"Dogfish Happiness" by Adam Stumacher

Here in the ashram, two o'clock in the afternoon is the time of rose petals.Here in the ashram, two o'clock in the afternoon is the time of rose petals. This is the moment when all the sannyasins converge from whatever work duty we're on that day, and we stream into the center of Rajneeshpuram. We toss down rakes and bulk mailing lists and spatulas, and we wander out into the streets just as Marvin Gaye begins gushing out of the overhead speakers. We throw our heads back and close our eyes. Every direction shimmers orange and maroon with our clothes, and our beaded malas swing back and forth as we dance. While the helicopters circle overhead, we are the fluid sway of buttocks and breasts; finally, we are at home in our own bodies. We lean into the music and release, but we don't open our eyes.Then the Sannyasin Security in their orange uniforms walk past, dancing and laughing. We laugh with them. We are not blind. Yes, those are assault rifles in their hands, and this makes us laugh. Yes, we see the gun barrels leaning out of helicopter doors, and this makes us laugh as well. Because Bhagwan has revealed to us that to laugh is the ultimate freedom. It is only this laughter and the quivering glow of our bodies that matter now. And now the girls dance past throwing flower petals onto the street, and we smile because our hands remember the stiff soil under those roses.Helicopter blades whirling and Marvin Gaye's liquid voice, and then behind the girls, gliding past in a black sedan, comes Bhagwan himself: an old man with a cloud of white beard and a laser grin. An electric surge crackles out into the crowd as his car passes. Now we can feel his presence, the graceful probing of his mind, and many of us collapse. We yell and cry and spit and kiss and beam, and most of all we dance with his presence because this is why we are all here.This is why we take sannyas, our vows as disciples, and why we adopt new names. This is why we wear only the colors of the setting sun, along with the mala, a necklace made of 108 sandalwood beads and a black-and-white locket of our master's smiling face. This is why we wake up with our shoulders raw from working the garden. This is why we withstand the panicked letters of parents, the amused eyes of news anchormen, the spittle in our faces every time we leave the ashram and walk down the street in Antelope. In Rajneeshpuram during the time of rose petals, we can feel the charge of a holy presence and finally we are home. We will do anything to hold onto this moment.. . .Rupda, whose name used to be something else, sticks her head out the window of the old Datsun and lets the wind flap inside her cheeks. She imagines she is some prehistoric bird swooping low to the ground. Her wings skim the cornrows that edge the blacktop, and they throw shadows onto the gas stations and powerlines that blur past. She prepares to rocket skyward. But then her father, whose new name is Yogesh, pats her on the shoulder.“Watch out for mailboxes, dove.”The vinyl seat sticks to the backs of her legs.Rupda is in the navigator seat, her father said, but she hasn't looked at a single map yet. It is summer, and they are somewhere in Ohio, or was it Iowa? One of the vowel states. She is no good at geography. And besides, in summertime she doesn't want to think about school. She'll be in seventh grade this year, but for now she won't think about the eighth grade girls pulling at her mala until the beads scatter on the floor, or that fat Ms. Snyder snickering at her orange-dyed PE clothes. No, it's summer, and this road goes straight as far as she can see. That's all the geography she needs at the moment. And anyway, wherever they are it's hot and flat and boring.“Please, dad. Just this once.”“We can't stop there, dove. It just isn't possible.”” I mean, we can just get fries and a shake. That's vegetarian.”“The backseat is full of wholesome food.”Of course, she never really wanted to come along on this stupid trip to begin with. July is the best month at River Run, their commune back in Vermont. The frog pond is warm enough for swimming, and the commune always has lots of summer visitors. And Champak said in his last letter that he might be coming back then. Champak, whose name is Alan again now that his mother isn't a sannyasin anymore, is already in high school. His ears are too big for his head, and he hides them in a blonde flop of hair. On River Run in summertime, he is the pipeline to everything cool in the outside world: Grandmaster Flash, parachute pants, wine coolers. Might see you in July, said his letter, so of course Rupda wanted to stay. But she knew that when her father makes up his mind, the only conversation he can have is the one where he repeats his reasons over and over.“This summer is the one time when we can make the drive all the way out to Oregon,” Yogesh said. “And besides, your mother would have wanted this.” His lower lip had that slight shudder as he spoke, like at the funeral.From what Rupda remembered, her mother hated anything resembling religion, and if she were still alive she never would have even let them move onto River Run, not to mention driving across the country to Rajneeshpuram. But how could she argue when her father's lip had that shudder? So she didn't say a word to him while they packed the trunk. In fact, she kept silent all the way until nine miles past Oneonta, New York, when she had to use the bathroom. Only now they were somewhere in the vowel states, and she had to talk to him again because she was hungry.“Just one chocolate shake, maybe a burger. Please? I mean, what's the big deal?”“Maybe you'd like a piece of fruit, dove.”“We used to go out for burgers with mom. Remember?”“How about a pear? They're perfectly ripe.”Rupda leans her face back out the window and squints her eyes shut again. She finds herself thinking back to that day last summer when she and Champak snuck away from River Run. She remembers the exhilaration of cramming her hand into the commune's cash box while he kept watch at the door, then running barefoot down the dirt road, throwing on sandals when they made it out to the scorching pavement. While they walked the hour into town, Champak told her all about the secret underwater passageways in Mario Brothers, which of course she had never played because the commune didn't have a TV, not to mention Nintendo. Then they were passing through the strip malls at the edge of town, turning into the Burger King parking lot. Doors swung open to the aromatic smack of fryer oil and antiseptic countertops, and they walked inside.“What's the matter, dove?” Her father's hand is on her shoulder again.“Nothing.” She gives him her best caramel smile.“The food at Rajneeshpuram will just blow your mind,” he says. “When we get there, you'll see. Trust me. And my god, the people are just so beautiful, and there's this amazing energy to the meditation, as though—”“Don't you still miss her at all?”He clutches hard at the steering wheel.Rupda turns back to the window, thinking back to how Champak used to make her laugh during meditation. Every morning, after a breakfast of buckwheat pancakes, everybody at River Run would gather together in the meditation room down in the basement, and begin to sway and dance to the music. Dynamic meditation was okay, Rupda thought, because there were no rules. Sometimes she would stick out her tongue and make faces in the mirrored walls, and no one seemed to mind. In fact, one of the sannyasins usually grinned and made a face right back at her. But then last summer Champak came to visit. He tried something different every day: once he got down on all fours and barked like a dog, another time he stood on his head and twiddled his thumbs, a mischievous grin upside down on his lips. After Champak came back, it didn't take long for her to understand how ridiculous River Run really was.Now Yogesh loosens his grip on the wheel. “Of course I miss her,” he says. “I have to deal with it every day.”Rupda slides her legs back and forth across the seat.“That's what this is all about,” he continues. “River Run, Bhagwan, everything. You know that, don't you?”She clears her throat. “On second thought, Jonathan, I'd just love a pear please.”“That's not my name anymore,” he says.They drive on in silence for a time. Rupda thinks back to Champak's last letter, when he wrote to her about his new marine fish tank. About how he had this dogfish that circled around and around the little glass world, because it would sink if it stopped moving. But the fish never got bored, Champak explained, because dogfish don't have any memory. Then, at the bottom of the letter, he signed the name Alan.Her father takes his hand off the wheel and pats her head. “Okay, dove. I'll tell you what: Let's give ourselves something to look forward to. When we cross over into Oregon, we'll stop for a burger. For old time's sake.”Rupda looks out the window again. Green stalks thwack past and the road jets on straight to the horizon.. . .Of course we read the newspapers, too. But these stories just make us laugh. We sit on our cots in the enormous red sleeping tent, leaning into pressure point massages while somebody reads the paper aloud, and we can't help grinning just a little. Because none of the stories are true, even if some of the facts are correct.We laugh because reporters have such a love affair with numbers. If they had their way, we would all just be mathematical values, clean and sexless, on some multi-colored pie chart. Yes, Rajneeshpuram has been here for four years, seven months. Certainly, the year-round population of the ashram is now three thousand two hundred sixty eight. Granted, the original township of Antelope, Oregon has only eight hundred and twelve residents. Bhagwan does, indeed, have ninety-three Rolls Royce, all Corniche models. And he has not uttered a word in public for two years, one month, and three days. But just sitting in his presence is the purest bliss. No reporter has ever written that, because happiness is not something that can be quantified.Nor can a statistician measure the experience of dynamic meditation, so of course the newspapers do not understand us. Every morning, thousands of sannyasins spread ourselves throughout Kabir, the great meditation hall. The walls in this space are all mirrored, and each is covered with a huge laminated photograph of a grinning Bhagwan. At first, the mirrors reflect images of bright figures gently jumping or swaying or spinning. But then wild African drumming sounds begin, and we release. We scream and kick and howl and twist. We fall onto the ground and pound our fists onto the floor. We dance until our necks glisten. All the fury against a world where we never belonged is let out in a cathartic swirl. The mother who never put her glass of bourbon down long enough to notice if we were in the room, the marketing VP who slid his hand up under our skirt in the elevator, the townies who shouted “faggot!” while he drove past us in his dad's sedan, the leggy blondes at cheerleader tryouts who laughed at our second-hand clothes: every morning these people get every last droplet of rage our bodies can wring out. And because of Bhagwan's playful smile on the walls around us, we forgive them all.Then, the drumming stops. We lie panting on the floor, spent and focused and relaxed as never before. Everything is silent and still, and we are one body now. We are the ocean. Inhale, exhale.No, the newspapers will never understand this. We have to laugh at what we read, because there is always so much the writers miss. This morning, they would only report that, on a sixty five thousand acre ranch in the Eastern Oregon desert, three thousand two hundred and sixty eight people are shouting and throwing their bodies around. But those are only the facts. The truth is, we are pulling ourselves out of the womb. The truth is, the reason the world finds us such a threat is really quite simple: we are free.. . .When the Datsun finally crosses over the Oregon border, Rupda's father throws his head back and howls like a coyote. Recently, this has been the way he expresses satisfaction. After a particularly good communal meal at River Run, his yowls are sometimes joined by other sannyasins breaking out into song or drumming on their bowls with chopsticks. Rupda used to love those drum sessions, the loose rhythms and syncopated shouts, but lately she just imagines how embarrassing it would be if somebody from school were watching. And she can't forgive that one time at a band recital when, after her flute solo, a yawp emerged from the back row. Yogesh is now finally in touch with his bliss, he likes to say.“Join in, dove. Just let it all out. Rajneeshpuram here we come.”She digs her fingernails into her leg until they leave red marks, the kind that won't fade for days. The desert mountains seem to smolder outside her window as the sun sinks towards the horizon. By the time they reach the outskirts of some dinky town called The Dalles, the landscape has faded into gray.“This looks like a good place for that burger,” she says.“We're almost there now.” Her father rubs his stomach. “And the Rajneeshpuram kitchen puts out vegetarian curries that will knock your socks off, dove. You sure you still want to do this?”“You promised.”“Okay,” he says. “Just this once. After all, you are in the navigator seat.”Past the bait and tackle shop, they see a sign for a place called “The Black Knight,” with a neon sign of two lances crossed above a flashing steak. The Datsun kicks up dust clouds as it pulls into a parking lot full of pick-ups. When they walk in through the door, burly men swivel around on the barstools and watch them make their way to a booth in the corner. The jukebox is playing some old country song, and Rupda hears silverware clank against plates and somebody murmuring the word “Rajneeshee.” The waitress scowls as she approaches their table.“So it's a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate malt for the young lady.” The waitress looks down at her notepad while she talks. “And for you?” Something in the way she moves her jaw makes Rupda think of a bulldog, or a gym teacher.“Just a trip to the salad bar, please.”“Suit yourself.” The waitress frowns and sidles away from the table. The hum of conversation starts up again, but Rupda can't help noticing the other customers watching them over mugs of after-dinner coffee.Yogesh laughs suddenly. “You see, dove, we make people uncomfortable. We make them question themselves. That's a very important role to fill.” His face settles into a grin as he drums on the table with his fingertips.Rupda imagines the waitress in the formless jogging pants of a P.E. teacher, blowing rhythmically on a whistle and jotting hash marks on her clipboard. The class circles around and around the track, and over on the other side of the fence the cutters blow cigarette smoke out their nostrils and laugh at Rupda every time she passes. If only they could have seen her last summer, with Champak. Down by the frog pond, when he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of Camels, which he thwacked over and over against his thigh as told her about that scene in Beverly Hills Cop when Eddie Murphy pretended to have herpes. Sunset was already streaking the sky by the time he opened the pack and flared a match. He lit a second cigarette against the first and passed it to her. Her throat blazed and she squinched her eyes, but by then it was dark enough Champak probably couldn't see her face. He put his arm casually across her shoulders and let it linger there.Her father's drumming has gotten louder on the tabletop now, and the other customers are turning around again on their barstools. Rupda reaches out and places a hand on his fingers until he stops.“Maybe they're right to stare,” she says. “Maybe there's something wrong with us.”“Would you rather be normal? Normal wasn't enough for us. Not after—”“But everybody hates us.” She picks up the peppershaker and starts pouring it out onto her napkin.Her father fidgets under the table, like it's killing him to hold back from drumming. “Remember that first meditation retreat at River Run? How you couldn't stop smiling?”“You know, mom would never sit next to us if she could somehow walk into this place.”“You kept spinning and spinning, looking around the room at all the dancing people.”The pepper flakes fall into the creases in the napkin and then spill over onto the tabletop. Rupda closes her eyes. “I mean, if she could somehow be alive again and walk through that door right now, she would sit over on one of those stools by the counter. She'd pretend like she didn't even know us.”“You just completely let go that day, during the second stage of dynamic meditation.” Yogesh starts a soft drumbeat once again. “You cried and beat your fists on the floor. Snot got all in your hair. Do you remember? And then after, you smiled at me. That was it. Don't you see? We were finally home. That day was just about the first time I'd seen you smile since—”Rupda keeps her eyes shut. “You don't listen, Jonathan. You never listen. Maybe that's why mom did it, you know? Maybe if you ever stopped and listened, she wouldn't have—”The sound of her father's drumming stops, and Rupda realizes the jukebox is also silent, and she can't hear any of the other customers, either. For a moment she imagines she is all alone in the diner, alone except for one other customer. Her mother sits at a barstool, pasty-faced in her hospital gown like the way she looked the last time Rupda saw her, after she swallowed all those pills. Rupda calls out her name, but her mother just swivels away on the stool and stands up. Her bare feet slap loudly on the linoleum as she walks out of the restaurant.A clinking sound makes her open her eyes to see the waitress putting a plate down on the table. The other booths are starting to empty out now. Across the table, her father is holding his face in his hands. His shoulders are still.“The salad bar closes in ten minutes.” The waitress's voice is almost gentle. “You better hurry.”But for a long time, the two of them just sit there. Rupda looks down at her cheeseburger, but she doesn't move.“I'm sorry,” she says. “I didn't mean that.”“That's okay, dove.” Her father pats her hand, gives an unsteady grin, and stands up. “I better get something to eat,” he says.. . .Sure we have fears, just like everybody else. We are only human. But unlike so many who distract themselves by turning on the television or shopping for a new appliance, we are confronting our fears. Here in Rajneeshpuram, we are taking precautions.We are afraid of AIDS, for example. Bhagwan has shown us, through his advisor Ma Ananda Sheela, that AIDS will kill most of the world's population. So of course we are afraid, but we are also very careful. As Bhagwan has instructed, we wash our hands with alcohol before every meal. We also use alcohol to wipe down toilet seats before and after each use. And of course, when we open our bodies to each other, when we release and share ourselves in physical union, we wear condoms. Condoms, and rubber gloves. These rules are designed to protect our rose petal clarity, our electric charge of holiness. If anyone fails to take these precautions, we report them to Sannyasin Security. This is an act of great compassion.But our most pressing fear at the moment is the local election. Of course, this is not a new fear for Rajneeshpuram. Even the town of Antelope did not want us here at first, but our community continued to grow like a tree, and this neighboring town became intertwined in our branches, and now we are one. As of the most recent municipal election, sannyasins have a controlling majority in city council, and soon we will rename the town into “City of Rajneesh.” No, we are not afraid of elections in Antelope. Our fear is the Wasco County Commissioner elections tomorrow. There are some candidates who do not understand our bliss, who have never shared a meal with us or joined with us in dance, and they swear they will close us down.As Ma Ananda Sheela would say Bhagwan would say, an election is just one more way the newspaper tries to reduce a fluid, human situation down to cold numbers. But sannyasins know how to dance with anything, even numbers. We can laugh our way to liberation through elections, as well. Like all other fears here at Rajneeshpuram, this one is being confronted, and the problem will be resolved with love.Just this afternoon, a group of sannyasins traveled to the county seat in The Dalles, and we walked into many restaurants there. The other customers spat in our faces, of course, but we only smiled in return. Beaming with love, we carried small vials over to the salad bars, and we poured them into the dressings. Nothing serious, of course. Just a soft kiss of salmonella, the dosage very carefully calibrated. Yes, some people may be sick, but only for a few days. Only long enough to keep them away from the polls tomorrow. Ultimately, this action is in everyone's best interest. Because by confronting all fears, Rajneeshpuram will continue to flourish as a great tree, filling the desert with pulsing, green life.. . .The hospital waiting room is crowded with young mothers leaning up against the walls, lumberjacks squatting with magazines. But the chairs to either side of Rupda remain empty. She doesn't really mind, though. She's used to it. This is just like the school cafeteria at lunchtime.She bounces her feet on the floor and looks around, imagining the waiting room as the galley of a flimsy ship heaving side to side in a storm, the people crushed up against each other, green-faced and vomiting. Then she notices some movement rippling through the crowd on the far side of the room. Everybody moves aside and a tall nurse approaches her chair.“Your father will be fine, hon. Don't worry. He'll be just fine.” The nurse has a sad face, and her neck is somehow too long for the rest of her body. “It's just some sort of food poisoning.”Rupda stops kicking the floor, but she doesn't say anything. The nurse reaches out and touches her shoulder.“What's do they call you, hon?”Rupda looks up at the too-tall nurse, and smiles warmly. “I'm Lindsey,” she says.“Such a pretty name. Your father is sleeping, but if you'd like I'll take you in to see him.”Lindsey nods and follows the nurse back through the sea-sick galley, passing through the swinging double doors. Then they're in a long hallway of recovery rooms, and the nurse gestures towards a doorway.“Just go on in and have a seat, hon. The doctor will be right with you.”As soon as Lindsey enters the room, the door swings open behind her and a man in scrubs sticks his head in for a moment, looking at her wordlessly. His face is covered in a surgical mask, but Lindsey thinks she recognizes those grinning eyes from photos hanging all around the commune, and she imagines the mask must be covering a white cloud of beard, that this must be Baghwan. But the door swings shut before she can say anything.She walks over to her father's bedside, taking in the pale green cast of his face, the steady rise and fall of his chest. Machines from the next room over fill the room with a soft bleeping sound, and she looks around herself, unsure what to do.Then she notices that someone has left a scalpel on the countertop, and without thought she picks it up, feeling its weight in her hand. Without thought, she returns to her father's bedside and leans forward, pulling on the cord of his mala. The sandalwood beads are smooth and hard between her fingers as she holds the blade against the string, ready to cut. And then she stops.There is a frozen moment, like that instant last summer when Champak held her cheek in his hand down by the frog pond, before he leaned forward to kiss her and slid his hand up under her tee-shirt, and before the next morning when he laughed and blew his blonde mop out of his face, reminding her this was just a summertime fling. A frozen moment, like that instant during their first dynamic meditation at River Run, when she stared into the mirror and saw her father whirling and laughing, and she felt the slow rise of the sob in her chest. His eyes were closed and a sort of serenity had settled onto his face, like the expression of peace the mortician crafted onto her mother's features for the open casket. She wonders if maybe, her mother, too, had a moment like this, feeling the weight of that handful of pills, listening to them rattle, before she threw them into her mouth.But of course. Lindsey will never know. The best she can do is set the scalpel back down on the bedside table and straighten the mala around her father's neck, flipping the amulet over until Bhagwan's picture is grinning up at her once again. And then, amidst the steady bleep of the machines from next door, she reaches down to cradle his head, holding him close against herself and silently promising that, whenever they get back out onto the road, she will do a better job in the navigator seat.