Thirteen Confessions

by David Corbett

  He didn’t. Suffering a sudden wave of shame that quickly metastasized into utter self-loathing, he dropped his eyes, studied the straitjacket’s crisscrossed sleeves, the security loop pinning them to his chest. He caught a whiff of bleach off the white cotton canvas.

  “My name is Katy,” she said, leaning a bit closer. “I’m a counselor here at the jail. I’ve come to help you feel better.”

  Good luck with that, he thought, even as, from somewhere beyond the oily skid at the bottom of his mind, he sensed a feeble hope that it just might be true.

  She sat back, folded her hands in her lap, and crossed her ankles, as though in sympathy with his bound arms.

  “I’m going to guide you in some breathing exercises, very simple stuff. It’s the principle aspect of Buddhist meditation. I think it might help calm you.”

  He considered spitting back: What fucking makes you fucking think I’m not fucking calm? His skin felt like a carpet of chiggers, the air in his lungs had been set on boil. And there’s this guy they found with me, he thought, fella named Mousy, sweet skinny fuckup with a chain-lightning mind—we grew up in the same stinking shithole—maybe you’ve heard of him?

  “Close your eyes,” she said, “not completely, you don’t want to fall asleep.”

  By way of demonstration, she dropped her eyelids to half-mast, while Shocker flashed on trying to bitch slap his only real friend back to life. Yeah, he felt pretty sure he didn’t want to fall asleep.

  “Be present,” she said, “but focus on nothing except your breath. Inhale … Let the air fill your lungs, drop your diaphragm. Gently, gently. Then just let it go, exhale …”

  She did it herself a few times, as though to show him how, and he figured, why not? What other miraculous plan is in the works?

  “If thoughts enter your mind, don’t dwell on them. Let them go. Return to your breath. Focus on that. There’s nothing so important it can’t wait.”

  He couldn’t imagine such a thing could be true. My brother-from-another-mother died a few feet away and I was too loaded to save him. There was a thought to latch on to, cling to, like an anchor dragging him down to the bottom where he belonged.

  Except maybe he didn’t. Maybe, just maybe, he belonged here, with this woman named Katy, nothing to do but breathe in … breathe out … breathe in …

  He wasn’t sure how much time passed, but the freedom to let go, the simplicity of nothing in the world to do but breathe, felt strangely forgiving. He imagined her hand on his chest, just above the solar plexus, creating a kind of radiance, a warm rush not unlike heroin, and all the nagging, bitchy questions of his life seemed answered, or answerable.

  He opened his eyes a little and looked at her, wondering if it could be true. This stranger, this visitor—could she possibly be the person who might save him?

  He whispered, “I don’t want to die.”

  She glanced up—no expression at first, like she was waking from a dreamless sleep—then offered a smile.

  “We all want to live and keep living,” she said. “Unfortunately, that’s not a viable long-term option.”

  After that, he let her call him Lonnie, a name he’d long associated with a mother drowning in self-pity, a father too focused on being pissed off to make a living, a ratty house in a crap town. But Shocker would no longer do. Shocker died with his unlucky friend.

  From an investigator at the public defender’s office he learned that the stuff he and Mousy booted that night wasn’t heroin at all, but fentanyl, and there’d been a flood of overdoses all across town. Useless knowledge in retrospect. Meanwhile, Jelly Stone had disappeared, haunted by hindsight or just run out of Dodge by an angry mob of fist-shaking junkies. That won’t last long, he thought. The strung-out are notoriously indulgent.

  Katy’s visits continued. His parents had split up and moved to their separate redneck havens far away and out of the picture—happy chance, to his mind—and no one from the scene, not even Clint, bothered to come by, no doubt meaning they all blamed Guess Who for Mousy’s death. Get in line, he thought. Regardless, for all intents and purposes, Katy became his world.

  She and the center she worked for helped liaison with the public defender handling his case, offering to provide housing, oversee and monitor his diversion to rehab. He took heart in that show of confidence. Besides, he felt no inclination to backslide. The very idea, in fact, came to terrify him.

  But being an addict by nature, and having discovered something that made him feel good, he couldn’t help but want to do it relentlessly. So within the confines of his cell he dove into not just meditation but the dharma, memorizing the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, devouring every text Katy provided: the Mahayana Sutras, the Dhammapada (Treasury of Truth), the Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification).

  By the time he walked out of the detention facility into the foggy burn-off of a mid-winter morning, carrying his shoebox of books and dressed in the spanking new jeans and sweatshirt Katy had brought him (the better to obscure the freakish ink scrolled across his skin from knuckle to neck and down to his skinny flat butt), he felt reasonably ready to confront the monster he’d always pretended didn’t exist: the future.

  She drove him to a quiet street on the edge of the Presidio and parked outside a sprawling three-story Shingle Victorian with a brick façade—an anomaly in a town known for its earthquakes. It seemed to suggest either reckless optimism or uncanny luck, and that struck him as only too apt for a rehab center.

  Banyan trees shaded the pebbled walkway, and Lonnie half expected to spot a smiling monk perched beneath one of them plucking an angular banjo. Similarly, he wondered what kind of wistful muzak might be playing inside the house, and whether with its flutes and singsong chants it would conjure a spa or a noodle house.

  Neither, as it turned out. As Katy led him through the thick front door, nothing but silence greeted them.

  The place resembled a professor’s home, or what he imagined one might look like from movies and TV. Katy introduced him briefly to a couple other residents shelving dishes in the kitchen—both twenty-something, strangely scrubbed and ruddy for recovering addicts, no piercings, no tats, no scarification—then led him up two flights of stairs to an office at the back of the house.

  A black-haired man in a cardigan and slacks sat at a desk with his back to the door. Through the giant windows along the north wall, Lonnie spotted, beyond the tops of the eucalyptus trees in the near distance, the Golden Gate, the Marin Headlands.

  Katy knocked gently. The man did not move.

  She didn’t speak or knock again, just patiently waited. Finally the man removed his glasses and set down the book he’d been reading, rose from his chair, turned and approached the door. He was Asian, trim with an athletic gait, handsome if a bit sharp-featured, the angles of his face accentuated by the impeccably combed-back hair. Scholarly eyes, a careful smile. Two red discs on the bridge of his nose marked where his glasses had rested.

  “Welcome to Metta House.” Hint of an accent. He extended his hand. “I am Doctor Wu.”

  The ensuing handshake was clumsily formal and gratefully brief.

  As though sensing the awkwardness, Katy interjected, “Metta means loving-kindness. It comes from the Pali word mitta, which usually translates as ‘friend’”.

  Doctor Wu nodded. “More accurately,” he said, “‘the true friend in need’”.

  Lonnie shrank a little, feeling their eyes on him.

  As though reading his mind, Doctor Wu said, “Your friend, the one who died, I believe he called himself Mousy Tongue?”

  Lonnie swallowed what felt like a burr. The floor seemed to buckle. It wasn’t meant as an insult, he thought, to Mao or you or anyone else. The kind of thing white people always say.

  Finally, he managed to whisper, “Yeah.”

  Doctor Wu clasped his hands behind his back and stared a hole throu
gh Lonnie’s skull. Then, ever so gradually: a mischievous smile.

  “That’s rather clever.”

  The following day Lonnie commenced his daily routine, which involved the usual recovery diktat—making a fearless inventory of people he had injured, preparing to make amends—though without the self-flogging he’d expected.

  Instead, the practice focused on cultivating bodhicitta, the arousal of the compassionate heart, and each day ended not with groveling prayers of contrition but a vow of empowerment—to live as a bodhisattva, dedicating this life and all subsequent lives to help alleviate the suffering of others.

  Every morning Doctor Wu led the residents in an hour of sitting meditation, followed by a session of tai chi chuan, another of qigong, moving meditations that gave Lonnie a sense of his physical presence he’d never before known. He’d previously thought of his body as nothing more than a machine of meat, an animated coffin waiting for its corpse. Now he came to recognize the flesh and the spirit as mirror images, deepening his resolve to stay clean.

  His energy normalized, without the crazed swings between mania and lethargy. The monkey in his head began to settle quietly in the branches of his mind.

  Where he’d once flaunted his tattoos, they came to embarrass him as hopelessly crass, but that too evolved into humble acceptance: they were him. In fact, as his skin and muscle tone improved, the ink seemed to flare more vividly, like the plumage of a wild parrot.

  Afternoons were spent in more meditation, some with chanting of mantras focused on healing or transformation, then study and discussion of Buddhist texts and concepts. He came to learn that Doctor Wu had once been a prominent biochemist, whose work—to the extent Lonnie understood it—concerned revealing how both classical Newtonian mechanics and quantum physics were necessary to explain the workings of a living cell. But then some kind of scarring inside his retina began to cloud his vision, making it all but impossible to read the small print in most scientific journals, and two operations only made it worse. So he elected for disability retirement and, needing to redirect his life, chose to dedicate himself to teaching Americans the benefits of Eastern traditions.

  Not just any Americans. He found he had a special calling, a particular aptitude for helping those whose talent had only created chaos. The gifted but broken, the brilliant but lost.

  That explained, Lonnie realized, the peculiar breed of cat inhabiting Metta House. Unlike the losers, skeeves, and derelicts he’d only recently considered his tribe—and whom he’d reasonably imagined would reappear in rehab—everyone here had been successful, some insanely so.

  Victor Mazur had been a hired gun in Silicon Valley specializing in network penetration, exploitation, and defense. Eleanor Tosh had been the assistant director of research for the Pacific Stock Exchange. Jonathan Adler had taught both political philosophy and economics at Stanford. Even Katy had a hotshot resumé—she’d been the youngest faculty member ever at the San Francisco Academy of Ballet.

  Sure, they’d all had had their problems, cocaine mostly, pharmaceutical uppers, nothing so white-trash as crank. To ease the inevitable crash or just mellow their buzz they’d used Nembutal, Seconal, good old reliable booze. A few had toyed with pharmaceutical opiates, Oxy and Percocet mostly, the occasional flirty snort of heroin. None had mainlined like Lonnie, or sniffed paint from a paper bag or raided a neighbor’s medicine cabinet and swallowed literally everything he’d found. None of them had gone on a week-long meth binge only to wake up in a truck-stop toilet in Cheyenne, swatting at invisible bats, no idea how he’d gotten there. Their addictions hadn’t been a lifestyle choice so much as self-medication, stress management, the dark underbelly of American mojo.

  Leaving Lonnie with the nagging question: What in the name of God-and-weasels am I doing here?

  That became clearer as he got better acquainted, not just in class but performing the daily chores. And the answer, again, surprised.

  Household duties were performed communally, shoulder-to-shoulder, care of the house and garden, preparation of meals. Only illness excused you. And as he joined in with everyone else to rake leaves and weed flowerbeds and trim back trees, empty the trash and wash the dishes and sweep the floors, change beds and, yes, scrub out shower stalls and toilets, he learned that he wasn’t alone in feeling a profound disaffection with the Land of the Free.

  The others may have avoided the bitter grind of growing up working class—coming from presentable families, enjoying an actual shot at prestige and money—but they’d come to see the trap in that. Each of them shared Lonnie’s utter contempt for the capitalist shell game, the perpetual hustle of working people, the naked rape of the poor. And they’d earned that disaffection not from the outside like him, but from deep within the system. They could genuinely claim the mantle of traitor, to their kind if not their country. Lonnie admired that.

  One night, as they sat around shooting the breeze over white tea and sesame brittle, he got a deeper sense of what bodhicitta and the vow of empowerment meant among these people.

  In contrast to the usual silence that characterized the house, a CD of classic chants crooned softly in the background, performed by Shi Changsheng, the former pop star turned Buddhist nun.

  “This may not be your kind of thing,” Katy had said with a shrug when she’d slipped in the disc, “but I find it kind of soothing.” Lonnie took note of the title, “Mantras for the Masses,” wondering why dancers so often had such sentimental taste in music, then tried to ignore the syrupy, over-sincere production, focusing instead on the weightless melodies.

  Meanwhile the conversation ambled from this to that, until Victor, the former cyber-warrior, casually kicked it into a different gear.

  “You hear all this stuff about Chinese hackers.” He was burly, stern, wild-haired, clean-shaven. “How on a daily basis they’re raiding not just military and intelligence databases but corporate ones, even hitting small businesses. They’re probing utility networks to fine-tune a potential crash of the power grid, stealing patent applications, pirating software.”

  “Planting rootkits and Trojans in stock market computers,” Eleanor, the finance maven, added. A comfortably plump woman, disheveled in earth tones, sensible shoes.

  “Don’t forget the Sony hack.” Jonathan, the philosopher, finger-tapped his mug of tea like an ocarina—cowboy handsome but eerily tall, slouching in his armchair, stretched out like a ladder. “Seventy percent of the company’s hard drives trashed, handiwork of the scurrilously named Dark Seoul.”

  Eleanor shook her head. “All for a Seth Rogan movie. Bad? Meet worse.”

  “What they never tell you?” Victor again, leaning into his message. “We’re doing the same damn thing, only ten times worse.”

  “God forbid,” Jonathan said, “the rest of the world defend itself.”

  “We’re the good guys.” Eleanor bit off a morsel of sesame brittle. “You know, because we’re us.”

  “Beware the inscrutable Asian.” Jonathan glanced inside his mug as though distressed by its emptiness. “Yellow Peril 2.0.”

  Finally Katy spoke, directing her words to Victor, nodding toward Lonnie. “Tell him about Site M.”

  “Site M?” Eleanor chuckled acidly. “Christ, tell him about MonsterMind, Treasure Map.”

  Victor smiled and edged a little closer to the others, like Uncle Buddy preparing to tell the kids their favorite story, but he focused his gaze on Lonnie. In the background, Shi Changsheng sang in prayerful monotony: “Om mani padme hum … Om mani padme hum …”

  “There’s a wastewater pump station that just got built deep in the woods along the Little Patuxent River outside Fort Meade, Maryland. County officials told reporters that the National Security Agency made anyone working on the project sign a piece of paper agreeing that if they ever talked about the job to anyone, in any way, they’d go to prison for life.”

  “Amerika über alles,”
Jonathan said.

  Lonnie glanced back and forth between them. “I don’t get it. Wastewater—like what, a sewage treatment plant?”

  “The pump station,” Victor continued, “will provide around two million gallons of water a day to this huge, top secret lair code-named Site M. Located right next to NSA headquarters. Guess why.”

  “Here’s a hint.” Eleanor waggled her fingers. “It’s not for flushing toilets.”

  “Site M,” Victor said, “is the $900 million center that houses the U.S. Cyber Command.”

  “More specifically,” Jonathan said, “High Performance Computing Center-2, which all would agree sounds far less ominous.”

  “Think of it as a missile silo,” Victor said, “only there’s a computer inside, not an ICBM.”

  “Not just any computer,” Jonathan said. “A gargantuan cyber-brain that consumes 600,000 square feet.”

  “That’s about ten football fields,” Eleanor said, “assuming you share the average American’s fondness for sports analogies.”

  “A computer that large,” Victor said, “needs perpetual cooling, which means it has an insatiable thirst for water. That’s why the NSA spent $40 million on a nearby pump station that no one who helped build it can talk about.”

  “Unless they want to disappear,” Eleanor said.

  Jonathan added, “Which segues nicely to TreasureMap, no?”

  Victor tented his fingers thoughtfully. “The purpose of this massive computer is essentially to track every single person on the planet connected to the web—mainframes, laptops, tablets, phones—an almost real-time map of every Internet user in the world.”

  “Not just to know where they are,” Eleanor said. “You know, send a friendly email, cute little emoji—Hey, just checking in, hope everything’s lovely.”

  “We’ll be able not just to access, but to attack. An operation code-named Turbine will allow us to infiltrate any device in the world with malware.”

  Katy made a face. “I’m not entirely comfortable with the word ‘we.’”