Shake The Head

Something told her to stay awake, though a crash from caffeine was catching her full throttle. She couldn’t decide if it was fun or not. Not, mostly. She had scored the prize seat on her flight back from her temporary home, by luck! Without paying for it, the airline counter lady had sat her in the last row of the emergency exit section. More legroom plus a reclining seat! An unexpected luxury. A sign.

When the flight attendant recited the script on opening the door in emergencies, it lingered with her. She found herself wishing for an accident, that old familiar morbid curiosity that had been with her since as long as she could remember. An impulse more than a thought. So she could experience opening the huge, imposing emergency door. A test, if you will. She shook such thoughts out of her head. Again.

“If I pass out, I may never wake up again.” She shook her head.

“Stay awake,” her quiet voice warned. She put in her earbuds but played no music. Better, the silence. She put on her sunglasses; dim felt good right now. Strange sensations of endless rolling vertigo played over her body like ripples through water.

She was here because of a surprise she had found in her father’s attic: the black and white painting of swallows in flight, leaning against the back wall and covered in a thick layer of dust. Something had caught her eye about the painting, and she kept it. At the time she had been shocked into numbness by his sudden death (they told her it was an accident). Months later, while reframing the painting she found $20,000 hidden in the frame, and a note, written by her father, signed:

Find me in the Center, practicing. -Dad

Finding the cash was a sad, guilty pleasure. It was the note that had set her on this journey, but it was the cash that had made it possible. Thank God she had not sold the painting.

She did not realize what it meant until later, after seeing his cold, grey body in the morgue. After numbly thanking her friends and family. After their social niceties. And after all that had faded into silence, forgotten as the world moved on, even though she could not.

The Center, practicing…

The capital c in Center must mean a meditation center in Asia. Her father had spent a few years off and on in Asia during his forties, when she was very young, and she knew he was into spirituality at the time.

The note told of a secret room somewhere. And a space hidden in the stone wall. Did her father leave it to keep it safe? Or because he was in trouble? The note didn’t say. As time passed, and as she kept re-reading the scrawled message, a feeling grew that there was something there for her to find.

The vertigo came in waves. Intense, blanketing waves of tingly, pleasant sensation. A physical response from her body wherever she placed her awareness. Other sensations like a liquid fire bath. Meditation brings benefits of awareness even when one is really high. Too high. And crashing fast. Blood sugar? she thought. Shook her head. Too bad it made her dizzy. It really didn’t help the vertigo. Only time would work its ineffable magics.

Takeoff seemed far, far away, when it happened. She felt the plane, without words to describe it. It became an extension of her sensory consciousness. The pressure of the still air column. The lift of the wings, the sudden transfer of weight off the wheels, front first. The extra thrust given just when the nose lifted, to swiftly leave the earth. The awkward but necessary folding of the landing gear. Then... smooth soft vibrations all over.

It was so unlike her when she finally decided to do something about her feeling. She had always been the stable one, the practical one, who made sure everyone was taken care of. And yet, she always had this darker impulse buried inside that made her want to jump when looking over a cliff, or hold her hand to flame just to see what happens. Or to open the emergency exit door…

Shake the head.

So she had set out without knowing where, with a vague sense of some mystery to uncover. A tangled winding path that led to the other side of the world, her father’s legacy reaching out to her from beyond the grave. As if to make up for all the years he was absent during her childhood. She re-traced her father’s travels, as he described them in her memory: Calcutta, then Burma. Then Goa. From there over to Kuala Lumpur. A brief, very expensive stay over in Singapore.

Lots of flights, all in coach.

After nearly a year of travel, living in dirt-floor huts surrounded by chickens and dogs, battling mosquitoes and malaria, fluent in pigeon English and hand signs, she had been ready to give up. To let go of her father, let his secrets lie. She was broke, tired, sick, and her whole body had ached, when she arrived at the Dhamma Java center outside Jakarta for a 10-day silent retreat. It was free, or donation only, and would feed her. She had been jumping from center to center, and stretched out her last few remaining dollars this way. There, she lost her mind, found the room, and the stone and what was behind it.

It had happened on the 8th day, after she had passed through layers of grief, clinging to the singular thought that this moment is all there is, and all else is transitory. She had been invited to use one of the individual meditation cells for the more experienced students. It was dark, and she had been sitting, agitated, trying to calm her mind, when she noticed a loose stone in the wall. Happy for the distraction, she started pulling at the stone. It came free and in a space behind it was a little black book. A leather-bound journal with her father’s handwritten scrawl all over its pages, suddenly here in her hands.

She flipped through the pages. the notebook was filled with verse; a glimpse into her father’s mind and heart. He had always been one of few words, at least in person. Or maybe just to her.... Her father would always be a mystery to her. She was so much like her mother, and he was so… untouchable. Her father, the secret poet, who never did much with his talent…

She discovered with surprise that he had a vibrant interior life, and had felt sad at times, lonely too. She had known that her grandfather was an abusive alcoholic, though her father never talked about growing up. Still, it felt like a punch in the gut to learn about the hours her father had spent baking in the car on a hot summer day while his father went into the bar and got drunk. And the terror of the ride home, swerving into garbage cans and mailboxes, which her grandfather would not remember later. The worst times, when he would yell and throw things in the kitchen, mostly at his mom. Such pain and raw trauma, it must have been hard for her father to write it. No wonder he had kept himself distant. He obviously did not want to become like his own father. He feared himself.

The poetry was whimsical, like the one about elements and love:

Love is the simplest thing.

Tiny, it buzzes with subatomic force

holding disastrous, awesome power,

yet more often slipping through your fingers.

As wholesome as dirt, it brings forth life,

able to support the most sublime and delicate foliage.

But with bitter taste in mouth and neck,

everyman must eat his peck.

Water naturally must take its course

love stays true to fate from end to source

as true if grave to crib as morn to night

with love comes all righteousness’ insight.

She never knew before that her father thought about these things. He had a warm heart, but his mind was always somewhere else. Finding the notebook ripped open her heart once again. This time she felt the exquisite pain of discovering a profound man behind the façade, of coming to know her father better after his passing. Her heart burst with a sorrowful love for him.

As her eyes grew heavy, the nervous energy seeped out of her cells on the vibrations of the plane. She stretched out her legs. Her head shook no more as she drifted into an unsettled sleep.

A great big monster hand scooped her out of some busy dream and shook her until her eyeballs hurt. Her arms flapped like a doll. Her eyes opened to a blur, uncomprehending. A massive, shrieking groan, felt more than heard, clawed at her eardrums and made her legs itch. The floor dropped away and she fell. The hand threw her towards the ground.

Suddenly she heard all the screaming, coming from everywhere. She realized she was looking at a disintegrating plane. From the inside. There was fire, heat, hurricane winds, smoke, flying debris. Huge ripped holes in the cabin walls like shark bites… giant, sky-swimming Megalodons, made of current and vapor, devouring this tasty juicy meat wagon. Seats were missing too, along with the people sitting in them. Faces were streaked with tears and blood. Moms holding their children in terror. Men with static, blank faces, or others shivering in fear or melting in despair.

When she looked out her window (still there) she was looking straight down at the ground rushing straight for her. She wondered if it was more fun to die outside the plane, falling freely. She decided that it was.

She fished and fumbled with her seat belt and struggled to understand what she was doing. A huge explosion!! And bare sky appeared just in front of her. The seats in the next three rows were gone, suddenly, along with the people sitting in them. She stopped fiddling and grabbed the armrest tightly. Everything was shaking.

Her next thought slapped her in the face: “Did I do this? Did I call this into my story?”

She looked deep within and did not hear a no. Stupid. Trickster mind. She tried to calm her thoughts; it was all she could do these last few seconds of her life.

So it goes.

A sharp sensation shot up her right side and…. she blinked… Someone was standing over her, holding her sweaty arm. She did not understand. “I’m sorry?”

“Ma’am, I apologize for waking you up… you were having a troubled dream.” A flight attendant was standing in the aisle, looking down at her, touching her arm.

She blinked. She shook her head. She looked up at the flight attendant, who smiled at her with genuine concern. “Are you all right?”

She thought about the first page of the little black book of poems, and the inscription there that read:

I love you, and I’m sorry I could not be a better father.

The words were like honey dripped on the open wound of her heart. She would cherish this treasure forever. Something deep inside of her that had always been there, like a tight fist, suddenly relaxed.

I am now she thought, realizing for the first time in her life, she knew she wanted to live. That she was ready to go home.