Neon Lotus

by Marc Laidlaw

  And Jetsun—what would he think?

  She smiled. Jetsun Dorje had been taking his role of protector too seriously in the last few weeks. When he had thought of her as Dr. Norbu’s assistant, he had treated her politely enough, but with no special deference. Now, although he called her Marianne rather than Gyayum Chenmo, he no longer flirted with his previous ease . . . when he flirted at all.

  She could not wait to see his face when she returned to the camp tomorrow. In striking off on her own, she would have demonstrated that she was not an idle Great Mother to be protected, revered, but never involved.

  “It’s letting up,” Common Good said, capping the canister. “You stay quiet under there. We’ll be coming to town soon enough. You never know if patrols might be out and around.”

  A few minutes later they pulled onto a road and the ride became much smoother. She heard an ominous hissing somewhere in the distance; it grew swiftly louder. She peered out from under the flap and saw a hovertruck speeding toward them, its bed heaped high with rocks. She ducked back under the tarp before Common Good noticed her.

  After that, they passed trucks frequently. Common Good did not speak to her again for perhaps an hour, and then he bade her to stay silent and quite still. ‘This is the checkpoint.”

  He came to a complete stop. Marianne hugged her knees up to her chest and tried to make herself small.

  “I’ve only entered this gate a thousand times,” she heard Common Good say. “And every one of those times, you’ve been here to take my card and make sure that I’m who I say I am. Will you never trust me?”

  A thin voice replied, “On the day that I trust a Tibetan, he will rob me, cut my tongue out, and shoot me in the back.”

  “But I’m the governor’s own prospector!”

  “All the more reason to keep a close eye on you. Take your card.”

  Common Good muttered his thanks and the jeep lurched forward. Marianne stifled a curse as she banged her head against the side of the car. Sounds of traffic were all around, in particular the groaning whine of the huge trucks. She looked out through a slit near Common Good’s shoulder, where she had seen nothing but the sky for hours. Now she saw buildings crowding out the light of late afternoon, tall windowless structures the color of rust, caught behind fences fringed with barbed wire. She saw mountains of broken rocks and steep conveyor belts carrying buckets of earth up into the dark mouths of factories. She saw no people though she heard them all around her, crying out, coughing under clouds of dust, protesting angrily in voices that sounded like unoiled machinery.

  The buildings closed in, no longer factories now but homes—or so she thought. They were tall as the factories, also windowless and corroded, but people lived on the catwalks and rooftops. Ladders angled everywhere; sheet-metal walls had been peeled back to form jagged doorways into darkness. She felt her shock turn to sadness, and memories came to her of other days in Tibet. These were not fragments from a prior life, but merely remembrances of photographs she had seen of old Tibetan towns, whitewashed buildings, trapezoidal windows trimmed in rainbow hues. She had not thought any part of Tibet could be so crowded. After weeks on the plains, she felt claustrophobic here in the warrens of the Mines of Joy.

  She pulled the tarp over her face like a veil and mourned the passing of the old ways. They would never come again. Even if Tibet regained its independence, the people would have to find their way through an utterly changed world. But who among them could have remembered the old days that lay so far behind?

  The jeep rolled to a halt. Common Good flung the tarp aside and leapt out of the car. She had expected daylight, not the darkness she found. Sitting up she saw that they were inside a tall building, the walls and ceilings obscured by shadow. Other jeeps, some dismantled, were parked about the place. She got out of the jeep gingerly; her joints ached from the confinement.

  “Quickly,” said Common Good. “This way.”

  Slinging a knapsack over his shoulder, he headed across the gloom toward a rectangle of space even darker than the rest of the garage. It was a door. He fumbled along the wall, then cursed.

  “The light’s burnt out. Give me your hand.”

  He led her into the dark passage. “Stairs here, step up. Now a turn to the right. Here we go. Not far now. Step down.”

  She saw a thin frame of light just ahead. He released her hand. She heard a loud creaking as the lines widened to silhouette an opening door. He leaned out into daylight, looked both ways, then beckoned to her. She hurried after him into a narrow, stinking alley between high walls of metal. A few faded prayer flags flapped overhead; she guessed they were illicit, but she couldn’t imagine an inspector coming here. Common Good rushed down the alley to another door, which he quickly unlocked. Marianne heard a barking dog, a child beginning to wail. She started

  to look back the way they had come, but Common Good seized her wrist and pulled her inside.

  The door banged shut. A dim light glowed in one corner of the room, which was crammed full of crates and electrical junk. The cramped walls were no more than splintered screens made out of dismantled wooden crates; they rose perhaps seven feet high and then ended. Above the walls was darkness. Looking up, she saw chinks of light high above, and shadowed shapes that were difficult to identify.

  “Some tea?” Common Good asked.

  “This—this is your home?”

  “Lavish, isn’t it? I have one of the larger apartments, being the governor’s man. I got first pick when they emptied this plant. The town keeps moving, you see, to follow the veins of ore. It leaves a trail of wreckage and abandoned factories behind it, but they come in handy as long as our population continues to grow”

  “Can’t you spread yourselves more thinly? There’s so much land around you. . .”

  He shook his head, laughing. “Yes, but it would be harder to keep control of us that way, wouldn’t it? Such is life in the Mines of Joy.”

  He started a fire in a small stove, then filled a kettle from a distillation tank that occupied one corner of the room. Setting the kettle on the flames, he said, “I’ll go get her now.”

  Marianne nodded. “Please do.”

  Common Good disappeared into the space between two walls and she heard him moving off into the distance. Sinking down on a cushioned crate, she watched the fire for a moment; then she glanced up at the emptiness above.

  Those shadows . . . she could see now that some were moving. Suddenly a flame sprang to life high above her, throwing its bluish light on several faces huddled close together. She realized that she must be looking up through the mesh of a catwalk on which a family was encamped.

  Dizzy, she had to look down again. What kind of privacy did Common Good have? Why didn’t he spread a tent of cloth over his walls?

  Of course, she realized, the darkness of the factory provided a great deal of privacy. She could hardly see a thing of the people above her.

  Her host reappeared, wide-eyed, rushing into the room. “I don’t understand—”

  Marianne knew, even before he spoke, that the woman was gone. As she started to her feet, there was a loud rapping on the metal door.

  Common Good pushed her into the darkness between two of the screens. She found herself in a dim, confusing corridor made of partitions set in a zigzag path. She stepped back farther into the dark, then turned through the first available opening. There was no light but she could hear every sound in the room she had left behind.

  “Yes?” Common Good said.

  “Open quickly,” came a muffled voice. “It’s Munpa.”

  As the door screeched open, a bit of light slanted briefly over the top of the screens where Marianne hid. It went out again once the visitor was inside.

  “You’re wondering where she is,” said Munpa.

  “Who? I don’t—”

  “You’re in trouble, Common Good. I came to warn you. The inspectors were looking for you this morning. I knew they wanted that woman you’ve been hiding. Don’t act stupid
now—we’ve seen her from above.”

  Marianne glanced up at the dark catwalks, the flickering lights. She wondered if the people in the heights were watching even now, gazing down at them with great owlish eyes.

  “The inspectors?” Common Good said. “They found her?”

  “No! We saw them coming and we carried her away. We have her now. But you know they won’t stop looking for her; and they’ll want you too.”

  “She’s with your family?”

  “Yes. I want you to come talk to her. She’s a madwoman, isn’t she? Is that why you brought her in? It was a kind thing to do, Common Good, but you could very well die for it.”

  Common Good said nothing for a moment. “It was kind of you to rescue her, and equally dangerous.”

  “Well . . . we’re all in this together, aren’t we?”

  “Ah, Munpa, this is terrible. Do you think—?”

  “Sh! Listen.”

  Marianne listened to the silence but heard nothing. Munpa’s ears must have been sharper than her own. Then she heard a tiny crackle of static and an even tinier voice—like the buzzing of a fly trapped in a corner of the other room.

  “They’re coming back,” Munpa said.

  Common Good said nothing.

  “Did you hear me? We must get out of here.”

  “But Munpa, I can’t. . . .”

  “Lock the door, damn it. We’re not going out that way. How do you think we got your madwoman out of here?”

  She heard Munpa coming down the hall, passing the room in which she hid. “Come on, Common Good,” he said.

  Seconds later, a shadow stepped in next to her.

  “You heard?” said Common Good. “We can’t stay here.”

  “I heard,” Marianne whispered.

  “Who’s that?” said Munpa. He appeared in the doorway, a short wiry man with hair that glinted silver in the dim light. “What’s going on here? Not another one! Common Good—”

  “Explain later,” said Marianne. “Let’s go.”

  Munpa shook his head and went back down the hall, deeper into the warehouse. Marianne followed right behind him. Suddenly Munpa stopped and reached up into the dark air. His hand closed around a glinting bar which he drew down to the level of his waist. She could vaguely see a hanging ladder.

  “You first, then,” he said to her. “I’ll have to steady it for the two of you.”

  She grabbed the rung, stepped onto it, and boosted herself up into space. The bars of the ladder were hard plastic, but the rest of it was rope; her weight should have sent it swaying through the dark, but Munpa anchored it from below.

  “Now you, Common Good,” came Munpa’s voice.

  Below her, a second weight dragged on the ladder, straightening it for her. She climbed more quickly now, and as she went she thought to look up.

  Above was nothing but darkness; the few faint lights she had seen before were all extinguished now. For a dizzying moment, she felt as if she were hanging head downward, dangling into a pit. Then she heard a loud pounding from below.

  “Open up!” came a muffled cry. The pounding continued. Suddenly, a ray of light shot through the depths of the factory, as if a dull beam had been switched on. The door to Common Good’s apartment had crashed inward.

  She froze, gripping the ladder in fear, unable to climb, unable to look away. From above, Common Good’s ramshackle home looked like a cluttered maze. Shadows blocked the doorway momentarily as four figures burst into the place.

  The ladder lurched a final time and began to sway. A hand grasped her ankle.

  “Climb!” Common Good whispered.

  She took a deep breath and tore her eyes from the scene below. Reaching for the next rung, she pulled herself up.

  Sounds of destruction clamored under her heels. She glanced down and saw that the inspectors were probing the angles of the maze with flashlights. She waited for one of the beams to fly upward and catch the three of them there, helplessly strung across space. The searchers began to kick down the walls. The crude wooden screens toppled like dominoes.

  “Stop that, you idiot!” someone shouted. “He could easily hide beneath a mess like that.”

  She didn’t want to wait for the lights to catch them. She climbed higher and higher, her eyes on the few specks of daylight that peeked through the factory roof like distant stars. The darkness robbed her of any sense of proportion. She put out her hand again—

  And strong fingers caught her wrist.

  “Quickly!” said a woman’s voice above her.

  Another hand grasped her shoulders and pulled. For a moment she lost her foothold on the ladder and was left hanging in space. Then the hands dragged her onto a steady metal surface. She clung to the thin mesh as if it were solid ground, grateful for any stability. She lay there panting, trying to make no sound, until she felt a body next to hers. Common Good whispered, “Sonam Gampo?”

  “Here,” she replied.

  She opened her eyes and found that she was looking down through the bars of the catwalk. The searchers’ lights flickered across the ground and occasionally showed Munpa in silhouette as he climbed the last few yards to safety, hauling the ladder with him by its lowest rung.

  A moment later, they were reunited on the ramp. Munpa conferred in whispers with those who had helped Marianne, then he nudged her gently. “Go on tiptoe,” he said.

  She got to her feet and found a handrail to follow. They crept through the black air, leaving the inspectors shouting and swearing beneath them, and finally passed through several curtained enclosures before coming out into the violet light of evening. They had reached the roof of the factory.

  She sighed at the first touch of fresh air, but flinched at the light. Fortunately, it was not too bright. They stood in a courtyard between several squat metal huts. Clay pots full of wildflowers were set along the walls. Prayer flags flapped overhead and sacred windmills whistled in the rising breeze. A handful of faces watched them from the doorways, most of them children.

  Munpa stepped in front of her and said, “Who are you?”

  “This is the Gyayum Chenmo,” said Common Good, interceding on her behalf.

  Munpa’s eyes widened. He took a step back and dropped to his knees, putting his hands to his forehead. Before she could say a word to stop him, he had thrown himself down on the hard metal floor.

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t do that. It’s you who deserve my thanks.”

  The little man continued until he had made three full prostrations, by which time a crowd had begun to gather in the courtyard.

  “Let them honor you,” Tara whispered to her. “You inspire them, Marianne. You bring them hope. You have no right to refuse their offerings.”

  “Gyayum Chenmo!”

  Word spread quickly. The people of the rooftop appeared with offerings of scarves, tattered but clean, and flowers which they had tended themselves. Their eyes were full of tears; hands reached out to touch her, as if her mere presence were a blessing. She was pressed into a corner of the courtyard, unable to free herself. As she sought the right words to reassure the crowd, Common Good pressed her arm and said, “Here she is, Sonam.”

  A lilting voice cut through the clamor. Marianne felt Tara’s mind swimming to the fore of her thoughts. The crowd parted to admit the newcomer. She had a glimpse of a dark, sharp-faced woman dressed in faded rags.

  For a moment no one moved, neither Marianne nor the people of the rooftop nor the woman from the west. The Gyayum Chenmo and the madwoman stared at each other.

  Marianne felt herself waver and dissolve, giving way to the rainbow goddess within her. She was no longer Marianne Strauss. Instead she became a young girl decked in jewels and silk finery, a radiant bodhisattva in the midst of her worshipers.

  In that same instant, the madwoman no longer seemed a woman at all. Tara’s eyes saw her as an enormous lotus with petals that shimmered like rain, capturing all the tones of red light, a blossom that seemed to have been carved from a single ruby
. On each petal was a golden glyph, a syllable from the language of ritual. In the midst of the lotus was a scarlet mouth, and the lips of the flower were singing, “Gyayum Chenmo.”

  Marianne came to herself with a start. She was human again, quite mortal, dressed in her dusty nomad’s clothes, her skin dark with pigments and unlustrous. And the madwoman, the lotus, was simply a woman with tired eyes and a sad mouth who looked as if she had accepted defeat and expected nothing of life beyond this moment.

  The tattered woman smiled. When she spoke, her voice was the voice of the lotus.

  “Orn mam padme hum!” she sang, cupping her hands before her. Tears fell into her palms. “Hail to the jewel in the lotus! Om tare tu tare Tara svaha! Born of Chenrezi’s tear, compassionate daughter, companion and protector! Golden Tara! Green Tara! White Tara! Sayer of the sacred words which strike down all evil forces! Cry Phat!’ Cry ‘Ture!’ Cry ‘Hun!’ Pierce the sky and trample your foes, and the way shall open before you. Take the path that lies to the west, and your father-mother Chenrezi shall have what was his long ago.”

  “To the west,” said Marianne. “Have you seen the lotus then?”

  The woman sank to her knees. Marianne stepped forward, knelt down, and joined hands with her.

  “She has seen,” said the voice of the lotus. “She is with me now, high in the snowy mountains, safely hidden in a vale of three falls. It is cold here, and so lonely. Once in ten years I bloom, but there are never eyes to behold me, no one to witness my beauty. But this woman, straying through the wilds, caught sight of my first red bud. I reached out to her, I spoke to her, and I sent some of myself away with her to see if anyone still sought me. A part of her remains with me until she can return. It warms me like a sugar-rich sap, so that I live a bit longer than usual. But you must hurry if you are to find me, or the icy doors of winter will close about me. She will bring you to me if . . . Are you the one who seeks me?”