The Auctioneer (part two of two)

Part one here...

A pod of people formed on both sides of the first pile. The auctioneer set his hand on the tobacco, as though blessing it before it was sent out into the world. He began by calling out the number of the pile and an opening price, raising it by watching the subtle gestures of the buyers who stood around the pile. Within 10 seconds the pile was sold, for $1.94 a pound and he had moved on to the next pile. As he moved, another man called out the final price while a third reached for the card, wrote something on it, and threw it back on the pile.

The auctioneer seemed to fall into a trance, nudging the price gently higher until each pile sold. I watched in awe as he proceeded from pile to pile down the row, never running out of breath, always in the same cadence, raising the assembly like a charismatic preacher with his subtle shifts of tone. When we reached the end of the first row, we performed a precise maneuver; the auctioneer turned to face the pile of tobacco behind him while the buyers, opposite and outside the aisle walked around, like the pencil on the end of a compass. It was then, as the yin and yang of the auction shifted that I understood.

There are no coincidences. One night, not long before, I had been channel surfing between the halves of a basketball game. I stopped on one of the specialty channels in the nether regions of cablespace, transfixed by the image of a Tibetan lama, robed in saffron chanting over a mandala. Relaxing into the steady rhythm of his prayer, I was unaware that my then-girlfriend had entered the room until she leaned over the back of the sofa, her hair falling over my shoulder. She kissed my cheek and said, “I wonder what he’s selling.” I looked at her and raised an eyebrow. She smiled the smile of seduction and said, “Sounds like he’s having an auction.”

I turned off the television.

* * *

As I stood outside the knot of people around the auctioneer, I realized what had brought me here. I knew then why I would spend my coming days wandering from small town to small town across America, attending, when I could, a tobacco auction here or a farm auction there, perhaps an estate up for the bidding or a parcel of land for commercial development, listening to the singsong of the auctioneer’s cant. And finally, upon reaching the sea, perhaps voyaging across it to India or Tibet to hear the other holy men chant their chant, offer their wares. From there, perhaps, to the infinity I had just glimpsed.

In that moment I understood what the auctioneer could not have understood about himself, that it was not tobacco or drug forfeitures or pop art that he auctioned, but attachment. The auctioneer’s twang sang out to me, to all of us, as the buyers assembled thought they purchased a farm commodity, but were actually accruing parts of the divine. And the auctioneer, oblivious to his role, an unknowing boddhisattva, the catalyst, continued. He was an old man, who had surely been doing this for quite some time, selling his self and with that loss of self gaining entrance to another plane. Perhaps he would be reincarnated as an auctioneer in a larger venue, perhaps at Sotheby’s or Christie’s where the speedy murmur would give way to more measured and aristocratic tones. Or perhaps that was bad karma; perhaps he had already been there and this was his reward.

Maybe, I thought, he’ll simply go to the top. Moving up, becoming a lama himself, an auctioneer of his own soul, bringing upward along the great chain of being those whose lives he touched as this man in North Carolina. Or was this his final stop, having acquired and then discarded sufficient divinity, having peered over the wall into the jeweled city but not crossing into it, coming back to tell us all the way, giving pieces of himself to serve as a compass? I pondered these questions, but dared not ask him for fear of breaking the spell. Instead, as I left the building and found my way to the road that would carry me to Tennessee, I could only content myself with images of his next life, auctioning his divinity to the most willing bidders.