Keep Looking

By Ace Remas

Hector Feck found gold for the first time at age sixty-six. It was a transforming experience. As he pinched the single gold nugget from the black sand collected on the ridges of his pan, he was astounded he felt no satisfaction in this discovery, even after twenty years of occasional gold panning, dredging, and metal detector searches. Instead, he was disappointed. Not because the nugget was too small. It was not. When washed and cleaned, the nugget would fetch at least $1,500, money he sorely needed. He realized as he inspected the nugget carefully, all he had accomplished was to increase his desire for more gold, which meant more searching for it, and even when he found more, he would not be satisfied. He realized he would never be satisfied. Nothing in this world would satisfy. Except, he remembered, as if inspired by a vision, the looking for gold. He was satisfied with the activity. "So why continue to look for gold?" he asked himself. If it was for the money, then gold-hunting was just another job.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781641388160

Book preview

Chapter One

No doctor told Bill his heart was near its end. He knew just by the flaccid beat in his chest as he lay in bed awaiting sleep and by the onset of strangely unfamiliar sensations he was shocked to observe. He craved sleep and allowed himself to indulge in it. Despite arising late in the morning, he was curiously fatigued in the afternoons and, unless stimulated by a cup of strong coffee, wanted to do nothing but watch news on television, though he had no interest in its dull litany of violence and political grandstanding. His bones ached even after a short walk. His body had lost its flexibility, and he was always uncomfortable, tossing in bed at night, constantly shifting his posture in the chair. The muscles in the back of the neck and shoulders were stiff and throbbed with dull pain, making it difficult to hold his head high. He nibbled at food and found no satisfaction in it.

Like his body, his mind had changed too. He began reflecting about the past, remembering things he hadn’t recalled for years. He longed for the time his son was a baby. Money, and the making of it, held no interest for him. Dealing with it was merely a chore, like taking out the garbage or organizing the papers on his desk. The joys and terrors of his friends seemed inconsequential, and he could not feel motivated to offer congratulations or help. Life had become just the passing of time, witnessed but not engaged.

Death was just a passing too, a natural unfolding, like time itself, as unremarkable as the slow shift of the seasons exposed each day by the slightly adjusted slant of sunlight. He neither feared death nor anticipated it. Living had been reduced to sensing the shallow rhythm of his breath and heartbeat and wondering how life was sustained by such uncertain mechanics.

Whether the effect of physical weakness or mental laxity, he did not know, but he often retreated to the backyard where he could sit in his favorite lawn chair and allow the sun to warm his face. Old habits of thought suggested such reprieves were laziness. As the days passed, however, that habit was replaced by another. He could not name this new habit. It was more like reluctance to act, though he still felt he was doing something. He took an inventory: yes, he was breathing; and yes, he was observing the hummingbirds and admiring the flowers in bloom; and yes, he was, he realized with a quiet shock, enjoying himself. He could not believe, at least just yet, such an experience could be called productive, but even so, he felt a sense of accomplishment. Maybe, he dared to wonder, what he had called doing all his life was not doing at all but in truth was avoiding actual deed. After all, near the end of his term on this planet, what mattered all his successes and failures over these seventy-four years?

Nothing he could recall of his life seemed as important in this moment as the sun warming his cheek. This must mean something he mused, something cosmic and, therefore, eternal. As amazed as a weak heart could be, he wondered how a ray of light born ninety-three million miles away and driven through a hundred and fifty miles of hazy atmosphere could still warm his cheek. The universe must really be something utterly amazing, but only now did he come to this understanding.

He refused to be regretful or shamed by these thoughts. He refused to think he had wasted his life for no other reason than he had lived it, and it brought him to this moment: the universe is utterly amazing! Now he could die, he thought. This would be a good mind to die with.

He put his right hand on his chest. The heart still beat, slowly and faintly. His chest rose and fell with his breath, though barely perceptible. He could hear the whirr of the hummingbird’s wings; feel the heat of the sun on the skin; the weight of the body in the chair; and, strangely, a joyful coursing of the nerves throughout the hidden world inside his body. Maybe now! he thought. But he didn’t die, not just yet.

The distant power of the sun finally drove him inside. Perspiration stung his eyes; the heat was fatiguing. He didn’t want to lose this moment by fretting over such minor matters, but he accepted that he hadn’t mastered control of his mind to avoid fretting. He lifted himself out of the chair to retreat into his study where he could sit in the shade and feel the air breezing through the open door and windows.

He resisted the impulse to lay down on the couch in his study. He knew he would fall asleep if he did and he did not want to fall asleep. If he was to die, he wanted to die awake and not in his sleep as his mother did. His brother and sister said it was a good thing their mother passed away during her afternoon nap. She had avoided, they claimed, the fear of facing the fathomless jaws of death. Bill didn’t say anything in response to these speculations. Maybe a person should peer into the future when given the opportunity. It doesn’t happen often. But he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to start an argument with his brother, who already was worried about who was to pay the funeral costs.

Even without the prospect of dying, Bill disdained such material motives. How could your bank account show you the immense wonder of the universe? It couldn’t and wouldn’t. When his brother died, Bill often reflected, he is going to be miserable he hadn’t the time to spend all his money.

Bill had already resolved to die a pauper. But he didn’t have to try hard. Though he was imaginative in making money, he never received the wisdom of keeping it. This proved to be a spiritual fault. Twenty years earlier, he had heartily engaged in a Buddhist practice. He approached Buddhism with the same fierce and joyful energy he applied to his business, his hobbies, and his family. He quickly rose in the religious organization and was soon teaching meditation classes in a Buddhist center he founded at the instruction of the tradition’s spiritual director. He gave his money to this enterprise and expected nothing in return, which is what he got. He devoted so much energy and time to it his own productive hours were reduced. Gradually, as would prove to be inevitable, he lost his money and his earning power and had to quit the Dharma business before he became a disappointment to his students and spiritual colleagues. Now he was broke, nearly dead, washed up. He was a pauper in every sense of the word: physically, financially, socially, and spiritually.

But he wasn’t unhappy about this. In fact, he saw this condition as a necessary and useful part of his spiritual practice. Perhaps by default, but nonetheless, he had achieved some measure of renunciation. Like a monk in a cave, what mattered to others did not matter to him. For this he was grateful.

For a time, he believed he was successful. There was money in the bank and he had plenty to spend or give away, which he often did. He had achieved some respect from his peers and students for his Buddhist wisdom. People praised his explanations of spiritual practice and philosophy. They admired his business expertise, which was evidenced, for a short while anyway, by the number of employees engaged in his small company. Some expressed admiration for the lack of disharmony in his family and social relationships, his devotion to outdoor activities such as hiking and camping, the charm and brilliance of his son, and his able and popular wife. Although he never quite accepted these trappings were truly successful, he clung to them despite the spiritual misgivings that sometimes worried him.

As a good Buddhist should have expected, all this outer evidence of happiness and success proved to be quite temporary. As time passed, his worldly acquaintances came to regard him as a fool. He was too free with his money, he presumed business had a momentum that he did not have to attend to, he was reckless with his reputation; he didn’t eat right nor take care of his body so it gradually deteriorated, and his impatience with ignorance and spiritual laziness alienated many. Some would label his faults as hubris.

Bill regarded these misfortunes as good fortune. Though he could not end attachment to all these aspects of his life through his own effort and wisdom, by some blessing they had been taken away from him. He was left as he was now, with no options, no hopes, and consequently no clinging. The universe appeared as it is. Completely impersonal, a vast turning mechanism of cause and effect in which personal views, aspirations, and actions mattered little. He was what he was and nothing more, a man bereft of function. Not a Buddhist teacher, not a businessman, not a parent and husband, not a spiritual acolyte, and not healthy. All life, all lives, were eventually undone like this. Everything that once was just ends.

This observation was earned, not learned. While believing in the good things life offers, Bill could not give up those good things. When they were taken away, then he knew. They were good only temporarily and everything dies. It was fortuitous, he now thought. He learned this before he actually kicked the bucket. At least he would not carry this clinging to the beyond that lay before him. For this realization, he was gratefully and strangely content. In truth, he understood in a moment of clarity, his life could not have turned out in any other way. There was no need to speculate further on it.

He found it somehow fitting that the last vestige of material life, his body, was slowly coming to an end too. He would soon be dead. His wife would be supported by the hefty life insurance policy he had purchased in a fit of frenzy after experiencing a near plane crash in a violent storm over the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. That was more than thirty years ago, and the policy was worth a million dollars by now. Despite his hankering for freedom from material concerns, he was happy at least he had correctly accomplished at least one thing that would benefit others.

Where, and how, to die gradually arose as a fixation. He marveled that he had spent all his life concerned about where and how to live. Everything in life was uncertain, and nothing turned out as he might have expected or wished. But death, that was certain. Everyone died. Every living being died. The wisdom of Buddhist teachings began to sink in. Buddha taught how to die, not how to live! Every Buddhist practice was preparation for the last moments on this earth. How to leave behind family, possessions, and passions. How to aim the mind at something useful and stop its endless shuttling between worry and excitement. How to accept this body—that thing confused with self—will soon return to the dust from which it was created.

He understood this new fondness for remembering the past must be a symptom of his approaching demise. He pushed himself off the comfortable couch to retrieve his Moleskine notebook. From the collection of pens blossoming out of a coffee cup on his desk, he selected his favorite pen. He marveled at how pervasive attachment was. Not just any pen would do but only his favorite pen! And the Moleskine, a blank note book that had cost him seventeen dollars at Barnes & Noble, he now considered an extravagance. Any pen and any blank sheet of paper would do, but the romance of keeping a journal required an exotic and ritualistic form. He resolved that when this Moleskine was filled with his notes, it would be his last one. He would renounce it as well and replace it with a fifty-cent tablet purchased at the local drugstore.

Returning to the couch, he tried to recall in life what had brought him to this state. What was his state? All his previous life disappeared as if a mirage had dissolved before his eyes. It was merely a dream. What he could remember was partial and probably fictional as well. He could not rely on it. He might as well accept that what was past is past—meaning, it is gone. He could not have it again, even by remembering it. The past was no more certain, even though he had lived through it, than the future, which has yet to be lived. He didn’t need to make notes in the expensive Moleskine. He didn’t need a pen. He set them aside and enjoyed the fresh air wafting through the open door of his study. All there ever was, he knew with a solemn shock of wonder, was all there ever is in a single moment. Nothing before, nothing after. Even the word moment was too elaborate. The present was not sustained even as long as it took to utter the word. Words and language corrupted understanding and did not clarify it. The sun boiling away ninety-three million miles away, the hummingbird sucking nectar from the blooming flowers, the soft breeze like earth’s breath cooling his cheek, and the faint thump of a heartbeat beneath his shirt needed no language. The universe needed no words. Names identified things, separating them from the seamless unity from which they emerged like rainbows. He resolved to live the rest of his life, however long that was, without words, without explanation.

It seemed enough to listen. Talking and writing interfered with listening. There was no reason to speak of the wondrous universe. There it was, on display, for anyone to see. How had it taken seventy-four years to see this? If he listened, he could hear the soft rhythm of his heart, the whisper of air passing in and out of his nostrils, the faint music of the wind strumming the leaves in the trees outside, the distant sounds and echoes of traffic, insects buzzing in the flower garden. In such a state, he imagined he could also hear blood flooding the channels and rivers of his body. He looked up at the blue day sky and wondered if he could hear the stars and planets coursing through the Milky Way if he stayed still enough. He resisted the urge, another habit, to enumerate and name these impressions, as if a name could help him remember this exquisite experience. Words were too coarse. He didn’t need them, nor did he want them. Maybe this is what death is like, he thought, despite the resolution not to convert experience into an inner dialogue. His old world was a world of the named, this thing and that thing. But this new world, the listening world, was nameless.

Bill’s wife, Mary, called from the kitchen to say his morning coffee was ready. He heaved himself out of the couch in his study and made his way to the kitchen.

I think it’s time I went to Reno, he told her as he accepted the cup of coffee she handed him.

Mary had heard this before, many times before. She patted his arm as she shuffled past him in her slippers to the living room where they were accustomed to spending the morning chatting about the day before them.

No, I mean it, he insisted.

He refused to follow her to the living room.

You mean right now?

Well, not Reno. To Hawthorne.

Bill grew up in Hawthorne, a small, lonely Nevada town on Highway 95 between Reno and Las Vegas.

Hawthorne? Why? What’s going on there?

Nothing. But I think I should go . . . now.

Two years ago, Bill’s best friend in high school, Burt, died. He was Bill’s age. A few years earlier, another friend, Menes, was murdered in Honduras where he was operating a silver mine. He was not so struck by their passing when it happened as he was in this moment, obstinately staying in the kitchen, standing by the counter, with a hot cup of coffee in his hand. Why Burt and Menes came to mind in this moment, he could not say. He paused and looked around the room, as if trying to spot someone in a crowd. There was no one there, of course, but Burt and Menes inexplicably seemed present. His son Jason too.

Jason died in a car accident fifteen years earlier when he was only nineteen. Maybe the horror of that loss and Bill’s mind tormented by unrelenting grief for the next few years was the cause of this moment. Oddly, he wasn’t saddened by these thoughts. He had learned after fifteen years of grief that he was emotionally lazy and succumbed easily to wild feelings of loss, anger, and longing, which often overcame him. For the sake of his family, he had learned to disguise these surging bouts of emotion assaulting his will. Once, in the midst of a conversation with a friend, he understood what suffering was. Suffering was naming in a world that is nameless. Without name, nothing is left behind and everything is discovered anew in every moment. Burt, Menes, and Jason were not, are not, their names. If he clung to name, he suffered their absence. Their presence, always present, needed no name, and in such a state, he knew they hadn’t gone away.

What are you going to do in Hawthorne? Mary asked absently as she thumbed through the most recent issue of the Time magazine, which had arrived in yesterday’s mail.

Bill did not respond, not even with his customary grunt, knowing his silence would sooner or later stop her distraction in the magazine. She looked up, seeming a little impatient but at the same time forgiving. Bill shrugged his shoulders.

I think I’ll hike up Mount Grant, he said when he had her attention.

Mary threw down the magazine on the coffee table. You sure you want to do that? Aren’t you out of shape?

Bill understood her real meaning: Aren’t you too old?

He also understood his own meaning. A climb like that could kill him.

I guess I’ll find that out, he answered her at last.

Chapter Two

Late the next afternoon, Bill arrived in Hawthorne. He parked the car in front of the high school he had attended fifty-six years earlier. Behind the school buildings, he could just make out the very top of Mount Grant in the west. Once inside the school building, he made his way to the room where Mrs. Oliver taught English to his freshman class. The door of the room was open. A janitor was emptying a waste basket next to the teacher’s desk.

The janitor, a man with shaggy gray hair and beard, waved him in without interrupting his chore. The desks were different. The small desk chair he remembered had been replaced by long rows of tables with student chairs lined up neatly behind them. He went to the chair closest to the spot where his desk had been and sat down. The tall window next to him framed Mount Grant in the distance, just as he remembered it.

Mount Grant loomed a few miles away across the intervening desert range. The broad bulk of the mountain rose steeply from the valley floor, ascended to a long flat ridge on each side of the peak like shoulders, then rose up again in the center of the mountain range like a head. On top of the round peak was a large pile of talus, visible even from distance, gracing the imagined head of the mountain with a top knot just like the top knot that crowned Buddha’s form. Whenever he thought of Mount Grant, Bill always recalled its image in this way. Over the years visiting his hometown of Hawthorne, which he did occasionally, became a pilgrimage to stand at the feet of Buddha.

As a fourteen-year-old high school freshman, he gazed at the mountain in this way and wrote an essay for Mrs. Oliver’s English class, which described Mount Grant as an incarnation of Buddha’s form atop the long shrine of the Wassuk Mountain Range. Pioneers trekking across the scorching Great Basin alkali playas to seek the glories promised by the pure land of California were encouraged by this symbol of perfection awaiting them on the western horizon. Mrs. Oliver was so entranced by this view, even though she was a stout Christian, she awarded Bill with a prize, a copy of The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott. The book was handsomely bound in cloth and Bill still treasured it. It stayed on his bookshelves throughout his life. Her recognition affirmed for Bill the wisdom of seeing purity everywhere he looked. Somehow, even as an immature and inexperienced fourteen-year-old, he understood the world—and life—was what one made of it, was what the mind made of it. This world, including the solid and formidable form of Mount Grant, possessed an inner reality and was not just an outer fact. As Mrs. Oliver handed Bill his prize in front of the class, he promised himself he would someday lay the book at the altar of the Wassuk Mountains in gratitude for the wisdom they had bestowed upon him. He secretly pledged to ascend Mount Grant and touch the top knot on Buddha’s head. At that sacred spot, he would leave an offering, the treasure Mrs. Oliver had just given him.

Though he kept The Talisman always in sight on his desk or bookshelf all these years, he had never read it. The few times he had cracked open the book, he found the early nineteenth century prose daunting and unfamiliar. Today, because he intended to pay homage to Mrs. Oliver, he had brought the book into the classroom to read at least some of it, though when he thumbed through its yellowed pages, he doubted she had ever read it either.

The book began with an apology to readers, the author’s introduction, explaining his novel was a work of fiction so readers could not expect the historical circumstances and places described in the book to be accurate representations.

Reality, Sir Walter Scott had written, where it exists is only retained in the characters of the piece.

Bill sat back on the school chair, shocked to be hit so squarely by truth. Character, not world, was reality. The inner quality of life, not outer conditions, determined the realities we are dealt. How had he missed these few words for sixty years? Mrs. Oliver had awarded him with wisdom, which he had carried as an unsprouted seed for decades. Intrigued now, he opened the book to its first chapter and began reading, and so entered a new world, the world where a knight traveled the deserts of Palestine to meet the Saracen enemy of his lord, King Richard I.

The janitor cleared his throat to let Bill know he was ready to lock up the room. Reluctantly, Bill closed the book and stood up to leave. Standing by his chair he tried to imagine Mrs. Oliver at the front of the class. She died several years ago. When he had read about her passing in the local weekly newspaper that he had mailed to him in California, he was determined to attend the services in her honor. He and Mary drove from their home in the Bay Area to Hawthorne that fall day and spent the evening with a group of Methodist parishioners in Mrs. Oliver’s church, just down the street from the town’s largest casino, the El Capitan, where he had worked as a busboy during the last few years of high school. No one remembered him, as he expected. Everyone he knew in high school must be dead or gone, like his friend Burt.

He could muster no ghost in the room. The janitor cleared his throat again, and Bill strode out of the classroom.

He walked around the school building to the west side to get an unobstructed view of Mount Grant. Sitting on the bleachers by the outdoor basketball court, he spread open The Talisman on his knees to continue reading. Before him the magnificent form of Mount Grant loomed, the great cloak of its shadow slowly advancing across the desert toward him as the late-afternoon sun set in the west.

Once an obstacle, the language of Sir Walter Scott’s lofty English this evening gave birth to a new vision. The Knight of the Couchant Leopard riding across the desert near the Dead Sea toward an oasis encounters a Saracen enemy, equally well armed, on his steed. They parry and clash without either combatant finding advantage until darkness, when they throw down their arms and declare to each other a steadfast truce. Thus ends the first chapter.

Bill closed the book just as the mountain’s shadow darkened the space about him.

Thank you, Mrs. Oliver, he shouted joyously.

Why he should be moved by Scott’s story of chivalry and the Crusades he could not say. Maybe it was the description of honor, purity, devotion, and bravery—traits rarely experienced in the twenty-first century. As it was for the Knight of the Couchant Leopard, all that mattered to Bill when he died was how he had acquitted himself in this life.

Sir Walter Scott’s description of the desert in Palestine could have been written for the Great Basin valley, which contained Hawthorne below Mount Grant. Just north of the town was Walker Lake, a dark, flat shadow under the lee of the mountain. Like the Dead Sea, it had no outlet to the oceans, and as the decades passed, the lake became more and more saline. One day its concentrated minerals would choke the last remnant of life and the lake too would die, of no use to any one or to any creature.

He looked west, toward the flanks of Mount Grant, which rose sharply from the flat desert alluvials fanned out below the gash of each canyon. One way to the peak of Mount Grant would be to walk from where he sat on the bleachers directly toward the mountain. Sir Walter Scott described the Knight of the Couchant Leopard’s progress across the Palestine desert plain so vividly that he likewise could see himself as a small speck moving slowly across these sands. He felt pleased by this vision. Somehow it was appropriate to regard himself as the smallest thing in Buddha’s landscape. Why he should cling to such a tiny life seemed preposterous.

The brighter stars began twinkling in the eastern sky. He was reminded of the sun warming his cheek in the backyard and his wish to listen to the Milky Way. He stopped. Faintly, he felt his heart beating, heard his breath whine at the nostrils. The air was still.

His backpack, equipped with water, a little food, and a sleeping bag, was in the car. He could sling it over his shoulder and begin his journey, even though the mountain’s shadow was inexorably turning into night. He could probably make it to the foot of the mountain before the darkness became too dense.

All his young life had been lived under the magnificent form of Mount Grant. There was never a day he did not spend at least a few moments gazing at it and remembering his pledge. At such times, he imagined himself setting out directly from where he happened to be in those moments and walking across the desert to the mountain. Even as a youngster, he felt it would be liberating to surrender himself to the universe in this way, just another orbiting point in the vast space of the starlit cosmos. His thoughts never included the practical issues of safety, food, and camping gear. He only thought of going. As he stood there this evening contemplating the wisdom of setting out right now according to his teen fantasy, he realized he had never imagined returning. Like death, a trek up Mount Grant seemed a one-way trip.

From where he stood, it would take at least two days to make the ascent. He had enough food and water in his backpack for that. But if something happened to