He shook his head no. She knew as well as he that all creatures were sacred and that the very worst papa attached to taking a life.

She flew to the drain board where the washed and dried pot lay overturned, snatched it up and shoved it in his hand, making motions to indicate that he should capture the thing and take it out into the night. Far out. Over the next ridge, if possible.

And so he lifted the pot to the wall, but the tarantula, with its multiple eyes and the heat of its being, anticipated him, shooting down the adobe surface as if on a hurricane wind to disappear, finally, into the mysterious dark space beneath his wife’s bed.

Geshe

In the morning, at an hour he supposed might be something like three-thirty or four o’clock, the first meditation session of the day began. Not that he’d slept much in any case, Karuna insisting, through gestures and the overtly physical act of pinching his upper arm between two fingers as fiercely tuned as any tarantula’s pedipalps, on switching beds, at least for the night. He didn’t mind. He welcomed all creatures, though lying there in the dark and listening to the rise and fall of his bride’s soft rasping snores, he couldn’t help wondering just what exactly the tarantula’s message had been. (I am the karmic representative of the arachnid world, here to tell you that all is well amongst us, which is why I’ve come to bite your wife. Hooray! Jabba-jabba-jabba!)

Geshe Stephen, who’d awakened them both with a knuckle-­rap at the door that exploded through the yurt like a shotgun blast, was long-nosed and tall, with a slight stoop, watery blue eyes, and two permanent spots of moisture housed in his outsized nostrils. He was 62 years old and had ascended to the rank of Geshe—the rough equivalent of a doctor of divinity—through a lifetime of study and an unwavering devotion to the Noble Eightfold Path of the Gautama Buddha. He had twice before sought enlightenment in a regimen of silence, and he was as serene and untouched by worldly worry as a breeze stirring the very highest leaves of the tallest tree on the tallest mountain. Before the retreat began, when the 13 aspirants were building their domiciles and words were their currency, he’d delivered up any number of parables, the most telling of which—at least for this particular aspirant—was the story of the hermit and the monk.

They were gathered in the adobe temple, seated on the floor in a precise circle. Their robes lay about them like ripples on water. Sunlight graced the circular walls. “There was once a monk in the time of the Buddha who devoted his life to meditation on a single mantra,” the Geshe intoned, his wonderfully long and mobile upper lip rising and falling, his voice so inwardly directed it was like a sigh. “In his travels, he heard of an ancient holy man, a hermit, living on an island in a vast lake. He asked a boatman to row him out to the island so that he could commune with the hermit, though he felt in his heart that he had reached a level at which no one could instruct him further, so deeply was he immersed in his mantra and its million-million iterations. On meeting the hermit, he was astonished to find that this man too had devoted himself to the very same mantra and for a number of years equal to his own, and yet when the hermit chanted it aloud the monk immediately saw that the hermit was deluded and that all his devotion had been in vain—he was mispronouncing the vowels. As a gesture of compassion, of karuna”—and here the Geshe paused to look round the circle, settling on Karuna with her shining braid and her beautiful bare feet—“he gently corrected the hermit’s pronunciation. After which they chanted together for some time before the monk took his leave. He was halfway across the lake when the oarsman dropped both oars and stared wildly behind him, for there was the hermit, saying, ‘I beg your pardon, but would you be so kind as to repeat the mantra once more for me so that I can be sure I have it right?’ How had the hermit got there? He had walked. On the water.” Again the pause, again the Geshe’s eyes roaming round the circle to settle not on Karuna, but on him. “I ask you, Ashoka: What is the sound of truth?”

Ashoka

His name, his former name, the name on his birth certificate and his New York state driver’s license, was Jeremy Clutter. He was 43 years old, with a B.A. in fine arts (he’d been a potter) and an M.A. in Far Eastern studies; a house in Yorktown that now belonged to his first wife, Margery; and a middle-aged paunch, of which he was—or had been—self-conscious. He’d met Sally at a week-long Buddhist seminar in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and she’d pointed out to him that the Buddha himself had sported a paunch, at the same time touching him intimately there. In his former life he’d made a decent income from a dot-com start-up, thepotterswheel.com, that not only survived the ’01 crash but had become robust in its wake. Money built his yurt. Money paid off Margery. Money embellished the Geshe’s grace. And the Geshe gave him his true name, Ashoka, which, when translated from the Sanskrit, meant “Without Sadness.”

Ironwood

The second morning’s meditation session, like all the ensuing ones, was held out-of-doors, on a slightly pitched knob of blasted dirt surrounded by cactus and scrub. There was a chill to the air that belied the season, but to an aspirant, they ignored it. He chanted his mantra inside his head till it rang like a bell, and he resolved to bring a jacket with him tomorrow. Geshe Stephen kept them there till the sun came hurtling over the mountains like a spear of fire, and then he rose and dismissed them. Bowing in his holy, long-nosed way, the Geshe took Ashoka gently by the arm and held him there until the others had left. With a steady finger, the finger of conviction, the Geshe pointed to a dun heap of dirt and rock in the intermediate distance and then pantomimed the act of bending to the ground and gathering something to him. Ashoka didn’t have a clue as to what the man was trying to impart. Geshe Stephen repeated the performance, putting a little more grit and a little less holiness into it. Still, he didn’t understand. Did he want him, as an exercise, a lesson, to measure the mountain between the space of his two arms extended so as to reduce it to its essence? To dirt, that is?