The Nimrod Flipout: Stories (14 page)

One Serious Mind-Fuck

He lit himself a cigarette. Until recently he’d still been trying to quit, but by now he’d seen enough of the light to understand it didn’t really matter. “I don’t suppose you have another one for me?” asked his baba, who was a helpless miser and basically an asshole. “No,” he lied. “It’s my last one.” A particularly good-looking Dutch trekker stopped beside them, looking for a hostel. And the baba gave her some vague reply about how the whole world is really one big hostel, and managed, as if just in passing, to hit her up for an unfiltered Lucky Strike and a pack of sugarless gum. He also tried to work up a conversation, but when he saw she wasn’t interested, he reverted to spirituality. “Beautiful, eh?” the baba asked, smiling at him. “Sure.” Himme nodded. “But what difference does it make, Baba? I don’t really exist anyway, do I?” “You’d make it with her, wouldn’t you?” the baba sniggered, and took a drag on his Lucky Strike. “How can I make it with her if I don’t really exist?” he shot back. “If she doesn’t really exist? Believe me, this whole existence thing is just one serious mind-fuck. You’re a baba. You of all people should know what I mean.” “I’d screw her brains out,” the baba persisted, not listening. Strange, that of all the babas that Shiva had scattered around the world, Himme had to go and choose the only one who also happened to drive a cab. Countless roads lead to enlightenment. Buddha, for example, reached Nirvana through despair; Chang-Chu, through inaction. It would be interesting to find out what his baba’s road was. Reality grew sharper around him, deionizing itself of every bit of dirt or haziness, as he began to sink into a state of no-mind. “I need some more money, for dahl,” the baba said, nudging him gently till he responded, and then returned to eat it next to him, taking care not to get his clothes dirty. “Where do you think that Dutch chick went?” he asked with his mouth full. “She didn’t really exist,” Himme insisted. “She was just a thought.” And the baba, who’d become thirsty again, borrowed some money from him for a Coke. “Once,” he said, “I got laid by some tourist. Nothing great, kind of fat. But she kept laughing the whole time. I love it when girls laugh.” Himme felt everything around him fading away, like an old thought, like a half-forgotten memory. “I’ll be back in a minute,” the baba said. “I just want to look into something.” And even though he knew that time was just an illusion, Himme nodded. “If you give me a little cash, I’ll buy us some cigarettes,” the baba said, and started playing around with the sole of his shoe. “Look at my shoes, they’re full of holes. So how about that Dutch babe, didn’t she seem interested?” While the baba was off buying cigarettes, Buddha arrived to visit him, smiling and chubby as always, with the tip of a familiar scar showing on the underside of his potbelly, and Buddha even brought him a present—a wicker basket full of dandelions gone to seed. He blew on one of the dandelions, and the whole world disappeared.