The wetsuit peeled away to a belly bloated white but of the same substance, that squishy squamous thickness, that reptilian or amphibian give—like if I would’ve poked him, the indent inflicted would’ve remained for life. His limbs were tentacularly downed powerlines, livewire distensions. He was a nonviolent resister, of himself. On a hunger strike, protesting himself. That’s how ill he was, that’s how Gandhi. An ascetic, or ascitic, revealing to me scars, stitched slits all ragged red inflamed like the marks of the great, the markings by which one suffers for greatness, also revealing his penis—testudinal, pinched, sacs sagging like they’d been punctured, hairless—and he was hairless too under the wig.

“What the fuck? What happened?”

“A second opening, all of life is but a second opening, or it can be,” he said. “That, and only that, is the fuck.”

He trembled back to the concrete floor, relotused himself stiffly.

I settled just across.

“Please,” he said, “our sandals are still on us.”

“Off?” I said. “You can’t take them off by yourself?”

Or he wouldn’t, so I undid the velcro and got him discalced, shed socks from feet, rigid toes horned coarse and crustated.

He seemed relieved: a man at rest after a powertrip.

“A man is born royal,” he said. “His father is the king but he is no prince. Or he is on the outside. But it all is just outside, exterior.”

“This is you? Or are you talking the Buddha?”

“We are not talking Buddha. Or we are but he is not Buddha yet. He goes. He seeks to go outside of the outside. From the palace to the walls, through the gates. Out until the gates and the walls and the palace are all behind him.”

“So you’re becoming the Buddha? Considering a career change?”

“We are no one. We are the horse and the chariot both.”

“But in the different accounts I’m trying to recall, isn’t there also like a charioteer—a guy who’s steering or whipping? The Buddha, or whatever he is, whatever his name is, wasn’t alone.”

“We are all alone, always. No matter accounts. Whether a charioteer or no charioteer. Immaterial. Does not matter. There is no horse and the man is just walking.”

“But he’s walking in orienteering socks and nubuck archopedic sandals.”

“As like he goes, he is followed: men seeking money, to be repaid only in hatred, women seeking money, to be repaid only in sex, and he ignores them and goes on. He meets an old man, very old, on the verge of death, and laments because age awaits us all and all the world does not lament every moment. He meets another man, afflicted not just with age but with disease, and laments because infirmity awaits us all and all the world does not lament every suffering. Yet another he meets. Or he does not. Because this man is not a man, not old or infirm anymore, not living, a corpse, and the man who is a man, who is still alive, healthy and young, laments nonetheless, because death awaits us all and all the world does not lament every death.”

“I’m with you,” I said, and I was.

“So the old, the infirm, the deceased,” he said. “They get into his head. And the head is shaped as like the bowl for alms and all its faces are the same in vacuity. The man is incapable of love, incapable of emoting anything. He is depressed and seeks the trees. He sits under a tree and waits and attempts to cure himself of waiting as like it were a disease and attempts to destroy his waiting as like it were a life. Then through the trees, enter the fourth man, the beggar. And the beggar would have passed, this is the point, he would have passed the man at the tree, and would have respected that peace and asked for nothing. Because true beggars never ask. They are beggars because they are given. There is something in them that compels the alms, something saintly. They might even refuse. In reward or punishment. The man asked the beggar who he was and the answer was not a beggar but a wanderer—we wander, he says, we search.”

“And then the man attains enlightenment and becomes the Buddha and the beggar goes to heaven,” I said. “All beggars go to heaven—they never refuse.”

“But maybe we can say it is better if the man never asked and the beggar never answered,” Principal said. “The man becoming Buddha just knew. Basically. Maybe from the presence of the beggar. No. Or from the existence of the beggar. Yes. Because begging is giving too is the point that communicates all the knowledge that is ours.”

“I don’t follow.” I didn’t.

“We are becoming bhikshus,” he said. “Itinerant, mendicant. Sadhu to the Hindu. Monastic.”

“Do you have an itinerary in mind or is that against principle?”

“Europe, that is all for now. 25something° N, 55something° W.”

“You can’t get specific, or won’t?”

“Immaterial. Not divulged.”

“That’s supposed to be reassuring?”

“We know.”

“What do you know?” I asked.

“Without asking,” and he reached for his kasaya, that white woundbind slopping the floor. He took from a slit in it a blueblack scab.

He gave, I took. It was a passport.

“We have our charioteers after all. Payrolls of them. Part men, part chariot, part horse, all inclusive. Expediters.”

“This is possible?” I turned the passport around in my hands.

“What is not possible is to go wandering the earth as like a Class D motorist licensed by the state of NY.”

I opened it up. My date and place of birth were accurate. And unfortunate. The proceeding pages were as blank as an alms plate.

The pass I already had, I tried to remember when it expired, and where it was stashed—in Ridgewood’s hoarder forests? with Rach?

The photo on this pass was even worse, though, from spyquip: me stumbling back to my hut from the party, out of my mind and unretouched.

I couldn’t tell—I couldn’t.

Which of us was not himself.

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9/7–8, BURJ AL-JUMEIRAH HOTEL, DUBAI

total time of Principal recordings: 146:07:09

total number of Principal.Tetrec files: 58

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