They called her "Überjoy" but her real name was Joycelyn Eberhard. She was a finalist in the Miss Teen Idaho beauty pageant, but now she's gone missing-in China, no less. Her fiancé, Orion, worried when she signed up for the Peace Corps, but he never expected something like this. Her disappearance is shattering to him, so he has no choice but to head overseas and search for the woman he loves. His search takes him to the remote Himalaya Mountains in Nepal and Tibet, where getting help from local authorities is not as easy as he would have hoped. He is forced to seek assistance elsewhere, from intrepid special operations mercenaries and unorthodox mountaineering guides. Soon, Orion's search targets not only his fiancé, but the meaning of life itself. Set in the mountains of China-where earth meets sky in more ways than one-Questing for Überjoy is a quest for love. It is also a quest for meaning, as Eastern culture surrounds heroic Orion and teaches him more about himself than any experience in America. One moment philosophical and the next filled with danger, it is a story that could change your life and send you on your own quest for mountaintop enlightenment.

Questing for Überjoy

Book Three of the Post-Lux TrilogyBy Konrad Ventana

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Konrad Ventana
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-2952-5

Contents

1. The Disappearance of Überjoy...............................12. A Hero's Journey to Nepal.......................................233. Et Tu, Kathmandu?...............................................354. Thoughts Unbecoming.............................................515. Pleiades: A Lost Generation of Doves............................676. Peaceful and Wrathful Emanations................................837. The Third Bardo: Lord of Death..................................998. Mirror of Karma.................................................1199. Be Not Fond of the Dull Smoke-Colored Light.....................13710. A Flock of Ladies on the Lake..................................15911. Blessings from Above...........................................17712. Exodos.........................................................193

Chapter One

The Disappearance of Überjoy

Orion is a special kind of guy. He is a man's man, a ladies' man, the best man. And soon, although he does not yet know it, Orion is about to embark upon his most significant adventure. Orion is an Eagle Scout, which is a title held for life: "Once an Eagle, always an Eagle," as the saying goes. He is, in fact, descended from a long line of Eagle Scouts and, before that, from a long line of hunter-gatherers that goes as far back as anyone can remember. Orion is a man who is no stranger to high drama. In college, he was the captain of the ski team, a fearless downhill racer. It was during those formative years that he articulated his passion for a majestic beauty that moves in exquisite curves, and he developed thighs like tree trunks. In the summertime, he'd worked as a lifeguard at the local country club, where he was always prepared, although there was never much call, for deep-water rescues.

Orion is a different kind of guy—he is a nice guy who is used to finishing first. Yet he'd give you the shirt off his back if such an occasion would arise, and this must have been fairly common for him, since he always seemed to be wearing more than one shirt at a time in an outdoorsy sort of layered look. Let's just say that he was prepared to give you the shirt off his back and leave it at that. However, something needs to be said from the outset about Orion's habit of finishing first. It was almost as if nature had endowed him with such outstanding athletic prowess as to enable him to dash effortlessly across the most forbidding and inscrutable of landscapes as though he were gaining sustenance directly from the sun, driven not by a hunger for some inimitable victory but by a tireless desire to chase, to pursue, to attain something valuable, regardless of the effort required. By the ripe old age of thirty-five, Orion had attained an inspiring constellation of sought-after accomplishments in the various spheres of his life.

Orion's renowned athletic prowess and success as an iconic sporting entrepreneur was equaled only by his impressive good looks, which offered him an expansive choice of leading ladies. A shock of naturally wavy, dark chocolate hair stood playfully on end when he rubbed his hand through it in either exasperation or consternation. His piercing blue eyes made people wonder if he wore colored contact lenses. His plump, perpetually wet-looking lips peered out behind soft, light brown whiskers, which his fiancée found both endearing and scratchy; he bit his bottom lip whenever he was listening carefully or pondering his next move.

At the point in time in which our story begins, Orion is engaged to be married to the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. A finalist in the Miss Teen Idaho beauty pageant a few years back, the lovely Joycelyn Eberhard is still capable of stopping traffic all the way from Bonners Ferry to the main campus of the University of Idaho, where she recently graduated with a Master of Arts degree in education. The university's College of Letters, Arts & Social Sciences is apparently where Joycelyn adopted the notion that "World Peace" ought to be somewhat more than a convenient rhetorical device used to evoke an emotional response in the audience of a local, or even national, beauty pageant. That is, perhaps, why she was so keen on "doing something earnest and consequential" before settling down and raising a nuclear family, as was generally expected of a young American woman of such obvious natural beauty.

It was the idealistic allure of the Peace Corps that drew Joycelyn Eberhard away from her conventionally anticipated life course, in a personal and somewhat quixotic attempt to do something earnest and consequential in the name of World Peace. Neither Orion nor any of Joycelyn's closest friends or family members—all of whom fondly referred to the quondam beauty queen as their own Überjoy—could fully comprehend her unnecessarily idealistic motivations. They could no more comprehend her decision to join the Peace Corps as a volunteer teacher than they could hide their dismay at the very thought that their Überjoy would forsake her dashing fiancé, her friends, and her family for the starkness of a cold, two-room schoolhouse on the other side of the planet. It bears mentioning that this particular two-room schoolhouse is located in the Khumjung Sherpa village, high in the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal.

Although it galled Orion, this strident man of action, to wait upon anything or anyone, let alone something as near and dear to him as the woman he intended to marry, Orion knew that Joycelyn Eberhard was a woman worth waiting for. And so, there was nothing he could do but tarry through the long winter and the spring and the summer until the coming of the fall, when his beautiful, starry-eyed fiancée was scheduled to return from her idealistic sojourn to Nepal—nothing he could do but wait with uncharacteristic forbearance for his Überjoy to return.

Amid the autumn of his discontent—it was September, and Überjoy was to return in late November—Orion trained with the Sun Valley Ski Patrol, striving to keep in top shape for the upcoming ski season. Orion was striding briskly along as the pale, yawning arms of the morning mists rose up as if in surrender to a greater glory ascending in the brightening blue sky. The last crystalline vestiges of nature's dewy tears were silently sublimating from the forest paths as the enduring soles of a dozen high-tech running shoes appeared and pummeled the ground. There was a rasping sound of chainsaws coming from the direction of Dollar Mountain, and the sweet, greasy smells of damp leaves and wood smoke hung redolent in the air. Orion was striding briskly along the Wood River trails, freshly garnished with newly fallen leaves that would soon be blown away or covered with snow in the coming months. As usual, he was racing far out in front of his fellow ski patrollers, who were casually chatting and joking while jogging comfortably along with the uniformly measured cadence of their pleasant, postmodern lives. Following the old Union Pacific Railroad route through the Wood River Valley, the rustic trail looped around Elkhorn Village and eventually connected with a paved roadway that ran on into Sun Valley proper. Yes, it is in the autumn of Orion's discontent when we first observe him striding briskly along; and then he is briskly striding past, leaving the poetic chiasmus of this introductory moment far...