The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  His gnarled hand reached into the drapery of his robes and slowly withdrew a dagger.

  Oh, God. He grasped immediately what the man was about to do, and because it was impossible, he could not understand how to prevent it.

  He was left to watch as the blade dug like a scalpel into the soft white of a blinking egg imbedded in his flesh, and Tim heard himself scream no no no as the old man hissed and gritted his teeth in genuine pain. Warm blood poured down the arm, hideously blinding more of the blinking eyes and dripping down to the sawdust floor, and Tim heard the corresponding wails from beyond the shelter.

  “Stop it! Please stop it! You can’t believe this is right!”

  “This is for those who did these unspeakable acts,” said the old man. “And for those who allowed them to happen, seeing is believing.”

  The soldier made a guttural sound—not quite a yell but a kind of bark of his revulsion and fear. He ran out, and Tim heard his boots stomp in the moist earth. As the woman and boy brandished their own knives, Timothy Cale rushed past them into the rain. He knew where the soldier was going—the soldier was joining the others who had been guarding the SUV. People ran now into the main thoroughfare of the village as distant screams rose over each other. Shouts grew louder in the native dialect, and there was a string of gurgling cries. The soldiers could do nothing.

  Tim couldn’t bring himself to step closer to the silhouettes of villagers, some staggering into the road, others falling to their knees.

  All of them were clutching their heads, their fingers on their foreheads or at their temples…

  Dazed in his shock, he looked back at the rectangle of spilled light from the doorway, and he saw a curving, trickling stream of blood pouring out. It mingled with the puddles of rain.

  He couldn’t stop the impulse to be sick.

  His eyes felt the salt-burn of tears, his forehead still soaked with rivulets of rain, while his throat was scorched with bile. He pulled himself up and forced his senses to register again, but this time the people of the village were missing. No, not all of them, they couldn’t be. Could they? The first ones, yes, he could tell that the first ones who had shouted and run into the street were… gone. A mysterious banishment that was the crowning touch of the strangers. But the others? A whole village gone. He heard the ugly metal chunk as one foolish soldier prepared his rifle to fire, but there was no staccato burst. Something stayed his hand, forcing a reappraisal.

  You’ve got to do something, thought Tim. You can’t stay just a witness to this.

  He started to run through the unpaved narrow streets, his shoes splashing through the puddles of mud and rainwater, looking for… he didn’t know what. Survivors, those who hadn’t been claimed yet. He had pleaded with them: There must be someone! At least one innocent here! He couldn’t find anyone. Bodies, yes. Bodies and more bodies like those they first spotted on arrival, each one with staring blue eyes, but others were missing. Others were taken. He felt a growing hopelessness—then panic, because the soldiers might start up the SUV and leave him behind. Through the sshhhh of the relentless rain, he spotted an old woman, curled up, hugging her knees near packed metal chairs behind a market stall table.

  Oh, Christ, he didn’t speak the language. Maybe… Maybe if he just held out his hand, and if his tone was gentle enough, he could persuade her. “You have to come with me! It’s not safe for you here!”

  She said something that sounded like a fatalistic complaint. Telling him he was mad, that it was pointless. Her voice was high and sharp and raw, the whine of a gnarled tree branch being snapped off. She was horrified at what was happening around her, but she couldn’t see escape.

  “Please,” he called over the rain, still holding out his hand. “Please!”

  After a moment, she picked herself up with an effort, her limbs trembling either from fear or the palsy of her age, stepping out from her hiding place. She could walk surprisingly quickly, but he wished she could run. They had to get away from this place. The strangers in the robes had either overlooked her or were busy reaping other souls. He found himself pulling her along by the arm, cursing himself for his fear.

  He heard the small boy from a side alley, calling out for someone. Mother, father, it hardly mattered. Scared brown eyes under a mop of black hair, his tiny limbs at his sides, but his neck turning this way and that, looking, hoping… He was small, and given the diet and environment here, it was difficult to tell the his age. He could have been anywhere between four to seven years old. Tim scooped him up, and the boy cried out, but the old woman said something to shush him and comfort him.

  As they approached the SUV, the interpreter looked close to a nervous breakdown. He barely heard Tim calling for them to leave, shouting that there was nothing they could do but go. The man was gibbering and nodding, but he didn’t move to call to the soldiers in Hindi. Tim yelled in English to one of the soldiers up ahead in the road, brandishing his rifle but with nothing to fire on, telling him the obvious: We have to go.

  He heard the soldier call out four names, but only three men returned. They piled into the SUV and drove away, and no one looked back.

  There was silence in the vehicle for a long time, and then at last, Tim tapped one of the soldiers on the shoulder. No point asking the interpreter—the man was traumatized to a sobbing wreck.

  “Ask her their names.” He meant the old lady and the boy.

  Most of the soldiers looked haunted by what had happened back there. The soldier he addressed looked vaguely angry, and he took it out on their guests, snapping Tim’s question at the old woman. She answered him back in a low but firm voice, and Tim didn’t think he needed a translation. She had told him in so many words to go to hell. His kind wasn’t trusted in their province, and they would be avoided even more after tonight. The soldier gave her a contemptuous look and shrugged at Tim. The old woman looked out the window, and the little boy moved closer to her, trying to nestle to her bosom. She patted his arm absently.

  About twenty miles passed, and then the woman spoke up in rapid staccato bursts of her dialect, pointing out the window. Tim couldn’t imagine how she could identify anything through the storm, but she clearly wanted them to stop.

  The angry soldier barked back at her, refusing, and Tim leaned forward. “What? What is it?”

  “There’s another village here,” explained the soldier. “She wants to go there, says she and the boy will be safe. I have told her to shut up and do as she’s told.”

  “Let her out,” ordered Tim.

  “You do not understand these people, sir. They should not be indulged with their—”

  “Let them out. You’re here as my escort, and we have no right to detain this woman. I coaxed her into the car so that she would be safe. She probably knows every village and resident from here to Patna! If anyone can find a relative for this kid to take care of him, it’s probably her. I mean, what do you guys want to do? Take the kid back and stick him in an orphanage? Now stop the goddamn car!”

  The soldier driving pulled up on the side of the muddy road leading to a set of pinprick lights in the distance. Tim opened the car door for the old woman, and she mumbled something to the boy. He slid his small bottom along the upholstery of the seat and jumped out, taking her hand.

  “You’ll be okay here?” he asked needlessly. He knew she couldn’t understand a word, but he asked anyway.

  She muttered something back and then made a scattering, waving motion with her hand. Go away now. Leave. The soldier reached for the door handle and shut it with a slam. Then the SUV roared away, and Tim could barely see the old woman and boy navigating the muddy path to the new village. There was silence in the vehicle all the way back to Patna.

  Coming into the outskirts of the city, Tim pressed the button on his window, listening to the whrrr of the electronics for the door and held his palm out to feel the beaded curtain of rain. These drops, he knew, were real. They were the most tangible things in his world now that the old woman and boy we
re gone, and so he focused on them. Feel the rain, his mind insisted, trying to shut out the memory of the horror they had witnessed. Listen to the rain, feel the drops, feel them…

  This much, he knew, was still real.

  It wasn’t over after he returned to Delhi. The Indian government managed to keep it out of the media, but its leaders, as well as the US ambassador and the State Department, were fiercely interested to know how the entire population of a border village could disappear. After all, the houses, the market stalls and the modest headquarters of the single local official were all intact, which proved no rebel group had gone on a mad spree.

  Even the bodies with their blue eyes were now missing.

  While pools of blood had been detected from satellite photos near the sad building where Tim met the robed strangers, it wasn’t a large enough quantity to suggest this was where systematic butchery was carried out. No, all the people had been taken elsewhere. Everyone wanted to know where.

  The soldiers who had been Mr. Cale’s escort told a preposterous story, and the interpreter tried to hang himself but botched the job. He was left with the mind of a retarded child after his brain was deprived of oxygen.

  What could Timothy Cale tell them? He couldn’t say the escort fought back. Their rifles hadn’t been fired, and the proof of that was that each gun magazine still had all their rounds. He didn’t have a scrap of evidence to back up a plausible lie. For a week, the ambassador let him have compassionate leave, inclined to believe Tim had suffered post-traumatic stress disorder from having seen something terrible. “But when you come back, we need answers,” he was told.

  Sitting behind his desk again, feeling as if he had been away for years, Tim felt the draft of the rumbling air conditioner and sipped the strong coffee the Indian staff always liked to brew. He looked at his incident reports and knew he had no answers. He didn’t know what to tell his boss at his two o’clock appointment.

  And then there was “a development,” as it was discreetly put.

  During his leave, a warrant officer and lance corporal of the Army of Nepal had discovered the old woman and the little boy living not far from where the SUV had left them on the muddy road. They claimed to be from the empty village. The boy turned out to be close to seven years old, and the old woman had been born into a lower caste. She had suffered much from her neighbors. The two were driven to Patna where police and government bureaucrats questioned them. Yes, they had seen the visitors in robes. No, they didn’t know who these bizarre strangers were. They had felt searing agony and then nothing.

  Obviously, they had been returned… Minutes before Tim Cale had discovered them and had them whisked away in the vehicle.

  So, thought Tim. Those deadly beings had found two innocents after all.

  You thought you rescued them, but maybe you were part of the plan.

  The Indians decided the matter was closed. The Americans did not. They sent Tim home under a neat disciplinary rule of the service that involved a gag order, and they kept him on a desk in Washington until it dawned on him that he would never get a foreign posting again.

  He had done minor studies in medical ethics, as well as business ethics, and he had a large enough network of Washington and New York contacts that he could launch his own consultancy business. As far as the Beltway was privately concerned (but never to his face), the boy and the old woman who survived the village massacre were a peculiar vindication for Timothy Cale. He began to land assignments that involved the seemingly unexplainable, the fringe science that occasionally spelled disaster when it found gullible congressmen as advocates or when his former colleagues in the diplomatic corps fell prey to “magicians” in Bangkok or Manila.

  He racked up a lot of billable hours and air miles casually exposing frauds when he wasn’t tapping out reports on stem cell research. He prospered. He didn’t think too often about the village near the Indian border. He tried not to think about why the strangers in robes had selected him to be their witness. Receptive, they had called him. Whatever that was supposed to mean, it made his flesh crawl.

  And now the booths.

  The government had brought him into this mess because of what had happened in Bihar. But the border incident years ago fell under the category of the supernatural. These amazing transposition booths were science. “Doesn’t matter,” he was told on the phone. “You are the only sane American we’ve got who’s had experience with, well, for lack of a better word, resurrection.”

  Word of the booths didn’t follow anyone’s schedule, least of all the one Weintraub had. Yes, he had an announcement ready in case of a leak, but he argued the biggest issue to resolve before breaking the news was organizing what little concrete data they had.

  “Wrong,” countered Tim, who argued there was a more urgent priority. “They’ll come at you like jackals. But they’ll descend even more on the girl.”

  On Mary Ash. Reporters would expect her to have answers, and Tim guaranteed they would form a mob outside the Ash family residence until they got their clips and their quotes and their background stories on poor Mary’s high-school romances, her college ambitions and her day-to-day habits, what music she listened to and who she voted for and any other scrap of useless info to fuel further speculation. Nickelbaum’s victim, Tim argued, needed privacy to recover. She was entitled to it.

  But the compassionate grace of fate was too much to hope for. By Thursday of the following week, the BBC broke the story first on their investigative show, Panorama, admitting they had been tipped off to a possible new execution method that bypassed federal and state requirements. CNN was next, and then Fox News weighed in, suggesting a cover-up. Great, Rupert Murdoch’s crew is taking its usual hysterical approach, Tim grumbled to himself.

  Matilda, his personal assistant, came into his office without knocking as usual and switched on the news. “You’ll want to see this,” she told him. More often than not she anticipated Tim’s needs correctly, but she had the knack of making it sound like a command, which always amused him.

  She was plump and graying, the least likely woman of fifty-eight you would expect to know how to score pot to help her friends handle chemotherapy. Tim hired her on the spot at the end of her job interview—right after she noticed Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the Civil War on his bookshelf and told him how, for a high-school essay, she had tracked down an extremely elderly aunt, blind and half deaf, who recalled Sherman’s March to the Sea. Matilda was brusque and opinionated, but she made sure Tim was on time for his appointments. She cleared his desk and kept him organized. She was his secret weapon and professional treasure.

  Tim sat back in his leather office chair and deferred to her wisdom in switching the mute button off and changing the channel. Gary Weintraub was on, a weed patch of microphones surrounding him, giving a clue as to how enormous the media scrum was. But Gary was in his element. Tim once teased him about seeking the spotlight, and Gary Weintraub had given him a cockeyed grin and arched his eyebrows.

  “Of course, I do, and you should be glad I do,” he insisted, jutting his sausage fingers in a tight fist, thumb on top, as if he needed to push an elevator button right away. “You know why the majority of teenagers come out of the secondary education system, and they can’t solve a basic algebra equation or know five elements on the periodic table? Because there are so few superstars in science. These children come out with dreams of being in the NBA and the NFL. Nobody wants to be in science. It’s all government subsidized or academically funded or pharmaceutical-based. Group endeavor. Now I ask you, Tim, who would want to be a part of that?”

  But these days, Weintraub could have it both ways. Even those who never watched PBS or read Scientific American knew who Gary Weintraub was—their lovably eccentric moon-faced TV “uncle” who hosted shows about space and dolphins. They probably assumed the breaking news was about a discovery of his own. Those who knew better likely felt he was the best of all possible front men.

  Tim couldn’t help
but notice the neurologist, that kid with the cloud of shoulder-length brown hair—what was his name? Miller. He stood behind Weintraub, wearing a lab coat and a self-satisfied grin, enjoying the spectacle. Ambitious enough to learn exactly where the cameras would include him.

  “—subject is female, yes,” Weintraub was confirming now for the reporters. A question from the scrum was muffled and got lost, but his reply explained what it was. “In her early twenties. No, I don’t think it’s prudent to specify more than that—”

  “Are you denying then that it’s—” A reporter threw out the name of another one of Nickelbaum’s victims.

  For the first time, Tim detected the exasperation in his friend’s voice. “I am not confirming it, nor am I denying it,” he said with a nervous laugh.

  “Come on, Professor Weintraub, there’s only one victim he was ever convicted of murdering!” piped up a more aggressive reporter. It didn’t take much logic to narrow the possibilities down to Mary Ash.

  “All I can tell you at the moment is that the subject is recuperating with the help of doctors and her immediate family.”

  The reporters weren’t ready to let it go. “If it is her, is there a correlation then between the legal system and what the equipment does?”

  “Good gracious, no!” said Weintraub, forgetting himself for an instant. “That is to say, we don’t know that, and there is nothing so far to even remotely suggest that idea.” He began to walk away from the microphones.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Jesus, people,” said Miller with a hand on Gary’s shoulder. “He’s a physicist, not a metaphysicist!”

  There was a ripple of laughter from the scrum. You could tell what would be the top clip used from the news conference on the six o’clock cast, and Tim had to admit it was a good line. Ten points for the smartass.