Kashmir, where the air was sweet and smelled of bamboo and tart orange blossoms. He had walked barefoot on ancient stone, meditated to the ringing drone of the singing bowl, and chanted with all the other potheads who had wound up there. He had given himself over to it all, trying to feel pure, trying to feel love—he even gave himself over to the food, daily servings of a mealy rice that tasted like waterlogged chalk and bowls of what appeared to be curried twigs. And there came a day when at last Saunders received the wisdom he had come looking for.
It was a scrawny, raven-haired kid from Colorado named John Turner who pointed the way toward a higher purpose. No one prayed longer or more intensely than John, who sat through the guided-meditation sessions, stripped to the waist, his ribs showing in his painfully white sides. They were supposed to focus on something beautiful, something that filled them to the brim with happiness. Saunders had tried picturing lotus petals, waterfalls, the ocean, and his San Diego girlfriend naked, without feeling that any of it was quite right. John seemed to get it, though, right away—his long, horsey face shone with rapture. Even his sweat smelled clean and happy. Finally, their third week there, Saunders asked him what he was visualizing.
“Well,” Turner said, “he told us to picture somethin’ that filled us with happiness. So I been imaginin’ the fuckin’ Quarter Pounder with Cheese I’m going to sink my teeth into when I get home. A couple more days of eating sticks and spiced dirt, I think I might be able to visualize a bag of the flavorful motherfuckers right into existence.”
Saunders had gone to India in love with a blond-haired girl named Deanie, The White Album, and ganja. By the time he got back to San Diego, Deanie was married to a pharmacist, Paul McCartney was touring with Wings, Saunders had smoked his last-ever joint, and he had a plan. Or not a plan, exactly, but a vision, an understanding. Reality had briefly slid aside one of its black, opaque panels, to give him a glimpse of the gears that ticked behind it. Saunders had discovered a universal constant, like gravity or the quantum nature of light. No matter where you went—no matter how ancient the traditions, no matter how grand the history, no matter how awe-inspiring the landscape—there was always a market for a cheap Happy Meal. The Lotus Way might lead to nirvana, but it was a long trip, and when you had a lot of miles to cover, it was just natural to want some drive-thru along the road.
Three years after he left Kashmir, Saunders owned five Burger Kings, and upper management wanted to know why his restaurants turned a profit 65-percent higher than the national average (his trick: set up shop across from skate parks, beaches, and arcades and grill with the windows open, so the kids were smelling it all day). Thirteen years later he was in upper management himself, teaching Dunkin’ Donuts how to repel Starbucks (his plan: make ’em look like snobs and outsiders, play up the New England angle, total market saturation).
When Jimi Coffee offered him a seven-figure salary to help the company restructure and take its franchise international, Saunders agreed after mulling it over for less than twenty-four hours. He especially liked the idea of helping Jimi to go global, because it would offer him a chance to travel; he had hardly left the States in the years since India. Maybe he could even get them to open a Jimi Coffee in Kashmir, right across the road from his old monastery. The seekers would probably appreciate the many vegetarian offerings on the Jimi menu, and a vanilla cappuccino would make the sunrise chants a whole lot more palatable. When it came to producing a state of focus, quiet contentment, and inner peace, Zen meditation ran a very distant second to caffeine. Your average suburban white-bread Buddhists could manage without their daily yoga class, but take ’em away from their coffee and they’d be animals in no time, absolute—
Saunders folded back one corner of the paper and took another look at the platform.
The train was yanking itself to a stop at last, in little hitches and jerks. He couldn’t see the joker in the wolf suit anymore, had left him well behind. Saunders sat in the frontmost car of the train, the first-class car, and he had a view of one