by Amber Foxx
Bad for business. Of course. People who believed in Muffie wanted her advice, and people who didn’t came to laugh behind her back. She was part of the theater of Dada Café.
Mae called back. Getting no answer, she left a message that she would give the search a try. Muffie’s claim that she was ascending and her subsequent disappearance without contact made the effort ethically acceptable, not idle prying. In all likelihood, Muffie was right here in Santa Fe, with family or with her guru, not actually in a spiritual state beyond her body. Mae had packed the Sanchez and Smyth catalog in case she needed an object for tracing Muffie, but she could probably find her just by locating the Ascended Bliss Center. She’d need coffee first, whichever method she tried.
After a shower, Mae put on a short, sleeveless black dress, and sun hat and sandals, slathered on a layer of sunscreen despite Muffie’s advice to the contrary, and walked to a coffee shop she and Marty had passed the night before on one of the four streets leading into the Plaza. She would have time to eat and feel human again before the noon concert.
As she ordered her coffee and muffin, Mae noticed the barista’s nametag said Helix. Real name? New name for the City Different? She had to be a kind of off-beat person.
Mae asked her, “Have you heard of a spiritual teaching center called Ascended Bliss?”
“No. But there are so many. Maybe it’s new. Or out of business.”
A man in line behind Mae grumbled, “Those places are a dime a dozen.”
The web site Roseanne had showed her hadn’t given an address or a phone number, just a tribute to Sri Rama Kriya. It didn’t seem to announce a new place or introduce a new teacher, but to honor someone well established.
“I don’t think it’s new.” Mae paid, aware of using her father’s money. It was a strange feeling, being taken care of. “This lady in T or C talks it up a lot, comes up here to see her guru. Sri Rama Kriya.”
“Gurus,” said the man who’d been behind her, stepping up to the counter and getting his wallet out of his back pocket. “Throw a rock around here, you’ll hit one.” He laughed as if he’d made a good joke, and placed his order.
Mae took her breakfast to a low table with a comfy couch and a spread of local newspapers, and settled down, refreshed at being out of the smoky, hairy house.
“I can recommend some good places,” Helix called across the room. “There really are a lot. What are you looking for? Buddhist? Yoga? Tibetan?”
“I’m looking for this place. Ascended Bliss.”
“Try The Reporter, then.” Mae started to look through the papers and found the one Helix suggested. “Look at the ads in the back. I assume you already checked the phone book, though.”
“I didn’t.” Mae felt embarrassed. There was a phone book at the house. She must be getting spacey with the altitude at seven thousand feet. Her head did feel peculiar, as if it was full of echoes, and her thinking was slower than normal. She leafed through the paper, distracted by listings for music events—she would have to come back to that to look for Jangarrai or opportunities to find him—and then reminded herself what she was doing. She might need two coffees to get her mind focused.
The back pages featured classifieds, many for yoga classes, energy healers, massage, or personal training, ads she would be in if she lived here. There were also services like pet psychics, power animal retrieval, past life astrology, psychic surgery, and a number of other concepts odd enough to merit Muffie’s approval, but no Sri Rama Kriya and no Ascended Bliss Center for Enlightenment. Of course, Mae could look in the phone book when she got back to the house. But with so little public identity, no web site and no advertising, the odds of finding it still open and with a working phone number seemed slim. Even that negative finding was progress, though. If it didn’t exist, Muffie wasn’t there.
Only fifty percent spacey after her second cup, Mae left the coffee shop and walked to the Plaza. Somehow it was noon already. Half a day had flown and she’d hardly made a dent in the mess. It was silly to feel like she was wasting her time when that was why she was here, but she wanted it done already so she could be a tourist. As she walked, she could hear the musicians warming up. She might find someone who knew the missing Jangarrai.
A five-piece Celtic band including standup bass, hand drums, tin whistle, fiddle, and guitar played on a wide-roofed stage in front of an open patch of pavement that served as a dance floor. A mixed audience of all ages and walks of life sat on benches, in the grass, and on the stone wall surrounding a tall monument, or stood near the dance floor. Only one person danced, a purple-gowned woman of about sixty with questionably auburn hair and a floating purple scarf that she used as a partner. She drifted and swirled, laughing and joking occasionally about being a lonely tourist from California.
Mae found a spot on the stone wall and adjusted her hat to better shade her eyes. Toes tapping, she wished she was as uninhibited as the Californian, and wondered how likely it was that anyone in this band knew Jangarrai. His music was nothing like theirs.
Passing the dancing tourist, a lean, long-limbed black man in jeans so soft and faded they flowed like silk along his legs cut across the open space in front of the stage. Without slowing his brisk pace, he turned to face the stage, looked up at the band with a face-splitting grin, and broke into a dance so explosively alive it seemed to light up the already dazzling square. Dancing backwards, he executed a series of complex steps and turns, spinning as easily as another person might walk, tipping his straw fedora to the band. His collar-length hair, escaping from the limited control of the hat, flew out in a cloud that looked as if someone had tried to comb out a cotton ball and given up. It was ash blond, while his little tuft of a goatee was dark. He wore a thin white cotton shirt so sheer that Mae could see the chocolate brown of his skin and the definition of the muscles in his shoulders and arms, a body as tight and toned as a wild animal’s. His face was almost square, with a wide jaw and high cheekbones, a broad straight nose, and huge dark eyes. And there was a gold tooth in that blinding bright smile.
Now that was crazy. Unless she’d missed some fashion trend, no one had gold teeth any more, did they? He looked, Mae thought, like a pirate.
Breaking off his dance, he jogged away on whatever errand had taken him across the Plaza. The performance had lasted about thirty seconds, but projected more vitality than the entire band had during the song—and they were good. He stole the show.
A group of boys about eight years old began hopping and jumping to the music, and a father started dancing with a little girl on his shoulders. The purple-clad tourist floated up to Mae and said, “You could dance, too. There isn’t a law against being crazy, you know.”
Mae laughed. “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”
She thought of the blond-haired black man. He hadn’t been scared to dance alone. He’d left this wave of dancing in his wake, as if he’d repealed the law against being crazy. It wasn’t quite enough to make Mae kick up her heels, though. Maybe Niall was right. Stiff.
When the band took a break, she walked over to the man at the table where their CDs were for sale and asked him if was familiar with Jangarrai.
“Sure. You just missed him.”
“I did? Darn. Is he playing anywhere this week?”
“Haven’t seen him have a regular gig in,” he stopped and thought, “maybe four months. Seen him play on the streets now and then, and sometimes he sits in with the African drummers. I don’t know. Keep your eyes peeled.”
“Thanks.” She bought a CD, thinking it might be fun to drive with this music. “What’s the name of the African drum group?”
“There’s two. Can’t think of the name of the big group that plays for the dance class at the Railyard, but the trio is Afreaka. Like Africa, with ‘freak’ in it.”
Mae thanked the man and crossed the street to look at the Indian vendors’ art and jewelry. She needed to head home, though, before she forgot what she was really here for. As she browsed the jewelry, Mae tried
to pierce the high-altitude brain fog, reminding herself over and over: phone book, look up Ascended Bliss. Google Afreaka. She couldn’t believe she had just missed Jangarrai, and wondered if he had been the bleached-blond, gold-toothed, crazy dancing man. Not likely, though. He didn’t look like Jangarrai’s music sounded.
Back on Delgado Street, Mae stopped at the mailbox at the end of the wooden walkway and pulled out a stack of mail. She’d have to ask Marty what hotel Ruth Smith was staying in and drop off the mail at the front desk. The evicted tenant couldn’t have had time to get her things forwarded.
Taking the mail inside, Mae sat on the edge of the stained and hairy coral couch to sort junk from real mail, with Pie mewing underneath her. She said a few kind words to the cat, leaned down and offered a hand, and the mewing stopped, but Pie did not come out. Sad. How could Mae heal a cat she couldn’t touch?
She noticed the name on the envelopes. Not Ruth Smith. Ruth Smyth.
The image that had slipped into her mind in her half dream state the night before came back to her, the woman cutting fabric. Making the prototypes of the Sanchez and Smyth clothing? Vegetarian health-nut Muffie would be appalled to think she wore clothes by a bacon-eating, chain-smoking, beer-drinking designer.
Muffie. Mae got the phone book off the kitchen counter and looked for Ascended Bliss. No such place. Looked up the last name Blanchette. No such family. Muffie could stay with friends or relatives here, of course, and not have her own number, or be unlisted, but it was hard to imagine a spiritual center of some kind having no phone number. Maybe the barista who suggested it had closed had taken a good guess.
Getting her laptop from her luggage, Mae brought it out to the garden, hoping the house’s wireless signal reached that far. She was in luck; she could search for Sri Rama Kriya outdoors with the scents of sage and lavender. Nothing came up online except Muffie’s Sri Rama Kriya tribute web page and a book, The Wisdom of Sri Rama Kriya. This was getting kind of far from Muffie now. It would be more direct to do a psychic search with the Sanchez and Smyth catalog.
After checking her e-mail—a message from Deborah asking if Mae had located Jangarrai, which got an answer of “almost”—Mae took her crystals and the catalog from the house and returned to the garden. Outdoors, she was less likely to pick up Ruth’s energy, more likely to get a trace of Muffie.
Mae sat facing the statue and rested one hand on the catalog, her grandmother’s amethyst in her other hand. Closing her eyes, she set an intention to find where Muffie was now. The tunnel overtook her vision quickly, and the emotional input from the other end of it felt irritable and strong. When the tunnel opened, Mae didn’t see Muffie, but Ruth again, talking on a telephone. She paced, cigarette in hand, and seemed to be arguing. Probably yelling at Marty or Niall. Mae withdrew from the vision.
She was going to have to look for Muffie somewhere else, and wished she had something of hers to work with that wasn’t a Sanchez and Smyth catalog. It wasn’t helping.
Still, holding a personal belonging someone had handled a lot had never failed before. Mae shouldn’t see Ruth from the catalog, any more than she could find Jangarrai from his CDs. It was Muffie’s property, so her energy should be in it. This brought up two possibilities. One, Ruth’s energy was so overpowering even in the garden that it blocked Muffie’s. Two, there was no energy link to Muffie anymore because she really had ascended—or because she was dead. Roseanne wouldn’t care as long as she could keep the restaurant open, but Kenny would be devastated.
Hoping that more cleaning would eradicate the Ruth energy, Mae changed back into grubby work clothes, vacuumed the upholstered furniture, and cleaned it with spot remover. Maybe if she could remove Ruth, she could find Muffie, alive. Still, she needed to let Roseanne know that she hadn’t succeeded so far, and called her at Dada Café. Rosanne was bound to be there. She probably wasn’t getting any time off, if the owner had vanished.
Mae walked out into the garden to make her call, basking in the sweet scents, the hot sun, and the serene presence of the statue. The Dada Café hostess put her through to the office, and Roseanne answered, jumping in without small talk. “Did you find her? Or the guru?”
“No. I can’t tell if it’s because she doesn’t exist anymore to be found, or if I’m just so swamped with energy from the tenant who was in this house. If I can find somewhere quiet to do the psychic work away from this place, I can try again. Or you could send me something else of Muffie’s besides that catalog, just in case. I think the tenant was the Smyth in Sanchez and Smyth.”
“I don’t have any other things that were Muffie’s. She cleared out. I mean, she handled everything in the restaurant a lot, but so does everybody else. Anyway, you’d have to be here to use that.”
“I guess I’ll try again with the catalog, then.” Mae sat on a bench, watching a lizard on the bricks. It held still, its brown body almost blending with the path. “But—what if that ascension line was a suicide threat? Has anyone been to her place to see if she moved out? Or if she’s lying dead in the bathtub or anything?”
“Her landlord called me, actually. He hoped she’d be at work so he could ask for more money, because her deposit won’t cover hauling her furniture out. Said she left without giving notice, just dropped off the keys in his porch mailbox with a note that said ‘gone.’ He went in her place—no sign of anything wrong. She packed, took her clothes, all her small stuff.”
“Will you be able to tell if she’s cashing her paycheck or anything? Any use of her health insurance? I have no idea what a manager can find out about that stuff.”
“Muffie was never on the payroll or insurance here.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Rich. I told you. Rich and crazy. She didn’t pay herself. She just did this—God only knows why. To have a place to be God or something. And if God is dead, I’m in deep doodoo, because business is down. I know it’s only one day, but some people find out she’s not here and they decide not to stay and eat. I hope she didn’t leave with the idea of closing this place.”
“I think her guru’s place may have closed.”
“Crap! You can’t find her, you can’t find him—they all drank the Kool-Aid and ascended.” Roseanne sighed. She spoke to someone who seemed to enter the office, and then returned to Mae. “I wonder where her family is. They’d know.”
“There aren’t any Blanchettes in the phone book. If she’s even from here.”
“Damn. That ascension line, in front of the camera ... If she really could do that, we’re screwed.”
“But why would she pack her clothes for that? What if she’s doing something else? A marketing stunt for the restaurant, getting people to think she flew off like that.”
“Oh my God, what a great idea. I’ll get Bryan to come up with something—that is so perfect. Yes.”
The lizard began to do pushups, puffing its neck, and staring at Mae. “Wait a second,” she said. “What if she’s dead in some other way, not ascended, and you’re doing a publicity gimmick about her ascension? That’d be awful.”
“Not as awful as having her around. It’d be the best of both worlds, get all the business with none of the hassles.”
Mae cringed at Roseanne’s cynicism. “But what about the people who believe in her? Like Kenny and Frank?”
“They already miss her. Which is driving me even further up the wall. They say work was more stressful today without her leading staff meditations. I told Frank to lead it, and it was actually better, but he didn’t think so.” Roseanne spoke to someone else again. “Sorry. One of my servers. Their table wants aura reading guidance on what to eat and drink.”
“That may seem silly to you, but Frank and Kenny are—” Mae hesitated to break their anonymity as recovering addicts. “Serious.”
“So are these idiots. God! Just when I’m finally free of this wacko I have all this pressure to keep her around. Do you know how hard it is to act like you agree with total bullshit all day? Why can’t people just
eat here for a vegetarian meal and good wine? Why does it have to be all this psycho drama? Why can’t Kenny and Frank just go do yoga and chant and all that and not have this crackpot boss telling them this other stuff? Why can’t I make money without this circus?”
Good questions. And Mae couldn’t answer them. It seemed that everyone would be better off without Muffie, if they could only stop believing in her, though not better off if she was dead. She’d been kind to Kenny, after all, even if she gave him some strange ideas.
“I don’t know if I can, but I’ll keep trying to find her. You probably should do something besides ask me. Seriously. Disappearing isn’t normal.”
“Fine. I’ll do something. And you’ll look and I’ll pay you when you find her. I need to make sure she’s not closing this place out from under us.”
Mae wanted to say, “pay me for trying,” but Roseanne had hung up. If Muffie was dead, there would be no finding, only trying.
Inadvertently scaring the lizard off into the lavender, Mae went back into the house. Back to the filth. She took a dust cloth from under the bag of cleaning supplies in the kitchen, but was distracted again as she got to the living room. The letters for Ruth Smyth.
She called Marty and asked for Ruth’s hotel to drop off the mail.
“She’s staying with her sister in Albuquerque now. Said she’s got forwarding at the post office set up, so that’s the last mail for her you should get. Hang on, I’ve got the address.” He paused. “Care of Ginny Sanchez—” He gave an Albuquerque address.
Mae wrote it on the two envelopes she would need to forward. “So she really is part of Sanchez and Smyth.”
“Yeah, but she’s an artist, too. Painting, drawing ... Didn’t think you’d’ve heard of Sanchez and Smyth. Kinda pricey for you.”
“Niall took me to Dada Café. The owner is really into Sanchez and Smyth clothes. Have you met Muffie?”
“No. Kenny and Frank keep raving about her, but Niall hates healthy food, so we put off going there. Finally tried it about a month ago. She didn’t come to our table, but we could hear her with the other patrons and it got on his nerves. Did she try to read him?”