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around with this icy-white face and staring green eyes looking like the Gorgon, and my dear friend Alinga spaces out more and more-sometimes, honestly, I feel I'm the only sane one left. The heat, no kidding, is terrific! A hundred twenty, twenty-five every day from eleven to four. That place I used to go out by the red rocks to be by myself is like an oven now, even after the sun goes down. I don't know how the lizards keep from getting fried. Be grateful for your sea breeze and all those leafy oaks and maples. To think, we used to sleep under a puff even this time of year! If I sound homesick, maybe I am. I miss the sea and also frankly I could do sometimes with a pop of Jack Daniel's, the way we used to do after yoga, to settle the shakti and stirred-up vrittis, after Irving had left. Oops. I shouldn't have put that bn tape, in case you play it for him. And I've never figured out how to erase. Well, anyway, I've said plenty for now, let's leave some tape for later, for what I said.

[Breathlessly] O.K., Midge, here we go. [Noise. Amplified cloth and finger friction. Underlying rustling that may be heartbeat. Much ensuing silence and some unintelligibility. Female voices, difficult to distinguish. One male voice, indicated below by italics.] Shanti, guru.

Namaste, Master.

Namaste, my nayikas.

Come on, let's get the shit rolling.

Durga, don't be so rude. Just because you're uptight-

Oh listen to her now. Listen to the corn-fed princess. Easy for you to say don't do this or that. For you this is all one more space shot. I wouldn't be uptight either if I were you. When it all goes down the drain you'll go back to Cedar Rapids and have Daddy finance six weeks in Guadeloupe at an all-girl Club Med.

Oh dear, one of those days. Darling Durga. That's quite unfairr I'm as committed as you are.

'Why would it all go down the drain? How could it, when it's so basically splendid?

Committed to your own artha is what you are. Committed to your own kama and your little roommate's padma. Could you ask her possibly to keep her mouth shut where she doesn't know a bloody thing? She just got here, for sweet Jesus' sake.

She is not little. She is stately.

She knows plenty. She's been facing up to the mess Nitya left in the books, while you've been off with your great gift of gab telling that talk show in Phoenix what a shit every official in the state is.

I didn't say the state, I just said Dorado County. And I restrained myself from saying a blessed word about all the shits in the FBI and the INS.

I thought it was truly delicious. The lady hostess, the talk-show lady with her enamelled face and little microphone in her lapel, quite forgot her smooth talk. She suffered the shock of enlightenment before the eyes of her million viewers.

And while you've been off playing Ma Barker to those freckle-faced security kids up in the canyon, Satya and Prapti and I have been trying to cope with all these old wheezy guys from the county that keep showing up.

The building inspector says the whole septic system is illegal and must be dug up before it bubbles up. He says we're sitting on a volcano, so to speak, and obviously can't have outdoor plumbing on the A-frames, and that on the original application they were called 'winterized tents.' This other man, from the medical licensing board, says our so-called clinic'is simply a drug distribution center.

That must be libel. That must be legal slander. I have my licenses, everything is licensed and they know it.

It's the bloody nuisance value, that's all they care about. That's all any of them care about. They're shits. They're ignoramus cowboy fascist shits.

Well, you can see how it must all look to them. They're under pressure-

Shut up, you. Alinga, can't you shut your sweetheart up? Just because she's twice as old as you-

Why should Sarah shut up? She's been digging into facts while you just keep dealing in fantasies.

Let Kundalint speak.

I was just going to say, the county is under pressure from the state officials, who are under pressure from the ecology lobby and the newspapers and the nationwide media. The way they see it, we've made Arizona into a laughingstock. If we could just have fewer stories for a while, and be less confrontational with the other people in the county, who after all were here first-

You know nothing about these rotten shits. They carry shotguns. They're fanatic ruthless Protestants. You come here from some prettified Eastern suburb and you think making a Buddha Realm in the teeth of all this fascism is like throwing a tea party for the fucking hired help.

Maybe if we didn't keep calling them fascists. They're just Americans-

I can't listen to her any longer. Master, I can't. I can't stand her voice, that simpering Lady Bountiful voice. Look at the way she keeps patting herself on the chest, as if to say, 'Oh, dearie me.' I abhorred her emanations the day she showed up here-I knew she didn't understand us and never would, how we're trying to make something new here, and the new always has to destroy the old. The old ego has to be destroyed. She doesn't understand that. She hasn't listened to your wisdom. She's full of phalatrishna, full to her blooming eyeballs. I dare say she doesn't even know what phalatrishna is. It hurts me to listen to her, and that's God's honest fact. Physically hurts. Her smug voice goes on and on in my head like a buggering dentist's drill.

Honestly, Durga. You're the one who's going on and on. Maybe you should take a rest in the clinic along with Nitya.

There are no beds.-We are almost out of tranquillizers.

It means 'thirst for fruits.' Phalatrishna means the thirst for results satisfying to the ego. I am not that. I thirst only for the greater glory of the Arhat, that the peace we enjoy within his love may be extended to everybody.

Begob, listen to her! Like a bloody parrot!

I have said, Let Kundalini speak. What does she find in Nitya's books of accounting?

There are assets, still. But not what there should be, in view of the tremendous expenditures here. And not what they were. The sale of books, tapes, posters, and T-shirts are all off. The perfumed soaps and bath oils and incense cones are 'holding up, but I'm afraid they were always a minor item. The worst thing is that a lot of the regional meditation-and-massage centers have simply gone out of business rather than conform with the centralization policies that have been handed down.

Those little centers were pits. They were cesspools. Some hadn't the foggiest idea what massage therapy was, or bioenergetics. They were plain and simple whorehouses.

Durga dear, you've become such a prude. You used to be fun.

Aye, your kind of fun.

Still, the staff were donating their services and shared their profits with the Treasury of Enlightenment, in exchange for using the Arhat's image. ' And his inspiration, Polly. Don't forget to parrot that. The example of his love.

Quite so. Work was their worship and they were happy, as we all are. Why turn them off? You went around terrifying everybody, demanding more and more, a bigger and bigger cut, saying they should rob their parents, pretend to illnesses they didn't have, smuggle dope-

I never told them to smuggle dope.

You told them to gather sweets where they could. The two sannyasins who were caught with cocaine down in Nogales said it was on divine orders and they had been brainwashed.

Of course the little twats would say that. Anything to save their little skins.

I am disturbed about the T-shirts.

Durga, I've beard you tell the sannyasins at darshan that on their visits home if they steal their mother's jewelry it would be doing her a favor.

We perhaps need another scandal to increase the sale of T-shirts. Always in America there is the danger of being forgotten. Fashion moves with a shameless speed.

I said it would help their parents spiritually, and in God's truth it would. What's happened to you, Alinga? This person has reinfected you with bourgeois values. This whole squabble is bourgeois. Am I the only man, woman, or creature here still trying to create the future?

That sounds like rather a bourgeois thing to be doing, if I may say so.

You looked as smug and sassy as she does, saying that. That same little cock of the head, the little complacent tucks in the corners of the mouth. Maybe you're the parrot.

Dear Durga, if you'd ever listen to our Master, instead of trying to become Master yourself-

Oh! That's too vile. That's too easy. That's shit and you know it.

I don't know it. How would I know it? Everybody in the ashram, everybody down to the flakiest sannyasin, knows you're trying to take over but don't have the touch. The touch has to be light, my dear. Light. You're heavy-handed. You're the fascist, not those poor cowboys and Indians and plumbing inspectors out there.

Ma Prapti. You heard this butch bitch. You heard what these harridans are saying to me. Say something.

What can I say? The spirit of our enterprise is changing. You might say it has been poisoned. Many of those who come to the clinic are unhappy. Formerly they were happy, even when they were very disturbed.

Order must be.allowed to emerge from disorder. To impose order is to create another layer of disorder.

You. Don't you start in on me now. Your foolish limousines. All those ostentatious jewels. No honest jivan-mukta needs tons of useless jewels.

Amitabba goes drenched in jewels through the Buddha Realms in the West. Millions of jewel flowers tremble wherever be walks, through the towering jewel forests.

Oh sweet Christ. Come off it, Art.

Art?

That's what she calls him.

She does?

Look, all of you. There's a conspiracy to destroy us out there. The state is suing us, the county, the Keep Arizona Clean crazies, the parents of that sannyasin who died of hypothermia coming back from the Kali Club-

And why are they suing, dear Durga? Because you're constantly provocative. Because you've turned this charming dream of a Buddha Field into Gestapo headquarters.

To maintain order. To maintain our privacy. So female leeches like you can go around with your wide smirk of a mouth and suck hold of the next new body.

Perhaps, were it to be announced that I have attained yet another level of enlightenment-

The press is bored with your enlightenment. They never believed it anyway. They want dirt now. Dirt and blood. That's what they always want, actually.

They want rajas. They want action. Ha.

Uh, not to be compulsive about detail, but there were some practical things I noticed, going over the account books. There's a great deal of long-distance telephoning from the Uma Room and the