You Meet the Buddha in the Rabbit Hole

With the gay lights of Portland dancing across our windshield, we drove back to Red's house to relax and continue our evening. Up in her second floor room, at the top of the smooth wooden stairs, our conversation meandered to the subject of Chinese martial arts. "Kung Fu Fighting" had been one of the few novelty songs from that era that she had recognized when I had played them for her on the Fourth.

I waxed on the genius of Bruce Lee, a one-time resident of the Pacific Northwest. Red is taking a Qi Gong class.  I told her I knew a little bit about that from a course I took at Willamette back in the magical Spring of '88. Actually it was a Tai Chi Chuan course---the only dance course I took there. It was taught by a petite Chinese woman who spoke with a thick accent and who always wore black martial arts clothes.

It had been a long time since I had done the entire Yang Long Form that we learned in class---105 (or 103, 108, etc.) sequential movements that are supposed to take a half hour to complete. If you do it faster, you're doing it too fast. I remembered only fragments at this point. I told Red I wanted to get back into doing it, since invariably it made me feel fantastic afterwards, as if I had an electric superhero body of optimal strength and flexibility.

We discussed some of the philosophy of Tai Chi Chuan, which means "supreme ultimate fist." In bare feet on the wooden floor of her room, I demonstrated for her a few of the movements I remembered, including the "Yin-Yang palms," in which one holds one's hands as if cradling a large ball, circling it in front of one's mid section. I followed it up with "white crane spreads its wings" and "step up to form the seven stars," the last one being a reference to the fact that one is supposed to place one's limbs in a position resembling the Big Dipper.

"Doing that one meant you were almost done," I said. "But when it was over, you wished it would go on."

Performing these moves for an appreciative audience of one put me on a little bit of an ego high, at how cool I felt, like I was some kind of real bad-ass.

Past midnight, I excused myself and exited the room carrying a small bag of toiletries, heading for the bathroom down the hall. It was pitch black in the hallway, but I knew where the bathroom door was.

Still on my Tai Chi high, I turned left and walked through door. Or at least I thought I did. What happened over the next few seconds was one of the strangest and most confusing episodes of my life.

The first thing I felt was the floor seeming to give way under my foot. There was nothing under my foot at all.  It was as if I had walked out of the house entirely, through a secret trap door into a black featureless void. At once I was falling, rotating to the left, with no point of spatial orientation.

After the initial shock, it hit me: I hadn't walked into the bathroom at all. Instead I had turned too early and had begun descending the wooden stairs to the first floor.

When this realization came over me, it did little to help me at first, since I still had no visual cues of what was near me. My mind instantly brought up a spatial memory of the staircase, which I knew went down about four steps to a small landing, then turned to go the rest of the way down towards the front door. There was also a small landing to the left at the top of the stairs on which sat a large potted plant, as well as a folding framed portrait of Chinese Buddha figures.

From the manner I was tumbling blindly, and my instantaneous calculation of my position, I reckoned that I might fall down quite a ways before I came to a rest.

This is going to hurt, I thought. In my head I braced myself for serious imminent pain.

Still holding my toiletries in my right hand, I groped instinctively in darkness with my free left hand for any kind of handhold. My fingers landed on something soft which gave way without stopping my fall. As my body rotated, my arms and legs collided hard with wood. A crashing din of glass and metal erupted in the darkness. It seemed to go on forever in waves, even though it was only a few seconds.

Then it was over. All was silent and calm again. Red came bursting out of the room and flipped the hallway lights on.

"What happened!?"

At that point I took stock of myself. I was lying on my side, wedged in the staircase near the top, my right hand still clutching my bag. Its contents were unspilled and unbroken. My left hand was holding one of the long fronds of the potted plant, which was overturned on the landing, leaving a large mess of spilled soil.

Somehow I knew I was OK. My first thought was for the damage I'd caused, since I knew the plant and the Buddha portraits belonged to Red's landlord, from whom she rented her room in the house, but who was currently away traveling. Mostly I was just plain embarrassed.

Red was very concerned for me. While I explained the incident, I lay in my crumbled position for half a minute, double checking that nothing in me was broken. Then I slowly pulled myself up from my strewn position. Besides a nasty bruise on my right arm, and a smaller one on my left knee---both of which ached but in a superficial way---there seemed to be no damage to me.

I began laughing out loud. "What an ego come-down," I said. In some sense, I felt as if I'd deserved it.

From the crashes noises I'd made in the dark, I assumed that I had destroyed the plant and had smashed the framed Buddha figures. But we righted both of them and found them unharmed. The frond I had seized during my fall was unbroken. Even the glass plate below the heavy planter was still intact. We left the spilled soil on the landing. Red said she'd scoop it up in the morning.

She brushed off my concerns about the plant. She said she actually wished I had destroyed it, since she hated it.

"No such luck," I told her.

With the hallway lights on, I resumed my original mission to use the bathroom, then returned to her room, still chuckling at my folly.

When I put my bag of toiletries on the desk by the front window I noticed the small novelty snack bar that I had purchased the weekend before at the used bookstore on the coast, but which we hadn't yet opened.

In the bookstore, I'd been reading passages from the original Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. When I went up to register, there were snack bars for sale that had obviously a theme from that famous work. The wrapper featured cartoon illustrations of Alice and the the White Rabbit.

When I saw the unopened bar sitting on the desk, I held it up towards Red and said "Hey look what I found!" In big gold letters the wrapper said:

Now we were both laughing.