Note: [In this retelling of my trip to Adidam Fijian Island, Naitauba], names have been changed. That person almost biting my ankles is a completely real person -- but not named Daphne. And it was not a "Bruce" driving that truck off into the night in the other chapter...it was the only wellmuscled white person on the Island.

We filled our plates and I found an empty area on the mat between sone women who greeted me in a friendly way. Though I had peeled off the anti-nausea patch after getting off the boat, I was still swimming in the haze of this drug. In the same muffled way that I was aware that Daphne was keeping closer track of me than was comfortable, I noticed that I was dressed wrong and had the wrong haircurt. I was surrounded by women and each one had long, flowing hair, a carefully made up face, painted nails, plenty of jewelry. They were wearing silky flowered skirts, delicate pastel-shaded tank tops, and tight wide belts.

My hair was cut so short it could easily stand on end if I rubbed it a little or went to sleep with it wet. I was wearing no makeup. On my wrist was a two dollar watch I'd bought in a drugstore. I was wearing a pair of cotton pants, and an ordinary blue t-shirt. My body felt even more wrong than my clothes. The contrast was so stark I felt like I had just pulled up on a boy's dirt bike, turning very sharply at the front door and gouging a long strip out of the velvety lawn, and was now sitting on my helmet while everyone else tucked their perfectly waxed legs under them.

I looked across the room at the men who were hunched over their plates, shovelling their food in with plastic chopsticks. They were all wearing old shorts and undershirts. Their hair was scraggly and they looked sweaty. They looked like the hired gardeners of the women, not like the husbands.

I began to eat slowly, still wondering if I was hungry, until it dawned on me that these beautifully groomed women were bolting their food so fast they were hardly chewing between bites. I had always been a slow eater and I made no attempt to match their speed. I'd eaten about a fifth of my food when I head a bell ring and everyone jumped up, rushing their tin plates out a back screen door. I followed them to a giant dishpan brimming with a murky, warm soup. Into theis greasy brew we dipped our plates and chopsticks, tossed them into a drying rack, and ran.

I had been on the Island less than fifteen hours when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It startled me because I was in the middle of what I thought was a very serious ceremony. I was led away from the chanting and ash and kumkum and water to a small windowless concrete room and offered a chair.

In a different mood I might have identified this room as a cell, but still luxuriating in the warm cacoon of the ear patch drug, I was too delighted to think in terms of cells. Every interaction on this Island, I understood, was some form of purification or blessing. All I needed to do was tell the truth and I would be made whole again.

"We've been looking over your retreat application and we have a question."

Great, I thought. An immediate opportunity to tell the truth. The Guru was blessing me already.

"You've written here that you've been in an intimate relationship with Sam."

"Yes." I was doubly pleased now. The Guru was going straight for something significant.

"We're confused. We have no record of this relationship having being formalized."

"Formalized?"

"Approved."

"Who would have approved it? It wasn't hidden. Everyone knew about it."

"The Island, as I'm sure you know, has to approve a relationship."

"But until last night I didn´t know anyone on this Island. Who would have known if a relationship was right or wrong for me?"

"I think you're missing the point. Everything we do in this community must be lawful. It isn't lawful to just make an independent decision and plunge into a relationship without drawing on the wisdom of the larger culture."

"We didn't plunge in. We go to know each other slowly."

"Well we'll put here that it was a celibate relationship."

"But it wasn't."

"It's not possible to have a noncelebate, nonapproved relationship."

What could I say to this? Before I could speak Carol said, "You're not saying you actually had sex?"

"Yes."

"Look," said a dark haired man who needed a bath, "This isn't going to work. Let me type this in."

The woman at the computer moved aside and the man, taking her chair, began to type briskly.
"What are you putting?" I asked.

"Celibate exploratory relationship."

"But that wasn't what it was."

"We can't lie about it, " said a reed-thin blonde man. "Let me try," and he sat down at the computer, moving the mouse briskly across the mouse pad and deleting the last section.

"We can't send that to the Guru," said the dark haired man, not moving away from the blonde man's shoulder.

"What kind of sex did you have?" asked the woman doctor.

"Normal," I said, wondering what she was getting at.

She said more sharply, "What I mean is, you didn't have an orgasm did you?"

"Yes, " I said.

"Oh God!" said the dark haired man, sweating more profusely. "How the fuck are we supposed to write this up? I'm going to get eaten alive for this."

"How could you have had an orgasm? Did you just totally disregard the guidelines?"

The guidelines! Something I could speak about with some clarity. "When I heard I was supposed to go to the clinic to find out about the guidelines I did. We followed the guidlines to the letter."

Although I had not liked the fact that there were guidelines, I had actually quite liked the guidelines themselves. They seemed a nice way to make a gentle, thoughtful transition from being friends to being lovers, and they were also in line with safe sex recommendations.

"Then how did you have an orgasm?"

"I wasn't told I couldn't."

“No one told you orgasms were not permitted?’

“No.’

"Then surely you must have realized you were being given ridiculuous advice."

"No."

"Look, she's new," said the thin blonde man. "Maybe she honestly didn't know."

"I didn't," I said, feeling uncomforatble that they were even tossing around the possibilty that I was lying.

The devotees' quarters were very simple. The rooms were concrete-floored, with unpainted two by four and board walls. The the joints were filled up faster than they could be cleaned with a black powder, produced by large ants. Cockroaches, of a huge and sturdy variety, roamed freely and ate anything remotely tastey such as bars of soap and the bindings of books. The were no flush toilets for us, just tiny shacks, each containing a tap, a metal bucket, and a toilet so filthy that it was hard to stay in the shack long enough to get my pants down.

The woman's shower house was designed along similar lines. It was concrete floored with a few shower heads in a row. Out of these shower heads came water so scalp-numbingly cold it was hard to imagine where it was drawn from. I could get wet enough to soap up, but staying under the water for long enough to rinse off the soap was very unpleasant. In this shower room was a moldy shelf on which there were a few old razors and shards of soap. On the wall was a piece of old mirror.

I was fascinated by how immaculately groomed the woman were. Where did they put on the make up? Where did they dye their hair? Where did they pluck their eyebrows? Not only where, but when? Each day I was falling so hopelessly behind on my respoinsiblities that I had not yet filled out one of the checklists which were supposed to be submitted each evening before bed. I was aware that I was only doing a small fraction of what others were doing, yet I barely had time to step under the shower and comb my hair. The men seemed to not even have enough time for this.

I often had the sense that Daphne was a sharp nosed dog, following close at my ankles, ready to bite them if I broke a rule no one had told me about. One morning, after an icy shower, I pulled on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and raced along the path to the meditation hall. The beam of Daphne's flashlight slid up my legs and stopped on the hem of my shorts. "It is not acceptable for women to wear shorts," she said as she sped passed me, determined to claim a good patch of floor for her meditation pillow.

Or I would be inching my way carefully toward my bed, hoping not to be observed, so tired I could hardly see straight. And there would be Daphne, close behind me. "Have you filled out your checklist?"

"No," I said the first time this happened, "but I just need to close my eyes for a few minutes."

"But you haven't fulfilled all your agreements."

"I'm so tired I think I'm going to throw up," I said, weaving slightly, not as an act.

"On this Island, fatigue is not a reason to sleep."

This claim struck me as comical and I almost smiled, but I also felt a wave of panic.

Definitely the easiest thing to do would have been to develop a strong dislike of everyone on the Island. This would have been the simplest defense. And certainly I heard plenty of things about them to dislike. I had good reason to hate their guts. But somehow I could not summon the dislike.

For a week I simply watched them, detatched, as if I had landed on Mars and was trying to figure out the language, the customs. During that first week I was most acutely aware of absence: the absence of laughter, the absence of joking, of ordinary delight. There was plenty of ecstasy over God, but there was no ordinary pleasure in life. There was no lighthearted music. People's faces looked tired and drawn to me, and the men had a sinewy quality to them. They all looked like they were desperately in need of a large hamburger.

And the women, for all their makeup and lace underwear, had a harshness to them. Though I felt like a twelve year old boy from a gang in East Oakland, and planned never to own a pair of crotchless black underwear such as I had seen others getting into, I felt much gentler. I was even a little afraid of this harshness in them, and sometimes when I slipped down to the kitchen to try to get a piece of bread, I could feel my heart beating in a way I had last felt when I was about six and had sometimes found myself playing at a friend's house who turned out to have the scary, mean type of mother I was not used to.

I felt that same fear about stepping into the kitchen and being reprimanded by one of the women who worked there. It was not that I was not allowed to have a piece of bread -- this was actually permissible -- but if the kitchen staff was in a certain harried mood, this privilege was temporarily revoked. The only way I knew to discover if the rule had been revoked or not was to cheerfully smile and walk toward the breadboard. If I was snapped at, I just gave a second smile and left very quickly. What surprised me was both the razory edge to the snap, and the prickling in my eyes when I felt it, as if I truly were, once again, six years old.

For days there was the promise of popcorn and a video for all the devotees on Friday night. Everyone was looking forward to this immensely, which reassured me about what lay beneath their constant bowing and humble praises. For two hours we would all be allowed to relax. Since I had been slipping away to my old retreat room every day for some peace and solitude, the video didn't hold quite the thrill for me that it did for the others who had not had even fifteen minutes of free time since I had arrived, but I was still looking forward to it. The posted schedule said that we would do yoga at 5:00, eat dinner at 5:15, have the Arati at 5:35, study and momorize sacred texts at 6:00, do Pranayama at 6:30, answer our diary questions at 6:45, and then from 7 to 9 we would watch the movie, followed by mediation form 9 to 10. At that point the lucky ones would get ready for bed while others who had fallen behind on their responsibilities would try to get caught up.

At 7 a bell sounded and everyone rushed out of their rooms clutching their meditation pillows, hurrying toward the room which had a video monitor in it. People were in a mood I'd never seen them in, joking and even laughing a little.

We all crowded into the room, arranging our pillows all over the floor. One or two people even leaned back against their intimate partners. This was the first exchange of warmth I'd witnessed between two people of the opposite sex.

The lights were turned off and the video started. At first the image was almost jarring in its brightness. I was used to the colours of the island, the sounds of hushed voices, the ocean, birds, and the stillness of the meditation halls.

The starting credits were still playing when I heard a whispering near the door. The video was snapped off and the lights clicked on. A man stood in the doorway, ashen faced.

"The Guru is very disturbed."

There was a small but noticeable lag between this announcement and a rustling of concern. I had a sense that for perhaps five or six seconds everyone in the room had been unwilling to pull their attention from the video to attend to a major spiritual crisis. "Can't this wait?" was the question I suspected popped into many minds but was not said out loud. But quickly everyone came to their senses and there were exclamations of worry and facial expressions of deep guilt.

"Everyone down to the main meeting room right away. We've got to turn this situation around."

Down in the meeting room everyone sat up very straight though they looked exhausted.
"Our response it totally inadequate. War has broken out in the Middle East and we're responsible.’

I knew in that moment that I had, beyond any shadow of a doubt, entered a realm of true madness. I pressed my back against the wall though this was considered a lazy and undevotional way to sit. I looked around the room, unable to believe my ears. I also wondered how anyone knew of the war. Clearly, some people must have had access to the news, if the rumour was true.

"It is our lovelessness, our heartlessness, our inability to receive the Godman's love, that is fuelling this war," the priest continued.

Surely someone would object.

"I feel implicated by this," a woman said. "I can feel the hardness in my heart."
I wanted to shout out, "Have you people all lost your minds? What are you saying? What are you believing? How can you possibly swallow this?"

But I sat perfectly still, my back held rigidly against the wall, all my muscles tight. I knew I was alone in my perception. If I spoke I would be convicted as the worst of the traitors, perhaps the one human being on the planet most responsible for this recent war.
A chant began in my mind -- not one of the usual Sanskit ones, but one that went, "This is insane, pay no attention! This is insane, pay no attention!"

The meeting went on for several hours. People cried and confessed new kinds of lovelessness, described the cold stones in their chests where their hearts should have been. Theories were offered through sobs that we were probably responsible for some floods last year and an earthquake in Mexico. After all, it was a psychophysical realm.

I protected myself by alternately chanting my new chant and imagining my family doing certain things. I saw my brother build himself a ham and cheese sandwich on rye bread with mayonnaise and pickles, then sit in a round backed kitchen chair and eat it in big bites, holding it out now and then to my mouth in a warm big brotherly manner. I saw my mother scraping the ice from her car windshield. I saw my grandmother reciting the Apostles's Creed in the small church I loved to go to with her. I saw our dog bounding through a wheat field. I pictured each of these things in minute details -- the texture of the ice on the windshield, the smell of the cold, windruffled dog.

At last the meeting seemed to be winding down, but I was wrong about this. "Now each of us must write a personal response to the Guru confessing how we are implicated in this recent consideration and making a commitment to do some serious penance. Be back in forty five minutes with a typed response."

There was a flurry of movement as people hurried back to their rooms to begin confessing. Numb, I walked back to my room. Not having a type writer, I got out a piece of paper and a pen but after I had written the salutation, I could not think of one single word to write.
How could I say I was sorry I had caused a war in a country I'd never even been to? I was desperately sorry for certain mistakes I had made, but I wasn't about to take on the burden of millions of black-haired strangers.

Twenty minutes passed and I still had not written a word. I wanted to run away to the Native's village, finding my way along the rutted road with a flashlight. When I got there we'd just smile at each other and they would invite me into a grass hut and give me the fat black baby to cuddle that they'd passed over to me on the boat. Perhaps we'd share another root, with bites passed to me in the tip of the machete.

Or maybe I could take the blanket from my bed and hide out in the forest or find a beach no one knew about.

Daphne appeared in my doorway. "Just about finished? What typewriter are you going to use?"

"I'm still working," I said, trying to give an impression of deep concentration.

"Well don't take too much longer. It doesn't need to be more than two or three pages. Bruce is taking them out in the truck soon."

She left me alone.

Could I somehow take the whole thing as a metaphor? I knew it was meant literally, but might there not be some way to accept it as a metaphor and cough up a response? Nothing came to me.

Or what if I looked at it all very abstractly -- even, say, in quantum mechanical terms? Or something along those lines. Suppose I just considered us all to be vibrations of energy. Was it not possible that some very mysterious link existed between my energy field and a distant energy field named Hamid or Sharom? No one really understood the true nature of light or gravity, so there was at least a very slight possibility that I had caused this war. The chances were certainly less than one in a hundred billion, but I could leave that part out of my confession.

I knew that none of this was what was being asked of me. Being broken at the heart -- in a way I wanted no part if -- was what was called for now, not some guilt-free interpretation involving physics.

I glanced at my watch. Ten minutes to go. I looked up and saw the head priest standing in my doorway.

"Just about finished?" he asked.

"I'm still working," I said, and he continued on his rounds. I found it hard to take him seriously, though I knew I was meant to take him very seriously. The day before he had dropped by for an unannounced inspection and grading of my room. On a clipboard he had written C+ beside my name, presumably because I had left a purple t-shirt on the table and some books were spread out. I hadn't thought I had enough possessions to create any kind of mess, but apparently I had. He was taking his job so seriously and looked so skinny and sunburnt that I could not help thinking of him as an earnest camp counselor instead of as a high priest.

I heard a bell ringing which I assumed was the final deadline. I reached up and switched off the light and climbed up onto the table I slept on. I lay on my back, my hands behind my head, waiting. I could hear sounds of franticness -- people dashing after the truck with their letters just as it was pulling away into the blackness. I was so tired I felt almost delirious, too tired even to run away.

I woke to the beeping of my alarm clock. Disoriented, chilled, thirsty, still dressed in my clothes, I reached for my flashlight and saw it was indeed four thirty. I had slept through the night and no one had come for me.

In the meditation hall I felt conspicuous, as if even in the darkness I was marked as the unrelenting one who had refused to shoulder her share of the war, but at least I was virtually guaranteed immunity for another hour and a half. It was out of the question to be disturbed during meditation.

At breakfast neither the war nor our letters were mentioned. They were not, in fact, ever mentioned again. I was afraid to ask how things were going in the Middle East because I thought this might lead to the question of my unwritten letter, so I just wondered and wondered. Had a war really broken out? Was it still going on? What was it about? How many people had been hurt? Were any nuclear weapons being used?

I became aware at this point that my mind had split into two distinct parts. There was the part that did not believe for one second that I had any role at all in the Middle East except in the most general way, such as having been a consumer of oil, and not only that but I thought the whole proposition was flat out madness.

Then there was another part of my mind that knew all the rules of the Island. I knew where to walk, where not to walk, what things to say, what questions not to ask, what tone to ask them in. I was coming to understand the logic of the Island, and even to think and function in this logic, though I didn't believe a lot of it. (Ir was this crazy logic, for instance, that kept me silent on he subject of the war when I really wanted to know how all those people were faring.) And then, and this was perhaps the most dangerous of all, I could feel these two parts of my mind struggling with each other, the logic of one snaking through the logic of the other. My thoughts would go like this:

I wonder how bad the situation is in the Middle East.
You can't ask or you might be asked why you never confessed.
Never confessed! Give me a break! Don't give me that bullshit!
If you're nailed for not confessing, you may be kicked off the Island.
So what!
Then you'll lose your only chance to be healed of the torment of your guilt over W's death.
I didn't kill W!
Then why does his death haunt you?
Okay, I'm not sure if I had some role. I just want to feel better.
No chance for that anywhere but at the Godman's Feet.
But how do I know he really is the Godman?
Be careful with that thought. You know the worst offense any human being can commit is to doubt their Guru. The karmic consequences for what you're doing now will be so bad that W's death will seem a picnic in comparison.
Leave me alone!
I'm just trying to warn you.