First, I had hoped that she wouldn’t ever call. Then, when she came, that it would be to say please forget what was said on the train. It had so many ways to go wrong. I wasn’t a killer for hire, I didn’t want to be a killer for hire, I even understood the standard definitions of the difference between right and wrong. Yet here I was, playing it out, drawn to it somehow, and instead of doing the simple thing, walking away, I was trying to come up with a gimmick that would make it stop. When someone has to cough up the cash, things turn to smoke, mist, a puff of dust, to be scattered on the wind. That was what I really wanted to happen.

I said, “If you want to make it earlier, you can text me, the way I told you. Otherwise, I’ll see you here at three. With the money.” Very matter-of-fact about it. “Or I walk away.” See how sane that was?

CHAPTER FIVE

DUKKHA, BABY. IT LEADS TO KARMA

“I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.”

OSCAR WILDE, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

I DIDN’T HEAR FROM HER. But I wasn’t supposed to.

From the second-story window of my house I can see a bit of the county road. At around 2:00, I started watching. I told myself that I was doing it so I could be sure no one was following her and also so that I could go down to #46 and be there to stop her from getting nervous and driving up to my house or calling me or texting me. But I suspected it was because I was impatient, meaning that I had started to want this to happen, that desire had entered the playing field. Woodstock probably has more Buddhists per capita than anyplace else on the East Coast. There’s the Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, the Tibetan Buddhist Center, straight up above the town, on the saddle between Guardian Mountain and Lookout Mountain, the North American seat of the 17th Karmapa.

Then there’s the Zen Mountain Monastery, a few miles to the west in Mount Tremper.

You can’t be around Buddhism very much and not know that desire is problematic.

The essence of the Buddha’s teaching is the Four Noble Truths.

The Second Noble Truth is that the root of all suffering is desire.

This comes in three forms, which he described as the Three Roots of Evil, or the Three Fires, or the Three Poisons. The first of these is Greed and Desire.

It has been my own personal experience and observation, that Truth is easy to see, unless Desire clouds your mind. Lies succeed by speaking to Desire. The most successful lies are the ones we tell to ourselves. Thus speaketh my inner bodhisattva when it sits beneath the bodhi tree.