Sun House
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Synopsis
An epic comedy about love, spirit, and the quest for transcendence in an anything-but-transcendent America, from the author of the perennial cult bestsellers The River Why and The Brothers K.
A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit Jesuit into crisis. A boy’s mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man, and innumerable others.
The journeys of this unintentional menagerie carry them to the healing lands of Montana and a newly founded community—where nothing tastes better than Maker's Mark mixed with glacier ice, and nothing seems less likely than the soul-filling delight a troupe of spiritual refugees, urban sophisticates, road-weary musicians, and local cowboys begin to find in each other's company.
With Sun House, David James Duncan continues exploring the American search for meaning and love that he began in his acclaimed novels The River Why and The Brothers K. This stunning novel, set amid the gorgeous landscapes of the American West, illuminates the contemporary world through the prisms of Eastern wisdom, cast-off ecstatic religious ideals, and the unpredictable, expansive yearnings of the human heart.
Release date: August 8, 2023
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Print pages: 672
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Sun House
David James Duncan
I. Dead Mother’s Son
(Portland, Oregon, 1958 to 1968)
Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
EXTREMELY IMPLAUSIBLE ACCIDENTS do not feel innocent. When, for instance, an inch-long steel bolt shook loose and fell from an AeroMexico DC-8 cruising at 38,000 feet, drifted seven miles to Earth, and embedded itself in the skull of an eight-year-old girl hoeing weeds with her widower father in a Mexican cornfield, killing her almost instantly, the term “freak accident” did not begin to appease. The minds of everyone who loved the girl groped for explanations. A thunderhead shook things loose…An airline skimped on maintenance inspections…A skilled maintenance man, distracted by a coworker’s tale of a secret affair, failed to torque down the bolt despite the thousands he had faithfully inspected…But no rational explanation, not even a “correct” one, purges the preposterousness from the event. An inch-long bolt. Seven miles. The perfect timing. The tiny target. Chance veered so far out of its way to kill this child that some sort of premeditated attack seemed to have been committed.
The question then became: By whom? Who was the unseen attacker? Destiny? Fate? God? One wants to know. And one doesn’t want to know. Because say it is God. Suppose that not a sparrow or human-made meteor falls without His knowledge. Suppose the winds are His breath, and His exhalations oh-so-carefully steered the steel throughout its drifting, twisting, high-speed fall. Now say you’re the girl’s father. Suppose you call out to your daughter when she drops in the dirt, wondering what crazy game she’s playing, smiling at her histrionics as she briefly writhes, then lies perfectly still. Suppose that, as the game grows protracted, you grow irritated, stroll over to her—and find the small, blood-filled cavity amid the raven hair you braided that morning. Suppose you look skyward as you shatter and glimpse, miles above, not even the departing jet but only a fast-vanishing contrail.
Now start trying to love that all-knowing, oh-so-careful God.
Suppose you’re the Jesuit novice from El Norte, summoned in the old padre’s absence to console the mourners at her grave. Suppose that, after heartsick consideration, you fall back on your Jesuit training, draw a troubled breath, but try to sound confident as, in your stiff foreign Spanish, you tell the girl’s father and handful of ragged friends, “Yours is a terrible loss. I’m more sorry than I can say. But God loves those He takes as well as those He leaves behind. His purposes are beyond us. We must trust, even so, that all things are meant to bring us to holiness.”
Suppose the father grows wild-eyed, leaps forward, and smashes your face repeatedly till you fall to the ground. Say he then sobs, “You must trust that my fists have brought you to holiness!”
How can you answer? Some human beings are singled out to suffer agonies of the heart. We don’t know why. All we know is that any even slightly confident explanation or consolation we offer in Spanish, English, or any mortal tongue sounds glib in the face of every such event, and so merely insults the hearts in agony.
THE PORTLAND ACTOR and playwright James Lee Van Zandt once suffered a highly implausible blow: Jamey was born on January 30th, 1958, at Providence Hospital in Portland, Oregon. On January 30th, 1963—five years later to the day—his mother, Debbie Van Zandt, died of leukemia in the very same hospital.
When any conceivable Divine Being or Random Fate deletes your mother in the very place she gave birth to you, and on your birthday, the extreme odds against it suggest that a premeditated attack has been committed. The five-year-old Jamey struggled for months to grasp that his mother was never coming back. He struggled for years to accept that she’d been ripped away like a sweetly offered, viciously retracted birthday gift. His acceptance of these two facts, after all that struggle, led him to conclude that Fate, God, or whatever Power rules earthly life is so farcically cold and cruel that only a fool would place faith in “It” or “Him.” He then began losing faith in other things the ruling Power was said to bestow upon humans—things as basic as the reality of his own feelings and experience; reality of his face in the mirror; reality of his very world and life.
This early wound began weathering Jamey’s identity the way winter storms and summer thunderheads weather granite peaks. Psychologically, his wound sensitized him to farcical situations, disingenuous behavior, and cruel illusions of all kinds. Philosophically, the wound bequeathed him a seething hatred of any and every formulaic, theological, New Age, or piety-ridden consolation. Socially, the wound turned him into a sometimes hilarious, sometimes self-destructive iconoclast so unemployable that he had no choice but to employ himself, becoming a playwright, actor, and theatrical director. The wound also bequeathed his comedy a ruthlessness that at times delighted and at other times appalled his audiences.
But before any of these influences were clearly recognized by Jamey, his early wound and fierce rebellion against it nearly killed him several times over.
A BOY OF five, after suffering a heart-wound, doesn’t rant and rail at the heavens. A boy of five plays the hand he’s dealt, and if it kills him, oh well, and if it doesn’t, what do ya know? The strongest suit in Jamey Van Zandt’s hand was his nature. The weakest was his luck. An example of both:
When Jamey was born, his head was seventeen inches in circumference. The opening in his mother’s pelvis was not. Debbie needed an emergency C-section to deliver him and days of rest afterward. Baby and mother were separated. In the hospital nursery, Jamey contracted staph boils, which were treated with sulfa drugs to which Jamey proved allergic. He ended up in Intensive Care. Prolonged separation delayed lactation. By the time mother and child were reunited it was impossible for Debbie to breastfeed her son. This was Jamey’s luck. He grew into a big, happy, resentment-free lug of a baby anyway. This was his nature. Jamey’s was not the sort of heart that cried out, Where are the breasts that I deserve? His was the sort that said, Bottle? Cool. Formula? Yum! From birth Jamey was blessed, despite his wretched luck, with a nature easily pleased by the world within his reach. If the kid in the backyard next door had a twenty-dollar action figure with kung-fu grip, fully articulated joints, and power-action waist, and Jamey had an old wet dishrag, Jamey set to work exploring the properties of his wet rag, inventing a personality for it, interacting and teasing and yucking it up with it till the neighbor kid would be pleading to trade his action figure for Jamey’s rag.
Another of Jamey’s strong suits: indefatigability. An invaluable asset for a lad destined for a life in the arts. An example: Jamey loved to crawl as an infant and became unusually proficient at it—so proficient that, long after other kids his age were walking, he took no particular interest in uprightness. Jamey was fifteen months old and his parents, Debbie and Jon, feared he was developmentally disabled in some way before he began to experiment with walking. But his experiments met with an odd setback: vertical toddling struck little Jamey as hilarious. Trying to convey a toy across a room by placing one tiny foot in front of the other when, on his hands and knees, he could nearly carry his mother on his back, made him laugh so hard he’d lose his balance, teeter into walls and furniture, bang his knees, hips, head, fall on his ass, laugh hysterically, stand back up, leg it into more crashes, and laugh even harder. When neighbors and relatives witnessed his hilarity-sabotaged toddling, word spread and small crowds would convene, soon laughing so hard that the future thespian experienced an early love of his ability to amuse an audience.
One morning during his Walk, Crash, and Laugh phase Jamey sat down on the floor, fell silent, and after a few minutes began to cry—a nearly unheard-of act for this ebullient little person. When Debbie tried to figure out why, the toddler could articulate nothing, but the crying grew so inconsolable that she took him to an emergency room. The problem was a hernia. Jamey underwent surgery that night. The operation left a seven-inch scar reaching from his groin’s ground zero to his right hip bone. The surgeon warned Jamey’s parents that it would be days before he tried to walk and that it would hurt like hell when he did. But this was where his indefatigability kicked in: on Jamey’s first night home from the hospital, Jon woke to an eerie sound in the bedside crib, wakened Debbie, and in the glow of the night-light they beheld their son gripping the crib rail in his chubby fist as he staggered back and forth like King Lear in his late madness, cheeks streaked with tears, belly shaking with laughter. Even in pain, two-leggèd locomotion continued to strike Jamey as a scream.
THE BIRTHDAY DEATH of a mother does not unmake such a nature. Once in a while, though, his native ebullience would vanish, leaving him so inert that he appeared physically or mentally damaged. Not surprisingly, the worst of these cripplings came, as regularly and cynically as Santa Claus, on the birthdays that were also his mother’s deathday.
On his first post-mom birthday his dad, Jon, and older sister, Judith, attempted to blow the family grief to smithereens by throwing Jamey an extra-big party. They decked the halls with synthetic jollies, hired a professional clown, amassed solid and liquid arsenals of multicolored forms of sugar, and invited an army of gift-bearing kids. The revelers buried Jamey, as planned, in hypoglycemic cheer. When the birthday boy began dashing about as gleefully and idiotically as his guests, Jon and Judith’s plan seemed to be working. During the post-cake opening of presents, however, an officious-looking neighbor girl handed Jamey a gift and—with the cool neutrality of the mathematically precocious—announced, “You’re six today, Jamey. And your mom is minus one.”
Negative numbers. What a fascinating concept for the birthday boy. The instant Jamey began to consider Debbie’s negative first deathday the gift in his hand vanished, the sounds in the room grew muted, the unopened mound of presents morphed into an emaciated body on a mechanical bed, and his mother’s hollow eyes and chemo-swollen face turned to stare into and through him. Lost, Jamey stared back. He saw the blue eyes shine with love for a moment; then the head grew naked, the face turned yellow and puffy, and he saw himself faltering in his efforts to love this frighteningly changed face in return. Her hollow eyes saw him falter. In desperation he said to the face, I love you, Momma, but felt only fear of her state, causing the pained eyes to hurt even more.
Minus one.
Jamey stood frozen so long the math whiz finally tapped his shoulder, a wag called out, “Anybody home?” a circle of sugar-smeared faces burst into laughter, Debbie’s swollen face vanished—and Jamey grew soul-sick. Mumbling to Jon that he didn’t feel good, he deserted his guests, tottered to his room, put himself to bed, and remained there till every trace of the celebration was out of the house.
Jon and Judith’s would-be exorcisms of Jamey’s haunted birthday escalated like warfare: over the next three years they tried a swimming pool party, a roller rink party, and a Barnum & Bailey Circus party. But the neighbor girl’s formula stuck:
I’m seven this year—and Mom is minus two…
I’m nine—and Mom’s minus four…
The parties, for Jamey, were sulfa drugs. Allergic reactions made him more and more erratic. The day he turned eight, for instance, when it came time to make a wish and blow out the candles, he leaned carefully over the flames and stayed there, unflinching, until his hair began to singe and stink. When his father pulled him back and asked what he was trying to do, Jamey blurted, “Get my wish!” and ran from the room sobbing. When he turned nine and his big boisterous party was leaving the Barnum & Bailey Circus at Memorial Coliseum, Jamey eyed his entourage with allergic distaste, melted into the exit crowd, and vanished so completely that Jon, after a long and frantic search, called the police. Jamey was picked up after midnight by a squad car on a street three miles away. When his distraught dad again asked what he was trying to do, Jamey felt an answer, but couldn’t yet speak it: what he truly wanted from his birthdays was a chance to grasp, by and for himself, the maddening gift he’d already been given: a dead mother.
A few weeks before Jamey’s tenth birthday, Judith, in front of Jamey, began to query Jon, not Jamey, about the upcoming celebration. Jamey blew up. “Those parties are for you, not me! I hate them!” Judith then exploded in return, shrieking that their mother had given Jamey parties so she was doing the same. “Go ahead, Jude!” Jamey roared. “Play Mommy on my birthday. But I won’t be there to watch!”
Jude fled the table in tears. Jamey stomped to his room. Jon gave his son time to cool, then went in and asked what he most wanted to do on his birthday. With great earnestness, Jamey said, “Treat it like a regular old day. No party, no nothing. I want to spend the day alone with…with whatever’s left…you know…of Mom.”
Jon Van Zandt was a Stoic. His face showed nothing as he slowly nodded. But his voice quavered as he murmured, “Permission granted.”
ON HIS FIRST party-free January 30th Jamey slept late, woke slowly, then remembered his new birthday freedom. Sighing with satisfaction, he stared up at the ceiling and commenced, as planned, to conjure every last thing he could remember about his mother. He managed to recall, at least faintly, a pleasing voice. He recalled a benign warmth bending down to praise him. He vaguely glimpsed a blue-eyed, pretty face. But before he could study that face, memorize it, convey his love to it, it broke up and melted into mist.
Distressed, Jamey summoned his indefatigability, jumped out of bed, dressed as fast as he could, and called to the mother mist, “Come on!” The mist made no reply—was no longer even a mist, really—but Jamey made a show of coaxing it downstairs even so.
He found Jon in the process of making his favorite breakfast: strawberry crepes topped with whipped cream. He found that Judith had placed, on his plate, a three-by-five card upon which she’d typed: “Happy Regular Old Day. —Jude.” He noticed her staring at him so blankly she resembled a three-by-five card herself, and grinned. “No kidding, Jude,” he said. “This is the best present you ever gave me! So thanks.”
Judith stuck out her tongue, then bent to her crepes with seeming distaste. Jamey plowed into his with relish.
Jon joined them at the table. “So what will you do today, Mister Regular?”
Jamey peered out the window. “It’s not raining and not too cold. I’d like to just go out on my bike, if that’s okay, wander around all day, then come home for a regular ol’ dinner here at the regular ol’ ranch.”
Poker-faced as ever, Jon said, “Two quick confessions. One, I broke the Regular Ol’ Day Rule and got you a present. Two, I broke it again and gave Jude permission to bake a cake. If we ban all guests except Gramma Nan and if we don’t sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ could you stand to blow out ten candles and eat a piece of the cake?”
Jamey tried to look put-upon, then grinned. “That’s regular enough!”
“By four the daylight’s going,” Jon said. “I want you home at three. And no disappearing this year. Disappearing is not regular, Mister Regular.”
“Deal,” Jamey said with another grin.
HE SET OFF into Southeast Portland through a morning as bland as his plan for the day. The sky was a white so dull it looked like a ceiling, making the outdoors feel like the indoors of a giant unheated building. Jamey’s bike, an old English three-speed, made a pleasing clicketa-clicketa-clicketa when he stopped pedaling, so he began to seek residential streets with downhill slants. Riding to the crest of each, he would put on a burst of speed, then glide, enjoying the clicketa-clicketa for as long as possible.
He’d been at this for half an hour and had set a record glide of three blocks, when he realized he hadn’t thought of his mother once. Blushing with shame, he pulled up to the curb and looked at the empty air. “You’re minus five today,” he said softly. “Is there anything you’d like for…for your negative fifth deathday?”
He listened to the air’s lack of answer long enough to grow sad. But sadness activated his indefatigability. “Come on!” he said. “There’s gotta be something.”
The nothing remained nothing. But Gramma Nan, Debbie’s mother, often remarked that Debbie had been stubborn. Jamey refused to grow downhearted.
Looking around the neighborhood, getting his bearings, he realized he was only a block from the Woodstock public library. This struck him as more than nothing: Debbie used to take him and Jude there. Jon too had taken them a few times after Debbie died, but with Jon the visits had felt hollow—a Good Husband dutifully maintaining his Departed Wife’s rite. Debbie had taken them to the library for an incomparably more enjoyable reason, and Jamey, briefly, could picture her declaring it: “I love books!” Then she’d prove it: every time they went to Woodstock public, Debbie checked out the maximum number from both the grown-up and kids’ sections. She read Jamey and Jude to sleep every night. She also abandoned Jon at the TV most nights, preferring the novels she devoured in bed. Recalling all this with growing hope of contact, Jamey rode fast to the library, locked his bike in the rack, and stepped through the double glass doors.
Once inside, he stopped in the entrance area and stood quiet, hoping to sense Debbie somehow. He felt a faint pull from the children’s book section but decided it was a memory, not a presence, so he stayed rooted where he was. You’re the booklover, he thought. Show me where you want me. He then spread his feet a little, folded his arms over his chest, adopted a pleasant expression, and waited.
The library was nearly empty. A couple of codgers, winos to judge by a faint pall in the room, slumped in armchairs, perusing newspapers strung on wooden poles. The checkout counter was untended. Hearing a creak to his left, Jamey turned to see a gray-haired librarian halfway up an aluminum stepladder that let out rodent-like squeaks when she shifted her weight. On the wall before her was an enormous cork bulletin board topped by the words AROUND THE WORLD THIS DAY! The woman was push-pinning wire-service news clippings to the board.
Want to read those? Jamey whispered in his head.
Feeling no response, he waited a full minute—and felt more nothing. The librarian kept push-pinning. Invisible ladder-rodents kept squeaking. AROUND THE WORLD THIS DAY! the bulletin board kept proclaiming. Another minute passed. Jamey’s hope for a prompt gave out. Still, he waited. He no longer believed anything was going to happen but felt that his patience, at least, and the pleasant expression he tried to keep on his face were gifts he could give to Debbie.
More minutes passed. The nothing responded with more nothing. The librarian turned twice and smiled at Jamey. Both times he dropped his eyes, knowing she was going to speak to him if he didn’t move soon. He had a feeling her first words would be: Waiting for someone? If those were her words, he looked forward to replying, Yes. My dead mom.
I’ll read anything you like, Jamey told the nothing.
Dead air.
Does this mean you want me to read what I wanna read? he asked.
Nothing moved or urged or whispered.
Taking care not to sigh with exasperation, keeping his expression pleasant, Jamey stepped up to the big bulletin board. The news clippings, he saw at once, all pertained to events of the past twenty-four hours. They were divided by continent. EUROPE had the most stories, but the librarian had cheated a little: she’d filed all news of the Soviet Union under EUROPE, but Jamey knew that most of the USSR was in Asia. AUSTRALIA had just four clippings. ANTARCTICA had nothing but a yellowed old photo of a blizzard-blown penguin with a chick standing on its feet. Jamey was surprised to see that the United States was not included under NORTH AMERICA. He guessed this was because the dozens of US papers, over where the codgers sat, contained too many stories to include.
He closed his eyes before the continents.
You choose, he thought. Then waited. And, as a special gift, waited some more. He faintly remembered the tone his mother had used, and glow he’d felt, when she’d tell him he was “such a good boy.” But again, this was memory, not presence.
Sensing nothing, he opened his eyes, maintained his kind expression, and stepped up to ASIA. There were clippings from Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, Saigon, Peking, New Delhi, all telling of events that had taken place on this same January 30th. But Jamey’s fifth grade teacher, Mr. Yaw, had explained how what he called “the make-believe known as the international date line” enabled certain news stories to travel impossibly fast. Inspecting the ASIA stories more closely, Jamey saw that several had partaken of “date line make-believe” by out-racing the clock. Something newsworthy would occur, a reporter would write it up, and if the story was wired from west to east, it could cross the date line and appear in print before the clocks said it had occurred. One such story, reported by the New York Times, was fresh in from India. On the library clock Jamey saw it was 10:50 a.m., yet in a Times photo taken at 11:00 a.m.—ten minutes into the future—a flood of humanity was washing through the streets of Calcutta.
The flood itself seized Jamey’s imagination. “More than a million people,” the caption said. A crowd twice the size of the entire population of Portland. Hard to believe. Yet the aerial photo showed a sea of dark heads and white clothes veering and sheering through the city streets in patterns that brought to mind vast flocks of migrating birds. Skimming the article to find out what had summoned the human flood, Jamey found they’d gathered in honor of a man shot to death, twenty years before, on this same 30th of January. A man named Gandhi. Not having heard of him, Jamey whispered it to rhyme with “candy.” Another small photo showed the fallen hero to be a bald-headed, spindly-leggèd, grandfatherly little fellow in wire-rimmed glasses, smiling charmingly though he stood on the cold streets of London dressed in what looked like a dirty sheet, sandals, and no socks. The Times reporter praised this humble figure with a lavishness Jamey found distressing: “The father of a revolt based on strategic mass harmlessness.” “Impossible odds against him from his first day in India to his last.” “A once-invincible Empire brought to its knees by one man’s weaponless rebellion.” How was it weaponless, Jamey wanted to ask, when Gandhi had been shot dead? The vast crowd, worshipful praise, and murder of the sweetly grinning old man began to create a panic inside him. Was it random coincidence that Gandhi died on Debbie’s deathday? Or was another premeditated vicious coincidence in the works? Feeling a desperate need to show “God” or “Fate” that he was keeping an eye on His or Its shenanigans, Jamey marched across the room to the checkout counter, borrowed a pencil, fished his library card out of his toy wallet, flipped it on its back, lay it on the counter, and in the humorless manner of a traffic cop filling out a reckless driving ticket, wrote:
Jan 30, 1948, Gandhi shot dead
Jan 30, 1958, Jamey VZ born
Jan 30, 1963, Debbie VZ dies of leukemia
Jan 30, 1968, Dead Debbie Dead Gandhi and
Live Jamey meet in Woodstock Library
He glared at the empty air of the room, daring the Author of these vicious synchronicities to show His smirking face.
“Are you interested in Mahatma Gandhi?” an audible voice asked.
Jamey froze. The gray-haired librarian. She’d come down off the ladder and followed him to the counter. The way she had said the name surprised him, softening the a’s to rhyme with “awe”—and that’s what Jamey felt as she pronounced it. Mahatma Gandhi. What a string of syllables to own for a name!
But was Jamey interested in this man who, twenty long years after his assassination, was still adored not by a few forlorn mourners like Jamey, Jude, and Jon but by millions? Could he afford to learn more of this hero when, despite an ocean of adoration, he’d been murdered on Jamey and Debbie’s already ridiculous birth and death day?
“Please follow me,” the librarian said.
Jamey nearly snapped, No! But this was his mother’s special library and day. She would have insisted on politeness. Directed at last by a palpable mothering force, he tagged along to the Young Adult section, where the librarian located and handed him a volume titled The Man Who Won a War by Not Fighting. But when the cover photo turned out to show him the same grandfatherly, sheet-and-sandals, happily grinning Gandhi he’d seen in the Times, everything that was happening felt deathly wrong. Hyperventilating as he spoke, Jamey reeled off the dates, “1948! 1958! 1963! 1968!!”
“What was that?” the librarian asked.
Jamey shook the book at her and blurted, “Does this tell about the killing of Gandhi?”
The woman stepped backward as if Jamey had physically shoved her. “I-I’m sure his death is mentioned.”
“No! I mean, does it describe it? Like how many bullets? Where they hit? And what Muh…Maw…what he did after each bullet? And how long it took him to die?”
The librarian’s jaw dropped. She took two more steps backward.
Seeing he’d horrified her, Jamey dropped the book, picked it back up, shoved it in her hands, turned to flee, but was so cramped up and burdened that he could only stagger toward the door. His plan for the day had succeeded! The instant the librarian had pronounced Gandhi’s name correctly, Jamey felt magic in the sound. The word “Mahatma,” especially, struck him as strong. So strong it had lured a million people into the streets this very day. So strong that even the likes of leukemia and bullets might have trouble dragging such a word to its grave. So strong that Jamey burned to know precisely how much violence was needed to tear the word from the man who’d answered to it.
But this was only half of what struck him: the instant he sensed the strength in the word “Mahatma” he compared it to another word: “Debbie.” And his mother’s yellowed face and wasted body grew so present, and her name struck him as so weak, that she collapsed onto him with a physical weight that caused him to sicken and stagger and sink. By the time he reached his bike he was too stricken to even stand, let alone mount or ride.
Deadly coincidence does not feel innocent. On January 30th, 1968, a million souls surged through the streets of Calcutta, pouring adoration into the legacy of a man who’d answered to the word “Mahatma” as, half a planet away yet in the same surging moment via date-line magic, an equally adoring boy hunched alone by an old English bicycle, crushed by the weight of his yearning to save his mother, even now, by giving her a more powerful name.
II. Risa’s Immaculate Conception
(Seattle, Washington, 1985)
She saw the lightning in the east and she longed for the east,
but if it had flashed in the west she would have longed for
the west... The east wind whispered a hadith handed down,
successively, from distracted thoughts, from passion, from
anguish, from tribulation, from rapture, from reason, from
yearning, from ardor, from tears, from my eyelids, from fire,
from my heart:
“He whom you love is between your ribs.
Your breathing tosses him from side to side.”
—Ibn al-Arabi, The Tarjumán Al-achwáq: XIV
A UNIVERSITY OF Washington coed named Marisa Stella McKeig began an affair on the very first day of college. Her lover, for several years, was the ancient Indian language known as Sanskrit. Risa (rhymes with Lisa) was drawn to the old tongue by an even older lure: smitten by the look of a dark-eyed boy she saw registering for Intro to Sanskrit, she slipped in line behind him. The attraction came to nothing: Risa fell for the tongue instead.
On the first day of class the professor, Dr. Chagan Kuldunchari—a seventyish, hawk-faced, outwardly calm, inwardly intense Indian—strode into the room carrying nothing but an old-fashioned, yard-long wooden pointer. The instant Risa saw the pointer she imagined it to be a relic of the defunct British Raj and guessed—correctly as it turned out—that the dignified man before her had been unjustly beaten with it.
Dr. Kuldunchari did not introduce himself. He didn’t make any sort of statement about the aims or methods of his course. He just walked over to a movie screen that stood in front of a blackboard, moved it aside, and the students saw words, written in pale blue chalk, covering the board. Standing to the left of the words, Kuldunchari set his body as if against a st
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