Craving (42 page)

I understood it, though it left a sour taste in my mouth and a cold lump in my throat. It was a complicated manipulation, all of it, and the Buddha was behind it.

“You’re the second Buddha, though you are not a Buddha.”

“And so it is.”

The disease was just a choice. The fixation was the weakness. The first and only Buddha set a standard they believed impossible without him, something he expected. Ananda became the focus of their shame, probably the mission Buddha had given him. Now the Arhat were looking to me with the full weight of all their expectations, when I had not the slightest clue.

His arms tightened and I felt the moist pressure of his lips between my eyes. It sent a shiver through me and reminded me of Arthur in a warm way. “Do not be afraid, dear one. You are what you need to be.”

“To do what?”

“To be yourself.” It was a common phrase, but his tone made it sound like a vital occupation.

“What about them?” I pulled away.

He head tilted to the side. “What about them?”

I shook my head, but said nothing.

“We believe in
annica,
but if all is one, then one is all. Be what you are, independent of them, and perhaps they will come around. There is no way to teach what the Buddha learned. It must simply be accepted.”

“You’re telling me to give up?”

But he was already smiling. “Give up what?”

I realized my fists were clenched and my limbs were so tense, I might fall over from exhaustion if I relaxed even the slightest bit. I was angry that I was not the leader. I was angry, because there was nothing I could do to help the people that had destroyed my sister’s life. I was angry because her life had meant nothing. I was angry because I could not govern the universe.

But to live was to suffer, fairness an illusion. I was clinging to something that did not exist, fixating on something that was impossible. By doing that, was I not contributing to the disease?

I let go, took one great breath and pushed all the sickening emotions from me. Limply, I pitched forward into Ananda’s arms, where I lay for some time in silence.

I could still hear her voice if I tried hard enough, asking me what happened to people who died. I was about fourteen, which made her eight. At the time, I was an angry teenager, free from all earthly concerns beyond curfews, proms, and why my mother wouldn’t let me wear makeup. I had shrugged off her too-serious concern.

“They go to heaven,”
I had said, knowing it was simplistic. I realized then, how irresponsible it was of me to make such declarations. Looking back on it, it almost made me hate my father for saying the same to me.

“How do you know that’s right?”

I could remember putting my hands on my hips and feeling a preposterous amount of annoyance.
“Who cares if it’s right? When you’re dead, you don’t feel anything anyway.”

That gave her pause. Her eyes widened in that innocent way and she cradled her chin in her hand.
“Do people really see their whole lives before they die?”

I was waiting for a phone call, and as it rang, I tried to push her out the door.
“How should I know? Why don’t you jump off a building and find out, Munchkin?”

I remember her frown as I slammed the door in her face. It was the same frown she had had at our parents’ funeral. It was the same frown from the alley.

What had she been thinking? What unanswerable question had driven her? Had her final act been to follow my stupid, inflexible instructions?

I realized that my eyes were looking in the direction of the monk. He was watching the two of us as we lay curled up in each others’ arms, and he was judging us.

“All men deceive, see what will befall them and do nothing, are cowards at their core, but all men desire better. The desire, ironically, is the one thing holding them back, because they cannot think about
how
they think,
why
they desire. They cannot believe that the desire to be better is hiding the method to achieve it.”

“Then what else is there? What can I do?”

“The way is to trick them into finding the way,” Ananda whispered to me.

“How?”

“Block every other path, but the one that leads them back to themselves.”

I was still shaky, but I sat forward and couldn’t help but chuckle. “You sound like Arthur. I bet all you First Circle guys probably talk exactly the same. Remind me to never
ever
hang out with a group of you. I have a feeling I would pick up a thesaurus and beat someone to death with it.”

Ananda blinked at me. “You know a member of the First Circle?”

I pushed myself up onto my knees. “He was Eva’s friend too, or something. Actually, I’m not sure what to think of him, but I’m sure he’s
my
friend. I get the feeling he’s blocking every way but the one that leads me to myself, the jerk.” Ananda helped me to my feet, braced me when I tottered in place. “He told me about you. Said you were delightful.”

“That is kind of him. I am sure he is also delightful, if he is your friend.”

“I’m sure you’d know him if you saw him and not just because of your memory. He kind of stands out.”

“Really?”

“He’s like, well . . .” I glanced at the Arhat. “He has blue eyes, for starters. He said that was common when he was born. Something about intermarrying tribes. You’re the historian.”

Ananda’s face transformed into happy surprise so suddenly, I nearly laughed. It was his first expression that acknowledged how old he was, that he understood the passage of time and the division between then and now. “Ah,” he breathed, “yes, I know him well. He
is
delightful.”

“You guys were friends?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Was he always so cryptic?”

Ananda chuckled. “I am afraid so.”

“You have to tell me, just so I can hassle him,” I insisted, pulling free from his arm. “What’s his real name?”

He jumped up, took a few spry steps back, and without even the slightest effort, leapt back up into the tree “I am sorry. I have no head for names.”

“You have a perfect memory, but no head for names? How is that even possible?”

“Many different people have the same name, is that not odd?”

“Ah,” I replied, though I wasn’t sure I knew what he meant. I turned, expecting to see Karl gliding across the grass on a vicious wind, but there was no one to escort me back to my cage. I had time to think.

I took a seat on the flat rock and faced the monk. If there was no cure, no disease, if there was no such thing as enlightenment or higher wisdom, if nirvana was a lie, if the Arhat were all victims of their own assumptions, then the Buddha must have known. Surely it was not a realization he’d had suddenly while standing beneath a tree. He had spoken to his followers of other Buddhas, and yet had talked of himself as the only Buddha. I had thought it a mistranslation, but what if it was a reference to their flaw? What if he had always known that he was the first, the seed, but that a second would be chosen and that a third might come to be because of their followers?

It all led to the same question: why bother at all? Either this was the most pointless endgame ever, or it wasn’t the endgame.

I sucked in air and blinked at the monk. He looked back at me, perplexed.

The first lesson: describe the tools, the second lesson: toss them aside, the third lesson: build a world without them. Enlightenment was an unfinished progression, not a moment. Katsu was not an instant of understanding. Katsu was the slamming of a door, and if enough doors could be locked, then the student would eventually wander in the right direction.

But what’s the right direction?

That was the deepest riddle of them all. What was at the heart of the struggle, the ultimate goal of all mankind? Why did we rise each day, work hard all our lives, and die with our wills drawn up? Why did we live?

Because life happens, and why not?

We lived to continue to live. That was the destination, but the Arhat were immortal already, so what was their destination? To live
better
, as Eva had said. Each leader of each successive era of Arhat had to trick them into evolution, herd them like cattle to the complete control of their desires. That was Eva’s mission. She had believed that now was the time for the next phase.

It comes to a choice.

My captor was sitting in front of a computer when I found him, leaning over it as if he wanted to dive into what he saw, the fingers of his right hand rolling the little wheel on the mouse in a frenzy. Suddenly, he pounded the desk and leaned back, frustrated. On the screen in front of him, Jinx’s program was parsing language, sorting through random words, decoding Eva’s journals. It would have been unsettling, watching that man run his claws through her vulnerable thoughts, if not for the success it signified.

Whoever had checked Jinx’s drive for bugs, had reconnected their computer to the system and sent the files on the drive to Karl; which meant that Jinx could, at that moment, be rifling through their mainframe, adding to his knowledge base, constructing doom for their unsuspecting machines.

A heavy crystal wine glass sat before his left shoulder, and as Karl scrolled through the sutras, his hand shot out, much as Jinx’s for a coffee mug, and grasped the prismatic stem.  A dark red liquid sloshed around in the perfect lead-lined goblet, viscous and slowly congealing. It was blood, and not the kind that resulted from the tinkering of a few bartenders in a dark dance club. I watched him gulp it down, roll it around in his mouth lustfully, watched him close his eyes in contentment as he consumed a piece of someone else.

I found myself wondering whose blood it was, and realized that I already knew. My thoughts went back to Eva’s autopsy and the puncture marks on her arm.

My calm fractured and then collapsed.

“Is Ananda finished with you, then?” he asked as he fingered the glass idly.

I swallowed. I had to maintain that state of utter complacency, neither interested in, nor attached to, any answers that might be found. I had to be aloof if I was to continue to see his flaws and manipulate them accordingly. That was how Moksha did what he did—complete and perfect restraint.

“
I
left
him
.”

There was a moment of pause as he wondered if I knew the truth, if Ananda had revealed the secrets to me that would undo their terrible condition. Staring at the dark red of the glass as it sloshed around like liquid gelatin, however, I would never have cured them if it
were
possible.

“And why would you do that? He is, after all, such a marvelous conversationalist.”

“I’ve learned all I can from him.”

“Really?” He sat forward and turned toward me, trying to seem casual, though I could see the ravenous glint in his eye and the tension of every sinew. “So he finally spoke to someone? I suppose that means you will soon have outlived your usefulness!”

I watched him, refusing to rise to his bait. In the back of my mind, I was contemplating strategy, thinking of how difficult it was to remember what my mother had always told me about the bullies at school.

“It’s not about them. It’s about you. Who do
you
want to be? Don’t let them change you.”

I was trying to be compassionate, but I mostly just wanted to crush his larynx.

“My, the look on your face! You’d think I was going to toss you in with the undead right away!”

I thought of the hidden ones, forgotten, rotting underground like so many corpses, and marveled at the strange patterns people obeyed. From epiphany to devotion, from devotion to myth, from myth to superstition and ritual, and from those to this final stage: whatever it took for the mind to obey when the heart could not. It was pathetic.

I felt strange, then. In a moment of disassociation much like seeing my own body from a distance, I stood, critically analyzing what I was. I was meta-thinking, thoughts about thoughts, and it was almost chilling. Had I obeyed that same path? If not for Arthur’s intervention, wouldn’t I have seen my fate as inevitable? What if it was the perception of the map, the physical map, that determined how a person traveled? What if the real destination was a place with no roads?

Suddenly, I no longer felt anxiety or disgust, as if my mind had shut off sensation and was simply analyzing data. It was colder than the
jhana
, but as seconds drifted by with me lost in its murky depths, I found it was not such a terrible state to occupy.

“You’d have at least a few weeks before Moksha began gnawing off his limbs, anyway,” Karl chuckled.

He was testing me, sampling my personality for any drastic shifts. Detached as I was, I was unaffected by his bullying and callousness, but knew I could not allow him to see that. If I was going to paint myself a messiah, escape through acceptance, then I could not seem as emotionally isolated as he.

“I do not believe he will,” I said softly.

“Why is that?”

“Because we have crossed paths.”

His chuckle turned to outright mirth. “And something about you makes a difference?”

“Starving men do not beg for salt. I am what I needed to be.”

He leaned back in the chair and raised an eyebrow, looking me up and down in mockery. “You are certainly arrogant for a prisoner.”

I bowed my head, “A man is only a prisoner if he wishes to be.”

“The biometric lock on the steel security door thinks otherwise,” he shot back. “You enjoy parroting adages, don’t you?”

Parroting. Ha.

These were the tiny arrows that cut us to ribbons, these pointless witticisms at each others’ expense. If the larger portions of meaning in our lives were constructed of these brittle seconds, what fragile and hollow things they were.

“Believe what you want. It will not change anything. And I will not give weakness a place to form.”

I turned away and my eyes caught the glass.

The cold, metallic casement of that eerie peacefulness began to melt and transform into ire. I clenched my fists and could feel my flesh warming. In a tremendous backlash, I suddenly saw it as my one responsibility to prove all that he said wrong. Every day people gave in, bit by bit, to insurmountable odds, or disproportionately huge circumstances. I no longer could, because I no longer wanted to. I had seen how false it really was. Someone had to do it, and that was me, even if escape was not in the picture.