47
Tibet to Germany
September-October, Present Day
T he trek back to Lhasa was daunting, but there was peace in having to do little but walk a very long way. The nuns gave Rominy and Sam thick blankets, barley cakes, and yak butter, a gruesome but nutritious cuisine to keep them alive until they could find help and, eventually, Western food. They spent many miles discussing ideal pizza toppings.
Winter was fast approaching and traffic was infrequent even on the busiest highways, but eventually they’d encounter a vehicle when they returned to a road. In the meantime, the empty immensity was a recess from Nazis. Autumn’s line of white kept creeping down the Kunlun range, but the cold north wind was at their backs and the only mystery was how to put one foot in front of the other. Despite a chest blackened with bruises, Sam took two thirds of the weight without complaint. He was big, strong, angry, and oddly serene about their immediate predicament. But then Tibet had been home to him for two years.
“It’s not a question of if we’ll get help, just when,” he assured her. “I’d rather be lost in Tibet than Nevada. Less loopy.”
They slept together, not for love but for warmth: it was too cold to take clothes off anyway. They had no fuel to make a fire, and no tent for shelter, so they’d find a wadi or outcrop and curl together behind the windbreak, burrowed beneath blankets. She knew he wasn’t ignorant of the fact she was a woman-sometimes he moved restlessly as they nested, and at other times he looked at her with shy longing-but they were both filthy and cold, with no energy for sex and no reason yet for romantic affection. She appreciated him not talking about it. They huddled like fox kits, and when she woke up shivering he’d wrap her in his big arms and hug her until she stopped.
“Do you know all that I’ve got left of my old life?” she said one morning, after lying on her belly like an animal to drink from an icy pool.
“A Social Security number?”
She reached into a pocket inside her parka. “I took this from my great-grandfather’s cabin. It’s a Tibetan scarf he was given and somebody-Beth Calloway, I guess-wrote a code on it so we’d find an old mine. That’s it. That’s my ancestry. No journal, no satchel of maps, no car, no job.”
“You told me you stashed some of the inheritance in a Seattle account.”
“With no identification to get it.”
“The less you have, the more it means.”
“Give me a break.”
When they recrossed the low saddle that had given them their first view of the Kunlun, an enveloping snow squall robbed her of any sense of direction. Sam had retained a compass in his pack, however, and followed a bearing as if he were at sea. “Always carry the ten essentials. Compass, margarita mix, dark chocolate.” His skill was reassuring. Meanwhile, she’d been cold and hungry for so many days that discomfort had become the background buzz of existence. She knew she’d gone past the point of dieting to malnutrition, but the monotonous food did supply enough energy to keep her trudging. Her fantasies turned to yak burgers in the Shangri-la Hotel.
She didn’t dwell on their mission. She dreaded having to confront the man she’d loved and now hated, Jake Barrow. She wanted to simply go home but couldn’t. She wanted to give up but had to win. Courage, she’d decided, wasn’t bestowed, it was chosen. Her ancestors had decided to be brave.
Now it was her turn.
“Do you believe in God, Sam?” she asked at one point as they trudged.
“God?” He paused, looking about. “Nope, don’t see him. Santa Claus for grown-ups, Rominy.”
“You’re not spiritual anymore?”
“I’m not religious. There’s a difference. Take Jesus, for example: a Xerox copy of gods who preceded. He was the son of a carpenter and virgin like Krishna, born on December twenty-fifth like Mithras, heralded by a star like Horus, walked on water like Buddha, healed like Pythagoras, raised people from the dead like Elisha, was executed on a tree like Adonis and Odin, and ascended into heaven like Hercules. The religious tradition is genuine, but to pretend he’s the one and only, instead of the latest software update-no way.”
“You’re quite the theology student.”
“You don’t come to Tibet without wondering about things. I was a searcher, like everybody, but after a while I got bored with dogma. You know, the Buddhists don’t have a lot to say about God or Creation at all. They stick to what they know, which is dealing with our fucked-up heads.”
“But they talk about love and empathy. Wasn’t that Jesus, too? Those nuns devote their lives to this cosmic… thing. This goodness, this grace, that unites all the great faiths. They see him, or it, or the Essence. They’d see God right now, right here, in this wilderness.”
“I’m sorry, but that rock isn’t God, not for me. And what Essence? Living in the Middle Ages at the edge of the world? Praying twenty million times a day? For more of the same in the next life? I’ve watched them for two years. It’s an interesting show for tourists, but not to buy in to. I’m sorry, Rominy, but for those who find life pointless and death terrifying without religion, I just say maybe it is pointless and terrifying.”
“Well, I’ve seen God,” she said.
Now he stopped, hands on hips. “You have? And you didn’t ask her for a ride?”
“Very funny. Remember when we climbed up the edge of the waterfall to the lake, saw the smoke from the nunnery, and started cutting along the mountain to get to it?”
“Yeah.”
“It was so empty, so desolate, so lonely, that he, or she, filled it.”
“Filled what?”
“Everything.”
“If your dope was that good, I wish you’d shared it.”
“It was a very odd feeling and it only lasted for a minute. As we worked our way toward the nunnery I suddenly felt completely at peace. As if I were exactly where I was supposed to be. And I felt connected . I felt connected to Jake, I felt connected to you, I felt connected to the river and the rock and the birds orbiting overhead, to the universe. I felt everything was one. And I thought, ‘This must be what heaven is like.’ ”
He regarded her skeptically. “Brain chemicals. High altitude, sleep deprivation, faulty diet. You hallucinated, Rominy, like every prophet and guru who’s gone into the desert and deliberately starved. You felt what you wanted to feel.”
“But I didn’t want it. In fact, for a few moments I didn’t want anything.”
He sighed. “Do you feel it now?”
“No.”
“Will you concede it could all be a trick of the mind?”
“No.”
“That maybe the Twelve Apostles were a bunch of potheads?”
“No. It was too real. It was so real that that was the reality, not”-she waved her hand at the landscape-“this. Not what I feel now. It’s like I woke up, just for a second, and now I’m back asleep again, in this dream we call life.”
“Wow. Whoa. Jake was just a snake, Rominy. There was no ‘connection’ to that Nazi-loving bastard.”
“That’s the weird part. He is a snake, but there was a connection. That if we could really see the essence that this staff is supposed to tap, that if we could lift the veil and get down to the fundamental that’s behind everything, there was, is, a connection. It was spooky, wonderful, scary. The real Shambhala isn’t lightning bolts, Sam, it’s unity. That’s what we lost. That’s what we’re looking for.”
“I’m looking for a yak burger.”
“Even Hitler, even though he was irretrievably lost.”
“Rominy, come on. Now you’re starting to sound like Jake Barrow. Is that what we’re going to say to that bastard when we catch up to him? All is one, all is forgiven, now please give your stick back?”
“No. Just that he has no idea what he’s really carrying. He was in a place to see, and stayed blind.”
