The 37th mandala : a novel

by Laidlaw, Marc

  The pictures tore at Michael, weakened and dazed him; but after all, he had seen all this before, and the image was no more shocking a second time.

  What unnerved him now was the audience.

  They were laughing. Watching the screen with enrapt, blue-lit eyes where tiny TV monitors swam. Little mirrored mandalas twirled in their pupils like advertisements.

  Blackness gnawed his vision. He backed out of the room and clawed his way along a wall, stumbling up against a cold metal folding chair. He lowered himself into it slowly, hanging his head between his knees until vision returned.

  As his eyes cleared, he saw a pair of hard black shoes standing before him.

  One-Ear said, "I thought I'd find you down here."

  "What do you want with me?" Michael groaned. "I don't have anything you want. If Derek Crowe's in here somewhere, fucking go to him."

  "Assuming Mr. Crowe cares anything about you, or human life in general, I would like to have something more to offer him. Now get up and come with me. I think I know where to find him."

  Michael lowered his head.

  "I said get up."

  "I'm sick, you asshole."

  One of the hard black shoes gave him a sharp kick in the shin. Michael gasped and grabbed his leg, but forced himself to stand. No one looked his way. It was as if the scene meant less to them than the art on the walls or the video displays. As if Michael didn't exist in their eyes. Remembering what had amused them, he realized it would be unrealistic to expect help from such people.

  One-Ear trailed him through the maze, nudging him with the gun. Michael turned into a room where several people stood around a woman. She wore a black plastic helmet that covered her face completely. She was engaged in pantomime, touching something only she could see.

  "Now, reach in," a man was saying. "Grab the fucker's heart. That's it—twist it! Pull!"

  She was murdering someone invisible. Doing it with her bare hands.

  Michael stepped back, right into the gun.

  "Which way?" One-Ear said, growing shrill and irritable now.

  "How the hell should I know? It's a maze down here."

  "You're not saying you're lost?"

  "Of course I'm lost."

  At that moment, Michael heard a voice he had not expected hear.

  "Michael?"

  He turned. Lenore was coming down the hall.

  "Michael, how did you—what's happening? Who is he?"

  She had seen the gun. One-Ear, indecisively, turned it on her as he fastened his fingers on Michael's arm.

  "Don't move," he said.

  "Who are you?" She looked up at the air above One-Ear's head. "What are you doing?"

  "Lead us out," One-Ear barked. "Take us to Derek Crowe."

  "What do you want with him?" she asked.

  "Lenore," Michael said. "Crowe was lying."

  "No," she said. "He's playing his part."

  "Shut up!" One-Ear said. "Take me to Mr. Crowe! Now!"

  Voices in the hall came up quickly behind them. Michael twisted his head around. One-Ear jumped uncertainly, wondering how to keep his gun on Michael and Lenore and still face this new threat. Around the corner came a young couple, a man and a woman.

  "Etienne!" One-Ear said. "Don't move."

  "What nonsense," said the young man, Etienne. Without hesitation, he clutched One-Ear by the throat, shoving him against the wall. "Nina, would you please?"

  The woman took his gun. "You must be Chhith," she said. "A pleasure to meet you at last."

  Michael moved closer to Lenore, taking her hand. Her fingers were ice.

  "Now, Chhith, you're not playing the game at all correctly," Etienne said. "We must straighten you out."

  Chhith spat some words in a language Michael didn't recognize, but Etienne merely smiled at Lenore. "Will you excuse us for a bit? We've put Mr. Crowe to work signing autographs upstairs."

  Nina gestured with the gun, and the man called Chhith stepped away from the wall. They urged him down the corridor, around the corner, out of sight.

  "Jesus," Michael said, sagging with relief. He turned to Lenore. "What happened to you?"

  She was looking at the air above his head again; it drove him crazy when she did that. She was as bad as ever. And this place, full of the mandalas and their sick energy, was making her worse.

  "What," he said. "What is it?"

  "You shouldn't be here," she said. "You shouldn't even ... exist."

  "What do you mean? I was worried about you. Now I'm terrified."

  "Don't worry, Michael. Just go."

  "Go where?"

  "Out. Away from here. Take your chance. They can't see you, so they can't stop you. Don't get caught in the middle."

  "Of what? What's happening, Lenore? What is all this?"

  She looked around the hall as if she owned the place. "It's the end for some," she said. "But for you it's already over."

  "Come on. Let's both get out of here."

  "I have to stay."

  "Lenore, come on. Derek Crowe is a fake—a charlatan—a thief. You have to get away from him."

  "I came all this way to find him, Michael. It's not just the mandalas, I think. I'm doing this for me. Now please, leave me to it. You can't do anything here."

  "I won't leave you," he said.

  "You have to. You can't make me do anything anymore, Michael. I don't want to hurt you, but it's all over for us. I don't want you here, understand? I don't need you, I don't love you anymore, I don't want you. You have no part in this."

  Her words tore into him with surgical, cold precision. He stood there as Lenore moved away. He put out a hand, then let it drop.

  "Don't try to follow me," she said. "Don't interfere."

  "With what?" he said, but she didn't answer. She went off down the hall.

  After a while, he stumbled in the other direction, looking for a dark, quiet place to sit down, somewhere to rest and gather himself. He knew only one thing: He was not leaving.

  He circled around in the underground maze, avoiding people wherever he came upon them, finally passing a door behind which he heard nothing. He opened it and saw a silvery glimmer of mirrors. It was a vast round room, empty except for an oxblood couch and a red velvet chair in the very center of the floor.

  He crept in, closing the door behind him. He avoided the couch and chair. They looked too much like props in the center of a stage. Instead he sank down against one of the mirrored walls and put his head on his arms.

  I have to find Lilith, he thought. But she could take care of herself, he realized with relief. She had proven that already.

  For now, he wanted nothing but to be alone.

  Finally, Derek Crowe thought, a group of fans I'm not embarrassed to he seen with.

  Club Mandala had stacks of The Mandala Rites at an upstairs table in one of the gallery rooms, and they were selling faster than he could sign them. It seemed for a time as if everyone in the club were lining up to buy a copy. The woman handling sales stopped periodically to slice open another cardboard box full of copies and stack them on the table before going back to making change and taking cash. Derek, meanwhile, had wearied of writing inscriptions. For a time he had signed his name and made a small circle beneath it, filling it in with dots and wavery lines, crude hieroglyphic mandalas; but that looked so awful, compared to the elaborate designs in the book, that he finally resorted to an unadorned signature. The customers seemed satisfied with this, though few made conversation.

  Of course, it was possible to think that despite their fashionable clothes, their lack of any overt affiliation with medieval systems of belief and quackery, these customers were really no different from the ones who flocked into Hecate's Haven hoping to become Cosmic Masters. His book was the equalizer, after all; if they bought into it, they were every bit as foolish as the neo-pagans and theosophists. On the other hand, maybe they were buying the book as a novelty, a bit of trendy kitsch to go with their mandala tattoos. Copies would circulate as f
reely as capsules of 37. It was a badge of hipness, as temporary as any, but during the course of the trend's popularity, there was an opportunity for Derek to climb to greater things. "Mandala Madness!" blared the cover of the Bayrometer, also available in stacks around the room. Once the mandalas faded from favor, his name would hang in the public's mind and his next project would benefit from his fame or notoriety. The mandalas were a stepping-stone to other and better things, not an end in themselves.

  "Mr. Crowe?" said a fellow about his age or slightly younger, either prematurely bald or with shaven pate. He held a small packet in his hands. He wore odd, square little glasses and spoke with a slight lisp. "Bob Maltzman said I should introduce myself. I'm Neil Vasquez, your illustrator? I've been working on the concept for your mandala deck."

  "Well, yes!" Derek said. "Come over here, I'd like to talk to you!"

  Vasquez smiled nervously, dark eyebrows bobbing. He stepped around the table as the next person in line slapped down their copy for signing.

  "Great to meet you! You did a fantastic job on the book, and this Tarot idea sounds terrific!" Derek was giddy, beside himself with tonight's success.

  "I—I brought a prototype deck for you. These are probably smaller than what we'd end up using, but the quality's pretty good."

  He laid the packet on the table, a deck of glossy cards not much bigger than standard playing cards. Crowe shuffled through them quickly. These mandalas were incredible, three-dimensional and lifelike, floating in a shimmering ether. They looked like photographs, with quicksilver shadings, colored in dark iridescence.

  "You did these yourself?"

  "They're computer generated. I've worked out a fractal program that does it, based on thirty-seven iterations of the same equation. I—it worked out so well, I started thinking, what if this is how the mandalas are generated? Like, if you see the universe as a vast processor crunching away until these things evolve. Of course, they'd do it in a dimension parallel to time, so they could sort of pop in and out of our dimension and do their stuff without really having to get stuck in it."

  Derek said, "I had the impression they're more along the line of ancestral spirits, Ascended Masters, or something like that. But mine certainly isn't the last word on the subject."

  "You see? You have real insight. I'd love to hear your suggestions."

  "We should really ask the mandalas what they think." At that thought, he looked for Lenore. He hadn't seen her for a while. "I never got to tell you how much I admired your illustrations."

  "Well, thanks, I'm glad. But these, I think, are light-years beyond the black and whites."

  Derek spoke to the room. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is the artist of The Mandala Rites! Neil Vasquez! Don't neglect to add his signature to your copy!" He turned to Vasquez, who looked flustered, smiling nervously, his entire skull flushed and mottled. "Put yourself right here next to me, Neil. We'll get an assembly line going."

  "Wow," a girl said, leaning over the table. "Are these like Tarot cards?"

  "That's right. We'll be putting them out shortly."

  "Cool!" She started flipping through them, and soon others were craning to see over her shoulders.

  Derek glanced over at Neil, who was blushing proudly.

  "I think they're a hit," he said.

  He wasn't sure how much time passed before Nina appeared at his elbow, placing a glass of wine at his side. "Are you ready for a break?" she asked.

  His hand was cramping, so he gave a short nod and stood up. "Neil, why don't you stay?" he said. "Give them something extra for their money."

  "We have another surprise," she said. "Etienne's waiting downstairs."

  On the ground floor, there was scarcely room to move. People had begun to circle around on the dance floor more or less in unison. It was either that or not move at all, apparently. The lock-step pounding of their feet merged with the thrumming music. He found himself thinking of fan blades swinging around and around, slicing heavily at the air: monotonous, hypnotic, a droning rhythmic whir.

  While he hesitated at the edge of the dance floor, someone took him by the arm. He turned, expecting another fan, another request for an autograph.

  "If it isn't Derek Crowe, famous author," said Lilith. "Or should I say plagiarist?"

  He couldn't quite hear her in the noise. "Lilith—I didn't expect you here."

  "Did he find you?"

  "What?"

  "Your friend with one ear."

  "One ... ear?" Derek went cold.

  "Oh, Chhith!" Nina said. "Don't worry, Derek. Everything's taken care of."

  "What—how did you know about him?" he asked Lilith.

  "He gave me a lift tonight. He says you have something that belongs to him, which I don't doubt. You seem to have a lot of people's things. I didn't realize you had so many secrets, Derek. You were wise to hide them from me."

  He was completely baffled. She couldn't possibly be referring to all the things he feared she meant.

  "Could you excuse us?" Nina said firmly. "Mr. Crowe has to be somewhere else right now."

  "Be my guest," she said.

  "I'll catch up with you later," he called as Nina tugged him along.

  "Don't bother," she replied. And he couldn't be sure of the words she added, the club was so noisy. Surely it was nothing to do with "Elias Mooney." He'd misheard her, out of guilt or paranoia. No one knew a thing about Elias. Not even Etienne and Nina.

  He was growing intensely aware of the second skin he wore. It fit more comfortably than he would have believed. Was it insane to wear such a thing so close to his skin? No one suspected. It was utterly perverse! The way it rustled against him, tickling and tingling, tightening in places, was very strange, very pleasurable. A comforting, all-enveloping pressure that was more than slightly erotic, as if his entire body were an enlarging sex organ, blood-pumped, sensitive.

  He found himself laughing as Nina led him downstairs past what had to be a guard or bouncer. He hadn't realized there was a basement until now. But this, clearly, was where it was all happening. The party within the party. The coolest of the cool were here, standing and kneeling before small displays of technology and multimedia art pieces, as if worshipping at the very latest altars.

  His eyes were hooked briefly by one particularly incongruous sight among the blur of fashion: a pinch-faced, sad-eyed, clearly puzzled man dressed as if for a business meeting, in a shiny Hong Kong suit. He moved haltingly down the halls, peering into rooms. It was not so much the man who interested Derek, as the stack of papers he carried—typescripts, photocopies, even a few red and black notebooks of the sort Eli Mooney had filled with his rant. Derek's first and craziest thought was that these were his secret mandala files, stolen from his closet. Impossible! The man sidled on, vanishing around a corner, but not before Derek caught a glimpse of his own handwriting.

  With a muttered excuse to Nina, he followed the man. His horror knew no bounds. They couldn't be his papers; how could they? How could some stranger have acquired them?

  Chhith, he thought.

  Derek looked around the corner and saw an alcove with a door in it. He pushed his way into a dark, purple-lit space. At first he saw ultraviolet patterns glowing and writhing under a black light—mandalas and creepers, vines and skeletons, dragons and carnivores with poisonous diamond eyes. As his pupils adjusted to the low light, he saw that the shapes were imprinted on the skins of two naked figures who coupled vigorously before a small but appreciative audience.

  Just then, the sad-eyed man with the bundle of papers opened a door at the far end of the room. Derek saw his silhouette briefly, the bundle of papers clutched to his chest, then the door closed. He stepped in, averting his eyes from the couple who were working their way across the floor of the room. One hurled the other hard against the wall—nearly in his path—and they continued to fuck in a vertical position. Derek sidestepped them and continued on. It was a bad North Beach sex show, redone for the culture vultures. As he reached the far door,
it opened under his hand. Etienne smiled in.

  "There you are!" Etienne stepped in and closed the door. "I see everyone's warming up!"

  Derek looked back and saw that the crowd he'd moved through, as if wearing blinders, was beginning to imitate the actors—if they were actors. The audience members had begun groping each other and seemed to be shedding their clothes, although given the dim light and the pounding of Derek's head, it was difficult to be sure of anything he saw.

  "Charming, isn't it?" Etienne said.

  "We think heterosexuality is very quaint," said Nina, emerging from behind Derek, sliding an arm around Etienne.

  Derek felt as if some similarly jaunty response were mandatory. "Quaint but effective," he said. They all laughed together as they steered him out of the room.

  "Yes," said Etienne, "sex still has its uses."

  He must not appear to be terrified, but he was reluctant to let them lead him along anymore. Overhead, the din of pounding feet had settled into a softer, more rhythmic shuffle.

  "You—you mentioned a surprise," he said uncertainly.

  "Any guest of honor has certain duties," said Etienne.

  "You are the master of ceremonies!" said Nina gaily.

  "And it is time to fulfill yours. Everything is ready, even you must sense that."

  Even I? Derek thought. Was Etienne implying that he was obtuse?

  "Of course," he answered.

  They rushed him toward another door where two burly men stood guard. The bouncers opened the door and ushered them through.

  Derek found himself in a large round room, lit only by a spotlight at the center. Mirrored walls curved around. At the center of the room sat a couch of oxblood leather, like a psychiatrist's sofa; and beside it was a padded armchair. It resembled a psychiatrist's setup.

  Lenore Renzler lay on the couch. The chair was empty.

  Derek took a few steps forward. "Lenore?" Her eyes were open; she lay there unblinking, without even glancing at him.