The One We Feed (11 page)

“Something
tells me it never even crossed his mind, actually.” I made a face and stamped
my foot on the mat, “So I’m just supposed to keep on acting on my own
intuition, allow him to remain silent, when he’s messing up his own
dharma
?”

“You can’t
know that!” he yelled, fanning more salty seaweed smell my way. “God, I wish
you could hear yourself the way I do!”

“Okay,” I
opened my eyes and surrendered, hands in the air. He was right, there was no
way in hell I could rely on Arthur and no reason why that should so offend me. I
had already determined that I cared deeply for him in a way that I had never
cared for any other person and could not go back on that. This was just the
cost of doing business. Somehow, I had to come to terms. “But don’t tell me you
haven’t at least
tried
to figure out how he does what he does. He seems
to read minds, see the future, seems to feel bad about how his abilities affect
us, but what is he
doing
, specifically?”

Deflated, Jinx
looked away. “I don’t know. It
seems
like he can see the future, but I’m
not sure he can. It’s in how he phrases it, you know. Nearest I can tell is
that he is inferring multiple paths from a given point and that, when we act in
certain ways, those other possibilities collapse and his vantage resets. But
that would be happening all the time. It makes me wonder how many little
safeties he’s set up, like the coagulant pack, that never turned out to be
necessary. How many times did he do it and we never knew because, really, we
never would?”

As I pondered
it, I found myself crawling through my memory-web, looking for any behavioral anomalies
that had stuck out at the time. He had done it often, had little gifts awaiting
our needs, but I couldn’t come up with a single one that seemed extraneous. Then
I remembered that many of my memories were not memories at all but visions I
had had, possibilities that had never come true because of how I had acted. His
time line, however non-linear, could not actually exist in my visions, so whatever
was in my visions was not real for him or even possible for him to know about.

Only one even
featured him: the vision of him rescuing me from Ursula’s men, the one in which
he’d told me his name. I realized then that even though I had never needed the
baby oil for my makeup, it had always been there, until it suddenly hadn’t
anymore. It was the one thing that didn’t have another use, the one thing that
had seemed out of place, and it had vanished just after I started staying
there, just after Ursula had ended up in the morgue, about eighty years tardy. Then
again, that vision was the first and only time I’d ever removed makeup in his
company, since after the
real
altercation with Ursula I’d been in the
hospital.

My skin
suddenly covered in goose bumps; perhaps that was the one and only time my
visions had trumped his experience of reality. At no other point had I
surprised him.

Or it’s even
worse than that and he was just leaving breadcrumbs.

“Okay,” I
whispered. “I’m breathless with wonder. You want me to find out where they are?”

“Yes,” Jinx opened
his door and got out. “I need a shower like you wouldn’t believe. I’m sticking
to myself.” Before long, he was scrabbling over tiny dunes to the water’s edge,
leaving me to my one-sided conversation.

I watched him
run about, the waves lapping at his bare feet. It was such a strange image, an
immortal child playing at the place where time seemed to stop, even as the
universe kept time in sea foam. I had always loved the waves; I found them at
once both depressing and restorative. A constant reminder of each passing
second that never seemed to stop; it went on
forever
, and yet...it
went
on
forever.

I wanted
nothing more than to help humanity survive itself. I had accepted the mission. At
the same time, I had to embrace death, be fearless in the face of it, and not
see it with the bias of someone who’d once called it the ultimate enemy. A
paradoxical position, yet it was impossible to succeed otherwise.

I was glad I
had chosen this place to collect my thoughts and, for the umpteenth time that
year, felt terrible for questioning Arthur’s wisdom.

Picking at the
dried blood on my clothes, I thought, rather sheepishly, that if Arthur was so
awesome, he would know I wanted to talk to him and would already be waiting to
find me when, in fact, I was ready….

You don’t need
to
.

I couldn’t
help but smile. “What, apologize?”

Yes.

In the
distance, silhouetted in bright colors against the dark blue water, Jinx
skipped a flat rock across the moon’s broken reflection.

I am sorry
that you find me unhelpful.

It was just
like him to be so compassionate as to deny me the privilege of apology, yet to
believe I needed to hear such things from him. Mildly insulted, I sighed and
reclined my chair. “It’s okay. You’re not unhelpful. I just wish….” But what
did I wish? I had told him once that I didn’t want a teacher, but it was quite
clear he could never be a peer. Why then was I so obsessed with the idea of him
becoming one? “I just wish you could be the thing that fixes me.”

I could almost
see that smile of his; my skin had already warmed.

That is a very
erudite examination of your nascent character, my dear. Well done.

“Don’t
patronize me, you jerk.” I closed my eyes and imagined him in some dirty hotel
room, perhaps lying back on a dizzying pattern of red and pink flowers,
shimmering in the sateen of polyester. “So I guess this means you’re already in
tune with the events of the day?”

We are already
checked into another place. I have used the card Jinx gave me. This morning, I
will take Ananda to the library.

“I wondered
why you gave him the map and he kept it. You already knew he’d have to find his
way somewhere else.” I shook my head, almost in admiration. “Have any wise
reflections to contribute, or is it all on my significantly less well-muscled
shoulders?”

Perhaps. Do
you know the story of Kali Ma?

I calmed
completely, the childish, angry side of me appeased. It was story time again.

I could
remember lying in his arms, comfortable in a profound way, listening to him
draw comparisons to parrots and fruit and all those inane things that seemed so
entirely pointless. “Nope, though the name sounds familiar.”

Kali is the
Goddess of Change, the slayer of Demons, the consort of Shiva, Eater of Worlds.

“Epic. I like
her already.”

It is said
that she was called forth in battle, to slay an unstoppable foe: Raktabija, the
demon from whom each drop of blood spilt is as a seed.

Inexplicably I
shuddered. “As in the Hydra sense? From one cut neck two heads spring up?”

As in,
he replied.
Kali
stormed the battlefield, adorned in skulls and tiger skin, eyes flashing red,
emaciated and born to a thirst like no other. She sucked the blood of her enemy
and consumed his many blood-clones. She drank the battlefield dry and danced on
the dead in ecstasy.

I shifted
uncomfortably. “Okay, no longer so fond of her.”

She sounded a
bit too much like Ursula.

I could
imagine him chuckling.
Alas, her lover Shiva was among the bodies. She did
not notice in her
frenzy
and danced right over him
.

“I get the hint,
Arthur.”

Listen
carefully and keep this in your thoughts. His voice stopped her. The sound of
his cries halted her dance and ended the war. When she saw what she had done,
she was inconsolable, for she had never meant to so demean him. In contrition,
she opened her great mouth and showed her tongue. Do you know why?

“Are you sure
she was sad about stepping on him, because I definitely stuck my tongue out at
Howard more than once, along with my middle finger.”

The tongue is
a symbol, Lilith. To some it is the representation of the life force, to others
it is a threat. You decide which is meant.

I thought of
the box of tongues again. It was certain that Mr. Dark Spot meant those as a
threat, but if Kali’s tongue was her weapon, then leaving it vulnerable could
be considered a show of respect, a surrendering of arms. The monsters in Karl’s
cellar had been docile enough, once one got beyond their initial defense of
horror, and the first thing they had chewed off was their own tongues. Perhaps
that was some form of acquiescence, not a gesture of misery. It could even be
why I found them so receptive; they had vowed to listen, not to speak.

With a nod, I
decided I
did
like Kali.

There are many
other versions, because Hinduism uniquely absorbs new tales as often as
possible, considering them to be further illustrations of divine meaning.

“That
certainly explains why there are so many gods.”

And why the
Buddha is an avatar of Vishnu.

“It’s weird
when you talk in third person.”

He
acknowledged the joke but pressed ahead.
In one tale of Kali’s dance, it is
not the grown Shiva that halts her destruction. It is the infant Shiva. He
cries out and distracts her. Disarmed, she stoops, takes up the child, and
feeds him. Thus, to many, Kali is the Great Mother, the mistress of fury and
wrath, but the purest force for revolution.

“I
knew
I
liked her.”

I could just
picture it. A wide plain of scattered corpses, a burning skyline filled with
wailing. She would tread on them like a hurricane, dash them to pieces in
triumph, scatter them like the dust they were, until the cry tore through her,
hit her in a way nothing else could. At her core, she was a mother and he, the
little baby who was really her love, required only a small thing from her. After
all, was she not fattened on the blood of the enemy, full to the brim, never to
miss the tiny bit he took? I could see her shift the skulls away from her
breast, lift his little head to it. I could see her face, now fleshy and red,
fall calmly around a contented smile. I could see it all as if he drew it for
me, that perfect image of womanhood.

You are a
force to be reckoned with, my dear. The events of the day show this to be true.

I stirred,
seeing the face of the man I had killed in my strange and sudden lapse of
reason. I could also see Petula, cradled in my arms, murmuring that I was safe.

Remember to
listen for the cries.

“Which ones?”

Ah, and now
you see it. I suppose it is all relative, isn’t it? To help one, another must
be sacrificed, until the world and we are great enough to sustain all,
indefinitely.

“Desperate
times,” I murmured.

It is up to
you. Not me. I am transient, Lilith, and sometime soon….
He stopped,
and for a moment I was afraid.

“What?”  

Things will
not always be as they are now. Know this and trust in your own judgment. I
certainly do.

“Until I stomp
over the top of you,” I laughed, but there was a gurgle of sadness in it. Tears
were close at hand. I pushed my fingers into my eye sockets.

You are a
product of this world and it will tell you all you need to know to do what must
be done. You are what you need to be.

“Again, how do
you know that?”

I know
you
,
Lilith.
You
give me all I need.

Confused,
uncertain, miserable, I let his words stand.

“We’ll be on
our way soon. The girl who was watching us isn’t doing it anymore.”

Stay safe.

“Bye.”

I will see you
soon. I will even draw Jinx a nice, hot bath.

“See, you
are
helpful.”

He vanished
like fog, leaving a fuzzy place in my head that buzzed like an electrical
storm. Just for good measure, though, I stuck out my tongue.

Chapter
7

Bridges

At the new hotel, I parked the
car and watched as Jinx slithered out of the passenger seat toward the concrete
staircase, as if his legs didn’t work properly. His body listed forward and to
one side, and his hands, those sure, quick, little jabbing marvels, trembled
slightly. I could tell he was still recovering and that the promise of the tub
was one he was trusting in completely. To see him that way was sobering.

I had lost
many people in my life, so many that when I had met Arthur, not a single aspect
of existence had managed to hold my attention. Finding out there were immortals
in the world had been, in many ways, the beginning of joy, of excitement, of my
life
. It wasn’t all just misery and hard lessons, because there was a
way to cheat. Except that that way was not yet complete. If Jinx could be hurt,
then there was still work left to be done.

I didn’t move
to follow him; I felt like I’d been chugging cough syrup. I sat with this
displacement and wondered. If the Sangha could uncover a way to prolong their
existences on this earth, could someone else come along and perfect the
thought? Maybe someone like me?

When Jinx saw
I wasn’t behind him, he turned his weary eyes to the windshield and gave me a
concerned, questioning, and coaxing glance, all twisted together like a warm
pretzel. I smiled back at him and nudged my chin at the door which now stood
ajar.

Go,
I thought at
him,
I need to be alone.

Arthur and
Ananda were probably still locked in their perpetual game of
Go
, a permanent
non-struggle for a sportsmanlike dominance neither of them really cared about,
or what Jinx called “Steven King’s take on a Milton Bradley commercial.” I
could see each tiny movement that never varied, Ananda’s repose, his cousin’s
beautiful but unearthly stare, and knew that the last thing I wanted was to be
anywhere near them.

I waved Jinx
away. At last he gave up with a knowing smile. His path toward immortality had
been to contemplate the universal truths of mathematics alone with a ream of
parchment and an inkwell. If I wanted to be alone, I could count on him. There
were just some species of immortal that preferred to roll solo.

I let out a
great sigh and felt my body melt forward and against the steering column, my forehead
pressed to noon, my hands slipping from ten and two. I tried to line up all the
facts like helpful little plastic soldiers I could knock over in an orderly
fashion and feel as if I had conquered my own fears, negativity, sadness, but everything
seemed intangible. Many of the facts hadn’t necessarily even occurred and, to
my addled brain, melted together like Petula’s dampened pictures.

I knew I could
alleviate it all by simply looking for the anonymous abomination myself and
figuring out what made her tick, but I recoiled from the idea. As much as she
seemed to need my help, I could not but hesitate. It wasn’t just because the
last time someone had seemed to need me, it turned out I’d had it hopelessly
backward. It was because of my vision of her, because of the way her body had
seemed to snap and break apart, only to stay mobile, like some kind of horrible
clockwork doll that had to be wound up by existential terror and rage. They
turned the little key and she devolved, cracked into pieces and wrenched from
their hands, outpaced even me, only to seek out death, her red eyes reflecting
something I thought I recognized.

That was it
really. It wasn’t the fact that she was new and different; it was that she was
hollow, empty like they’d strapped her down, taken a metal instrument, and
scraped out her soul. I had seen that blind, stricken stare only once before,
in the eyes of my grandmother the day after my grandfather fell down in our
front yard and didn’t get up again. It was the semblance of ultimate loss, a
face that cared about nothing, could find reason in nothing, reached for
nothing as if it were the only way out of an existence that had already ended.

Tears came to
my eyes and stung worse than any chemical irritant. If I looked for her, if I
dared to carelessly dredge the murky depths of her mind, I might see
exactly
what slimy incident had made her young face look like that, and I wasn’t sure I
wanted to. Some bodies should remain hidden, some fences unclimbed, some paths
unwalked.

It was a million
times worse to live through than it could ever be to witness.

“Selfish of
me. And pathetic.”

Had I always
been this weak? When Eva died, I cried only a couple times. When I killed
Ursula in her nightclub, I joked about it. When my friends had been in danger
and I a prisoner, I’d been flippant and naive. Anything to ignore the terrible
fear in the back of my mind of the void. But feelings don’t just dissolve. In
fact, feeling itself is an
act
of release. Until you
feel
them,
those thoughts just swarm and gnaw at your brain like a colony of mold,
weakening you even further.

I had to stare
down my fears.

But like all
great leaps in character it was not so much a leap as a fall. As I sat in the
car, my forehead conforming to the pattern of the steering wheel cover, I
relived the vision again and again. Each avenue had been explored and I had
even gone much farther. I had spoken to the watcher, rid us of her informing
intrusion at least for now, sized up our enemy, and made it impossible for them
to lead the weird stranger to her gallows. I had done everything that needed to
be done, except for the one thing I should have done from the beginning.

My fingers
came to life and marched to my pocket, retrieved my phone, and set it in its
cradle on the dash. I turned the key. The car beeped, Bluetooth connection
established. Without even lifting my head, I pushed a button with my chin and
said, “Call, Matt.”

The woman’s
voice echoed mine, but sounded rather dispassionate about the whole thing.

The phone rang
only once. When he answered, I could tell he already knew it was me. There
would be none of that needless small talk—thank God for caller ID. We could
slip back into the cadence we’d quitted so recently, and I could wrap his voice
around me like a nice, old blanket.

“Hey there,
Ninja Girl,” he said with a smile in his words and a gentle sigh. “What you
been doin’?”

I tried to
quip back like the ripcord I was but failed. My voice caught. I fought with it
for a moment and finally managed to speak. He waited patiently.

“I miss you
guys,” I said quietly.

I could tell
by his breathing that he could hear the pain in my voice. “Immortal road trip
not what it was cracked up to be?”  

Drops spilled
over the rims of my eyelids and sparkled on the leather beneath my nose. “There’s
just so much…,” I began, but how was I to explain what I felt to a man who had
never read a mind, seen an event over and over from every possible angle,
learned a language in five seconds flat? “It all gets pushed into a few
moments. All the faces...stories, images…they get smooshed together, and I try
to…” I could hear the desperation in my voice. “I try to package them up, I try
to make them as smooth and simple as possible, but I can’t. I see everything,
every detail and it’s filled up every single spare inch.”

I broke down
for the third time that day. He listened to me cry and didn’t even bother to
shush me. He just sat there, matching my quiet weeping with the rhythm of his
breath.

“I’m losing
it,” I admitted finally.

I could tell
his eyes were closed. Men like him have open eyes in their voices; you always
know when they
see.
Right now he was trying just to feel, so his eyes
had to be closed.

“You’ve gone
through a lot of changes. Maybe it will take some time to learn to cope. It may
not feel like it’s that simple right now, but maybe it is, hmm?”

I let out a
shaky breath and nodded against the wheel. “But, Matt, I...I’ve had a terrible
day.”

“Oh? Wanna
talk about it?”

For a moment
he sounded so like my father that it coaxed a small squeak from me.

I realized
then how much of our friendship was had over the phone. Calls about Eva, calls
about Arthur, calls about this, that, or the other. Had it always been like
this? In the Dark Ages, before technology, had people just gone through life
lying to one another or had they sat down, face to face, bared their souls, and
suffered in self-consciousness? Or had we invented gadgets just so that we
could finally unburden ourselves? Were we an entire race of people opposed to
squirming or a race on the verge of great desire, looking out over some horizon
line?

I knew Jinx
would say that technology was the only reality left to evolution since it had
halted
natural selection, giving us medicine, surgery, knowledge of the heritable
baggage of our parents’ genomes. Technology was neither good nor bad, just an
extension of our own craft, but I knew it was merely the easiest extension. Those
little mechanical bridges brought together vast distances that only
seemed
vast.
Really, they were so small, only a breath away. We just couldn’t see it.

We saw the
world as it appeared and tapped the resources at our fingertips, but there was
so much more to us. There were deep wells of potential, unbounded assets that
could reach across divides and bring us all together in a way nothing ever had.
Technology wasn’t our evolution, it was our crutch.

So much easier
to make it difficult.

“Come on,” he said.

But until I
could reach across with only my soul and make him
feel
me, all I had
were words, spoken on a frequency, carried and bounced about by satellites
hovering thousands of miles above.

“I killed
someone.”

No one saw it
as the great transgression I did. It was just an unavoidable occurrence. Well,
however impossibly fated it was, it was
happening
to me. My destiny had
crossed paths with that man’s in a massive train wreck, and I, the stronger,
had triumphed. However unavoidable it was, I had made it that way.

Matthew sat up
in his chair, and I could almost hear his mouth snap open like the rolling
blinds on the window in his office. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, but
he’s not.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know.
He may have been a bad man, a good man, but…I killed him, a person who had
cheated death for years, and he lost a hard-fought battle because I lost my
temper.” My voice swung upward, warning of a distraught wail. “What’s wrong
with me?”

“Lilith, hush.
Don’t cry like that, please.”

He would have
been a good father. It felt somehow tragic that he had only ever taken care of
other people’s children, found other people’s children, buried other people’s
children. Perhaps that was commonality that bound us together so tightly.

“I’m sure
there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

“If you
suggest it’s that time of the month I swear I will never speak to you again.”

“Don’t. It’s
not the right time to joke. I won’t hold it against you if you’re just
miserable for a while.” I heard him pull his hand across his stubble in a sound
like a body being dragged through gravel. “You’re more acquainted with how
these things work. You know there has to be a reason.”

“I don’t know
that, Matt. I don’t.”

“Well, fine. I
will know it for you. There
is
a reason.”

In his voice I
heard the stolid optimism that had not been his originally. It had belonged to
me. I had loaned it to him weeks ago and apparently had never gotten it back. Everything
I had done had ended badly, and, despite the fact that I was trying very hard
to be the woman Arthur kept warning me I was, I was failing and had no idea
why. Now Jinx was under the impression that just because one or two awesome
things had happened around me, I was there to single-handedly save the
immortals from their own unending stupidity.

For some
reason then, I thought of my one real success, Karl, and needed to know for
sure if I could count him as such. “Have you heard from Karl recently?”  

Matthew let
out a dark chuckle. “Funny you should mention that. I have something I want you
to hear, but only if you’re up to it.”

“I need
something besides this.”

He didn’t ask
me what I meant. He got out of his chair and opened the farmhouse door. I could
hear that the coffee house was empty, it being early Sunday morning, but the
tinkle of glass told me Sam was hard at work, cleaning dishes and restacking them
for a day of fantastic but muted customer service.

“Hey, Sam,
play it again,” Matt instructed with his mouth away from the mic.

I couldn’t
help it; I snorted and began to laugh like a crazy person. I had always known
he was my Humphrey Bogart, no matter how strenuously he denied it or how
scathing his glares had become. He heard me and returned to the phone with a
chuckle.