Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [111]
“What say, speak bad?” Rudra asked. “About this?” He waved at their view. “Maybe that is your third good correlation. The outer and the inner.”
“I want something more specific.”
“Maybe he means we should stop reading, and look at the river.”
“Ah yes. True.”
And they did.
But the next night, when Frank drove into the farm’s parking lot after work, late, and got out of his van and headed for the treehouse, Qang came out of the big farmhouse and hurried over to intercept him.
“Frank, sorry—can you come in here, please?”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“Rimpoche Rudra Cakrin has died.”
“What?”
“Rudra died this day, after you left.”
“Oh no. Oh no.”
“Yes. I am afraid so.” She held his arm, watched him closely.
“Where is he? I mean—”
“We have his body in the prayer room.”
“Oh no.”
The enormity of it began to hit him. “Oh, no,” he said again helplessly.
“Please,” she said. “Be calm. Rudra must not be disturbed now.”
“What?” So he had misheard—
“This is an important time for his spirit. We here must be quiet, and let him focus on his work in the bardo. What say—help him on his way, by saying the proper prayers.”
Frank felt himself lose his balance a little bit. Gone weak at the knees—yet another physiological reaction shared by all. Shock of bad news, knees went weak. “Oh no,” he said. She was so calm about it. Standing there talking about helping Rudra through the first hours of the afterlife—suddenly he realized he was living with aliens. They didn’t even look human.
He went over and sat down on the front steps of the house. Everything still scrubbed, new paint, Tibetan colors. Qang was saying something, but he didn’t hear it.
After a while, it was Drepung sitting beside him. Briefly he put an arm around Frank’s shoulders and squeezed, then they just sat there side by side. Minutes passed; ten minutes, maybe fifteen.
“He was a friend,” Frank explained. “He was my friend.”
“Yes. He was my teacher.”
“When—when did you meet him?”
“I was ten.”
Drepung explained some of Rudra’s role in Khembalung, some of his personal history. Frank glanced up once and saw that tears had rolled down Drepung’s broad cheeks as he spoke, even though his voice and manner were calm. This was a comfort to Frank.
“Tell me what happens now,” he said when Drepung was silent.
Drepung then explained their funeral customs. “We will say the first prayers for a day and a half. Then later there will be other ceremonies, at the proper intervals. Rudra was an important guru, so there will be quite a few of these. The big one will be after forty days, as with anyone, and then one last one at forty-nine days.”
Eventually they got up and clomped up the central stairs of the treehouse, winding around the trunk of one of the main trees. Then down the catwalk to their room.
Others had already been there. Presumably this was where Rudra had died. The sight of the empty and sheetless bed cast another wave of grief through Frank. He sat down in the chair by the window, looked down at the river flowing by. He thought that if they had not left their garden shed, maybe Rudra would not have died.
Well, that made no sense. But Frank saw immediately that he could not continue to stay there. It would make him too sad. Then again (remembering his conversation with Caroline) moving out would help his evasion of Cooper anyway. He was free to go and do the necessary things.
In the days that followed, Frank moved his stuff out of the Khembali treehouse back into his van, now the last remaining room of his modular house, compromised though it might be. He usually parked it in the farm’s little parking lot, just to be near Drepung and Sucandra and Padma; he found that nearness comforting, and he did not want them to think that he had abandoned them or gone crazy or anything.