Fiction

Chapter Two

And so George returned to the family, and for a few months things were back to, shall we say, readjusted-normal. He moved in with Mom and Dad, to their great joy, and he somewhat diffidently asked Tommy if he could use another hand on the farm. Tommy, looking at George’s state of obvious fitness, said sure. They worked out some financial arrangement without any haggling or difficulty at all, so far as I ever heard, and there George was at 48, working alongside his younger brother, back in the rhythm of a farm’s final weeks before the year’s long sleep.

“It’s like he’d never been away from it,” Tommy told me over the phone one day, “except with motors. You know how George could always take motors apart and fix whatever was broken? Now he won’t deal with them at all. Isn’t that crazy?”

That beat me. “So how much does that leave him to do around the farm, if he can’t even drive a tractor?”

“Oh, he doesn’t seem to have any problem driving them. How could you forget how to drive, you know? It’s fixing them, he seems to have forgotten about. I asked him to tear down the generator motor and he wouldn’t do it. Very apologetic, said he’d be glad to do anything else I had in mind, but he couldn’t work with motors. Weird.” Continue reading Conspiracies, Chapter Two

Those who liked Messenger might like a few chapters I wrote that tell of George after his return. The novel was to be called Conspiracies of Men and God but it looks unlikely that I’ll ever finish it. Too much water under the bridge in real life since this was written. Just for fun, then.

Conspiracies of Men and God

Chapter One. Angelo

I wasn’t doing any real work anyway, just looking through the news wires, trying to look busy. I reached over and answered automatically, my eyes still on the terminal. “Newsroom, Angelo Chiari.”

A muffled voice. “Mr. Chiari, we need to meet.” He was almost whispering, and I’d make a tiny bet that he was talking through a handkerchief or something. People get these real clever ideas from watching movies and reading detective stories, and I suppose some of the ideas must work in real life, or they wouldn’t be used in fiction. But it gets annoying when you’re on the receiving end.
“Who’s this?”

Like he’s going to give me a straight answer. “Can you be free in half an hour?”

As it happened, I could, if I should happen to want to. The day was supposed to have gone to covering the Kellerman trial. but the judge had recessed it for the day and Charley Johnson–the city desk editor–hadn’t quite found anything that he could send me to cover. It would have to be something that wouldn’t tie me up when the trial resumed the next day–which meant it would have to be something even less exciting than the Kellerman trial, which would be a trick, but long experience told me that if I didn’t get out of sight, sooner or later Charley would remember that I worked for him. I turned from the terminal and picked up a pen; asked the guy on the phone what it was about. It didn’t surprise me in the least to hear him tell me it was something he couldn’t tell me over the phone.

“Listen, friend,” I said, “I don’t do wild geese. If I’m going to move from here, I’ve got to know what it’s about.” Joe Panella looked up from his terminal across the narrow aisle and made a wry face, looking at the ceiling. I matched his expression, and nodded. Another one, we were saying.

Continue reading George Chiari after Tibet

Afterword

Fifteen years ago, I was reading Lost Horizon repeatedly and thinking about Shangri-La continually. Like Alexander Woollcott so many decades earlier, I had gone “quietly mad” over James Hilton’s book, I think now because I was clinging to the thought that somewhere there existed a refuge of sanity.

In September, 1979, I began to write Messenger as a sequel. 

Why? Several reasons. Continue reading Messenger Afterword

Epilogue. 1994

If my life in the monastery hadn’t taught me about chance and accident, my return to the world would have. I could have gotten to Pakistan at any time, weather permitting. But getting home from Pakistan, without papers, without money, without a coherent story explaining how I’d arrived there, might have been a trick. As it happened, God took care of the problem. It was just a matter of timing.

Mr. Conway set a dozen monks at a time to copying out my memoir, dividing the job among them, so that the monastery would retain my story after I carried the original over the mountains. (The original, I should mention, is considerably longer than this version. Discretion, necessity, and economic constraints have all mandated that I leave out great slices of my experiences there. I particularly regret having to remove many, many of my conversations with Mr. Conway and Mr. Barnard.) Within days of that final, nighttime conference, we—three young Tibetans and I—were on our way over the mountains. Continue reading Messenger Epilogue, 1994

Chapter Fourteen. Messenger

“Mrs. Bolton,” Mr. Petrov said politely. “Your dream. Mr. Chiari, you will listen inside.”

By now it was night. The table we sat around was illuminated by the two oil lamps on its surface. The room’s walls and ceiling had become shadowy, indistinct. The effect was not one of gloom, but of comfort, the sort of almost luxurious comfort you feel beneath warm covers in a cold room; the comfort comes from the contrast.

In lamplight, people speak more softly, observe each other’s faces and words more carefully, penetrate into their own thought, and the thoughts of others, more deeply. At the same time, they are apt to rediscover a part of their mind they normally ignore. As they listen to what is said, some inner day‑dreamer goes off on its own quests, and the messages from both parts interact, and reinforce one another. Continue reading Messenger Chapter 14

Chapter Thirteen. Responsibilities

Six weeks later. Early evening. Eight of us sat around a polished wooden table in one of the library alcoves. The two senior monks, Mr. Chin and Mr. Petrov; Mr. Conway; Mr. Herrick; Mr. Chang; Sunnie; Mr. Barnard, and myself. I was emphatically in the presence of my betters.

Mr. Barnard occasionally referred to Mr. Conway, humorously, as Shangri‑la’s “Executive Director,” but I had rarely seen him act in that capacity. The few incidents that disturbed our placid routine were handled in their course by a quiet word in the right place. As the high lama had promised, the burden of leadership there was light.

And never had I sat in on a meeting of the few who represented Shangri‑la’s guiding hand. They always seemed able to struggle along without my contribution, just as President Kennedy, the Air Force and General Motors always had, back when I was in the States. Besides, Shangri‑la has neither the need nor the taste for business meetings. The board of directors, or however they referred to themselves, rarely met. Or so Mr. Barnard said. Ordinarily he and Sunnie, quite as much as I, would be unneeded at any such meeting. Actually, for all I know, they met frequently, if only for the pleasure of each other’s company. Continue reading Messenger Chapter 13

Chapter Twelve. Adjustment

Finally he was ready to talk.

I had brought him outside and showed him the trail and offered to walk with him if he wanted. He had set out, as I’d expected, alone, without a word. I had settled onto one of the stone benches on the patio—which Mr. Barnard always called a veranda—and, after a few minutes, had taken a cigar from my pocket and lit it with a sparker, feeling a little like Mr. Barnard myself.

I had told myself, while I sat there waiting, that we had told Corbin for his own good, that waiting would have meant deceit, that ultimately this was kinder. I had told myself that this was Mr. Conway’s decision and that Mr. Conway didn’t commonly make mistakes. I had told myself that Corbin seemed to be a bright kid and would undoubtedly have figured out the situation soon enough.

But Corbin’s eyes, as I remembered them, outweighed all this logic, and I wondered if for once Mr. Conway had miscalculated. Continue reading Messenger Chapter 12