CHAPTER TWO

Having desires is perfectly natural for human beings. Desires, however, were never intended to govern us.

The Sensei

Samuel was eager to get home, go for a walk with his family, and relate what he’d learned from Vanessa Mallory. But first he needed to run a couple of errands.

At the bank’s drive-up, he put a deposit into the tube and pressed “Send.”  He waited. And waited. He pressed “Call Teller.” After a while, a smiling face appeared on the screen.

“How can I help you?”

“I’ve been waiting for a receipt for my deposit.”

“Do you think you could date a couple of your checks for me?”

“That’s the reason for the delay?”

She flashed a big smile, teeth and all, and nodded.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“Of course,” he responded. “I could do that, if you would be so kind as to send them back to me.”

She flashed another big smile. The screen went blank. Samuel could hear the tube whizzing back to him.

Banking done, he drove on to a giant Wal-Mart, where he was to purchase a gift for his daughter, Tia. Rebecca had given him specific instructions on where the toy kitchenette could be found.

He was eager to get out of the newly enlarged and remodeled store under the fifteen-minute grace period experience had taught him he’d have before beginning to leave his body. What was it about this kind of store?

First, it was the fluorescent lights bearing down on the top of his head, especially on his soft spot, where the three bones of his skull met, as well as at an acupuncture point called Hy-a-ku-e in Japanese, which meant ‘the meeting of one hundred gods.’ During his days in school as a youth and later in college, he never acknowledged the effect fluorescent lights were having on him.

Once he became an acupuncturist, whenever a patient’s Hy-a-ku-e point felt soft or mushy to his touch, he would plant a gold needle there, and leave it for as long as twenty minutes. The patients loved what it did for their spirits and sense of well-being.

But what else was it about this kind of store? It was the overwhelming amount of stuff, most of it disposable and without aesthetic value, oozing out of an overwhelming number of aisles.

He couldn’t find aisle E-16, and he could not find someone to help. It was too much for Samuel.

C’mon man, stop making such a big deal of it. It’s just a store. Now pull yourself together and find the kitchen set.

Finally, with the boxed kitchen awkwardly tucked under his arm, he hurried to the checkout. Although he did find a real person, there was also a new machine standing between them, instructing him to feed it a credit or debit card.

Samuel froze in bewilderment.

“How do I do this?” he asked the clerk.

Years before, he had witnessed his mother reach a point where she was unable to harmonize with the changes new technologies were creating.

“This world doesn’t work for me anymore, Sam,” she had said. “I’m not long for it.”

Now I know how she felt, only with the way things keep speeding up, it’s happening sooner for me. Even though our family doesn’t use cell phones or microwaves, whenever we stay on the Internet too long it feels like being in this store.

His nerves fraying, Samuel headed toward home, feeling danger all around him. He yielded to pedestrians and to frightened, disoriented deer. He begrudgingly got out of the way of tailgaters and sudden lane changers. He made way for bicyclists acting both as pedestrians and drivers, for cars stealing in front of him off side streets and driveways, for cars running red lights, for distracted drivers talking on their cell phones, and for runners wearing i-Pods crossing the street.

A frantic, desperate energy surrounded him. Ambulance and fire engine sirens wailed. Sweat trickled down the inside of his arms. Samuel shifted into fight-or-flight mode. His body contracted, his shield came up.

It gives me no consolation that I’m conscious of what’s happening or that I see where it’s going. Everyone’s acting like things are normal. This civilization will only turn more chaotic. Our denial is going to assure the outcome.

Several days earlier, when the family had joined him in town and were walking from his office to a restaurant for dinner, Tia had said, “Daddy, the feeling in this city is so hard for me. It’s like something, no, like everything, is cracking into little, tiny pieces.”

Her words flew in the face of popular magazines repeatedly pronouncing the town as one of the most desirable places in the country to live.

Samuel turned his attention to the challenge of getting out of town safely. When the car reached the winding canyon road that led toward home, his stress lightened a bit. He pressed on the radio button.

“The stock market closed at a record high today,” reported an NPR newscaster. “Many investors are now seeing the sky as the limit.”

Samuel’s body again contracted. He turned off the radio.

He remembered a story his teacher had related about a master acupuncturist who’d lived in a small village in the mountains of Japan. One morning, at the start of his treatment day, the man read an alarming quality in his patient’s pulses.

After the master observed the same pulse quality in his next two patients, he sent word out to immediately evacuate the village. Several hours later, an earthquake leveled the area.

What’s happening inside people now is just as devastating. How would I describe it as a pulse condition? As a person whose consumption is expanding so furiously that his capacity to concentrate is drained. His expanding pulses no longer synchronize with his concentrating pulses. Death is imminent.

Samuel opened the car door. He was home.

Advance reader comment:

“I began reading your book a while back. Then, some things came up and I got busy. Recently, I started the book over and found so much I hadn’t discovered before—things that are really making sense to me in this time of constantly expanding technology—it’s as if I’m reading an entirely new book. Fascinating.” B.I.