The One We Feed

by Kristina Meister

  Devlin nodded. “I saw it later, when it was already too late.”

  “But the principle was yours. It was all you had left.”

  “I believed he had betrayed me, but it was so much easier to denounce him for betraying our creator, to hate them all for that divinely righteous reason.” He lifted himself then and leaned over Ananda’s welcoming countenance with a fierce self-loathing. “I fought to regain my father’s armies, to build our nation up from dust, to smash them to pieces. I did whatever was necessary, and because of my abandon I was cast aside by the very people I tried to help.”

  “Where is principle then?” the Arhat asked in the mildest of tones.

  Devlin buckled and, without fight, lay back down. “Indeed. At that point, after everything was gone, my family, my wife, my home, my faith, I realized what I had become, and I left.”

  “So much better to have nothing, than lose ourselves trying to keep something,” Ananda whispered like a Greek chorus.

  “I had reasoned so long, anticipated so often, that I could not turn away from it. Everything became a question of numbers, of motivations, of struggle. My mind plots without me, keeps me from peace, from rest, from anything but the constant tally of favors. I am so tired of it, but there was no escape, because I cannot turn it off.”

  Ananda opened his eyes and found me much too easily. I had forgotten that I was an outsider.

  “She could fix you,” he whispered against Devlin’s forehead. “She has already done so to several of us, even me.”

  To my surprise, Devlin chuckled. “Your pretty little shadow? Oh, I believe you, but that would hardly do, would it?” He lifted his face and found Ananda’s eye. “The queen may be the strongest piece, but someone has to guide her.”

  I drifted, ambivalent, but they were speaking of me and my very real future. I should have been more curious, but I was lost in Devlin’s happiness.

  The dark head shook slowly. “She has all the guidance she needs.”

  “Then what can I do?” Devlin insisted. “There must be something.”

  Ananda smiled up at me and winked. “Clear the path.”

  I took the hint and evaporated, only to condense in the car. Jinx had dutifully driven back to our headquarters and was sitting beside me, fiddling with the netbook as if bored.

  “Some piece of amazing code upon which the future of humanity depends?” I wondered aloud.

  He unplugged an ear. “Nope, NES simulator. Man, I forgot how fucking hard Super Mario was. Why does the princess keep getting kidnapped anyways?”

  Chapter 19

  The Sword-Maker

  I wanted to give them their peace, so I avoided eavesdropping on Ananda and Devlin, no matter how curious I was. Jinx divided his time between shouting at Skype calls and computer programs; hackers were all nocturnal, it seemed. Arthur sat quietly in his corner reading a book about string theory, occasionally frowning or blinking over the edge of it at me.

  “You seem bored,” he remarked when I refused to stop staring. “Yes?”

  “I know I should be spending time in Reesa’s head, trying to figure out what I’m meant to know about her or do with her.”

  “It is good that you know this.” He turned a page.

  “But when I do look into her memories, I feel….” I sighed heavily and pulled my hair back behind my ears.

  “Furious?”

  I sat up and eyed him. “Exactly.”

  He put his bookmark in place and set the book down, turning his full attention to me in a single intense glance. He had the kind of mouth that always looked as if it was about to smile, but I was sure that at that moment he was really giving it serious thought.

  “Should I feel that?” I asked finally. “I mean, you’re like, the philosopher and moral so-and-so. What do you think? Is anger an okay emotion?”

  The smile appeared as if it had always been there. “There is no point in debating what you should feel. Who has given you the expectation? No one can tell you what is appropriate, because no matter how similar, no one can provide a comparison.”

  “Right.” I checked Jinx’s earphones. Still in place, “but aren’t you the one always saying that we should accept everything?”

  “Did I ever say that acceptance was the end?”

  I thought about that for a bit, leafing through mental documents of Buddhist lore. “Well, you did say that it was the means of enlightenment.”

  He shifted in his chair and leaned toward me. It was silly, but I inched toward him on the bed like a little girl, keen to hear whatever he had to say.

  “Suffering exists, everywhere, and with varying values of horrific consequences and perpetuation. I lived in dark times. Motivation was all that mattered. My efforts were the only way to pull people out of misery long enough to question how their brain interpreted their circumstances negatively. Once they realized that their suffering was a function of their natural state, they were able to change their natural state. That was the beginning, but the process must continue.”

  “Okay,” I whispered, a bit shocked to hear him own his revolution. He very seldom did that. It was more than a bit humbling. “But what is next?”

  “Acceptance does not mean docility. It does not mean complacency.” He receded into his shadowed corner and left me on the edge of my seat. “It means a foundation, a bedrock. From that position, one can see clearly enough to discern what must be done to negate a need for acceptance.”

  “So I should accept that her story makes me angry, that her story is one of misery and pain that could have been avoided, prevented. I should accept that I want to tear Mara’s heart out and shove it up his….”

  “And once you have, you may see past your feelings, determine what it is that makes you angry, and how to change it forevermore, so that no one need ever accept such things again.”

  “Grace,” I murmured.

  Arthur watched me as I positioned myself comfortably on the bed in preparation for a psychic sojourn.

  “What if the problem is so systemic,” I wondered aloud, for the first time giving voice to the glowing red eyes, “that the only solution is something sweeping, something that changes everything, like when democracy was invented and all those revolutions began?”

  “Then so be it,” he replied, and, though he betrayed no emotion, something in me felt a chill.

  I turned my head and found his eyes. “You’re fine with that?”

  Was he smiling? I couldn’t tell.

  “I can accept anything.”

  “Cryptic.”

  I sank into the jhana with that peculiar smile in my mind’s eye and lay myself over Reesa’s mind, withdrawn though it was. She could choose to disregard what she was feeling, retreat from reality; but the neurons were still firing, and as long as they were I could invade her memory. I told myself it was to soothe her, but really I was just another trespasser. There were, however, times when you had to be cruel to be kind.

  She was remembering an older woman close to death. Tiny and sunken against the billowing white of hospital sheets, the elderly patient was wracked by occasional shivers of pain. With a start, I realized it was her Gran, almost unrecognizable in her flannel shroud.

  Reesa was curled into a ball on the bed, her head resting on a pillow near the woman’s stomach. She was watching the old woman breathe, careful to mark each tortured intake and each grateful release as if they were the most important things she had ever seen.

  The memory was sharp, scraping through my mind and demanding I pay attention to the sorrow that gave it its edge. This was a pivotal moment, a turning point for her character, and in the darkest times, she could not help but recall it. It could have been a Crossroads, if indeed her people were born in such a way.

  Suddenly the woman’s thin eyelids fluttered open. For a moment, the expression in them was dazed and uncertain, until they found Reesa and smiled. The calloused hand moved and patted Reesa’s tightly woven corn-rows.

  “You s’posed to be sittin
’ there, child?” she said in a broken whisper.

  I felt Reesa shrug. She may have been small, but she knew what was heavier than the weight of rules. The girl chose her words carefully. “Gran, you scared?”

  There had been no mention of death, no repetition of a serious diagnosis, but Reesa knew, and her wise Gran could not keep it from her. I saw the weathered face give in and watched her eyes perform a slow, watery blink. “What I gotta be scared of, hmm?”

  “Dyin’,” Reesa murmured. “Momma says you goin’ to heaven. Are you?”

  “I don’t know, child. Ain’t for me to say.” The heavy hand patted again.

  “But what if there’s no place like heaven?” Reesa sat up, perfectly content to confront the issues no one dared contradict when they had forever. “What if Jesus was just a man that people made up things about? People make up things about me all the time! What if...what if there’s nothin’ after this?”

  I thought the older woman would be upset. She still had a crucifix around her neck, a well-loved Bible at her bedside, but to my surprise she just gave a soft chuckle that made me feel utterly composed. “Well then, child, nothin’ I say or think is gonna matter, is it? In that case, I might as well just keep on believin’.”

  Reesa’s well-muscled brow wrinkled in consternation. “How can you say that? You’re gonna believe a lie, just cause it makes you feel better?”

  “If nothin’ I say or think matters, then fear is my only enemy.” She sighed and nodded with surprising resolve. “We choose our battles, child, and our weapons.”

  “Theresa, get down from there now!” another female voice cut in. I knew at once that it was Reesa’s mother’s. I could see the concern in the woman’s eyes when she, too, saw the matron who had raised her looking tiny and pressed flat. I couldn’t read her thoughts, but I didn’t have to. They were there in Reesa’s head in remembrances of frustration and discord. Little eyes had seen a great deal: bills piling up, her mother’s longer absences, the stretches of time alone in her own thoughts.

  The woman in the bed, Reesa’s great-grandmother, was the glue that held everything together, and in a few precious hours, she would be gone forever.

  “Oh, let her stay, Esther,” the old woman whispered. “She ain’t hurtin’ nothin’ and I don’t mind.”

  Reesa’s mother said nothing. I saw then that she didn’t know how to speak to this woman. Evidently, her own mother had passed away from something when she’d been a child, and she’d been raised by Gran; but Gran was a generation apart, a woman whose mind she thought was failing.

  Reesa’s heart ached with resentment for her mother, because she was certain her great-grandmother’s mind wasn’t failing, that her mother just didn’t understand anything that had been communicated. To Reesa, the lessons were obvious and deep; she hated her mother the way I had hated Eva. She blamed Esther for this moment, for what to her mind was the undignified demise of a hero.

  As the memory faded, with Reesa’s anger flickering in the foreground, I realized how young she had been. Eight. Still lacking the words to give her emotions form but able to feel them none the less.

  It was so tempting to think of children as unfinished, as lacking; but really their eyes saw more than ours because they didn’t know yet what was impossible, what to ignore, what things made life just that much easier. It was one reason I never entertained the thought of having children. I wasn’t sure I could handle eyes like those staring me down, demanding answers, picking lies from truth with brutal efficiency.

  Impressed and saddened, I let her guide me backward, through her physical suffering and into her even more distant past. We landed in a scene she could barely recall. She must have been about four, her eyes filled with the image of brightly colored Legos stacked and restacked by her unpracticed fingers. But as frustrated words rang out, I realized it was not the images that were important.

  “Gran, how can you say that?” Reesa’s mother was demanding. “After all you did? You marched with Dr. King! How can you say it?”

  Reesa glanced up. Her mother was seated at an old dining room table, a backpack on the floor beside her and an open book in one hand. Gran was standing at the stove, pulling sprigs of rosemary from a larger branch.

  “I earned the right to say it, that’s how.”

  “But Gran!”

  “No!” she interrupted, one dark finger raised at her granddaughter’s fury.

  It was the beginning of her end, I could tell. It was in how she stood, the tiny veil of pain in her gaze that divided her soul from the outside world.

  She shook her neatly curled head with that same stern decisiveness. “You don’ know nothin’ about it! You go to a good school, you have a beautiful daughter. You walk into a room and sit where you like, do what you like, marry who you like. You have a voice!”

  “But prejudice and racism still exist, Gran!”

  The older woman turned away and took a steadying breath. “I know they do,” she said quietly.

  “Then how can you stand there and tell me that it’s time to move on and….”

  Gran planted her hands on the edges of the stove and set her shoulders. Reesa froze, every tiny movement stilled. This was how Gran looked just before she got upset, and even Reesa knew not to make a sound.

  “I didn’t say to move on. Everybody got their problems,” she said so quietly that Reesa almost couldn’t hear her. “Was a time when women couldn’t vote. Was a time when a black man had to ask permission to sing. Was a time when thousands of Indians got their homes stolen. A time when Jews were cast out. Every race, creed, gender, and culture had the force of ignorance leveled against ’em.”

  “Exactly!” her granddaughter shouted, throwing her hands in the air. “Our struggle is still….”

  “And today we got people tryin’ to tell others who they can love, what god they have to believe in, what country they gotta fight for. While you go to your good school and raise your pretty girl, people die every day. They die, Esther. They die!”

  Taken aback by the strange tension in her grandmother’s face, Esther fell silent.

  “If a white man tells you you can’t have a job because you’re black, what do you do?”

  “Well….” Esther turned and glanced out the window. “I could report him to the NAACP, file a discrimination lawsuit, or….”

  “Exactly! You got laws to protect you now. They ain’t perfect, but you got ’em. You got rights and the best part is, you know you got ’em! Anytime a white person looks down on you, all you got to do is work a little harder. It ain’t right, but it also don’ hurt you. It don’ make you a worse person, it makes you a better person! So while you sittin’ here, bein’ a better person every day, people elsewhere ain’t able to marry, ain’t able to worship, ain’t even able to live. Their struggle is greater.

  “Slowly the fools will die out and take their stupidity with ’em. The harder we work, the less their ideas make sense. The less their ideas make sense, the fewer children pick ’em up. We already won our tiny battle. But there’s a bigger war goin’ on, and we’re obliged to help. You can’t focus so small, Esther, not if you mean to really end this fight. You can’t pick what opinions you agree with, or what people you like. You gotta fight for everyone, for every single person that disagrees with you, that hates you, that fights against you. A fight for civil rights is not a fight where you get to pick your allies. Your ally is the world.”

  There was a pause while mother and daughter counted breaths and misunderstood the gravity of what they were hearing. Reesa looked to her mother’s face, to see what, if any, influence her Gran had on the woman that she had been taught to obey. It was a sobering moment, even for me, the invader, because my parents had been my world; and even though I had known my grandfather, I had never seen him correct my father in front of me. I wondered then if such an occasion would have made me lose respect for him or gain it.

  Finally, Esther turned back to her grandmother. “It’s my culture, Gran, my her
itage. I’m not gonna set it down and forget it because you say we should go fighting other battles now.”

  Gran picked up a spatula with a tiny shake of her head. “I didn’ march, didn’ get shot with fire hoses, didn’ get arrested so that every day you could get up an’ look in the mirror, and see a black woman lookin’ back at you. I fought so you would see you lookin’ back! Until you know what that means, you ain’t never free!”

  “I know who I am! I haven’t forgotten!”

  “Mark my words, girl,” Gran said back in a tone so taut I could hear it snap, “before you dead, you’ll see a black president. Fifty years. Just that much. One generation dead and gone, and all their thoughts gone with ’em. You mark my words. But how long till you see a gay president? A handicapped leader? How long till we see someone who isn’t bought and paid for and does what’s right without thinkin’ ‘bout what he can get from it? How long?”

  She turned back to the stove; Esther got up from the table, abandoned her things, and stormed out of the room; but Reesa, thoughtful, quiet, little Reesa got up and climbed onto the sofa. Next to a lamp, there was a mirrored picture frame. She picked it up and peered at herself for a long while.

  In the kitchen, her Gran was muttering. “Ain’ gonna be chained by nothin’, not no man, no law, no country, no god, and least of all a silly little girl who don’ know the first thing about sufferin’. She want a struggle, I’ll give her a struggle, sure as shit. Bless me, Father….”

  Reesa blinked at her own shattered reflection, at her distorted frown, and tried to understand, but she could not. She had dark skin and eyes that contrasted sharply with her teeth and sclera. She was a girl. She reached up and tugged one of her braids; her hair was different from Helena’s, the little girl who played with her sometimes. How was she supposed to look in the mirror and not see those things?

  She got up and walked into the kitchen, picture frame still in hand. She didn’t realize what was in the picture, not even in the present. It was a grainy black-and-white photo of her Gran in younger years, holding a sign, the Reflecting Pool behind her blurred with thousands of other figures. It was the Million Man March and Reesa’s great-grandmother was at the head of it.