Island - Aldous Huxley [150]
Attention to her hands on his face? Or attention to this dreadful glare of the inner light, to this uprush of tin and plastic stars and, through the barrage of vulgarity, to this packet of garbage that had once been Molly, to the whorehouse looking glass, to all those countless corpses in the mud, the dust, the rubble. And here were the lizards again and Gongylus gongyloides by the million, here were the marching columns, the rapt, devoutly listening faces of Nordic angels.
“Attention,” the mynah bird began to call again from the other side of the house. “Attention.”
Will shook his head. “Attention to what?”
“To this.” And she dug her nails into the skin of his forehead. “This. Here and now. And it isn’t anything so romantic as suffering and pain. It’s just the feel of fingernails. And even if it were much worse, it couldn’t possibly be forever or to infinity. Nothing is forever, nothing is to infinity. Except, maybe, the Buddha Nature.”
She moved her hands, and the contact now was no longer with nails but with skin. The fingertips slid down over his brows and, very lightly, came to rest on his closed eyelids. For the first wincing moment he was mortally afraid. Was she preparing to put out his eyes? He sat there, ready at her first move to throw back his head and jump to his feet. But nothing happened. Little by little his fears died away; the awareness of this intimate, unexpected, potentially dangerous contact remained. An awareness so acute and, because the eyes were supremely vulnerable, so absorbing that he had nothing to spare for the inner light or the horrors and vulgarities revealed by it.
“Pay attention,” she whispered.
But it was impossible not to pay attention. However, gently and delicately, her fingers had probed to the very quick of his consciousness. And how intensely alive, he now noticed, those fingers were! What a strange tingling warmth flowed out of them!
“It’s like an electric current,” he marveled.
“But luckily,” she said, “the wire carries no messages. One touches and, in the act of touching, one’s touched. Complete communication, but nothing communicated. Just an exchange of life, that’s all.” Then, after a pause, “Do you realize, Will,” she went on, “that in all these hours we’ve been sitting here—all these centuries in your case, all these eternities—you haven’t looked at me once? Not once. Are you afraid of what you might see?”
He thought over the question and finally nodded his head. “Maybe that’s what it was,” he said. “Afraid of seeing something I’d have to be involved with, something I might have to do something about.”
“So you stuck to Bach and landscapes and the Clear Light of the Void.”
“Which you wouldn’t let me go on looking at,” he complained.
“Because the Void won’t do you much good unless you can see its light in Gongylus gongyloides. And in people,” she added. “Which is sometimes considerably more difficult.”
“Difficult?” He thought of the marching columns, of the bodies in the mirror, of all those other bodies face downwards in the mud, and shook his head. “It’s impossible.”
“No, not impossible,” she insisted. “Sunyata implies karuna. The Void is light; but it’s also compassion. Greedy contemplatives want to possess themselves of the light without bothering about compassion. Merely good people try to be compassionate and refuse to bother about the light. As usual, it’s a question of making the best of both worlds. And now,” she added, “it’s time for you to open your eyes and see what a human being really looks like.”
The fingertips moved up from his eyelids to his forehead, moved out to the temples, moved down to the cheeks, to the corners of the jaw. An instant later he felt their touch on his own fingers, and she was holding his two hands in hers.
Will opened his eyes and, for the first time since he had taken the moksha-medicine, found himself looking her squarely in the face.
“Dear God,” he whispered at last.
Susila laughed. “Is it as bad as the bloodsucker?” she asked.
But this was not a joking matter. Will shook his head impatiently