Craving

by Kristina Meister

  Most importantly, could it now be avoided?

  “I don’t understand,” I whispered.

  William said nothing. He reached inside a closet and pulled out a towel and bathrobe, and hung them from the hooks just inside the archway.

  “You should . . .”

  “Not now,” I cut in, realizing how abrasive I sounded just in time to correct my tone. “I don’t need to bathe, I need to meditate.”

  It was a phrase I never thought I would say.

  “Your friends are fine. Karl doesn’t care about them as long as they don’t interfere and you cooperate.”

  I shot to my feet and began pacing. “How can you be sure?”

  “I just am. Detective Unger was released, remember?”

  I didn’t want to mention my other friends, the ones that they might not know about, namely Arthur. I could still see Ursula’s ravenous death-grin as she ripped the image of him from my mind.

  I turned away from William and wandered toward a makeup desk and lighted mirror.

  “Forgive me if I don’t trust him entirely.” I plopped onto the stool and was about to rifle through the contents of the drawers, an activity that usually perked my spirits, but I caught sight of my face and froze.

  At first confused, I turned and looked behind me, but the room was normal. William stood a few feet away beside the foot of the tub, gazing at me with his passive keenness. Suddenly uneasy, I turned back to the mirror and realized that it wasn’t the room’s fault, it was mine.

  My face was completely different, or more appropriately, looked like it was a mask being worn by someone with better and more pronounced bone structure. My skin was flawless, all fine lines and minor bothersome spots gone. It looked as if my complexion had transformed into beautifully pale sandstone, supple yet still stony, struck through with the pink stria of my lips. My dark hair, usually a rat’s nest of wave and frizz, had smoothed to a shimmering Pantene commercial. My dark eyes seemed to refract more light than usual, from obsidian to star sapphire. My expressions were so precise that my look of abject shock might have been used in a CIA handbook of what to look for during interrogations.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” William hadn’t cared if I showered; he’d wanted me to see myself.

  I stood up and looked at my reflection in a full-length mirror to my right. Gone was the protective layer of whale-fat I had convinced myself was the epitome of feminine virtue. My well-maintained muscles seemed to jut from beneath my flesh. Sliding my hand under my T-shirt, I found my stomach had completely smoothed into the washboard Howard had always wanted. My mouth hanging open, I looked for the scar on my hip, where a nail had torn through my skin during a friendly wrestling match with a neighbor boy, only to find that it too, had vanished.

  “What . . .?” I gasped. “What the hell is going on?”

  “You have control,” William explained a little too happily for my state of mind. I dropped my hands, dumbfounded. “It means there are no more DNA copying errors. Right now you’re regressing to the point at which you stopped maturing and began decaying. You’re twenty-five again.”

  Twenty-five was not the best of years. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  His lips parted, but he said nothing.

  I did a twirl and looked at all of my other womanly attributes, to find them all exactly where they should have been, which was not where I had left them.

  “Fucking cockmongers . . .”

  He made a noise in his throat, as if he could no longer stand seeing me in distress and nearly lunged for me. With a determined expression, he took hold of my wrist and pulled me back into the bedroom. Without preamble, he pulled out one of the comfy chairs surrounding a round game table and pushed me into it. Sitting across from me, he put his elbows on his knees and took my hands in his.

  His earpiece dangled from the collar of his coat, forgotten completely.

  For a few moments, he tried to form words, his eyes sometimes pleading, sometimes ashamed. As distracted as I was, I couldn’t help but feel curious and compassionate. Something about his face and the tiny looks he gave me piqued the interest of Moksha’s little gift to me.

  “What?” I coaxed gently.

  “I want to tell you how it happened for me. I’ve been wanting to, all this time. I need you to know.” The words tumbled out, colliding with each other, leaving him looking confused at his own need. “I’m not sure why.”

  Feeling as if I was party to some sort of dire confession, I leaned in and gave him a tender smile. “It would really help, thanks.”

  He cleared his throat and bowed his head over our joined hands. “I enlisted in 1942. I was young and had been itching to do my part. When I turned eighteen, I signed my name and was more than happy to do anything that would pay the Japs back.”

  He blushed and glanced up at me. “I mean . . .”

  “I get it,” I reassured.

  “I didn’t have any special skills. I grew up on a farm in Kentucky. I was just a dumb kid, but I had fantastic luck. Pretty soon, they started calling me “Clover” and making jokes about how if I was in a unit, everyone else was going to die.”

  I chuckled. “The unkillable man? That’s ironic.”

  He shrugged, his face still obscured. “It was just dumb luck that I lived so long, but during the worst parts, like D-day, that’s how you got promoted. You were just the longest lived.” He sighed heavily. “I never realized how dark this world really was. At the time, I thought that there must be real evil in the universe, for things like . . . what I saw . . . to happen. Either there was evil, or there was nothing at all.”

  For a moment, I was back in my grandfather’s lap, his first grandchild. I was listening contentedly while he told his old war stories to my father, an untouched pitcher of iced tea and a tape recorder between them.

  “I can’t even imagine,” I breathed.

  “I was at Auschwitz.”

  My soul frosted over. Nothing else needed to be said.

  He let go of me long enough to push his hands through his sandy hair. Then he anchored himself to me once again.

  “After it was over, I . . . I just couldn’t go back to the same old farm. Lots of the guys went back, talked about home like it was heaven, but for me, having been there . . . I couldn’t go back to thinking the world was supposed to make sense. I traveled instead. Went to Asia for a while, wandered around there. When I was nearly forty, I sort of found myself in Tibet.”

  I perked up; Tibet was reputed to be the Buddha’s homeland.

  “I started going to this temple. The head monk spoke a few languages, and we could sort of communicate. Before long, I was studying there. They gave me a place to live, food to eat, something to focus on besides my memories.”

  Jinx would laugh and ask him about Raz Al Gould, but something he said struck a chord with me. “It was a temple run by the Sangha, wasn’t it?”

  A guilty nod. “They seemed so wise, and maybe they are. Or maybe there’s no such thing as wisdom.”

  “Someone once said wisdom is knowing what you do not know.”

  William granted me a smile. “When they gave me the sutras to read, I thought they were entrusting me with the greatest knowledge on earth. I read them obsessively, but at first, saw nothing. It all seemed too far removed, lost in translation, obscured by time and changing meaning.”

  That was exactly how it had always felt to me, and though I had read them, I just could not see how they had done so much to people like Eva, and apparently, William.

  “But the more I read them, the more my mind seemed to trace back through definitions. I began to understand the meanings intuitively. Before too long, I felt them more than read them, and I saw how different they were from my reality. You’re young,” he said to me, “and your generation has seen such an influx of foreign culture that you can’t possibly understand. To you, all this mind-without-mind stuff makes perfect sense . . .”

  “No,” I interrupted with a smile, “I think it
’s just been repeated so often that we think it makes sense, but really”—I thought of Jinx’s tirade on interior decorating—“we have not the slightest idea.”

  “It outraged me at first, being told that there was no such thing as evil, nor any such thing as good, that both were the same, just choices we made because of the desires we have. More than once, I threw the damn things across my room.” He chuckled. “But I always went back, wanting to make sense of them, wanting to see what everyone before me had seen, what every person for so many centuries had found of value.

  “When I realized it finally, I was sitting on my mat, staring into the night. It just hit me.” He leaned back and his hands slid from mine. I missed the warmth instantly. “There were only choices, only thoughts. The walls we draw between opposites were illusory, only significant to us. The universe does not distinguish between the sack of atoms that is my body and that red dwarf star. It cannot tell me from another human. The values, the meanings we place on other people are false. So what, then, separates me from the Nazis, the Kamikazis, the Italians? What made me different?”

  I shook my head, unable to speak. My throat was clamped shut preventing me from puncturing the invigorating bubble surrounding us with words that were too precise.

  “Nothing,” he said quietly, his bloodshot eyes glittering, “not a damn thing. There was no difference except the choices I made. Which then begged the question, that if I had been in their shoes, would I have made the same choices? I would like to say no, but I couldn’t be sure. That eagerness and drive I had to help my country may still have been there if that country had been Germany.

  “But then I knew that was not true. If all our decisions are based on that first, initial assumption, that axiom, I had come to believe life was a sacred thing that must not be disturbed. That was the core of my character, and all of my later decisions proceeded from that. I killed soldiers who killed innocent people and that was a truth I could live with.”

  “But it wasn’t the only truth?” I asked in a hoarse whisper.

  He shook his head, smile already in place. “It was just enough to get me by, but the longer I studied, the more I realized how shallow that reassurance was. I sank into depression, wondering if that was all there was. I didn’t want to function in the world, I wanted to rise above it, get out of it, make something of it. To just fall in line with axioms, what a way to live.”

  I sat back, frowning, knowing that was exactly what I had felt while sitting in my kitchen, the dead phone in my limp hand.

  “Everything means something.”

  “I knew it all had to be important, until it happened.”

  “What?”

  “It. I was sitting there and it washed over me. I sat for a week, staring off into space, feeling the answer in my very bones.”

  “Right liberation.”

  He nodded and folded his hands in his lap. “Its effects lasted for a few weeks. I was euphoric, everything made such marvelous sense. But the more sense it made, the more I wanted to share it. I knew there had to be a way to explain it to other people of divergent and opposed cultures. I knew that if we could do that, there would never be another war.”

  I shook my head sadly. “And that was your first mistake.”

  His chin dipped. “I became obsessed with understanding cultures, seeing the tiny doorways I might be able to open into their minds. I was fanatical about it, and completely forgot the lesson. The Sangha encouraged me, and now I know why.”

  I sat up straighter. Was he about to denounce his leaders? “They were cultivating your talent.”

  “As long as I was of use to them, they allowed me to believe I was on the right path. When I began to notice my vision improving, they told me it was just the natural effects of being healthy. When I became certain I was seeing through things, around things, inside things, they said I was one with all things. But when I began to dream of things far away, experience the world from my bed at the monastery, I knew that they were mistaken.” He propped his elbows upon the table and buried his face in his hands. His fingers massaged his hairline, and his breathing quickened. “I can see whatever I want, but since I wanted to see it all, discover the root of human evil, all I see is . . .”

  “The darkest of things.” I put a hand on his shoulder and had a sudden realization. My visions were eerily like his gift, if they were had by a Time Lord. I was seeing the worst of things too, but before they happened. Arthur had never said anything about premonitions, only remote-viewing. Could it be possible that I had something like William’s gift? If so, was I doomed to the same fate?

  “I tried to cut out my own eyes, just like they did.” I knew he was talking about the zombies in the cellar, slowly dismantling their own bodies. “But I saw it even then. When the eyes grew back, I nearly went mad, and it was then that they told me I couldn’t die.” He began to chuckle, but there was no happiness in it, only crazed sadness. “I went to them to escape those things, but they just keep happening. Now, because they did not stop it, I can’t stop seeing them!”

  My hand fell and, dejected, I sat back again. “Which is why you are the head of security.” And how, in my vision, he had been so timely with his attempted rescue.

  He nodded, though he was still hiding in his hands from my judgments.

  “William, how do you cope with it?” I thought of Ursula’s thirst and found myself retreating from him into my chair, wondering if he would pounce upon me.

  He reached into his pocket and tossed a bottle onto the table. “I go through six a day now and it’s not enough. I can’t go on like this much longer.” His voice broke, and he fell silent.

  The prescription was for an antipsychotic at a dosage my outdated pharmaceutical knowledge told me would fell a rhino.

  “Oh, Will.” I sighed.

  He was looking for a cure, urging me to be kind, to free him. For the first time, it broke my heart that I had nothing to offer.

  “Help me,” he said almost too quietly to be heard. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

  My limbs flooded with adrenalin, a sensation I now felt with a detached interest that allowed me to ignore it with no consequences. In my current state, that chemical indication of life or death lost much of its impact.

  If not for the vision, I would not be speaking to William. If not for the vision, I would not have asked him about my friends and discovered his tactical importance. If not for my vision, I would never have heard those words, “whatever you want.”

  Evidently, it wasn’t just the content of the vision, it was the timing. Could it be that some part of me was herding me toward an outcome it already saw coming?

  “If you do not go, there is no proof she will do anything, but if you do, you will certainly do something you’ll regret.”

  Arthur had understood the mechanics of my ability all along. The thought of him made me smile. When at last I learned what Arthur’s gift had been, I would torment him without mercy.

  “Please help me,” William whispered again. I could hear the tremendous effort it took him, even years after the fact, to admit that he still could not numb himself to the horrors only humans could accomplish.

  I reached out gently and pried his face from his fingers and cradled it lovingly. What would he think of me, I wondered, if I told him there was no end to this that was not a crushed skull?

  “William, listen carefully to me,” I insisted, uncertain I could even claim to be such an expert. His eyes sharpened, however, and he looked convinced. “Why are you still alive? Why not end it? I know you know how. Why do you and Karl struggle on, why do those creatures in the cells waste away so laboriously? What’s the point?”

  “We don’t want to die.”

  “You don’t want it all to be for nothing,” I corrected, “but if the purpose of the struggle is to struggle, then we are as free as dust.”

  The look on his face turned from desperation to attentive stillness.

  “The decision to see was your own. You asked f
or the responsibility, not fully understanding what might happen, but should that naiveté free you from the obligation? What drives you mad is that you have chosen a fate you do not want.”

  “You’re saying that I should want it?” He tugged on my loose hands, and I clenched.

  “I am saying the dharma is all you have. You did not ask to be born, but at some point you made peace with the idea of living. Make peace with this idea and accept your obligation. Be better than you are now.”

  “What is the dharma? I don’t even know anymore.”

  “To uphold the truth of the universe.”

  “Which is?”

  I could not help it, I could think of no better explanation. “The dharma is that very question. We know the answer, it’s the question and that fact that we still ask it that drives us.”

  For a moment only, he stared into space, and then his face slackened into a smile. “You remind me of him.”

  “Whom?”

  “Brother Ananda. When he looks at me, he always holds up his finger. I don’t know why, but it’s like he’s never going to answer the question that he sees, and that that’s the point.”

  “I’m afraid he just thinks it’s amusing.”

  Chuckling, William ran his hand over his forehead. “You’re telling me to embrace the things I see and act on them?”

  “I’m telling you not to shy away from something. You have tried that. Try something else. The visions will never go away, because the part of you that asked for them will never allow it. What seems like pointless knowledge being piled onto your shoulders, means something. You just have to figure out what you are trying to tell yourself.”

  “That isn’t something that the Arhat are willing to hear. They were told that their suffering would end, but they were just made to suffer more acutely because they see so much more deeply into the human heart.”