way now. It’s as though plates below have shifted, or as though some boundary between this known, tangible world and the jungle beyond the border have been pulled back. I see into places that were always there, just conveniently hidden.
Mataji gives Evan exercises he is to do every morning.
“Lie in a comfortable position and see your illness, your fear, as a dark swamp inside you. Then breathe out all the blackness. And breathe in your health as white light. See yourself becoming a man made of light. Okay, Evan?”
She takes out a pendulum to test Evan’s energy. Evan holds his palm out and Mataji lets the pendulum swing over it. It starts in a line. From Mataji’s expression, I understand that a straight line is not good news. But slowly it begins to form circles. The circles are not wide and generous, though, as I am sure they are meant to be. They are long and thin, odd, egg-shaped circles.
“Yes.” She is nodding. “The pendulum reads the electromagnetic field. You’re still weak, but the curve of the swing tells me that we can keep you alive, Evan.”
My mother and I are watching the pendulum, holding fast to the arc.
“Did you hear what Evan said about the angel?” my mother asks, as we wait outside for Mataji to finish up with Evan. We gaze at one another like Lot’s wife looking at Lot’s wife – not moving, both turned to salt.
I stand in the sunshine, made of salt. Evan has AIDS. Everything is uncertain and I feel precarious. I am on California’s San Andreas Fault here in Johannesburg, South Africa, on shifting tectonic plates. I climb into the car and, as we head slowly towards the concrete highway and home, stare out of the window at the poor whites begging.
CHAPTER 6
Seething Stew
It is the end of January.
Ross arrives back from Mozambique, tanned, wearing loose orange pants he picked up on a beach from someone peddling them all the way from Bali. We tell Ross that Evan has been sick but, on Evan and my mother’s instruction, Ross is not to be told the truth, so it is instead a wrongly diagnosed lymphoma, actually TB, and under control thanks to a new doctor and some drugs, and he’s on the mend. With that out of the way, we quickly change the topic to Ross’ holiday across the border.
“I thought things in Mozambique were still too volatile,” I say about our neighbour still in a civil war.
“Maputo is peaceful and still quite charming, but if you walk even five hundred metres past the roadblocks, you can be shot to pieces. So you’re constantly looking into some close darkness along a road, around a slight rise, across a stretch of water, and there you could be killed.”
“That’s crazy, Ross!” My mother is serving him homemade pizza. “You can’t go on holiday to a place where you could get shot at!”
We all turn to stare at her.
Pause.
Because.