by Bloom, A. D.
Alvin laughed. “Sweet kid,” he said to Bonnie, adding, “I remember being young and naive like that.” Then Alvin looked Casper between the eyes again and said with a tone of regret, “Kid, you don't get off this fucked-up ride that easy. Once you're on it, you're on for the duration.”
Casper wondered just how far he could stretch the bag of Blue Dream in his pocket.
The parade of tits and ass circling their Baalz had thinned considerably, but a new Brazilian girl had just arrived. Her outfit was Brazilian, anyway. Alvin turned and looked closely. Yeah, no Adam's apple, he noted. She'd been wearing the same Carnivale headdress for months, and the feathers were ragged. Alvin thought he knew how they felt.
Casper didn't get Alvin, and asked, “What about you, man? If you don't wanna be here then how co-”
Alvin cut him off, “I'm whatcha' call a wanted man.”
“Who... cops? G.S.A.?”
“Shit, man,” Alvin sighed, “G.S.A., Goddies... they all want a piece of me.”
“What did you do, man?”
“Nothing, that's what I did, and Nothing is a hard thing to understand, okay? G.S.A. n' Goddies both treat anything they don't understand as a threat, so apparently I'm one big-ass threat to everyone. Whoever gets hold of me will probably torture me, and then put a bullet in my big, fulla-Nothing head. Suxors, huh?”
“Suxors,” Casper agreed. He offered the only solution he had, “You wanna get stoned, man?”
A limousine pulled up on the Baalz right side, dwarfing it. It sat next to them, blocking the theater's outside lane, and one of the six reflective windows of the passenger compartment's left side lowered itself an inch, closed again, and repeated the sequence three times.
“Give it a rest, Smokey,” Catherine said, “our ride is here.”
Casper, Bonnie, Catherine, and Alvin passed from the beastly Baalz to the modded Bentley limousine, partially concealed by the opened doors of both cars. When they entered the Bentley's regally appointed interior, they were stunned and speechless. There was a celebrity within its velvet upholstered sanctum.
Hi-5 pointed to the PornoPop video image of herself, currently on the five-story AniLux wall in the front of the drive-in theater, and asked them a simple question. “Does that wall make my ass look big?” At first, none of them replied. “Well, speak up, Bitches,” Hi-5 commanded. “Does that wall make my Ass look Big?”
Only Casper knew the answer to Hi-5's question, “Hell, yeah, your Ass looks Big,” he said, “Hi-5 is the biggest-ass bitch with Big Ass!” Then Alvin, Bonnie, and Catherine sat in utter amazement, as Hi-5 and Casper recited in unison from one of her earlier hits.
Hi-5 is the biggest-ass bitch with big ass.
If your rod goes and gives big ass a pass,
Then you're hatter-mad. (crazy, baby)
Hi-fiver has nal-gas con culo calidad,
Her ass is roentgen hot n' pumpin rads!
Hi-5 grinned at Casper, but when she turned to the other newcomers in the rolling palace of her Hi-ness, she wore a sterner face, asking, “And what have you three been up to that was so important you had no time for the finer things?” They were speechless. Hi-5 laughed and said, “I bet y'all were blowin' some shit up, weren't ya'. Crazy Goddie mofos. Let's roll, Coco.”
The last suggestion was directed to the limo's unseen driver, and the Bentley mod rolled away from the Baalz, made one lap of Mrs. Murphy's drive-in and exited through the sliding metal front door. It pulled out to the Baccha Bay City streets and picked up speed quickly.
“I'm a big fan, Ms. 5,” Casper admitted, “Your video with that, um... jiggly plus model made a real impression on me earlier today.”
“Jiggly plus model... jiggly plus model... Was it a brunette?” He nodded. “Oh, I did her in, '5 Forces Models',” the megastar explained. “That video still gets a lot of play.” She smiled, and as Hi-5 opened the door to a storage compartment on her left, she said, “Call me your Hi-ness.”
The compartment was stocked with all manner of intoxicants. There were all the contemporary favorites, but also the less fashionable oldies but goodies. Like liquor.
Catherine smiled with genuine warmth at the crystal decanter she saw; her heart told her was full of Scotch. Catherine's expectations were high, and she wasn't disappointed when Hi-5 read her gaze, and handed her a Swedish crystal highball with four fingers of the finest Catherine had ever tasted. It left a trail of warmth that ran down Catherine's dry throat to her core where she was happy. Catherine gave up worrying about the enormous indiscretion she imagined it was to send a celebrity in a custom modded limousine to fetch fugitives.
Bonnie declined intoxicants like a good Angels recruit, and Hi-5 suggested that she must be a, “very Angry Angel, indeed!”
Hi-5 looked Casper up and down, trying to guess his poison, but she could already smell it. “For my biggest fan,” Hi-5 said, handing him a bundle of conical joints, rolled on a scale that ignored the dramatic potency of 21st century, first-world cannabis. They were two kinds, one rolled in blue translucent cellulose, the other gold. “One is Indica, and the other is Sativa. You can guess which is which or just smoke both kinds, baby.”
She turned to Alvin, and scrutinized him for a clue as to what his favorite might be. “Hmmm, what is your favorite, I wonder? Don't you dare say 'Nothing' because my Hi-Eye can see that's not the Truth... Oh, yes, silly me, yes, of course...” Hi-5 piled a little of everything she had into a silver cigarette box. “Pills and powders, buds and hashes...” She handed the box to him, with a twelve-ounce bottle of tequila, reciting the punchline to a very old joke. “And then the Buddha says to the hot-dog vendor, 'Make me one with Everything'”
Alvin always liked that joke, and he smiled at her and accepted the silver box, even though he knew Hi-5 wasn't there to rescue him, but to escort him to his probable doom.
“Who are you, Mr. Buddha?” She asked quietly, looking at Alvin. “I've heard this, and I've heard that, but I'd like to hear it from the source since... well,” Hi-5 paused, before finishing in a respectful but matter-of-fact tone. “I have a feeling this might be the last chance.”
Hi-5 lit her own brand of cigarette. It sported a licensed image of her breasts, and was more expensive than anything else in her cabinet of neuromance. Crossing her legs, she put her chin in her hand, and stared at Alvin. He stared back for a prolonged moment, then swigged from the bottle, popped a random pill without even looking at it, lit an absurdly large conical joint, and began to speak.
“My name is Alvin,” he said, “and everyone calls me The Buddha, but I'm Nobody. I'm just fucking Alvin.
“The whole Buddha thing was just a gig, 'ya know? A gig, a role, an act. I was just being who they wanted me to be. I never hurt anybody, but... but they're all dead... 'cause of me. You ever hear the expression, 'guns don't kill people, people kill people'? Maybe you agree with it, maybe you don't, but... I'm as guilty as the gun.” Alvin realized it wasn't just Hi-5 listening. They all were. Well, if you folks want a story about the Buddha, he thought, I've got one.
The Bentley mod passed a shopping mall, and teenagers loitered near the glowing, twin eighteen-foot columns that marked the entrance to the consumer temple. Alvin stared out the window with a look in his eyes that Casper recognized from the drive-in, when he'd told Casper not to listen after talking about the Sides and the Coin and Carlos.
“See those kids by the mall? I was them once. You guys probably thought I was born in the circus or something, but I had a mother and a father, and all that normal growing up and going to the mall shit. I went to school. Went to college. Financial products. I sold fucking financial products. I even had a wife. Seems like someone else's life now, like I'm invading someone else's privacy, even remembering. All that ended. Just like that.
“Currency crisis. No more jobs. All the money was worthless. All the debts got called, and like everyone else, all the shit I owned was on credit, and I didn't really own it. The banks owned it and they took it back. The house
, the car... They didn't take the wife, she just disappeared on her own. So I was out on the street with the people I'd sold shit financials to, and all I had was a newly enhanced sense of irony. The currency changed from the dollar to the Amero. I didn't have any of those, either.
“They had these vagrancy laws then, back when they had the money to jail people for being shit-poor. They'd always let you go before the sentence was up, though. The last time they let me go, I took my fifty Amero and got a train across the river to Grand Central Station. Nice warm steam vents behind the bushes near those midtown corporate buildings... If you were small enough to fit over 'em. Fuckers had heat to spare, 'ya know? Good falafel in midtown, too.
“I used to snatch bags from people who were looking up at the schedules in the station, and I'd get away clean, running through the crowds, since, 'ya know, being so small, they couldn't see me through all the people, once I got like ten feet away from 'em. People were always running to catch trains, and once I had the bag, I looked like everyone else. Well, sorta.
“I remember the kid I stole the bag from. The one that had all the books. I was hoping for money or electronics or maybe a sweater, but all that skinny college kid had in his bag was paperback books. I never bothered to try and sell 'em. You can't make shit selling books on the street. And some cop would always fuck you up if you tried to lay 'em out on the sidewalk. After the city ran out of money, they wouldn't bother arresting you. They'd just beat your ass so you'd remember not to come back and make that neighborhood look bad by being poor there.
“So I'm hiding out on the steam vents, behind the bushes, up on this ledge like ten feet above the sidewalk, with books I couldn't sell, so I started reading 'em. Weird-ass stuff. Religious stuff but Not. I liked the Huang Po guy the best because every page he tells you to put the stupid book down, and go live a goddamn life instead. I didn't have one of those anymore, so I just kept reading. There were plenty of classic Buddhist books too. They weren't as much fun to read as the zen stuff, but they were easier to understand. Maybe that's why it wasn't as much fun.
“I stayed up on that wall, over the steam grate, forever reading those books, and when I couldn't read anymore I just watched the people, trying to figure out why they all looked more miserable than I was. One day I was so hungry, I remember actually trying to catch a rat that was sniffing around the steam vent, looking for food in my pack. “Plenty of books, no food for you here, dumbass rat.” Alvin paused, counted on his fingers, and laughed. “Hehe, haiku you, mutherfucker.”
“One day, I jumped down from my spot over the grate, planning to work the Station or maybe the subway, but I landed on some slippery shit and my legs went out from under me. I hit the pavement hard. The plastic bag that I had the books in split open, and the books fell all around me. I just laid there wanting to die. People were walking by, like always, but then all of a sudden they were dropping money on me. Dropping money like they never had before. It was the books. They saw the books. Buddhist books all around me.
“This was about the time the Global Secular Alliance formed and they were talking about banning religion. Suddenly a homeless, Buddhist dwarf was... what's the word? Marketable. I was marketable.
“People on the street felt good giving me money. I felt good getting it. I cleaned myself up some. I got some orange sheets, and made 'em into robes, like I'd seen monks wearing on TV, and that worked even better. Giving to a plain old homeless guy wasn't fun for 'em, but giving to a wandering dwarf monk, well, that was a good time. I started blessing them and shit. It was turning out to be a pretty good gig. I'd sit there with the books around me, wearing the orange sheets, and I did okay. The cops even left me alone. I had to shave my head but fuck it, man, I can do that. I can do that, no problem.
“I'd panhandle in the day, and I'd climb back up behind the bushes on my grate at night. I was pretty safe up there. I thought I was, anyway.
“I still don't know who fucked me up, but they fucked me up bad.
“It was November... Thanksgiving decorations in the stores. I remember being asleep on the grate and then smelling something evil and getting kicked. Hard. Really hard. I got kicked like fifteen times before the mofo threw me through the bushes, onto the sidewalk, ten feet below. I bashed the side of my face on the concrete. It was swollen and blue and purple. Like a black eye, but the whole side of my face. Broke a couple of ribs, with all that kicking, too.
“I ran, and then I was stumbling around, tripping on my robes for a few blocks. I musta' looked like hell. I made it to the park, Central Park, I remember that. I remember falling on wet, green grass. Then I woke up inside... in a bed.
“There were all these hippies. Not like farming commune ones... college hippies... dormitory livin', urban hippies. I guess they rescued my ass... Brought the little, half-dead, midget monk home to the dorm. When I woke up, they were all standing around me, telling me how sorry they were... about the G.S.A. criminalizing religion, and how they didn't agree with what the G.S.A. and the news channels said about how all the world's problems, all through history, were because of religion, and because of people like me. They told me I wasn't the only one who'd been attacked and beaten by the mobs, and how people of faith were suffering everywhere. They told me not to worry because they were gonna hide me. Keep me safe. Then they all just stared at me, waiting for something. It took me a minute to realize what they were waiting for. They wanted some Buddha shit out of me.” Alvin shrugged.
“I gave it to 'em. I figured it was the least I could do. I didn't see it like a con. It was more like singing for my supper. I didn't have the books, but I remembered a whole lot of what I'd read. They wanted a Buddha, and so that's who I became: the Buddha.
“I remembered a lot from the books, and they loved that crap. I thought it was interesting stuff, but they ate it up. Yeah, it was weird, but I wasn't gonna ask too many questions. They fed me and kept me safe. Books like the ones I stole from the skinny kid... all religious books... became illegal. So I became the source for Buddha stuff.
“I was the Word, and they treated me like a secret idol. They hid me, and moved me, and hid me again. It had all gone way beyond my control, but what the hell did I have to cling to? Being a secret idol, a hidden gold Buddha wasn't so bad. It was a good gig. I was important. They believed in me.
“As I was passed around and hidden in new places, I realized their numbers must be growing. I got moved to different cities, different states, but I wasn't so secret anymore. I had no idea, but they were recording all the Buddha shit I said, and passing that around too. I was surprised as all hell when people I'd never seen before wrote me emails and even paper letters. Came to me and told me how my message had changed their lives.
“That was all pretty fucked up, but the real troubles began when I ran out of shit from the books to say. They wanted more. I knew this was the best gig I'd ever have, and I wasn't going to blow it. I did what I had to do. I made some new stuff up. Stuff I thought wouldn't hurt anyone. I reached down deep for the stuff I thought about when I was on the street, wondering why everybody looked more miserable than me.
“I just gave 'em what they wanted. I didn't see any harm.
“I told 'em how we're all slaves. We're all slaves to gods and ideas. Those are memes. I told 'em how the memes are like living ideas, and that the memes were waging a proxy battle through us. The battle was for the Mind of all mankind because without existence in the minds of men the memes die just like gods die without believers.
“I told 'em man's violent history is the history of memes in competition for exclusive survival. Old god memes like Yaweh and Allah, newer idea memes like Communism, Capitalism, Consumerism and its Eightfold Way of Consumption. The most powerful meme now, I told 'em is Science, the god of Proof that denies Faith, and through that mechanism seeks to kill all other gods but itself. They liked that one.
“Every god and political idea, I told 'em, is a jealous god, a jealous meme, and will accept no other. I told 'em, “We ha
ve been Hosts. That's all we've been,” I told 'em, “Hosts to waring parasite memes that inhabit the Mind, and seek to kill the competing parasites by killing or converting the Hosts.” I told 'em how we've gotta be freed from a struggle that isn't ours.
“That's when my popularity really soared. I actually complimented myself. I thought I'd done something Good For People, but I had no idea what I did.
“The global secularists had made enemies of the faithful, but I'd made enemies with every meme, every god, every idea, every belief system on earth. The irony was, that with all my Buddha-lovin' believers, I'd created a sort of anti-meme. I'd created the very thing I condemned. Except nobody killed to preserve the thing I created; they just died for it.
“When the first killers came, they came from both sides – the G.S.A. and the Goddie insurgents. They all sent people to kill the Buddha, but I was hidden well. Getting close to me took months. Months of living with the Buddha-lovin' neo-hippies, months of listening to the crap I said. During those months, they changed. They really changed. They actually began to believe in the things I said.” He laughed. “The men and women sent to kill me joined us. They joined us. Fucking amazing.” Alvin laughed, shook his head and then stared at the floor of the limo.
“I still thought I was doing A Good Thing.”
He took a long pull on the tequila bottle.
“When they sent the next round of killers, it wasn't just for me. And they didn't hang around and get converted. They just came to kill. Kill me. Kill the neo-hippies. Kill everybody who ever heard the word of the Buddha. Erase it from history. Erase me, my followers, everybody. Everybody. When it began, when I saw what was happening, I begged everyone to dissolve. Melt away and forget the whole thing, but they wouldn't listen. Nerve gas, fire, bullets, bombs, poisoned water. Shit, they even zapped 'em with microwaves. The more of them that died, the more stupid and stubborn they got. Got more and more attached... to the whole, stupid Buddha thing.