Craving

by Kristina Meister

  He opened the refrigerator, hiding his face from me. “My pleasure means nothing if you are not safe.”

  Annoyed and feeling bad that I might have worried them, I pulled my hair back and tied it up. “Okay, I get it. Can you tell me why I can do it? How is it possible?”

  I wanted him to tell me that that wasn’t what happened to Eva, that she hadn't sat at Ursula’s feet, in rapt attention.

  He sighed. “Your transition is unique in my experience. You are very special, my dear.”

  I blushed. “But I’m not supposed to take pride in that, right?”

  “The question itself implies the answer.”

  After a minute, the door closed and a plastic container of food was brought to me on a tray. Inside it was a wonderful salad topped with cheese and cranberries, pasta, and a fruit tart. I suddenly realized I hadn’t eaten in a long time, and though I knew I should want to eat it, I didn’t. Politely, I took the food from his hands and forced it down. When I finished, Arthur took a seat and crossed his arms.

  “I broke into AMRTA. It wasn’t hard. The security isn’t as tight as I thought. A number keypad, motion sensors, and a camera, but I guess if no one can read your treasure and it falls apart at a wrong look, you don’t need much security. Either that, or they just want the illusion of security. The code was my birthday, which means Eva spent her time in that room, doing whatever she was hired to do.” I chewed another bite, avoiding his face. “It was like a museum, a sealed clean room, with all these moldy, old-looking scrolls in plastic boxes. They were written in Sanskrit, I think. Did Eva know Sanskrit?”

  “Yes.”

  I frowned. “Oh. Well. Then I came here and we cracked the code. Jinx is going to input all the data into his computers and then we’ll get our answers.”

  Arthur was silent for a long time. When I finally dared to look up at him, he seemed blank.

  “You’re not my father,” I said, before I thought about the words. “I don’t have to apologize to you.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m sorry.” I immediately gasped. “That came out wrong! I know you’re only trying to help me. I’m sorry! I just . . .” I shook my head.

  His lips moved in a tender smile. “I know, Lilith. You do not have to apologize to anyone. Everything means something, right?”

  I looked at my feet. There it was again, that subtle correction. He was reminding me, without seeming to, that I was fixated on an idea that would spiral into darkness if I wasn’t able to control my reaction to it.

  Of myself.

  I didn’t need to apologize, we both knew, but if I didn’t keep my grip, I’d end up like Ursula.

  “Got it. No blood-drinking. Right.”

  In his almost-silent way, Arthur chuckled. “How many cokes did he get out of you?”

  “First or second time?” I replied with a smile.

  “Both.”

  “Two the first, one the second, but that one was a freebee.”

  He turned in his chair and struck some hash marks on a running tally he seemed to be keeping. In deference to my newest friend, I pointed at the slashes. “Um, you promised him espresso.”

  Turning back, he blinked at me.

  “He’ll be expecting it.”

  He wrote it in and pointed to my wrist without looking. “Don’t do that again.”

  “Giving me orders?”

  “Suggestions. You strained the stitches.”

  “It doesn’t hurt. In my vision,” I said without preamble. Now that I saw how he interacted with Jinx, I understood why he had a taste for a lack of prefacing. “Jinx said that he infected himself by studying math.”

  Arthur nodded. “Do you remember the invisible road to nowhere?”

  I thought back to the mall. That trip seemed to have happened so many months ago, but it was only a few days. “Yes.”

  “He found it.”

  “Katsu.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah.” I rubbed my wrist carefully. “So, what did it for Eva? You never said.”

  He pointed to the red books. “I’m sure she told us.”

  “Do you think,” I wondered aloud, “that the Sangha are planning a counter-strike?”

  “They don’t need to plan. They are opportunists with abilities like yours. They will let the pieces fall into place, and eventually, you will come to them.”

  “No I . . .” then I thought of the vision. If I hadn’t been able to go spirit-stealth at that moment, would I have gone in physically? When I realized I couldn’t answer my own question, I buried my face in my hands. “Crap.”

  He turned away knowingly.

  “Sam told me about the man who died downstairs,” I revealed, hoping my newfound talent would work on him, but when I put all my concentration into reading his face, feeling the air for the vibrations of a speeding heartbeat, I found nothing. “Who was he?”

  “Stop, Lilith. You do not need to interrogate your friends.”

  My cheeks burned, and I looked at the floor in embarrassment. “Okay, I won't experiment on you, but I still want to know who he was.”

  “An old friend,” Arthur said quietly.

  “Who found you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like Jinx did.”

  His eyes revealed nothing. “Yes.”

  “A two hundred-year-old immortal ubergeek walks into a coffee shop and you just say, ‘wow, how lucky?’ Come on,” I demanded.

  Arthur tilted his head. “He’s a caffeine addict. It’s not that unlikely.”

  * * *

  The white glow of the computer screens was an uncannily attractive compliment to Jinx’s personal color scheme. He sat in the coveted beanbag in the dark, peering at the gibberish, scanning Eva’s volumes into his hard drive, comparing and inputting all the numbers he’d derived from the legend. He was a tireless typing god and did not ever object to the uncomfortable happy face. I kept him supplied, running down to the café every couple of hours to refill his giant espresso, bound and determined to maintain his state of vibrating quickness. Headphones in, he only looked at me to smile in thanks, and it was in that focus, in the glances of understanding, that I saw his maturity.

  He was average height for a grown person of nearly two centuries prior, which meant he was about shoulder height to me and seemed much younger than he actually had been, whenever it was he had achieved Right Liberation. That, combined with his demeanor and syntax, made the perfect camouflage. It was no wonder I could not perceive his true age, but grateful for the composure it gave him. I sat on pins and needles.

  Finally, he sat forward and put down his two keyboards, one normal, one a plate of what looked like glass stuck with uniquely arranged preprogrammed keys.

  “Mon dieu!” He flattened back his spikes like a hedgehog being petted, and then fluffed them forward again with a limp arm. He didn’t seem tired, and indeed, I wasn’t sure they ever really slept. I knew I did, but then again, as Arthur had said, I wasn’t finished changing yet.

  I blinked at Jinx. Done?

  “Not even close,” he muttered, sounding as if he had just uncovered, through painstaking excavation, the tip of a perfectly preserved pyramid of pure diamond. “Where’s Art?”

  I began the sentence and Jinx gave a nod.

  “Yeah, okay. I need to stretch my legs anyway.” He got to his feet and reached for the ceiling. When his arms fell, his face was pointed in my direction. Relaxed and seemingly enraptured, he smiled the smile of appreciation for greatness. “Your sister was a genius.”

  He turned around and went downstairs, leaving me to reason through what he said. I thought back to our youth together. I had been much older than Eva and found her bothersome. Before the accident, she was a sidekick I didn’t really want, someone annoying who always seemed to get in my way, making it so I couldn’t go out with my friends, borrowing my clothes for dress-up games, crying anytime I looked at her funny. After the accident, she was a stranger I willingly tried not to think about, even
as I grudgingly fulfilled my obligation to her. Had she been a genius all along, desperate for the incomprehensible qualities I possessed? Had she been reaching all along, only to finally give up?

  I clenched my fist.

  Had her last act been to foster in me the unavoidable compulsion to seek, where once I had been apathetic toward her?

  Serves me right.

  The two of them reappeared and with a glance at each other over my somber face, took their seats.

  “Should we get Sam and Unger?” I asked aloud, for Arthur’s benefit.

  Jinx plucked the headphones from his ears. “I don’t think you’re going to wanna.”

  “Why?”

  Arthur looked at Jinx and immediately the boy’s eyes widened. “Sorry, didn’t realize.”

  “What?” I insisted.

  Arthur turned back to me slowly and with his hand extended, formed a smile on his face that surprised me. It was the kiss before a forceful blow, a look that told me something was coming, and for a moment, I feared what to expect.

  “We can’t risk exposing them to it,” Arthur said quietly.

  I looked at the open books, the half-deciphered shadows of code slithering across them. “Exposing them to what changed her?”

  He nodded and in the silence, the notion struck at my chest like a cobra.

  “What about you?” I whispered.

  The smile remained as an apology, even as he bowed his head in a plea for forgiveness. My lips moved, but I couldn’t form the idea. Scores of conflicting emotions commanded a variety of responses from shouting, to hitting him, to sobbing, to sitting in shock.

  He, Arthur, my friend, was an Arhat.

  Jinx was staring at my shaking hands, his childlike eyes round in the darkness. “Lily, it’s not that surprising. You’ve known it all along.”

  I realized only then what he meant. The strange draw I felt toward Arthur, the unshakeable composure, the philosophical banter, and the strange way he seemed to separate himself from the world; they were all signs of his age and wisdom. But if he was one of us, he had to have an ability. As I looked away, my gaze unfocused, I was certain it had something to do with knowing exactly what I needed to hear and saying it in exactly the right way, at exactly the right time. I had thought ours was an immense connection that defied logic or physicality, but all along, it was magic.

  I looked into his face in betrayal.

  “Lilith, please don’t lose faith in me. I am your friend. I swear to you that has always been real.”

  He seemed to mean it, but it could just as easily have been another enchantment. I looked at Jinx, partly to see what he thought of such a thing, and partly to ascertain if he was under the same spell.

  He didn’t look bewitched. “He’s one of the good guys, Lily.”

  I shook my head, about to ask him how I could be sure of that.

  “You can feel it.”

  “Does Sam know? Did you tell Eva?” I spat in accusation. “Is that why she—”

  “Stop.” Arthur reached out suddenly and took my hands, looking me in the eye as sternly as he could. It was what I needed to see and hear, but I could find no reason for it to be false. As far as I knew, there was no alternate plot. Arthur had, as he had said, made no demands of me and had only ever tried to keep me safe. He had no reason to use his magic on me then, if indeed, he could control it at all.

  Uncanny insight, I took a deep breath, that’s why he pushed you away.

  I nodded, sure he was still my friend even if he was not the exotic thing I had needed to break free of my boring life of failures.

  Of myself.

  When he saw the comprehension and acceptance in my face, he nodded. “Sam knows, though he pretends not to. Eva knew. It was part of what drew her here.” He sighed heavily and squeezed my hands. “It was what we talked about, in the alley, the last time I saw her.”

  “That was you,” I breathed.

  He nodded.

  “Why aren’t you insane like them?”

  “Insane is a relative term, I’m afraid. Forgive me. If I had told you everything all at once . . .”

  “You would have shit a brick,” Jinx paraphrased, ever the comic relief.

  I knew they were right. Without seeing what we could be, without knowing what I had to be, I could never have embraced Arthur or his quest.

  “What’s your trishna?” I inquired, looking into his face boldly.

  “What keeps me here is the dharma.”

  “Spirit ninja,” I charged softly.

  It was the perfect smile again, and he seemed grateful to give it.

  I clenched my hands around his and without a thought, brought the backs of them to my forehead. “Ursula taught me one thing, that the only way to keep from lying is to never have a secret.”

  Jinx was already shaking his head. “It’s not a lie, not if he already knew when and where you’d find out. Then it’s just letting it unfold as it should have.”

  Arthur’s face had relaxed. “I will never conceal the truth from you, Lilith. You will find what you need to as you need to. I have more than enough faith in your powers of perception.”

  I raised my eyebrows, because I could feel the old me reasserting dominance, and the old me couldn’t handle too much strain before it attempted to withdraw. I knew it was a character flaw, not being able to set my character aside whenever necessary, but I was no Arthur.

  “Not as much faith as I have in yours. I’m freaking out right now.”

  Jinx began giggling halfway through and crisis averted, turned back to his computer. “Can I pull the curtain off this motherfucker, before I get lost in the wicked debates that could come from the unique interaction of our varied super powers?”

  Chuckling, I agreed, but could not help looking askance at the man about whom I continually rediscovered I knew nothing.

  “Great, so,” Jinx launched into his explanation that to an observer, because of his abilities, would have seemed like a lecture, “the gloriousness of a cyclic permutation is that it’s cyclic, right?” He turned the monitor toward us and pointed at his scan of the last page in the last book. One word on the page was highlighted in red. “See, we could pick one word for each coordinate in a repeating pattern, or we could go through the whole set of volumes with the first coordinates, right, until we get to the end. At the end, we find that we have three lines left, so we have two choices. We can do an ‘aces high or low’ and go back to the beginning, counting the first two lines and repeating”—his finger dragged across the screen to the first page, and pointed out the word it would indicate—“or we can assume that she meant us to see this as another modulus problem and infer another number for later use.”

  He looked to us and as always, with his second or two time lapse, launched back in to answer our questions.

  “I’ve done both and both yielded results. That’s when I realized there was more to it and figured out which one she intended.”

  We looked at him. He wiggled in his seat. “We could go round and round and round with the same two numbers, but your sister knew that eventually, they would no longer yield sense. We’d go round until we came back with gibberish. From looking at it, I realized,” he picked up the green book and pointed. “The number of commas in each set of numbers shows how many times we cycle through the books with these numbers, and a period indicates that we should stop when we reach gibberish and seek out no more complexity. It tells me to move onto the next set of modulus coordinates.”

  I blinked again. So can you . . .

  “Yes, I can read it now, but that isn’t the coolest thing,” he continued, pounding his knees with his fists to impress his feelings upon me. “The coolest thing is that any set of coordinates yields something perfectly rational, but useless.”

  “That’s—”

  “I know! This code has infinite complexity and to someone who didn’t know what they were looking for, it’d be a nightmare! She’s hiding the real message in plain sight, because without th
e key and the right set of eyes, you have no idea what message is the one intended.”

  Everything means something.

  Jinx looked positively manic. “Do you know how long it would take me to put something like this together with just my head and a bunch of paper and ink?”

  My neck muscles tightened to shake my head.

  “I don’t even know,” he anticipated. “I can do it with tech, but to do this old school . . .” He paused and looked at the book in his hand in bewilderment. “What did she study again?”

  I wanted to answer, but as before, I couldn’t recall.

  “She wanted to take care of artifacts and translate pictographs. It was her dream,” Arthur said, relieving me of a burden I couldn’t possibly carry. “She double-majored in Art History and Linguistics and double-minored in Comparative Literature and Book Arts. That is why it took her so long to finish.”

  I sat back, utterly broken, two giant sets of misconceptions destroyed in one fifteen-minute span of time. In that moment, I knew what a heinous, awful, horrible bitch I was. Eva was amazing, a beautiful person I should have showered with affection, and I had not seen it. I had been so caught up in my own suffering, I never even guessed that she was anything but a failure like me.

  Jinx was already shaking his head. “No way she learned that in any of those fields.” He stabbed the book with a finger. “This is not learned behavior. This is fucking brilliance. It’s gotta be a gift!”

  I frowned, forcing myself to think of that word, not by its first definition, but by the definition relevant to our world.

  “You’re saying it was her power?” I said, surprised that he let me get the sentence out.

  He turned to his special keyboard and hit a button. The screen changed and in a new window, a document formed from the scattered words. “This is only the first segment of what I believe is the intended message, cycling through the books twice, as directed by the commas, using the first modulus coordinates.” He turned to Arthur, “Look familiar?”

  For the first time since we began our association, Arthur looked stunned. “The Buddhavacana Sutras.”