by Amber Foxx
“Maybe.” Roseanne squirmed. “You could check it out, right?”
“I don’t know. I reckon if I saw her in heaven or something—” Mae regretted her joke immediately as Roseanne’s jaw tightened and her eyes grew bright and hard. It had been difficult for her to admit she had a shadow of belief in the ascension, and Mae had made fun of it. “Sorry. If she didn’t have her body, I wouldn’t see her. So far I’ve never picked up any energy or imagery from things that belong to dead people. If she left her body, I guess that’d be like being dead.”
“So if you saw her at all, it would mean she didn’t ascend, right?”
“That’s my best guess.”
“That’s all I need. It’d save me looking like an idiot to the police, too. Missing woman just meditating.” Roseanne shuffled through some restaurant business magazines on the desk, pulled out a catalog, and handed it to Mae. “This is Muffie’s. This is where she gets all her clothes. She sits here and leafs through it and drives me up the wall spouting about the authentic style and the spiritual energy. The stuff costs a fortune, which doesn’t seem too spiritual to me. She even tells people they need this for spiritual alignment, because of the organic cotton and bamboo, and the vibration of the art and colors.”
Sanchez and Smyth, Fine Western Wear and Art Clothing. The first page of the glossy brochure showed some extraordinary cowboy boots in leather patchwork with imagery of cacti and mountains. They were priced at two thousand dollars. The following pages displayed belts, hats, dresses, pants, and silk-screened T-shirts with unique art on them, including the outfit Muffie had worn today. Every item cost more than Mae’s entire clothing budget for a year. “She must be rich.”
“Rich and crazy. Both of which mean she could take off at any time.” Roseanne looked into Mae’s eyes. “Take the catalog. So you can pick up her trail. And give me your card. She’s up to something weird, and I want to know what it is. What if she’s going to close the restaurant? Donate it to her guru in her will when she ascends? What happens to us? We love this place, everyone that works here.”
“I can’t help you with that. I told you I can’t see the future. Just the past and the present. All psychics are different.”
“Most of them are fakes.” Roseanne turned the monitor back to face her way and studied the Ascended Bliss web site. “That guru might be fake, too. But what if he isn’t? Take the catalog. If Muffie doesn’t show up or call, I might need you. I know it seems crazy, but I think she was staging an exit.”
Mae took another business card from her purse. They had the same cell phone number on them, and the same e-mail address. “I’m sure you understand you have to pay if I work for you.”
“No problem. Psychic services are well within the scope of how Dada Café can spend some of its money.”
On her way out, Mae stopped to look at the antique posters Roseanne had mentioned. The bar had dark wood and tall stools, and bottles lined up in front of mirrors. Between the mirrors hung framed yellowed playbills, some in French, some in English. The plays had names Mae didn’t recognize. The Bald Soprano. Ubu Roi. “Can I help you?” asked the bartender.
“No, just looking at the playbills. I’m on my way out.”
“You should look at the mirrors, too,” the man said, as he poured a shot of liquor into a glass. Mae moved a few steps over to follow his suggestion. A fun-house type mirror stretched her reflected face into absurd proportions. The bartender grinned. “Helps the audience remember they’re part of the play.”
At home, Mae pulled her car into the carport and opened the trunk. She was eager to get to Santa Fe now, to see Marty and help him and Niall with their rental house. Since they were giving her free use of the T or C house, gratitude and love drove her to hurry. The only things she wanted to unload before she left were her books and a box of winter clothes. Removing the extra weight would make her car use less gas, and she might need room in the trunk for something.
Watching the ground for mesquite thorns as she carried the first box toward the house, she didn’t see the owner of a cheerful male voice that greeted her.
“Hi. You’re our new neighbor.”
She looked up to see a young man who looked to be in his late teens, maybe twenty at most, around five foot five, stocky and muscular, with short curly brown hair and multiple piercings and tattoos, walking barefoot down the thorn-strewn driveway. He held out his hand. “I’m Kenny. Frank and I live across the fence behind you. You must be North and South’s daughter.”
“N—oh, Niall and Marty.” The couple’s nickname made her smile. It described not only their accents but their personalities. Opposite poles. “Yeah. Marty’s my daddy.”
“He’s a cool dude. Can I help with your boxes?” Kenny lifted a box from the open trunk and followed Mae to the porch. “I helped Niall do the new floors. He told me you were moving in.” Kenny had no shoes to discard, and Mae wondered what Niall would think about those dirty bare feet on his perfect new floor. As if he knew, Kenny set the box down without stepping inside. “You probably haven’t been shopping yet. Can I get you a cold drink over at our place? I’m about to do a green drink. Just blended some this morning. If you’re new to the desert, you need some good things to drink. Get you adjusted.”
Mae looked at the clock and at Kenny, and wondered if she should go. Niall trusted him, so she could. Did she have time? He was her back-door neighbor, and being so kind. “Thanks. I’ve only got a few minutes, though.”
Kenny helped her with the other two boxes. Since the fence had no back gate, they walked around the block to a tiny white house with red trim, a house so small and unsteady-looking it was hard to picture anyone occupying it. To her surprise, the interior didn’t look like a typical teenage male home. The shoebox of a room had only pillows, no chairs, no television, and several full bookshelves. In one corner stood a homemade altar, draped in bright orange cloth and decorated with a photo of a smiling, bald Indian man in a cheap metal frame, tiny figurines of Hindu gods, candles, and geode stones, their tiny cave mouths glittering with teeth of crystals. Tightly rolled yoga mats leaned against the wall, and a small table held a CD player, speakers, and an MP3 player.
“Y’all must be really into yoga and meditation. This looks more like a yoga studio than a living room.”
“Thanks. It is, for us. We take classes too, but this is for our practice.” Kenny led her into a spotless but aged kitchen with avocado green appliances and a cracked linoleum floor that shone as if the tenants regularly washed and waxed the ugly old surface. A window air conditioner roared, making the kitchen cool, while the yoga room was around eighty degrees. “Our rooms are so small we almost have to walk on the beds to get to the dressers,” Kenny said, “so there’s no place to put down your mat.”
He opened the refrigerator, took out a glass pitcher, and poured a thick glob of green juice into a glass. Even from a few feet away it smelled like grass and garlic. “Want some? This is the wheat grass cleanse Muffie suggested I try this week.”
“I don’t think I need cleansing, thanks.” The fact that Kenny took Muffie’s bizarre nutritional advice surprised her. “I’d think that someone who’s into yoga the way you are would hardly need it either.”
Kenny took a hit of the green, made a face, and paused before drinking more of it. He took a bottle of carrot-orange juice out and poured Mae a glass, which she accepted gladly. She had been thirsty since arriving. “It’s the toxins in everything else,” he explained. “And from back when I wasn’t so clean.”
Sipping her juice, Mae thanked him and sat at the table. “Toxins?”
“Yeah, like from the water and the air, and everything I used to do. Even from your food being in plastic wrappers, did you know that? Muffie can read your toxic burden just by looking at you or touching you.”
As a psychic, Mae tried not to look at anything uninvited, so she wasn’t going to read Kenny for the supposed toxins unless he asked. Still, she doubted he had them. He looked incredibly fit. “I just had lunch
at Dada Café. Muffie told me some things I found kind of ...” How should she say it without offending Kenny? “Hard to believe.”
Kenny nodded, seeming to take this as confirmation, not argument. “I know. She’s incredible, what she can see.” He finished the drink, shook his head with a shuddering vocalization, rinsed the glass, and put the pitcher of pond scum back in the refrigerator. He joined Mae at the table. “Do you have a job here yet? I know your father said you’re here to go to college, but if you need a job I can talk to Muffie. Frank and I both work for her, and she’s really changed our lives.”
Made you drink nasty slime. “That’s sweet of you, but—” Mae resisted the urge to say what she really thought, and found a way to refuse and still be honest. “I’m looking for something else, teaching exercise classes or doing some personal training. And I’m leaving for Santa Fe in a few minutes, so I’ll have to look for work when I get back in a week or so.”
“Cool.” Kenny beamed. “Santa Fe.”
“I’m not so sure. I’ll be cleaning a rental house.”
“But it’s a very spiritual place. Really high spiritual energy there. You could look up Sri Rama Kriya, Muffie’s guru, there. She goes there to study with him a lot.”
Mae knew she wouldn’t go to this Ascended Bliss place, but didn’t want to openly refuse. After all, Kenny came across as happy, and his beliefs seemed to work for him. “I’ll see if I have time.”
He went back into the meditation room and came back with a small glossy paperback book. “I mean, you don’t have to. But if you get a chance and you’re interested ...”
Mae finished the juice and looked at the book Kenny laid on the table. The Chakra Meditations. “I started learning about the chakras to help with my energy healing work,” she said.
“You do healing? You would really love Muffie, then. You have to talk with her. She’s into everything like that.” Kenny sat next to Mae again and opened the book. “Muffie gave it to me when she first hired me.”
The fact that Muffie had given him a gift seemed out of character. To Mae, the woman had appeared self-centered and insensitive. “That’s pretty nice, for a new hire to get a present.”
“I needed it.” Kenny leafed through the pages. “She took a whole hour after my interview just to listen to me. I was only a few weeks out of detox, and I’d been living on the streets in Silver City, and in shelters. I was a wreck. I wanted to work at Dada because people said it was spiritual, and I wanted to stay clean.”
“I’m impressed.” She meant it, but was also slightly embarrassed at how much he’d told her. Kenny struck her as an excessively trusting soul. It made her like him, though. “You’ve really built a healthy life now.”
“I don’t take credit. But thanks. NA—Narcotics Anonymous—talks a lot about spirituality. I’m not a church guy, so when I met Frank at an NA meeting and he talked about Muffie and this place and her guru, it kind of spoke to me. Sorry, I just broke Frank’s anonymity. I don’t think he’d mind, though. We really owe a lot to Muffie for helping us get on a good path.”
Mae felt guilty for provoking Muffie, now. “Have you seen her today?”
“No. Frank called and said she left during lunch and didn’t come back. I work tonight—I wash dishes. I hope I see her. She always has these uplifting meetings for us before each shift. It’s weird that she left. She never takes a day off. Frank said Roseanne said Muffie was going to ascend. I know she can ... but ... God, I hope not. Not yet. I’d miss her.”
“She wouldn’t leave you like that, if she cares that much.” Hoping what she’d said was true, Mae took the book and began to look through it, expecting the wisdom that had helped Kenny with his recovery. Instead, it puzzled her. “It’s mostly pictures.”
“I know. The art was all I could handle. I was too rattled to read much back then. With this, I could meditate without a lot of ideas getting in the way.”
Mae felt as if she’d walked into a theater where she expected to find a comedy playing, and found a drama instead. Muffie was more than a ridiculous fake. Was she spiritual after all? “She was really good to you, then.”
“Saved my life. Can you imagine hiring a homeless recovering addict? She took a chance on me and took time with me.” He reached over to the book and opened it to one of the first pages. “She gave me these simple instructions that worked. To spend the first week with just this page. The root chakra. ”
Mae read: “Muladhara chakra. Root support.” The words formed an arc over a picture of a red wheel, like an old wagon wheel, filled with subtle line drawings of roots that grew out though the wheel, also in the rusty red of rocks and dirt. Underneath the image were the instructions: “Chant the bij mantra for the chakra and contemplate the yantra, the image for that chakra. Lam.”
“What’s a bij mantra?” she asked.
“It’s the seed mantra, the vibration of that chakra.” Kenny closed his eyes and chanted “Lam. Lam. Lam.” He had a surprisingly strong and resonant baritone. “I love it. Chanting. It clears my head.”
She could see how it would. It might be like what Jangarrai’s music had done for her on her trip. Mae studied the picture. It looked nothing like the mandalas or the chakra charts she’d seen at Healing Balance, and nothing like the colors typical of the Indian art displayed there, either. The fine line drawings were Western in both senses: American West, as well as non-Eastern West.
“Can you meditate on the pictures as well as the sounds?” she asked.
“I try. Muffie told me to go through one chakra a week. I still do. I’m back on the heart chakra today. I hope it helps. I’m afraid she really did ascend.”
Mae turned to the heart chakra page in the book. It showed a green wheel filled with leaves and the shady spaces between them, green plants growing out of the wheel. “Anahata chakra. The unstruck sound. Yam.” She liked the phrase “unstruck sound,” whatever it meant.
Kenny chanted the mantra. “Yam. Yam.”
Mae sensed that this book meant something profound to him. He was so young, and Frank looked only a couple of years older. They must have overcome some hard times to be in addiction recovery and so dedicated to their spiritual practices as part of it. Mae felt a new respect for her neighbors, and more confusion about Muffie.
“Thanks for the juice, and for helping with my boxes.” Mae gave the book back to him and stood. She already had a friend in her new town. A friend who had a different view of Muffie. “The art is beautiful. Thanks for sharing this. But if it means so much to you, you won’t want to be without it if she’s,” she felt strange saying it, the way Roseanne probably had as well, a corner of her mind doubting her own disbelief, “ascended.”
Chapter Four
On the drive north to Santa Fe, Mae tried to imagine what it might be like to do what Muffie claimed she could do. How would it feel to send your soul out of your body? Did hers actually go out and travel when she did her psychic work? Did she time travel into the past and see things, or leave her body to visit lost pets where they were hiding? Though she had a natural talent as a psychic, she’d had little training or teaching. She’d always assumed she simply had extrasensory perception, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized she scarcely understood her own gifts. She wasn’t qualified to judge Muffie’s ascension.
Scanning through radio stations, Mae picked up Native America Calling on KUNM and caught a conversation with an Apache elder, a coherent, respectable-sounding woman, who claimed to have seen an alien. It had terrified her cat, she said. Another station featured a serious discussion between two astrologers about the Uranus-Pluto square. “Uranus energy is shocking,” one said. “It’s like Mercury in a higher octave.” Things that were off the map in North Carolina and Virginia were on the airwaves here.
Openness to the odd fit with the character of the land: vast empty spaces of juniper-stubbled pink-beige dirt, dramatic wind-carved cliffs, narrow hoodoo towers, broad mesas, blood red arroyos, black volcanic teeth jutting
from brown earth. Anything seemed possible here.
The city of Santa Fe blended into the land, with every building designed to look like adobe. As she entered the residential neighborhood where her father’s rental house was located, not far from the central plaza, Mae noticed that many of the gardens had sage and lavender like she’d seen in the picture of Ascended Bliss. No grass, just dirt and rocks and flowers. The houses on the short block of Delgado Street between Palace and Alameda, her destination, had wooden bridges to their front walks, and driveways that looked like miniature drawbridges over a moat, only these crossed a dry gully, making them stand out from the rest of the buildings she’d seen.
Mae drove across one of these bridges and through an alley between two houses to reach the carport. Like the house in T or C, this one had a detached carport, a roof on poles over a short driveway, which required one to walk across the yard to get to the house. She parked beside her father’s truck and stepped out into the sunset, excited to see him.
Marty came out the back door that led from the house to the garden. The sight of her father’s tall, lanky frame and loping strides, his lean tanned face and sandy hair, his warm brown eyes, made Mae feel at home in the unfamiliar place. It was still strange to see him with graying hair and so many sun-lines in his face, a reminder she’d missed fourteen years of his life, but he was still Daddy, still the same laid-back, loving man.
He wrapped her in an embrace. “I’ve missed you, baby. Good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you, too.”
“Thanks for doing this for us.” Marty released the hug. “Come on in, but I have to warn you—it’s bad.”
“The outside is so pretty. I can’t believe anyone would mistreat this place.” Mae stopped to admire the garden that took up most of the backyard. An oval-shaped brick path surrounded a bed of sage and lavender, with a polished black stone sculpture in the center, a life-sized depiction of a graceful Native American woman wrapped in a blanket. She carried a basket and looked over her shoulder with a calm yet expectant expression. Mae found it remarkable that this sculpture could have been done by the same man who’d made the sheep from old springs and horseshoes that graced her living room in T or C. “Is that Niall’s work?”