“You’ve been gone six months. That’s long enough. We don’t care what it costs. Use that credit card we gave you and buy yourself a ticket back home.”
“I’ll be home in two months or so.”
“What the hell are you doing over there?” his father shouted, as best he could, against the satellite. “What is this about dead bodies in the Ganges? You’re liable to come down with some disease.”
“No, I won’t. I feel fine.”
“Well, your mother doesn’t feel fine. She’s worried half to death.”
“Dad, this is the best part of the trip so far. Europe was great and everything, but it’s still the West.”
“And what’s wrong with the West?”
“Nothing. Only it’s more exciting to get away from your own culture.”
“Speak to your mother,” his father said.
And then his mother’s voice, almost a whimper, had come over the line. “Mitchell, are you OK?”
“I’m fine.”
“We’re worried about you.”
“Don’t worry. I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound right in your letters. What’s going on with you?”
Mitchell wondered if he could tell her. But there was no way to say it. You couldn’t say, I’ve found the truth. People didn’t like that.
“You sound like one of those Hare Krishnas.”
“I haven’t joined up yet, Mom. So far, all I’ve done is shave my head.”
“You shaved your head, Mitchell!”
“No,” he told her; though in fact it was true: he had shaved his head.
Then his father was back on the line. His voice was strictly business now, a gutter voice Mitchell hadn’t heard before. “Listen, stop cocking around over there in India and get your butt back home. Six months is enough traveling. We gave you that credit card for emergencies and we want you …” Just then, a divine stroke, the line had gone dead. Mitchell had been left holding the receiver, with a queue of Bengalis waiting behind him. He’d decided to let them have their turns. He hung up the receiver, thinking that he shouldn’t call home again. They couldn’t possibly understand what he was going through or what this marvelous place had taught him. He’d tone down his letters, too. From now on, he’d stick to scenery.
But, of course, he hadn’t. No more than five days had passed before he was writing home again, describing the incorruptible body of Saint Francis Xavier and how it had been carried through the streets of Goa for four hundred years until an overzealous pilgrim had bitten off the saint’s finger. Mitchell couldn’t help himself. Everything he saw—the fantastical banyan trees, the painted cows—made him start writing, and after he described the sights, he talked about their effect on him, and from the colors of the visible world he moved straightaway into the darkness and ringing of the invisible. When he got sick, he’d written home about that, too. Dear Mom and Dad, I think I have a touch of amoebic dysentery. He’d gone on to describe the symptoms, the remedies the other travelers used. Everybody gets it sooner or later. I’m just going to fast and meditate until I get better. I’ve lost a little weight, but not much. Soon as I’m better, Larry and I are off to Bali.
He was right about one thing: sooner or later, everybody did get it. Besides his German neighbor, two other travelers on the island had been suffering from stomach complaints. One, a Frenchman, laid low by a salad, had taken to his hut, from which he’d groaned and called for help like a dying emperor. But just yesterday Mitchell had seen him restored to health, rising out of the shallow bay with a parrotfish impaled on the end of his spear gun. The other victim had been a Swedish woman. Mitchell had last seen her being carried out, limp and exhausted, to the ferry. The Thai boatmen had pulled her aboard with the empty soda bottles and fuel containers. They were used to the sight of languishing foreigners. As soon as they’d stowed the woman on deck, they’d started smiling and waving. Then the boat had kicked into reverse, taking the woman back to the clinic on the mainland.
If it came to that, Mitchell knew he could always be evacuated. He didn’t, however, expect it to come to that. Once he’d gotten the egg out of his system, he felt better. The pain in his stomach went away. Four or five times a day he had Larry bring him black tea. He refused to give the amoebas so much as a drop of milk to feed on. Contrary to what he would’ve expected, his mental energy didn’t diminish but actually increased. It’s incredible how much energy is taken up with the act of digestion. Rather than being some weird penance, fasting is actually a very sane and scientific method of quieting the body, of turning the body off. And when the body turns off, the mind turns on. The Sanskrit for this is moksa, which means total liberation from the body.
The strange thing was that here, in the hut, verifiably sick, Mitchell had never felt so good, so tranquil, or so brilliant in his life. He felt secure and watched over in a way he couldn’t explain. He felt happy. This wasn’t the case with the German woman. She looked worse and worse. She hardly spoke when they passed now. Her skin was paler, splotchier. After a while Mitchell stopped encouraging her to keep fasting. He lay on his back, with the bathing suit over his eyes now, and paid no attention to her trips to the outhouse. He listened instead to the sounds of the island, people swimming and shouting on the beach, somebody learning to play a wooden flute a few huts down. Waves lapped, and occasionally a dead palm leaf or coconut fell to the ground. At night, the wild dogs began howling in the jungle. When he went to the outhouse, Mitchell could hear them moving around outside, coming up and sniffing him, the flow of his waste, through the holes in the walls. Most people banged flashlights against the tin door to scare the dogs away. Mitchell didn’t even bring a flashlight along. He stood listening to the dogs gather in the vegetation. With sharp muzzles they pushed stalks aside until their red eyes appeared in the moonlight. Mitchell faced them down, serenely. He spread out his arms, offering himself, and when they didn’t attack, he turned and walked back to his hut.
One night as he was coming back, he heard an Australian voice say, “Here comes the patient now.” He looked up to see Larry and an older woman sitting on the porch of the hut. Larry was rolling a joint on his Let’s Go: Asia. The woman was smoking a cigarette and looking straight at Mitchell. “Hello, Mitchell, I’m Gwendolyn,” she said. “I hear you’ve been sick.”
“Somewhat.”
“Larry says you haven’t been taking the pills I sent over.”
Mitchell didn’t answer right away. He hadn’t talked to another human being all day. Or for a couple of days. He had to get reacclimated. Solitude had sensitized him to the roughness of other people. Gwendolyn’s loud whiskey baritone, for instance, seemed to rake right across his chest. She was wearing some kind of batik headdress that looked like a bandage. Lots of tribal jewelry, too, bones and shells, hanging around her neck and from her wrists. In the middle of all this was her pinched, oversunned face, with the red coil of the cigarette in the center blinking on and off. Larry was just a halo of blond hair in the moonlight.
“I had a terrible case of the trots myself,” Gwendolyn continued. “Truly epic. In Irian Jaya. Those pills were a godsend.”
Larry gave a finishing lick to the joint and lit it. He inhaled, looking up at Mitchell, then said in a smoke-tightened voice, “We’re here to make you take your medicine.”
“That’s right. Fasting is all well and good, but after—what has it been?”
“Two weeks almost.”
“After two weeks, it’s time to stop.” She looked stern, but then the joint came her way, and she said, “Oh, lovely.” She took a hit, held it, smiled at both of them, and then launched into a fit of coughing. It went on for about thirty seconds. Finally she drank some beer, holding her hand over her chest. Then she resumed smoking her cigarette.