by Smith, Skye
"Yeah right. Marique would cut my balls off if I showed up without you. Think again."
"Then send the guide home to tell Marique what is happening, and you stay at the mill house. Come and get me in like, two days. If I need to be here longer, like I will go with you to speak with Marique myself."
Will looked at the old man. He seemed harmless enough. He was certainly a true holy man and not one of the many charlatans. "Okay, we'll leave all the food with you. Two days, and I will be back."
"Bring some banana bread," she said with a smirk.
* * * * *
They waved one last fare thee well as Will and the boy went out of sight around the big bend in the valley. They sat together on a sun-warmed stone in silence. "I am sorry," he said, finally feeling alone with her, and therefore able to speak of secrets. "I should have realized that you had never before left your body. It was foolish of me to assume that someone with such a highly evolved aura would have already reached that step of enlightenment. Forgive me."
"You are forgiven," she said, "It was disturbing, like really disturbing, but I survived. So, like, that was normal?"
"There is nothing normal about strong auras. Yours is the strongest I have ever felt, and the whitest. Until you, I had the strongest, though still not white. I have met only three others with such auras and I have lost contact with all three. That was a long time ago. In the 1950's and 60's when the world was in a social turmoil, and before the cell phone era had begun destroying auras."
"So cell phones destroy auras. Are you certain of this?"
"That is not what I said, although it could well be true. All I meant is that auras seem to have become extremely rare during the era when cell phones took over from line phones. It may not be the phones themselves, but there is some change, something world wide, something very common in this era, something that was not there before."
"I blame digital cameras and the internet," she said. "Because of them, fewer people risk going nude. How can you find another aura if there are no groups of nudes to walk amongst?"
"Interesting. A strengthening in modesty. With your theory, we could still have just as many auras, but they simply can't find each other any more. And if one aura cannot find another, then that aura cannot know itself and build itself. Interesting. I hope you are right, for my theory leads to a much darker thought. That mankind is making auras extinct."
"I discovered mine, or rather, a friend discovered mine, on a nude beach," she said. "How did you discover yours?"
"I was born a twin. Two beloved sons of an Arab Sri Lankan man to a half Dutch, half Sinhalese woman. We were a mix of three races and three religions which caused such confusion in our minds that we lived outside of all of them and yet could play lip service to any, when there was a need."
"But your English is flawless, I mean, except for a strange accent." She felt drawn to the man, not as a man, but as a relative. She had never known her father and had spent no more than weeks with her grandfather.
"Our English tutor was my Dutch grandfather. He refused to teach us Dutch. He thought we would have a hard enough time with English, Arabic, and Sinhalese since they all use different scripts."
"So are you a Buddhist, like, is this a place of Buddhist pilgrimage?"
"This is a place of pilgrimage for many religions. Because of my father, of course I am of the Islamic faith of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed."
"But I haven't seen you face Mecca to pray, not even once since I arrived."
"You assume too much. The prophets Moses and Jesus were not men of mosques and mullahs, churches and priests. Neither am I. I was trained as an academic. I came to Dharamsala as a young man to translate Tibetan scriptures into Sinhalese."
"And you stayed here all this time?"
"I would have, ah, but then the youth of America and Europe arrived seeking an understanding of their own religions beyond the trappings of temples and priests. I lost my way for a few years, but all for the good. In the company of the western youth I found out that the auras that my brother and I shared, were not unknown to others from far away lands."
"So your brother's aura is as strong as yours?"
"Was, was as strong. He died, no, was killed, no, was assassinated, while trying to broker a peace between the Tamil Tigers and the Generals of Sri Lanka. There were large corporations profiteering from the continuous war. Peace was not good for their business plan."
She did not reply. She didn't even know where Sri Lanka was, never mind who the Tamil Tigers were. She was too embarrassed to ask and prove her ignorance. The silence became embarrassing. "So is that why you are hiding up here in the Himalayas. Are you afraid they will assassinate you too?"
"Oh no. I have been hiding here for years, ever since I ... never mind."
"You can't do that. You can't start telling me something that may explain our auras and then just, like, stop. I can keep a secret. Just tell me which parts I must never repeat to anyone.."
He was silent for a long time, and then he shrugged and told her, "I killed a man. I mean I killed two men, I think, but I killed one of them for sure."
"Because they killed your brother?"
He took a deep breath in exasperation. "No. I killed them years ago. Or rather my aura killed them, I think. It was never proven. Both deaths were officially deemed as heart attacks, but I believe ... I know ... it was my aura that caused their heart attacks."
"Just before they had their heart attacks, did you feel a surge of darkness sweep through you. A blackness. A feeling of hopelessness, of despair? And then was that followed by your aura becoming blindingly bright, instantaneously?"
"Why yes," he stared at her. "Why yes." His eyes widened. "How would you know this unless you had experienced it?"
"My aura has also killed men. More than two. Why did you come here to hide. Were you afraid that the police would send you to jail?"
"Once the doctors claimed that each was a heart attack, the police closed the files. It was not fear of the police." He dropped his voice. "I am a pacifist, a true believer in the sanctity of life. I came here so that my aura could not kill again."
Now there was a very long silence. He looked at her downcast eyes, and the troubled quirk at the corner of her mouth. He guessed at her inner turmoil.
"How many have you killed?" he eventually asked.
"The answer is a secret, right? No matter what, a secret."
"I so swear."
Her voice was barely above a whisper. "I think twenty by my aura. Six in the two months I have been in India. But ten more not by my aura, but like, because of it."
"Ahhhh!!!!" he yelled to the cliffs around him. "Ahhh!!!!!" he yelled to the heavens. "I was right to hide here. Thirty deaths. You are what, perhaps twenty, and already your aura has caused thirty deaths. You are a serial killer, a mass murderer. How can you look so sweet and innocent?" He was completely appalled. His face was a study in shock.
Tears welled in her eyes. She didn't know where to look. "I don't know. I don't feel innocent. When I feel the guilt wafting over me, pressing me down, I just replay my memory of the event. Each memory contains not just the killing and the corpse, but also the justification. I ask myself, if it were to happen again, would the man still die? The answer is always yes. So far at least."
"Thirty justifications?" He sounded dubious.
"They were all evil men. The darkness that you felt, I felt also. I believe it is that very darkness that triggers my aura to go wild and lash out. I think the brightness of my aura destroys the darkness, but in destroying the darkness, the man's life force is also destroyed."
"And what causes the darkness?" It was his turn to ask the questions.
"I have connected it to two things. Either the man has a sickness of the mind, like in the west what they call a psychopath, or like, the man is carrying a disease caught from cats. It's called toxoplasmosis but it is actually caused by a parasite passed through shit. They were all men, by the way. No women, no
children. All men. All very bad men, evil men. In India they were all slavers who were abducting and selling children into prostitution."
"Thirty," he said quietly looking at his feet. He heaved a deep sigh, and stared off into the distance. "Who made you the judge and jury?"
"They did. They thought that I was one of their victims, but like, I was poison bait. Besides, I am not a pacifist. I'm an American. Even as a kid in school when we were taught about how the French peasants guillotined the corrupt nobility, I thought that was just. They got a quick death, which was better than they deserved. I wish they would set some guillotines up along Wall Street."
"Thirty. Oh dear. Now I will have some of those memories. Oh, what have I done?"
"What do you mean?" she asked and looked at his face. There was real fear there.
"When you connect auras, back to back, neck to neck, as we just did, our subconscious minds also connect. That means our memories connect. There are no filters, it is a direct connection. You will now carry some of my memories and I some of yours." He forestalled the questions forming on her lips. "Don't ask me how. I am not a scientist. The memories somehow travel over the auras, or at least they did with my brother."
"That explains it. When I was trying to wake myself so I could eat banana bread, I kept having strange dreams. Like totally off the wall dreams. Nothing to do with me. So they were your memories."
"It is likely so. And in exchange I will dream about you murdering thirty men. Oh my, or worse."
"What could be worse?" she asked and shivered. The sun left this valley early due to the steep sides and high ridges that surrounded it. The valley was a south facing sun trap, with its own micro climate, but without the sun, the mountain breeze took control of the temperature.
"I have never done this with a woman before. There will be other memories, female memories. How embarrassing."
"Oooh," she teased, "and I will have male memories. How naughty. That's almost like having sex." She pushed herself off the warm stone and started walking towards the cave. "Show me how your hot pool works. I need a bath."
* * * * *
While she was daydreaming in the hot pool, he made a soft bed for the both of them from the gear left to him by pilgrims. Not just from the religious pilgrims from all over India, but also from the mountain worshipping pilgrims from the climbing clubs of the Alps and the Rockies.
"We will sleep together, back to back, but not touching," he said matter of factly as if he slept with women every night. In truth he was very nervous. He hadn't been with a woman for almost forty years. He couldn't remember the last time he had an erection. Decades ago.
She did not argue. Shyness and modesty were no longer counted amongst her virtues. "So, while we sleep our auras will trade memories."
"While we sleep our subconscious minds will trade memories through our auras," he corrected. "Is there anything that you wish to learn that I know? Arabic for instance. Before we sleep, I could instruct your subconscious to seek out that language."
"You mean. I can learn languages while I sleep?"
"Only if I already know them, and only if you already know the symbols and the sounds."
"I don't know if I would ever use Arabic."
"It is a lovely language. Hmm. English you already know. Sinhalese would be less useful than Arabic."
"Sanskrit. Didn't you say that you were a scholar translating Sanskrit into Sinhalese."
"I don't know if that would work. You see, Sanskrit was an oral language without a script of its own for writing. It is now written phonetically using the scripts of other languages, newer languages."
"Okay, so is that a problem?"
"Well, India has twenty-two official languages and thousands of mother tongues. I suppose we could try to teach you the standard Hindi script of Devanagari. Hindi shares a lot of words with Sanskrit, like Spanish shares with Latin. Who knows? It may work. Why Sanskrit?"
"Because then I could research auras in ancient scrolls and books. There is certainly nothing about them in modern books. Okay, lets do it."
For the rest of the night by the light of the eternal flame, and her LED head band light, she regretted saying okay. Devanagari script was like nothing she had ever tried to learn before. The only similarity to the English alphabet was that it was written from left to right. Everything else was absolutely different. such as the letters all hung down from a horizontal line. There were ten symbols for vowels and thirty-nine for consonants, but many of them were repetitions with an added tick mark.
Luckily, Vidu did not have to teach this cheeky and inattentive girl the alphabet. Instead he could teach her subconscious directly, which he did by keeping her in a trance. Still it took a long while, for he did not want her conscious mind gone for more than a half an hour at a time. Eventually, he decided to treat each half hour trance as a lesson, and start each lesson with a review of the last. Hopefully, the repetition would cement the script into her mind.
It was he, not her, that got tired and gave up and went to sleep. He, after all, was doing all the work. They slept back to back under a mylar space blanket, that he hoped would not interfere with their auras, and yet keep the damp air from chilling them.
He hardly slept. Every time either of them moved, the space blanket crackled like a potato chip bag. It did keep the damp air from descending on them, but it also created a cool surface for the humidity from their bodies to collect on and drip from. In frustration he kicked the space blanket away and pulled an old square sleeping bag over them. Finally he slept.
Or rather he didn't sleep, he dreamed, and the dreams were nightmares. Seeing the world through a young girl's eyes made even ordinary things seem threatening. He was horrified by how vulnerable he felt while dreaming of being a young girl in a modern world.
Again and again he felt threatened by the looks that men gave her in the dreams. He woke in a hot flush and tried to calm his racing heart. He did not want to dream anymore. Not if the dreams were of the trials of a young woman simply trying to make her way in a world dominated by large and loud males, and their lurid stares of sexual greed.
Sleep was a long time coming to Maya. Strange letters and sounds danced through her head and kept her almost awake. The letters and sounds turned into words and then sentences, none of which she could understand. It was like being on an Indian railway platform with foreign voices speaking in tongues all around you.
She kept trying to tell them to shut up, but the words wouldn’t come. Her voice squeaked but would not say. Finally, when mentally exhausted, deep sleep came as a relief and the chatter of words became quieter and quieter in her mind.
She woke up to a nudge. The old man was sitting up next to her, nudging her, and telling her that there was tea. She sat up too, and pulled the sleeping bag around herself to stay longer in the warmth of the bed. The old man was wearing a poncho made of an old blanket. He took another noisy slurp of chai.
"How did you sleep?" he asked, nodding at her to sip some tea.
"Okay once I got all the Hindi letters and words out of my head," she said softly between sips of the sweet, milky liquid.
"Ah, that is one of the main functions of sleep. It gives your subconscious time enough to untangle the knowledge gained in the day and organize it within your memories."
"How did you sleep?" she asked. "Did you have nightmares about killing men?"
"About the deaths, no. The deaths were just the end result. About the men, yes. How can you stand being attractive to such evil men? Men with such evil thoughts about you. If I had been you growing up, I would have eaten like a pig and made myself ugly so that I did not have to deal with it."
"That is the way chosen by many American girls. They eat like slobs and dress like slobs and like, become slobs so that men will leave them alone. I think that they just trade one evil for another. They begin to hate themselves for how they look, but too late, find out how hard it is to become slender and pretty again.
Worse, every time th
ey look in the mirror they get depressed, and it takes junk food and chocolate to make them feel better again. After watching this vicious circle in my older friends I, like, kept my slenderness and my health and learned to ignore the slimy glares of men."
"And you carry a widow's cloak. That must be a godsend on the plains of India," he said as he passed her some glucose biscuits. The mention of the cloak was enough to fill the next hour with her stories of hiding from the empty stares of Indian passers by, and the relief that came with dying her blonde hair black.
* * * * *
They spent the morning telling each other stories of their auras, and swapping theories, and learning each other's techniques for using the auras. Actually, he already knew all of hers, but he was not so rude as to say so.
She again allowed him to put her into deep trances so that he could train her subconscious. This included methods she could use in healing, such as how to synchronize another’s heart beat and breathing to hers. It included methods she could use in teaching, such as how to transmit sounds and vibrations to another person's subconscious. The very method he was using to pass the sounds of oral Sanskrit into her memory.
When she was bored with trancing, he fed her the last of last season's dried psilocybin mushrooms. After waiting for a half an hour, to give the mushrooms time to elevate her senses he took her for a walk in the warmth of the mid-afternoon.
He introduced her to the little valley, the little micro climate, that was his home. Introduced her to the plants, and the insects, and to the shy mountain animals. To someone tripping on mushrooms, it was a wonderland of color and views and sounds and smells. At one point, he carried her clothes so she could dance around in just her sandals.
He kept a close watch on her to make sure no harm befell her. Because his old muscles could not keep up to her youthful exuberance, he forbade her to climb the sides of the valley. Eventually the effect of the mushrooms dimmed, so that no longer was everything bejeweled in cascades of color. Once the bejeweling of her sight faded, her other senses had their turn to tune themselves to the wondrous little valley.