After they pedaled a short distance, Tony said, “Paint your monkey? I think you mean spank your monkey. And that’s kind of a bold thing to say to somebody, if not outright rude.”
“Of course I meant spank your monkey. But spank sounds harsh and abusive. Paint your monkey sounds aesthetic, don’t you think, dear? Anyway, when you speak a foreign language, sometimes you can’t resist the urge to create. I prefer to say paint your monkey. Do you deny that Simon is not going to go and paint his monkey?”
Sophia’s point was difficult to refute, so Tony kept quiet and they kept pedaling.
The river was about two miles from Main Street, accessed by a broad, well-built sidewalk with properly sealed joints, so it was a smooth ride. It was wide enough to accommodate four bicycles. At first, Tony and Sophia rode side by side, but then she decided to speed up and started to ride in front. Tony had no choice but to observe her glutes, which actually was no choice at all. The sides of the path were filled with oak trees and other minor trees, but not thick enough to be a forest. More like a wooded estate garden.
Biking seemed natural for Sophia, and Tony assumed she had done a lot of bicycle riding growing up. For him, even though he was seventy-three, the terrain was flat and he was used to climbing a lot of stairs, so there was not a lot of physical exertion. It only took them about fifteen minutes to get to the river. The sidewalk ended in what was a park with several shelters with picnic tables, a small bathroom, and water fountains. When they got close to the shelters, they could see that Leo was there. When he saw them, he got on his bicycle and left in the direction they had come from. Leo nodded and waved but didn’t speak.
Tony and Sophia parked their bicycles under one of the shelters and sat on the bench, gazing at the river.
“I think I know why your father comes here,” said Tony.
“It sounds so strange to hear him called my father. Not weird. I am just unaccustomed to thinking about having a father. Having a father never occurred to me. And I don’t have any particular feelings about it now. We sat together for those few minutes at the fountain, and he listened to me, but he didn’t respond. So I don’t have any feelings about him. But definitely no negative feelings. He seems content. Isn’t that what everybody wants?”
“Yes, it is,” said Tony. “That’s definitely what I want. I’m mostly content, but sometimes I feel restless. Like something big and maybe bad is going to happen. It’s just a feeling.”
“Is that why you are not pushing yourself on me, Tony?”
“Probably so. I like being with you. You’re absolutely beautiful, funny, uninhibited, and pretty dirty. I’m content with that and don’t want you to change it.”
“Tony?”
“Yes?”
“Would you kiss me?”
Tony looked into Sophia’s eyes, and after a moment, he leaned towards her face and kissed her. It was a real kiss. They both closed their eyes. Their mouths were locked, and their tongues were touching. It went on for a short time and then Sophia pulled back.
“Tony, thank you. That was sweet. May I ask you a few questions?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
“Did you feel a heart attack in your monkey?”
“That’s what I mean,” said Tony. “You’re kind of dirty. But funny, not filthy. But I don’t feel a monkey attack exactly. More of a palpitation or a murmur.”
“Tony, now I want to ask you a very serious and personal question. May I have your permission? You won’t be mad at me?”
“I promise I won’t be mad with you.”
“Can you tell me about the little girl?”
Tony choked a little bit and then said, “Yes, I can tell you. It’s peaceful here. This is a good place to tell you.”
“I understand.”
“It was over fifty years ago. I had just turned nineteen, and we were in Vietnam. We had no business being there. My unit had been sent to a village, and I can’t even remember why. The people in the village were very nice in bringing us some things to eat and drink. We couldn’t communicate except through an interpreter, but we only had one, and there were a lot of us. So we smiled at the villagers, and they smiled at us.
“All of a sudden, a woman was running at us. We could see she had a grenade. A soldier behind me was yelling, ’Shoot, Tony, shoot.’ “I did and the woman fell to the ground with the grenade intact. But I kept shooting. Part fear and part bloodlust. Very quickly, I realized I had hit a little girl. She was dead instantly in a pool of blood. I dropped the gun and could never pick another one up again. I didn’t talk for weeks. They discharged me and gave me a medal. I came back to the United States and threw the medal in a trash can.
“I guess I had classic PTSD. The only thing I could do competently was stare at the walls of my parents’ house. I couldn’t taste food even though I ate a little bit. I didn’t want to take a bath. I didn’t want to talk to friends or anybody else. I was like that for about ten years, and nobody knew what to do.
“They say the Lord works in mysterious ways, and I don’t believe in God, but my dad was running the bookstore. At that time, a very popular book was called The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. He gave me a copy.
“It’s the story of a Mexican-American anthropology student who went to Mexico for research and met a male witch. I think in Spanish you say brujo. Well, this brujo became his teacher and they ingested a lot of mushrooms and peyote. Those drugs cause hallucinations. In the book, the hallucinations were part of the teaching along the path of knowledge. Basically, there was more than one reality, many realities, and the brujo knew how to simultaneously inhabit them.
“At that time, smoking marijuana and taking drugs like LSD was pretty common in the United States with people my age. I had smoked marijuana in Vietnam, and thought I would give mushrooms a try. One day I managed to get the courage to leave the house and went to look up one of my old friends. Sure enough, he knew all about mushrooms and he got some and made me some mushroom tea. He told me I could trip while he watched me and made sure I didn’t hurt myself. Later, he told me I just sat and lay on the couch for about a day and talked. He said I was having intelligible conversations with different people. One of them, a little Vietnamese girl who spoke great English.
“When everything wore off, I was a different person. When I was tripping, I was upside down on the ceiling like Spider-Man, and I could look down and see the alternate me lying there on the couch with all kinds of problems. I saw many different scenes from my life. Arguments, sex with Rosie, Thanksgiving dinners with my family, sitting in a high school class discussing The Grapes of Wrath. It’s like I could see all of these things in slices but simultaneously as an independent observer, not as someone who had a conflicted identity and was mentally invested in those scenes.
“One of the hallucinations was the little girl. Of course, in reality she didn’t speak English, but there she was explaining to me about her family and how her parents taught her to go into the rice field to help grow rice. And how one day the Americans showed up and their world turned into hell. She told me the lady with the grenade was her grandmother. But she understood why I shot her. Why I shot her grandmother and why I shot her.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie A Beautiful Mind. In the film, the main character John Forbes Nash becomes schizophrenic, and his life starts to crash around him. He has hallucinations. As the film progresses, they develop medications for his condition. He begins to get better, and near the end of the movie he has a conversation with a little girl who had appeared to him throughout his hallucinations. She had come to say goodbye. John Forbes Nash knew he would never speak to her again. They departed on good terms. That’s basically the end of the film.
“Sophia, it sounds cheesy. But that was me. I was already much better by the time I saw that movie. Cured by the mushrooms, which I only took once. After the mushroom trip, I could see that my problems were not the complete me. I was just a small sliver of many different slices. I could look at myself and not judge myself. Basically, I became content. I will never be over shooting the little girl. It still makes me sad and I think about it every day. But I’m past it. I can cope.”
Sophia and Tony just sat on the bench looking at the river, holding hands. They didn’t talk for some time. Maybe ten minutes, maybe an hour. For that moment, time had disappeared.
Finally, Sophia said, “Tony, I told you I had one more question, but after hearing your story, I have another question.”
“Yes?”
Sophia cleared her throat as if she were going to say something really important.
“Go ahead, ask. I’m waiting.”
“Tony, what is the meaning of cheesy?”
Tony laughed so hard he fell off the bench and was just lying there on his back, laughing. Sophia climbed on top of him and started to tickle him. Then he started to tickle her. Then they both lay there on the concrete slab and looked at each other until they finally stopped laughing.
“Okay,” said Tony. “I bared my soul to you. I told you this incredibly deep story, even better than A Beautiful Mind. And then you want to know the meaning of cheesy?”
Then they had another five-minute laughfest. Finally Tony said, “Okay, let’s get up and sit on the bench and look at the river.”
So they did. When they recovered, Tony said, “Cheesy. I hope my explanation doesn’t sound too much like a dictionary definition. Cheesy means something that lacks originality and is overdramatic and very predictable. Telling a story in a way so stupid that people can’t believe it, and they laugh at it because of its insincerity. Another word for cheesy is corny.
“Actually, that final scene with the little girl in A Beautiful Mind is very cheesy. So cheesy that when they’re having their sad departure, violin music is playing in the background. My mushroom trip did not have any violin music.”
“I see,” said Sophia. “In Spanish we say cursi. And by the way, cheese and corn are two foods that I like. But I don’t think that your story is cheesy or corny at all. Thank you for telling me.”
“Well, what was the other question you wanted to ask me?”
“You said you think you know why my father likes coming here. Why?”
“I told you already over twenty years ago Leo came to the bookstore. He looked around, and the only book in Spanish was Siddhartha and he took it. Have you ever read Siddhartha?”
“No, what is it?”
“It’s the story of the Buddha. One of the Buddha’s names before he was enlightened was Siddhartha. He was from a rich and noble Indian family. Apparently, rich and noble families existed over two thousand years ago. When he became a young man, he married and had a child. Of course, he lived off the wealth of his parents. After a few years, he decided life had no meaning and he wanted to find the meaning of life.
“He told his wife he was going to go on a journey and become an ascetic and search.
“His wife encouraged him. Apparently, an adult male leaving his home in India was kind of a traditional thing to do at the time.”
“Are you sure his wife didn’t want to get rid of him because of the bad sex?” asked Sophia.
“Of course that’s not in the book. I’m trying to tell you something serious about your father, and you’re cracking sex jokes.”
“I’m sorry. Please continue.”
“The actual novel was pretty short, but to get to the point, Siddhartha tries every ascetic method he can find and does not find peace or enlightenment. Finally, through his own meditation, he finds Nirvana. Basically, he realizes that there is nothing. To oversimplify, he learns life is an illusion. But to consider life as nothing is not bad. It’s a way to shut out mental chatter or mind noise which keeps us distracted from finding the ultimate goal. Because at death most people have not achieved Nirvana, they must be reborn into the world and continue to suffer.”
“Wow. That sucks. We suck. We go along thinking what we do is meaningful, and then we screw it up, so we have to be reborn and try again, right?”
“Something like that. But Siddhartha was prescient and realized the way to help mankind was to die and be reborn and spread the teachings. But that’s not why I think your father comes here. And of course I’m testing to see if you really listen. What is prescient?”
“Oh, so you think I’m stupid? Some stupid Colombian bimbo with big tits! Don’t insult me! Prescient means having foreknowledge. It can mean somebody who’s very wise. It’s basically the same word in Spanish. The words that I don’t know in English are usually slang expressions and little words that aren’t dictionary words. If you weren’t such a fascist monolingual pig you would understand. That lady, Fang. Sure, her English sucks. But does anybody in Three Egg even know how to say one thing in Chinese?”
“You have big tits, really? I hadn’t noticed. Poor Fang. She’s so flat, she must have been standing behind you in the line when they were passing out tits. When it was her turn there were none left. And yes. There is somebody in Three Egg who speaks Chinese. Her name is Sophia.”
They both laughed and were about to kiss when Sophia pulled her mouth back and said, “You are monolingual, right, Tony? Or do you have multiple tongues that get numb?”
“I won’t tell. But I don’t speak Spanish or Chinese. God, girl, you are so dirty. Always thinking about my numb tongue.”
“Okay, so finish the story. Why does my father like to come here?”
“He has the book and always carries it with him, so I’m sure he’s read it. He had probably read it before he got the copy I had in my shop. It was popular all over the world. But at the end of the book Siddhartha sits and watches the river. The river symbolizes more than one thing, but one of the main symbols is that the river is timeless. But people only see the river as a single thing, a monolithic entity.”
Tony paused to make sure Sophia understood.
“Yes, you fucking pig, I understand. Monolithic means something considered as one piece. Like my bosom. Singular, not plural. I have two, but they’re so big it looks like one. Monolithic. Would you like to rub it?”
“Ah, that might make me lose my train of thought. So the river looks monolithic. But if you think about it, the water we were just watching has already passed. The water that has not gotten there yet is still coming and becomes the water that we see at present. So the river symbolizes past, present, and future in the same moment.”
“Wow, Tony! As Americans like to say, that’s some deep shit. But you said the river has more than one meaning. What else?”
“I can’t remember everything, but I’m pretty sure about this one. The sound Om in Sanskrit is supposed to be the sound of the universe. If you meditate long enough or well enough, eventually that’s what you hear. Om. You sit by the river; it’s a form of meditation, and so you become one with the universe. That’s it. I think your dad has this all figured out. He’s just trapped in his earthly body and waiting to die. Death will bring peace.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, we could ask Leo, but I don’t think he’s going to tell us. The problem of the body is that it gets tired and hungry. As a physical being, we have to take care of our basic physical needs. Those needs cause us to want and desire. Because we have want and desire, we can never be truly happy, even if you’re an enlightened soul. Anyway, I have no idea about your dad. It’s just a theory of mine, and the book is the main piece of evidence. But Leo did come to Three Egg and teach everybody a simple lesson. That if we would just share and put aside our greed, everybody is helped. Instead of saying that people are happy, it makes more sense to say people in Three Egg are generally content.”
“You know, Tony, I can’t say I’m one hundred percent content. But this is only my second day in Three Egg, and I feel like I am a river current that goes in a loop. I’m experiencing the present, the past, and the future all at one time. When I came here, I assumed I’d be leaving after a few weeks, but now I’m not sure. Thanks for explaining about my dad. Now I think eventually I can be content.”