Neon Lotus

by Marc Laidlaw

A light snapped on, glaring up from the gulch, stabbing straight into her eyes.

  She turned back to see shadows pouring from the open door of the inn. The keeper sank back against the wall, his hands at his mouth. A figure stepped toward him with his hand extended and Marianne froze, thinking that he was about to be shot for his complicity.

  “Drink,” the shadow said, forcing the innkeeper’s head back, putting a squeeze-bottle to his lips. “Don’t be frightened. Don’t think about them. Just drink.”

  The innkeeper settled down, gulping and sputtering, licking his lips. He cradled his head in his arms and sighed. Soon the manic laughter came bubbling out of him.

  Meanwhile, the other shadows had clustered around Marianne and Jetsun. Once their wrists had been fastened, they were led back through the inn where Gyan Phala sat smiling at a table in the main room.

  “Good luck,” she called. There were tears in her eyes.

  Outside, the cars were waiting.

  13. The Opening of the Wisdom Eye

  When her blindfold was removed, Marianne found herself staring into the third eye of a young man in an olive uniform. A white teardrop emblem decorated the outfit’s breast pocket. He smiled at her for a moment, as if pleased with his find, then stepped out of sight. His footsteps faded behind her until she heard a door shut with a snap.

  Her cheeks were clamped into position by hard pads that kept her head fixed forward; her wrists were bound to the arms of the chair. She was forced to stare straight ahead at a featureless black wall.

  After a moment she said, “Jetsun?”

  There was a crackling somewhere above her. A voice said, “You call yourself the Gyayum Chenmo, do you not?” Marianne stared at the wall.

  “It will be safer for your friend Jetsun if you answer our questions. You claim to be the Gyayum Chenmo, isn’t this true?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You told our driver that you are the divine mother of the revolution, that you have come to lead the Tibetan people to independence.”

  Marianne said nothing.

  There was a silence of several moments, as if her interrogator were perusing documents, turning pages at his leisure, biding his time.

  “You travel without identification. Your fingerprints are unknown to us. And you claim . . . you claim to be a goddess.”

  “I claim nothing of the sort,” she said. “You drugged Gyan Phala and she babbled nonsense.”

  “If we fed you on nectar, I wonder what you would babble?”

  Marianne felt the room grow colder.

  The nectar . . .

  Surely this was not the same substance that Chenrezi had sent them after.

  “Well, perhaps you are a goddess. We have no record of your birth. You may have materialized out of fog and fire or stepped full-grown from a lotus.”

  At the mention of the lotus, she felt a surge of panic. Where had it gone? She still wore the clothes in which she had been captured, but it was impossible to check her pockets. She could not feel the usual weight of its presence, nor hear its steady reassuring hum. They must have searched her and removed it while she was unconscious.

  The voice chuckled. “I do not think these very likely explanations. It seems more probable that you were born outside Tibet. Your eyes, for instance, intrigue us. They are green beneath your contact lenses. The color is rare in this country. And then there is the matter of your hair with its pale roots. If you are a goddess or dakini, you must not be native to Tibet.”

  It seemed pointless to argue with them. They could easily wash the dark stain from her skin and her hair. There was such irony in the man’s voice that she knew he was playing with her. What conclusions had he already reached?

  “This is not the first time we have had to deal with false gods,” said the voice. “We are quite practiced in eradicating incorrect notions of divinity. I advise you to surrender your illusory ideals immediately, willingly, rather than endure our methods of persuasion. Tell us who you are and why you have come here.”

  “I do not claim to be divine,” she repeated. “I am a human being like yourself.”

  “Ah,” said the voice. “Thus we discover your greatest error. For we are not human. Not at all. It is we who are gods.”

  “Marianne . . .”

  “I see you resist this notion. Well, that is to your discredit. Do we not bestow happiness on all within our reach? We possess the secret of amrita, the nectar of bliss. We gaze on the world with the triple sight of the wisdom eye.”

  “Marianne, it is Tara. Let me surface.”

  “Have not entire monasteries been formed to carry out our teachings? Do not humans stand in awe of us? Have we not, in godly fashion, spread death where appropriate to foster our holy cause?”

  “Listen no further, Marianne. Notice the lights. They've begun to act on you with rays of power like the one Chenrezi used to call me up from within you. Let me take control now, Marianne, or you could be severely harmed.”

  Marianne’s heart had begun to race. The voice echoed strangely and there seemed to be a strange flickering quality to the air. She had hardly noticed it at first, but now the black wall had started sliding in and out of sight. She imagined that this was something like the prodrome to an epileptic seizure. Euphoria welled up from her spine; the edges of her vision began to decay. Tara rode ahead of the frightening wave of blackness, keeping just out of its reach. Marianne wanted to ask her yidam many questions but Tara had no time to listen.

  The rainbow girl rounded on her, a fierce look in her eyes. A brilliant hand shot out to grip Marianne’s crown. She felt as if she were being forced down into depths of blackness, suffocated by her own yidam’s rainbow hand.

  “Go, Marianne!”

  It took all her will to breathe in the darkness and let herself drown.

  To dissolve. . . .

  For a time she was aware of nothing: no dreams, no visions, none of the vivid insights that she had experienced when previously in Tara’s care. She drifted in a void, shielded from the outer world by layer upon layer of darkness. Her recurrent thought, if such it could be called, was that this was an emergency like none she had ever faced. She wondered if even Tara understood the extent of the danger.

  Sometime later, the screaming began.

  Marianne thrashed at the emptiness, searching for her body, wondering why the gates to the outer world had fallen open.

  Tara, the gatekeeper, must have been distracted.

  Deafness closed in abruptly. It was as if plugs had slipped from her ears only to be clamped hastily back in place.

  Even so, the screaming lingered in her mind. She clung to the memory, not wishing to return to oblivion. She wondered why the screams had sounded familiar.

  Were they her screams?

  No. . . .

  Then whose?

  “Tara!"

  Desperately, in a bodiless panic now, she struggled to push her way up from the depths. The weight of an unseen ocean bore down on her. Tara had secured her well, wrapping her in the heavy chains of her own mind. But the yidam’s grip had weakened significantly in the meantime, while Marianne’s will remained strong.

  “Wrong way," came a faint inner voice, almost a gasp.

  She stopped trying to fight her way up through the darkness and let herself sink instead. As she drifted toward the floor of her mind, she encountered the currents of her breath. They caught her and pulled her now this way, now that. Skeleton, muscle, blood and membrane: the world stitched itself together around her, a puzzle waiting to be solved. She felt like a tumbler in an elaborate lock, a stray photon baffled in a lightproof maze.

  She groped through the dark, plunging through sudden openings only to find that they ended in cul-de-sacs. Occasionally she heard traces of sound from another dimension: wailing, mad laughter, pleas and screaming, all in the voice of Rainbow Tara.

  My god, she thought. They're torturing her, trying to tear her loose. She should never have offered her
self. If she lives in me, then I can never truly be harmed. But if she dies, then who can ever make me whole again?

  Her desperation tripled as the screaming began to fade.

  Suddenly she saw a mandala burning in a million neon colors, a circle of light enclosing a complex schematic. It was that most ancient of images, the sacred circle that charted the soul: the infinite line, the self-devouring serpent Uroboros.

  In the mandala, she remembered, one journeyed always toward the center. It was useless to seek escape at the outer gates of the circle, for there lay only the charnel grounds populated by fierce demons and hungry ghosts.

  Therefore, to find her way out, she must go steadily inward.

  She released whatever understanding she’d caught hold of. She surrendered her sense of identity and merged with the formless void.

  Abruptly the neon mandala flared. Its colors blended into whiteness. She strayed into the world of sight and sound, but it no longer seemed like an external place. It was more like a realm contained within her, part of the mandala that comprised her soul.

  She was the black wall. She was the cords that bound her limbs. She was the chair and the electronics of torture.

  She screamed, not with Tara’s voice this time but with her own.

  She ignored the strange leaping of electric shadows. Her first concern was her yidam. She closed her eyes and searched slowly through the shallows of her mind. She recited the alphabets, Tibetan and English; she counted backward from a thousand; she tried to recall every memory she possessed, filling in all the moments of her life, seeking any stray corner where Tara might have taken refuge . . . might have crawled to die.

  Wherever she found holes and blanks in her memories, she peered most closely. What had been her father’s last words? What were the contents of the shelves in the Nowrojee Supermarket? When and where had she taken her first sip of buttered tea?

  Tugging at the stubborn clusters of memory, she experienced an eidetic flash. Her mind turned inside out. Everything that had ever slipped from her thoughts stood clearly revealed to her, utterly luminous for an eternity. It was like walking from a busy street into the midst of a forest clearing. The sun came down in long beams through drifts of pollen, shining like the golden calipers of heaven.

  At the edge of that clearing, in shadow, lay a dull and tarnished figure, sobbing.

  She looked more like an old woman than a girl. Her color was gray, marbled as though with mold. The grass beneath her was bright green, pulsing with light, as if the plants were trying to infuse her with their life. But it was hopeless.

  “Tara?” she whispered, kneeling.

  Her yidam’s eyes were open but they did not see her. Marianne could not imagine what had done this.

  She knelt and slipped her arms under the withered form. Rising, she walked away from that place of total recall and headed into the soothing shadows of the forest.

  As she went, she sang to the girl who weighed less than cobwebs in her arms.

  “My daughter,” she whispered.

  When Tara's breathing became racked and difficult, she set her down on a bed of pine needles. She smoothed gray hair away from the pale face.

  “Tara. . . .”

  The yidam opened her eyes and stared at Marianne. She hoped that Tara could see her, if only for a moment.

  Tara’s lips moved. Marianne had to lean quite close to hear the words. Her tears fell on Tara’s cheeks.

  Tara whispered, “I will see you again.”

  Then the yidam s eyes closed. Her skin turned black as jet and she began to dwindle. In a moment she was large enough for Marianne to cradle in both hands. She held the tiny black doll up to her face and wet it further with her tears.

  “What will I do without you?” she asked.

  The shape continued to diminish until it was no more than a black drop in the palm of one hand; and then a speck that drained away through a pore in her flesh.

  I am in you. . . .

  Marianne rose from the grass. She had never felt so alone.

  She had never felt such rage.

  She turned her eyes to the trees and glared at them until they disintegrated, becoming a black ceiling, a black wall, the room of her yidam’s torture.

  After a time she heard footsteps.

  She let her eyes fall shut and lay limp in the chair. Her bonds were loosened; strong hands grasped her arms and pulled her forward. She let herself slide from the chair.

  “It looks as though more than the ego has been destroyed,” said a young man’s voice. Her eyes opened slightly and she saw the same man who had strapped her in the chair and removed her blindfold. He slung one of her arms over his shoulders and half-carried, half-dragged her toward the door. She saw that the room behind the chair was full of machines with lenses and dark screens. In the middle of the far wall was an open door, and in that doorway stood another man.

  She shut her eyes.

  “There should be no physical damage,” said the man in the doorway. His was the voice that had conducted the interrogation. “Her delusions of divinity reinforced the ego beyond all normal bounds; its dissolution must have come as a great shock—much greater than we typically see.”

  “Then she’ll need longer to recover.”

  “Much longer. But once she’s well, she will be all the more valuable to us. She’s not the only one who thinks she is the Gyayum Chenmo, after all. The Tibetan people believe her. It will be simple enough for her to do our work for us once we have planted in her the seed of a new ego.”

  The man in the doorway stepped aside and she found herself being dragged down a hallway. She pretended to awaken slightly and find her footing with exaggerated clumsiness, so that the young man did not carry so much as lead her. She kept her eyes half open.

  The corridor came to an end. Her guide removed a sonic key from his pocket and the wall slid open on an elevator compartment. Inside, she slumped down against the wall, glancing up as the older man followed them. She dared not study him, for his eyes were fixed on her—all three of them. They were bright blue in color. His hair was thin and red, like his mustache. Dark skin; features only faintly Asiatic. She saw in him a melange of racial traits including Negro and Caucasian.

  If one race combined all the breeds of humankind it might look like this, she thought. Yet his triple eyes gave him an appearance that was distinctly inhuman.

  “Our great little mother,” he murmured, reaching out to stroke her hair. “You may indeed give birth to a new age, but I daresay it will not be the one you expected.”

  * * *

  They left her in a cell with dark walls where a yellow lightbulb burned. All of the objects in the room—a desk, a bed, several books, and sheets of paper—appeared black or white. The yellow light voided her perception of color. Her skin looked as gray as Tara’s had been when she died.

  For a time she sat in the chair at the desk, her head in her hands, thinking of nothing. She knew that they wished her to open the books, but she refused for now. She was reluctant to see what bits of information they intended to feed her. She was wary of showing curiosity, for they supposed her to be numb with shock. Certainly she was in shock, but the experience had not numbed her. Her senses were heightened despite the black and white surroundings.

  Her mind wandered, briefly touching on many subjects. She wondered after Jetsun and prayed that they had not subjected him to the rays, for then there would be nothing left of him that she could recognize, nothing beyond his outward frame. If Tara had not shielded her from the rays, had not sacrificed herself, then Marianne’s mind would certainly have been destroyed. She prayed that they had not thought Jetsun important enough to torture.

  After a time, she remembered the lotus. Her hand drifted to her pocket. As she had feared, it was flat, empty.

  Yet there was something inside, something that rustled with a dry sound. She dipped her fingers in and encountered what felt like a wad of dead leaves. She withdrew a handful of desiccated petals, a shri
veled gray bud that had once been the lotus.

  “Oh no,” she whispered. “Not you, too.”

  Desolate, she closed both hands around the dead flower and put it to her forehead.

  Through the bones of her fingers, through her skull, she felt a faint vibration. Light touched her eyelids.

  She opened her eyes and held out her hands.

  The petals were flush with life, growing plump and fresh again. A soft humming presence filled the room. Out of the flower came a brightening pink radiance—yes, pink. She could make out colors again: the brown hue of her tinted skin, the maroon hem of her sleeve.

  She stood up, brought the lotus close to her face, and stared into its heart.

  “Tsering?” she whispered. “Are you there?”

  At first she could not believe the sound of lighthearted laughter that came out of the lotus. The boy’s face appeared, cupped in her hands, smiling out at her.

  “We fooled them, Gyayum Chenmo! When they searched you, they didn’t even look twice at me.”

  “That’s excellent, Tsering. Except . . . they were not completely fooled. We’ve lost Tara, my guide. They crushed her, drove her mad. They would have done it to me if she hadn’t . . . hadn’t sacrificed herself.”

  “Don’t be sad,” said Tsering. “You can’t destroy energy. The leaf falls to fertilize the earth but the tree remains.”

  Marianne shook her head, wondering. What is the tree, in this case? Is it me? Or Chenrezi? Or the greater task at hand? If I die in this undertaking, if I am merely another leaf that falls, where is the tree that shall remain standing?

  “Would you like to leave now, Gyayum Chenmo?” Tsering asked, in a naive tone.

  “I wish it were that easy. Of course I would like to leave. I wish I had never seen this place.”

  “But you can leave, you know. The lotus is your key. Try it.”

  Without questioning him she walked toward the door, holding the lotus out ahead of her. It made an almost inaudible sound, mimicking the sonic key which her guard had carried.

  The door slid open.

  She waited to see if anyone had noticed the change. After a moment, hearing no one coming to investigate, she poked her head into the hall.