The One We Feed

by Kristina Meister

  Was I going to hurt someone else? I almost didn’t care.

  “You said I’d made a Crossroads for him! He can’t be Unknowable without going to the Crossroads! You told me that!” I tried to keep the emotion from my voice, but I could feel each and every cell in my body tightening, squeezing the words from my throat. “You lied?”

  “That would be dishonest.”

  My lungs expanded painfully as I drew in as much wind as I would need to assail him, “You….”

  “Be careful, Lilith,” he interrupted. “In this moment, you must decide. Is anger the only option left to you? I have faith that you can choose to be different from them, however much you share,” and with a cool, detached blink, he walked back inside.

  An eerie feeling passed through me like a draft blowing about old, dead leaves, rattling bones in some dark cave. It was colder and more disaffecting than the dissociative gloominess of only a few hours before. I reached out and steadied myself with the hood of the truck, feeling as if the world was swaying with me as its epicenter, as if I was somehow standing, one foot on the shore, one atop the tide, neither here nor there.

  Chapter 8

  Perchance to Find

  I didn’t go inside. I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye anymore. His face was some kind of permanent puzzle I couldn’t quite figure out, though I knew I was meant to. It filled my usually obsessive-compulsive consciousness with a sense of permanent distraction because, when I was near him, all I could think about was the contradiction he represented. He wasn’t the compassionate, lotus blossom, curly-headed Buddha they’d painted him but some kind of uncompromising general with a plan all his own. I wasn’t sure if I found it fascinating or exasperating, but if there was one thing I was sure of, it made me angry. And at that point, I could not afford to be angry around anyone.

  Sometimes it’s just best to stay away from the things we love most.

  I sat in the car watching the fog collect against the windows. Little beads of dew clung to each other, until finally they would pull each other down in a tiny droplet, leaving a tail like a comet. After an hour or so, the whole car was a sparkling prism, with me encased inside, pulsing with apprehension like a beating heart.

  My gaze lost focus and I drifted in and out of a traumatized dullness, making no effort to tweak my hormones and neurotransmitters, as if I even knew how to manage each one by name. That control, as perfect as it was, was all very vague to my conscious mind. I had faith that the machine of my brain knew what it was doing, even if I didn’t. I’d be fine when and if I needed to be.

  Suddenly, there was a squealing at the window beside me. A finger was dragging through the diamonds, tracing out an infinity symbol. It added two pupils and a smile, and Ananda looked through the clean gaps at me.

  “Go away,” I said quietly, “you’re almost just as bad.”

  He blinked. “I am going to work.” He sounded for all the world like a child.

  His fervor drew a tiny smile from me. “Good for you. Take him with you.”

  “I am.” He tapped the window sweetly with a perfect fingernail, as if he wanted to chip away the glass and get at me. I locked the door. He dragged a hand across the window and swept away his bleeding smiley face. I hunkered down.

  “‘My sword leans against the sky,’” he quoted at full voice. “‘With its polished blade I’ll behead the Buddha and all of his saints. Let the lightning strike where it will.’”

  I sighed. Leave it to someone so unassuming to remind me that just because they were pacifists, that didn’t mean they were pushovers. “Charming. I’ll be sure to ponder that one until my eyes turn red.”

  To my surprise, when I looked at him, the Arhat was smiling at me as if I were the childish one.

  “It is a simple truth,” he said. “The teachings shatter all need for lessons. Rest your sword against the sky and be at peace again. You have slain the Buddha, Lilith. He does not exist anymore.”

  “I’ll add that to my résumé, then, but can we not talk about slaying, please?”

  A dark blue shape came slowly down the stairs and wandered toward the office. As it moved past Ananda’s little patch of clarity, I could see that it was Arthur, dressed in black slacks and a long-sleeved blue shirt. He walked to the sidewalk and waited patiently, his back to us. I found myself wanting him to turn, just to check if the blue was the right shade to do his eyes justice. It was a thought that made me sick.

  Ananda followed my gaze and, with a heavy sigh, turned back to me. “Alive and well.”

  “Or something.”

  “Why so somber?”

  I gave up and rolled down the window. He reached in almost instantly and touched my face, smudged the taut skin where tears had dried, and brought some warmth to my cheeks.

  “He keeps apologizing for not telling me things, and I keep saying it’s okay, but what’s the point of having him here if he isn’t to be relied upon?”

  “That is a wonderful question,” Ananda said with a wink. “You are getting much better at asking, I think.”

  “Are you guys going to get better at answering?”

  “If a friend,” he replied, the finger finally inching into the air slowly, “is there to be relied upon, it is a strange kind of relationship. If humans collect each other to satisfy needs, what happens when we have no needs to satisfy? You are immortal, Lilith, with no hunger or thirst. If this is so, why are you still collecting? What are your friends to you?”

  “I still have needs.” I didn’t want to concede the point or admit to the implication of motivational impurity.

  “That you are more than capable of satisfying for yourself. Your definition of friend must change, I think, for you to be happy with any of us. I think, perhaps to you, Arthur is a signpost to where you should go, but you already know where you are meant to go. It is built into you, the ability to make these choices, the ability to…,” he shrugged, “to strive and withstand where others fail. You do not need him, so you are at conflict with the idea of having him.”

  I reached up and captured his hand, shaking my head. “You’re going to be late for work. Bosses don’t like that.”

  He leaned against the damp car and kissed my cheek. “You are free, Lilith. So be free. At least come out of the car. It’s as if you live in it.”

  As he pulled away, he tugged on the handle and opened the door, automatic locks helpfully clicking open. Reluctantly, I twisted my legs out and stood, rolling up the window as I went.

  “Time to get going, I guess.” I locked up and turned to him. He caught me in another hug. My body resisted, but he would not take no for an answer. “Have a good day,” I whispered in his ear.

  “Lilith…,” he held me out at arm’s length, “is the path the thing we walk or the thing we leave behind?”

  I stared at him, momentarily caught in his sticky question. “Both?”

  He released me and silently trotted after his cousin as if he was late for his play group.

  “Fucking Buddhists,” a damp and disheveled Jinx grumbled from the balcony. “When do you think they come up with that shit?”

  I looked up at him, ready to laugh or cry or something. “I’m not sure, but I’m beginning to think there’s like, an almanac.”

  “Need to calculate the next solar eclipse?” Jinx said with a grin, “It’s always darkest before the sun, even the sun casts shadows, light and dark are one, blah blah blah. If it was up to them, the Connecticut Yankee would be a cinder by now, poor bastard.”

  “Hush! What kind of Buddhist are you anyway?”

  “The kind that isn’t,” he snapped irreverently.

  “The best kind!” I wandered up the stairs, bringing my purloined comfort can of Redbull with me. I presented it to him as if he were a monarch. “He’d have applauded you.”

  “Fabtastic.”

  “He’s right, though. At least I think so. I’m just gonna say he is until I know what the hell he said.”

  He held up a finger, mi
micking Ananda perfectly, “Right and wrong are unimportant. It is the question that is essential. Translation: ‘Your whining is beginning to chafe.’”

  I ruffled his stiff hair lovingly. “Ah, Jinxy, my snarky calm in a storm of non-storming.”

  He led me into the room and shut the door behind me, still chuckling at his own jokes. I explored, though it was just like every other room in every other city, comforting and disconcerting all at once for its familiarity. If I tried, I could still see the outline of a body haunting the wall opposite the very different closet.

  The computers were still in the back seat of the truck, along with most of our personal belongings, but that fact hadn’t stopped either Ananda or Arthur from having fresh clothes or my hairbrush and fluffy slippers from magically appearing in the bathroom. Above them, on a wall hook, a thick terrycloth robe hung invitingly.

  “Damn him.”

  “Difficult to stay angry, right?”

  “No, just difficult not to feel like an ass at the same time. I think I hate that about him.”

  “He really upset you, huh?” He turned on the hot water in the tub and perched himself on the free-floating counter while I took down the blood-spattered mess of my hair and tried to drag my brush through it. “I heard you shout.”

  The faucet was hammering in the background like a full-force waterfall, robbing my words of the solemnity I felt they deserved. “Karl’s powers are gone, just like yours.”

  “Good! He’ll finally have to learn some people skills!”

  “He’s invisible, but he hasn’t even seen the Crossroads yet. How is that possible?”

  “Merde! Lily, maybe it’s just different for him.”

  I looked at him. I had felt like my statement was a loaded one, one almost too heavy for me alone to carry, but he had punctured it. It deflated and sagged over my shoulders incommodiously.

  He fidgeted. I watched him look away. There was something he didn’t want me to ask. We both knew it. The knowledge twisted through the air with little steam clouds wafting from the tub.

  “What aren’t you saying?” I asked in a voice I thought was too soft to be heard. “I can’t take this anymore. Somebody please give me a straight answer.”

  I had planted my hands on the counter and was making an effort not to look at myself in the mirror.

  “I don’t know yet,” the boy said with a peace-keeping sigh. “I just got his voice file yesterday morning. Let me talk to Karl outright, figure some stuff out, and I’ll let you know if I see a pattern.”

  I saw a pattern. Everyone was treating me as if I were a toddler, or perhaps they were protecting themselves from a creature none of them could anticipate: me. I watched as Jinx pulled down a clean towel and set it on top of the toilet, took out the little bottle of courtesy body wash and emptied it into the tub. Large bubbles began to form and the humid air began to smell of cucumbers. For someone who was inherently anti-social, he could be pretty sweet.

  “You need to take some time off.”

  “Off from what? A rigorous schedule of watching Arthur play board games, or my unending contemplation of all my ingrown failings, or maybe from my consistent propensity to make bad things happen to good people?”

  He shook his head as if he’d seen the morose answer coming. “You sound like you’re fifteen.”

  “You look like you are.”

  “Ha!” He took my car keys from the counter and marched toward the door. “I can’t help it if I grew up when the average height was five foot three.”

  “So get taller.”

  “Got better things to do. Besides, people never pay any attention to kids. Take a bath, you’ll feel better.”

  “No I won’t. I’m a person of action; just sitting here is the bane of my existence.”

  At the door, he shook his head. “I’m going to unload everything, then I’m taking off. I’ll be gone until late tonight, like midnight.”

  I would be alone again, stuck with the two most enigmatically self-ciphered individuals that the universe had ever seen fit to produce. It couldn’t have been more insufferable if the Sphinx and Helen Keller decided to have tea in our hotel room and discuss agnosticism.

  “No later, or you’re grounded.”

  The door slammed on my hunched back. I stared at it in the mirror for a while, until the acoustics of the bathroom let me know the tub was almost full. I turned it off and without really wanting to, began to strip. My coat came off easily enough, but it was crusted over with the fluids of several individuals. Between thumb and forefinger, I examined it and determined that only its dark color made it salvageable. My white t-shirt was thoroughly ruined and my jeans...well, they were jeans. What were jeans if not the scarred and painted compendiums of our lives?

  No pun intended.

  I turned out the lights and pulled the door shut. The water was too hot, but too hot really meant nothing. I closed my eyes and focused on the pain in my skin. If I’d been some kind of anatomist, I’d have thought about specific types of nerves or the speed at which they conducted signals, or some-such, but I could only ponder what I knew, and though it probably took longer for my body to acclimate, it was fast enough. Soon I was slipping in, oblivious to the temperature, certain a full-body first degree burn was easily fixed.

  I poked at places where there should have been the telltale white lines of my injuries, but there were none. No bruises, rips, or stains on me. I looked over at my poor denim lit up by the gap under the door, feeling more naked knowing that they were the only signs of what I had endured.

  Thanks to Jinx, Lilith Pierce had vanished off the face of the earth. My money had been reinvested and tucked into the dark spaces of the banking underworld, where golden cockroaches reigned supreme. My family home belonged to strangers, its former occupants all dead. Even my husband had gone under new management. All I had left were my memories, my friends, and my goals.

  None of those seemed quite so clear anymore. If they disappeared altogether, would I still exist? Arthur once told me in passing, that the Samurai spent one hour of each day thinking of themselves as dead. I thought he’d meant pondering the world without them in it, in an It’s a Wonderful Life kind of way, but the more I thought about it the better I understood that if a person was dead, what the world looked like without them would kind of be moot.

  As I felt the water close over my head, I considered that I had died once but had come back, and so it was not really the same dead they’d been meditating over. Theirs was a different dead, one I would never feel if I played my cards right, the permanent kind, the unknowable, useless kind. Their dead was nothingness, and maybe thinking about that gave them some perspective.

  “I’ve always regretted things I never did, but I’ve never regretted the things I’ve done.”

  It was perfect in the tub; dark, warm, and insular. I’d been practicing holding my breath at every given opportunity, just to see how long I could go. If I shut out reality and went into the jhana now, I’d only be medicating myself, turning slowly into William or Petula, but if I curled up in this porcelain womb and thought of myself as not yet born, something would change in me; some respite would come.

  It has to, or I’ll explode.

  My mind fell into some kind of cosmic gap, my heart slowed, brief alerts of the tipping of homeostasis were manually overridden, and I hovered, dark and warm, forgetting everything.

  Everything except Petula.

  What reason could Jinx have had, I wondered, for stabbing her? What seeming consistency had turned him to such action? He’d brushed it off, but I knew, knew it had something to do with a pattern he was attempting, in his scientific method, to reproduce.

  I pictured her, curled up in her dirty blanket, in her cement hovel that was everything from childhood twisted by bitterness. I worked at the image of her until I could recall every single feature, the lank curls, the uncertainty and fear in her demeanor, but mostly, her staring eyes. It was as if they were sightless, tracking no movement, seei
ng no detail. What was she, or rather, what had she been, before she’d found immortality?

  Could she have been blind, before?

  I opened my eyes in the scalding water and despite the immediate surge of agony, continued to stare. Shadows encroached, and the white slope of the tub blurred in and out as my corneas were damaged and repaired.

  Was that what it was like, not to be able to see? A constant struggle to find something everyone else took for granted, or perhaps to quantify something others understood, but you yourself would never know? Did one learn to cope, or obsess over the lack? Was that the secret of her ability?

  I pictured her eyes sliding shut on the peace I had momentarily given her. Had her sight become an unlivable curse?

  Her image seemed so sharp then that I almost believed I was looking at her. I repeated her name again and again in my thoughts, and felt a change like a fall from a high place.

  The shallow water took on greater depths. All at once, it was as if I were floating in a lake, an ocean, something even larger, if there was a word for that; a great Sargasso of deep, ever-flowing tides and currents, carrying me along like plankton, her face swimming before me.

  Disoriented, I reached out for the edge of the tub. The ripples stirred the image. It swirled into sharp angles, squared forms that were impossible, colors and shapes that moved inside each other, solidifying into an actual place, into people and things. I realized suddenly, that I was seeing. I was viewing a place that was not here but there, and I was not in the jhana.

  The dreamscape had the look and feel of a hospital, security glass and white linoleum, but there was something very wrong about it, a certain disrepair and decay. There were also an inordinate number of patients wandering the halls, their gowns flapping open or their wrists reddened with ligature marks. Several orderlies were standing about, sorting papers and pills with unabashed dullness. As one of the inmates turned and began talking to himself, I realized it was a nuthouse.