$1000 Buddha

Stewart Engesser

I

They wheeled into the crushed-shell parking lot of Snug Harbor Nursery and Garden Center, their imported SUV the color of seafoam. The afternoon like honey, the sea breeze carrying the wash of waves, the tang of salt and roses.

We had waited all summer, and now, here they were.

The Ones.

Carl, Britt, and I watched them emerge. Golden, pre-ordained, their fate written in the stars. Their energy predatory.

The Prophecy unfolds, Carl said. These are the assholes who will buy the $1000 Buddha.

II

In May, when Carl wrote the price of the Buddha lawn ornament on the tag, I laughed.

Nobody’s gonna pay $1000 for this, man, I told Carl. They’re forty bucks just down the road.

But Carl knew something I did not. He knew that if you say something is worth $1000, it’s worth $1000. All you need is one good rich person, dumb and arrogant enough to believe you.

III

The Ones circled the $1000 Buddha. They radiated tax avoidance. Designer drug problems. Shingled cottages on private islands.

What’s up with the Buddha, dude, the man asked Carl. Linen shirt open at the collar, thinning sandy hair, Nantucket reds and a belt with whales.

Gulls screamed obscenities.

Would you like to know the Buddha’s provenance, Carl asked.

He presented the word provenance perfectly, with a slight French accent, just as the breeze picked up, carrying the funk of a changing tide.

The Ones understood provenance.

Carl smiled, elemental, beautiful, in control.

He began to lie. 

He described how the Buddha had been crafted in the 16th century and salvaged from a bombed out Vietnamese monastery outside Hoi An in 1968. How it had made its way to an open-air market in Saigon, been spotted by an antiquities dealer and shipped to Amsterdam in 1973. There, it was purchased by an American CIA officer and brought to his summer house here in Kennebunkport, where Carl purchased it at an estate sale.

All of it lies!

So cool? the woman said, like it was a question. She was luminous and spacy, all flowy white cotton and thousand-dollar bangles.

We’ll take it, bro, the man said. Have someone load it in the car. We’re tight for time.

TIME is not your problem, Carl told him cheerfully, as though he were saying, I’ll have these guys load it while I ring you up.

The man didn’t understand what Carl was talking about. But I did. I understood perfectly, because we were all tripping on mushrooms, and our souls were breathing in unison.

Carl was calling him an asshole.

IV

It is late summer in Maine: blue-skied, sun-spackled, apple-crisp.

It is the day Carl sells the $1000 Buddha.

But we don’t know that yet.

The tops of the trees are turning gold. The light so beautiful I want to climb inside and live in it forever.

We are tripping on mushrooms.

I am embracing impermanence. Living in now. All the usual cosmonaut stuff.

Am I hungry? Absolutely not. A pint of vanilla ice cream sounds good, though. Or an orange! Does anybody have an orange?

No one has an orange.

Late afternoon, the last days of summer. We are getting ready to close, and Carl is cranking the second set of a Dead show, the Orpheum, July 18, 1976. Jerry Garcia is needling and stitching, conjuring devils while the band weaves a nest for them to live in.

I can feel all the muscles in my body. I feel heavy, but also, weightless and fluid. Occasionally frightened for no reason. Flickering between joy and the crushing realization that I am no longer a child.

We are dancing, if hopping and swaying is dancing.

I’m not wearing shoes. None of us are wearing shoes. We have no idea where our shoes might be, or if we will wear them again.

The puzzle of the shoes, pointless and impossible.

Shoes! Fuck! Barriers, symbols of fear, symbols of western European hegemony rooted in genocide!

The crushed stones in the parking lot hurt my feet when I dance on them. The hurt means I’m alive, a thing of flesh, and doomed to die, but in the meantime, I am light and water and music.

However, I wish I had shoes. Because the stones really hurt.

I move to the grass. Then everyone moves to the grass. The grass! The grass! Yes! We all shout at the same time, and dissolve into laughter. So perfect, so soft. Grass!

I am eighteen. Music is color. Music is language and emotion and time. It is the past, the present, the future, it is the map, the stars, the ocean, and the boat to cross it. Energy exchanged in endless loops.

I am exactly where I am supposed to be. I am exactly who I’m supposed to be.

I am naïve enough to assume this is a permanent condition.

I do not know Jerry Garcia, nor does he know me, but we are communicating, across time, across the threshold that divides this world from the next.

One man gathers what another man spills, Jerry Garcia sings to me.

What Jerry Garcia is saying is that we understand each other. We are on the same side. We are brothers, we understand the same secrets.

Brit is whistling. Brit, the best kiss of summer, taut, tan, pale soft edges, tangles and thorns, forest wisdom, wildness, questionable judgment.

I’m in love with her, and I haven’t kissed her yet.

But this is the day.

I don’t know that yet, either.

I can’t stop laughing.

The trees know my name, my real name, the name I don’t even know.

I will die and feed them my bones, my flesh, my teeth. What an honor!

I wish my abs were tighter, though.

It’s OK. 

Genetically, I am not programmed for tight abs.

The light falling through the trees is something I want to taste. What does it taste like? Honey. It must taste like honey.

We will dissolve into the spooling dark. Our energy will rejoin the great energy of the universe. Will we retain any memory of our previous existence? The butterfly remembers the traumas of the caterpillar, so maybe?

In the meantime, I am thinking about not eating meat, or at least only meat I harvest from animals I kill. But then I think about killing an animal, with maybe its partner looking on from a hidden place, stamping and hooting in grief. And I realize, not for the last time, that I am in many ways a monster.

V

So, OK. Britt.

Alcoholic parents, cereal for dinner, double-wide trailer, broken appliances in the yard.

She’s twenty and splits her own wood. Self-assured, yet prone to occasional panic. She has a gravitational pull she can’t turn off. She’d like to be able to turn it off. Sometimes it pulls in not-so-good things.

She lives in an illegal campsite in a far-flung corner of the Conservation Trust, off Gravelly Brook Road. So, technically homeless. She rides a bike she built herself from parts she yanked from the dump. She can identify wild medicinal plants. She makes tea from the needles of white pine. She grows weed and has a non-commercial lobstering license. Is she a witch? Does she have powers? Maybe, maybe. When you see her, you love her, and that is part of the complexity we all must navigate.

Everyone wants something from her.

I want something from her, too. I want her to respect me. But mostly I want her to be happy, to be who she is forever, to never change. In other words, I don’t understand anything about life.

How many days pass unremarked, uncounted, a bland wash of nothing much? Too many. But not this day.

This is the day I kiss Britt for the first time.

Years later, decades later, this kiss lives and breathes and shakes me awake in the middle of the night.

VI

Up ahead, in a future that doesn’t yet exist, we break up. I flee Britt’s wildness, her volatility, her ferocious love and refusal to compromise. I travel. Vietnam, Thailand, China, New Zealand. Brit flails and rages, winnowed by ill-advised affairs, opioids, and crack cocaine. She veers and reels and breaks my heart; she sells her blood for money. She is beaten and pushed from a car, has a child, and then another, and eventually she flees with her children, finds sobriety and something like happiness, something that feels good without killing her.

Yes, I’m talking about yoga.

She moves to Florida. No. No. But yes.

FLORIDA.

My twenties unravel slowly, on a small island off the South Island of New Zealand. I harvest green lip mussels. I am the breakfast cook at Jo and Andy’s Bed and Breakfast.

My accent changes. E’s turn to I’s. I forget who I am in American.

I stare into things the mirror no longer gives back, the wind chasing sheep.

In this future no one dreamed of, Brit and I talk on the phone sometimes, but the conversations falter, because affection and history aren’t enough, and mistakes, sometimes, are permanent.

I love her, and she loves me, and it doesn’t matter in the least.

We used to be fluent in so many languages, and now we can barely say goodnight.

But that is years away.

Today is today.

Carl is blasting the Dead. Brit is whistling, each note stretched and broken open and resewn with me inside it.

My heart is full of love.

I have never failed anyone, not even myself, and no one I know has ever died.

VII

The Dead were slow rowing through a syrupy groove that kept threatening to fall apart and didn’t. The music was more alive than anything I’d ever heard in my life. The beginning of the universe, the lion and the lamb, the road and destination, all the mistakes along the way.

Joy. It was doing things to my heart.

The Ones arrived, dragging a flurry of bad vibes.

Suddenly we were expected to be regular mortals, instead of creatures made of light conjured to life by wizards.

But we were doing something important.

We were warriors from the vaporous past, trying to right ancient wrongs.

Yes, the hoop is broken, the power is in the wrong places.

But we were putting things back where they belonged.

The Ones circled the $1000 Buddha.

Carl told them lies.

The man called Carl, bro.

I thought about striking the man with a hoe. I thought about what it might feel like to kill him.

Was I frightened of hell? No, because hell is a human construct designed in part to keep the poor from killing the rich.

Don’t kill the rich, you’ll go to hell.

Oh, buddy! It’s OK. You won’t.

But no one was killing anybody.

We were just ripping them off.

Britt and I loaded the $1000 Buddha into the Range Rover. The Range Rover smelled like the spices sailors used to haul back from Zanzibar. There was actual wood inside. The leather interior was the color of browned butter.

The man told us to watch the fucking leather.

Britt and I giggling, trying not to giggle, snarfing, snorting, trying not to laugh, tears streaming, oh my God.

Britt was beautiful, dirty, sweaty, bare tan legs, and we were crammed into a seafoam SUV, sparks everywhere.

How long were we taking to secure the Buddha? It felt like we were taking forever. I wanted forever. Britt’s hand touched mine, her eyes flashing. Britt looked at me, and I knew. We knew.

It was now.

It was this.

Everything.

I kissed her inside the seafoam SUV.

Britt kissed me back, and she meant it.

I became a new version of myself.  

I adjusted the seat belt around $1000 Buddha and felt his grief. The Buddha wanted to stay with us!

My hands were shaking.

Sorry, Buddha!

Britt and I got out of the SUV.

The Ones drove away.

We had made $1000 to split three ways. It was so much money! A guitar, a bus to NYC, concert tickets, a sheet of acid. 

But it was all wrong.

How could we leave the Buddha with those people?

I experienced a sadness there are no words to express.

VIII

Brit leads me toward the ducks. The owners of Snug Harbor keep a variety of animals. Miniature horses, peacocks, heirloom chickens. They roam in fenced paddocks. Visitors are free to greet them, walk among them, touch them, but they are not allowed to feed them. That is our job.

The ducks are hungry. Waddling to and fro, ruffling and honking.

Being super ducky.

Some ducks are friendly and waddle up to say hello.

Hey, buddy!

Other ducks are shy, and pretend to be interested in other things, slugs in the grass, a patch of cloud. A couple ducks are aggressive and yell at us and tell us we are late, and what the fuck, and this kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we tell the ducks.

We feed the ducks.

Here you go, it’s supper time!

Then we feed the mini ponies and the chickens and the peacocks. The animals radiate contentment, except for the swans, who hunger only for our death.

Britt and I kiss in the gazebo. Our energies exchanged, tongues and dreams and the drifting tides.

Carl comes up and we all walk out to the pond and sit on the grass under willows. Carl hands beers around, ice cold from the cooler in his truck.

The beer is so good. So cold, so green, so sort of actually alive.

Britt is quiet.

Is it me? Is it us?

Oh God.

Someone somewhere is listening to Bowie. I can hear the music through the trees, funky, illuminated, nocturnal.  Music for eyepatches, music for silver jumpsuits. Or maybe we’re the music. Maybe it’s coming from us.

This doesn’t feel right, Britt says.

I realize what she’s saying.

We are thinking the same thing.

We can’t let those people have the Buddha, Britt says.

I agree, I say.

A law has been broken. But what law, written in what book? None of us know. We can’t point to it. But we know there is a book. We know there is a law. And we have broken it.

Yeah, Carl says. Let’s steal the Buddha back.

As soon as he says this, I feel better. Was this the plan all along? Maybe! Sure! Who knows! It doesn’t matter. Wrongs can be righted! That’s the point I hold onto. The misguided belief that any mistake can be corrected.

It’s OK, Buddha! We’re coming to rescue you!

How are we going to know where the Buddha even is, Britt asks.

I have the dude’s name, Carl says. From the receipt. So maybe the phonebook?

IX

It was late. The moon was a silver crescent. Our faces were smeared with camo face paint. We wore black hoodies. Gloves. Bandanas over faces. We wore beanies to prevent strands of hair snagging on a branch, to be retrieved and scanned by forensics for DNA.

We were maybe overthinking.

But we had a mission, and we wanted our mission to succeed.

We crouched in the dark, Carl’s truck parked on the other side of the woods, off the road at the end of a dirt track in case there were security cameras. Houses glowed through the trees.

The stars were amazing.

Are you sure this is the place, Britt asked.

There’s the car, Carl said.

It was true. The SUV was parked in the drive, along with several other expensive imported SUV’s. The house was illuminated with floodlights and loomed above a patch of flowering shrubs and fruit trees on a lot that used to be woods. It looked dishonest and ill-suited for the weather. Too many flat roofs, too many decks to keep clear of snow. Over-complicated, ill-conceived, a ship doomed to sink.

Across the road there was a shingle beach and a tidal cove where we used to swim. Lobstermen used to set traps in the cove. There used to be a couple moorings where various Perkins and Emmons kept their boats. Now the beach was private.

Signs read TRESPASSERS PROSECUTED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW.

The moon went behind a cloud and Carl whispered GO.

We went. Creeping around garden beds, out to the firepit, the patio. Whispering, Buddha, Buddha, where are you, little man?

Inside the house, through the windows, a dinner party. Candles flickered, flowers in vases, music no one was listening to. The Ones sat at the dining table, along with a man who looked like his name would be Chip, and a woman who may have been dressed in English riding attire. There was tweed, there were elbow patches.

A woman came in with a platter of food, and it was clear the woman was a servant.

Laughter like fine china, breaking.

Britt came around the corner of the house. No Buddha. Carl followed, also without Buddha.

Then I thought to look in the car, the seafoam SUV, and there he was, snug and buckled in. They’d never bothered to take him out.

The SUV would be locked. Of course, it would be locked. And if we tried the door, the car alarm would sound.

We should set their fucking car on fire, Brit said.

Carl and I chuckled, because what an awesome idea, and of course, no, we would not be setting the seafoam SUV on fire.

Think about it, Britt said. It all lines up.

How does it line up, Carl asked.

I didn’t say anything. There was something about the idea I liked. Something about it felt right. But I didn’t want to set anyone’s expensive SUV on fire. More specifically, I didn’t want to suffer the legal penalties for doing so.

Buddhists set themselves on fire to protest the persecution of Buddhists, Britt said.

OK, Carl said. This feels different.

I’m going to look for a can of gas, Britt said.

I started thinking about arson, and felonies, and those stainless-steel toilets that sit in the middle of a jail cell.

I imagined myself getting wanged in the head with a prison cafeteria tray. Someone calling me Poof Boy as he shanked me with a sharpened spoon. I saw ass rape in the showers, a high, lonesome crow above a dark tower.

Britt was unafraid of arson, jail, the mysterious crows of a ruined future. She’d happily live the life of a train hobo, subsisting on beans, moonlight and the grit that makes a girl a hero.

I wanted Britt to respect me. I wanted her to love me.

But I was a coward.

It seemed important to conceal it.

I tried the door of the seafoam SUV.

It was unlocked.

I opened the door.

I unbuckled the $1000 Buddha, click, and lifted him out.

X

Forty-five years ago, my friends and I stole a Buddha. Now I don’t know what I’ll do from one minute to the next. I sit in one chair, then move to another. The past is catching up. And the future is out there, too, rushing at me from the other direction. I’m sixty-three years old. My father is dead, my mother is dead. I’m alone. I feel a kind of compression.

It’s not exactly a happy life, but one I can laugh at.

Britt is in Florida. She runs a yoga studio and lives with a guy she met in AA. She looks great, she’s a grandmother, her kids are happy. Carl went lobstering in 1998 and never came back to shore. He’s been dead longer than anyone I know.

I came home from New Zealand when I was thirty-one. I married a summer person. She was beautiful and wanted babies, and I looked good without a shirt. In my defense, for a time I believed I loved her.

Horses, sailboats, second homes, assholes named Bittsi, assholes named Chap. Was it the wine or the coke that made them talk like their jaws were broken? I hated them all, I hated them the way a wolf hates a dairy cow. But who am I kidding? I’m no wolf. At best I’m some kind of designer dog, a poodle mixed with something dumb, yapping at heels and afraid of its shadow.  

My kids don’t visit. One of them seems to be a compulsive liar, the other has a weird face. They are scattershot, medicated, vibrating with anxiety, and have so far failed to distinguish themselves in any way besides the amount of money they spend on therapy. Their mother calls herself an interior designer, and lives in a McMansion with a hedge fund manager who considers himself my superior. Who knows, maybe he is.

The $1000 Buddha sits in my yard, under an apple tree. Years ago, when she was little, my daughter asked if she could paint the Buddha. She painted it yellow and orange and green and blue. I liked what she did. A few years after that, a tree limb fell and cracked the Buddha from shoulder to hip. I tried to fix it, but I didn’t do a very good job. He sits in two pieces, in a bed of ivy, paint peeling away in scrolls. I tell myself, it’s OK. It’s just a thing, an object, returning to the earth. And other times I look out my kitchen window to the $1000 Buddha and grow so cold, because I see everything that’s gone, and everything that’s coming.

I lived the wrong life.

For example, I work in advertising.

There’s a campaign I’m supposed to present in the morning that isn’t ready. It’s a campaign for a bank, but so far all I have is one line: Small is a big idea. What the hell does it mean? Something about personalized service, something about community, something about standing up to the big banks and doing it right.

In other words, bullshit.

Carl comes to me in dreams sometimes. Once I dreamed I saw him at a party. He was right there in front of me, good old Carl, exactly as I remembered him. He said, hey man, how are you. I said, it’s so good to see you, man! I thought you were dead! And Carl looked at me and smiled, and said, I am. Then he walked away, into the crowd, and he was gone. I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find him. I never forgot that dream. It has stayed with me.

I dream of Britt sometimes, too. When I do, I know I’ll never get back to sleep.

I still love her.

And now I’m old, and Britt is happy in Florida, and we will never see each other again.

She was wild, and she was true, and I was not.

I was a coward.

But I never stopped loving her.

What would have happened if we’d stayed together? Maybe we’d be dead. Maybe we’d be hopeless drunks or running a failing dog kennel, resenting each other like most every other married couple. Or maybe we’d wake up in the morning holding onto each other, thinking, thank God. You. It’s you.

Anyway.

After one of those dreams, I always have the urge to call her. Was she trying to send a message? Was she using mysterious powers to ask for help? Usually, though, I don’t call. What’s there to say? I get up, and if it’s not too close to morning, I’ll pour a little bourbon and go out to the porch to see what the moon is doing. But the last time I dreamed about her, it was so real, so intense. There she was, the fierceness in her eyes, that face, that warrior face, copper skin and cheekbones. In the dream we were so close. We were so young. What had happened to the years? She was trying to tell me something, something important, but she couldn’t get there. I said, take your time, I love you, take your time, I’m not going anywhere. And then of course I woke up. The moonlight on the floor, the dog asleep on the bed. I called her, right then. I call her and she picks up, and in that voice, that husky voice, rough from cigarettes, rough from bad choices, she says, hey soldier. How goes the battle. The years are gone, my heart does its little dance, and I think, this. This. I will never get enough of this.