Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [179]
“Dakini!” Rudra said, eyes gleaming.
“Maybe,” Frank said, googling the word, some kind of female Tantric spirit, “anyway it convinced me that I had to stay in D.C., and yet I had put a resignation letter in Diane’s in-box that was kind of harsh. So I decided I had to get it out, and the only way to do it was to break into the building through the skylight and go into her office through the window.”
“Good idea,” Rudra said. For the first time it occurred to Frank that when Rudra said this he might not always mean it. An ironic oracle: another surprise.
Another time Rudra knocked his water glass over and said “Karmapa!” shortly.
“Karmapa, what’s that, like three jewels?”
“Yes. Name of founder of Karma Kagyu sect.”
“So, like saying Christ or something.”
“Yes.”
“You Buddhists are pretty mellow with the curses, I guess that makes sense. It’s all like Heavens to Betsy!”
Rudra grinned. “Gyakpa zo!”
“What’s that one.”
“Eat shit.”
“Whoah, okay then! Pretty good.”
“What about you, what you say?”
“Oh, we say eat shit also, although it’s pretty harsh. Then, like ‘God damn you’ or whatever. . . .”
“Means maker of universe? Condemn to hellworld?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”
“Pretty harsh!”
“Yes,” laughing, “and that’s one of the mild ones.”
Another night, shockingly warm, the house stuffy and murmurous, creaking under the weight of its load, Frank complained, “Couldn’t we move out to the garden shed or something?”
“Garden shed?” Rudra said, holding up his hands to make a box.
“Yes, the little building out back. Maybe we could move out there.”
“I like that.”
Frank was surprised again. “It would be cold.”
“Cold,” Rudra said scornfully. “No cold.”
“Well. Maybe not for you. Or else you haven’t been outside lately at night. It was as cold as I’ve ever felt it, back in February.”
“Cold,” Rudra said, dismissing the idea. “Test for oracle, to see if Dorje truly visits him, one spends night naked by river with many wet sheets. Wear sheets through the night, see how many one can dry.”
“Your body heat would dry out a wet sheet?”
“Seven in one night.”
“Okay, well, let’s ask about the shed then. Spring is here, and I need to move outdoors.”
“Good idea.”
Frank added that to his list of Things To Do, and when the house mother, a kind of sirdari in the Sherpa style, got time to look at the shed with him, she was quick to approve and make the arrangements. She wanted their closet to house two elderly nuns who had just arrived, the oldest one looking frail.
The shed was dilapidated in the extreme. It stood in the back corner of the lot under a big tree, and the leaf fall had destroyed the shingles. Frank swept off some of the mulch and tarped over the roof, with a promise to it to make proper repairs in the summer. Inside its one room they moved two old single beds, a bridge table with a lamp, two chairs, and a space heater.
Immediately Frank felt better.
“Nice to lose things,” Rudra commented.
Frank quoted the Emersonfortheday: “One is rich in proportion to the things one doesn’t need.”
“We seem to be getting very rich.”
The Khembalis’ vegetable garden lay outside their door in the backyard. It was obsessively tended, even in winter, and now that spring was here the black soil mounding up in long rows from the pale mulch was dotted everywhere by new greens. Immaculately espaliered branches of dwarf fruit trees were dotted with lime-green points and no longer looked dead. If there was any sun at all during the day the garden would be filled with elderly Khembalis sitting on the ground, weeding and gossiping. Frank joined Rudra and this group for a couple of hours on Sunday mornings, puttering about in the usual gardening way. Rudra spoke to the others in quick Tibetan, not trying to keep Frank in the conversation. Frank had his Tibetan primer, and was still trying to learn, but the language’s origins were not Indo-European, and it seemed to Frank a very alien system, hard to pronounce, and employing