Chapter Five

Bard here. Those of you familiar with the Gesar epic must be wondering a number of things. At the top of your list might be, “Where is Trothung and what happened to him?” Well, that is a good question and to find out we will take a brief historical tangent.

We last saw Trothung many years ago. 860 to be exact, around the end of Gesar’s first incarnation and his various battles with the enemies of Ling. For the most part the enemies and demons had been vanquished and Tibet was returned to a time of relative peace. Trothung had spent his final years in retreat, meditating on his deity Hayagriva, balancing that with time with his wife and children. When the bardo of death came for him, he was led to various incarnations, all designed to make up for some of the rather nasty deeds that he had carried out. We could spend many pages cataloging these, but suffice it to say that he had played the part quite well that you could say was written for him. To recapitulate for the reader: Gesar was but a nebulous celestial being known as Döndrub, barely more than a few well-chosen thought waves, when he, this celestial being Döndrub, made a rather long list of requirements for his success if he were to incarnate on earth. He presented this list to Padmasambhava and in the list was, surprisingly we might add, the presence of a devious, tactful enemy to keep him sharp and always on his toes. This was the part that Trothung had stepped into and portrayed over decades and through many campaigns. The beings that followed the death of this Trothung incarnation, slowly, over centuries, matured into the wiser, more compassionate man we encounter at this point in our tale, a man named Tom Myers. He had moved to New Orleans to be part of FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina and then, liking the city, had stayed on when he found employment as a shipping clerk. He was living a quiet life in an edge community and now, as his work had dried up because of the pandemic, he had been volunteering, delivering food for seniors and occasionally driving them to doctor’s appointments. He missed his wife, well, the husbands and wives of all his past lifetimes and his many children, and now at this time in particular could not stop thinking of them.

And he was thinking of them at the moment that his cellphone vibrated. He looked down at the text message that he had just received.

“Manéné here. Get your things together and head to Madison, Wisconsin. Address to follow. We will contact you there. All is forgiven. We need your help.”

Trothung sat down at his desk, pulled out his laptop and thought for a bit. Hundreds of years since I’ve heard from her. She was always such a pain in my side, I can still hear her irritating voice grating in my ear, yet she was awfully smart and I have to admit she had cunning beyond even my own. Not much point in staying here then, when such an opportunity comes like the proverbial bat out of hell to uproot your life. I might not have been the greatest of meditators of my age, but this rule at least I know in my heart: Upheavals are always to be leaned into, there is really no other way. For nearly a thousand years, this had been a constant in my life and I will not abandon it now. The only question really is how to get there. By air, six or so hours with a stop in Charlotte, or a fifteen hour drive. Then I would have my truck and there certainly won’t be any traffic. I can’t even remember what traffic was. Time for a road trip, methinks.

An hour later, Trothung was leaving New Orleans and heading north on I-55. His ’94 Tacoma had just a little over 150,000 miles but was still going strong as it had lived its life in the south, far from the corroding northern winters. The clutch had been replaced before he had bought the thing about five years previously. It didn’t have the largest cargo bay, but he had simple needs and it was steady, reliable transportation. The bench front seat was worn and wore its duct tape with a not so well hidden sadness. Aside from a dent in the passenger door that came free with the truck, the outside, though dingy, was unmarked. At sixty-five it ran fine, at seventy it showed its age and the lack of muscle in its 2.4L engine. On the other hand, Trothung knew perfectly well that both he and the truck could make the fifteen hour or so run without sleeping and it was in an expectant mood that he left the Louisiana bayous behind and headed north.

He thought over what he knew of the pandemic and what he might be able to contribute. More than that, he thought back on the many struggles he had faced and all the times he had had far away on the Tibetan plateau with this same group of warriors. Many things came to mind, but most of all he dwelled on Gesar who, though who originally a fierce adversary, had over time won first his respect, then his awe, and finally his loyalty. But even though they had been through so much together, Trothung was never sure what exactly Gesar thought of him. Trothung knew full well that he had been pre-ordained and instructed to be Gesar’s crafty enemy and this was a part that he had performed so seamlessly that Gesar had forgotten his own request for such a one, such a foil to keep the knife of his insight, judgement, and wisdom sharp. Because of this they had parted, not with the joined understanding of compatriots, but with something far too complex and spiteful to unravel. It was with this trepidation that Trothung pulled off the highway to the Shell station at the Louisiana-Mississippi border in Jackson. Thankful that his thirsty truck took regular and that gas had recently gotten so cheap, he filled it, put on his mask, and went into the little shop to get some chilled coffee drinks and sandwiches for the road. Looking down at the chicken pesto sandwich that he had just purchased, he could not help but wonder at the irony of it all. Chickens, so many chickens, so many megabases, a trillion or so tons of DNA turning over every seven weeks, and so many infected with so many viruses. Even though it was now thought to be bats that had infected pangolins, or some other wild intermediary, rather than chickens, still the domestication and factory nature of the animal industry had bred this pandemic as certain as night follows day. There was, in true fact, no way for this pandemic not to follow SARS, MERS, avian flu, and let’s not forget swine flu while we are at it. You put that many animals that close, add a few billion viruses, stir frequently and there you have it, as inevitable as the cauldron in Macbeth, spewing forth disaster on the land.

None of these deep thoughts kept Trothung from carrying his coffee and chicken sandwich to his truck, closing the door, and returning to his northward journey on I-55.

Chapter Six

By the time Trothung was back in his truck, Gesar and Gyatsha were high over the Indian Ocean on a Qatar Airlines flight to Chicago with a short layover in Doha, then traveling to O’Hare and on to Madison. Nearly everything he saw was new to Gesar. Gyatsha, on the other hand, accustomed to the riches of a city like Doha, was in his element. After he had made fun of his old friend for not knowing where the airline’s complimentary earbuds went, let alone what they were for, he spent some serious time trying to orient Gesar to the current century and to the world that he now found himself in. Rather than watching one of the seven hundred free movies, countless TV shows, or listening to music, Gyatsha, squelching his desire, used the time in flight to fill Gesar with the information required to lead this particular modern world out of the pandemic.

Two hours into the flight it was time for a break and more than time to introduce Gesar to beer, this world’s closest thing to chang, the traditional Tibetan alcoholic drink. It was then that Gyatsha remembered that there was no alcohol on a Qatar flight. The introduction would have to wait. On the other hand, they were on their way to Wisconsin, a land well known for its beer and with this thought Gyatsha returned to his instruction. But soon it became obvious that neither of them could concentrate. Gesar was nodding off and Gyatsha, unable to settle in, looked for a movie to lull himself to sleep, vexed that he was the anxious one while Gesar was so laid-back and clearly enjoying himself. To all appearances Gesar seemed the experienced traveler rather than the secluded yogi that he had been as the centuries passed, timelessly resting in a samadhi of equanimity, oblivious to this world realm and the progress and struggles it was enduring.

When Gyatsha awoke he was surprised to see Gesar glued to his screen, enraptured, watching the first Men in Black. Gyatsha chuckled under his breath, but suddenly worried that Gesar thought that what they were up against would somehow be just like the movie. Though, of course, Gyatsha enjoyed picturing himself naturally enough as the Tommy Lee Jones character and Gesar as the less experienced sidekick, the Will Smith character. Finally, and for once, his younger half-brother really would be outranked. This was but the fleeting thought that it deserved to be, as it just now occurred to Gyatsha the unlikelihood that Gesar would have anything resembling a passport. The extent of his own obliviousness surfaced when it finally dawned on Gyatsha that the airline clerk in Indonesia had not asked either of them for passports. Perhaps the clerk may have forgotten, but now Gyatsha thought it more likely that Gesar’s mental powers had worked their invisible magic. People nowadays would call that a Jedi mind trick, but of course Gesar would have no idea what that meant. Clearly, Gyatsha would have to lay off the pop culture references, at least for a while. Pushing away the question of what they would do to get through customs at O’Hare, Gyatsha picked up his remote and looked for another movie that would entertain him until his next nap.

They had a three hour layover in Doha during which Gyatsha showed Gesar what it was that materialism had produced while he, Gesar, had been in retreat, contemplating the truth of emptiness and luminosity. The massive and very modern Hamad International Airport had succumbed to an eerie atmosphere: all the shops were open though the airport itself was nearly deserted. They saw handbags that cost thousands and jewelry that cost tens of thousands, all sorts of electronic gadgetry, and magazines and newspapers from all over the world. They drank Persian tea, ate pastries, and sat in massage chairs to ready themselves for the journey ahead. Gesar began to recite in song the strangeness of all he was experiencing, but Gyatsha thought it more prudent to hush his good friend and try to stay under the radar of the well-armed and plentifully deployed security forces. After some back and forth Gesar relented and, thankfully, it was time for them to re-board the plane for the fourteen hour flight to Chicago.

Two meals, one sleep, and two movies later the plane began its descent into a cloudy and cool Illinois spring morning. The usual air traffic noise around O’Hare had diminished to a mere whisper of its usual boisterous and continuous cacophony, generating a pleasant serenity foreign in a fair number of suburban Chicago neighborhoods. Though it did denote the end of the world as they knew it, nonetheless it was a quiet that the residents had not previously experienced and to which they were unwittingly becoming quite enamored. Gyatsha still had no idea how they were going to get through customs. Actually he had no idea how Gesar was going to get through, as Gyatsha himself had a perfectly valid passport that he was now, he noticed, taking out of his breast pocket. He was annoyed with himself for not bringing this up earlier and he turned to Gesar, saying, “Do you know about customs, not in the cultural sense, but how we are going to get through Customs and Immigration here in Chicago?” Gesar, in return, simply smiled and shrugged his shoulders and told Gyatsha not to worry. Gyatsha, for his part, attempted to put the worry out of his head as the broad Chicago skyline came into view.

As they exited the plane, Gyatsha’s worry returned, along with his realization that it was suspicious that they had no bags, just his carry-on with the single change of clothes that he had brought. But Gesar kept on smiling and they walked toward the customs counter where Gesar did a brief shuffling step and took Gyatsha’s arm. Together they walked out of International Arrivals. “Disguise,” Gesar said, “is simply knowing what you are and making it very, very real, not only to yourself, but to those around you. Maybe you remember when I pretended to be a raven and convinced my Uncle Trothung to put on the horse race that made me king, husband to Drukmo, not to mention heir to the great wealth of Ralo Tönpa?” Thus admonished, Gyatsha buttoned his lips as they headed toward the bus that would take our two warriors to Madison. There, their fate as well as the fate of all humans was to be a topic worthy of multiple digressions—discussions about race and economic privilege, about who would live and who would die, and, ultimately, speculation about what the future would hold for humanity. The dolphins and other mammalian ocean creatures were at this very moment reveling, for very good reason indeed, in the misfortune of the species that had so often hunted them, nearly to extinction, just as this zoonotic infection now seemed bent on the decimation of the human experiment. No dolphin shed one dolphin tear in this regard.