Buddhist Catnaps and Broken-Down Hymns

Chasing Cassiopeia

The Buick is longer than a steamship and it cloaks the open road, tires over tar. It is a roiling fist, a ghost, a bullet out of this place and a thousand others like it. Places promising little, capable of nothing. Tonight, we are free of it. Tonight, you and I ride past the crooked pines and the boarded up Citgo station on Acacia, the Flatiron, and every last marker of mediocrity to a place we’ve only read about, a place we didn’t believe could be touched.

A thrumming 364. Nailhead. Four barrel Rochester. Tailfins slicing the fog. Twin Turbine, deuce and a quarter. A phantom surveying the outer edges of paradise, Eden’s passing lane. Climbing out of the stale mire onto a ribbon of road curling past refineries, dunes and bogs and everything we were told we might regret. The tintinnabulation of the carillon wanes behind us and the hissing of the road becomes our sole hymn, an epic tone poem, and we follow its tantric Odysseyian hum without question. Cassiopeia’s our map and the quarter moon’s our unfailing lighthouse.

It is here that we realize, perhaps fully for the first time, that we are alive. Alive and capable of nothing but goodness and madness, truth and trust. A trust in a sky ripped open like a canyon floor, pouring redemptive rain down on our windshield, the sound of it playing free jazz against the glass. A trust in flight and gravity and nuance and Bacchus and the sutras of the ages that have paved this route before us.

It’s summer. The air is thick. Your pale and naked feet hang out over the passenger mirror and your hair blows back in angelic tousled streams. Your parents are still young and so are their dreams. Elvis is thin and Robert Kennedy is alive and Brando still gives a damn. Camelot unfolds before us with an ending not yet written, not yet decided by lone gunmen and conspirators and Cuba and Nixon and your father’s curfew limits and your mother’s prudish insistences.

And we ride through Elysium without once putting on the brakes, just to see what happens when you exit the barricades on the other side. To see what happens when you don’t stop until the wheels fall off.

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Watching TV

The television is on CNN and neither of us is paying attention. Nothing new. Around the clock news has rendered the once thriving body of journalism a corpse that just didn’t know it was dead yet; a zombie staggering to and fro between channels 34 and 39. But we’ve had that discussion before and were in lockstep agreement, so we don’t talk about it just as we don’t talk about a thousand other things any more.

You read your architectural magazine and I my Clemente biography. I am near the end of the book for a second time, and even though I know what is coming, I’m not in the right headspace to take it all in. A man who sees death’s insistence a thousand ways to Sunday, a guy who believes an airplane holds his final destiny, but climbs aboard a Managua disaster relief flight, a cargo plane no less, and goes down off Isla Verde. I know this story. I know how death haunted Roberto, how he lived with it always on the periphery, for what reason we’ll never know. Or maybe we do.

Anyway, I can’t keep going. I can’t read about his empty flight case being all that was found or his insistence that he travel with the fourth plane of supplies because the first three were diverted from the victims. And I can’t fathom one of his teammates skipping his funeral to dive deep into the black morgue of the Atlantic looking for his remains.

You seem to be spent as well, carrying your work home for weeks on end, even looking at trade magazines during what has been ordained as downtime. Kissing my forehead, you drag yourself into the bedroom.

Still, I sit, too immobilized by my own rusted spontaneity to find a foray into lovemaking or even finding the bed to do something as sensible as getting a solid night’s sleep. Walking the dog? Too laborious. Too many steps.

A story comes on about the immolations in Tibet, young monks and nuns setting themselves alight in the streets of Sichuan to protest their oppression. 44 of them in the last two years. Maybe not an epidemic, but certainly, it was trending.

“The images you’re about to see are graphic in nature, and not intended for all audiences.” I watch as some unkempt reporter on the streets of Ngaba, where fully half of the sacrifices have taken place, interviews a man older than the Himalayas. Subtitles populate the lower thirds, his Tibetan stated and measured. Something about the heel of China on their throats. I don’t grasp it all, too taken with the horrific footage intercut with his comments. A young girl, barely in her twenties, sitting in perfect repose, a flower in lotus. The flames begin at the outer edges of her robe and curl inward, engulfing her ribs and chest. The fire rushes up and consumes her motionless body. She is a burning death shroud. She is a beacon. Dying a half a world away, dying on television.

The reporter says that often these suicides will run through the streets, screaming in agony, while citizens look for a way to extinguish the staggering burning ball before it becomes a blackened corpse. The Chinese police try to prevent the sacrifices, beating them with long sticks, even shooting them in an attempt to deny them the privilege of dying on their own terms. But this girl is so still it’s as if she’d died before the match was ever lit, like she’d transcended and was merely waiting for the shell around her to melt away, the chrysalis of this world.

The story leads to some hollow closing comment from the anchor, a maddening cliche, and then to the campaign trail and a cornerback indicted for possession and the latest Apple gadget and why we won’t believe what Kim Kardashian said this time and so on into the night.

I sit and I wait for the story to cycle around again, and it does, like clockwork, same time next hour. And the next. And I watch it all. The ignition. The rising. The determination. I sit in wonder of a life forged in fire. The Clemente book weighs heavy in my hand, my finger a numbed bookmark flagging the page that takes him from diamond to embers. You lay a mere room away, asking if I am going to come to bed. But I don’t move. I just sit while the world burns away around me.