“I thought Odysseus should in time regain his homeland;
I had no mind to rob him of that day…only I thought
he should be made to suffer all the way.”
— Homer
11 SEPTEMBER 2001, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
Reach fifty and you’ve logged more than a billion and a half seconds of life. Looking back, it may feel as if every one of those unique moments of “now” has slipped like sand through your fingers. The residue of time is memory and the more you try to hold on to it — or forget it — the longer it takes to wash away.
In September of 2000, I had been invited to attend the State of the World Forum’s Millennium conference in New York, where I spent a week listening to Nobel Laureates, movers and shakers, visionaries and celebrities propounding their theories on Shaping Globalization. On the final day of the event, my brain was spinning with the implications of disastrous economic and foreign policies fueled by unsustainable population growth and diminishing natural resources. In a heavy mental fog, I had walked south from the Hilton on Sixth Avenue to 34th, then east. Entering the Art Deco lobby of the Empire State Building, I’d waited in line for an elevator to the observation deck, 102 stories above the streets of Manhattan, above everything but the World Trade Center rising up from Battery Park to the south. I needed to get above the cacophony, needed to breathe, to listen to an un-amplified voice — the one that had always spoken to me in high places. That day, the voice seemed to emanate from those gleaming twin towers rising above Battery Park — so alike but forever separated by an uncrossable chasm. An apt metaphor for my current relationship.
For the past year, Leigh and I had been embroiled in an emotional quagmire. Her jealousy and mistrust had fueled my lack of disclosure and commitment. My lack of disclosure and commitment had reinforced her jealousy and mistrust. Mutual assured destruction. I’d gone to New York in dire need of inspirational ideas and an alternative point of view.
I got both in an unexpected way.
Double Scorpio had appeared at my dinner table — blonde, sexy and full of mischief. We’d drunk wine and laughed like naughty children until our sides hurt. I hadn’t laughed like that in…well, maybe forever. We’d stepped out for drinks at a little place she knew on the West Side. The conversation had shifted to “what if?”
Double Scorpio was thirty-four, a little wild and a little vulnerable — the worst possible combination. Her laughing brown eyes had projected an alternative future, a completely different state of the world. It was like a drug that made me feel young again.
A simple yes or no. A choice of whether to open a door or leave it safely locked that happens in some matrix of potential where time is inchoate. Immeasurably short — less than a breath — but long enough to decide. Long enough to commit that act of heresy.
Double Scorpio and I never slept together, never exchanged more than a single kiss goodbye. But that brief brush of the lips—okay, not so brief—crossed an emotional line in the sand. In that moment of decision, I knew beyond any doubt that I could never return to the painful status quo. Or else I’d surely become that sorry-ass, middle-aged cliché I so dreaded. And so, I decided to end my cold war of the heart with Leigh and let the chips fall where they would.
One year — exactly 31,536,000 seconds — ago, I’d taken a yellow cab from Manhattan to Newark International Airport, breezed through security, and boarded United Airlines Flight 93 to San Francisco. This morning, it hit me like a bucket of ice water when I heard the news.
If that State of the World conference had been held this year instead of last, I would not be writing this. Because this morning, the world saw very clearly what its state had become while everyone was out there creating wealth in the new economy and shaping globalization with eyes wide shut.
This morning, four groups of well-organized terrorists boarded commercial aircrafts in Boston, DC and Newark, to unleash their twisted version of jihad against everything our decadent modern world holds sacred.
For the last couple hours, I’ve been watching slow motion replay after replay as the hijacked planes — first American Airlines Flight 11 and then United Airlines Flight 175 — auger into the steel and glass twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center. I’ve been watching the jet fuel explode and toxic black smoke billow into a perfect cerulean sky, watching the soaring symbols of financial hegemony crumble beneath their own ignited weight, and then rise up again — conjured by the keypad of some digital alchemist — to repeat their demolition, over and over, before my slowly glazing eyes.
That’s when I hear that Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco has gone down somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. And I remember that exactly one year ago today I was aboard that same flight.
Timing is everything.
“Four years ago,” Yassir tells me, as Khadijah prepares tea in the kitchen, “Shaykh Hisham was invited to Washington. The State Department was having some special hearing about Muslim charity organizations. Shaykh Hisham told them the Wahhabi mosques in America were collecting money for radical militant groups.”
For that bit of whistle blowing, Hisham al-Kabbani was censured by conservative Muslim clerics all over the country and defamed by some as takfir — a heretical apostate. The bureaucrats in DC thanked him for his time, and took no substantive action, fearing they might offend their Wahhabi allies in Sa’udi Arabia.
And today, the Sa’udi Interior Minister had the extraordinary gall to suggest the attack on the World Trade Center was perhaps the work of Zionist fanatics. Didn’t Voltaire say that people who believe in absurdities are bound to commit atrocities?
“Voltaire was not recommended reading at our school,” Yassir laughs.
I’ve been hearing radio reports of attacks on people wearing turbans — obviously by thugs who wouldn’t know a Sikh gas station attendant from a Salafi Jihadist.
“Today, we are all staying home, Tâ-Hâ.” Yassir pats his bald head. “And no turbans.”
What does he know about this attack?
“Only what we are hearing on CNN. But I think it is just as Shaykh Hisham predicted. The jihadists tried this with a truck bomb in the World Trade Center garage eight years ago.”
Why am I finding it so difficult to defend Islam today?
“Only today?” My teacher’s wry sense of humor eases my discomfort.
I motion toward the kitchen. Khadijah’s right, I admit. I’m not a real Muslim.
“Tâ-Hâ, no one expects instant perfection. There are different stages of Islam, many levels of surrender as you peel away the layers of your ego. You have a good heart. Good intentions. Let’s just say…you are a beginner.”
And those men who flew planes full of innocent people into the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania countryside this morning — what kind of Muslims were they?
“Confused and full of hate,” Yassir answers without hesitation. “Prophet Muhammad — sala Al-Llâh alayhi wa salaam — would be shedding tears over their ignorance. Al-Qur’ân says very clearly that taking a single innocent life is like killing all of mankind. Those men were not real Muslims — even if they called themselves that.”
I ask Yassir if it is true that martyrs in jihad are promised 72 virgins when they reached Paradise?
Yassir laughs and moves to his bookshelf, thumbs through a half-dozen volumes until he finds the Wahhabi version of Qur’ân we were each given in Jeddah as a Hajj gift from King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud.
“‘Al-Wâqi’ah’,” he says. “When you read the surahs, you must take into account what was happening in the Prophet’s life when he first recited them. Imagine him resting beneath the shade of a date palm in his garden at Madinah. Remember? You were there.”
The trees are gone. It’s all gold, and marble, and Wahhabi guards with black berets and guns now.
“But can you imagine how it might have once looked with the sahaba sitting around the Prophet, eating those sweet Anbara dates, like the ones we ate there? And maybe his friend, Abu Bakr, or maybe his son-in-law, Ali, asks, ‘What will it be like in Paradise?’ The Prophet closes his eyes, smiles at the vision he sees and then he speaks with the voice of Archangel Jabreel:”
“In the Gardens of Delight, Paradise
A multitude of those foremost will be from the first generations
who embraced Islam
And a few of those foremost will be from the later generations.
They will be on thrones woven with gold and precious stones.
Reclining thereon, face to face.
Immortal boys will go around them serving, with cups, and jugs,
and a glass of flowing wine.
Wherefrom they will get neither any aching of the head,
nor any intoxication.
And with fruit that they may choose.
And with the flesh of fowls that they desire.
And there will be Hûr, fair females with wide, lovely eyes,
like unto preserved pearls.
A reward for what they used to do…
Verily, We have created them maidens of special creation.
And made them virgins.
Loving their husbands only, and of equal age.”
“Like any good storyteller, the Prophet was painting a picture of what he had been shown by Al-Llâh, a picture that could be understood by people living in a harsh desert world, where all these wondrous things he described were great luxuries beyond their reach.”
And what’s up with those 72 virgins?
“It comes from Hadith written much later,” Yassir explains. According to the story, the Prophet was overheard telling one of the sahaba that in Paradise he would have 72 wives. It might just have been a joke,” he grins slyly as Khadijah appears with a tray of tea.
“Or a warning,” his wife interjects. “Just imagine their shoe closet!”
Yassir shrugs. “You see how stories get exaggerated?”
That verse in Qur’ân reminds me of the Rubáiyát, I tell him: A loaf of bread beneath the bough, a flask of wine, a book of verse — and thou…
“‘…And wilderness is Paradise enow.’” The imam completes the verse as if he’d been reciting it all his life. “Khayyám wasn’t talking about getting drunk with his girlfriend, you know. He, too, was tasawwuf. His poem is about finding bliss with the Eternal Beloved.”
So how come, in all the time we’ve spent together, he’s never told me about those 72 honeys waiting for me in Paradise?
Pouring mint tea into our glasses, Khadijah laughs aloud, probably for the first time today. “Forget it, Elvis. You can’t even handle one!”
It’s been almost a year since the one I couldn’t handle has spoken to me. But this afternoon I receive a brief e-mail message from Leigh:
Are you all right?
Her son is frightened, she writes, understandably stunned and confused — like the rest of us. How do I plan to explain this to my kids, she asks?
Is the world going crazy?
There is so much I would like to say to her. But our broken hearts still hurt too deeply, mute our capacity for compassion. In response to Leigh’s question, I answer: Going?
Why do they hate us?
I think about that before responding. I try to explain to Leigh that it is our hubris and hypocrisy they hate — our clandestine overthrowing of populist, democratically-elected leaders and support of scumbag dictators who torture dissidents and get kickbacks from big oil companies. “They” are just people, not so different than any of us.
Why do you defend them? Leigh asks.
I remember that stating an unpopular truth only makes you the target.
Ana al-Haqq.
Since that day in Heathrow Airport, I’ve been pondering over the heretical declaration that resulted in a horrible death for the Sufi master who called himself the “wool carder.” Why did Mansur al-Hallaj make such a provocative statement knowing full well the consequences it would bring down on his head?
Maybe Hallaj had nothing left to lose — and nothing more to teach. Perhaps the truth really had set him free.
11 SEPTEMBER 2001, ALAMEDA, CALIFORNIA
A decade has passed — ten years minus 39 days to be exact — since that fire in the Oakland hills incinerated my old life and compelled me into a journey I could never have anticipated. I’ve been married, divorced, broke, flush and in debt. I’ve moved nine times, traveled to ten countries and had more hands-on / gloves-off education in comparative religions than any Ivy League academic program could ever offer. I’ve scrambled up mountains and slogged through deserts in places I can’t even pronounce, hobnobbed with lamas, hieromonks, imams, and matchmakers. I’ve confronted the Destroyer, defied the gods, and thrown stones at Satan. I’ve flirted with death and true love, but managed to escape both. I feel a lot older but not much wiser.
My ex-wife and our daughter, Eli, now live in a Queen Anne Victorian, a stately relic from the days when wealthy San Franciscans regularly ferried across the Bay to Alameda Island for a warm respite from the bone-chilling summer fog. Kate works for a San Francisco-based public relations firm, one of whose clients — Match.com — required some first-hand qualitative research. The compatibility cursor had pointed to Bill, a sandy-haired, bearded contractor with two older sons and this rambling Vic he’d been restoring for the past decade. Both Bill and the house needed a woman’s touch, so Kate had moved in to take charge of both renovations.
On Tuesday evenings, she rehearses with the Pacific Mozart Ensemble, indulging her vocal muse as I assuage my guilt for having abandoned full-time parenting by taking our daughter for a burger and ice cream at Tucker’s.
When I arrive in Alameda late that afternoon, Kate and Eli, like almost every other American family, are glued to CNN, desperately hoping that Wolf Blitzer will help them make sense of the madness spreading rapidly from Manhattan around the world.
“They’re jealous of our freedom,” Eli says earnestly. Looking up from the jarring quick cuts and blistering sound bites, her innocent blue eyes clouded with dark incomprehension. “President Bush said it on the news.”
Kate is still dressed in work clothes, a tailored gray linen suit over a sleeveless peach shell, her still-blonde hair twisted into a modest knot and clipped at the back of her head with a lacquered tortoise shell beret. She shakes it loose, and addresses Eli with a sobriquet our nine-year-old finds mortifying. “Pug, go play in your room for a while. Your father and I need to talk.” Eli sighs deeply, and shuffles off — banished once again to the sanctuary of an over-protected childhood.
Bill’s stuck in Bay Bridge traffic, so Kate pours two glasses of Zinfandel, sets them on the antique seaman’s chest pressed into service as a coffee table, and slumps on the brocaded sofa. “I really don’t want Eli to be watching this. They’re showing clips of the people who jumped out of eighty-story windows before those towers collapsed…and fucking Palestinians cheering in the streets…” Kate’s Jewishness rises to the surface; her voice cracks and her angry eyes flood with tears. “Thousands of people were killed. Why are they doing this? What do they want?”
Not our “freedom,” I assure her.
She raises her hands in exasperation. “Then what?”
Truth is, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. I tell her there are a lot of people in the world that feel they have nothing left to lose. Some are ready for a holy war, the final battle between good and evil. Some of them actually believe they’re doing God’s work. Our fumbled attempts to hunt these guys down have turned them into folk heroes or martyrs. To Jihadists like bin Laden, a few thousand or a few million lives are unimportant in the greater scheme of things. In Paradise, the innocent will be sorted from the guilty.
“That’s just crazy!” Kate replies.
It’s history, I remind her, pacing back and forth in front of the marble fireplace. And now, we’ve got one powerful priesthood challenging another — one that flies a Muslim flag over its lies, and one that wraps them in a Judeo-Christian banner. It’s tradition, after all: Reconquistas, crusades, pogroms, purges, ethnic cleansings. What part of that picture does she not find crazy?
“I think you need a drink as much as I do,” Kate concludes.
What I need is…
“Ice cream,” a small voice in the hallway finishes my sentence.
Eli emerges in tears from the shadows. I wrap my arms around her, lowering my face into our daughter’s silky-little-girl-hair, breathing in the memory of every replay of her favorite Disney video, Fantasia, and every time I dozed off as she read to me from Harry Potter.
I can remember so clearly the first moment I held her, umbilical still attached to her mother’s placenta, enraptured as she drew her first breath of air into her tiny lungs, as oxygen saturated her blood, changed her color from blue to pink and the force that animated that fragile little body decided to hang around for a while. Welcome to Planet Earth, I had told her through tears of joy. Your name is Elizabeth, and I’m your dad. What I didn’t tell her — what I couldn’t have known then — was that I would end up being her dad only on Tuesday nights.
Ice cream! That’s exactly what I need — and a time out from CNN and everyone’s crazy ideas about what God really wants.
“I don’t think there’s a God,” my daughter replies, an earnest look in her narrowed blue eyes. “But if there is, I don’t think He wants people to do things like this.”
Eli and I hold on to each other like life rafts as I glance over at her mother. No, baby, I whisper into her ear, I don’t think so either.
Kate’s stocking feet rest on the edge of Bill’s oak chest. She sips her wine and frowns into space as if sifting through the wreckage of childhood innocence for an undamaged fragment of optimism. It has never been Kate’s way to dwell on catastrophe, or even unpleasantness, and her strategy is to change the subject when someone else succumbs to the temptation.
“Last weekend, I did something very out-of-character,” Kate announces into space. “I went with Bill to hear this sweet little man with a really thick Indian accent talk to an auditorium full of wide-eyed people about some kind of meditation thing.”
That is out-of-character, I agree. Does she remember what happened when I tried to teach her Zen meditation after our first dinner together?
Kate allows herself a nostalgic smile, looks over at our daughter hugging her dad and twenty years of disappointment drops from her voice. “And the rest, as they say, is history.” She sorts with purpose through a pile of catalogues and magazines scattered on the trunk, finds a brochure with a stylized Wheel of Dharma printed on the cover. “It was called…” she squints through her reading glasses, “Vee-pa-sana. Is that right?”
Close enough. It’s what the Buddha supposedly taught before his devotees made statues of him for other religious fanatics to dynamite.
“Bill and I had this come-to-Jesus talk,” she tells me. “We’ve both been so stressed out, so absorbed in our jobs. We’ve been ignoring each other, or being bitchy…well, I’ve been bitchy, anyway,” Kate admits. “Bill just retreats into his man-cave. He said we needed to find some way to connect on a deeper level, suggested we go on this retreat together, learn how to meditate. I mean, isn’t that ironic? Turns out he’s a lot like you — only more so!” Her forced laugh and sad smile say it all.
“Well, I considered it,” Kate continues. “I really did. But seriously, getting up at four in the morning and sitting all day long on a hard little cushion — with a straight back? For ten days? Silent as a stump? Oh, yeah, and segregated. I wouldn’t even be allowed to see Bill the whole time. I mean, hell-lo! What was he thinking? What about a romantic retreat in Maui?”
I find myself mimicking her melancholy smile, tell her Leigh had the same reaction when I suggested we rendezvous somewhere in the Middle East after I finished the Hajj.
“Have you heard anything from her?” Kate asks.
Leigh wanted to know how I was explaining what happened today to Eli.
“Maybe she really wanted you to explain it to her.”
I can’t even explain it to myself, I admit. I’m sure the pundits from various political and religious camps will be debating the underlying causes and responsibilities for quite some time. But to me, madness is just what it is, and it can’t be mitigated by any attempt to rationalize or sanitize it. So, Eli and I are going to get ice cream, and pretend to be civilized human beings while we still have some civilization and ice cream left. Does she want to join us?
“Thanks, but I think I should wait here for Bill.” Kate’s cheery smile overpowers her sad eyes, chasing those gloomy negative thoughts into somebody else’s back yard.
Beyond the gingerbread filigree of her open porch and lovingly tended garden, the September sun hovers low over a long canopy of dazzling emerald maple trees. Eli scampers down the steps like the Little Princess in hot pursuit of Chocolate Decadence.
“You’re a good daddy,” Kate says.
You mean for an absent daddy?
She shakes her head. “Just because we live apart doesn’t mean you abandoned your children. You’ve always been here for them — no matter what. You’ve always shown up.”
On Tuesdays, anyway. My father showed up every day — even when we wished he wouldn’t. Compared to him, I’m a coward.
“Are you kidding?” Kate laughs. “You’re the bravest guy I’ve ever known.” She walks in stocking feet over to where I have a tight grip on the handrail. “No matter what you’ve done, no matter where you’ve gone, I will always love you for who you are.”
The tears in my eyes flow not from sadness, but clarity. The long-blurred picture of our marriage has just racked into sharp focus, and all the random colors have finally resolved into a coherent landscape revealing the long road we’ve traveled. My ex-wife has just artfully apologized for her refusal to understand what was devouring me alive during our years together, and simultaneously justified her request that I saddle up and move on. With exquisite irony, she has defined the fundamental difference between us and finally granted me sanction to be what I am — what she is not, and never will be.
“Sometimes,” Kate says, “we just have to sit quietly and accept what is. Remember?”
Like it was yesterday, I don’t say out loud. Like the 18-year-old girl of my dreams was still sitting across from me, knee-to-knee, both of us tingling from head to toe. I laugh softly at the bittersweet memories as Kate slouches endearingly to diminish her height, the way she did when we were courting and she wanted me to feel taller than I was. “A wise and handsome young man told me that, once upon a time. Before life got to be so painful.”
Watching my daughter examine a caterpillar as it inches across the walkway, I tell Kate that I wouldn’t change a single moment of my life.
“No regrets?” she asks wistfully.
None, I assure her. And for just the briefest hint of a sigh, I can see that the girl who fell in love so long ago with a hopelessly romantic seeker still wonders what might have been — had she just gone along for the ride.
For both of us, it is that moment of completion, that rare state of grace born spontaneously out of today’s dark cataclysm. The enormity of those tragic events has made our personal differences seem so trivial, reminded us both of what is truly important — the uniqueness of what we’ve created, and shared for so many years.
This journey that is always just beginning.
It leads you sometimes in circles, but inevitably around to everything you’ve tried to avoid, and everyone from whom you’ve ever tried to escape. It continuously invites you to take another look at what you think is true. And if you are very, very lucky, it might just reveal the secret that is so paradoxical it exposes every illusion your ego can conjure, so powerful it dissolves every lie you have ever permitted yourself to believe.
Ana al-Haqq — I am the truth.
It means that if you cannot love yourself, you will never be able to love divinity. It means that the only part of “God” you will ever see is right here, right now. It is the reflection in your own mirror — not that impermanent, ever changing, protoplasmic shell you inhabit until it becomes useless, but the indestructible spirit that dwells behind your eyes — the One who observes the one observing. How could you not laugh out loud when you suddenly realize there is nothing more sacred to discover than what has always been right in front of you?
“…And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.”
The molten sun ignites a single maple tree, setting cold fire to its exquisite leaves. Infused with star-point jasmine, the autumn breeze caresses the hair on my arms as I take hold of my daughter’s outstretched hand. Melting into her joyous anticipation of “chocolate decadence,” I am alive and awake, fully accepting responsibility for every bridge I’ve ever built or burned, every altar and corpse I’ve left by the roadside, every lover and teacher I’ve embraced and released. No regrets.
After all the wandering, the searching, the false hopes and startling discoveries, the long years of despair and brief moments of blinding clarity, the pilgrim commits yet another act of heresy — chooses to dismount and place both feet firmly back on the earth.
HERETIC • Reflections on Unorthodox Pilgrimage •“Final Count” is the fifth and final part of a memoir about a decade of travel and pilgrimage to sacred places throughout the world between 1991 and 2001.
It is based on contemporaneous notes — many of which were written in a tent wearing gloves, in monastery dormitories, airports or hotel rooms of dubious distinction. Along the way, I published pieces of the full story [The Last Place on Earth in Blue, Journal for the New Traveler in 1997; The Throne of Shiva in Travelers Tales “Pilgrimage”and The Ravens and the Virgin in Travelers Tales “Greece”, both in 2000; and Melting Point in Whitefish Review, 2014], but never the whole memoir. I finished the final manuscript in 2008 and could find neither an agent nor publisher. While many were complimentary about the writing, they felt the story was too esoteric and would not sell. Far be it from me to tell them their job.
Over the years, I have shown the completed manuscript to a number of people and received some very encouraging reviews. This has led to my decision to publish the book in a serialized format on both Medium and Wattpad with the hope to get enough positive responses and reviews that I can develop a strong case for publication in a “traditional” venue.
Thank you for your time and interest, and I look forward to hearing from you.
