Gone was the benevolent acceptance with which Tom was familiar and instead was power in a gaze the likes of which he had never felt before. More intimidating than the most threatening he’d encountered in the military. More ominous because it confronted him with the reality he’d spent decades trying his utmost to avoid: the torment of his own mind. An unfathomable horror to which he’d been witness decades earlier and from which there was no escape. A to-the-bone dread which had become his all-consuming preoccupation. In his neighbor’s eyes, this was all reflected back to him with an objectivity that conveyed an urgent and powerful warning. No longer could he avoid the appalling recognition that however deeply troubled he felt right now, it was as nothing compared to what lay ahead if something didn’t change.

What would he do when there was no balcony to sit on, no bourbon to anesthetize? After he died when his mind, instinctively drawn to the horror, became completely absorbed in it? Unfettered from a body, without anchor to a place where he could return for even temporary relief, he was confronted not so much by some Hieronymus Bosch nightmare as by his own future. Was this not the very definition of hell—the relentless experience of intense pain without cessation? One he may have glimpsed and tried to discount before but which was reflected inescapably in the overwhelming wrathfulness of Lama Tashi’s gaze.

“I agree that action is needed,” Lama Tashi said after a while, in what felt like from a different lifetime.

Deeply disconcerted, Tom saw his neighbor’s expression segue back to its usual tranquil demeanor. Never had he guessed that the mild-mannered guru possessed such core-shaking power. With a shudder, he recognized why Lama Tashi had always shown him such compassion—not only because of what tormented him now, but because of what he understood lay ahead. It was going to get even worse.

Lama Tashi knew that he had Tom’s undivided attention. “Nothing in the future is decided,” he said, speaking directly to his thoughts. “It is up to you to create the causes for the effects that you wish to experience. You create your own reality.”

There was a lengthy pause while Tom absorbed what had just happened. Staring at him he asked, “What are you suggesting?”

Later, before going to bed, Lama Tashi stood outside his home looking into the darkness—the space which, for his neighbor, was a theatre of horror. The source of baleful specters that came to torment Tom, that held him transfixed by dread, yet somehow compelled to return night after night, bourbon in hand.