Ep. 7: Marcus's Wife Leila Fills in Another Piece of the Puzzle.

Turns out the Buddha's not Sid's first rodeo.

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The Man Who Woke up the Buddha is the story of a guy named Sid who wakes up from a stroke and realizes he's the Buddha, even though he knows almost nothing about Buddhism.

Previously: After doing a few errands, including getting wine, pastry, and pot for Di’s book group, Marcus hit the road. While driving, he brooded about Sid’s mortality for a while, before reluctantly calling his sister Julia, whose memories of Sid living in their house during her sensitive teenage years weren’t quite as adulatory as Marcus’s. Finally, he makes it home.

---

The moon was almost full, and some fireflies flashed unenthusiastically, as if they knew there was no way they could compete. Several varieties of moths were going at the two small spotlights on either side of the screen door. Marcus couldn’t see what moths saw in light. The thought made him smile.

He walked in, opened the freezer door, and took out some pepper vodka.

“I’m awake.” Leila called from upstairs. A pause. “Bring me a little, too.”

She either knew him too well, was psychic, or both.

As Marcus reached for the glasses, Maxfield started aggressively rubbing up against his leg. The cat might be too proud to beg, but not to make his intentions known.

“You feed him?” Marcus yelled upstairs.

“What?”

“Never mind^⁠.” He walked over to Maxfield’s dish. It seemed to have plenty of cat food in it, although there was the hint of crust on top. Picking up the official plastic cat-food fork, he turned it over a few times and Maxfield happily returned to one of his four main reasons for having incarnated this lifetime.¹

Marcus figured he’d fooled Maxfield into thinking it was fresh food. Actually, Max had fooled Marcus into freshening it up. Cat food, like fine wine, has to breathe.

Costs a lot to earn a cat lifetime, the Buddha reflected, but it's worth it.

Marcus poured two glasses of the frozen pepper vodka and took them upstairs, where he found Leila sitting on top of the sheets, three pillows (one his) behind her, the air conditioner on low, and her large soft gray cotton robe belted, but loosely.

A case file was on her lap and a half dozen more next to her. After kissing her and handing her the drink, he sat on the edge of his side of the bed and leveraged his shoes off without untying them. She put the file she’d been reading on top of the other ones and moved them aside.

“Juvenile delinquent or addicted baby?” Marcus asked indicating the top folder.

“Both. Juvenile delinquent with addicted baby.”

“Ugh,” he said.

“Just another day at the office. Hard to titrate the little guy off. Even with her nursing.”

“The kid really goes through withdrawal too?”

She just shook her head. Neither yes. Or no. Or anywhere in between.

“Guess it ain’t that simple,” he said. “The dad?”

“Jail.”

“Dealing?”

“And assault with a deadly. Cheers,” she said, ending the conversation, as they looked in each other’s eyes and clinked glasses.

“Salud,” he said, taking a sip, remembering the days when he’d have downed a shot in one gulp.

“So?” she asked, looking straight ahead.

“Well, like I told you, he confessed, as he put it, to being the Buddha.”

She took a sip, put the glass on her night table and pushed herself up a little more. “I guess that’s better than Teddy Roosevelt,” she said, picking up the glass again.

They both laughed. One time Sid had famously erupted into a Teddy Roosevelt “Bully!” after he’d managed to convince a local zoning board to turn down an application from a major chain store because the land abutted one of his properties. He bought it the next morning and had a skateboard park built—contributing most of the money himself.

What had seemed like a brief impersonation to those at the zoning meeting, however, became a week-long obsession. He picked up a walrus mustache at the toy store, started wearing rimless glasses, signed up for horseback riding lessons he never took, and asked for extra starch when he dropped his collection of collarless shirts at the cleaners on Monday.

“He took that one a little too far,” Leila admitted.

“I’ll say. Especially when he began talking about how much he wanted to go to Africa and hunt endangered species. Or even some that weren’t endangered. Although one could argue Al Capone was even more outrageous,” Marcus added, taking her hand, “since he started referring to the kids’ allowances as blood money, and claimed they were actually loans so he could charge vigorish.”²

Now they couldn’t stop laughing. He reached his arm out and pulled her into the crook of his neck.

Indeed, for a few days, Sid had walked around downtown, wearing a fedora, smoking a cigar, and striking up conversations with panhandlers, especially ones who carried cardboard signs that said, “Jesus saves.”

“Which bank does he use?” Sid would always ask before handing them a $20. Sometimes, he would also cash checks for them, most of which weren’t any good.

“So, now he’s the Buddha?” Leila asked.

“Yup, he’s moving up in the world, at least spiritually speaking.”

“Sometimes I wish he’d imitate himself.” She sighed more than laughed. “So did they get it all?”

Another wave of weariness swept over him. He’d talked to Leila that morning but couldn’t remember how much he’d told her. “Most of it. Margins were too close to some vessel or other.”

“Definitely malignant?”

“Presumably. They’re doing the biopsy to learn what kind of cells.”

“Di sounded OK when I talked to her. Shaky but OK,” Leila said.

“Zoey’s keeping her pretty distracted.”

“I bet. So, where exactly is it?”

“In the Supra-tent-or-ium,” Marcus said slowly. “Which is like a dividing line between the top and bottom half. But I don’t get it ‘cause it looks like they went in up here,” he took his hand and waved it above the top of his head, front to back, as if shooing a fly.

He scrunched his face in frustration, as he did whenever he didn’t get something and wasn’t sure how to figure it out. “I gotta find someone who can explain one of those brain charts in English.”

Leila waited. She couldn’t tell whether he had finished or was just taking a long time to formulate his next thought. It was the latter.

“He showed me his CT scan—proudly of course. He’s going to have Casper tape it up on the hospital window. Says he likes the way the light filters through his brain at sunrise.”

“Good line. They’ll do radiation now, you said?”

“Probably. Depends how much is left. And what kind it is and how close it is to other parts of his brain.”

Marcus drained his glass and put it on his bedtable. To keep him from going back downstairs she handed him hers. “Here, you can have the rest.”

He sipped and stared.

She got under the sheet, pulled the extra pillow out from behind her back and put it next to him, but didn’t fully lie down. When she started talking, it was as if to herself. “You know, once I got him in a rare serious moment and asked him to explain his impersonations and he gave me an equally rare serious reply.”

“You told me…” Marcus said, his voice trailing off… “What exactly did he say, again?”

“He said that, quote, ‘If I knew what I know I wouldn’t know it.’ Followed by, ‘If I knew who I was I wouldn’t be him.’ It wasn’t that he sounded vulnerable or was just joking around. More like he knew how fine a line he was walking.”

“You are the only person who could get him to talk about it like that,” Marcus said with a combination of admiration and envy.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“I do. He probably would have preferred to give his confession to you, not me.”

“You always do that, Marc.”

“I know.” It was true. Her insights into his friend sometimes made him feel left out, separated from her as well as him. They didn’t have to discuss it. It had come out once in their therapy and they agreed it was his issue not hers. A simple, but tenacious one. After all these years together, Sid still never quite treated Marcus as an equal. Whereas he had treated Leila as one from the first time Marcus introduced them. Same with Kesey. After all, he was the one who brought them together in the first place. Why… He shrugged and let it go.

“Sid is one of the few true geniuses I’ve ever known,” Leila said decisively, having sensed he’d gone down a rabbit hole.

“Better not tell him that,” Marcus laughed.

She cut him off. “A real genius…a genie.”

“Never made that connection. The connotation.”

“Me neither,” she said, thinking about whether it actually made sense. “But it’s true. Genie. Genius.”

^⁠“And what kind of rabbit is he pulling out of what kind of hat this time?” Marcus waited for his analogy to be brushed aside.

But it wasn’t. “He pulls crazy wisdom out of whatever hat he has on.”

“A neat trick.”

She took the glass back out of his hand, took another sip of vodka…it was getting too warm to enjoy, more peppery… and handed it back. “Well, like I said, if he’s willing to impersonate so many people maybe he should give his own self a chance.”^”

“What does that mean?”

“Who is he when he wakes up in the middle of night?”

That gave Marcus pause. But he didn’t have the energy to think it through. “Maybe. I don’t know.” His eyes began to close…he’d stayed in there with her as long as he could, but his energy had drained out. He finished the vodka and slid down under the sheets reaching over to turn off the light on his side of the bed.

“He wants some pot brownies by the way…says no one can make them like you. Plus, he insists you’re a saint…shows how omniscient he is, not. Sorry. Strike that.”

She rolled over to collect her papers and put them under the bed so she wouldn’t slip on them if she got up during the night. Then she got back under the covers and turned towards Marcus who reached for her. They held each other close.

“Oh Sid,” she sighed^⁠.

Next Episode: Sid gathers his grandchildren to give his first “dharma talk,” which is the story of his life-threatening stroke and how, in the middle of it, he realized he was the Buddha.

1. The other three being sleeping, getting scratched, and doing his best to feign nonchalance when birds arrived at the feeder outside the picture window in the living room.

2. For those of you who never read gangster novels or watched gangster movies, “vigorish” is the excessive interest that bookies are able to extort when you’re hanging at the end of your financial rope.