The Secret Door

by Carl Watson

The ten endless days of dysentery were finally over and I was feeling better. I was standing out on the hotel balcony tentatively eating some fruit, and priming myself to move on. There were some young Bengali girls on the next rooftop, probably twelve, maybe fourteen years old. Probably married already, or at least promised. They were beautiful, laughing girls, with all the energy of the world in their laughter. We began to trade incomprehensible jokes. We would point at things in the sky and name them. They kept saying “Flying saucer, flying saucer.” The sun was setting over the holy river. It was the hour of aarti, when the gods are praised, and across Benares the devout were ringing bells in front of family altars or burning incense in the temple courtyards. An airplane flew overhead. I pointed and said “Kathmandu.” They didn’t know what I was talking about, so I started playing air guitar—Bob Segar-style—“I’m going to Kathmandu….” The Indian girls also started playing air guitars. Alas, the entertainment industry cliché drove the point home and some international bonding took place.

I was starting to grow concerned that too many pop songs were forming the pivotal points of my story. Fate is funny that way. Somehow poorly remembered hooks and riffs had replaced my decision-making ability, as popular music not only polluted the past, but it directed the future. I went down to the Benares train station and pushed and screamed along with everyone else for a couple of hours until somebody in a cage sold me a ticket to some place I did not recognize. Then I watched a man fall off a crowded commuter train. The guy’s limbs got mangled under the wheels and he was writhing around for awhile while a massive argument broke out between about a hundred people in white shirts as they decided what to do. There isn’t really any medical assistance, so they need to compensate with a lot of vocal effect. This caused a delay.

I got on a train but didn’t go very far, and eventually I had to get on a boat to cross another river. It was a long flat boat with lots of wood. I fell asleep and dreamed of a face floating in the river water. I remember people walking by, kicking me. “Get over it,” they seemed to yell. The chastisement might have been in my mind, but the sound of the rats was not in my mind—they were clawing around in the woodpile I used for a pillow. Sometimes I would wake up from my half-sleep only to find myself the center of attention for a small crowd of gawkers. I wondered why they didn’t just lay into me with their bamboo sticks and get it over with. Why doesn’t the barber simply cut your throat and take your money? Why don’t they all just climb on the commuter-train-narrative of your soul and blow out your brains with an Uzi for that matter? Maybe people are fundamentally kind.

I realized that somewhere along the line I had begun to associate my increasing paranoia and my impending fear of violence and persecution with some misbegotten quest for innocence. It didn’t make sense at first, so I had to break it down. There was the life Sophie had to offer—the life of discord and unending dialectic. Then there was this fake life, where everything is fine but lonely. There were also the various tortured lives of people I knew: Kathe, Bernadette, Arno. And, even further back, my mother and father, grandparents and brothers, some girl or other in another town that I once loved long ago. Each memory image was a diversion, a path away from the face in the mirror, or the face in the river water—a path both convoluted and escapist. On top of that, figure in the fact that I didn’t really even know Sophie that well, at least according to her. One has to wonder what the point is, or rather, the point of what?

I don’t know most people, and I think no one does, no matter how close or intimate they become. I don’t even really believe “knowing” is possible; it’s only a projection of our own obsessive desires. What I did know was that I was thinking too much about what I might know, and it was making me nervous. “Stop thinking,” I thought. Aware of the absurdity of such a statement, I let the fog roll off the river and into my mind. I attempted to Zen-out, as they say. But the only thing that came from that metaphysical exercise was a chill, but sometimes that’s enough; you have a definite sensation and you stretch it out as long as you can, you make it work for you.

The boat docked that morning. It was still dark. I asked around for the bus to the border town where I would cross into Nepal. Somebody pointed to a bus and I got on it. The seats were made out of the same hard planks as the floor of the boat. A woman who looked like a dark Sophie—a Sophie with a nose ring and a purple sari—sat across from me. She seemed nice enough and not at all argumentative. God only knows what her troubles were.

Ten or twelve hours passed. Finally the bus reached Motibari. Instead of paying some rickshaw wallah, I decided to walk. Keep it simple, I thought, reciting in my mind some Eastern aphorism I had once heard or read: “I chop wood, I carry water, I walk to town.” Life did not need to be complex. After all, the town was only a few miles further. Before crossing the border, however, I decided to eat as I was hungry and needed energy. I was also depleted from my recent week of living expulsively. I should have been suspicious of the long black hairs in the white rice. I should have doubted the dingy grey water that was used to wash the silverware, but I never learned much from experience and it was too late to start learning now.

Crossing into Nepal, the entourage of cabbies and rickshaw wallahs eventually fell away. Indeed, I was glad to be walking, glad to have left India, glad to be outward bound. It wasn’t long, however, before the effects of the recent meal began to make themselves known, and I was going to be embarrassed soon if I didn’t do something about it. There was nothing around but a thicket of weeds by a pond to the left of the road. It was an ominous large pond in a wooded area, but at least it afforded some privacy. It was there I repeated many a previous scene of explosive transportation, and, yes, I knew the ecstasy of Ramakrishna yet again, if only briefly. But this time I was in nature, if this could be considered nature. But whorehouses were nature, too, after all, and so were world wars. I decided “nature” was a useless excuse, a poor comfort.

So there I was, sitting on a stone in the shade. The violent wrenching of my intestinal tract had drained me and I wanted to rest, so I took a stick and began to poke the floating body of what I thought to be a drowned monkey—perhaps a clumsy monkey, fallen from a tree, who would now never breed and spread his clumsy genes to the monkey pool. Then with a slow sickening realization, I saw it was really a red baby, a dead red human baby with its limbs hacked off. The child was encircled in a delicate aura of whitish foam—a halo of decay which contrasted with the septic green pond water, and it made small ripples in that green water because little fish were pecking at it from underneath, causing it to pulse with a hallucinatory rhythm, which, over the infinity of those few seconds, seemed to time itself with the rhythm of my own depleted beating heart.

It was a bright day in the world beyond that bower, and there was plenty of reassuring noise along the roadside. One might even have expected some kind of soundtrack to accompany this vision, as if it were a subcontinental, back-alley version of the baby in a bubble that floats in outer space at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001.” Punctuation point or a bullseye? What it was was dense, highly organic, and hardly visible—a silent focal point that seemed to draw up and swallow all light and sound, while at the same time offering itself as an odd comfort to the confused traveler. And so it stayed in the back of my mind pulsing like a cold dead planet, repeating what seemed to be the words “Nevermore, Frank Payne,” like a mantra, “Nevermore.” I seem to exaggerate here, but there was a certain tenacious Poe-like quality to the visitation, only it wasn’t a bird, it was a raw decayed red baby without limbs.

I’ve seen other things at different periods of my life, things of which I seldom speak, or of which I have had doubts, things that might embarrass me if I went on publically about them. And so I never admit to most of it. Nor can I say how such sights affected me, except perhaps that each acted as a temporal door to a past or a future where, suddenly, and for only a moment, I knew more than I do now or ever will. You can read the travel books, the novels, etc., but the veil falls away when you’re confronted by true horror, or beauty. The color of that dead baby’s skin brought to mind for me, not only the visceral confrontation of the child with nature, but a hyper-consciousness of my own beating heart and blood beneath the furnace of the sun—that Turner-like vortex of light which Sophie insisted was the goal of all sexuality.

The experience of the East is not comprehensible, they say, except after a total re-education of the senses. They also say that in the third stage of enlightenment, a tree is once again just a tree and a stone is just a stone. Then again there is a difference between being kicked in the teeth and reading a description of being kicked in the teeth, which is to say, that since a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, my thoughts surrounding this hacked red body were, of course, not the body itself, nor were they manifestations of some buried sacrificial obsession, nor was the body any kind of sign unless I chose to make it so. Still, the question remained: was this red baby, this child-of-waters lodged in my mind, merely another nothing to which I added the something of my predisposition.

I once had a friend who had seen a red baby that he claimed had appeared in his toilet one day, and seemed to beckon him on to some fabulous yonder. But he was a junky and prone to such visions. According to Sonny Valentine, the Gnostic Valentinus (Sonny’s namesake) had seen a red baby seated on a thrown: “I am the Logos,” the child had said to him. I doubted this red baby of mine was of the same geneology as either one of these, but I was free-thinker in a land of free thought, and so I let thought play, as if I could stop it anyway.

By most accounts I’ve read, God is merely play. There is no body. Just activity. So I took up my stick and continued to play with the little corpse, a girl, it turned out to be, pushing the dead girl around in the water with the stick, pretending she was a ship, a link in the food chain, or the chrysalis of a reborn saint, all the while knowing I wasn’t spiritually evolved enough to see her for what she really was. But I did see myself suddenly, for what I really was—both part of it all, and, at the same time, separate from everything, a citizen of the universe and a tourist with a stomach problem in a third-world roadside bower, poking a dead baby in a rank pond with a stick. This was no Wordsworthian rustic pastoral, no “spot of time,” but it could very well be that Kubrick-like punctuation point, the final note to the symphony of incongruous images that made up my perceptual life.

And then I heard a voice that seemed to come from the road; it could have been male or female but it seemed to say, “Open the book and read.” At least that’s what I thought it said. But the only book near me to read was the book of the world itself, and it didn’t seem to have anything appropriate or useful to say. Suddenly my mind snapped and I laughed. The universe was suddenly new. It was funny, but it stunk too. Everything was the same and different. Not that I had attained satori, or anything even approximating true humility. I think more likely I was just embarrassed—profound embarrassment—our modern version of divine humility. But as there wasn’t anybody around, it seemed a waste of energy to be embarrassed. Or was it?

I quickly rearranged my clothing in the position of the infinite present, that Eden of animal consciousness that philosophers claim we have long lost. In fact, the infinite present for us humans can seem more like a damnation wherein we are denied our religion of regret. The concept of dharma has something to do with distinctions between chaos and order, past and future, and the eventual acceptance of good and evil as indivisible. We live in a foam of unknowing, and history is full of people who did the worst they could in order to get God to show a face or intervene—it never happens. I was alone. The secret door had opened despite me. But whether it was good or bad was a judgment call. What I did know is that I had actually forgotten about Sophie for a moment, and that in itself felt good, kind of like some old bum on a public street must feel, who, having shit in his pants, finally lets go of all fealty to social contracts. He doesn’t care about anything or anybody’s opinion and he is free. But no such luck for me, because Sophie returned to the theater of my mind with her skewed smile and her black-rimmed glasses and her eyes that seemed to spin like chariot wheels and I was again encaged in memory.

It was, by then, nearly nightfall. The small town I came to was little more than a caravan stop—a bunch of timber-frame hotels surrounding a huge mud lot full of buses and bonfires, an insignificant way-station on the dirt road to nowhere. The hotel desk clerk didn’t even comment on my condition. I paid for a bed, then I took a shower with all my clothes on. Then I stood at the window and watched the fires burning in the square amongst the stable of busses. Depression and major dependency were right around the corner. It’s true the Kumari Devi of Kathmandu was just a few more days to the north, but somehow I no longer needed to see her. Sophie was on her own, and in days to come I would look back on that decision and think it might have been cowardice and not respect, that swayed that decision for me.

Carl Watson was born in Indiana and currently lives in New York City. His previously published books include Anarcadium Pan, Bricolage ex Machina, and Beneath the Empire of the Birds. His novel, The Hotel of Irrevocable Acts, was published in France in the Gallimard series Du Monde Enterier and in New York by Unbearable Books/Autonomedia. Carl Watson’s most recent novel, Backwards The Drowned Go Dreaming has just been published by Sensitive Skin.