Charlie got up and followed Anna out to the kitchen when she went to get the salad. He said to her under his breath, “I bet the old man speaks English too.”

“What?”

“It’s like in that Ang Lee movie, remember? The old man pretends not to understand English, but really he does? It’s like that I bet.”

Anna shook her head. “Why would he do that? It’s a hassle, all that translating. It doesn’t give him any advantage.”

“You don’t know that! Watch his eyes, see how he’s getting it all.”

“He’s just paying attention. Don’t be silly.”

“You’ll see.” Charlie leaned into her conspiratorially: “Maybe he learned English in an earlier incarnation. Just be aware of that when you’re talking around him.”

“Quit it,” she said, laughing her low laugh. “You be aware. You learn to pay attention like that.”

“Oh and then you’ll believe I understand English?”

“That’s right yeah.”

They returned to the dining room, laughing, and found Joe holding forth in a language anyone could understand, a language of imperious gesture and commanding eye, and the assumption of authority in the world. Which worked like a charm over them all, even though he was babbling.

After salad, and seconds on the pasta, they returned to the living room and settled around the coffee table again. Anna brought out tea and cookies. “We’ll have to have Tibetan tea next time,” she said.

The Khembalis nodded uncertainly.

“An acquired taste,” Drepung suggested. “Not actually tea as you know it.”

“Bitter,” Padma said appreciatively.

“You can use as blood coagulant,” Sucandra said.

Drepung added, “Also we add yak butter to it, aged until a bit rancid.”

“The butter has to be rancid?” Charlie said.

“Traditional.”

“Think fermentation,” Sucandra explained.

“Well, let’s have that for sure. Nick will love it.”

A scrunch-faced pretend-scowl from Nick: Yeah right Dad.

Rudra Cakrin sat again with Joe on the floor. He stacked blocks into elaborate towers. Whenever they began to sway, Joe leaned in and chopped them to the floor. Tumbling clack of colored wood, instant catastrophe: the two of them cast their heads back and laughed in exactly the same way. Kindred souls.

The others watched. From the couch Drepung observed the old man, smiling fondly, although Charlie thought he also saw traces of the look that Anna had tried to describe to him when explaining why she had invited them to lunch in the first place: a kind of concern that came perhaps from an intensity of love. Charlie knew that feeling. It had been a good idea to invite them over. He had groaned when Anna told him about it, life was simply Too Busy for more to be added. Or so it had seemed; though at the same time he was somewhat starved for adult company. Now he was enjoying himself, watching Rudra Cakrin and Joe play on the floor as if there were no tomorrow.

Anna was deep in conversation with Sucandra. Charlie heard Sucandra say to her, “We give patients quantities, very small, keep records, of course, and judge results. There is a personal element to all medicine, as you know. People talking about how they feel. You can average numbers, I know you do that, but the subjective feeling remains.”

Anna nodded, but Charlie knew she thought this aspect of medicine was unscientific, and it annoyed her as such. She kept to the quantitative as much as she could in her work, as far as he could tell, precisely to avoid this kind of subjective residual in the facts.

Now she said, “But you do support attempts to make objective studies of such matters?”

“Of course,” Sucandra replied. “Buddhist science is much like Western science in that regard.”

Anna nodded, brow furrowed like a hawk. Her definition of science was extremely narrow. “Reproducible studies?”

“Yes, that is Buddhism precisely.”

Now Anna’s eyebrows met in a deep vertical furrow that split the horizontal ones higher on her brow. “I thought Buddhism was a kind of feeling, you know meditation, compassion?”

“This is to speak of the goal. What the investigation is for. Same for you, yes? Why do you pursue the sciences?”

“Well to understand things better, I guess.”

This was not the kind of thing Anna thought about. It was like asking her why she breathed.

“And why?” Sucandra persisted, watching her.

“Well just because.”

“A matter of curiosity.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“But what if curiosity is a luxury?”

“How so?”

“In that first you must have a full belly. Good health, a certain amount of leisure time, a certain amount of serenity. Absence of pain. Only then can one be curious.”

Anna nodded, thinking it over.

Sucandra saw this and continued. “So, if curiosity is a value a quality to be treasured a form of contemplation, or prayer then you must reduce suffering to reach that state. So, in Buddhism, understanding works to reduce suffering, and by reduction of suffering gains more knowledge. Just like science.”

Anna frowned. Charlie watched her, fascinated. This was a basic part of her self, this stuff, but largely unconsidered. Self-definition by function. She was a scientist. And science was science, unlike anything else.

Rudra Cakrin leaned forward to say something to Sucandra, who listened to him, then asked him a question in Tibetan. Rudra answered, gesturing at Anna.

Charlie shot a quick look at her see, he was following things! Evidence!

Rudra Cakrin insisted on something to Sucandra, who then said to Anna, “Rudra wants to say, ‘What do you believe in?’”

“Me?”

“Yes. ‘What do you believe in?’ he says.”

“I don’t know,” she said, surprised. “I believe in the double blind study.”

Charlie laughed, he couldn’t help it. Anna blushed and beat on his arm, crying “Stop it! It’s true.”

“I know it is,” Charlie said, laughing harder, until she started laughing too, along with everyone else, the Khembalis looking delighted everyone so amused that Joe got mad and stomped his foot to make them stop. But this only made them laugh more. In the end they had to stop so he would not throw a fit.

Rudra Cakrin restored his mood by diving back into the blocks. Soon he and Joe sat half-buried in them, absorbed in their play. Stack them up, knock them down. They certainly spoke the same language.

The others watched them, sipping tea and offering particular blocks to them at certain moments in the construction process. Sucandra and Padma and Anna and Charlie and Nick sat on the couches, talking about Khembalung and Washington D.C. and how much they were alike.

Then one tower of cubes and beams stood longer than the others had. Rudra Cakrin had constructed it with care, and the repetition of basic colors was pretty: blue, red, yellow, green, blue, yellow, red, green, blue, red, green, red. It was tall enough that ordinarily Joe would have already knocked it over, but he seemed to like this one. He stared at it, mouth hanging open in a less-than-brilliant expression. Rudra Cakrin looked over at Sucandra, said something. Sucandra replied quickly, sounding displeased, which surprised Charlie. Drepung and Padma were suddenly paying attention. Rudra Cakrin picked out a yellow cube, showed it to Sucandra and said something more. He put it on the top of the tower.

“Oooh,” Joe said. He tilted his head to one side, then the other, observing it.

“He likes that one,” Charlie noted.

At first no one answered. Then Drepung said, “It’s an old Tibetan pattern. You see it in mandalas.” He looked to Sucandra, who said something sharp in Tibetan. Rudra Cakrin replied easily, shifted so that his knee knocked a long blue cylinder into the tower, collapsing it. Joe shuddered as if startled by a noise on the street.

“Ah ga,” he declared.

The Tibetans resumed the conversation. Nick was now explaining to Padma the distinction between whales and dolphins. Sucandra went out and helped Charlie a bit with the cleanup in the kitchen; finally Charlie shooed him out, feeling embarrassed that their pots were going to end up substantially cleaner after this visit than they had been before; Sucandra had been expertly scrubbing their bottoms with a wire pad found under the sink.