Wreck and Order Read online

  I arrived at the guesthouse that my guidebook recommended just after dark and shook the gate, secured with a tiny padlock, until a middle-aged woman with a serene face and wild gray hair admitted me. The front room was large and spare, except for a snoring blond dog, a few plastic chairs, and curling posters tacked to the walls, one of a monkey eating a banana (STAY FIT!), another of cherubic white children photoshopped onto a field of sunflowers (BE A SWEET HEART). There were no available rooms at Rose Land, so the owner offered me her grandsons’ upper bunk for two hundred rupees. Of course the boys wouldn’t mind sharing a bed, I shouldn’t be silly. She handed me a faded pink towel from the pile atop the dining room table. I felt again the odd relaxation of being beholden to circumstances, far from my phone, my car, my bed, every person who knew my face—alone in a way I never was in Paris, where the city’s judgment and coldness weighed on me even in sleep. No one here seemed to care whether I knew the rules or not. I excessively thanked the owner for making room for me and asked her name. “Call me Mary,” she said, and pointed to a bedroom on the other side of the courtyard.

  A sunburned Norwegian, a lanky Dutch guy, a dreadlocked Italian couple, and a small, excitable Frenchman were smoking cigarettes and eating cream-filled cookies around the table outside. The Italian woman offered me a cookie. I licked lemon cream as I listened to their introductions. The Norwegian girl was traveling for a year before starting a master’s program. The Dutch electrician had just phoned his boss to extend his trip for a month. The Italian couple was stuck in Sri Lanka for two weeks because their six-month Indian visa expired. The French guy had been country-hopping for three years and would do so as long as his savings lasted. He took the cheapest bed in any given town—a mattress on the floor of a poor family’s living room, a hammock in a backyard, he’d take it, he didn’t mind—he only ate curry packets from the street vendors (fifty rupees fills you up for hours!) and he only traveled by bus and foot: a first world tramp on a third world vacation. One way to spend a life, no worse than most. The Norwegian girl offered me a beer. I was too exhausted to be tempted.

  I propped my backpack against the bunk bed in Mary’s daughter’s room, which she shared with her two young sons. Sarasi was sitting on the double bed, looking over her sons’ schoolwork. I thanked her for sharing her room. “It’s no problem for us.” She had the faintest hint of a British accent. “I just hope we won’t bother you in the morning. We wake up at four thirty.” I asked where she worked, rummaging through my bag in search of pajamas and a toothbrush.

  “One of the best hotels in town, thanks to my English. Growing up in a guesthouse, you know.” She tried to sound bored, not proud. At least I hoped she was secretly proud, which would have made my presence in her bedroom less of an intrusion. Her hair was short and gelled, unlike the long, slick braids I’d noticed the women on the bus wearing. The small radio in her room was tuned to a station that played Billy Joel, Cyndi Lauper, Michael Jackson.

  A black Lab pushed through the flowered curtain covering the entrance to the room, tongue dangling. “This is my puppy,” one of the boys said. “He is called Teega.”

  “Hi, Teega,” I said.

  “Careful for—” Sarasi said, just as Teega pounced on the protein bar I’d just taken out of my bag. He sprinted out the door. I lunged after him, but he was a galloping blur of black fur, swinging the square of calcium-enriched puffed rice from his mouth, running victory laps around the table in the courtyard. The Dutch guy leaped in front of him with a balletic karate chop. Teega paused, gave his stolen goods a fierce shake, and then continued his rampage, sugar-free caramel smeared over his snout. Mary stepped into the courtyard, holding a slingshot armed with a tiny pebble. She yelped, cocked her arm, and fired a warning shot onto the tin roof. Teega let the emptied bag drop to the ground. He prostrated before Mary, tiny head between overgrown paws. “Bravo, Mama,” the Italian woman cried, flapping her hands together. Mary returned to her bedroom. Her daughter peered out from behind the flowered curtain.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hope that wasn’t your dinner.”

  “No, no,” I lied, too tired to care whether I ever ate again.

  Sarasi gestured me into the room and pointed to the bunk bed. “Take the bed you prefer,” she said. “The boys sleep with me. At least for now.” She lowered her voice. “We don’t know where their father is at the moment.” She looked at her short, rounded, pink fingernails. “People are so mean. They make the same mistake again and again.” I didn’t know whether she was talking about the boys’ father or herself for forgiving him, but before I could ask her, her older son was pulling on my hand, introducing himself, telling me about his mosquito net.

  “This is a new one,” he said. “Best kind. You are so luck. There are many dengue fever mosquitoes. One of the boys in my class has died. I saw him before he has died. He looked like—” Tilak sucked in his cheeks and rolled his eyes to the back of his head. I grimaced. He grinned, gratified.

  Sarasi’s younger son was curled on his side in the double bed, his cheek resting on the back of his hand. “My brother goes to sleep so early,” Tilak said as I hoisted myself into the upper bunk. “I like to be awake late in the night.” He warned me to fully close the gap in the mosquito net and scanned the room to make sure no one left out a glass of water. Dengue fever mosquitoes plant their babies in the old water. They are silent, so you have no warning before they bite. They’re so tiny you could kill them with one finger but still they get to you before you get to them and just like that—Tilak clapped his hands above his head—your whole body is filled with the disease and you turn purple and your blood freezes and you die.

  Sarasi told Tilak to hush. She lay down next to her younger son in her jeans and T-shirt and blinked at the ceiling. Wish it was Sunday. After Tilak’s breath grew long and deep, she pulled the sheet over his balled-up body and returned her face to the ceiling. That’s my fun day. I tried to stay awake long enough to appreciate my cramped spine elongating against the hard mattress, ’80s pop mixing with the crickets outside, the interplay of accents coming from the courtyard, the odd comfort of sharing an unknown family’s home. But I’m only making up those details in retrospect. What I remember is that, just before I disappeared into dreamless sleep, I felt like nobody, far away from all the usual thoughts, both scared and safe.

  —

  I stayed at Rose Land for weeks, setting out on foot each morning to explore the temples and gardens, then coming home to eat rice and curry out of plastic bags I bought from the Muslim restaurant in town, which Sarasi told me was the cleanest. I took a trip to the seashore, as I giddily thought of the south coast, feeling like a sweet little girl in a children’s book. Bikini-clad Europeans posed for sexy photos alongside Sri Lankan families—husbands gaping as they splashed with toddlers in the shallows, women in saris holding babies in one hand and umbrellas in the other, to keep their skin from turning darker in the sun. I didn’t want to be reminded that I was just another white girl on vacation. So I headed back to Rose Land, where I could spend my evenings helping the boys with their English homework and letting Sarasi paint my nails. (“You have pretty hands,” she said. “You should maintain.”) The Italian couple had returned to India, so I took their room—two twin beds pushed together beneath a window lined with bars to keep the monkeys out, usually filled with flashes of orange robes swooshing around bare feet. There was a monastery uphill from Rose Land, and the top of the window met the very bottom of the courtyard. As I laid out my clothes on one of the beds, fully unpacking for the first time, the monks began chanting. “So beautiful,” I said when Mary passed my open door. She smiled indulgently. “The government pays them to live there,” she said. “Most easy job in Sri Lanka.”

  Still, I lay on my bed every night at sunset, listening to the oceanic crooning of unknown words, watching the square of sky deepen to black. Only someone unlovable could love aloneness this much. I didn’t know whether this was a good thought or a bad thought, but I
didn’t much care either way.

  I never used the blank moleskin notebook I’d brought with me, intending to record scenes and conversations for some future self, scavenging for the vaguely imagined article I planned to write or desperate to recall past joys. So I don’t remember many specific moments or sensory details from that first trip, just that I was barreled down constantly by their combined force. The manic city streets, the koel birds crooning at dawn, the ancient stone Buddhas nestled at the base of heavy fig trees, the huge white beaches with huge green waves and huge pink sunsets and huge clouds slicing a huge sky. Sri Lanka did feel like freedom—from trying in general, if not from Jared specifically.

  I met an Irish girl at Rose Land, who’d just come back from a silent meditation center in the mountains. “Most beautiful place in the world,” she said, and wrote down the name of the town for me, in the back of my empty notebook.

  SHIRMANI

  Gongs woke us before dawn; we dressed, peed, and brushed our teeth by candlelight; followed a trail of slowly moving flames to the Buddha hall; sat still for one hour; drank tea while watching the sunrise; stretched slowly for an hour; ate porridge with dates and roasted peanuts; sat still some more; stretched; ate rice and vegetables; sat; stretched; drank tea; watched the sunset; chanted; slept. This was every day at the silent meditation center in the mountains above Kandy.

  Sometimes during the morning meditations, a man at the front of the Buddha hall spoke into the darkness about ordeenearness and realeetee. He had just returned from a trip to Germany; a couple invited him to stay at their house and teach their friends about meditation. When the couple went out one night, they thought their Buddhist teacher might be amused by watching television. He flipped through the channels for hours. “More than one hundred programs,” he said to the candlelit room of solitary sitters. “So many choices, all the time, night and day. This is dukkha. This is suffering.” He asked us to experience instead our ordinary human forms, to feel friendly toward our ordinary human lives. What I experienced for the first few days was a barrage of thoughts demanding that I scratch my lower back, extend my legs, stand up, get the hell out of Shirmani, take a lifelong vow of silence and stay at Shirmani forever, fall in love with my breath, buy myself a new dress, burn all my clothes, become a lesbian, notice my breath without subjecting it to conceptual thinking like love, use the working meditation period to hunt down and kill that squirrel that wouldn’t shut the fuck up, do something, anything, just make it better, make it better, make it better. I did not feel friendly toward this vain urgency.

  “Please feel your heart,” the man in white said as our candle flames disappeared into pale early light. “Please feel your heart deeply.” I tried to scoff at his corny command, but the mere mention of that place brought my desperate attention there anyway and just like that my heart was feeling me, grasping at my throat from the inside, pulling taut the skin around my collarbones and neck. All those times I failed to contain my childish urges, drank too much and humiliated myself with some public display of rage or sorrow and so drank more; all the days in Paris I wasted with my misery; all the times I shrieked and punched and clutched at Jared instead of walking away; all the times I failed to take myself home. Impossible to contain the memories of the bad things I’d done, more terrible for their stupidity, for being average, repeatable badness, not even—

  “Can you forgive me, heart?” said the man in white. For the first week of this question, spoken always into the gradually lightening room as the morning meditation came to an end, I did succeed in scoffing and shutting out his voice, or else becoming sensually distracted with the stream of water from my nose and eyes pooling at the hollow between my collarbones. The word “sorry” felt just as stupid as the actions that invited an apology. “Can you free the heart from the past?” His voice was slow and oddly unaccented. He repeated the question, speaking to himself. And because there was the same secret weight to his voice day after day, finally, out of solidarity, I repeated the words to my own—whatever it is, not the physical heart but the writhing tangle of remembered words and gestures underneath the wishbone center of my rib cage. After a few more days, it wasn’t that I felt that place as freedom, like the man in white suggested. But at least it was no longer clamoring for my attention.

  “Only silence can feel the realeetee,” said the man in white at the front of the Buddha hall.

  Realeetee at Shirmani was constant, various birdsong (long beaks tapping a crystal vase, a mechanical kitten crying out for a real live mama cat, the final note of a radio ad for something tasty and fattening and cheap); monkeys sitting on the roof of the kitchen hut, disdainfully gorging on stolen jackfruit; a tornado of cicadas that enveloped us in their throbbing hum each night as the sun descended; stone pathways dappled in sunlight and lizards and, one time, a frog no bigger than my pinkie nail; pastel sheets draped on a sunny laundry line; exquisitely seasoned rice and curry and spicy-sweet tea; stone benches overlooking a valley of every possibility of green rising into a sky of every possibility of white, overlaid with charcoal smudges of mountain ranges whose visibility came and went with the fog, palest blue at the horizon giving way to pure light in a measured spectrum that revealed the dome overhead; “biscuits crunching in the night,” the phrase that tolled in my mind—so easy to amuse oneself when speech is outlawed—during the evening meal of what was presumably once a bread product, before it was sun-dried in a desert and then baked in a kiln, and for which, at the end of the final meditation before bedtime, we were all ravenous and gratefully consumed in the dark, under the stars, surrounded by millions of insects playing their wee violins, no match for the collective crunch our evening snack released into the reigning peace of the nighttime forest; thick, small leaves that fell from the tops of impossibly tall, thin tree trunks, twirling so quickly they seemed frozen midair at each interval of their languid descent; a saggy-breasted, elderly Sri Lankan woman who came to every evening meditation wearing an oversize T-shirt emblazoned with a steaming cup of coffee and the words CAREFUL, LADIES…I MAY BE HOT; a brightly dressed, exuberantly gestured young white man, either gay or Italian, who attended none of the group activities except for meals, to which he was always first in line, heaping his plate with a mound of food fit for a starving family, consuming this mound with his hands—hunched over, legs crossed, eyes intently downcast—and then refilling his plate with such brazen greed that it seemed he earnestly believed we were at this secluded meditation center on an island in the Indian Ocean to eat as much as possible of the healthy foods harvested and prepared for us for pennies.

  Mostly, there was sitting. And when I had sat still long enough that my attention was, at last, consumed by the flicker of my breath—a candle pulsing in a slight, steady breeze—and my body was so light I could only sense it as the line of contact between palm and thigh; when I felt a large insect tickle my neck and still did not move until the tickle became a shooting pain that made me reflexively flick a large caterpillar with poisonous feet off of my Adam’s apple and then resume sitting still, concentrating now on the web of stinging nettles emanating from the center of my neck to the crown of my head; when I opened my eyes slightly and saw a monk’s brown feet moving slowly across the floor and was overcome with a full-body sorrow for all of us meditators doing all of this sitting and slow walking and listening to the mind’s harangues, for what?; when I had convinced myself that whatever I was doing in that room was irrelevant to who I should be as an individual, which was the same way I felt when I was depressed; when, snot running into my mouth and tears dripping off my chin, I kept on sitting still; when the heavy, wet sorrow of effort was suddenly, mysteriously replaced by the brightness and gratitude of this same effort—so this is sitting; this is walking; this is breathing; this is lying; eating; shitting; seeing; drinking; feeling wind and heat and cold—and sensing finally that this was enough, to pay attention was enough; when I noticed how the tiny muscles pulsed across the top of the monk’s foot with each step, like the
pulse of the tiny flame of my breath, to which my whole being was, in that moment, reduced; when I felt a peace that seemed unshakable, that would surely last forever, even as the memories and plans and judgments oozed back in, because the peace-feeling understood that these thoughts came out of nowhere, or somewhere unseen, like the sounds from the forest all around—outside my control, having little to do with me, unstoppable but not at all terrible; when the seemingly unshakable peace-feeling did fall away, replaced by shrieking protests from my knees and hips as my numbed lap came back to life all at once; when I extended one leg, then the other, slowly, slowly, unfurling vein and muscle and bone—ah, a new kind of perfect peace, one that quickly dispersed, replaced by the thought that all of this was just one more experience and led nowhere and would give me nothing I thought that meditation ought to give me, unless I just hadn’t done it enough or hadn’t done it the right way—the candle flicker still there, though, the urge to come back to it still there—and on and on and on until at last, still entirely at a loss as to how to be a human being, I leaned back.