The Day of the Iddhi (part 1)

By Suhotra Swami

Chapter 1

Project Rathramnus

            As he reached for the door handle, Charles Wiederoy glanced at the Koyomi Oerloeg mounted on the wall next to the doorframe. It was nearly 9:00 on an old-calendar Wednesday morning in late October. According to the ASAT calendar it was Year 3 on a Vagbhavavara morning of Fortnight Gebo. The temperature outside was 5 degrees Grad. Today’s Tip: “Gebo is the rune for gift; in this season, the Vata dosha tends to have more influence on the mind than Kapha or Pitta. The gentle wind from the west known as Zephyr (siva-vayu) interacts with that dosha either as Mitra (‘friend’), gifting one with joy, or Varuna (‘binder’), gifting one with a sense of emptiness.”

            He saw nothing interesting in the top news headlines, and nothing in his voice/text mail inbox. Just before he walked out the door, he turned to catch Aitvaras’s eye. Charles made a soft clucking noise and gave him a thumbs-up. In his big gold cage the tough little all-black bantam cockerel bobbed his head and quickly shuffling his sharp-spurred feet, showing off just a hint of the fight in him. “How long do bantam roosters’ live?” Charles wondered. “Mom got me Aitvaras when was still in the Navy. She died forty years ago.” Giving Aitvaras a wry, affectionate look, he spoke aloud. “Hey, little guy, you do yoga when I’m away?” Little guy nuthin.  Little tough guy.

            Young roosters—the male poultry equivalent of tattooed, t-shirted tough teens hanging out on streetcorners—are called cockerels. Aitvaras, pedigreed as the seventh son of a black Lithuanian bantam father who was himself the seventh son of his father, was by size and friskiness every bit a cockerel. But why he stayed so youthful was a mystery.

            Experts in these matters agreed that bantams are directly descended from Gallus gallus, a wild jungle fowl of India. Aitvaras sure had a lot of the jungle left in him. In San Diego there was a guy a block over who kept chickens, mostly Rhode Island Reds. Somehow Aitvaras let himself out of his cage, got outside and nearly killed two full-grown roosters, both twice his size.

            In ’95, a few days after Charles and Yayoi had moved to San Diego, Wiederoy’s older sister Cora showed up all the way from Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She dropped Aitvaras off with an unopened note from Laima, then sixteen years gone. A year after she wrote it, in 1979, she died of a stroke. She had the first one fourteen months earlier, and knew she wouldn’t survive a second.

            Cora had promised Laima that she would deliver the letter with the bird only when “Aitvaras brings Charles and his wife to live in the States.” It was odd indeed he was in Japan then, unmarried; it would be years before he met Yayoi Nakano. Their initial relationship was cordial but distant.

            In the letter Laima begged Charles to “take Aitvaras to heart. He may look like Chicken Little to you, but I guarantee he is a genuine Aitvaras. There is no better luck than the kind he can bring to a household.” Charles knew only one English meaning, “kite,” for the Lithuanian word aitvaras. Neither he nor his sister understood what Laima really meant by that word. In her letter Mom also insisted that Aitvaras be never shut up in any cage except the one of fine gold wire that she personally provided, which Charles estimated could not have cost less than $500 in 1978.  

            The important thing was that Aitvaras quickly won Yayoi’s heart. Almost every evening she played the koto, the 13-stringed Japanese zither. The black bantam loved its sound. His favorite piece was Tamasuzani, with its haunting, emotional vocal accompaniment that Yayoi sang in a way that could make the hairs stand at the back of  neck of anyone who heard her. Wiederoy had never been able to get Yayoi to even consider recording the music she played and sang (“that’s not the Japanese way,” she said in her The Argument Ends Here way). Yet for “Aiti, look how handsome you are” Yayoi eagerly made an endless cassette of 16 classics—“for Aiti, and Aiti alone.” She spoke only Japanese to him, which Charles believed he really did understand. 

            As he opened the door he touched the Koto4Aiti icon on the Oerlog’s screen. The koto’s opening flourish cascaded from the stereo speakers like tiny gems  poured by a priest over the jade form of a Buddhist deity. Aitvaras squawked in delight and began his bobbing in time to music that Americans had no time for. 

            Wiederoy glanced at at the Oeloeg’s flashing menu for Western, Babylonian, Vedic, Chinese, Aztec and Mayan astrological data, Aura reading, Ayurvedic pulse-taking, Elder Futhark rune and I-Ching hexagram casting, Enneagram counseling, Motoyama biofeedback analysis, a Q&A session with a Turing depth psychology therapist, and a half a dozen similar options. All just a finger’s touch away. With a shrug he stepped into the hall, locked the door behind him, and dropped his running shoes on the floor.

            As he laced up his running shoes outside his door, he decided that Zephyr must be acting unfavorably upon him. He’d been troubled by burglaric thoughts that sidled up as if from nowhere to invisibly sidestep into his mind, where they perched and chattered until driven off with a silent shout. Trouble was, they never failed to return. What would the Turing depth psychologist call them? Wiederoy said aloud, “A neurotic cry for attention released from the unconscious; the inarticulate shadow-self finding a voice.”

            After decades of practice of a number of yoga techniques for inner exploration, purification, enlightenment and release, he’d come to believe his mind was a sterilized laboratory, no place for obsessive, objurgatory jabbering. He remembered an obscure word, “egrigor.” Defined as a thought-form that takes on a life of its own…yes—surely, this was an egrigor that had set up camp in his subconscious. From there it was invading his consciousness.

            Earlier this morning, he’d been enrapt in his daily meditation session. At his age, with his experience, it was no trouble to shut down the volume of ambient noise inside his head. Yet like a reverse sun, a disk of night instead of day, this egrigor of shankaa (doubt) arose from the depths of his lower chakras into the inner sky of his heart. It shook his concentration with the force of a bulldog shaking a rat. This morning’s mantra-dhyana—the most important sadhana of his day—was now a shambles.

            He sighed, stood up and made for the stairs. Doubts had started to haunt him last spring when an old friend died. “Have you lived your life to the fullest? Did you live a good life? Was it productive?” At first Wiederoy tried to dismiss them with a simple monologue of relative comparison. “My life has been a search for capital-T Truth. The path I am on is more elevated than most others’, at least in this part of the world. Western civilization is finally getting round to taking spiritual values seriously that I put into practice in my life decades ago.”

            But once he entertained these doubts with even superficial attention, they deepened into an internal dialogue. Questions came back at him honed sharper and striking deeper. “What is a full life? How do you know what you’ve done with your life is good? What is good?” As the months passed, the egrigor invaded his quietude with increasing frequency, its arsenal of distractions ever more formidable. Yogis called this visheshashankhaa, the growth of doubt into many troubling particularities.

            “Even if you think you lived a full life, what about the life you’re living now, holed up in your cell on the second floor of this phalanstery for New Age retirees? What about the future? Look at you. You talk about the world around you adopting your values, but you’re more a stranger to this world than you ever have been. You’ve isolated yourself just like Bjoern did. You’ve convinced yourself that you’re better adjusted than him because you live in a city and raised a family. But you can’t relate to the changes around you any better than he could.”

            As summer passed into fall, he searched his heart for real answers. Unfortunately the only answer that came was just another doubt in disguise. Bjoern Ingvaldssen, for the last fifteen years of his life, routinely tossed it off whenever Charles tried to talk to him about the deeper purpose of human existence. “At my age there’s just not that much to look forward to.” Now Wiederoy found himself locked into his old friend’s dour point of view. But because he always prided himself on being more metaphysical than Bjoern, he had to add, “At least, not in this life do I have much more to look forward to.”

            As he came down the stairs to the ground floor landing, it crossed his mind that the Greeks, for all their philosophy, had to endure the same sort of doubts. Above the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi was inscribed their great call to self-realization, Gnothi sauton, “Know Thyself.” Underneath that, medem agan was added: “Nothing too much”—which seemed to Wiederoy a shrug-off to the blots that persist even upon the most sapient of minds.

            Departing the building, he stepped into the morning air, pale, still and clammy as a corpse. Where’s the Zephyr? “Like that Oerloeg, I think I’m wise,” he said aloud. “That’s trouble. Remember Heraclitus.”

            Pythagoras of the golden thigh is the first Greek known in history to have used the word philosopher (lover of knowledge). This was what he called himself. He is supposed to have lived around 600 B.C. Heraclitus is supposed to have lived a century later. The latter is quoted,

Pythagoras son of Mnesarchus pursued inquiry further than all other men and, choosing what he liked from these compositions, he made a wisdom of his own; much learning, artful knavery.

And:

The great man is eminent in imagining things, and on this he hangs his reputation for knowing it all.

            Heraclitus maintained that there is more to wisdom than the furnishings of the mind. Ethos anthropos daimon—character, for man, is his fate, or his personal divinity. In Sanskrit, daimon would be rendered daiva. What else had Heraclitus said about fate or divinity? There was an aphorism that began aion paiz paizon. “The lifetime of a man (aion) is a child at play (paiz paizon), moving pieces in a game. Kingship belongs to the child.” Aion, as far as Wiederoy remembered, was a synonym for time (chronos) as well as eternal life (aeizo-on). The sayings of Heraclitus—of which there is no original text; whatever is known of them are found in the works of other Greek or Roman writers—are full of riddles. No matter, today it suited Wiederoy to tie these two aphorisms together. Daimon, like aion, indicates our fate or the time we must live through in this life. Yet daimon, like aion, is eternity too. Time (kalo asmi), fate (daivi hy esa guna-mayi mama maya duratyaya), character (daivi sampad vimoksaya nibandhayasuri mata), eternity (mahatmanas tu mam partha daivim prakrtim asritah), are a child at play. The Divine Child. Janma karma ca me divyam. Kingship belongs to the Child.

            “What does that Child want with me?” he murmured aloud on the curb, waiting for a black Andruss Palmerin with government plates and tinted windscreens to glide silently by.

            Bjoern Ingvaldssen always waved such ruminations off. Yet he had a sailor’s natural superstition, and Wiederoy was his freit—something to which his superstition attached itself: the skipper’s good luck charm. Ingvalsson’s profession had been as dangerous as it was rare. He’d helmed the Umitsubame, an oceanographic exploration “submersible,” which is what civilian scientific submarines are called. They’d met in Japan in 1986 when Mr. Yukio Nakano, the owner of the Umitsubame and the organization behind it, Kairyu Dantai, offered Wiederoy a job. The pay was fabulous. “The logic of Kairyu Dantai’s wealth,” Nakano used to say, “is the algorithm I personally developed for running it: D1 + D2 = BP: ‘Daring plus danger equals big profits.’”

          For eight exciting years Wiederoy sailed with the Umitsubame. Weighing in at less than 1500 tons, carrying 25 personnel max, she was a delphinet compared to contemporary military submarines. But she was a delphinet too in her eager, swift hydrophilia.

          Her design was inspired by the experimental Type XXI U-boat, one of the Wunderwaffen the Germans were readying for production when the Third Reich crashed and burned. The Soviet Navy developed Type XXI technology into its Whiskey and Zulu class submarine programs. The heart of this technology was the Walter hydrogen-peroxide fuelled turbine.

          Kairyu Dantai produced its own Walter-type kasankabutsu turbine that could comfortably drive the Umitsubame at 25 knots per hour 330 meters beneath the surface for 8 hours straight (one knot is 1.85 kilometers). If she stayed her speed below 10 knots, the Umitsubame could remain submerged for a week, reaching depths as low as 760 meters. For surface travel she used diesel power.

          The submersible was equipped with a retractable manipulator and a mechanical recovery claw for salvage operations. She had wheels on which to rest on the ocean floor. When her turbine was powered down, compressed air thrusters moved her with precision—port, starboard, forward, backward, up, down, or in a circular axis like a huge single-bladed propeller. Variable ballasts in long tubes that hung pontoon-like from her lower hull helped her be agile at great depths.

           

            Ingvaldssen snuck all around the Pacific and, occasionally and even more hermetically, forayed into the Atlantic. The Umitsubame mission: exploring uninhabited volcanic islands. Sonar charting the ocean floor. Collecting specimens of sea life. Investigating sunken archaeological sites. This in particular was Wiederoy’s department—he had a B.A. from UPenn in archaeology; one of his professors had been Dr. John Cullinane, a big name back in the sixties and seventies.

            All these underwater research programs cost money. The Umitsubame had two other missions that not only funded them, they made Kairyu Dantai rich. Wiederoy knew almost nothing about them until much later, when Bjoern unburdened himself of his secrets...the last time they talked, two and a half years ago.

            Wiederoy laughed bittterly. How self-servingly stupid he had been, for years, to try to find comfort in knowing “almost nothing” about what was going on—when in his first year with the Umitsubami he, Bjoern and Yukoi Nakano’s daughter Yayoi had almost been killed in the most ghastly manner on the little Pacific island of Medama-ochi (or as the Americans called it, Medamothi).

            Following that, there was the incident in Lake Logurinn in Western Iceland, the most frightening event of his life. Then there were the long swift underwater runs the Umitusbami took over superheated volcanic vents on the ocean bottom…and the strange creaking sound that came from the hull as something out there, out in the ocean, wrapped itself around the submersible. But nobody—especially Bjoern—wanted to sat anything about it. And when Bjoern finally did, it was too late anyway. For these reasons, a bewildered Charles went on pilgrimage for three months to Nepal in 1987. But he came back.

            “Folly in youth is sin,” Wiederoy said to himself. “But at my age it becomes madness.” Nine years of his youth spent in deliberate nihiliscience, of “just following orders”—even as the Umitsubame plunged through an ancient barrier that a Chinese legend tells was set up by the Yellow Emperor of Canton to keep apart the kingdom of men from the kingdom of mirrors—even as Charles, Yayoi and Bjoern took leave of the saeculum, the consensus reality of  “sane human beings,” to explore the reverse world of Ungaikyo, the Fish of the Mirror—was it all catching up to him now? Was he losing his mind?

            The ascetic face of his mother Laima appeared in a beaming glode of his beclouded memory. She reproved him with her melancholy, Angelite-blue eyes. “Jeigu ash, su shventos dvaisos pagalba, ishvarychiu vennius, tada Dievo karalyste atsivertu tu!” With these words she had so often had urged him to stand fast, to never abandon himself to demons of doubt by caving into the idiocy of Western psychology. Had she not vowed to him on the day he was born that “If I cast out devils by the spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is upon you”?

            She’d educated him well in the history of the saeculum, the world of men. By the time Charles was an adolescent he could recite the names, dates and “reasons” why individuals, sects and even whole regions of the European continent, were excommunicated, tormented and massacred for the “abomination” of seeking God by light that came from sources other than the ophidian iridescence of the post-Rathramnus Church of Rome. He knew that in 1209 at Beziers, where “heretical” Cathars lived side-by-side Roman Catholics, the entire city was sacked by Pope Innocent III’s crusaders. Twenty thousand people were murdered—Catholics, Cathars, it didn’t matter—because of the Pope’s order: “Kill them all, let God sort them out.” He knew the first female victim of the Church was a gifted mathematician and philosopher, Hypatia, daughter of Theon of Alexandria. As a teacher, Hypatia was celebrated as “The Philosopher” and “The Nurse.” Bishop Cyril of Alexandria was outraged that, first, the public respected a mere woman because of her scholarship; and second, that she taught classical Greek doctrines that the Church wanted uprooted because of their “paganism.” In 415 a Catholic mob tortured, murdered, then dismembered Hypatia. Mass murderers, Laima argued, were no judges of who is sane and who is not.

            This act of looking back at his youth twisted his mind into a contrapposto. He suddenly saw the eidetic image of a witticism he’d read long ago:

               The most serious doubt that has been thrown on the authenticity of miracles is the fact that most of the witnesses were fishermen.

            Was the Umitsubame’s crew any better than fishermen? Semel insanivimus omnes: at one time every one of us has been crazy. But no. What he, Yayoi and Bjoern had experienced together, and Bjoern’s final confession of why they had seen what they did, would certainly not to be dismissed by today’s science…the science that began in 1993, a quarter of a century ago, when the Japanese Science and Technology Agency announced its intention to develop a Generation 6 global computerized telecommunications network that would cultivate the innate extrasensory powers of the human psyche. The JSTA declared then that the far frontier of technology was “the study of man’s spiritual activities.” The very purpose of the new ASAT calendar was to mark the progress of that frontier’s settlement and civilizing. What Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) wrote in Brave New World Revisited, his non-fictional commentary on his famous novel, was well underway.

               The twenty-first century…will be the era of the World Controllers…The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship education will really work—with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.

            Charles had to be honest with himself. When he was crewed on the Umitsubame, he did know—and just didn’t want to stop to think too much about it—that Nakano wired their paychecks from Kairyu Dantai’s HQ in the industrial district on the seafront of the Uraga Channel, the inlet that connects Tokyo Bay and the Pacific Ocean, to a Latin American country with a Pacific shoreline. A small but economically significant percentage of this country’s population is made up of immigrants from Japan. One of the wealthiest members of that community was a nephew and kyoushi (godson) of Yukio Nakano. The godson owned a bank fortuitously located in a Pacific coastal city of the Latin American country. Savings accounts opened at this bank by employees of Kairyu Dantai paid 22.5 percent interest per annum, tax free. 

            Ingvaldssen had worked for Nakano since 1975. When his boss died in ’95 he let Wiederoy know that it was Nakano’s plan that Kairyu Dantai be broken up. The first thing to go would be the Umitsubame. After they submitted their resignations in Tokyo, Ingvaldssen took the submersible out to sea with a skeleton crew. The skipper and his men returned on the Michizure Maru, the supply ship that accompanied the Umitsubame on all her voyages. When pressed by a curious Wiederoy, Ingvaldssen whispered that a secret clause in Nakano’s will stipulated that the submersible be scuttled over the Japan Trench, eight and a half kilometers deep.

            Bjoern, a frugal old cuss of Norwegian parentage, had twenty years of savings in the Latin American bank that made him a millionaire several times over. Wiederoy had worked for Kairyu Dantai for less than nine years at a lower pay scale. But in 1988 he married Yayoi Nakano, Yukio’s marine biologist daughter. In her twenties, she was in charge of the collection and cataloguing of sea life whenever the Umitsubame sailed. As her father’s only child, she inherited his personal fortune, also salted away in the Latin American bank.

            So it wasn’t for want of money but for the sake of being productive that Mr. and Mrs. Charles and Yayoi Wiederoy moved to San Diego. They both took teachers’ posts, she at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla, he at the sprawling 11^th U.S. Naval District on San Diego Bay. In a civilian neighborhood on the Bay’s east end they bought a house. Like sundown-reflecting iridules above Point Loma on the Bay’s west end, a couple of magic years glided by.

            Bjoern, in the meantime, couldn’t let go of the briny. He moved to Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands, bought a house that faced the waves and parked a sailboat out front. Last spring, at eighty-seven years old, he drowned while boating between Kauai and the nearby island of Niihau. “Death by misadventure,” read the coroner’s report.  Charles suspected suicide. He hoped it wasn’t worse than that.

            To understand what happened in Charles Wiederoy’s life after San Diego, we must rewind it to the years 1977 through 1982. In ’77 he graduated from the University in Pennsylvania with a B.A. in archaeology. He was also four years in the school’s Reserve Officer’s Training Corps program. He earned a commission in the U.S. Navy, which he joined the same year. From the start of his ROTC training he had but one aim: to be an investigator for the Office of Naval Intelligence. At the end of 1978 he was a lieutenant junior grade, a rank nearly the equivalent of a captain in the U.S. Army.

            By this time the ONI had taken him into its fold. Sent to Japan as a covert operative, he was assigned to a CO (commanding officer) on a Navy base on the coast of Okinawa. This man was a captain, the Navy’s equivalent to an Army colonel, with the improbable name of Ramon Yamato. Seven years older than Wiederoy, he had come up through the ranks not by an ROTC commission but by gathering intel under fire with the Navy Seals during the Vietnam war.

            Captain Yamato had a formidable reputation for bravery and brilliance. Wiederoy had been warned his new CO might ride him hard for being a college-educated pup. Yamato was something of a self-made polymath, with an aura of arrogance that typically attends the self-educated.

            His background suggested he marched through life with an enormous chip on his shoulder. Yamato’s mother, Juana Ines de Miranda, was a pure-blooded Spanish woman whose family tree went back to the Californios, the Hispanic settlers who in 1821 declared California an independent country. That lasted until 1847, when American troops occupied the capital, El Pueblo de la Reyna de Los Angeles. Juana’s family, six generations before, had been landowners of fabulous wealth. Now all they had was their pride at having not a drop of Anglo nor Aztec blood in their veins.

            By the time she was twelve Juana was an expert seamstress; by sixteen, she was a tailor of clothing for both sexes. In 1947, when she was a comely eighteen years of age, a wealthy Anglo couple hired her on a full-time basis. Her employers were both involved in the burgeoning new television industry. They wanted to look as fresh, new and stylish as the electronic medium that, during that very year, would begin to rock the boats of the old Hollywood studios—and would not stop rocking them until the studio system sank in the 1960s.

            The couple loved Juana’s original designs and her meticulous workmanship. She knew she had the talent to start her own fashion business, but a sense of nobility and independence nurtured within her by her proud parents put paid to any notion of risky business ventures with common money-grubbers. Stability and security were everything to Juana, and that meant finding a responsible man to be her husband.

            Men of pure Californio heritage were hard to find. The Anglo family she worked for employed a Nisei who was ten years older than Juana. She found him a sincere, honest man who was as proud of his Japanese bloodline as she was of being pure Spanish. Watching him standing tall in the garden, his features of that special noble, gentle type she’d seen on the statues of Japanese gods with names like Amida and Miroku in the windows of expensive import shops, Juana felt an aching tug in her heart that sometimes wouldn’t leave her until she cried herself to sleep at night. But the next morning she would again have to lay eyes upon him, and the wound would reopen.

            His name was Hajime Yamato. Working in the same household eight hours a day soon put them on a first name basis. When he proposed to her, she was afraid to tell her parents, and was amazed by their approval when she did. We respect the Japanese, they told her. They are good people, honest people, neither Anglo nor mixed-blood Indio-Mexican.

            It certainly helped that Hajime had fought with distinction in Italy with the famed 442^nd “Go For Broke” Regimental Combat Team that the U.S. Army grudgingly formed so that young Japanese-American men could prove their loyalty during the Second World War. Hajime walked with a slight limp from a combat injury. His emotions were mangled too, but he kept that to himself. His comrades died around him by the dozens on Hill 140 (“Little Cassino” near Livorno) in the summer of 1944, but that didn’t really hurt him.

            What did was a letter he received from his mother soon afterward. During the same summer his first wife, Izumi, a fragile doll of a woman, died of Huntington chorea in the Manzanar Relocation Center, a concentration camp for Americans of Japanese ancestry back in California. Months after they’d wed, Juana wheedled that out of him. Then all she could do was stare at her man’s face, her mouth moving soundlessly. But there were no words for this, so she just buried her head into his chest and wrapped her arms around him as tightly as she could. Hajime stared into the distance, feeling Juana’s tears run down his shirtfront.

            Prior to their internment in 1942, Hajime’s family had owned a farm; in 1945 they learned it had been sold to a family named Peterson that had moved west from Oklahoma. That’s why Hajime was now a gardener. This particularly incensed Ramon, Juana Ines’s father. “What the Anglo government did to the Japanese-Americans was a repeat of what they did to the Californios when Captain Fremont’s troops conquered us. They marched in, took command of what we had worked so hard to build up, and at gunpoint dispossessed us.”

            In 1958 Hajime Yamato died of cancer. His son Ramon Yamato was ten years old. The effect of a father’s death—and such a father!—on her only child worried Juana so. He was too young to suffer a broken heart.

            During a stint in Washington D.C. in 1975, right after the end of the Vietnam War, while the reverberations of the Watergate scandal still rang in the Federal Government’s halls, Captain Ramon Yamato used his ONI pull to find out the truth behind the death of his chichi. In the late 1940s his dad was invited by the Veteran’s Administration to try out a new treatment for his war injury. The government doctors told him that regular injections of plutonium offered a good chance of curing his limp. Hajime Yamato signed a paper that permitted them to commence with “the experiment.” He had no idea what plutonium was, and his doctors made no effort to inform him.

            Much later, on 3 October 1995, President Bill Clinton would glibly apologize to the people of the United States for what had two years earlier been brought to public attention by the new Atomic Energy Commissioner Hazel O’Leary (known to some in the Pentagon as “Witch Hazel”): that during the Cold War, thousands of U.S. citizens were suckered by their government into a nationwide test of the effects of atomic radiation upon the human organism.

            Before accepting his assignment to the base commanded by Captain Yamato, Wiederoy had been shown a file on his new CO. Some of the above facts about the man were omitted, but enough were included so that when they met, Wiederoy didn’t need a degree in psychiatry to understand that his captain was a conflicted man. A light touch with someone so emotionally scarred was only prudent.

            He was an expert at it, but still Yamato consumed a lot of energy just keeping a lid on his boiling emotions. Wiederoy’s impression was that his CO fit a (probably archaic) psychological profile known as choleric-sanguine. The captain was a quick study, brainy and determined. He was capable of judging situations around him with incisiveness. His trouble was factoring a place for himself within the environment in which he was expected to live and work. Too much bottled-up anger, too much inner pain. 

            Wiederoy saw it in Yamato’s eyes. When he was a kid, Wiederoy’s mother had taken him on a vacation to Florida. They stayed at the home of a woman his Mom knew. One morning he awoke, looked out the window and saw a live alligator in the back yard. Captain Yamato had the eyes of that alligator—eyes that never betrayed a shift of emotion, eyes that were coldly unforgiving, patient in their fury, and most of all, ever-watchful.

            Okinawa being Wiederoy’s first active ONI assignment, Yamato decided he needed to be broken in on cases that were just one step above Shore Patrol duty. He had to stake out what Yamato suspected was an organized conspiracy among Naval personnel to smuggle heroin into Okinawa from nearby Taiwan. During the post-Vietnam 1970s, substance abuse was rampant among the men stationed at the U.S. military installations on Okinawa Island. Drug trafficking threatened the security and readiness of Naval operations in the eastern Pacific. It had international implications. The ONI was not clear from where such large quantities of heroin originated.

            Taiwan was certainly the place where the drugs changed hands from unknown Asian suppliers to the ring of U.S. Navy pushers. The ONI dismissed as impossible Taiwan as the place where the poppies were grown and the heroin manufactured. Most likely it was the Iron Triangle straddling the northern borders of Burma and Thailand. Perhaps the H came from remote locations in the Philippines or Indonesia. It could even come from Red China—which could only mean that nation’s communist government was pulling the strings, using heroin as a weapon of sabotage in an undeclared war against the massive U.S. military presence near Taiwan. The People’s Republic, after all, claimed Taiwan as part of China. American armed forces were all that deterred the Chinese from crossing the strait and seizing the island. Any of these scenarios, but especially the latter, was reason enough for the ONI to be involved.

            Wiederoy was soon turning in surreptitious photographs and tape recordings of drug deals as they went down in Okinawa. Captain Yamato seemed satisfied with his work. A man named Roy Earle—military rank unknown, if he even had one, who belonged to a special unit within the ONI—had gotten friendly with Wiederoy in Washington. It turned out Earle had field experience in “dealing with” Asian drug traffickers. He’d warned Wiederoy that anything less than a satisfactory performance might set aflame what scientist Carl Sagan called the “reptilian” portion of Yamato’s brain. Earle said the shoddy work of an operative previously assigned to the Captain had set off a paroxysm of fury in the CO; Yamato chased the man down the streets of Okinawa city dressed like a local, screaming profanity after him only in the dialect of the island.

            To the Okinawans, there was no cause to call the police, even as Yamato beat the operative to a pulp. Most of them merely averted their gaze. To them, a fellow countryman had finally dispensed with the façade of servility and was venting his honest frustration at some arrogant Gai-jin in the uniform of the conqueror. One man even joined Yamato in his chase, weeping in a release of joyful fury as he ran to catch up, crying out “Mishima! Mishima!” after the famous novelist who formed the Tate no Kai (Shield Society) in the 1960s to protect Japan from creeping Americanism. 

            Yet what Wiederoy witnessed with his own eyes was quite the opposite. Yamato seemed an officer and a gentleman. It was true that his gentility glinted a little too brightly, like a razor held up to the sunlight. Yamato had his way of letting you know who was in charge at all times. Yet while his sense of self-entitlement was obvious, he did not rub Wiederoy’s nose in it. In fact he went out of his way to be friendly.

            At least three mornings a week they met first thing in the Captain’s office—Wiederoy having to hand over surveillance evidence or submit an oral or written verbal report, or to receive instructions on a new assignment. Yamato never failed to brew up a pot of Sayama green tea. The Captain tried to make the most of these relaxed moments by calmly laying out his positions on a number of subjects that at first seemed far removed from police work. Yet on whatever off-beat subject he spoke, Yamato was never asleep at the wheel. He had an instinct for knowing when a speculative exploration of metaphysics had to return to that tried-and-true definition of politics—“making the best out of an imperfect world.”  

 .

            Yamato’s voice seemed incapable of much more than a forceful whisper. Pouring out the tea, he more than once offhandedly rasped that he received packages of Sayama  free of charge from his good friends at the JDF (Japanese Defense Force) HQ at Iruma on Honshu, the Japanese mainland. In spite of the Captain’s soughing, Wiederoy never had to strain his ears to catch what the Captain was saying, nor was he ever obliged to ask him repeat something he once said. Yamato had that rare talent of being able to cast his voice into his hearer’s consciousness. It was a skill that a UPenn history professor discussed for the better part of an entire class period. At the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, President Abraham Lincoln read an address to a gathering of thousands. This was long before the age of microphones and public address systems. Every person present heard the President loud and clear. 

            The morning Wiederoy’s investigation came to its final end, he silently laid a cassette tape in a small Manila envelope on his CO’s desk. “Lieutenant,” Yamato hissed, “you realize that this tape you’re giving me is only possible because you’re plugged into a network of information, right?”

            “I believe so, Captain. That’s a reasonable observation.”

            “Thank you, Lieutenant. I think it’s not only reasonable, it pretty much sums up the nature of reality in which we live and work. Sit down, sit down.” Wiederoy took a wooden swivel chair that stood on rollers. His CO handed him a little cup of freshly brewed tea and asked, “You ever hear of something called quantum field theory?”

            “Well, sir, I am college educated and all that, but physics was never my particular field of study.”

            “Don’t worry, Lieutenant. I’m not trying to drop you into some theoretical swamp to leave you to flounder around so that I can get a laugh out of it.  I aim to stay within the bounds of relevance. And God knows what I have to say is relevant. I mean, it’s relevant to what we’re—your’re—doing in the field for the ONI. So just bear with me. I’m not an expert, but from what I understand, quantum field theory holds that the universe is criss-crossed by what amounts to a cosmic information network that holds together the whole of creation, or whatever you want to call it—the total universe, the complete reality—whatever the appropriate terminology is for the whole shebang after the initial big bang. It’s held together by information. Clear enough so far?”

            “Sure, Captain.”

            “But this information appears to us as a vast electromagnetic field. Did you know that this”—he rapped on his tabletop—“is just made out of positive and negative electric charges? Electric charge is the main component of atomic and subatomic structures. When these charges cancel themselves out—you know?—when the positive and negative charges are balanced, so there’s no massive surge of energy from one point to another, we get what everybody calls regular, good old matter.”

            “Yessir.”

            “But in fact there’s no difference between electricity and matter. Water in a lake—still water that is in balance with itself, not moving anywhere, not flowing—is like matter, and water in a river—flowing along, branching out in different directions, seeming with a life of its own—is electricity.

            “This is true of our own bodies. Our nervous system functions because of a constant flow of neurochemical charges. And yet we’re loathe to admit the body is changing at every moment, getting older by the second. We see it as something static and perdurable.

            “So that’s the first point, Charles. Everything we know is just electrical charge. Either it is balanced or in flux, but there’s no point in calling the balanced charge ‘matter’ any more than there’s a point to saying a completely still lake with a mirror surface isn’t the same thing as the stuff squirting out of your garden hose. All you’d be doing by arguing that is assigning conditional names to one substance that we all know adjusts itself to different conditions, right? You might as well take the word ‘water’ and rearrange the letters—‘retaw,’ ‘tawre,’ ‘werat.’—to describe the different ways it behaves.”

            Yamato went silent. In that long moment he seemed to turn inward, leaving Wiederoy and the world far from himself. Then he was back. Casually sipping his tea, he asked, “You know something about Buddhism?”

            “A little, sir. Since being stationed in this country I’ve been doing a little reading…”

            “I was raised a Buddhist. Actually a Buddhist and a Catholic, but I liked Buddhism better. Of course I have to admit I was never good at either. What the hell would I be doing in this uniform if I was a good Buddhist? Be that as it may, there’s one thing I learned that I never forgot. Probably the only thing, and I guess that’s why I ended up in the Navy. That one lesson is that the law of the Buddha is mahasamudra, the Great Ocean. Buddhist scripture attributes eight qualities to: it’s cold, clear, swiftly flowing, pleasant to the taste, fresh, and offends neither the throat nor the stomach. The Great Ocean is the very ‘stuff’ of reality.

            “Think about it, Wiederoy. The ocean we know is one thing, right? Yet as Navy men we know better than anyone how differently it behaves. It even appears differently. Different areas of the ocean have different optical properties. The ocean has the most varied naturally occurring physical states of any material or substance on Earth, whether solid, liquid, or gas. It has the greatest capacity to do things without being altered significantly. It contains in potential all other things. Science tells us life originated in the ocean. Dissolved in its waters are traces of the building blocks of everything we know on earth, organic and inorganic. The rain clouds above our heads are evaporated ocean water. And finally, the ocean is Nirvana. You read philosophy, Wiederoy?”

            “I’m interested in religion and philosophy, sir. But my study of it isn’t very developed, at least not yet.”

            “Well, maybe after this conversation, you’ll enter deeper these waters I’m speaking about. Nirvana as the ocean: Heraclitus—never read him, I suppose?”

            “Not yet, sir. But as you say…”

            “…after our talk, you will. Good. Heraclitus, who lived around the same time as the Buddha but half a world away, said,

It is a delight, not death, for souls to become moist.

            “And another saying attributed to him is,

The reversals of fire: first sea; but of sea half is earth, half lightning storm.

            “Lapsed Buddhist that I am, I believe Heraclitus meant fire to be the great cosmic ocean of electrical charge. Its balanced aspect appears as sea and then earth. Two opposite examples of physical matter. Its reversed aspect is lightning (electricity).

 

            “When I hear someone talk about ‘the ultimate state of nature’ I think of the ocean. The ocean is one, yet because of its natural diversity, there is much we can, should and must learn from it. The eight qualities, for example—that’s information. Most of Japanese Buddhism owes a great deal to the Indian Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. I recall that in his description of the mahasamudra, he did not place Nirvana under the waters; he described it as an Island where the streams of ignorance and passion do not reach. It is an Island made from the most precious jewel of the most profound dharma, complete peace.