Coattail Karma

by Verlin Darrow

  We landed eventually—rather poorly—and our plane taxied up alongside a much smaller black jet. We were hustled onto it, but in the dimming light, I could still see a palm-strewn beach and several low-slung resorts. The heat and moisture felt good after the plane’s dry, cool air. Looking at Jason, I figured we were more likely in the South Pacific than the Caribbean, but it could have been anywhere. In the movie featuring this island, giant zombies would roam around and attack slutty teenagers. Or maybe a honeymooning couple would fall off a cliff and have to crawl back to civilization, but only the woman would make it, so she’d cry a lot.

  The new plane seated eight—less comfortably. The seats were smaller and harder, with less headroom and legroom. I took some satisfaction in watching my giant kidnapper squirm in his. The jet engines shrieked as we took off.

  Again, Sam and I were kept apart, and no one talked. This time I meditated. Six hours later, calmer than hell but no more enlightened, we landed—perfectly—at night at a private airport in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere.

  My guts gurgled. Rain spattered against the fuselage. My knees screamed at me. And suddenly, my meditative calm vanished, and I didn’t miss it. Fuck this! It felt good to be mad. My brain shut down, and the feeling took over.

  As soon as we stumbled down a portable staircase, I began striding toward what looked like a small terminal. The anger was driving me. It didn’t want to take orders from anyone.

  “Hold it,” Frank called in his gravelly voice.

  “Shoot me if you want,” I said. “I’m hungry, and I’m eating.” I kept walking. I could’ve run, but that would’ve showed fear. I was shooting for defiance.

  Jason ran over, grabbed me from behind, and pinned my arms. It was like being held by a bear—a bear wearing cologne. He smelled like cinnamon and leather.

  “Let’s get takeout,” Sam suggested calmly as Jason effortlessly dragged me back. “What’s good in New Zealand?” she added. This time I could hear the disguised tension in her voice.

  “New Zealand?” I said when Jason released me from his embrace.

  “North Island,” Jason said. “Home.”

  Without a word, Frank handed the gun to his partner and scuttled off. Jason gestured for us to hunker down on the plane’s stairway. He stood a few feet in front of us in the light rain, holding the gun uneasily. I could see that like most martial artists, he didn’t like guns. It probably felt like cheating to him.

  “Have you been here before?” I asked Sam, turning to look at her. Her pale face gleamed in the plane’s landing lights, and she tried to smile.

  “Once.”

  “You guys better shut up before Frank gets back,” Jason said.

  “Or what?” Sam asked. “I know you wouldn’t use that gun.”

  “Why not?”

  “Your vows.”

  “What about yours?” he asked, raising his voice.

  I flinched. “Vows?” I asked.

  The two of them just stared at one another. Sam was icy; Jason glared. Would they fight again?

  Just then, a short white guy in a navy-blue uniform trotted toward us, and Jason held the gun out of view alongside his massive hip.

  “Are you a cop?” I shouted when he came into range. I stood and launched myself in his direction, banging into the muscular arm that Jason thrust in front of me. It was like getting hit by a metal baseball bat.

  “Mind yourself,” Jason whispered, flashing the gun.

  “Good evening,” the uniformed man called back in a slightly different accent from Jason’s. “I’m the airport manager and have a few questions I need to—” He broke off as he got closer. “Hey, aren’t you Jason Patariki?” he asked, his face lighting up.

  “I am,” Jason told him.

  “Oh my God. What an honor. Right here at our little airport.”

  “What’s your name?” Jason asked, smiling like a politician.

  “John. I’m John. Oh man, this is really something.”

  “Well, John. I’d like to visit with you, but we’re right in the middle of something here.”

  John finally turned his attention to me and Sam. “Oh, of course. I’m sorry. Please carry on.” He jogged away, and that was that.

  “What happened to his questions?” I asked. “Who are you?”

  Sam supplied the answer. “Rugby. He was the king. And they’re mad for it here.”

  “Oh.” I thought that over and decided to try a psychological approach. Since I knew how to do therapy, surely I could flip things around and do anti-therapy.

  I forced myself to smile and mustered a passably sincere-sounding tone as I addressed Jason. “I guess it was hard to make the transition to civilian life, huh? It’s kind of sad, really.” Then I switched gears, adding an edge to my words. “You’re a national hero one day, then you’re following people, trying to beat up women—unsuccessfully, I might add—and finally you even kidnap us. That’s the worst. Did you know in the US you can get the death penalty for kidnapping? What’s next? Are you going to molest some kids?”

  The gun was back. “Why don’t we all just shut the hell up until Frank gets here?” he barked.

  His jaw clenched, and his eyes blazed. I’d gotten to him.

  “Is that a rhetorical question, Jason?” Sam asked. “Because I can think of several good reasons why we ought to talk without Frank. You know he’s crazy.”

  “Shut the fuck up!” he roared. “That’s an order from the guy holding the gun. Enough!” With each word, his volume and intensity increased. He radiated palpable energy and power. It was easy to picture him dominating a rugby match.

  Somehow, I managed not to flinch, and I felt a flash of satisfaction from this inconsequential triumph. Then I wondered if my baiting Jason was making things worse or if I was investing in a riling-up account that would come due later in some useful way. I wasn’t interested in pushing my luck to find out, so I followed orders and shut up.

  Ten minutes later, Frank jogged back to the steps by the plane, where we sat in the light rain. He nodded at Jason. “He’s on his way,” he said.

  “What’s next?” I asked.

  “We find out if you’re a clone or not,” Frank said.

  Chapter Four

  A clone? Seriously? That’s what this was about? If no one had publicly cloned anyone yet, how could it have happened thirty-seven years ago? It was unimaginable—at least to me. Clearly, looking at the others’ faces, all three of them could imagine it. Were they privy to some backstory I didn’t know about?

  By this time, we were thoroughly soaked. What was wrong with sitting in the plane, anyway? Then a much smaller Maori man drove up in an oversized silver SUV. Sam and I were blindfolded and shepherded into the third row of the vehicle. This was harrowing on one level, but on the other hand, I was now sitting in proximity to the most beautiful woman I’d ever met. And wherever she was going, I was going there too.

  I decided to focus on something useful. What did I know about New Zealand? Not a lot. I thought about what I knew instead of brooding about the possibility of being a clone, or being killed, or whatever else awaited me at the end of the car ride.

  The two main islands were supposed to be very green and unspoiled, with more sheep than people. Most of it was rural, with thousands of miles of rugged coastline. All sorts of flora and fauna had developed independently on the islands—tree ferns, kiwi birds, and… My list ran out there, and I couldn’t remember anything else about New Zealand. This left me with cloning again. And what might happen to me. Thank God Sam began whispering to me at this point.

  “Don’t worry,” she said.

  “Don’t worry?”

  “We’ll be fine. They need us. And to my knowledge, they’ve never murdered anyone.”

  “That’s faint praise, don’t you think?”

  “It certainly is,” Sam agreed.

  “Who is this ‘they’?” I asked.

  “Shut up!” Frank shouted. This seemed to constitute about eighty perc
ent of his working vocabulary.

  The answers would have to wait. After a few more minutes of worrying, the effects of sitting hip to hip with Sam penetrated my preoccupation. Much as Jason had radiated energy, Sam did too. Hers was gentle and a little buzzy, like a mild electric charge. It washed over me in slow, calming waves.

  I slipped my blindfold up and glanced at her, puzzled. Hers was around her neck. Other than Paul’s handshake, I’d never felt anything like this before. Sam nodded her acknowledgement of the phenomenon. She was doing it on purpose—sending me positive energy. I raised my eyebrows. What the hell, I tried to say without words.

  Sam smiled a sweet half smile—like a feminized Buddha statue. Her face was completely relaxed, and her skin glowed with light.

  As weird as all this was, I was comforted when she put her arm around me and pulled my head onto her muscular shoulder. Frank noticed we weren’t wearing our blindfolds; we slipped them back in place. Eventually, I fell asleep.

  Sometime later, the SUV slowed to a halt. At this point, I lay with my head on Sam’s lap, and her hand rested on my head. After a brief moment of peace, my gut tightened and my mind slipped back into frenetic thinking in a futile attempt to escape the fear and confusion that arose.

  Just before we were led out, Sam whispered, “I’m on your side.” This time, her attempt to shore me up sounded insincere. The comfort I’d found evaporated. All I knew about her was that she was beautiful, seemed oddly familiar, and could transmit energy. Were we really allies? Why? Who the hell was she?

  After stumbling along, still blindfolded, on a dirt road or a dirt trail or a dirt something, our footsteps landed on a more substantial, smooth surface underfoot, and unseen hands maneuvered us onto a wooden bench. It had stopped raining or maybe it had never rained here. I had no idea how far or how long we’d driven. I heard feet shuffling and a slight echo of that sound as well. Were we indoors? It didn’t feel like it. The air was quite cool, and it smelled damp. Could the echo be from a canyon? A few minutes later, while I strained to hear a whispered conversation somewhere off to the right, at least this small mystery was solved.

  “You can take off your blindfolds,” said a male voice with an Asian accent.

  An elderly man stood before us in the antechamber of a large cavern, dressed in a cobalt blue robe with a black belt. I couldn’t tell his ethnicity—Indian maybe? Pakistani? The cavern was unremarkable—no stalactites or other formations. The movie that would feature it would have intrepid spelunkers getting lost, but then a dog saved them, but then the dog died. My film plots had certainly taken a turn for the negative.

  “Bhante,” Sam said, standing and bowing to him with her hands clasped.

  “Samavati,” he said, bowing back. “It’s a pleasure to see you.” He turned and bowed to me as well. “Sid, thank you for coming.” He was bald and large-featured, with especially oversized, droopy ears.

  I stood, my fists clenched. “Are you serious?” I asked. “We were kidnapped at gunpoint on the other side of the planet, for God’s sake.” My voice trembled, terse and raw.

  He smiled, and his warmth tried to thaw me. “I assure you that in Christian terms, it was very much for God’s sake. And I asked Jason to invite you here. I’m afraid when he encountered his old nemesis—Samavati—he reacted from a primitive ego level. The rest followed. And Frank will no longer be working with us. We cannot tolerate weapons. So I apologize for everything. I’m very sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? Sorry?” I shouted. “You think that makes it all right?”

  “No, of course not.” Bhante tilted his head down, his eyes on his own feet.

  “So we’re free to go?” I asked.

  “Of course.” His head snapped up, and he looked me in the eye. “But as long as you’re here, perhaps you’ll honor us with your company for a few hours.” He smiled again. He seemed to have a lot of confidence in its ability to influence people.

  “No, thanks,” I said, turning to leave. Standing behind us were two exact duplicates of me. They both smiled at me with my face.

  “There are more of us,” one said.

  “Can’t we persuade you to stay?” the other one added.

  My knees went weak. My limbs felt dead, and I couldn’t speak. My face flushed hot too, and my chest tightened so much, it was hard to breathe.

  At least my doppelgangers didn’t have my voice. The first one spoke with a Spanish accent. The other one sounded like he was from New York. They walked around us and stood beside the Bhante guy. One wore a black robe, one wore a green one.

  Sam bowed to them as well and then studied me as I struggled and failed to accommodate yet another extremely unpalatable slice of reality.

  “Well?” said Bhante. “I can offer you a shower, a cup of tea, and as you can see, a change of clothes in your exact size.”

  Now, stuck in neutral, I couldn’t form thoughts, let alone words. Being a clone was like finding out I was adopted times a thousand. Were clones even real people? How long did clones live? Maybe I’m a triplet. Finally I mustered, “Sure. Whatever. But let Sam go. She doesn’t need to be here, does she?”

  “I want to be here,” she said. “It’s time RGP found out the truth as well. And if Bhante is here, we’re safe. My concern was that Jason and Frank might be operating on their own.”

  “Thank you,” Bhante said. “You’re very welcome to stay, although as you can imagine we have no spare women’s clothes here.”

  “Is this a monastery?” I asked.

  “Of sorts.” He gestured to a downward set of stone stairs off to our left.

  As I followed the trio of Bhante and the two other versions of me, Sam sidled up beside me and held my hand. Hers was quite callused, which must’ve been a martial arts thing. I appreciated the support in that moment. And her energy snaked up my arm as well.

  In hindsight, descending that long staircase represented some sort of profound sign-up—a willingness to move toward that which terrified me. And it was downward, too—underneath the world I knew.

  At the bottom of the stairs, a long hallway carved out of the limestone cave’s walls stretched ahead. Bright red wooden doors marked a series of rooms along the hall. Bhante gestured to the second open doorway on the left, and Sam and I walked through it hand in hand while our host and the other Sids remained in the hallway. This room was also carved out of stone; axe and chisel marks scored the rough walls. In a moment, two more versions of me came out of the bathroom adjoining the small, simple bedroom.

  “Everything is ready for you, Sid,” one of them said. He spoke in an English accent and wore jeans and a black T-shirt.

  “There’s a towel and toiletries laid out on the counter,” the other me told me. He didn’t have an accent. His hair spiked up, punk-style.

  Unlike a mirror, these images of myself moved independently in three dimensions. For the first time, I could see how I truly appeared to others—striking-looking, handsome even. My Asian features fit together on my face in a pleasingly exotic way. And my arresting eyes were dark and piercing. I would’ve bet money that if I ever had an opportunity to see myself more clearly, I’d move myself down on the one-to-ten hotness scale. As it was, I decided I was an eight.

  Another part of me watched myself go sideways again to avoid my emotional experience. “How many of you—of us—are there?” I asked. Another surge of adrenaline kicked in, despite the lack of a physical threat. At this rate, I’d deplete my endocrine system and be unprepared for any future emergencies.

  “We don’t know,” they said in unison. The second one continued. “When the first seven or eight found their way here and we were all in the Great Cave together, it was too overwhelming for some of them. Two are still struggling psychologically—maybe you can help them. So now there’s a rule that we never have more than three in a room at the same time. Identical triplets don’t go crazy, right?”

  “So give me a ballpark figure,” I said. “Ten, Twenty? A hundred?”

  They lo
oked at one another. Sam squeezed my hand. For some reason, the number mattered to me. “Maybe twenty or twenty-five,” the first one said. “By the way, I’m Norm. This is Jim.”

  We all shook hands, an extremely strange experience. So that’s what my hand feels like. It was smaller than I expected.

  “You’re not asking the sixty-four-million-dollar question,” Sam said to me.

  “Which is?”

  “If you’re clones—and I’m not sure you are—who are you a clone of?”

  I was floored by this. I hadn’t thought of it at all. I’d been focused on the copies, but who were we a copy of?

  “We don’t know,” Norm and Allen said in unison again. The hairs on the back of my neck rose as a unit, as well. This was like a scene in a science fiction movie. People can’t speak in unison.

  “Why don’t we clean up?” I said to Sam, happy to change the subject. “And then we’ll have a chat with Mr. Bhante about that.” I wasn’t in a rush to find out who “Dad” was. It mattered too much. What if he were a despicable historical figure like Pol Pot or Ho Chi Minh? After all, who had the resources to manage something like this?

  “The word ‘Bhante’ is an honorific,” Norm told me. “Like Lama or Monsignor. It’s not his name.”

  “What tradition is this?”

  “Sri Lankan Buddhism,” Sam answered. “With a twist. I’ll see you soon.”

  She left with the others, and I headed for the shower.

  ****

  I considered the new information under a stream of hot water. Buddhists, huh? They weren’t acting like any Buddhists I’d ever heard of. And what did Sam mean when she said she wasn’t sure I was a clone?

  Maybe it was all a hoax. Maybe these lookalikes had undergone plastic surgery to resemble me so I’d think we were clones. But this brought me back to the discussion I’d had with my friend Chris. Why would anyone go to all this trouble to con me? I wished I could’ve called Chris and recruited him to research the crap out of all of it. But not only had Jason confiscated my cell phone early on, there’d be no service in a cavern anyway.