The Yoga of Max's Discontent

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2016 by Karan Bajaj

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eBook ISBN: 9780698192041

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bajaj, Karan.

The yoga of Max's discontent / Karan Bajaj.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-59463-411-6

1. Self-realization—Fiction. I. Title.

PR9499.4.B346Y64 2016 2015024636

823'.92—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Leela,
So one day you set out to find your own
truth.

Arise! Awake! Approach the feet of the
Master and know THAT. Like the sharp edge
of the razor, the sages say, is the path. Narrow
it is, and difficult to tread!

—THE KATHA UPANISHAD, 400
BC

I
give her a week at most.”

“Don't say that, Max,” said Sophia.

Max and his sister stepped out of the hospital lobby onto deserted, icy West 59th Street. Sophia looked up at him, shielding her eyes from the snowfall with a gloved hand.

“She's only forty-nine, for heaven's sake,” said Sophia. “Everyone else's parents are alive.”

The wind gusted. Max wrapped his scarf tighter around his neck. They shuffled along in the thick blackness of the night, past the bare trees covered with snow and the closed Starbucks, toward Ninth Avenue. Max tried to find a cab for Sophia to get back to Brooklyn, but none passed. His eyes burned. He'd been up for more than twenty-four hours, since midnight the previous
day, when his mother had to be rushed to the hospital once again. The cancer had spread to her lungs, making it difficult for her to breathe.

“Do you want to crash at my place tonight?” said Max, who lived only a few blocks away on 63rd Street and Columbus Avenue.

They turned on Ninth Avenue. Sophia looked up at him, blue eyes brimming with tears, tight brown curls wet at the ends, face creased with years of worry. She looked older than her twenty-five.

Max put his hand on her shoulder. “You'll . . .” He stumbled over something. A man lay slumped against the stairs of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle on Ninth Avenue.

“Watch it, giant,” said the man.

“Sorry, sorry,” said Max.

The man gripped Max's leg. “Give me change,” he said, his red eyes staring out of his pale, unwashed face.

Despite the weathered but thick blanket that covered the man, his unkempt beard was speckled with ice. Max didn't want to see yet another cold, dying body that day. He dug into his coat pocket and gave the man a ten-dollar bill. The man let go of his leg. They had walked only a few yards when they heard him shouting. “Hey, big guy, give me more.”

“God bless, God bless,” said Max.

Max held Sophia's hand and moved faster. He'd been around junkies all his life and knew how unpredictable they could be.

“Wait, you selfish giant.”

Quick footsteps. Max turned around. A shock of white hair rushed toward Max.

“You hit me,” said the man, facing him.

The man stood a head shorter than Max's six feet six inches, yet Max's heart clutched. The sidewalk was empty except for a man wearing an orange cloth and frying something in a food cart a block ahead.

The man grasped Sophia's coat. “The city demands compensation, restitution, and retribution, madam. The city demands compensation, restitution, and retribution,” he said.

“Don't touch her,” said Max.

The man pulled Sophia closer. “The city demands compensation.”

“Get away,” said Sophia, pulling free from the man's grip.

Max pushed the man back. The man rushed forward and threw a gloved fist packed with ice at him. Max felt the thud against his nose. A warm, hollow sensation pulsed through it. Blood dripped from his face to the ice below. It looked crimson, unreal.

“Get away from him. I'm calling the cops,” said Sophia.

The man blew foul air at Max. “The city demands compensation . . .”

A dam burst inside Max. He grabbed the man's neck. The man raised his thin arms weakly. Max let go of his neck and pushed him back with force. The man fell on the ice. Max swooped down next to him and raised his fist to break the man's quivering jaw.

Someone grabbed his hand.

Max swung his other arm back, trying to break free. Again someone caught it. Max pushed his shoulders back. The grip tightened. Max whipped his head around.

A naked man.

Max broke out of his trance. A tall, thin East Indian man with a naked torso held his arms. The bright orange cloth around his waist flapped in the wind. The food-cart guy.

“Yes, okay, sorry,” said Max.

The Indian man let go of Max's arms. Max got up from the ice. The homeless man curled up in a ball, whimpering.

“Max, your face,” said Sophia, her hair dripping with sweat despite the cold.

Max touched his nose. He was bleeding.

“Should I call 911?” asked Sophia.

He shook his head.

The homeless man picked himself up and limped up the stairs of the church.

“The city, the city . . .” he mumbled.

•   •   •

THE INDIAN MAN
had returned to standing behind his food cart, a pan in one hand, a mug of water in the other.

Max went up to him. “Thank you. I could've hurt him badly,” he said. “I don't know what came over me.”

“Think nothing. Indeed, you are like my child,” said the man. He began to cut onions, seemingly unaffected by the cold.

Max stared at him. The wind screamed. No one could possibly live through this freeze without a shirt on his back. Would it be insulting to offer him money? Max took out his wallet. A cab stopped in front of them finally.

“Your face is bleeding, Max,” said Sophia. “Should we go back to the hospital?”

Max hesitated, then put his wallet away. He opened the back door of the cab for Sophia. “I'm fine,” he said. “Just get home safely.”

Sophia got inside the cab. “We never catch a break,” she said.

“But we always have each other,” Max said, then shut the cab
door and rapped twice with his knuckles on the window. She looked up at him and smiled. The cab pulled away.

A cold draft hit the space between Max's eyes. Jesus, what had come over him? Would he have really smashed the homeless guy's face? How quickly he'd regressed to the violence of his teenage years. Max wiped his nose with his scarf and walked toward his apartment.

M
ax stopped outside the revolving glass doors of his apartment building. Inside, the uniformed doorman was putting flowers in an antique vase on a gold-plated ledge next to the lobby mirror. Behind him, the wall-length painting of a Japanese rice farm glinted in the chandelier's light. A wave of revulsion swept through Max. Just who had he become? A few steps away, his mother lay dying in a hospital bed, a man slept on the steps of a church, and another flipped pitas half naked in the snow. Max turned around before the doorman saw him. He walked along 63rd Street toward Central Park. The freezing wind dried the drops of blood falling from his nose as soon as they hit the air. The homeless man's blow had shaken him awake. He'd finally
complete the errand he hadn't gotten to since his mother had been confined to a bed in his apartment three weeks ago.

•   •   •

MAX WALKED ACROSS
bright, empty 59th Street and stopped at the Capital One ATM on Park Avenue. He withdrew $2,000 and distributed the bills on his body—in his back pockets, inside his underwear, in his socks, in the sleeve of his shirt, inside his coat pockets—leaving only $40 in his wallet. At 4:00
AM
he caught the 6 train on Lexington Avenue to Pelham Bay Park. The preppy drunks in his car got off at the 77th and 86th Street stations, and the fedora-wearing hipsters in Harlem. By the time the train reached the Bronx, the compartment looked much like it had in Max's childhood: a woman high on crack scratching her deathly pale face, leaving thin red lines on it; a homeless man slumped on his seat muttering to himself; and three boys wearing baseball caps and imitation Air Jordans drinking from brown bags and slobbering over pizza slices. The boys stared at him. Max gave them a cool, blank look and glanced away. Lingering longer was intimidation, not meeting eyes was fear—either could leave him bruised and bloody on the subway station and without his $2,000. He'd deserve it too. A white guy in a Boss overcoat in the South Bronx late at night was begging to be messed with. The boys whispered among themselves and laughed. Max got off at the Brook Avenue station. The boys followed him outside the train and up the stairs.

“Where you going, whitey?” they said behind him.

Max didn't turn around. He walked along dark, unlit Brook Avenue with an exaggerated swagger, pumping his chest forward,
swinging his arms loosely, chewing the nonexistent gum in his mouth—the pimp roll he had perfected in his childhood.

“You need a hit?” they said.

He turned on East 139th Street. A drunk was rummaging through a trash can in front of a closed pawnshop. Another man in a tattered coat leaned against the glass door of a check-cashing store.

The boys picked up speed behind him. “Whoa, wait, GQ.”

Max took a quick left on St. Ann's Avenue. The boys' footsteps died out immediately. Just as Max expected, they wouldn't follow him into gang territory. Two men, one bent over a shining white cane, the other sporting an Afro, stood talking under the streetlight in front of a park next to St. Ann's Episcopal Church. Max's heartbeat returned to normal.

“J,” he said.

The Afro turned around, his hands reaching inside his overcoat, likely for his pistol.

“It's Max. Jerome knows me.”

The man with the white cane turned. Like Max, he was twenty-nine years old, but he looked twenty years older. Since middle school, when Max and he had studied together at PS 65 Mother Hale Academy on Cypress Avenue, Jerome had been shot by rival drug dealers in both his knees and his right hip and arm. His face was a tangle of knife scars, his hair prematurely gray, and his skin cracked from a lifetime of drug use.

“Da Max,” said Jerome, giving Max a high five. His hands were shaking and his voice was hoarser than a year ago when Max had last run into him. “What you in the ghetto for? I thought you'd gone all uppity.”

“Not uppity, man, just busy with shit,” said Max. “I've come to see Andre.”

“Bitch's going to finish school, I hear,” he said.

Max nodded. “You should go too.”

Jerome laughed. “And your uncle will raise them little 'uns?” he said.

A car blasting Latin music came down the street. Jerome pressed the cane firmly against the ground and pulled a plastic bag with rose-gray powder from his coat. “You want some H, da Max? On the house.”

Max shook his head. “Gonna head to Andre's. Some punks were following me, so I turned around.”

“Want me to come with?”

“I'm good now,” said Max, shaking Jerome's rough, shaking hands.

The car pulled over. The Afro bent over the car window.

“Be safe,” said Jerome and hobbled over to the car.

Max turned around and walked beside the fenced park toward 139th Street. Much had changed since his childhood. Then the park had been a barren sandy lot filled with hypodermic needles and blue crack caps. A lone tree had stood in the center of the gravel, its dry branches covered with dolls—some intact, some with missing hands and legs—eerie, makeshift memorials made by parents who couldn't afford any better for children who died of gang shootings and drug overdoses.

I . . . I don't wanna g-get up there.

Sophia's stutter would worsen every time they passed the park on their way from the train station to home. Max would hold her hand and promise her they wouldn't end up as dolls on the tree if she stuck close to him. Now the tree had been
replaced with seesaws and slides. The ground was clear of debris, the gravel raked smooth, all signs of progress except for the addicts themselves. Years ago, Jerome's father had dealt crack in front of the park. Now his son, with the same fading ghostly face and hacking cough, was dealing heroin. Maybe Jerome's kids would break the cycle, thought Max without much hope.

•   •   •

A PROSTITUTE IN
a tight yellow skirt with haunted eyes and chattering teeth paced outside the brown brick building on 139th Street where Andre, Max's friend since childhood, lived. Max punched the security code on the console and entered the building's cold tunnel-like lobby. A bottle crashed on the floor. Max walked around the broken glass, urine, and other beer bottles next to the doorway and knocked on Andre's apartment door.

No response.

He knocked again and called Andre on his cell phone. The phone buzzed inside the apartment. Andre picked up after four rings.

“Max.” His voice was thick with sleep. “Is Ma okay?”

“Yes.”

“What's wrong, then?”

“It's just cold outside,” said Max.

“What?”

“I'm freezing outside your apartment,” said Max and knocked again.

“Shit.”

A thump. Wheels rolling on the floor. The door opened. Andre sat in his wheelchair in a white sleeveless shirt and underwear, dreadlocks disheveled, drool slipping down from the
corners of his mouth. Max stepped in. The house was heated like a furnace. Ammonia and bleach fumes seeped into Max's skin, making his throat itch. A bottle of E&J, naked lightbulbs, a cardboard box with greasy pizza crusts, broken lighters, razor blades, and a residue of white powder lay on the kitchen counter, the aftermath of a crack binge.

“Jesus fuck, did you call those Bloods motherfuckers over again?” asked Max. “You're gonna get killed, man, you fucking wait and see.”

Andre rubbed his eyes. “Quit being a bitch, Ace,” he said, his voice still thick with sleep. “Ain't nothin' to it. You work in a bank. I work here. The kids gotta know me to trust me.”

Max walked across the floor littered with beer cans and empty glass vials. He poured the E&J into a dirty glass on the kitchen counter and gulped it down. Andre's eyes followed him.

“What happened? Is Sophia okay?” he said.

Max took out the cash from his wallet, socks, shoes, and underwear, tightened it in a roll, and put it on the kitchen counter. “I just came to give you this,” he said. “So you can keep digging your grave studying useless-ass criminal behavior at college.”

Andre stared at the cash. “At five
AM
? Motherfucker be crazy?”

“Doesn't your semester start next week?” asked Max. “I won't have time for a bit. Mom is about to go down.”

“Naw, hell, Ace,” he said, his eyes dropping. “I figured it'd be soon.”

Andre rolled his wheelchair up to the counter and poured the last of the E&J into a clean glass for Max. They went from the boxy living room to the even smaller bedroom, Andre's wheelchair knocking down more empty beer cans with its wheels.
Max sat down on the spring bed and downed the yellow-brown liquid in one swig. The window behind the bed was barricaded with thick steel railings to block stray bullets from gang shootings outside the apartment. They looked like prison bars.

“Shit, man, go counsel kids in Manhattan gangs. Enough trouble to put your nose into there,” said Max. “Here you're just gonna get banged one day.”

“How 'bout we don't talk about me?” said Andre. “You want a smoke?”

Max shook his head.

“I ain't using no more, but fuck it today,” said Andre. He wheeled out of the bedroom. Max's head felt heavy from the drink. He leaned against the headboard. His eyes began to shut.

•   •   •

“. . . I TELL . . .”

Max opened his eyes. Andre sat opposite him sucking from a plastic Coca-Cola bottle bong with a suction hole at its center. His eyes were glassy, his face vacant.

“Sorry I dozed,” said Max. “What?”

Andre burned more weed in the makeshift bowl attached to the hollowed pen-tube wedged in the suction hole. He took a giant suck from the bottle's mouth and inhaled deeply. “Do you know what I tell them young gangbangers about you?” said Andre, enunciating each word slowly. “I don't say shit about you going to Harvard or working on Wall Street. Everyone in the projects knows that. I just tell them about St. Paddy's Day years ago when a bunch of us went to the city. You remember?”

Max blinked away his sleep, trying to focus. Andre never spoke of their childhood. “I guess.”

“You don't remember nothin', bitch. It was before all the shit went down,” said Andre. He took another drag. “We were twelve then. Or thirteen. You sagged your pants low and rapped and drank in the 6 like all of us. Muscle or Pitbull or someone dared you to ride hangin' outside the train when we got off at Canal. You did it for ten seconds, then fell off and bloodied your nose on the platform. Later that night, we smoked up and you stole a record from Bleecker Bob's. Then, we got back home and crashed.
We
crashed, that is. You came back and studied all night for some stupid math quiz. You recall?”

Max didn't. There were too many such days growing up. “I think, yes,” he said.

“That's what I tell these kids. Do what you gotta do to survive in this hell, but go back each night and get your shit together. Piece by piece, build your motherfuckin' empire,” he said. He leaned forward on his wheelchair. “You gonna be okay, Ace. On the real. You're always hustlin', always okay. And Ma's suffered enough. She'd want to be at peace herself.”

Max throttled the question that came to his lips. Is that what his mother was feeling? Andre would know, though he never talked about the day fifteen years ago when Max and he were caught in the cross fire between the Black Spades gang and some local toughs outside a bodega on Cypress Avenue. One moment, they were sucking ice pops. The next moment, three punks wearing gold chains with pistols in their hands appeared in front of them. There'd been a blaze of yellow light and popping sounds. Max had crashed down on the road, knocking out
two front teeth. He was staring at his bloody gum tissue splayed on the ground when Andre fell beside him, his cream shirt colored in red. “Pop, it hurts, Pop,” he had shouted. The bullet had pierced his liver, tearing through his spleen, and lodged into his spine, paralyzing him from the waist down. A deep sadness rose up within Max.

“Some world this is, where you're better off dead than alive,” said Max.

Andre looked at him with soft, mellowed eyes. “Don't hate, Ace. You always took my shit harder than me,” he said. He put the bong down and tossed Max a cushion. “Sleep for a bit?” His arms were thin as spindles and his body was twisted in an effort to avoid pressure sores from sitting in the wheelchair all day. Max's stomach knotted in despair. He forced himself to get up.

“No, man, I gotta be with Mom,” he said. “I just wanted to drop off the C's.”

“Can I see her today? I'll get a ride into the city.”

Max nodded. “She'll like that.”

•   •   •

MAX WALKED OUT
of the apartment. Instead of going to the subway station, he turned on Alexander Avenue. In the dim light of dawn, 141st Street looked as if it had been bombed by a fighter jet. Overflowing trash cans, a vacant parking lot with heaps of tires, puddles of vomit outside a bar, thugs slumped against closed pawnshops with flashing neon lights. He stopped ahead of Willis Avenue and looked up at a blackened window in the corner-most building of the Mott Haven housing projects cluster. His mother, Sophia, and he had spent most of their lives in an airless one-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of the
building. The brown bricks hadn't seen a single coat of paint in the ten years Max had been gone. With its furrows, cracks, and chipped corners, the building looked like a body ravaged by cancer. Screams ripped intermittently through the quiet morning.

“You best walk away, bitch.”

“Maria, open the fuckin' door.”

“Whatchu think of yourself?”

Sophia had hated those screams; the gunshots; the kids that called her names—“white bitch,” “snow bunny,” “nerd”—tore her overcoat and messed up her hair when Max wasn't around; and just about everything else about the projects. Max had swaggered and strutted, rapping, shooting hoops, shoplifting, getting into petty fights—anything it took to fit in. His mother had been different from both of them. She had developed a steely toughness, an indifference to the world crumbling around them. When the gangs started shooting at one another in the alley behind the building, she would clean their apartment vigorously. While Max and Sophia covered their ears and flattened themselves against the wall, she'd scrub the chipped legs of the ragged brown sofa, wipe the cinder-block walls, mop the floors, and move and rearrange the lone table and three chairs in the living room again and again. She'd stop when the shooting stopped and continue with her cooking or sewing as though nothing had happened.