In London’s Heathrow Airport, signs say lavatory instead of restroom, and the onrush of travelers bound for points further down the terminal reminds the American of something the monks used to say. Slowly, they told him in ungainly English. Slowly, he thinks now. He refuses to walk on the peoplemover, despite the irritation audible in the Excuse Mes of the passengers who push past him. Instead, he stands to the right and glides patiently through the panes of midday sunlight the skylight admits. The neutral blue carpet reminds him dimly of some other layover in some other life. He tells himself he has learned the meaning of slowly. He often thinks of himself like this, in the third person.

The monks wore long robes in colors of sunlight, orange-pink or golden, that concealed any movement of legs. The overall impression was of stillness. Even traversing a room, even descending to the floor to pray, they seemed to arrive at the end of a motion without having begun it - slowly. Slowly. They said it so often it could have been his name.

To them, the American must have seemed the visual equivalent of noise, a buzzy jumble of movements: spilling grains of rice on the tabletop, brushing them quickly into his hand, embarrassed, closing the hand, returning the rice to his bowl, trying to unstick one persistent grain from his palm, then his finger. Scanning their faces to see if he’d been noticed. The monks spilled rarely and, when they did, never seemed in any hurry to clean up after themselves, though at the end of the meal, when he cleared the dishes, the table beneath was always spotless.

The lama had admonished him not to hurry through his chores. Slowly, he said. It was, after all, a privilege to clear the dishes, to empty the chamber pots; with mindful repetition of these duties, one discovered the dharma in the quotidian. The lama had actually used the word quotidian.

* * *

At London’s biggest airport, people say loo instead of can, and as he enters the corridor, it occurs to him that it’s been six months since he last used a proper toilet. He’s come to appreciate the humbling experience of squatting over a metal pot, of walking barefoot to the stream on mornings so cold he can see his breath, of dumping his pot and others into clear running water that almost instantaneously goes clear again. Even after a fifteen-hour flight, his jeans, worn nearly bare in places, feel foreign against his skin. For four months they sat folded at the bottom of his rucksack. The rough sensation of the monastic linens on his tall white body gradually receded from consciousness. Like the absence of TV. Like Lily. Like the silence at Tengboche, which at first kept him awake at night.

Despite the urgency in his stomach, he moves slowly toward the stalls. He barely registers the men standing at the urinals or hunched over the gleaming vanity that lines the long wall. He barely notices the vast surface of the mirror.

He clicks the shiny bolt into place. The back of the stall’s full-length door has been outfitted with hooks for the convenience of those who do not travel lightly. He sets his rucksack on the floor and sits down, his body remembering how we drop our trousers to our ankles, how we hunch forward, hands clasped between knees, how we stare at the floor if we have nothing to read. He tries to achieve a meditative emptiness, to silence the loose farts echoing in adjacent stalls, the symphony of flushing. He supposes this is symptomatic of his struggles with the teachings.

The lama’s eyes had twinkled when the American kid who had just hiked up the hill from the bus depot explained his intention to become a student of the Way. The lama’s university diploma was prominently displayed on the wall of the office. The first noble truth, he told the boy who faced him across the empty desk, is that all life is suffering. The Buddha teaches that we must become joyful participants in the sorrows of the world. Those who see in the Way a retreat from sorrow, the lama said, grinning, are walking in the wrong direction. The boy informed the lama that his undergraduate thesis had critiqued the American notion of transcendence without experience. That, unlike the celebrities who publicly flirted with Eastern religion, he himself was fully prepared to participate. Joyfully if need be. Now, as he finds himself seeking to blot out the smell of cleaners and waste, the fusillade of faucets, the memories Heathrow summons, he wonders if maybe the monk hadn’t apprehended him perfectly after all.

* * *

Somewhere along the bank of sinks a Briton says, “Excuse me.” There’s something quintessentially British about this tone of embarrassed propriety; the American behind the stall door recognizes it from the dormrooms and classrooms where he spent his semester abroad. Excuse me, the British said, even when they meant Excuse you. Even in the tube stations, even in the pub: Excuse me, mate, can I slip by? Their voices hushed so the natives wouldn’t take offense, he and Lily had taken pleasure in mocking this and other cultural quiddities - excessive frying, wretched club music - in that early-middle phase of their relationship when conversation consisted largely of jokes. He remembers Lily’s reimagining of the Blitz. “Pardon my existence,” she said, with an apologetic flourish of her hands. “But would you mind, em, you know, leaving off bombing, if possible?”

Until they found themselves together in London, he’d suspected that Lily was sort of insubstantial. She reminded him of the loud, cruel girls who had ruled his West County high school. At the university they both attended, they had moved in proximate circles: his friends had been friends with her boyfriend. On those occasions when they happened to be in a room together, she was always at its center. She frequently erupted in a hoarse smoker’s laugh whose volume, from where he hung on the margins, seemed contrived to hide emptiness. But her hands made him question this impression. They were constantly in motion, like birds describing figures on the sky. Sometimes when he caught a glimpse of her at the other end of a long cafeteria table, gesturing elegantly to illustrate a point, he would wonder if she was as shallow as she seemed. They never talked enough for him to be sure one way or the other. They had, in the course of two years of semi-acquaintance, only managed to exchange majors, dorm names, hometowns. Most of what he knew about Lily, he knew from Aaron.

Aaron used the phrase “my girlfriend” more than seemed necessary. It struck him as almost proprietary. Nonetheless, when the boy recognized Lily in the orientation group for the London exchange program, he decided to take the empty seat next to her. Comparing schedules, they discovered that they would be in several of the same classes.

“Fate,” she said with a smile that could have been sarcastic.

“Interdisciplinarity,” he said. Their fields of study, comparative religion and art history, were entangled. “Even a Pollack or whoever has to wrestle with faith and death and that stuff,” he said.

“Pol-lack,” she said, flattening her hands on the surface of her desk. Then, before he could answer, “Bo-ring.”