Island - Aldous Huxley [137]
“Lakshmi.” Susila laid a hand on the old woman’s wasted arm. “Lakshmi,” she said again more loudly. The death-calm face remained impassive. “You mustn’t go to sleep.”
Not go to sleep? But for Aunt Mary, sleep—the artificial sleep that followed the injections—had been the only respite from the self-lacerations of self-pity and brooding fear.
“Lakshmi!”
The face came to life.
“I wasn’t really asleep,” the old woman whispered. “It’s just my being so weak. I seem to float away.”
“But you’ve got to be here,” said Susila. “You’ve got to know you’re here. All the time.” She slipped an additional pillow under the sick woman’s shoulders and reached for a bottle of smelling salts that stood on the bed table.
Lakshmi sniffed, opened her eyes, and looked up into Susila’s face. “I’d forgotten how beautiful you were,” she said. “But then Dugald always did have good taste.” The ghost of a mischievous smile appeared for a moment on the fleshless face. “What do you think, Susila?” she added after a moment and in another tone. “Shall we see him again? I mean, over there?”
In silence Susila stroked the old woman’s hand. Then, suddenly smiling, “How would the Old Raja have asked that question?” she said. “Do you think ‘we’ (quote, unquote) shall see ‘him’ (quote, unquote) ‘over there’ (quote, unquote)?”
“But what do you think?”
“I think we’ve all come out of the same light, and we’re all going back into the same light.”
Words, Will was thinking, words, words, words. With an effort, Lakshmi lifted a hand and pointed accusingly at the lamp on the bed table.
“It glares in my eyes,” she whispered.
Susila untied the red silk handkerchief knotted around her throat and draped it over the lamp’s parchment shade. From white and mercilessly revealing, the light became as dimly, warmly rosy as the flush, Will found himself thinking, on Babs’s rumpled bed, whenever Porter’s Gin proclaimed itself in crimson.
“That’s much better,” said Lakshmi. She shut her eyes. Then, after a long silence, “The light,” she broke out, “the light. It’s here again.” Then after another pause, “Oh, how wonderful,” she whispered at last, “how wonderful!” Suddenly she winced and bit her lip.
Susila took the old woman’s hand in both of hers. “Is the pain bad?” she asked.
“It would be bad,” Lakshmi explained, “if it were really my pain. But somehow it isn’t. The pain’s here; but I’m somewhere else. It’s like what you discover with the moksha-medicine. Nothing really belongs to you. Not even your pain.”
“Is the light still there?”
Lakshmi shook her head. “And looking back, I can tell you exactly when it went away. It went away when I started talking about the pain not being really mine.”
“And yet what you were saying was good.”
“I know—but I was saying it.” The ghost of an old habit of irreverent mischief flitted once again across Lakshmi’s face.
“What are you thinking of?” Susila asked.
“Socrates.”
“Socrates?”
“Gibber, gibber, gibber—even when he’d actually swallowed the stuff. Don’t let me talk, Susila. Help me to get out of my own light.”
“Do you remember that time last year,” Susila began after a silence, “when we all went up to the old Shiva temple above the High Altitude Station? You and Robert and Dugald and me and the two children—do you remember?”
Lakshmi smiled with pleasure at the recollection.
“I’m thinking specially of that view from the west side of the temple—the view out over the sea. Blue, green, purple—and the shadows of the clouds were like ink. And the clouds themselves—snow, lead, charcoal, satin. And while we were looking, you asked a question. Do you remember, Lakshmi?”
“You mean, about the Clear Light?”
“About the Clear