The One We Feed

by Kristina Meister

  “I’m the one who called you.”

  “Oh, Sergeant! Thank you so much! Has he been any trouble?”

  “No, as long as you don’t count giving my partner relationship advice.”

  “His advice is good,” I said with a winning smile to the younger man. “Call her.”

  Ananda was grinning at me in his usual childish way, though there was something almost worried in his eye. I stepped forward to him and reached out. As if drowning, he immediately grabbed my hands and swung them back and forth.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, yes. They’ve been very nice. They even said they’d take care of the tree for me.”

  “That’s wonderful.” I glanced over my shoulder. Castor was observing us, almost as if he were testing the nature of our friendship. I sat down and pulled Ananda’s hands into my lap. He turned and met my gaze. “Now, you understand why they had to ask you to come down out of the tree, don’t you?”

  He shrugged. “The laws of men are strange. They said it was wrong to climb the tree, but the tree didn’t mind.”

  “I know, but it’s their tree.”

  His brow furrowed slightly. “No, it’s its own tree.”

  “True, but you see, they didn’t plant the tree so that it could be a tree. They planted it for themselves”

  “So that they would have a tree! With shade, and leaves, and that lovely little voice.”

  His frown deepened and my heart melted. It was strange to think that living in the care of generations of men who understood his compassion for all things had taken its toll. With every part of myself, I wished the whole world could see that he wasn’t the odd one.

  “I’m sure that’s what the tree thinks, but they can’t hear the tree. So to them, the tree serves a utilitarian purpose. It’s better for them if you don’t climb it.”

  He glanced around as if looking for proof of their apathy on the walls. “The tree serves a purpose, but it is itself. Should it be ignored, left to them, or allowed to speak?”

  I sighed. “We can talk about the civil rights of plants later, Ananda. Right now, I need you to agree that you won’t climb any trees unless you ask for permission. It’s very important to the dharma. You understand?”

  I gave him a knowing look and, with some concern, he nodded. “It has a parasite.”

  “I’m sure they’ll look after it.”

  “I would like them to; it is very weak.”

  I brushed my fingers down his face and caught the older officer’s eye. He dipped his chin.

  “Come on, Love. Let’s go home. Arthur will be back soon.”

  Ananda sighed heavily and stood as though burdened by the sudden understanding that the outside world was actively rejecting him.

  We turned to go back down the hallway. The young officer was shaking his head as if trying to clear it, while Castor followed us with his eyes. Ananda held out his hand in parting, and Castor took it.

  “Goodbye, sir.”

  “Next time you need someone to have a look at the vegetation, just come over here and let us know, okay?”

  “I will.”

  The policeman smiled in an almost fatherly way, but as the physical contact continued, his face began to drain of intent, and soon the muscles were lax.

  “Ananda!” I whispered. “Stop.”

  But the second Buddha stepped forward and laid the other hand upon his shoulder, right next to the speaker of his walkie.

  “You will look after the creatures of this world. It is the duty you chose, isn’t it?”

  His salt and pepper eyebrows drew together.

  “You’re right. I...yes.”

  “The trees are all sick.”

  “I’ll make sure someone has a look.”

  Ananda smiled. “A credit to your profession,” he whispered and let go.

  Before he could do anything else, I grabbed his arm and pulled him down the hall forcibly while trying not to look as if I was propelling him. Behind us, the cops stood in silence, scratching their heads and feeling a bit disoriented.

  I smiled at the man behind the bullet-proof glass as we moved through the outer door and caught him shaking his head in my periphery. Ananda and I held hands to the car, but I could feel the wall between us. Ananda was troubled, and that was something I’d never once discerned from him. He got into the car without a single word and put on his seat belt.

  I stopped at the tailgate to catch my breath and figure out what I could possibly say. Scolding made no sense, and, really, how could I find fault with him? The trees of the world would lament if ever Ananda stopped climbing them.

  I got in and closed the door. He stared straight ahead, hands folded neatly in his lap.

  “Ananda,” I said quietly, “Arthur said that there were certain things that you shouldn’t do. I know it makes no sense. I know it seems absolutely crazy to you, but there are rules out here for everything and if you break them, it draws attention to us.”

  He looked out the window.

  I reached up and smoothed out my forehead. “Just tell me why you were in the park at all. I mean, you were supposed to go to the library after you got off work. I know you’re your own person, but we’re trying to keep you safe.”

  I looked at him, waiting for an answer. He took a deep breath and turned back toward me.

  “You should not worry so much.”

  “I know, but….” I thought back on how different things were now, how many people had taken Eva’s place in my heart. It had been hard on her, to have me care so much. Could it be that it was possible to love someone too much for their good? “I know. You’re certainly old enough to take care of yourself, but the world has changed so much since you were on your own.”

  “No,” he whispered so softly I almost didn’t hear it, “no, it hasn’t.”

  I closed my eyes and was certain he was exactly right. Thousands of years, and the only thing we’d really learned was how to make hacking each other to pieces for the sake of greed and envy into a more organized past time. Reesa certainly hadn’t asked to be thrown into a pit of hell by some of the most enlightened men on earth. And they certainly hadn’t thought twice about doing it, either.

  “Why didn’t you go to Arthur?”

  “I couldn’t find him,” Ananda murmured.

  “So why didn’t you come back to the hotel?”

  He was silent. I prodded him with a stare.

  Jinx’s gift kicked in, as it so often did whenever I really wanted to know the answer to any question and was feeling a bit impatient. In response, my mouth dropped open.

  “I couldn’t…remember how.”

  My heart began to race. My hands found the steering wheel and stroked it unnecessarily. My stomach ached, one more reminder that it had nothing better to do.

  “What do you mean you couldn’t remember?”

  “I don’t know what I mean,” he replied in the tone of a child being chided for misbehaving. “I’m sorry, but I am not used to it yet.” It was another unfamiliar phrase for him, and he pronounced it with the air of one examining a rare object.

  “Used to it?” I turned on him, angry even though I had no reason to be. The anger wasn’t directed at him. It was at myself, because I had a sneaking suspicion I knew why. In my mind’s eye, a picture formed of sandaled feet standing in a puddle of my blood. “How long has this been happening?”

  His eyes fell to his hands. “Since we left the Vihara.”

  My voice was choked suddenly, but I coughed it loose. “How bad is it, Ananda?”

  “How bad can it be?”

  “What are you losing?”

  He shrugged slightly. “Just little things here and there that I hear and learn. But I don’t know they’re gone until I try to find them.”

  “That’s normal. Have you forgotten anything from before, I mean, before you started forgetting?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Events piled up and then rearranged so neatly that I almost marveled at how o
bvious it had been. Arthur would never have allowed his cousin to suffer. He had known for years where Ananda could be found and had left him there, in the care of the Guardians, for very good reason. Yet he’d allowed his cousin to tag along, regardless of the danger. Now I knew there was no danger, and he must have too. All along.

  “Damn it, Arthur!” I swore, my hand colliding with the wheel hard enough to shake the car.

  Ananda blinked in my direction. “Do not trouble yourself. I am able to be with you now.”

  “It’s not that, Love.” I reached out for him apologetically and clasped his hands as if for dear life. “Ananda, I am so happy to have you with us. I just...I think it’s my fault.”

  To my surprise, he smiled and gave a nod. “I know. Thank you. I felt the monastery was no longer the place I should be, and now I am out.”

  “You know?”

  Him too? It would have been nice if someone had told me.

  He smiled and squeezed my hands. “Jinx said he thought it was you, but I always knew. I knew when it was happening. Your blood...it was different.”

  “You stepped in it.”

  He nodded. “I knew I would be able to leave. I knew that there was no danger anymore.”

  If I had taken Jinx, Karl, and Ananda’s gifts without otherwise harming them, that meant it wasn’t necessary to kill people to acquire their talents. Then I realized that Ananda still had gifts, ones I’d acquired but had not stolen: his pacifying touch, his ability to go into the jhana, his ability to see the future. I turned to him, aghast, but he was already shaking his head.

  “Those other things come after Parinirvana.” He lifted my hand to his face and kissed it. “You take only what is dangerous. Benevolent and caring as always.”

  I fell back against the leather seat, stunned, and hid behind my free hand. “I’m scared….”

  “Men who fear their own darkness are perhaps the safest men,” Ananda said gently.

  “Why is this happening?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “I’d like to know how I’m functioning, if it’s all the same to you. It’d be nice to know what I’m capable of. To know what is possible.”

  “That phrase is strange,” he said, shaking his head. He relinquished my hand so that I could drive. The truck rumbled to life. I pulled away, still a bit shaky. “The word ‘possible’ implies within itself,” he continued, “ the unfettered nature of reality. Everything that is real is possible; everything composed of real elements must also be possible. Therefore anything that can be thought, if thoughts be real elements, must by definition be possible. To say you wish to ‘know what is possible,’ are you not actually establishing a boundary for something that is boundless? You are, in fact, trying to know what is impossible, but if you know that, then it would be possible again. Trees do not speak, so it is impossible to hear one, until someone listens in spite of impossibility and does.” He sighed. “Everything is possible. That should be understood.”

  I smiled in spite of how I actually felt. “You win.”

  “You are teaching people to forget what is impossible, Lilith, and nothing more. For some the realization is deadly. That is a result of their flaws, not yours.”

  My smile faded. “Should I care about it any less?”

  He leaned on his armrest and continued to smile benignly. “For you, that would be impossible. That is why you are one of three.”

  “Impossible, huh?”

  “Yes. Reality has limits.”

  “I’ll remind you that you said that.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  “You sure?”

  “No.”

  “Are you all right with that?”

  He chuckled. “It was always possible, and I am at peace with reality.”

  Chapter 11

  Falling Down

  She looked as I remembered her from the hundreds of times I had gone back there to view her final moments. Her pretty face composed, her expressive eyes wide and clear, her arms spread, white fingers combing through the breeze like feathers.

  “Live better or die as nothing more than this,” she says to a younger me, a lost me from so long ago, it seems. Again and again, I hear those words, but never do I tire of hearing them. Her final thoughts, so ironic, recorded in my very future, forever with me, in a way she could not be. She the architect, I the construct, and yet made from the same stuff.

  I wanted to go back to that night, when we two had shared some union that crossed space and time, the moment when we spoke our final words to one another, but even for me, a person who saw the future constantly, who could swim in and out of other pasts, recapturing that was impossible. It had been one instant.

  As malleable as time had come to be for me, it still came down to one instant.

  Her back was to me this time, the pink blouse untucked, her high heels discarded on the gravel of the roof. She glanced down, and without hesitation, stepped off. As many times as I had seen it, I still ached. There was only one comfort: that when she had passed, I was all around her, from every moment of crisis in my life. She had not been alone.

  I waited for that other self, whoever she may have been, to collide with me, to relay all the information she felt I should know. I did not wait long.

  A cold jolt to the system where thousands of sounds, sights, and smells crashed like a tidal wave over the continuity of my thoughts, and set me adrift. I floated for minutes, or years, but what did time really matter?

  I opened my eyes and was temporarily disoriented. Spread out before me was a city scene, an intersection of two main streets. I was standing on a bridge over it, my hands resting atop the thick metal rail. In a shifting of the tides, my memory resettled, and the plan returned to me.

  They would be beneath me soon.

  I turned and walked to the other side of the pedestrian bridge. It connected a mall to a recreation center and conveniently crossed directly over the route her captors intended to take. As inconspicuous as they tried to be, it was somewhat difficult to miss a caravan of black SUVs kissing each other’s bumpers around every turn.

  I touched the earpiece. “Can we be sure which one she’s in?”

  The boy’s voice was smaller still, nestled in the hollows of my ear. “No. I was kind of hoping you’d use your mojo and figure it out.”

  An excellent idea. “Duh. Sorry, I forget I can see through stuff if I want to.”

  “Happens to the best of us. If you were super-hero material, you’d already be wearing your tights.”

  I chuckled. Wind whipped around my hair and threw a few loose strands into my eyes. I caught them and pushed them behind my ear.

  “So jeggings don’t count then?” I looked down at my tight black clothing, wondering what accessory could possibly be added to make me look like more of a cliché.

  A cape. In this wind shear, it would look awesome.

  “No, they absolutely don’t.”

  Below me, the traffic light changed. Cars shifted positions, honked at the droves of people meandering through crosswalks with no regard for rules. Calliope music from a nearby merry-go-round echoed over the whole scene in some kind of diegetic irony.

  “Are we sure they’re going this way? It seems too crowded.”

  He hissed. “They’re not stupid, Lily. If they know I’m around, then they know I’m up to something. They’re hoping that if I am, I won’t risk exposure.”

  “I take it your webpage hasn’t gone up yet?”

  “Nearly. I’ve got almost everything I want on it. It’s the hardware that’s an issue.”

  “You mean you didn’t learn your lesson and don’t have some incredible warehouse somewhere storing servers in a special climate-controlled environment?”

  “You know me so well. Soon, mademoiselle. Soon.”

  I shook my head, hoping he could see me from the rooftop not so far away. “Would you believe me if I said I wasn’t ready yet?”

  “Yes, but don’t worry. You’ve got a few years
before people really start to wonder where all the kick-ass knowledge is coming from.”

  “Fabtastic,” I muttered.

  I watched the flags in front of the convention center sweep around their poles, at one moment caressing, the next strangling. Several seagulls swooped toward the water. The jarring dings and pipes of the music paused and then resumed in chorus with the shouts of happy children. The traffic lights changed again, the horns beeped. It was all quite harmonious, and I was there to disrupt it, but if I thought hard about it, I could almost believe I was there on a weekend, moving from shopping to an afternoon of ice skating. I smiled and leaned on my elbows, content with that idea, lost in a memory of the first time my father had taken Eva and me to a skating rink.

  “Spotted ‘em. They’re en route, two blocks back, about to turn. Time to go stealth, Ninja Girl.”

  I used Petula’s power and looked for them. “Yeah, I see ’em. Are you ready to roll?”

  “When you are.”

  I took a deep breath and put a thumbs-up over my head. “Remind me,” I said as I hoisted myself up and over the inner railing into the scrubby bushes, “why am I swooping down from above like a goddamn crow?”

  “Besides the fact that it would surprise the Sirens?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s epic.”

  A couple walking across the bridge stopped suddenly when they saw what I was doing. Frozen, the man was deaf to the anxious pleading of his girlfriend that he should do something to stop me. I got my balance on the metal of the outer railing, stood up, smiled their way, and waved.

  “Don’t worry, I’m a stunt woman,” I called.

  “They’re almost on you.”

  “Say when,” I whispered.

  The man woke and shook loose into a mad dash. I could hear his footfalls pounding toward me. I spread my arms and closed my eyes.

  “Now!” Jinx shouted.

  I fell forward, into midair and inner peace. I spotted her in an instant, a soft blur of red among a host of black, a rose among thorns. I smiled as I twisted and brought my knees beneath me in a perfect flip, grinned as glass, plastic, and steel collapsed beneath my hurtling weight. The sun-roof exploded in a hailstorm of auto glass, sparkling in the air like tiny stars. Even as I flattened myself to the roof and reached into the vehicle for the driver, I was giggling.