Life - Part Two
Chapter 1: The Wilderness
I was driving home in the falling snow, feeling worse for the course of a meeting that had deigned to improve the world situation, and ended in petty bickering over terminology, disputed facts of oppression here and there in the world, details of personal ideology. Suddenly headlights came at me, careening crazily, into my lane. I braked, slid; they kept coming at me. I jerked my steering wheel around and spun into the left lane, just managing to avoid the broadside of the sliding blue pickup truck. Luckily no one else was coming in the left lane. I watched in the rear view mirror as the other vehicle straightened itself and got into its proper lane; I did the same with my Datsun and resumed my drive home in a cold sweat.
Working for social change was one thing, difficult enough - but what about coping with change coming at you out of the spinning darkness?
Cynthia had brought up a point during the meeting, in which these two aspects of change were related. "The more the rich part of humanity resists change," she'd said, "the greater the chances of eventual upheaval from the poor and the oppressed." So, her theory went, the thing to do was "to be proactive, to find ways to bring in constructive change first." "Before the shit hits the fan," Phil had added. It sounded all very fine at the time. But how could this strategy have prevented my little near-accident back there?
I had been driving carefully, for one thing. And there were the winter tires that I'd finally got around to putting on just the week before. Maybe that's why I was "lucky" and avoided the collision.
Still . . . the apocalyptic fears expressed at the meeting and my jolt out of the night combined to haunt me with what seemed like a whole hall of imminent horrors.
Were all the brutalities of the ghetto, or of third-world dictatorships, merely lying in wait for me and my kind, just around the next corner, or the next? All manner of rape, torture, murder, starvation and depravity held at bay - so far - behind the thin suburbanized veneer of what I had taken for granted as reality?
I had learned by easy practice to deal with a tame lot of contingencies, relative to what could happen. I had suffered many times, I thought: but did I know anything about the true depth of suffering? Unlikely.
Certainly death itself, the universal end of suffering, would claim Charles Ashford in the end - but until then could I count on it to wait calmly in its lair, waiting for me to come quietly in my own time? I sincerely hoped so.
I broke into a fresh sweat from the recollection of the near miss just now on the highway. It could come with so little warning. Would I have time yet to find a peace within my habitual striving, a final grasp of utopia? If time were really so unpredictably short, I might have to revise my expectations. Maybe the mystics had it right, with their concept of perfection in the living presence of the moment. Was it possible, as some said, to refrain from desiring certain sensual comforts, the perks of egoistic advancement?
Sure. It was all a trick of words, a mental exercise. I could manage that, I thought. But still, I might be missing something in my facile self-analysis. What if there were issues so deep-rooted in me that I was still not seeing them: fundamental character flaws that would provide karmic justification for any and all tragedies of the physical, mental and emotional planes, in the service of an all-embracing spiritual re-education, a cram course with no pre-registration needed, no fees paid until crunch time . . .
In the times of trouble ahead, there'd be no credit given for amateur philosophers, part-time mystics, would-be writers, or armchair philanthropists.
"What plane are you boarding, sir?"
"My private one, thank you."
"I'm sorry, but all private flights have been cancelled."
But what, realistically, could go wrong?
("Charlie, I think I'm pregnant.")
I thought: I hate to think about it.
But there was more, lots more, where that came from: A new relationship, so irresistable that one of us, Sharon or I, is torn irretrievably away from ours, the precious one we've nurtured into apparent perfection these past ten years.
Economic forces that pull people and money out of this valley, so that there's no longer enough market for my veggies or my funky repairs, for Sharon's massages. We'd have to move - or really buckle down to a more basic level of scratching for survival.
Economic forces of the other ilk, of development and skyrocketing taxes, of logging and paving and building and regulation and overpopulation and traffic and crime . . . TV-land would come to us and swallow us up.
Oh, yes, there was more; there was always more. Senseless, random murder. Looting by bands of toughs fled from burning cities. A meteor passing too close to the earth. The greenhouse effect, the hole in the ozone: frying under the ultraviolet holocaust. Imprisonment for no good reason by a faceless state: thrown to the dogs of humanity, humanity turned into dogs by former men who were now possessed by dog-spirits. Despoiling of the land by sheer numbers of well-meaning but survival-driven people. Simple, common diseases: cancer, heart failure. Attack by a marauding bear. A tree falling on the house, crushing me or my loved ones in sleep. A landslide of falling rock, or an avalanche across the highway while I sped on some senseless errand. Meditating at the edge of a cliff - and nodding off, plunging to my cosmically stupid death.
What else could I expect in this life? It has to end sometime, somehow. That's in the contract, from the beginning. Is one form of death more natural than another? A nanosecond later, the cause becomes academic.
So what was I worrying for? The standard greeting-reply I gave to my clients still held true: "I can't complain."
That was the trouble. Things were too good, now. My wheel of fortune must be turning, I thought, somewhere unseen. The bogeyman has been waiting a long time now, and he must be pretty hungry.
In short order my family and I would be cast out of the garden I, we have so carefully found, chosen, built, tended. Is this our fate, our tragic karma? If so, is it because of some shortcoming, some hyprocrisy in our motives or reprehensible defect in our personalities; or rather because of a deeper vein of madness in the human condition - that we are doomed to aspire to perfection in the face of ultimate and inevitable limitations: our overbreeding, our overreaching in technological pride, our animal greed and blindness?
I got home, kicked the snow off my boots, brushed my teeth and went into the bedroom. Sharon was still up reading. "How did it go?" she said. She liked watching me undress.
"Oh, pretty good." It still made me self-conscious.
"Did you solve all the world's problems?"
"Not by a long shot. But still, it seems good to talk about it. Almost got killed on the way home by some truck sliding into my lane."
"Oh, no - are you okay?"
"Yeah, yeah. I swerved in time."
"The truck's okay?"
"Yup. Good thing we got those tires on last week."
"You know, I was a little worried about you. Had some kind of weird feeling. I tried to put it out of my mind. Then Eddie said, when I was tucking him in, 'Is Daddy coming back tonight?' 'Of course he is,' I told him. And then, it seemed okay. Anyway, I'm glad you're all right. Here, snuggle up."
Not nice dreams that night:
They said that the San Andreas fault had had its fun; that the worries were over. They never told us about the Harrison-Darby fault until it gave: ripping this old timber cabin right off its rebuilt foundation and tossing it aside like a pile of Lincoln Logs. The stove remained upright, heating the January air. We were so lucky: in town that Monday, and driving home when a flagwoman stopped us because the highway had buckled ahead. We never even felt anything more than what a big semi would do rumbling by in the passing lane. And Eddie said, "Is that thunder?" I was too busy adjusting the bass-treble balance on the car stereo to notice.
Now the house is okay again. We're all in the living room reading; kids on laps. Until (somehow I know), a leak in the gas line - a spark: an explosion of roaring flame. The cedar panelling goes up in a flash, catching the ceiling; pieces falling to the freshly oil-and-wax-finished floor . . .
I dash madly, after Sharon and Eddie and Constance are out safely, to save my files, my tools, my computer. A few extra clothes, for each of us, quickly: and then it's too late: no food. The building a ruin of smoldering concrete foundation walls, charred timbers.
"Now, Mr. Ash - can we call you Charlie? - Well, anyway, look, Ashole, we'll call you whatever the fuck we want, get it? - We know you were involved in the so-called student protest movements of the Sixties. That you were involved in the abuse of a number of illegal drugs. That you later were an organizer of public demonstrations in Canada; that in fact you counseled groups and individuals in the practice of civil disobedience; that you were arrested - "
"And not convicted. Who are you working for, really? The U.S. Government has announced that all of its military forces - "
"Hit 'im, Jake. Right . . . there. Ah, that's good. Feel better, now, Charlie? We'll take care of you. Just remember: we're asking the questions, hey?"
"Charlie, I have something to tell you."
I've never seen her so serious. This is -
"It's about someone else."
Here it is: someone else.
"Can't you say anything? Are you listening?"
But it's already over - "What? What are you going to tell me?"
"Look, I don't mean to hurt you."
Hurt me . . .
So I fall off the ladder - branches spinning crazily over my head like a crazy-house on the move - and land sort of sideways on my back - thankful in the instant that I kept my head up. But my right arm caught the full weight of the rest of my body, and snapped sickenenly. A hot flash spread throughout my spine. And I realized I could not move. . . .
