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waves through the limousine window. I see him drive by every day, now that I’m no longer stuck out in the artichokefields—I got terribly sunburned those first days, all across my shoulders and the back of my neck, since I had my hair pinned up, and you
know
what a good tan I usually take—and you wouldn’t believe the
peace
he generates, even at thirty miles an hour. We all hold hands and chant for him and the feelings of positivity and centeredness are fantastic. Tears come not just to
my
eyes but everybody’s, even people like Fritz who have been with the Arhat for years, even back in India, when the ashram began. Fritz is my group leader. My lover, too, I guess I can tell
you
. You, Midge, but not Irving or anybody else. Actually, Fritz’d kill me if he heard me calling him Fritz instead of his ashram name. The Arhat gives us all names, when he gets around to it, he hasn’t given me mine yet and the others say it takes months often before he notices you. Fritz’s is hard to remember if you aren’t at home in Sanskrit yet. Something like Victor or Vic Scepter—that isn’t quite it. Oh well. I’m tired. I say he’d kill me and that’s not true, but actually he does have a funny little temper. He’s German by birth and likes things to be
just so. Ach ja
.
    The others who live here in the trailer are all over at the Kali Club right now. How they do it after working—worshipping—twelve or fourteen hours a day I have no idea, but they’re all younger than I and tell me if you love the Arhat enough you don’t need sleep. Let me go back to the beginning, I know this is confusing. I stayed in this motel in this tiny town called Forrest, with two “r”s, I don’t know who he was, some rancher or explorer or vicious Indian-killer I suppose, with all ticky-tacky newish houses and nothing in the way of trees except for a few straggly cottonwoods down by the creek they call Babbling Brook but that to me seemed dull as ditchwater and utterly silent, even though April here is supposed to be the great run-off time from the snowmeltin the mountains. The mountains are very far off and look transparent except for their snowy tips. The rocks are reddish and have a soft look as if a child just got done kneading them. That’s k-n-e-a-d. To finish up about the trees—there
was
a lovely tamarisk in pink bloom outside the stucco post office, and in the motel courtyard a strange kind of huge tree with tiny oval leaves and long pods at least a foot long hanging down rustling and clattering in the wind. There’s always a certain amount of wind out West. The town seemed to be mostly cowpoke types and retirees from the insurance business in Phoenix, and when I asked about the Arhat’s ashram you should have seen how their faces hardened up. They
hate
him, Midge—this is old Goldwater country and they still call people hippies and say he’s brought in all these hippies to have drugs and orgies and furthermore the city he’s putting in illegally is playing havoc with the local water table. They told me how he’d gouge all my money out of me and work me to death and pump me full of drugs. The man at the post office said, “That devil fella they call a rat sure earns his name.” I can’t do the Western accent very well yet. One man, I think he was an Indian, American Indian I mean, even though he wore one of those little plastic truck-driver hats, you know, with a visor and the name of a beer on them, spat at my shoes when I tried to explain how the Arhat’s message was simply love and freedom and furthermore he was making the desert bloom. On top of all this, the motel gave me a breakfast with hash-browns that made me queasy all morning.
    The roads down here are
endless
, and mostly dirt packed into ruts and ripples. It seemed to take forever to drive that forty miles, bumpety-bump-bump, trailing this enormous cloud of dust. I don’t see how people in Arizona can have any secrets, because anywhere you go you leave this