Craving

by Kristina Meister

  I have no choice.

  A new intent came to me. It was the lack of direction that unnerved me, but with this self-selected ninja mission, I could focus. To induce the peace of the jhana, I stretched and flexed, did yoga on the ground until I could feel all the tiny movements of my body, feel the muscles give and the tendons relax. Then, I lay down on the floor and closed my eyes.

  No one had ever successfully cleared their mind and stayed conscious, I was sure. It couldn’t happen. The conscious mind, by itself, is constantly moving, talking, pondering, and just to shut it up people practice chants for years, monotonous sounds that contain enough vowels and fricatives to make Henry Higgins go apeshit. They short-circuited their brains. Some went to therapists and allowed a gentle voice to soothe that endless banter and engage it in a conversation that did not rely upon the streaming video of their senses. The only catch was that their mind was putty in another mind’s metaphorical hands. Self-induced hypnosis seemed, as I lay on the cold rubber floor, feeling the pain in my ankle, like the most absurd, impossible, unreasonable thing to do, until it happened.

  My thoughts went still. There was nothing. No sound, no movement, no sensation of any kind, as if my spinal cord had been severed. I realized that even though I felt nothing, I could think about feeling nothing. My mind had started back up, but I was trapped inside it, because it had ditched my broken body and was keeping itself company. I wondered if I was sleeping, but convinced myself that if a person wondered about being asleep, that must mean they had achieved whatever it was I was meant to achieve and would either wake up or . . . what?

  I tried to open my eyes, and the thought sent me reeling. Sight took on a whole new meaning, as I floated by the ceiling, looking down at myself.

  It was like seeing a stranger. I knew it was me, but I saw it as apart, and that realization alone was enough to persuade me of something profound: that I was not my body. Jinx would probably scold me, tell me something about the unique series of proprioceptors that were activated when a person was conscious, but were disabled in extreme relaxation. He would probably say something about brain waves, projection, or aural memory, but I was more than prepared to tell him to bite me, because in that moment, I was free.

  But there was no such thing as freedom. To live, in any state, was to make plans, to have feelings, to yearn, strive, or hope. To live was to suffer when those hopes were cast aside.

  “. . . because you’re the strongest person I know.”

  I had wondered when the change had happened. All this time, it nagged at me that there was a hole in my otherwise perfect memory, a chunk of my life that had either not been important enough to record, or transcended the operation, but in my higher plain of concentration, the memories could find me. The lost time pooled in my brain like cooling metal, warmed me through, and gave me a new shape.

  The dial tone in my ear, buzzing. Something in her voice tugging on me like a lost child. In her words, she was dead already, and in my heart I was already suffering as much as any person ever could. I had known what would happen, not in the prescient sense, but in that aching, half-realized intuition tracking inevitabilities through time. To be so certain flattened my spirit completely.

  If death existed, I had thought as the phone slid from my hand, then everything was pointless and temporary, and if that could be so, then all truth was equal, and there were no consequences. In that space of wasted moments, all that was false, illusory, conjectured, was as powerful as reality. Nothing meant anything, but if that was true, then everything meant something.

  That had been the moment, that perfect liberation. My life, or the thing that was defined as my existence, had ended, but had brought new meaning to what was left.

  It had not been minutes or even hours that I had sat there at my kitchen table, staring into nothing, my hand in the tepid water. I had lost about three full days to my trance. With my thoughts unfocused, I had watched Eva from that distance, my mind like a camera recording for later viewing. I had followed her to Ursula’s lair. I had been with her as she withstood their questions and insults. I had watched her level Arthur with that stare that no one could refuse and ask him, point blank, what he thought he was doing.

  I wanted her to demand an explanation for his betrayal, insist that he apologize for wanting the cure as much as they did, but I could tell that she was not angry with him. She was impatient.

  “Something must be done.”

  “It will happen as it will,” he had replied, his face cast downward like a scolded child.

  There she stood, defiant, a mastermind in the making, her hazel eyes eerily clear. “The Buddha, Jesus, all of those names, they’re not just words. They’re not just icons. They are our reminders.”

  He shook his head and closed his eyes. “No one should need such reminders.”

  “Yet here we are.”

  Arthur looked up and a moment passed in silence.

  “I agree with you!” She insisted. “But something must give. They were able to unlock their bodies, but once physical suffering disappears, the promise of an afterlife and the figure of an enlightened man is not enough to sustain! All that has kept the Arhat struggling and learning, is gone. Without that, there’s no hope for them.”

  She lifted her hands, Ursula’s mark patched with a bandage it did not need. It was almost as if she had kept the wound intentionally as a reminder of something she wanted Arthur to see. She reached for him, but he shied away as if he could not allow her to touch him, and she looked after him in sorrow. It was an odd reaction that made me wonder about the dynamics of their friendship. I’d wondered if Eva had seen him as I did, but that was obviously not the case; if anything, she treated him like a judge she was petitioning.

  “The transformation didn’t make them gods or even monsters. It made them human forever,” she said to herself, more than to him, “but human isn’t good enough. How we think, the things we feel, the way we perceive reality, are not meant for immortality. They know that and yet they strive to live, because they are certain that there is nothing else more important, that to give up life is the gravest of errors. They have no direction, Arthur! They will be here, forever, with no one to lead them, no icon above them, when that is all their human minds can manage!”

  Once again, I was in the shadow of her knowledge, uncertain about everything I thought I knew. Why did it seem as if she was holding him responsible?

  “You do not have to say it,” he said quietly.

  “She’s right!” she insisted. I wondered if “she” meant Ursula, and pictured the woman pontificating to her captive audience of one. The image troubled me. “This is the tipping point. If we do not weight things in our favor, all that work will be undone. They are in the end stages. More and more are stored each year or disappear, never to be heard from again. Ursula has gone stark-raving mad and there are plenty of others like her. The end isn’t coming. It’s here.”

  Arthur frowned at the gash on her wrist. “Does it hurt?”

  “No.” She covered the bandage with her other hand self-consciously. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Arthur, things have changed. You know how I see the world. You’re the only one who really knows. They need something, anything, to give them a direction.”

  “It cannot be me and it cannot be you.”

  “No.” She sighed. “It can’t.” She looked away and seemed so lonely, I wanted to hold her. “It all began that day. If I had . . . My parents . . .” she whispered in confession, “maybe I didn’t love them enough? Maybe I was too young.”

  This time, Arthur reached for her. “Maybe Lilith took their place, kept them alive for you. You are not a bad person, Eva. No one is.”

  She nodded, though it was a dubious nod at best. “You’re right. I should have listened to you. But I’ve always known what I had to do.”

  Stunned, I almost forgot that I was haunting a memory and nearly shouted at her. Could she have known
all along about our parents, about the Arhat? How long ago had she begun to change? Maybe reading the Sutras was a final stage. Perhaps Eva was not the naïve little girl she had always seemed. She had walked into the fray with complete knowledge, but I could not imagine why. Was it to save Arthur or was it out of compassion for the Arhat? How had she come to learn so much?

  “We are still missing pieces, Eva,” Arthur whispered. “Can you build upon what you do not fully understand?”

  “I can build on anything, Arthur. Have faith.”

  “But will it be fiction?”

  “Is there really such a thing as false hope?” she countered, crossing her arms.

  “Lying solves nothing.”

  “We planned it right. There is truth to every word and everything means something.”

  “We?” He waited in her silence, examining her, assessing her expression which seemed almost guilty.

  After a long while, she chuckled and nodded her head. “Yes, we.”

  “Are they ready?” he whispered. “They are terrified that this path is a suffering worse than what they endure, than what they knew before. They believe that on the other side, is not just a lack of joy, but a reality where joy is shown to be a false thing, Because they believe this, they will never progress, even with the perfect leader and the ideal set of values. A man cannot fly, if he cannot fall.”

  I saw her smile and heard her whisper my name.

  “Then I will push,” she said.

  He gave a slow blink and seemed to know exactly what she meant by that.

  “The fruit is poison.”

  “Only the first bite.”

  “Who will take it?”

  “Must you ask?”

  She stared him down, trying to convince him with her gaze, but when he seemed withdrawn, she walked away.

  Arthur stood in the alley for some time, looking up at the light that was her window, his face composed of that perfectly ambiguous expression that only he seemed capable of achieving. I wondered what he was thinking. He had to suppose that she had already set into motion a series of events that would put me right in their hands. He was too wise not to. When he looked at me, did he see me as a person, or as the end result of her craft?

  Ashamed, I was sorry I had been so short with him, when it was quite probable I would never be able to apologize. My faith in him had wavered and I felt so stupid. All along he could see how little I knew her. The righteous quest for truth was pointless, because Eva had not needed saving.

  My image of her was wrong, frozen at our parents’ funeral; a snapshot of her eyes glistening, her hands curled into her skirt, gripping it tightly. She had always been vulnerable, someone I needed to protect, and that was why I couldn’t see the lust for immortality born on that tragic day.

  It seemed their argument had convinced her she was right, because after witnessing it, the premonition of her death had swept over me, still sitting at my kitchen table, fingers turning to prunes. I had been with her on the roof’s edge, even though she had not yet set foot upon it.

  “Human is not good enough. Live better, or die as nothing more than this,” she said to herself, or perhaps to the world. Then she spread her arms wide and leapt.

  My flashback to the premonition ended, leaving me with a vague dizziness of time-displacement.

  Back in the present, looking down at my body, I could see the resemblance it had to her corpse, though it was so much more neatly arranged. If I were going to end my life, I thought, I was much too neat to do it so haphazardly. If I had jumped from a building, I would probably just be wondering how I could land in the neatest possible way. It was perhaps her last way of thumbing her nose at the order I had always applied to her chaos. Limbs splayed, clothes askew, a wonderful Rorschach test of dark red and pin-striping.

  What do you see?

  Human wasn’t good enough, but they were still trying to be human even though their perception of reality had changed drastically. They were still doing business, living lives, interacting in the old ways. From different to self-hating, from perfect knowledge to detachment, their very nature made eternity a dismal fate instead of a wondrous opportunity.

  It was no wonder they come to hate the Buddha, felt abandoned by him, but could he really be blamed? Had he known about the death inside that golden fruit when he presented it to the kingdom?

  Chapter 23

  I don’t know how long I was suspended above my motionless carcass. I saw no change, noticed no passage of time, but after a while, I realized I could still hear—if that was that right word—the screams of the other inmates. I knew the temperature of the room, though I had no sense of flesh or blood. I could still discern, but was unable to do anything about what I discerned.

  Helpless.

  Like I was standing on a mountain top, I looked out over a great horizon and had no idea what I was supposed to do now. Was I meant to observe, but do nothing, change nothing? Was I meant to float around forever, hovering above my own head, pondering the nature of all things? I mean that was great and all, being able to ditch the meat sack anytime, and I’m sure in the right circumstances it’d be tremendously enlightening about the nature of consciousness, but to me, it was shaping up to be a pretty boring eternity. And yet the Buddha had endured the jhana time and again, even charged his followers to embrace its seeming passivity.

  What can this possibly teach me?

  It occurred to me then, as I pondered all that I had seen, that surely, in this incorporeal state, I could escape not only my flesh, but the proximity to it. Could I, I wondered, stretch out my thoughts to my friends and . . .

  I would have blinked, but as it was, I had no eyelids to blink. The blue, spiky beacon below me, however, banished all confusion. I was in Jinx’s home, hovering above his shoulder, listening to him as he mumbled to himself in multilingual, expletive-rich outrage.

  He was sitting in his records room. A haphazard pile of file folders had been pushed over in front of him. He was sifting through them with one hand and typing on a laptop with the other. I had never been so glad to see anyone. It was an entirely new experience for perfidious me, thinking of the self as separate from the body, the ghost in the machine, and it was nice to see that the contents of my life were constant.

  “Why can’t we just break down the door?” Unger growled from the head of one of the mountainous tables. Until he spoke, I had no idea he was present and wondered why he was there. Jinx: eternally youthful, quick to a fault. And Unger: dragged through the muck of life, barely standing and ambiguous on his path; if any people could be more different, I’d never met them.

  “Because it’s not that simple,” Jinx replied in a long-suffering voice and turned up his music.

  “Why not?” Unger flipped over a few pages with an angry finger, as if the whole room offended him. I could understand why it might. He’d been swallowed whole by an entire case file and was realizing how detail-oriented his life had been, and how little he had actually accomplished.

  “Because.”

  “That’s easy for you to say; you’re one of them.”

  “So’s Lily, and for your information, I am an entirely different species of them, so shut it.”

  “I didn’t come here to watch you do . . . whatever. I came here to plan a strategy.”

  “Which I could do much better without you, ironically,” Jinx grumbled.

  I read over his shoulder, scanned his laptop screen with my mind’s eye, still slightly stunned that I was able to. The skeptical voice within was yammering something about manufacturing a reality when in dangerous and uncertain circumstances to appease the conscious mind, but I was much too busy putting two and two together to care about its advice. I wanted to believe that this was happening.

  Jinx had, due to his two centuries of acquired skills, hacked the banking records from my sister’s account and was tracing the deposits. Marveling, I realized it had never occurred to me to do so. I had always just assumed the money was Moksha’s, but now
that I considered it, I wondered if it could be. After all, why would Moksha pay someone who might end up killing themselves like all the other experiments, knowing that money would come to her next of kin? I doubted that they’d feel such an expense was worth it.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t raise those questions with the one person who would have investigated them. He was leaning on his hand just then, sighing in what I would have considered exhaustion, if not for the fact that he never slept; it was probably just caffeine withdrawal. I tried to think in his direction, repeat his name over and over until he heard me calling, but he showed not the slightest sign of noticing my existence.

  Unger wandered over, browsing the records as if shopping at a particularly odious fish market. Eventually, he found his way to Jinx’s side and put himself directly in the way of my view.

  No sooner had I touched upon frustration, than my vantage changed, and I was facing them. Whatever was going on, it seemed that I was in the highest form of control, able to command merely by desiring, evade obstructions by wanting to know.

  Unger whistled, impressed. “You know I could arrest you for this, right?”

  Jinx raised an eyebrow stud before the detective finished; I was awed that the Boy Wonder didn’t cut him off. “Maybe, but I’m a hacker. By the time I was done, you’d be in prison instead.”

  Unger’s face screwed up momentarily. “So what are you—?”

  “Following a hunch.”

  “A hunch?” The detective leaned forward and glared at the screen. “One of his or one of your own?”