Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [161]
Sucandra said, “Please, Frank. Join Rudra Cakrin in his room. No one else will move in there, and yet he needs someone. And he likes you.”
“Doesn’t he like everybody?”
Sucandra and Padma regarded each other.
“Rudra was the oracle,” Padma told Frank.
“So?”
Sucandra said, “It seems one old Bön spirit that used to visit him comes back from time to time.”
“Also,” Padma added, “he seems to feel we have lost Tibet. Or failed to recover it. He doesn’t think he will see it again in this life. It makes him . . .”
“Irritable.”
“Angry.”
“Perhaps a little mad.”
“He does not blame you for any of this, however.”
“To him you represent another chance for Tibet.”
“No, he just likes you. He knows the situation with Tibet is hopeless, at least for some time to come.”
An exile. Frank had never been an exile in the formal sense, and never would be; but living on the East Coast had given him a profound sense of not being at home. Bioregional displacement, one might say; and for a long time he had hated this place. Only in the last year had the forest begun to teach him how it could be loved. And if the great eastern hardwood forest had repelled him, how much more might it repel a man from the treeless roof of the world? Who could never go home?
So Frank felt he understood that part of Rudra’s moodiness. The visiting demon, however . . . Well, these were religious people. They weren’t the only religious people Frank knew. It should resemble talking to Baptists, and he had gotten used to that. It was just another worldview in which the cosmos was filled with invisible agents, intervening in human affairs.
He could always focus on the shared pain of displacement. Besides, Sucandra and Padma were asking for his help.
So that night Drepung took him in to see Rudra Cakrin, in a tiny room off the stair landing before the flight to the attic, a space that might once have been a closet. There was only room for a single bed and a slot between it and the wall.
Rudra was sitting up in bed. He had been ill, and looked much older than Frank had ever seen him. “Please to see you,” he said, peering up at him as they shook hands. “You are my new English teacher, Drepung say. You teach me English, I teach you Tibetan.”
“That would be good,” Frank said.
“Very good. My English better than your Tibetan.” He smiled, his face folding into its map of laugh wrinkles. “I don’t know how we fit two beds in here.”
“I can unroll a groundpad down here,” Frank suggested. “Take it up by day.”
“Good idea. You don’t mind sleep on floor?”
“I’ve been sleeping in a tree.”
Startled, Rudra refocused on Frank. Again the strange intensity of his gaze; he looked right into you. And who else had Frank told about his tree house? No one but Caroline.
“Good idea!” Rudra said. “One thing right away—I cannot be, what say—guru for you.”
“That’s okay, I already have a guru. He teaches me frisbee.”
“Good idea.”
Afterward Frank said to Drepung, “He seems fine to me.”
“So you will share a room with him?”
“Whatever you like. I’m your guest. You decide.”
“Thank you. I think it will be good for both of you.”
______
There was no denying that Frank felt deeply uneasy about moving indoors, as if he were breaking a promise to someone. A kind of guilt, but more importantly a profound physical unease, a tightness in the chest, a numbness in the head. But it was more all-encompassing than that.
On waking in the mornings he would get up from his groundpad in Rudra’s room, roll it up, stick it under Rudra’s bed, go downstairs and out the door, almost sick to his stomach with anxiety. Shivering in the driver’s seat of his van, he would wake up the rest of the way, then drive over to Optimodal, getting there just as they unlocked the doors. Diane was often already there waiting, slapping her mittened hands together. She always had a cheery smile to greet him. He found her consistency impressive. Sometimes his smile in response must have looked wan indeed. And in fact she sometimes put a hand to his arm and asked if he were all right. He always nodded.