Dinner with Buddha by Roland Merullo Read Free Book Online Page A

you.”
    Walking back to the car I kept a grim little smile on my lips. I got in, started it up, pulled back onto the highway. It had always been Dad who would know what to do, at least in the early years. Now Dad was flipping out. Rinpoche had traded seats with Celia and kept his hat on. The Chinese, I was thinking. Murderers of a million Tibetans, torturers of monks and nuns. The people of Tiananmen Square, five hundred executions a year, supporters of the North Koreans, who kept their political prisoners in cages and worked them to death à la Hitler. The Chinese, against six-seven Warren with his pellet gun and nighttime security system and my daughter with her three-week women’s self-defense course from senior year in high school. I glanced at my sister in the mirror. I looked sideways at the Lone Rinpoche. From even before Shelsa’s birth they’d been telling me what a special child she was and what a special role I was supposed to play in her spiritually illustrious future. A godfather of the first order.
    I’d never truly believed it. Not in my depths. And at that moment, gliding south on 85 past a billboard that advertised QUALITY SHOPPING IN FRIENDLY BOWMAN, ND, I wanted nothing so badly as I wanted my niece to be a perfectly ordinary seven-year-old, as unremarkable as the flattening dry landscape, as safe as the North Dakota of my youth, as unthreatening to the Chinese haters as a wildflower in a field. I wanted only that.
    From behind me she said, “Did you give Tasha love from me, Uncle Ott?”
    â€œHow did you know it was Tasha?”
    â€œI had a dream she was going to call.”
    â€œWhen? Last night? You were home with her last night.”
    â€œA daytime dream,” she said happily. “In the store. When I was holding the Jesus beads.”

Six

    All through the barren wasteland, the moonscape, the dry nothingness that is southwestern North Dakota and northwestern South Dakota, I thought about Natasha’s call. Probably she’d be fine. Most likely the guy in the Kroger parking lot was harmless, a wannabe cop, a martial arts expert looking for some spiritual counseling from the famous Volya Rinpoche. Maybe he wasn’t even Chinese. Probably the visit had nothing to do with Shelsa at all. Still, the tinted windows, the gun, the fact that he’d connected her with Rinpoche. . . . I didn’t like it much.
    As I drove—Bowman, the state line, an eighty-mile stretch of grazing land unsuited for the growing of human food—I kept a piece of my attention on the cowboy beside me. There he sat, still, happy, unruffled, while swarms of worries, fears, regrets, and hopes buzzed my brain, hornets in a jar. He wasn’t aloof, never uncaring, hardly naive; it was just that he’d somehow learned to use his mental energies in a way that was fundamentally different from the way I used mine. In the midst of a violent, speed-obsessed world, peopled with lunatics, how did one become that kind of human being? Focused, undistracted, not battered this way and that by dark wisps of paranoia?
    I would have asked him that question except for the fact that he’d been answering it for eight years now, since the first hour we met. He’d sent me books—his own and others. He’d given me meditation instructions, jokingly and sometimes not so jokingly pointed out my flaws and follies, turned my attention to the heretofore ignored interior universe of my mind. The story was that Volya Rinpoche belonged to a line of spiritual teachers—
masters
was the word some people used—men, and in his open-minded lineage, some women, reincarnated enlightened ones who volunteered to be reborn into this hothouse of pain and death for the benefit of humanity. I’d been fortunate enough to have him come into my life. . . . And what had I done with that good fortune?
    What I had done, I realized, was give up. I had my reasons. You don’t lose a spouse, a