The One We Feed (18 page)

I could feel
him pulling away, tiny muscles strained at the moors of my affections and began
to unravel. I grasped him tightly and leaned closer, throwing my arms around
him.

“Tell me you
love me. Say that I’m not just a means to an end. Say I’m a person that you
wanted
to know. Say it.”

But I should
have known better. He reached up and disentangled me, pulled me back into the
less secure bower of his embrace and blinked at me in sadness.

“Lilith,
neither you nor I have ever had a choice in this meeting, and that is because
we are not individuals, no matter how much easier that would make things. You
know this.”

He took my
face in his hands again and ran his thumbs over my lips. It was all I would
have.

“We are both
the means to an end.” And he let me go.

I don’t know
why I said it, but I heard the words come from my own suddenly parched throat, “The
earth itself will testify.”

He stopped. I
felt his gaze pass over me, but it was not the breeze of conscious
consideration I knew. It was a rigid gaze that pressed me. When I caught it, I
could see for myself the edge to it, the keen satisfaction there.

“So it will,”
he said.

“You’re not
leaving for good, please….” A sob escaped my death grip. “Not yet?”

“No,” he
turned and took the soul away from me. It was fair enough, I was so casually
hard on it. “I am taking a walk.”

“We are like
the sun and moon, you and I,” I murmured. “I feel like I’m chasing you all the
time, and you are always far ahead, shining brilliantly.”

“You are
wrong,” he smiled over his shoulder at me, one blue eye sparkling, “it is I who
am chasing you.”

Then he walked
away and all my strength left me. It was the parting before the parting, the
herald of things to come. He was preparing me. The least I could do was be
prepared.

I stood up
when my legs would again hold me, and went back into the room, a new sense of
purpose awakened.

Chapter
13

The Wild Man

Arthur did not return that
night, or even the following one. He wasn’t lying when he said that he would,
but in my core I was certain that the relationship as I had known it was over.
It hurt in an entirely new way. What I felt was graver than loss, deeper than
sadness. I had grown comfortable with the idea of an “us,” but that was a silly
thing for me to have done.

There was no
contract amongst our little fellowship, just a few travelers all going the same
direction. It could never be more than that because, to realize our communal
goal, I was sure we would have to go our separate ways. We all had our roles to
play in the dharma, but if pivotal figures like Arthur and Mara were fighting
for my soul, did it mean my choice would change everything?

I thought about
it for hours and came to only one conclusion, that where the Buddha was
concerned, it could never be so simple.

Fucking Zen.

Sometime in
the late afternoon, when I had finally exhausted every possible television
channel, had spied on every neighbor with my sundry talents, and had even
attempted a game of
Go
with Ananda, Jinx unplugged himself from the
machines and plummeted back into the real world. For a long while, he stared at
the ceiling as if suffering from mental blue screen.

“You okay, pipsqueak?”

An eye rolled
my way. “I feel like I just looked up the Universe’s skirt.”

I stifled a
smile. He’d been working non-stop on the Rakshasa question, dancing between
screens and windows like a pesky, information-sucking mosquito. My emotions
were just a bit frazzled for our usual banter. “What’s she got up there?”

He twitched
and was suddenly on his feet. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

He didn’t wait
for me. By the time I got down to the truck, he was inside, bleeding a can dry.
As soon as I started the engine, he synced his phone with the computer and
programmed the GPS. The mechanical voice filled the silence, directing me
through two freeway interchanges and over a bridge.

After he’d
crumpled up a third can and tossed it to the floorboards, I cleared my throat.

“I’m assuming
you found out about the Rakshasa.”

“I’m an
immortal genius,” was his reply.

“Are you going
to tell me?”

“How’s your
pinkeye?”

I glanced at
him. His boots were braced on the dash, and his lip ring was clicking over his
teeth.

“I need to
know, Jinx.”

“And I need to
find a way to tell you so that you don’t crush my skull. I’m a great healer, as
we’ve already learned, but strangely it’s never fun.”

I kept my
mouth shut until we arrived at our destination, somewhere within Golden Gate Park.
Jinx walked me to a giant, ugly box of a building with a massive safety-pin
sculpture stabbed into the ground nearby.

“There’s a
special exhibit going on right now,” he explained.

I halted by
the ticket counter and crossed my arms. “After what happened at the rock,
you’re going to bring me to a public place?”

“Newbs need
pics. I can’t help it if you’re stupid.”

“And violent.”

He slapped my
arm with a program and dragged me toward a roped-off corridor where other
ticket holders had gathered. Groups of visitors were being loosed into a
light-controlled labyrinth, prodded with audio tours, told that the only way
out was to go forward. I gritted my teeth, wondering what they would say if I
had a psychotic break and sent the poor public into a stampede.

Jinx waved
aside the audio tours and hooked his arm through mine; once inside the gate, he
wove us through the connected rooms, scanning placards and glass cases for his
goal. Stone heads, weird carvings, artists’ renderings all blurred together
amidst the susurrus of hundreds of quiet observers. Pools of light drew us from
gallery to gallery, until finally, in a pitch black room with only one exhibit,
Jinx came to an abrupt halt and drew me into a corner.

“Sit here, and
just listen to me.” His voice tickled my ear, and I could smell cigarette smoke
on his hair.

“What are
those?” I pointed to the two tablets across the room. They glowed with the
incandescence of a high-powered spotlight, all their tiny rows of slashes
turned to deep, shadowy wells.

“Cuneiform tablets
from the Akkadian period.”

I blinked and
resisted the urge to pull out my smart phone. “What’s the Akkadian period?”

He pinched his
face with frustration and leaned closer. “Just listen. You asked me to research
the Rakshasa, and I did, but I think in patterns, and every time I would trace
a tale backward, I would find another. Lily, every culture on earth has a myth
about shape-shifters, werewolves, beast men, and berserkers. Every single one.”

Swallowing, I
slumped forward. It seemed wading through the quicksand of time was impossible
even for Jinx. “Thanks for trying, anyway.”

“No! You’re
not listening. Let me explain it differently.” He grabbed my hands and squeezed
them tightly. “Everything in nature tends toward entropy. You know what that is
right?”

“Chaos?”

“Exactly.
Everything falls apart, atoms scatter, and particles break up. It’s the natural
law of all matter.”

I looked
toward the roughened edges of the ancient tablets and wondered how much was
lost to antiquity.

“So when I
trace a myth,” he murmured, “I expect it to slowly unravel.”

“Like a game
of telephone.”

A red spike
brushed my face as he nodded. “Which means that if we go backward, the myth
should become less nonsensical. Imagery should show less diversity, there
should be greater consistency. We have a source-tale of a wild man, and as
people fanned out, migrated, conquered, they spread the myth. Over time it was
altered, used to explain all sorts of phenomenon, and the wild man turns to a
monster, but it all began at the source-tale. Do you get me?”

Sullen, I
hugged myself, folding his hand against my heart. “Are you saying that the
Rakshasa are not the source-tale?”

A docent had
caught sight of us. Jinx’s voice dipped into a breath against my temple. “The
stories are much, much older, Lily. The Wild Man has been around since the dawn
of civilization.” He pointed at the tablets in their vibrant display. “I’ve
traced it back to the
Epic of Gilgamesh
, the oldest literary work in the
world.”

I suffered a
pang of loss. My education in world history and archeology had been cursory at
best, and I could not remember ever having read the epic. Eva would have known
it instantly and would probably have been able to talk about it for hours. If
we had been on better terms, I might not need the lecture. Then again, if we
had, I might not be here.

Jinx braved my
intellectual wasteland with a determined huff. “The epic is the story of an
evil king, a tyrant named Gilgamesh who ruled with an iron fist, up until the
day a divine emissary named Shamhat, the Magnificent One, descends from on high
and brings enlightenment to a wild man.”

I glanced at
him. His piercings glittered in the diffuse light. “Enlightenment?”

“The wild man
and Shamhat bump uglies, and suddenly he’s all wise and shit,” Jinx translated
with a smirk. “Point is, Enkidu goes from a savage to a philosopher overnight,
emerges from the wilderness, and teaches the oppressor a thing or two.”

With a frown,
I peered down at the program clutched in m hand. A frozen, austere face looked
up at me beneath a crown. Thoughts were beginning to align, and the chill of
certainty was slowly turning me to stone.

“So Enkidu
taught Gilgamesh not to be a tyrant?”

“They become
great friends. They beat up some monsters, they cut down some giant trees, they
float a big temple door down a river. They basically go on adventures until the
day Enkidu is killed.”

“Enkidu dies?”

He nodded.
“Gilgamesh is so broken up he sits beside the body for seven days, determined
not to believe his best friend and teacher is dead. When he finally can’t deny
it any longer, he makes up his mind to journey to the underworld to find a way
to save him.”

Thinking of my
sister, I knew that was a sentiment I could certainly understand.

“Does he?” My
voice sounded raw.

“Well, he gets
hold of the fruit of immortality, but while he’s taking a brisk swim, it’s
stolen by a….”

My limbs went
numb.

“A snake,” I
hissed. It seemed then that the myth of the Rakshasa wasn’t the only story that
had ricocheted through humanity.

I could hear
Jinx’s throat working furiously and realized I was clutching his hand much too
tightly. As I let go, he took a deep breath and stroked my hair behind my ear
with a soothing touch.

“Let’s take
the myth out of it and go to the actual archaeological evidence.”

“Okay.”

“According to
all established fact, the actual king known as Gilgamesh reigned for 128
years.”

My body
lurched. I held him out at arm’s length and scrutinized his face. “How is that
possible?”

The brown eyes
held mine in a death grip. “I can think of a couple ways.”

“You’re saying
that Gilgamesh was an immortal?”

“I’m saying,
he might be the
first
immortal.”

“Mara?”

“A tyrant with
an army of monsters…what do you think?”

I released him
and leaned back against the dark felt of the wall. Suddenly, I could see it.
Just as it had happened for me, Gilgamesh had mourned his wild friend, and over
the still form, he had meditated, until the break with reality was so severe,
he had simply forgotten to die. But if that was how the king became the myth,
then how had the first Rakshasa been born?

As if he could
hear my thoughts, Jinx leaned close. “Maybe he’s trying to recreate Enkidu, the
brave and fierce. Maybe he was trying to find his friend. You said you saw them
capturing people. Maybe it’s some kind of experiment and it all goes wrong,
because whatever he does to them, it can’t compare with what the holy emissary
did to Enkidu. An eternity of failures, who knows what that could do to an
arrogant king.”

I watched as
humans filed in and out, oblivious to us and our charged conversation. The
crackling tension in the air would be attributed to the tablets, and maybe they
would be right. Gaining my feet, I wandered over to them and got as close as
the ropes would allow. I wished I could read them, but I had a feeling they
would always be something of a mystery.

I was joined
by my guide, and felt his gloved fingers slip through mine. “There’s more, and
that’s why I brought you here.”

Pulling him in
front of me like some kind of shield, I wrapped my arms around his waist and
leaned my chin on his shoulder. “Okay. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

He took a deep
breath. “Remember that everything tends toward entropy.”

“I remember,”
I said, thinking there was no way I could forget it. My life was enough proof
of the concept.

“This tablet
here,” Jinx pointed to the left, “is a story from before Enkidu’s meeting with
Gilgamesh, when the tyrant was asked to banish a monster from a sacred tree.”

I would have
groaned, had our watchful docent not slinked by at that exact moment. “What
kind of monster?”

“No one knows.
The tree had a serpent in its roots, a bird of prey in its branches, and in the
trunk….” He took a deep breath. “It’s called the Ki-si-kil-lil-la-ke, but what
it means is lost. It’s not an owl, or a snake. It’s something in between.”

“Like a
dragon?”

“Or…maybe not.
Fast forward to Babylon, when a winged serpent-woman called a
lilitu
torments men by moonlight, filling their heads with dreams. Skip a few more
centuries and spread out a little, and we have wraiths, banshees, and sirens,
and all of them winged serpent women on the warpath, all with the same name in
an infinitude of languages: the night spirit, the Lilith.”

Letting go of
him, I tumbled back and made a beeline for the next chamber. He chased me,
whispering demands at my back, but I couldn’t listen. My ears were rushing, and
my thoughts fragmenting. A solid wall of bodies blocked me, and lost, I ended
up near a giant sandstone gryphon with the head of a man. In its shadow, I
collapsed onto a bench and buried my face in my hands, fighting for control.

What did this
all mean? Was I a monster or could I stop it? Was I doomed?

Jinx gathered
me up into an embrace and shushed me. “That’s not the end, Lily. Just listen.
During the medieval period, the supposedly biblical Lilith appears. She’s the
first wife of Adam, but there are absolutely no traces of her prior to that
point. Suddenly she’s the great deceiver, the first to speak to the snake, the
one to turn her husband to the dark side. Lilith is the one who eats the fruit
of knowledge.”