Judy Copeland

I came to this essay with a vague feeling that the events of my life ran parallel to the Hindu myth of Narada. Yet, in my early drafts, I wrote what Vivian Gornick calls the "situation" without the "story." I narrated the events—a trip planned and deferred, a romance started and ended—but the emotional and spiritual journey was missing. Exploring my dreams, as you will see in the essay, helped me discover my story. - Judy Copeland

Once there was a girl in Japan, a daughter of American missionaries. The girl lived happily until one day, when she was nine, her parents took her away from Japan. They took her away to the States, never to return. For the next two years, she cried herself to sleep at night, longing for her friends and her dog in Japan, grieving for the staccato syllables of her mother tongue, for the way the frogs sang in the rice paddies and the pine trees bent in the typhoons. For a world lost to her forever.

By the time she was sixteen and living with her parents in the Indian city of Varanasi, she'd lost too many people and places to grieve anymore. Instead she came to believe in a secret religion all her own, a patchwork of idiosyncratic notions stitched together with Hindu and Buddhist ideas borrowed from the people her parents tried to convert. And in her religion, love was an illusion, a trick her heart played on her. She traced the pain she felt at leaving people and places to her love for them, and she traced this love to her mistaken belief that they were real, when in fact nothing lasted. When in fact every world she'd ever known had vanished from her life with the twirl of an airplane propeller.

Already at age four, she had begun to doubt what her senses told her. One day, as she stood on her doorstep waving goodbye to a friend and watching him walk home, something amazing happened. Before her very eyes, he grew smaller until he disappeared into a tiny point on the horizon.

He's not real, she thought.

After that, the world of people and things seemed to her like an optical illusion, a movie on a screen. Sometimes the girl felt an almost unbearable yearning to go into that mysterious point on the horizon, to pierce the screen and see the reality behind it.

At sixteen, in Varanasi, she watched the wandering seekers come and go—naked, mud-smeared men who had no homes, no wives, no possessions, their wild gaze fixed on a distant point—and she knew that one day she too would leave everything behind. For the path to the Real lay in forsaking the unreal, in forsaking people, places, and property. To chase the far horizon, to walk through the veil of illusion to the bliss beyond, vanishing in a flash so pure the very thought of it made her rejoice—for this, she was willing to give up every attachment. And so the act of leaving ceased to feel sad for her. Instead, she embraced it as her art form, her holy sacrament. She came to love the whir of airplane propellers, the thrill of hurtling across space and through time, of watching people, cities, and continents grow smaller until they disappeared, because it meant she was getting closer to the Real.

The girl knew by heart the story of the Buddha walking out on his sleeping wife and child one night to go find enlightenment. Far from questioning this scenario, she took its rightness for granted, for she had noticed how little thought her own father gave to her and her mother when God called him to a new place. What troubled her about such scenarios was not that the hero's lover always got left in the lurch but that she herself would not be able to leave properly, when it came her time, unless she first acquired a lover. The classical Hindu ideal of the life-cycle confirmed her lack: To earn the status of homeless wanderer, one had to pass through the stages of student, lover, and hermit. While most people got stuck in the first three stages, the girl vowed to herself, at sixteen, that she would advance through them quickly, checking them off one right after the other like Girl Scout badges and wasting no time in becoming a homeless wanderer. She added “getting a lover” to her list of things to do.

Two years passed, and the girl went to college in the States. One night she met a blue-eyed boy from Oregon. Unlike the girl, who had few friends and often withdrew into closets to escape her roommates' chatter and meditate, he laughed easily and was popular with girls. On the night they met, he told of living his whole childhood in the same house. He said he missed his cat and golden retriever, and especially he missed the damp, mulchy smell of the Oregon rainforest. She talked of the places she hadn't been yet and longed to go—Tibet, the Sahara, the Mountains of the Moon.

One morning in February, after the girl and boy had gone out together two or three times, she emerged from her 8:30 class and saw him standing outside in the snow, waiting for her. He smiled.

“A little gift,” he mumbled, somewhat apologetically, as he thrust into her hands a slim blue paperback book with a Buddha-image on the cover.

Later, sitting cross-legged among the shoes on the floor of her dorm-room closet, she opened the book, Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, the tale of a man wandering in India on a spiritual quest. She saw a description of the hero underlined in light pencil. A few people, it said, “are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.” In the margin the boy had written, “You are also like a star.” Farther into the book, he had written, “Siddhartha reminds me of you.” Could he have guessed her secret goal? Never had she told it to anyone, never had she dreamed it possible for people to communicate their inner beings to each other, never had she even remotely hoped for such a thing as intimacy, and for all these reasons the aphrodisiac effect of feeling understood took her completely by surprise.

Though she hadn't previously thought about her appearance, now she got her hair cut in a stylish sassoon. She traded her glasses for contact lenses. From an Indian student she borrowed black kohl powder to outline her eyes; from her roommates, miniskirts to replace her frumpy missionary hand-me-downs. She even dieted her 5'9” frame down to a Twiggyish 120 pounds, all in an effort to look alluring to the blue-eyed boy from Oregon.

Soon they became lovers. When they were together, she spoke little, and it pleased her that he respected her silences. She was surprised at his gentle touch, at the explosion of colors his caresses could fire inside her mind, at the pleasures to be given and had by the body. Even more, she was surprised that these pleasures didn't sate her appetite but only intensified it.

Before starting the romance, she hadn't considered how she was going to end it. Now she felt out of her depth. She'd just assumed a popular boy like him couldn't be hurt by someone like her, could always find other girls, and now it occurred to her that her plan might be cruel. Most of all, she worried that a bungled ending might poison her future homeless wanderings with a sour aftertaste, leaving her feeling guilt, regret, or envy of others' happiness, dooming her to repeat the same cycle with other lovers, trying again and again until she got the ending right.

One spring evening, the girl and boy slipped into a public garden after closing time to make love beside a lotus pond. Later, as they lay spent on the grass, listening to the crickets, he asked her to marry him.

“If I were going to marry anybody, it would be you,” she said. “But I don't need to marry. I've already put in enough time in schools and closets to check off `student' and `hermit' from my list, so all I need now is a good romance and I can check off `lover.'”

“Is that really what you want from life? To check things off a list?”

It occurred to her that something might be missing from her plan, but she pushed the thought aside.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I've never really thought about it. The good life, I guess. Satisfying work, a woman to love, a house in Oregon. Mountains. Ocean. The time and money to enjoy all those things.”

“I guess we want different things then.”

The boy's face looked sad in the moonlight.

This was not going right. She should do or say something kinder, more graceful, but none of the stories she'd memorized about the Buddha and other famous homeless people covered this particular point.

Befuddled at how to end the romance, the girl simply left things hanging and disappeared, hitchhiking to San Francisco. She paid all her money to a travel agent to get on a flight to India. She pictured herself as a seeker, sleeping in temples; bathing in holy rivers; following dusty paths thronged with pilgrims from Assam, Rajasthan, and Orissa; walking beside sadhus and bear trainers, princes and prostitutes, thinkers and humbugs. Her favorite image was of rising before dawn. She could see herself walking, alone and unafraid, down to the banks of the Ganges to wait for the sun to turn the river blood-red.

Plenty was wrong with that vision, and she knew it. Among other flaws, she remembered from living in India with her parents that she would have to run a gauntlet of flirty men if she took a solitary stroll to the Ganges. Though she chose to airbrush those men out of her fantasy picture, part of her felt afraid to travel by herself. Perhaps that was why she phoned the blue-eyed boy and talked him into going on the trip with her. Or perhaps she wasn't ready to give him up yet. Anyway, he joined her in San Francisco. After the travel agent told them they wouldn't be allowed to room together in India without proof of marriage, they got married. Then, the day before they were to leave, the travel agent took off with their money.

Although the memory of her interrupted trip to India faded into a back closet of her mind, from time to time she would recall a Hindu myth—the story of Narada, a man who took a walk in the desert with God. When God got thirsty, Narada offered to fetch some water, and God sat down to wait. Narada walked to the nearest village. As soon as he knocked on a door, a young woman opened it, a woman so beautiful that Narada forgot what he'd come for. Her parents, as if they'd been expecting him, immediately offered him their daughter's hand in marriage. Gradually, he was drawn into the family business. Twelve years went by happily as Narada prospered and had many children.

Like Narada, the girl who didn't believe in love, now a woman herself, settled into marriage instead. Quite by accident, she'd married into a tribe of lawyers. Dinners at her in-laws' house in Oregon were loud free-for-alls on politics and world affairs, with daughters challenging their fathers and mothers their sons. Raised by Southern Baptists who valued innocuous table conversation above all else, except perhaps the rapture of “being saved,” which was, of course, beyond logical scrutiny, she found this rowdy new world of reason and debate exhilarating. Before long, she entered law school. Meanwhile, her husband, the only one in his family who didn't want to be a lawyer (he was too nice), studied to be a wildlife biologist. They moved into a house near her husband's parents in Oregon.

Whenever the story of Narada flitted through the woman's mind as she pored over a casebook in the law school library, or swam in a cool mountain lake with her husband, she would feel a little shock of memory. It wasn't the nagging feeling that attends procrastination. It was more like one of those silent laughs she sometimes had in her sleep when she realized she was dreaming but she liked the dream and was in no hurry to wake up. From a childhood of being dragged about the world by parents who themselves seemed to move like puppets on strings, going wherever God called them, she'd acquired a certain fatalism. It hadn't occurred to her to question the travel agent's stealing her money any more than she'd questioned his advice that they marry; she simply yielded to her fate, making the best of her new life in Oregon.

Since the day they'd married, she had left one suitcase packed. Sometimes she checked to make sure it was still under their bed, gathering dust in readiness for the day when she would leave. The man noticed her checking it but said nothing, for it was his nature to accept people and animals as they were. He would no more have commented on the woman's peculiar habit of checking her suitcase than reproach a fish for jumping or a cactus for prickling. Instead, he studied her habits, as he would those of a wild animal, to discover what made her look up from her law books and notice him.

They often went backpacking together in the Oregon wilderness, whose protean beauty reminded her of all the places she had lost in her childhood—the rocky seashores of New England, the cone-shaped volcanoes of Japan, the desolation of the high Himalayas. She marveled at her husband's bond with the animals he studied, at his ability to sense where they'd be, what they'd do next, how to get close to them.

Once, on a summer hillside, he picked a wild blackberry and put it in her mouth and she closed her eyes and tasted its sweetness as if she had just been born, a sweetness so real it made her shudder, then open her eyes. For the first time, she looked at the man and did not see a mere fleeting apparition. For the first time, she saw how blue his eyes were, how full and sensuous his lips, how golden the hair on his forearms. Together the man and the woman followed deer in the rainforest and tracked the spoor of coyotes to their desert dens. Together they sat silently in a canoe observing great blue herons stalking their prey, and lay down on a bed of moss to make love with rain splashing on them through the trees like fresh green paint. And the woman began to forget her belief that the world was illusory. When the man showed her birds and butterflies, grasses and glaciers, the colors of the rainbow, she saw them through his eyes, and this made them real to her.

Eventually the woman accepted a lawyer job in San Francisco, and the man quit his job to go with her. Unable to find work as a naturalist in California, he laughed less often now. With the woman always so intent on her legal papers, he felt abandoned in a foreign country. He slept fitfully, dreaming of Oregon, of the shrill whistles of marmots above the timberline, the bugling of elk in the foothills and the yowls of coyotes in the high desert.

Her sleep, too, became troubled. In her dreams her younger selves appeared and spoke to her, but she didn't recognize them as her selves, so deeply was she lost in her present life. One night she saw a Japanese girl with light brown hair, about seven years old, kneeling on a tatami floor, her head bent over a low table, as she penned what appeared to be a letter. Because only the back of the child's head was visible, the woman didn't realize the child's face was the same as hers, though she was able to peer over her shoulder at the letter and read, “My dear auntie, how long will you go on living remotely on your own rear end?” Then the woman's present self appeared in the form of a naked giant, crawling along the ground on all fours. Balanced precariously atop the giant's bare bottom rode a miniature version of the woman's kitchen table, at which she and her husband sat, two tiny homunculi, drinking their morning coffee and reading their newspapers, oblivious to their absurd perch.

Another night, she saw a baby girl in a crib inside a cabin of a ship crossing the Pacific to Japan. Over the crib floated three witches who shrieked, “Birth and dying, birth and dying, birth and dying,” and with every shriek they forced the baby to see a terrible vision, a vision in which all the suffering that had happened in the history of the world seemed to be happening in the same moment, and the baby was forced to see all of it at once: King Herod's soldiers putting an infant to the sword; an old man hemorrhaging to death of dengue fever in a thatched hut; a large frog cannibalizing a smaller one; a lion eating a newborn zebra while the zebra's mother was still giving birth to it; a serial killer torturing a young woman; an ice-age family huddled together in a blizzard, slowly dying of cold and starvation. The baby in the ship's cabin turned red in the face and screamed for the vision to stop, but the witches only shrieked louder, drowning out her cries with their chant.

When at last the shrieks and screams ceased, the woman felt the sun on her shoulders and realized she was standing on a summer hillside with her husband, her eyes closed, her lips parted for him to feed her a wild blackberry, and in a flash she understood that this had been the sweetest moment she would ever have in her life. Her eyes still closed, her lips still parted, she waited to taste the moment again. But before the berry touched her tongue, the three witches began screeching, “Birth and dying, birth and dying, birth and dying,” and forced her to watch the unbearable vision over and over again, until at last she screamed herself awake.

One night she came home from work to find a candle-lit dinner, and on her plate a single red rose. It still shocked and pleased her that the man would think her worth taking the time to cook a five-course dinner for. In the family she'd grown up in, loved ones didn't count as much as work, certainly not as much as God's work. Though she adored the man for making her feel she mattered, she'd never been able to fathom how love could be as important as he treated it. Though she loved him dearly, she'd always kept something back, always kept that packed suitcase under their bed. Now the thought crossed her mind that maybe she'd been wrong. Maybe love was the only real thing.

Before he sat down, he smiled and stroked her cheek, and she sighed with contentment, putting aside the troublesome thought. They ate their soup in silence.

Then he leaned across the table towards her, his eyes no longer smiling. “Remember when we first met and I said you were like a star that travels its own path?” he said. “I guess I hoped that by being with you and watching you I could learn to go inside myself and find my path, but it hasn't worked that way, and I seem to be losing my path, not finding it. So now I'm asking you to teach me how you do it. How does a star find its path through the sky?”

She stared at him, saw tiredness and despair in his eyes, and didn't know what to say. She was lost herself.

“I wish I knew,” she said.

He winced as if she had hit him.

“All these years, and you're still shutting me out, we're still not really close.”

She looked at him across the table, drinking in his face: at thirty-five he remained a beautiful man, with the bluest eyes she'd ever seen. When he looked away in hurt defeat, she noticed a new crease on his face, a little worry-line carved down the center of his forehead, and for the first time, she knew she could not leave him. For the first time, she knew she would love him until she died. It was not his beauty or his kindness that finally bound her to him. It was the aging they had done together.

But when she started to tell him how she felt, he looked uneasy and changed the subject.

That night they made love too fast, too hungrily and desperately, as if it was their last time. The woman fell asleep, and her future self appeared to her as a middle-aged, sari-clad Indian woman with piercing black eyes. In her dream, the woman was sitting next to the Indian on a plane, chatting about being on her way to a job interview in Los Angeles, where she planned to meet her husband and coordinate their career plans. As the woman talked, the Indian fixed her with a quiet stare. The woman shifted her eyes uneasily. The longer the Indian stared, the more manically the woman prattled about husband and career and the higher and falser her voice sounded to her.

Finally, the Indian broke in: “You are not going to Los Angeles. You know that, don't you? You know where this plane is really going.”

The woman's eyes met the Indian's, which grew larger and larger until they ran together and became a whirlpool that drew her inside. “Yes,” the woman admitted as she plunged into the vortex, “I know.”

After the swirling waters released her, she found herself back on the plane facing a movie screen onto which was projected a map of the world. A red line, like the ones used by in-flight magazines to indicate air routes, appeared on the map. From San Francisco, it advanced slowly across the Pacific Ocean towards Asia.

The woman awoke in her bed in San Francisco, thirty-five years old, exactly twelve years after her missed flight to India. But she awoke from more than a dream. In that moment, she recognized her past and future selves, waking at last from the stupor of living in the present. And in that moment, the accretions of her settled life in America washed away from her. Her mind went clean, and she remembered what she had to do.

When she told the man, he wasn't surprised. This time, though, he would not agree to go with her, saying he was going home to Oregon. For her part, she couldn't say when she'd be back—maybe next month, maybe next year, perhaps even the year after that. As crazy as it may seem, she wanted him to wait for her in Oregon. Though she still loved him, perhaps what she loved about him was less being with him than going home to him, and less going home than knowing she could, knowing that at the end of her journey he would be there to hear how a star finds it path through the sky.

Six months after the dream of the red line and a week before her scheduled flight to India, the man stood in front of the fireplace in their apartment, his face white, his lips pressed together in a tight little line, the crease in his forehead deepening until it looked like it was hurting him. He enunciated slowly, as though each word cost him tremendous effort: “I want a divorce.”

She drew her breath in, went stiff with shock, then angrily demanded to know why.

“I'm not happy anymore.”

The woman protested, she fumed, she marshaled her defense, she cross-examined, she split hairs. Though she'd never planned to part from him so gracelessly, she couldn't help herself, she was in too much pain. Even sitting in the closet failed to calm her. Eventually, after she exhausted her fury, she saw how useless it was to try to argue a person into being happy with her. She'd known even before the dream of the red line, even before the man's announcement, but wouldn't admit to herself, that she was losing him.

When the plane lifted off the ground, an old, familiar joy of hurtling across space and through time soothed her into a long sleep. She woke up missing the man and sobbing—and stopped, embarrassed, when she noticed other passengers staring at her.

She thought of Narada, the man who had promised to fetch some water for God but instead married a beautiful girl and forgot about his promise. Twelve years after Narada got married, a torrential rain came. Narada's house and all the riches he'd accumulated were swept away. Despite his frantic efforts to save his wife and children, they too were torn from him by the raging flood. He fainted from the shock. When he came to, he found himself lying in a desert, weeping. The torrent had subsided to a tiny rivulet that was about to dry up. At the sight of it, Narada suddenly remembered his original errand and stooped to catch some of the water in his hands. “What took you so long with that water?” chided a familiar voice behind him. “I've been waiting almost five minutes!”

Reflecting on the story, the woman saw why she'd had to wait twelve years to begin her journey. Before she could get free from the world of illusion, she'd had to do far more than foolishly tick off a checklist; she'd had to wait until the illusion grew real enough to trap her. And it was not until the moment when love finally became real that her release could begin.

A flight attendant handed her a hot towel roll, and the woman wiped her face. Lifting her window shade, she saw that the sun was rising. Across the farthest cloud bank a fiery red streak lengthened and thickened, expanding to color the whole horizon. A familiar voice inside her said: You have no reason to hurry back. Her mouth went dry, and the hairs on the back of her neck quivered, as the sweet thrill of freedom coursed through her.