Part One: Someplace With a Broken Heart
Colombo District, Sri Lanka, 2001
“You were looking for peace and quiet, so you came here?”
Buffy stands at the window in a white cotton dress and bare feet, her hair pulled up off her neck. (She looks so beautiful like that, Angel thinks, watching her from the bed, but it’s probably a dangerous choice of hairstyles around him, even after all this time. He wishes he could be safer for her, he wishes . . . well, he wishes he could make things different.) She’s pulled back the curtains from the window as a concession to the heat, or to look out into the dark wild night, but Sri Lanka is miserably hot and humid even when the sun is down, and a sheen of sweat clings to every inch of her. Angel can almost smell it, can almost taste it, and he wants to press his lips to her febrile flesh, to let his tongue lap up the salty beads from between her shoulder blades, her collar bone, her navel, the dimples of her knees.
He’s not sure where these thoughts come from, but they keep coming.
“I need somewhere quiet to reflect and heal—”
She turns back to him briefly. The movement, this movement, the turn of her neck isn’t quite right, and he flinches without really being able to pinpoint the flaw.
“So you chose Sri Lanka?” she asks again, some accusation in her voice now.
“You think I should have gone to Vegas?” he asks, the corner of his mouth quirking up.
“That’s not what I meant,” she says quietly, and turns to look out into the dark night again.
Angel stands and joins her at the window. He wants to touch her, but that’s not what this is for, so he just lets his hands rest on the cool windowsill; there’s perspiration on the stone from the water in the air, it’s that humid here. Outside, they can see beautiful lush trees and marshy paddy fields, and elegant sloping Asian architecture, more of the monastery where Angel is staying rising up around them.
“This country is torn by war, Angel,” she says softly. “Why would you come here to heal?”
They can’t hear any shooting or bombing, but that’s not because there isn’t any. Buffy is right: Sri Lanka is a country plagued by intense civil war, all around them.
“I can’t believe this is the only country with a bunch of monks to hang out with,” she adds.
He doesn’t answer her question. Instead, he says, not looking at her, “If it were really you I were talking to, you wouldn’t know that about Sri Lanka.”
She frowns, hurt. “Hey. I know stuff.”
He smiles at her, kindly, sadly. “I know you do, sweetheart. But world politics isn’t really your area of expertise.”
She smiles begrudgingly. “Okay. True.” She sobers. “But you are. And don’t think I didn’t notice you weaseling around the issue. So what’s up, huh?”
He turns away again. He can’t bear to look at her while he’s killing her.
“I just wanted to go someplace that was grieving the same way I am. Someplace with a broken heart.”
***
Angel wakes in a fevered daze, gasping for air he doesn’t need. Before he can help himself, he looks to the window: the curtains are drawn and there’s no girl standing there shaming him.
As far as he knows, she’s still in the ground rotting, dead at twenty because he wasn’t there to save her . . .
He buries his face in his hands before he makes himself sick. Again.
He can smell dawn on the horizon, can feel it itching under his skin. The demon in him wants to hide, to burrow back under the covers where the sun can’t possibly find him and to seek healing slumber, but the bells will ring soon for morning meditation, and he’ll have to be jarred from sleep again. And worse: there may be more dreams, and he’s fairly certain that if he has to endure more than one a morning, he’ll go insane.
So he forces himself out of bed and dresses. His clothes are cotton, light, but the air is so wet and hot that they’re a little damp even as he puts them on, just from being out. Beneath his bare feet the stone floors are cool and slightly wet with condensation . . . just like the windowsill in his dream. Not everything is make-believe.
He’s just finished dressing when the bells ring, just as he’d thought. He walks downstairs – he’s learned to get anywhere in shadow – to the prayer hall. Many of the monks are there already, already sitting in meditation, but he’s the first Westerner there. He usually is. The other Americans and Europeans staying at the monastery are serious about studying Buddhism – some more than others, but they’re all there for a reason – but the spirit is more willing than the body, and five o’clock in the morning is very early. Ven. Upāli nods to Angel, and he nods back; abstaining from unnecessary speaking is one of the eight precepts to follow for pure meditation, and besides, Angel is heavy enough with grief that he doesn’t want to burden himself further with words. The man is the monastery’s head and also the reason Angel chose Siyane Vipassana from all the meditation centers in Sri Lanka; Angel knows the man from his first trek through the country, when Upāli was a novice monk and Angel was struggling with the bitterness of his soul and not a broken heart. Upāli is an old man now, but he’s truly achieved peace through the lessons of the Buddha, and when Angel shows up on his doorstep having not aged a day since their last meeting, he doesn’t blink. Someplace peaceful, someplace quiet – someplace with a broken heart, Angel thinks before he can help it – is one thing, but someone you can trust is a gem beyond price, and even as pained as he is, Angel is grateful for Upāli’s presence.
Angel sits on the stone floor, closes his eyes, and forces himself to breathe. It’s funny, in a kind of really unfunny way, that he should end up in a temple devoted to Mahāsi Buddhism: the entire meditation practice is centered around breathing, which he doesn’t do because he’s dead. For the first few minutes of every meditation cycle, he has to work on his breathing until he’s got it regular enough that he can ignore it in order to meditate properly.
Upāli told him yesterday that he has too much anger in him to find a path to Enlightenment, and that he needs to spend more time on the Four Protections, reflections for meditation. Angel spends at least eight hours a day, every day, meditating, but Upāli has told him it isn’t enough; Angel would be frustrated, but then he reminds himself that this is exactly the sort of attitude a monk is likely to have.
He balks, however, at the Four Protections, because he can only get through three of them on a good day and one on a bad. Upāli knows this; he knows the reason Angel has come to Sri Lanka, knows why he finds comfort instead of challenge in the limitations of the precepts. But he also knows that there’s no way to heal a wound by hiding it away.
Somewhere, Angel knows this, too.
The first Protection is never difficult. It is devoting one’s self to the Buddha by appreciating his nine qualities. Angel does not worship Buddha, but he recognizes worth in the tenets of Buddhism, and there are no hidden barbs within the first Protection, so it always comes easily: Truly, the Buddha is holy, fully enlightened, perfect in knowledge and conduct, a welfarer, world-knower, the incomparable leader of men to be tamed, teacher of gods and mankind, the awakened one and the exalted one.
Angel meditates on this Protection for a long time, because no one is ever rushed in meditation, he could stay unmoving in the prayer hall until dusk if he wanted, and because today – he can tell already, from the way he was woken this morning, from the sick feeling still clawing at his belly that he can’t seem to shake with the body is intangible, it is worth nothing – is going to be a bad day.
The second Protection is harder, and he misses the point just about every time. He is meant to reflect upon the nature of sentient beings, and to identify himself with all sentient beings without distinction, but there is a word that he snags on at the end of the first sentence, and he just gets caught on it and cannot move far enough to be anyone but himself, screaming.
May I be free from enmity, disease and grief. As I am, so also may my parents, preceptors, teachers, intimate and indifferent and inimical beings be free from enmity, disease and grief. May they be released from suffering.
He hits “grief” and he can’t be at harmony with anyone, because there’s no harmony within his own body, there’s nothing but Willow standing in the lobby of the Hyperion, nothing but Buffy’s neck twisted at a wrong angle and her grave that he can’t get near because they consecrated the earth, nothing but the human life with the woman he loves that he gave up to keep all this from happening, gone for nothing, two years he could have had with her, two whole years of making love to her and seeing her in the sun and waking up beside her, his face in her hair, her hands curled around him.
He’s forgotten to keep his fake breathing going, and he can’t do it anymore or he’s going to be sick. He feels feverish. He’s supposed to work through the Protection until he masters it, but if he has to think about grief anymore . . . he moves to the third one.
The third Protection is to diminish the unwholesome attachment some people have to the body. He’s supposed to reflect on the body’s “repulsive nature,” to think of intestines and pus and everything unbeautiful and unclean about it . . . but all he can think is of the wrong angle of Buffy’s neck, and of the undertaker embalming her, cutting his girl open, and then he’s almost sick again . . .
The fourth Protection he cannot get through even on a good day.
Death is ever approaching. Life is uncertain, but death is certain; life is precarious but death is sure. Life has death as its goal. There is birth, disease, suffering, old age, and eventually, death. These are all aspects of the process of existence.
He’s been here for two and a half months and still he cannot get through the fourth Protection on a good day, though he tries every day, every meditation cycle. He is panting, straining under the pressure of the sentiments, under the churning sick feeling in his stomach. Suddenly, there’s a gentle warm weight on his shoulder; he turns, surprised, opening his eyes. Upāli is crouched beside him, his hand on Angel’s shoulder.
The old man speaks quietly.
“You cannot walk down a path you do not see,” he says in Tamil. He speaks flawless English, but never to Angel, who doesn’t want to talk to any of the other Westerners, and thus has not spoken a word of English since he arrived.
“I’m trying,” Angel responds. He is. He’s not far from punishing himself.
“It is not enough.”
“What more can I do?”
The monk’s gaze is difficult to bear. “That is for you to discover.”
***
It’s pouring rain outside. It makes plastic noises as it pelts the dense tropics foliage, pots-and-pans music as it thrums against the curved roofs of the monastery.
There’s a distinct possibility that it will drive Angel the last few miles to insanity.
He can’t sleep, and he sure as hell can’t meditate or read or do anything but toss and turn on his tiny bed and be tortured by the noise and the wetness and the thick earth smell it leaves in the air. Almost metal, almost like blood. He’s hungry, but he’s so angry that such a small reminder can push him so far that he won’t eat, even though Upāli keeps fresh blood for him in the kitchen downstairs.
“You can’t walk down a path you don’t see,” a clear voice says, startling him. If his heart were beating, he might have had an attack. “What about blind people? Don’t the monks care about them?”
Buffy’s sitting at the edge of the bed in the white dress from the other night, her feet still bare but her hair loose around her shoulders.
He’s pretty sure he is having an attack.
He sits up, partly from habit – it’s impolite to address a woman from the flat of your back, and foolish to let a predator see you that way – partly because he wants to be as close to her as possible, because he didn’t notice she was there until she spoke. He can’t smell her, can’t hear her heartbeat or feel her warmth.
Also, he just . . . wants to.
“It’s a parable,” he says stiltedly. “He didn’t mean it literally; he meant that I cannot do something I’m not at all prepared for.”
She does not look completely satisfied by this explanation. “Oh. Why didn’t he just say that?” She rolls her eyes. “Cryptic.”
He eyes her strangely; she looks entirely too real for a dead girl. He can count her freckles.
“I thought you liked cryptic guys,” he says finally.
The corner of her mouth quirks. “Cad.”
He can’t help himself; he lays his hand on her arm. She feels warm, real. He feels something tighten painfully in his chest and he thinks he may have made a noise out loud.
Buffy looks at him, surprised, but he’s not sure if it’s from his movement or the noise he may or may not have made.
“You can’t be here,” he accuses suddenly, panicked.
She looks calm. “Why not?”
He doesn’t want to say it, because saying it makes it true, and he’s gone halfway around the world to try and heal his heart from the wound. But he has to say it or further suffer this madness.
“Because you’re dead,” he chokes.
Her berry swell mouth puckers into a pout. “So are you.”
“But you—”
She looks cross. “So you figure, what, you’re just hallucinating me?”
“I don’t know. Yes? Or you’re haunting me, but I figure you’d have better things to do with your afterlife than haunt me—”
She points an indignant finger at him. “You’d better believe it, mister.”
They sit for a moment in an uncomfortable silence. Finally Angel, unhinged, desperate, turns and takes Buffy by the waist, pulls her body against his, crushes his mouth against hers. She resists at first, surprised, but then relaxes into the kiss; surprisingly, he pulls away first.
“Do you kiss all your hallucinations?” she asks breathlessly.
“I can’t feel you,” he whispers, not bothering to mask the accusation in his tone.
She sighs. “Yeah, well, that’s not why I’m here. And, you know – like you said – I’m dead, so . . .”
She lowers her eyes to a stray thread on her skirt, suddenly very interesting.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
She looks up. “For kissing me?”
“What? No. No, I’m never sorry for that. I meant for not saving you . . .”
She frowns. “It was my choice, Angel. It wasn’t your job to save me. Anyway, that’s not why I’m here, no chain-rattling or anything.”
He creases his brow. “Why are you here?”
“To help you with what that monk guy was talking about. Your path. You need to get back on it, and in a hurry. I mean, I’m flattered that you’re spending so much time mourning over me, but you’ve got big important things to do. People to help, worlds to save. And none of it’s going to get done while you’re on your ass pondering existence in a country with a broken heart.”
He starts to reply but finds the words arrest in his throat under her No Smart Stuff, Mister glare.
“What, you think I’d let you screw up your life and forget your mission just because I stepped into the light? Puh-leeze.”
***
Angel sleeps well and doesn’t wake until the bells call him to meditation. He doesn’t feel shocked anymore, just strangely leaden and wrung through, like after crying . . . but that could be because of the rain, too; his clothes are heavy with moisture. He walks through the corridors to the prayer hall in a kind of slow daze, thinking over the events of the previous evening. He’s not sure if it was a dream. If he wants it to be.
It takes him two hours, but he gets through all four Protections. Then he goes back to his room and packs his things to go home.
***
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