The Memory Palace (40 page)

“Not so fat,” I say.

He laughs. “What do they call you?”

“Mira,” I say.

“Tashi delek, Mira,” he says. “Maybe we can have tea together soon.”

Over the next week, after leading tours all day, I hang around the gallery until closing in case community members or students want to ask me, or the monks, any questions. Although I’ve read up on Tibetan sacred art, I feel like an imposter. It’s not like when I worked at the Field Museum and could answer questions about the origin of some ceremonial mask. Here people ask what path they should be on, as if I were some kind of spiritual guide. A middle-aged woman with a toddler asks me if I think there is life after death; an unemployed Vietnam vet pulls me aside and wants to know if the mandala will help with his depression. The exhibit is drawing in people who have never been in the gallery before—unemployed factory workers, disabled vets, North Country women with sad, weathered faces. They approach me with a lost look in their eyes. At the heart of the Kalachakra is the lesson of compassion. I want to tell them, What do I know about compassion? I abandoned my mother to the streets. Instead, I invite them to hear the monks.

Each morning, the two Tenzins lead a sitting meditation. Afterward, they give a brief talk about Buddhism’s “Four Noble Truths”: First, one must come to understand that he causes much of his own suffering. That’s easy enough to digest, except maybe when it comes to my mother. She suffers from biology, from crossed wires, from too many voices in her head. I have always known deep down there is great love and sweetness inside her, her true self she had at birth, but schizophrenia devours it every day. The second Noble Truth is that one must look for the cause of one’s pain. Where to begin with that one? Third, the looking brings confidence to end one’s own misery, and finally, the monks tell us, a wish arises to find a path to peace.

I go every day to hear them. As a rule, I’m not one to join a spiritual group, or any group, for that matter. I’m suspicious of the crowd that gathers, suspicious of gurus or spiritual guides. But the Tenzins are humble and remind those of us who come to listen that they have no answers, only suggestions on how to find some kind of inner peace. The Tenzins always end by talking about compassion and how we must try to eliminate the suffering of all
sentient beings. And what of my mother? In her letters, she says she is trying to figure out what part of her suffering is caused by “outside” influences and what is caused from within. She writes: I am bleeding from below, I can’t control my bladder, I am blind and have lost all of my teeth. Sometimes I can’t tell if it is night or day. Well, as they say, everyone is guaranteed the right to be deprived of the pursuit of happiness. What does Buddhism have to say about a schizophrenic woman who sleeps at the airport and covers her face in zinc oxide at night to ward off gamma rays from another planet? And how can I help her, be compassionate to her, but not put myself in harm’s way? I’d like to ask the monks—Should I see her again? What can I do? Is there any hope for her, or does hope just bite the tail of fear?

It’s the beginning of April and I have gotten into an easy Monday-through-Friday routine. I lead one to three tour groups in the morning, grab a quick lunch, then return for my next round of tours. One day the more rotund and cheerful of the monks, Tenzin Y., asks if I want to join them in the cafeteria. At lunch, he orders the special of the day—roast turkey, mashed potatoes, salad, and soup.

“You guys eat meat?”

“Of course we do.”

“I thought there was some kind of rule or something.”

“Everything is good. Especially cake.”

We find a table and sit down. I look across at the other monk’s plate, a small dish of macaroni and vegetables. Both monks bow before they eat. I am growing fond of these two men. Despite their robes and rituals, they are anything but off-putting or annoyingly pious.

“Anyone can learn to watch his or her mind,” says Tenzin Y. “Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, anyone. To pay attention to how one creates one’s own suffering, that is the point. To end the suffering of others—even more important.”

Tenzin G. is quiet during lunch. When he finishes, he gets up quietly, bows, and goes back to work. After he leaves, I ask Tenzin Y. about what he hopes the impact of the mandala will be on the community.

“The Kalachakra plants a seed of motivation in the mind of those who see it. The most important part of creating a mandala is the motivation behind it. Motivation eventually leads to compassion.”

I want to ask him about my mother. What about her suffering, the suffering of the mentally ill? How can I help her if I am too afraid to see her face-to-face? Instead, I ask him if he was born in Tibet.

“No,” he says. “Dharamsala, where His Holiness lives.”

“What about Tenzin G.?”

“He came over the mountains.”

“The Himalayas?”

“Yes. He came as a child to India, after China invaded Tibet.”

“Like the Dalai Lama.”

“Yes,” says Tenzin Y. “And many small children. They still cross that way by foot.”

“And Tenzin G.—did he cross over the mountains on foot?”

Tenzin Y. nods, his smile gone. “It was a very long and difficult journey.”

In my mother’s April journal, she writes:

The poet said April is the cruelest month. It seems so. I am trying to think constructively about cooking again. I learned how to cook at the Recovery Center before Reagan closed everything down for the poor. I would like to make a dish called Turley Tava. I’ve never prepared it, but will. Maybe it’s something like Hungarian goulash only it goes inside the stove: very small of quantity lamb, eggplant, fresh tomatoes, onions, yellow string beans and white potatoes. Stuffed peppers are good to make too. And meatless casseroles—tuna, mushroom, pasta. And salmon cakes. I would make those too if I had a home. I have always been partial to salmon cakes.

At my sister’s, the three of us take turns cooking. It’s quiet and relaxing to dine with them after being with the public all day. But sometimes I wonder if my mother digs in garbage bins for food. Has her life gotten so low? I worry about whether or not she has enough to eat, if she has shelter. I know I won’t mention my concerns to Natalia. What can she do? What can either of us do?
In the evenings, Natalia, her husband, Kerry, and I watch a movie or read in the sitting room. There are so many rooms in their house—five rooms upstairs, five rooms below. I wander through the house, not sure where to sit. Where does my mother sit—on a park bench? On the cold hard ground?

One day, a group from a local women’s shelter appears at the gallery. The women range in age from nineteen to seventy-three. The oldest is the same age as my mother.

“I’ve never been in here before,” says a middle-aged woman with blond curly hair, arms crossed in front. “It’s not my kind of thing.”

The women hang up their coats and congregate in the hallway. “Are we allowed to smoke?” asks the seventy-three-year-old. “Anyone got a cigarette?”

“Just look around,” I say, “then we’ll talk in a few minutes about what’s on display.”

“This is a waste of my fucking time,” says a young woman with short-cropped hair, tattoos up and down her arms. A couple women snicker.

“Walk around a bit. If you don’t like anything, you don’t have to stay after that.”

These women didn’t choose to come here; they’re only here because some social worker cajoled them into coming. What do I have to offer them? And the older woman—is that how my mother looks now, stooped shoulders, favoring one leg, sitting down every few minutes because her emphysema makes it hard for her to breathe?

“I want a cigarette. Where the hell can I smoke?” she says again.

“You got coffee here? I’d like a cup of hot coffee,” says another, whose left hand and wrist are bandaged. Did her husband do that? Did she try to kill herself? These women don’t need me, they need money and a place to live.

“Let me show you something,” I say.

I take them into a room filled with ritual objects and thangka paintings, painted scrolls traditionally used for meditation and healing. They walk around awhile, then meet me by the altar the monks have set up. I explain to them the story of Buddha, who was called Siddhartha before his enlightenment, and how, after a cloistered life of luxury, he stepped outside his palace
one day and saw an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a starving man who had rejected the material world. I tell them how Siddhartha was so struck with all the pain and misery he saw that he renounced his riches and set out to find a cure for human suffering.

“He left all that money?” asks the youngest, a girl with long dark brown braids. She could be me at twenty-two. “He gave up all those jewels? What a dumb-ass!” Everyone laughs. “So what happened next?”

“For years he wandered. First he denied himself everything, like that starving man he met his first day out in the world. Then, later, he wasn’t so hard on himself. He found a middle path between poverty and the life he had led before.” I tell the women about Siddhartha sitting under the Bodhi Tree and meditating until he found the root of all suffering.

“What’d he find?” asks Nancy, a woman about my age, pushing forty.

I try to explain meditation to the women. I tell them how it might help them to just sit sometimes, be still and watch their breath. I tell them, “It helps calm down the gerbil living inside your brain.”

We go into the main exhibition room and I introduce the women to the monks. The women seem intimidated, for some reason, and don’t ask questions. They watch the two Tenzins for a while, but aren’t that interested in the mandala. Most want to see the photographs they passed by when they first came in, so we return to the main hall. The pictures are from a contemporary series called “Tibetans in Exile.” I ask each of them to pick out a photo and tell the group what she thinks is going on. Nancy selects a portrait of an elderly monk holding several implements of torture. He stole them from his captors when he was being held and tortured by Chinese guards.

“Why did you pick that one?” I ask.

“The label said he was beat with those things,” she says. “Just look at his face. You can tell it really happened. It’s in his eyes.”

Another woman picks a photo of three little boys in Dharamsala, India. The caption below says that the children crossed over the mountains all the way to India by foot.

“I got three kids,” the woman says. Pat is her name. “I took them with me when I left.”

I tell the women how many children make the journey over the Himalayas alone. I show them photographs of the mountains and explain how treacherous they are, especially in winter.

“Their mothers let them go alone like that?” asks Pat.

“Their parents might be in prison for speaking out against the government,” I say. “Or they might have gotten killed. Some of the children lose fingers and toes from frostbite. But many of them make it to safety. I don’t know how but they do.”

I start to ask the women what I ask every group I take through this exhibit, even children: “If you had to leave your home in a hurry, what would you take with you?” and then I realize, for these women, the question isn’t hypothetical at all. They tell me they grabbed their children first, what money they had, and that’s about it.

“I wore the clothes on my back,” says the seventy-three-year-old. She still won’t give her name. “Didn’t take a thing,” she says. “My husband had a gun.”

I scooped up photographs of strangers and a piece of rosin. Natalia grabbed my mother’s address book so she couldn’t find the phone numbers of Natalia’s friends. My mother will obsess about her missing book for years. Do you know where my address book is? She will ask in her letters. I have lost the addresses and numbers of all my friends and loved ones. Some had unpublished numbers. How will I ever find them?

I’ve kept the women way past my usual hour-long tour. My mother could be in this group. She’d be outside right now, agitated, puffing on a cigarette. “It’s time to go,” I say. “But come back anytime. Just look for me. The show will be up for a while.”

They gather their coats and I tell them where they can get coffee and a snack, where to buy cigarettes nearby. One woman is missing, though, a quiet one in her late twenties, with wavy light brown hair and a bright pink hoodie. I retrace our steps. The mandala room is empty now except for the Tenzins, working steadily in the center of the room. I return to the room with the altar. The missing woman is standing in front of a thangka of Green Tara, one of the divine bodhisattvas, a female Buddha in the making. The woman spins around and gasps when she hears me enter. PTSD, most likely. I would have done the same.