Well, we met in Bombay. In Mumbai, I mean. That’s what I told him. Or maybe it wasn’t Bombay. Maybe it was somewhere else. A café? A hotel lobby? Somewhere there were tables, chairs, windows. Vincent strolled over and said g’day, and pretty quickly I realised I’d found someone who understood. What does that mean? Joe asked. Love, I said. I didn’t hesitate to use the word. Or it became a kind of love, anyway. He was a very energetic guy, your dad, that’s what I told him, he had a kind of energy about him that appealed to me. Somehow, we just connected. Joe was smiling. He smiled the way Vince used to smile. But sadder. A less energetic smile. He was sitting in that red plastic chair, which he’d dragged in from the front steps. It was weird to see him smile like that. This must have been the first day. Or the second, I suppose. The night of the second. I don’t know. The evening. Weeks ago, in other words. But why am I thinking about all this? The same warm breeze through the open window. I was in Mumbai, I said, and your dad came strolling over. And then what happened? he asked. Well, I must have been on my way down to Pune, I told him. I knew a girl who’d got caught up in the meditation scene down there, some sort of experimental ashram, and she used to write me these long letters, really beautiful, totally incomprehensible letters all about her guru and her past lives, and all that sort of stuff. How much she loved me. How much she loved her guru. How much she loved everyone she’d ever met. How she was reliving her former existence as a grey cat. How beautiful it was to hunt and kill, to satisfy her hunger and her instincts. That sort of thing. I had no idea what she was talking about. But she was a very good-looking actress, and my god, she had fantastic breasts. We’d been part of the ‘Students for a Democratic Society’ together, I think, and actors and actually housemates, for a little while. We’d been in a play together. What was the play? he asked. But I had no idea what the play was. I was smoking a lot of weed in those days, I told him, which was putting it mildly. Anyway, one day she sent me this letter that said: here I am in India, come find me, I don’t know what’s going on but everything else is like being half-dead. The whole world is a zombie apocalypse, basically, that was the general vibe, except for her and all her friends. They were the only human beings left, apparently. Or the only neo-humans. They were an example for the rest of the galaxy, that’s what she said. Joe laughed at that, I remember. I don’t blame him. And this was the Osho ashram she was talking about? Is that right? Yes, I said, Osho, exactly, isn’t that what we’re talking about? Although the truth is, I never really liked the name Osho. He was always Bhagwan to me. He still is. Even after he started dressing up like a goddamn Christmas tree, and driving back and forth in Rolls-Royces, and having people follow him round with machine guns. That wasn’t the Bhagwan I fell in love with, but he was still Bhagwan, even when he was Osho. Mohan Chandra. Then Acharya Rajneesh. Then Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Then Osho towards the end, after everything had happened, and he needed to rebrand the whole enterprise. You know the story? I asked him. He made some sort of gesture as if to say, yeah, yeah, I know the story, keep talking. So I kept talking. I heard my voice answering his questions, a patient, elderly, frail, faintly cranky voice. Very frail. A whisper really. He had to lean forward to hear what I was saying above the sound of the generator, the sound of the fan, the sound of the singing we could hear coming from across the water when the generator cut out. They were reciting the Bhagavad Gita. This was the first day. Or the second day. One or the other. Back when I could still speak, more or less. I still had a voice then, even if it was the voice of a dying old man. Now, not so much. I can still whisper if I really want to. I can write on a piece of paper. With extraordinary effort I can still roll over and sit up. I can still scratch myself. I can stand. If he takes my weight, it’s not too much of a problem to get up and shuffle across to the toilet. My legs tend to buckle without him. The singing has stopped now. How long ago did it stop? Someone is going past in a boat. A warm breeze moves the curtains. A warm breeze strokes the skin of the old man. Which is about as good as it gets. The pleasures of the body, as they say. Memories of other summer evenings. Other open windows and types of paradise. What year would that have been, he asked, when you met Dad? Oh, I don’t know, I said. 1976, I guess. Or maybe ’77. Basically, I just wanted to find this girl, head up to the Himalayas, walk around, see what was happening. I needed a break from the politics, I told him. The acting. The singing and the dancing. I’d done a stint as a centurion in the stage production of Jesus Christ Superstar. We did a lot of street theatre, too. I told him all about it. I heard myself talking and talking. Also, those actions we did: handing out free soup in the park, that sort of thing, wearing a giant goat’s head made out of papier-mâché. Also, I was a draft resister. My number didn’t come up, but I wrote and told them to go fuck themselves — I’m not taking part in your racist war. I don’t want to shoot women and babies. I don’t want to shoot men, for that matter, either. I don’t want to napalm people and burn down their villages, thanks very much. So I was eligible for jail, if they’d wanted to find me, which they probably should have, since I was pretty good friends with some of the people they really did want to find. People they did find in the end, and people they didn’t. People who went to jail for a long time and others who disappeared for good, like Willy Martin, who went up to Canada and died in great pain, apparently. I never was charged. But the point was to stick your neck out and change the status quo. My father never forgave me for that. He was a war hero. The medals, the nightmares, the whole thing. He was an angry man, a horrible man, really. Trapped in the horror. He flew thirty-three combat missions over Europe in a B-17. In World War Two, you mean? Joe asked. Yes, obviously. I admired him immensely for that. And then the Vietnam War happened, and everything changed. I grew my hair. I went to all the protests. I was there when Abbie Hoffman made the Pentagon levitate. I met Abbie. I wouldn’t say we were friends. But we knew about each other. We knew other people who knew each other. My father was very unforgiving. He was deeply offended. He took it as a personal insult. I was dead to him for a long time. But the last thing in the world I wanted was to end up like him, a broken, really deeply broken, very wealthy man, screaming in his sleep. Which, incidentally, is not far from what’s happened, despite my best intentions. I have the nightmares, anyway. Not the money. My father disinherited me. After he died at the end of ’87, I went up to see his lawyer. Turned out he’d given all his money to a right-wing think-tank called Center for the American Future –— real nice people. It was a surprise, but not that much of a surprise. I still dream about my father. Horrible dreams, especially since I got here. A lifetime of built-up psychic detritus, unspooling in the head. Some sort of clean-out before I’m evicted for good. Dreams, memories, nightmares. Call them whatever you want, I said. Or maybe I didn’t say all of this. Maybe I just thought it. Dreams about my mother, too. But mostly my father. What did your father do? he asked at some point, so I must have been telling him about my father. He was an engineer, I said. He worked for Boeing after the war. That was another thing I was very proud about, the little component he helped design for the Saturn V rocket. Some sort of little gizmo thing they used for steering the outer engines. I loved the moon landing. The whole Apollo thing. Armstrong’s dignity. My father’s crucial role. The future of human endeavour. I was obsessed for a long time. I was less proud, as I got older, of my father’s contribution to the design of military helicopters. Then he left Boeing and went into commercial plastic bags. That was the future. First space travel, then war, then plastic bread-bags, in that order. You’d think maybe they got the order wrong, but no. That’s human progress for you. Then Mobil bought him out, and he became a big millionaire and retired, and began drinking seriously. Did he ever talk about the war? Joe asked. No, I said. No. He never did. Not to me, certainly. So it’s impossible to say how many people he was responsible for killing, or, to put it differently, how many of them were Nazis. But one of my earliest memories is the sound of my father screaming in his sleep. The sound of my mother saying his name. I remember that. Also, the way he’d put you up against the wall, sometimes. Me, I mean. With his elbow in your throat. And now every time I see a plastic bag floating in the wind or clogging up a river, it’s like coming face-to-face with him again. With his mighty and more or less endless contribution to the world. But I was telling Joe how I’d arrived in India. That’s what we were talking about. I was twenty-three years old, and I was burnt out by all the protests, the actions, the acting, the readily available and not particularly expensive drugs. I slept in a lot of different places. Streets, hills, cars, barns, treehouses, rooms that belonged to people I’d never met. But I don’t think I slept very much. Under bridges. I was very tired. We were all exhausted for some reason. I don’t know why we were so tired. We were children. We were burning up. Anyway, the war was finished. A lot of people were going mad. People I knew. What was going to happen now? An old friend jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. His name escapes me. But we were pretty good buddies. Another guy I knew OD’d. There were lots of guys like that. It was a strange time. I wanted a different kind of adventure. The day Patty Hearst got sentenced, I was on an aeroplane. So that was, what, 1976, I guess. I flew to Turkey and somehow I got talking to this English couple, real drug-addled hippies, and we ended up driving their Land Rover down through Syria and Iran, and up into the north of Afghanistan. We woke up in a field one morning surrounded by Afghan warlords. Amazing people. Amazing orchards. Amazing lakes. After that we travelled down to India, and then we split up and went our different ways. He died of pneumonia, I think, later on. Who did? Joe said. The English guy. I’ve forgotten his name. I don’t know what happened to her. Susie, I think her name was. Susie. We lost touch. But we had a good time. Those were the days when Charles Sobhraj was going around murdering backpackers and stealing their passports. I was in India during the state of emergency. They were stoning the trains, they were trying to shoot Indira Gandhi. It was a fantastic time to be alive. It was chaos. And then at some point, I guess, I must have been in Bombay, in Mumbai, and Vincent came strolling over. And what was he like? Joe asked. Well, he had a kind of swagger to him in those days, I said, and it’s true. He did. He had a kind of tough-guy thing, with the tatts and everything, which of course he wasn’t. Or maybe he was. But if that’s the case it was before my time, so how would I know? But he liked to put it on a bit, I think. He liked people to think he was a tough guy. He had a boldness about him, which I liked straight away. He was a funny guy. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember Vincent being very, very sad and lonely because he’d just split up with some girl back home. Someone called Astra? Joe said. Was that her name? Do you remember? But I didn’t. I don’t. Maybe, I said. Could have been Astra. Anyway, we decided to get drunk on whatever we could find. We found some horrible, really horrible, horrible red wine, just undrinkable, and we drank that and some other things. Maybe we found ourselves some Indian whiskey too. Probably not. It wasn’t easy finding alcohol in Mumbai in those days, but it wasn’t impossible. He was a big drinker, your dad, I told him. A big smoker, too. He smoked a lot of weed. We all did. A lot of hash, which in India, in those days, was really gorgeous stuff. Anyway, we’d just met each other so, true to form, we decided to celebrate. I still had about three hundred and fifty Jesus Christ Superstar dollars in my pocket, maybe even more, which was a hell of a lot of money in India in those days, and I knew if things ever got desperate, I could always go home and kiss my dad’s arse for a while, and there’d probably be another million and a half waiting for me when he died, provided I kissed hard enough. I would have had to kiss pretty goddamn hard. But still. Not impossible. Not that I was planning on doing it. I’d made my break from him already. A semi-break, let’s call it. I’d gone to India. I wasn’t planning on coming back any time soon. I’d told my father, maybe with less conviction than I should have, where he could stick his ransom money. I didn’t say ransom. What I’m saying is, I’ve never felt money to be an issue, even when I was standing out the front of some church or another waiting for a free peanut-butter sandwich. It comes and goes. I’ve never clung to it. So we went to a fancy restaurant, Vince and I. A really confusing place with too many waiters or too many mirrors or both. But the food was excellent. I love Indian food. South Indian. North Indian. All of it. I used to anyway. It’s hard to eat now. Hard to swallow. Just a little bit of this and that. A little bit of coconut rice, some stewy things served on a banana leaf. There’s a nice Indian family next door who cook for me. Anitha and Kumeran. Lovely people. Maybe that’s what they’re doing right now. Organising something next door. Some idiyappam. Some appam with ishtu. Some beer and whiskey, too. I hope so. Although they’re Catholics and they don’t approve of alcohol. But I don’t remember what Vince and I ate in Bombay forty-five bloody years ago, if that’s what you’re asking. I remember we talked about the organisations we’d belonged to back home, that sort of thing, and the actions we’d undertaken in the name of the revolution. Vince had been into all of that back in Melbourne too, or so he claimed. You probably know more about this than I do, I told Joe, but he shook his head. No, he said. He didn’t know much about it. His dad had never told him much about anything. Or maybe he had, but he hadn’t been listening, which is probably more likely. Anyway, we found ourselves at the ashram, eventually, I told him. We took a taxi or maybe it was a train, I don’t remember. This is all a long time ago, so maybe none of this is true. I loved the trains. The trains were like wombs, you just lay there and everything you needed came to your window, it was fantastic. I guess they’re still like that. Rocky fields beside the train tracks, growing nothing. And then the landscape would change, and you’d be in the bloody jungle all of a sudden, the sun through the trees, the villages, the goats, the little cups of tea, the little treats. Kids running beside the train tracks, trying to keep up. It was a beautiful time. I was blessed. I really was. It was a golden age. And I vowed never to come back and ruin it. Why risk your fondest memories? I certainly never wanted to go back to Pune, that’s for sure, to the ashram. I’ll never do that. I’ve got a pretty good idea of what they’ve done to the place, because they send me emails, and I still haven’t figured out how to unsubscribe from their bloody mailing list. All that fascist, corporate mysticism really gives me the shits. It looks like an airport now. But here I am in India, anyway. I did come back. I couldn’t help myself. The idea was always there, nagging away. India gets into you, doesn’t it? Maybe, he said. I don’t really know yet. Well, there you go, each to their own. But in any case, I got an email out of the blue one day from an old ashram buddy called Maneesh, I told him. Formally Mitch Marlett. Canadian guy I hadn’t heard of since the Oregon days, the early eighties. He found my address somehow, and sent me a long, heartfelt letter from the jail cell where he was serving the last five months of a three-year sentence for gem smuggling. This was years ago now. He must have seen that episode of Law and Order I did, I think that was the only show they were allowed to watch in there, poor buggers, but every year since he got out, Maneesh invited me down to Kerala for a full-moon party. He had a place I could stay, he kept telling me, which he was looking after for somebody else. Paradise, he kept saying. Not that I care about full-moon parties. I don’t know why I accepted. Or maybe I do. I guess I do. Paradise sounds nice, doesn’t it. But also, things had started to change at home. The body had started to go. The body is a temple and the temple had started to fall apart, as temples do eventually. I’d begun to trip over. Nothing exceptional. I’d started to lose strength in my legs, in my hands. This is it, I thought. It’s coming for you. Did I really want to die alone in a tiny little flat on the outskirts of Sydney? No, I did not. With carpet like that? Wandering through the supermarket sometimes, my legs would stutter. Suddenly, someone would be picking me up off the ground. Some pretty young thing. I’d be lying on the ground staring up at the fluorescent lights. Blinded. So here it is, I’d think. Most days I didn’t believe it. But then I started to. Now I do, obviously. Now there’s no denying anything. Now I hobble around with a walking stick and struggle to swallow, which means I can’t ignore what I’ve been hoping to ignore for a while longer — namely death, namely motor-neurone disease, which is what killed my father, and which also killed my father’s brother and sister, and their father too, probably. It’s a disease I’ve anticipated for a long time, because the chances of my having it have always been fifty-fifty. It’s been riding towards me for generations, like a wave that’s finally breaking over the top of my head. So I told Maneesh, okay, I’m coming. I caught a plane. I arrived in India again. It was two in the morning. I did what everyone else did and put my bag through the X-ray machine, even though there was nobody there to operate it. Then I walked out into the night. India again. The decades come pouring back. It’s true. I was frightened, but I was happy, even if things had changed a bit in the last forty years. I caught a taxi. It was like coming home. I caught a train through the jungle. I lay on my little bunk and witnessed an endless procession of beggars and touts and blind sadhus and lepers with no fingers and women sweeping on their hands and knees. This is what I remembered. But why so fondly? I got out and caught another taxi, and all the happiness rushed in through the open windows. The Arabian Sea out there, the green ponds stranded on the beach. Palm trees. All the stuff you dream about when someone says paradise too often. I hardly recognised Maneesh when I saw him, he was so fat. He was topless. He was wearing one of those Indian skirts, like a sadhu. He was running a joint on the beach called the Café le Space. He called himself a DJ. He looked ridiculous. But no more ridiculous than me, probably. He’d just had a whole new set of teeth inserted into his gums, in Mumbai. Very affordably. That’s something I won’t have to look forward to. We found another taxi. We came out here. This is more or less what I told Joe, I think. And so here I am now, lying in this little brick building, not much more than a room really, hidden among palm trees, a long, long way from all the tourists, about fifteen metres from the water. The warm breeze strokes my skin. And if someone helps me, I can still walk down to the water. Paradise, Maneesh kept saying, although it’s more rudimentary than paradise, in my opinion. Still, the rent is hardly anything. The place belongs to a man who’ll be in jail for another year and a half at least, which is more than enough time. I’ll be gone before then. But there’s something else as well. Because if it wasn’t for Joe calling me up out of the blue and sounding so much like Vincent, I doubt I would have had the inclination to fling myself back into the past like this. I doubt I’d have had the courage or the stupidity, for that matter, since, in my condition, the past holds endlessly more than the future and for that reason, doing anything to jeopardise the past is really just a disaster waiting to happen. Which might be exactly what this is. But is it his disaster or mine? I wondered, looking at Joe sitting there in that red plastic chair. What happened when you got to the ashram? he asked. Was Dad there? That’s what we were talking about. Vince. Of course he was there, I told him, we walked in together. And the truth is, I remember that part very clearly. I’ll never forget it. We walked through the gates, and I just felt this warm fuzzy feeling. Like I really was coming home. It was like being in your mother’s arms again, I said. Well maybe not my mother’s arms, but you know what I mean. And there were all these beautiful people walking around, beautiful women and beautiful men, probably a couple hundred of them, dancing together and going crazy and wearing orange and wearing beads. It blew my mind. And then we met Laxmi, who was Bhagwan’s secretary at the time, a really lovely person, and she said: Are you ready for sannyas? And we said we didn’t know. What do you reckon? And she said, okay good, well you come tonight, have a shower, get yourself some orange clothes, don’t smoke any cigarettes before you come, lay off the weed. Don’t get all fucked up on anything. So we rocked up that night or whenever it was, it could have been the night after that, and we sat down, and they called our names out, I think I was the first to be called, and I went up and sat in front of Bhagwan’s feet and he told me to close my eyes, and then after a while he said, you can open your eyes now, and he put the mala over my head, and he started telling me what my new name was going to mean, Abhiyāna, which means divine adventure. And what was Osho like? Joe asked. Bhagwan, you mean? Yeah Bhagwan, he said. He was funny as fuck, I said. He was extraordinary. And that’s the truth. He was this just tiny, immaculate kind of guy, very graceful, but also somehow enormous, like a mountain. It’s hard to explain. He was an outrageous old bastard. And he had this look on his face, like the whole thing was a big joke. Life, I mean. All these people, taking themselves so seriously. And what I thought was: here is my true father. Or I felt it, I guess. I don’t think I thought anything. It was like a silent explosion. Or an implosion. Like something just falling away. It was really just the feeling of being home, at last, you know. You can stop searching. You can relax. Everything is going to be fine. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. All there is, is Love. Simple as that. But when he looked into my eyes, I saw there was nobody there. Where was he? Joe asked. I’ve got no idea, I said. He was just an empty vessel. He was a complete and utter fucking loony-tune. The whole thing was like a dream. Like a what? Joe said. He couldn’t hear me. My voice was very frail then. It’s basically gone now, but it was very frail then. The muscles in my throat are dying. Like a dream, I yelled. Oh right, a dream, he said. Okay. Cool, go on. What happened next? What did Bhagwan say? I don’t know, I told him. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like going on. I can’t remember, I said. You don’t remember any of what he said? he asked. Not a thing, I said. But it’s true, I felt totally penetrated. Penetrated? he said. Yes, I said, penetrated. Bhagwan was channelling something. It was like the universe was just pouring through him. And if you didn’t experience it, then you won’t understand. It was like every cell in my body was vibrating. I had to be carried away. What? Joe said, leaning towards me. He couldn’t understand a word I was saying. The great orator’s voice was gone. It was like the last few drops of juice from a straw, dribbling out. The whole thing had been sucked dry. Not that I ever got the chance to be the great orator I could have been. I played the Duke of Albany once in a very average production of Lear we did up at The Mount, in Massachusetts. But the Duke of Albany is not much of an orator. I was a great B-grade movie criminal instead, a great victim of straight-to-video B-grade violence. I was thrown through windows, shot, stabbed, kicked, dumped out in the desert to die. My body was eaten by coyotes. I rose again to become a great voice-over actor in an ad for Colgate toothpaste in 1987. I was a fairly decent drug-baron in Time to Die in 1992 with Lorenzo Lamas, and a passable corrupt lawyer in an episode of Law and Order. I was a half-hearted ageing alien bounty-hunter in series 2 of ShadowWorlds, which never went to air. That was a terrible production. We all knew it was terrible. Morale was very low. And now the voice is gone completely. And what did Bhagwan say to Dad? Joe asked. He had a look in his eyes now, Joe, like he was closing in on me, I thought. He was staring at me. He looked like he hadn’t slept properly for weeks. He brushed at the air. The beautiful green bodies of flies buzzed around us. They are still buzzing now, all these weeks later, or months, as the case may be, like miraculous jewels that die and get reborn almost instantly. And what did Bhagwan say? he asked again. How would I know? I said. And that’s true, I couldn’t remember anything that happened after he put the mala over my head. I had to be carried back to my seat, I told him. I was totally fucked. I wasn’t listening to anything anyone was saying. I’d been changed into someone else. Joe nodded as if he understood, but it was clear he didn’t really understand. He didn’t, and he couldn’t. How could he? He wasn’t there. And nothing I could say meant anything. They were just words, signs, when the true thing is sign-less. You’d be fucking crazy to believe any of this, I told him. But what happened to Dad, he asked. Did Dad join up? Of course he joined up, I said. That’s what taking sannyas means. It means you’ve joined up. You’re in the gang. You mean the cult, he said. Well, sure, if you want to get technical, I said. And I think he laughed then, we both laughed, but not in a happy way. And what was Dad like after that? he asked. What do you mean? I said. I mean, was he changed? After he took sannyas? Did something happen to him? I looked him in the eyes. He was sitting beside the bed. Light was falling into the room through the window. Late afternoon light. Then the light faded, and the room became dark again. He really didn’t look good. He was a middle-aged man now. Tired, sunburnt. His eyes were bloodshot. The skin was peeling off his face. He reeked of despair. Here is a man, I thought, who reeks of despair, and who desperately wants what I have to give. But would I give it to him? He’d come all this way just to hear it. And where was his family? He had a wife and a kid. He’d told me that much. He’d left them behind to come out here and talk to me. He’d told me he was here for a conference, but I knew he was lying about that. A conference? I’d said. Oh yeah, what sort of conference? Oh, nothing interesting, he said, just university stuff. Cross-cultural relationship building, that sort of thing. Just marketing, he said. But he was not a good actor. On the other side of the river they were still singing, chanting. They’ve stopped now. But back then they were still chanting. I miss that. The Bhagavad Gita. We could hear bells and water birds, and the sound of kids chucking a plastic Coca-Cola bottle back and forth in the shallow water, like they do most days at about that time, although I didn’t hear them today. I don’t think I did. I can’t remember. How was Dad different after he met Bhagwan? Joe asked. Your dad was crazy, I told him. He was even crazier than ever. But no crazier than the rest of us, no crazier than I was, that’s for sure. We were all crazy. Just be total, that’s what the saying was. That was the whole point. Normality is insanity, or maybe that was a different saying. We were crazy with love. We really were. We were superhumans, mutants. We were blessed. Every day felt like a week. We laughed and laughed. We laughed a lot. I know we cried a lot, too. Particularly the men. The men cried, I told him; the women, not so much. The women punched you in the face and chucked your shit out the window and abused you. The women were tough as nails. They had foul mouths. The men sat around crying and talking about their feelings. The women turned into men and the men turned into women. Really? Joe said, sounding unconvinced. But that was the truth. Or it felt like the truth. And at the end of the day, we all did a lot of fucking. A lot, a lot. There were absolutely no noes. Maybe there should have been, but there weren’t. I was there for four years in Pune and another two and a half in Oregon. Six years of my life. But it feels like sixty. Like a whole lifetime. I’ve lived twice, I told him, once with Bhagwan and once everywhere else, and I know which one I preferred, that’s for sure. Joe looked at me then, and I saw Vincent’s face suddenly looking at me. I remember this very clearly. I can see it now. Vincent’s beautiful smile. It was uncanny. He was smiling, encouraging me to go on. And I was happy to see him, Joe, I mean, and not only because I knew that the time was coming when I would need his help. When I would need him to help me roll over in bed and get up and go to the toilet. I would need him to adjust my respirator and get me to the hospital along dirt roads and back again. All the things that he does now, in other words. Shopping. Riding out to the shops to collect my medicine. Cleaning up. Sweeping spiders from the dusty floor. The work of a loyal son. Not that I plan on lingering. I do not. I do not plan on having a colostomy bag or a feeding tube. I draw the line there. I see myself taking my last sip of Nembutal while I can still swallow, sitting down there by the water, listening to those kids chucking that plastic Coke bottle back and forth. And that day is not far away. But something happened, didn’t it? Joe said, leaning towards me again. His face was very close. I could smell him. I’m sure he could smell me too. We were both sweating, but I remember he was sweating a lot. It was rolling off him. You and Dad came back to Melbourne together, he said, and something hard had come into his voice. What happened? Why did he leave the ashram? Why did he never tell me about it? The room was filling up with mosquitoes. Little evil ones. We had arrived at the crux of the problem, if that’s what you want to call it. The fork in the road. The little engine that was driving the whole thing. It was late afternoon. The grey sky was boiling. A luminous torpor prevailed. The air was damp. And suddenly, for no reason I can think of, or maybe it was because of the weather, the strange heat or the strange look in Joe’s eyes, I had a memory of the Ranch in Oregon, of Rajneeshpuram, the City of the Lord of the Full Moon, and of leaving the ranch one morning and riding a motorbike up to Seattle, to visit my father for his sixty-fifth birthday. Suddenly, I started telling him this story. I’d got special permission to leave, which hardly ever happened in those days, even if it was an emergency. Often they didn’t let you leave. I mean, you could always leave, but maybe you couldn’t come back again. Anyway, for some reason they said fine, take three weeks off. Have a holiday, you don’t look so good. I don’t know why. And Sheela, you know who Sheela was? I asked him. Yeah, Joe said, I know who she was. Well, by this stage, Sheela had replaced Laxmi as Bhagwan’s secretary. It wasn’t the same old ashram. I never got along with Sheela. She never liked me, and I never liked her. It was a mystery to me how Bhagwan could stand to be in the same room with her, to be honest. Anyway, things were different by that stage, that’s what I was trying to say. In what way were they different? Joe asked. Well, to start with, it was a ranch, not an ashram. To start with, we were in the middle of bloody Oregon instead of India. And by this point, of course, Bhagwan was no longer giving discourse. He’d gone into silence. I missed him. I missed him a lot. I still do, the old bugger. Plus, there was all sorts of legal bullshit going on which was not, and still isn’t, very interesting. Bullshit like machine guns? Joe said. Well, there was that too, I said. But I’m talking about bullshit to do with zoning laws and elections. And what about how they poisoned the salad bars? Joe said. Yeah, yeah, sure, I said, but we didn’t know about any of that stuff. All that stuff was a big secret. That was just a few fucking crazy people at the top. Everything else was fantastic, most of the time I mean. Most of the time it was just a really beautiful, harmonious, sophisticated, creative, loving kind of place. It was a family. It was a farm, it was a commune, it was a kind of labour camp for a while there, but it wasn’t a mystery school anymore, I guess that’s what I was trying to say. It wasn’t like Pune. Anyway, I was working in construction at this point, driving a great big bulldozer round and round. I was doing twelve-hour days, seven days a week in a giant, muddy paddock. I was exhausted. I was probably sick. I’d recovered from hepatitis. I’d recovered from a lot of different things. I know I was depressed, although I don’t think I knew it at the time. Maybe that’s why they let me go. Too much negative energy. I hardly saw Bhagwan anymore, except when he drove past every day at two o’clock in the afternoon in a Rolls Royce and waved. But mostly I didn’t bother with that. I hadn’t gone all that way just to watch someone drive around in his car. It was my father’s birthday, and for some reason they let me go. I borrowed this guy’s motorcycle, a great big Russian Cossack motorcycle, and I rode three hundred miles up to Seattle. It was fantastic. It took me a week to get there. One night I slept in the woods outside some little bum-shit town I can’t remember the name of. I fished in a river and caught a whopping big trout that I cooked on the fire and ate, and I thought this is the fucking life, but then I started to get really paranoid. I must have been smoking something pretty heavy, because I had the feeling that rednecks were going to come and murder me in my sleep, just like they murdered Jack Nicholson, if you know what I mean. Before that I stayed a few nights in Portland with a friend of mine, an old ashram friend from Pune. Her name was Yamini, which meant Nighttime or Starry Night or Peaceful Night or Night of Ashes or something like that. We’d been in love in Pune, and she’d already left the ranch by this stage. I guess, we were somehow soulmates. I stayed with her for a couple days. On the last night she asked me to move in with her. I said I’d think about it. I still think about it, if you want to know the truth. She had a job as a waitress in a burger place, but she’d worked in the publishing department in Pune, and she was hoping to get a job as an editorial assistant for an academic publisher. She was really lonely, because she’d been kicked off the ranch and she wasn’t allowed to go back again. She’d had a falling out with Sheela, and now no one would talk to her. None of her friends. She was blacklisted. I mean, it was a big thing that I was there. She thought her phone was bugged. It could have been, for all I know. She thought people were following her. I remember her house was really dark, and she kept looking out the window. She had a housemate, this Scottish guy, who only ate brown rice, basically. But I didn’t meet him until the second night. The first night, Yamini and I stayed up drinking and talking and doing everything else, and then on the second night, her housemate came home, and we all got pretty high and then at some point he locked himself in the bathroom and refused to come out. He was in love with Yamini, I think. On the third night, Yamini told me she wanted me to stay. She wanted to get married. Her visa was about to expire. She was English. Half English, half Italian. She couldn’t have children, but we could adopt, she said. I told her I didn’t know if I could do any of that. I wasn’t ready for it. I wasn’t ready to leave Bhagwan. In the morning we had a disastrous breakfast together. I remember she hardly spoke, and she didn’t eat anything, although I ate a lot — for some reason I was incredibly hungry. And then I left and went to a couple other places, and two or three days later I rode up to my father’s house in Broadmoor, which is a posh part of Seattle. It was late in the afternoon when I arrived. My father had this big two-storey mansion. I’d never been there before, but my brother had given me the address. I don’t know what I was expecting. It was an overcast day, really super-muggy, and there were people in cocktail dresses and dinner jackets standing around sweating on the lawn and drinking little drinks. I saw my brother. I saw my father’s new girlfriend. I saw my father. I was wearing an orange jumpsuit. It was 1983. My father saw me, and he walked across the lawn with two glasses in his hand, two glasses of single malt bloody whatever. I thought he looked pretty good for a sixty-five-year-old war veteran — he was tanned and healthy — although three years later he’d be dead. I remember I went up to him and said, happy birthday you old bugger, something like that, and I put my arms out. I hadn’t seen him for years, it was a surprise, I hadn’t told him I was coming, and he looked at me and said: What is this? I don’t recognise you, I want you off of my goddamn fucking property dressed like that. So that was the end of it. It wasn’t the last time I saw him, but it was probably the last time I saw him walking around. This was what I was thinking about or what I was telling Joe. I don’t know why. He hadn’t said anything for a long time. But I remember I was suddenly very, very tired. Breathing was tiring. Eating and drinking were tiring. But talking was supernaturally tiring. Not to mention remembering. It was almost dark by this point. We could hear dogs. We heard something splashing in the water nearby. At some point, Joe stood up and went to the door, as if he expected someone to be there. I felt a gentle breeze, almost cool. Dead spiders, light as cotton, drifted across the floor. Joe turned back to me. Are there monkeys out here? he asked. No, I said, I don’t think monkeys come this far south. He nodded. Okay, he said, and then what happened? What happened when? I asked. At the party, he said. Oh, well, then I got back on my motorbike and rode away, I said. My mother was in a nursing home nearby, but she had dementia, and I knew she wouldn’t recognise me either. She’d been there for years; she didn’t know who I was. So I didn’t visit her. I thought about it, but I decided not to. Did you go back and see Yamini? he asked. No, I said. I rode straight back to the ranch. That was my family. Joe was looking at me. He looked sick, I thought. Like something was wrong with him or like he was very hungover. He came back and sat down beside the bed again. What does it feel like? he asked eventually. What does what feel like? I said. Motor-neurone disease, he said. Well, it’s not that nice, I told him. It’s like being slowly paralysed. Your legs, your hands, your throat. It gets hard to swallow. It’s not very easy to drink this beer, for instance, as you might have noticed. So maybe there’s worse ways to go, but I don’t know many of them. He nodded and sat back in his chair. It was dark by that time. Light the lamp, I told him. There are matches over there on the shelf. Okay, he said. It took him a while, but he figured it out. The singing had stopped for the night. We listened to the sound of the gas lamp. The insects. We were drinking warm beer. I remember a very long silence. And what about Dad? he asked at last. You didn’t answer the question. Why did he leave the ashram? What happened? Nothing happened as far as I know, I told him. Your grandfather was sick, I said. Vince went home to see him. That’s what happened. But my grandfather lived until he was ninety years old, he said, he was basically invincible, he was like a bull that couldn’t die. I shrugged. So what was wrong with him, then? Joe asked. No idea, I said. I can’t remember. I guess it was a false alarm. And from there the rest was easy enough. I’d made up my mind. We’d made up our minds a long time ago, hadn’t we? That was the agreement. You were my brother, and that’s what you wanted. So I knew the script pretty well. I half-believed it anyway, after all those years. I said my lines. I wasn’t bad. Your dad went home and met your mum and settled down, I told him. Your mum got pregnant. You were born. Life happened, I said. That’s what happened. Which was more or less the truth anyway, wasn’t it? After you were born, I told him, your dad couldn’t do that sort of shit anymore. Hanging out with crazy hippies. He put it all behind him. And maybe I half-wondered who I was trying to protect. You? Bhagwan? The past in general? But it didn’t really matter anymore. You were both gone. All that stuff was finished now. It was just smoke in the head. By that point, anyway, the whole thing had started to annoy me. All the questions and answers. I was exhausted. And what happened to Yamini? Joe asked. She’s dead, I told him. She died. When did she die? he asked. A long time ago.