Craving

by Kristina Meister

  “It’s different from the ones in circulation. These are the lost Buddhavacana Sutras,” Jinx corrected.

  “What?”

  “See, just like the Biblical scriptures of the Christian canon, all the Buddhist texts have been royally fucked by time and stupid assholes who want to include their two cents, not to mention interested ‘Bodhi Sattva’ or Arhat who wanted a piece of the action. Buddha predates Christ by like five hundred years, according to legend, but the oldest texts ever recovered about him weren’t written until the first century.”

  “So, it was all by—”

  “Oral tradition,” he interrupted. “One of Buddha’s sidekicks, Ananda, had an eidetic memory and could recall all of the words the Buddha spoke. At the First Sangha of the Buddha, Ananda was asked to recite them, and did so from memory.”

  “Srotapanna,” Arthur said in a tone of voice that was unreadable. In his perfect accent, the word sounded lovely. “Ananda was the first Stream-Enterer, so called by the Buddha himself. He did not achieve the jhana, and thus, right liberation, until after the Buddha died.”

  I watched his face closely, but could find nothing. “You’re saying . . .” I prompted.

  “Ananda recited them and someone from the First Sangha wrote the Buddhavacara Sutras down. Over time, the Sangha adapted, translated, altered, and tweaked them, until they were written down by humanity. The originals,” he confirmed, “were kept by the Arhat of the Sangha. What your sister was reading, were the purest words of the Buddha. She infected herself from the source.”

  My mouth fell open so wide, they could probably see my molars.

  “But without guidance . . . hell even with it,” Jinx said with a whistle, “that’s a memeplex that’d fuck anyone over. The Buddha should have kept his mouth shut.”

  “Meeem . . .”

  Jinx made an annoyed sound and glared at Arthur. “You haven’t taught her about memetics? I mean that’s from the seventies! Fuck Art, what the hell do you read?”

  Arthur said nothing. He seemed to be rethinking all his interactions with Eva in blank silence.

  Without an audience, Jinx turned back to me, shivering like an eager puppy. “Memetics is just one catchy word for the study of how ideas compete and propagate, but I like how it sounds, so it’s the one I use. Cognitive Science has only become a study in the last thirty years or so, as we come to understand how the brain works, and how ideas seem analogous to genes.”

  “Huh?”

  “Said simply, a memeplex is a group of ideas, or memes, that work together as a unit, almost like an organism and its constituent molecules.”

  “Not sure I understand. You're saying ideas are alive?”

  “No.” He squinted at me. “I’m saying ideas are forced to obey the same rules that govern your immune system, DNA copying, and so on, just like electricity must follow the paths of wires. Thus, they function like an organism. If a memeplex can acquire more ideas, or interpretations, or versions of the truth, it grows, and can survive longer in a more hostile environment, can inoculate itself against invasion, can even copy itself into the mind of another through association.”

  “Right, alive.”

  “No! It’s feedback feed-forward. By coping with an idea, you create a more perfect idea that can be more easily passed on and has the capacity to survive other people’s skepticism. Get it? The communication between two sides of the system mimics life, but is not alive. Kind of like in computer coding, when the machine talks to itself. It’s just processing data along a set of parameters, but to us, it looks schitzo.”

  I understood finally, what Eva must have endured. Sitting in that white room, day after day, translating and reading those words over and over, uncovering the imaginary road to nowhere without anyone to point her in the right non-direction. What would it feel like, to be inundated with one rationality-shattering revelation after another? What would she have inferred? What would she have cast aside? And how could she be sure her filtration of the details was even close to accurate? It would have buried her.

  Something in my thoughts triggered a memory. I leapt up and yanked the black journal out of its place among its fellows.

  “It’s a wall that stretches upward, constantly tipping over me like a wave. I see far from beneath it, but it rolls over and I’m blind again. I breathe in dust and drown. I am buried in a fat, breathing, sweating animal that churns as it eats me whole. I sink into its flesh and am incorporated. When I open my eyes again, I see the horizon through the gaze of a universe.”

  I read it aloud, wondering in the back of my mind how similar our voices sounded, if for Arthur, it was painful to hear. He sat with his gaze veiled, Jinx at his feet nodding in time with words yet to come, experiencing what had to be an epic-sounding echo.

  He looked up just before I finished, but waited politely. “Hard core.”

  “But how could this be her gift?” I demanded, stooping down to caress one of the red volumes. “The gifts come from the desires that are most important to us, our cravings, so if she wanted to be understood, why would her gift be to . . .”

  I stopped. Jinx was looking at me, allowing me to repeat myself so that I could work through the mystery. It had worked.

  I flipped through the pages until I found what I was looking for. “Even though I never knew what she was thinking, I knew she hurt. Even though we were apart, we were together in sadness. Even though we were different, we were the same. She was tired of being seen. From therapists, to our aunt, to me, she was sick of being asked ‘are you okay?’ She wanted a mask to keep her feelings from affecting us,” I whispered looking at the empty happy face, suddenly wanting to curl up in it for comfort.

  “The soul is chipped,” I read, “the days are hammers. They find my weak spaces and pry. They look at me with nails and sharp tools. They chisel me raw. What am I now? They say, ‘You are beautiful. You are perfect, faceted and sparkling.’ But my beauty was my filth, my roughened splendor, my mystery. They stole it from me to make themselves richer and now, thousands strong, they smile as I reflect them. But my soul is a black stone, an obsidian mirror, and when they tire of deceiving themselves, they will see the darkness of their crude refinement. They will scry and find no future. I am a gateway to nothingness.”

  “An obsidian mirror,” I repeated. “Something even Ursula couldn’t crack. Something they couldn’t even break with torture.” I wrapped my hand around my wrist. “A permanent mystery.”

  “That you had to solve,” Jinx whispered. “Like the badass cryptographer she was, she built it into the meme she used to infect you. You were programmed to find something that could never be found.”

  “And uncover everything that could by accident,” I finished. I fell into the beanbag chair and laid the book down reverentially. “Katsu, Ev.”

  Arthur looked as if he wanted to speak, and Jinx was already encouraging him.

  “Go ahead, Art. It’s something I don’t mind hearing twice.”

  “Death is the final obfuscation, and now…” He looked at me. “You will never expose her mystery.”

  Chapter 19

  With the books scanned into his hard drive, Jinx had no reason to stay, and I would soon be alone again amongst three mature, grounded men. While Sam drove the computer and the bean bag back to wherever Jinx lived, I sat with the boy-like entity in the coffee shop, watching him suck down the last dregs of his payment.

  As early morning patrons came and went, I leaned my head in my hand and sighed as obviously as possible. I felt utterly lost and entitled to any guidance that anyone might have. If there was no mystery, then what should I do, focus on my current state? Did knowing my weakness change it? I had so many questions and it appeared that no one, for whatever reason, wanted to answer them. Arthur seemed preoccupied; Unger was off on a wild goose chase and not answering his phone; and Jinx, loveable, sweet, too-quick-for-his-own-good Jinx, gave clipped answers that were vague at best.

  It was as if Eva had done something illegal i
n this secret society, and that I was being protected from a world in which I didn’t belong. But with nothing to live for back home, I would have preferred being an outlaw instead of a burden.

  “I just don’t get it,” I murmured at the ears deafened by house music. “How can you keep up your energy if you don’t eat?”

  Really, I was curious for selfish reasons. Since the salad the day before, I had not eaten, nor had any hunger pangs bothered me. It seemed that the change was like an avalanche, small at first, then a sudden, crushing wave of alterations. It was petrifying.

  I leaned forward to tease him about having the shakes and found myself marveling. In my experience, most people waited for any gap to spit out their own thoughts into a conversation without paying attention to the other person’s, but Jinx was an entirely different animal. He may have seemed impatient, but in actuality was listening intently; he was just out of sync with my reality. It had to take a great deal of patience for him to communicate with anyone.

  “I do eat. I eat this.”

  “But caffeine only goes so—”

  “Do you know anything about nanoscale robots?”

  I hoped I didn’t look as incredulous as I felt.

  He flagged the girl working the bar and pointed at his cup. She frowned, probably certain that even though he was a guest, he was outstaying his welcome. Jinx rolled his eyes and began jiggling his knee impatiently until the girl nodded and turned away, then he launched in at full speed.

  “The body has a natural homeostasis, okay, a balance.”

  I nodded.

  “But it’s inefficient at repairing itself. Humans take in nourishment and it gets deconstructed, broken down into its constituent blocks, which are then recombined into the proteins that make up their cells. The less work the body has to do, the more complete your nutrition. In other words, you are what you eat. Excess or broken pieces are discarded as waste, right? Any disruption of this balance results in a breakdown of that cycle. Meaning, that if you lack food, get hurt, or have a mutation in your genes, the whole system grinds to a halt.”

  “So . . .”

  “What if you could recycle?”

  I made a face, not wanting to think about recycling my own waste like one of Jinx’s Fremin warriors minus his Still Suit.

  “Imagine what would happen if you could inject a person with a robot that’s only, say, three molecules big.”

  His eyes slid to the barista, watching her move behind the bar as if hunting beans. With a smile, I pretended not to notice.

  “So because it’s so tiny, it can find the pieces it needs to repair itself anywhere, pulling bits from broken pieces, recombining molecules at will. I mean, it’s only three molecules big, right? It would never break down or be disabled.”

  I didn’t respond. I knew better.

  “Now what if the function of the nanobot was to replicate and repair? It would make more of itself, like a virus, spread throughout the body because it’s tiny enough to be absorbed through cell membranes. It would do this until every single cell had one like it, and then would forever repair that cell’s DNA, thus preventing aging, injury, or any need for outside nourishment. In other words, it would freeze you where you were and make you invulnerable!”

  “What does . . .?”

  “The bots come from outside you, but…” He set down the empty cup in anticipation of the full one and leaned forward, eyes wide. “What if you had such control over your own body you could halt cellular breakdown by yourself? What if you could take all the broken pieces, break them down, and use them to repair your own anatomy? Fucking awesome, huh?”

  I stared at him in consternation. Arthur had confessed that though right liberation could not be unattained, it was not true immortality. It could be thwarted. Unger had confirmed that Ursula was dead. So if their kind . . . my kind, were as strong as Jinx seemed to think, then how could we be killed?

  Jinx began shaking his head. “Got into a wreck on my bike last year. Had to go to the hospital, because I was unconscious. When you’re unconscious, or injured severely enough, you can’t focus on your state and breakdown occurs faster than you have the ability to repair. Of course, when I woke up from my coma, I healed up just fine, so quick they weren’t sure what the hell I was. If you had enough concentration, you couldn’t be hurt ever, but hey, we’ve all got flaws.” He grinned at me mischievously. “Heard you did a number on Ursula. About time someone wacked that bitch. Guess she didn’t ask you if you were ready and able to kill someone. If she had, she would have called security when you told her about stabbing her in the fucking chest.”

  Surprised, I felt a pang of diffuse guilt. Surely, she was a murderer, but now that I was becoming like her, I wasn’t sure my case was so clear-cut.

  “I’m not a very good liar, but I’m pretty decent at not coming up with an idea until about two seconds before I’ll need it.”

  He was already laughing. “Way to work with what you got.”

  I thought about asking him how well he knew Ursula.

  He glanced at the bar again. “Knew of her. Couldn’t get me to do more than that, not even for all the coffee in Columbia.”

  “Why?”

  Finally, the waitress appeared, holding his new cup on a tray as if she were aiming at his head. His eyes tracked her movements and as she put the thing down, he snatched it up. With an annoyed glance at me, she collected his empty cup and walked away. If Jinx hadn’t had a tab, I was sure he could have singlehandedly paid her salary. It was no wonder she was bothered.

  “So, Ursula . . .”

  “Was way cursed,” he mumbled into his cup. “Everyone avoided her, except a select few.”

  “And by everyone . . .?”

  “I mean all of us.”

  “Us, huh?” I polished off my own coffee.

  “The many species of immortal, I mean,” he replied, “including all the Arhat.”

  “Why? I should think you’d be used to freaks and crazies.”

  “Because she could see. Not just see the truth, but people’s deepest fears and misconceptions. That’s power, man, and it’s a power that could level worlds.”

  I wanted to push harder, to get answers, to find out what her story had been. What was the source of her enmity toward Moksha? Had she been a liability? Was Moksha happy to be rid of her and thus had no quarrel with me? Would I hear from AMRTA again, or be forgotten? I hoped it was the latter, but a voice in the back of my mind was replaying my visions, and I knew that there was more to come.

  The boy across from me would never say anything, I knew. After letting Arthur’s secret slip, I was sure he had probably already cleared what would and would not be discussed. I could see it in the way his eyes kept flicking over my shoulder to the bindery, in the lack of specificity, in the way he kept trying to divert the conversation. But who was Arthur to dictate anything? I was grateful for his protection and guidance, but if what Eva had done to me was irreversible, then how long did he really think he had before I needed to know?

  A gun in the hands of someone who didn’t know how to use it was almost twice as lethal as a gun held by a sharpshooter. Not only that, but hadn’t I shown myself completely capable of dealing with weird and extraordinary things?

  He slurped at the coffee contentedly, his eyes half-lidded. “You shouldn’t be so upset. Your trishna is knowing, so embrace ignorance and be free.”

  With a good-natured glare at his cup, I raised my eyebrow.

  “I know,” he grumbled. “I’m a huge hypocrite, right?”

  “If I slit your wrist, will you bleed brown sludge?”

  “I know, right? But hey, we gotta fuel ourselves with something.”

  “But,” I began.

  “Mitochondria gotta burn fuel! I’m just way more efficient. If I wasn’t this”—he gestured downward at his body—“I’d die of malnourishment, and happily too, I might add.”

  “So what happens to all the liquid?” I asked, amused.

  “Look I didn
’t say we didn’t occasionally use the bathroom to rid ourselves of impurities.”

  “Psychic powers, clinical immortality, but still has to know where the nearest toilet is.”

  He made a face.

  “So how do I jump on the anti-death bandwagon?” I prodded, holding out my damaged wrist in order to garner sympathy.

  His eyes darted to the ditch door.

  “Jinx,” I scolded.

  He grimaced in what looked like physical discomfort. “Aw come on, Lily. Don’t!”

  “I deserve—”

  He fluffed his spikes and looked for Arthur, then dropped his voice. “You don’t know anything do you?” At my fixed stare, a look of pity transformed his features. “Nothing? He hasn’t told you . . .?”

  “No!” I looked over my shoulder, determined to learn how to meditate as effectively as they did. “He didn’t even tell me he was one of them, so what makes you think he’d be offering a tutorial on how to auto-heal? You’re honor bound to help an injured fellow.”

  Skeptical, Jinx set down his cup, something he almost never did unless he was focused. He shook his head, mouth open, for once unable to find words. After a few goldfish gulps, he reached up and took out his headphones.

  “He has to have a reason,” he whispered.

  “Why does he have to have a reason, and why should his reason matter?” I lost him around the first “why”; he was staring into space. “I am so over . . .”

  “Don’t . . .” he interrupted, his eyes darting upward, “don’t say it.”

  “Why?” I demanded, my arms crossed.

  The dark eyes seemed to finally look their age.

  “He’s my friend.”

  “Mine . . .”

  “So why are . . .” I tried to interrupt to explain that by keeping me in the dark, he was making a preposterous demand of me, and that violated the ideals of friendship as laid down by Arthur himself, but Jinx talked over me, already prepared. “With your limited knowledge, how can you possibly know what you should or should not understand?”

  My mouth fell open. “It’s my . . .”