The Yoga of Max's Discontent Read Online Free PDF Page A

protested about the threat of respiratory ailments, so the city had dumped it in the Bronx instead. Children were clearly more disposable there. Each time Max was on a break from school and had walked past the shiny blue metal-top building, he had thought he was on the verge of an insight. He was standing in the middle of two worlds, between the death and destruction in the projects and the hope and life at Trinity and Harvard. He was meant to discover something about the nature of suffering and why it chose those it did. Why hadn’t he dug deeper to find that insight?
    On the opposite side of the Hudson, a factory emitted a spiral of gray smoke. Sarah stepped out of her office and spoke animatedly to a group of shiny-faced, blue-eyed analysts milling around in the lobby. They laughed with their broad chins and perfectly straight teeth.
    After all those years, he was still trying to belong.
    While he was in high school, each day from four to six in the morning, he had cleaned the bathrooms of the Harlem Public bar, scraping hardened chewing gum off the urinals, removing T-shirts flushed into toilets, and washing dried vomit from trash cans. At Trinity, he’d rush into the gym showers and scrub himself again and again so his classmates wouldn’t smell the Cloroxand Pine-Sol on his body. He’d hang with his friends after school, hungrily watching them eat pizza and drink soda at Pizza Pete’s, telling them he didn’t like the flat taste of cheese, unwilling to admit he couldn’t spare a quarter for a slice of pizza every day. Back in the projects, he’d take his shirt out and sling his pants low and play with Pitbull’s sawed-off shotgun, not once mentioning calculus, SATs, college applications, and everything else that possessed him. Every day he’d worn a mask. And now once again he was fronting as a suave corporate type with his Borrelli shirt and Ferragamo shoes.
    â€œHow’s it going?” Sarah popped her head into his office.
    Max gave her a thumbs-up.
    â€œTom’s real hot on consolidating the production network,” she said. “Can they operate with three plants instead of four? What’s the trade-off between transshipment and site costs?”
    â€œI’ll dig into it,” said Max.
    â€œYou haven’t gotten to the supply chain yet?”
    Max shook his head.
    A wave of irritation swept through her face. “If you’re not up for it today . . .”
    â€œI’m on it.”
    Sarah left his office.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    MAX OPENED the Excel file. Again, his stomach tightened. Even his kid sister had had the courage to do her own thing. Sophia hadn’t fit in with the girl cliques in the projects, so she’d learned to rely on herself. Defying their mother, who’d wanted her to get a well-paying job, she was counseling teen junkies in aBrooklyn treatment facility. Andre was studying criminal behavior at John Jay to help kids get out of the same gangs that had crippled him. Who had Max become?
    So if there is birth, age, suffering, sorrow, and death, then there must be something that is unborn, un-aging, un-ailing, sorrowless, and deathless—immortal, as it were.
    He understood now why Viveka’s description of yogis on the top of the mountain had struck him. They had stripped their life down to its barest essence to find the same insight about suffering he’d felt close to uncovering years ago. Now that he no longer had his mother’s voice in his head prompting him to become someone, nothing stopped him from seeking the same insight. Did the yogis find any answers? After a moment’s hesitation, Max switched over from Excel to Chrome and began searching the Internet for information about Himalayan yogis.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    HE SKIMMED THROUGH story after story of young Westerners traveling to India to seek spiritual enlightenment. A shadow of doubt arose in