38. The fire sermon.

Union Square was a little more crowded than the day before. The old woman with the paper-stuffed bag wasn't there, but the vagrant was. The two young men who had been there for Sid's first sermon were there too, evidently waiting for him, wondering if he would appear. She saw one of them clutch the other's arm when they saw Sid. She followed at a distance, her notebook ready.

Sid said: "Once, long ago, in another life, I meditated for a long time, and the truth came to me, and I was enlightened."

Nan saw the people around him take notice.

"After this I went walking, to look for the best place to start my mission. Those were very spiritual days. Everybody, it seemed, was searching. A number of people recognized that I had been through a transformation.

"One of them approached me, and said: 'Are you a god?'

"I replied, 'No, I'm not.'

"He asked, 'Are you the reincarnation of a god?'

"To this too I replied, 'No.'

"'Are you a magician?' he pressed.

"'Not that either,' I told him.

"'So then you must be a man.'

"'No.'

"Finally he asked: 'Then what are you?'

"I told him: 'I'm awake.'"

Nan flipped through her binder of printed sheets and located the one she was looking for. Underlining a passage, she closed the binder and watched Sid as he looked around the group of people who had heard what he had said.

An angry-looking young man with a skateboard under his arm spoke. "What are you, some kind of missionary or something?"

Sid said, "In a way. Who are you?"

The young man was taken aback. "What do you care who I am?"

"I care who everyone is, or who they think they are."

"Yeah. You cult freaks are all alike. You find some bullshit to latch on to and then you walk around like you've got the answer to everything. Well you don't."

"Do you have answers?" Sid asked. He had a way of doing this that betrayed no sarcasm (if he meant any).

The young man wsa getting angrier. "I have some answers for you. God? Doesn't exist. Heaven? Doesn't exist. Salvation? Bullshit. The answer to life is that there isn't any answer. No one cares. We're all going to die, and it's going to suck the whole way along. That's what no cult is going to tell you."

"If those are your answers, you're absolutely right."

The young man blanched, then recovered himself. "Nice. You've got a little script, a script that tells you how to deal with people like me. You know, you're the fourth religion nut I've seen today. There was some old bitch on the subway too. Then Falun Gong or whatever. Some dude in Times Square with a picture of an aborted fetus, ranting and raving like anyone gave a shit."

"And you don't."

"No. I don’t give a shit. There's too much pain on one city block for anyone to be able to do anything about it by caring."

"Then go."

The young man scowled. "No. I don't think I will. I'll stick around to see what great wisdom you're going to cure all our problems with."

"No, I meant go into the street, just over there," Sid said. "You're in despair. You're right: there's no god, no one cares, not in any way that will matter, and there's nothing at the end of life but oblivion. No meaningful part of ourselves goes on after death, and most of us will be forgotten, because our existence, individually and collectively, is meaningless. It's a question of more or less misery, usually more. The best any of us can do is to try to convince ourselves that this isn't the case, but the painful truth is that it is."

Everyone within earshot listened carefully, looking from Sid to the young man and back. Sid was speaking quietly.

"So go," he said, pointing toward Broadway. "If you catch the light at just the right point, the cars will be moving pretty fast. You could get on your skateboard, hop the curb, and be under a cab's wheels in a few seconds. There would be a moment of pain, but that would end it. No more misery."

The young man looked paralyzed.

"You won't do it, will you?" Sid asked. "You've thought about it a hundred times, but something always stops you."

"Biology," the young man said, recovering himself a bit. "We're wired to survive, some reptile part of our brains that needs to eat and fuck and go on."

"It's more than that," Sid replied. "If the flesh is in pain, it is capable of destroying itself. The part that always holds on is the mind. It's the mind that fears becoming nothing. The body is at least something--a physical construct, a tangible thing. The mind is nothing. It changes from moment to moment, but it doesn't want to die. It wants existence.

"If you killed yourself now, after a certain amount of time passed, no one would remember you. The day after you were dead, people's memories of you would already start to degrade. There would be no 'you' left. You've made no mark that will endure. That's what you're afraid of, and it's the truth.

"The truth is that there's no 'you' now any more than there would be after you were dead. You're a shifting process trying to feel real. But you're not real, any more than anyone else. You are a collection of characteristics that has awareness. I'm not speaking to the same thing I was a minute ago. The image I'm holding of you now is as 'real' as any you've ever held of yourself, as 'real' as you've ever been or will be. But through all this, you're burning: that pain exists, it consumes you, fueled by an inexhaustible source.

"There is another way," Sid said. "The answer is not immortality. The answer is not becoming a god or becoming anything. There's nothing to become. No one can save you. You can't save yourself. But the answer isn't destroying yourself either. That's just playing games with matter, moving the dirt around. The answer is seeing your way out of pain, becoming free, leaving the game, pulling something essential within you out of the fire. That's where the suffering ends."