Black Glass (19 page)

“Uh huh, two hundred K-W-D? Right. Sure. Drop call, Miss Sinkitty.”

“You sound skeptical, dubious, unconvinced. Check your bank account—I have just transferred twenty thousand world-dollars to your account. Check and see.”

Pup’s heart started to pound. He licked his lips and looked at the robin. It cocked its head as if wondering what he was going to do next.

He took a deep breath, and said, “Hold on.” He clicked
hold
and then clicked the over to wi-net, pressed speed dial for his bank account, tapped in the pin ...

$20,704.78

That’s what it said. They’d transferred twenty grand and they were offering him more. Lots more. What would he do for
two hundred thousand
WD? He’d do pretty much anything.

“Okay,” Pup said hoarsely, flicking the cigarette into the fountain. “Tell me more about what I got to do.”

Richard Candle was sure he wanted to see his Master. He just didn’t know if his Master wanted to see him. Candle had stopped going to sittings, even before Danny had gotten himself into trouble. Candle had been feeling too distracted by work and worry about his brother, and Kenpo was moody.
Just what a Buddhist master shouldn’t be. But he was the only major lama of Shiva Buddhism Candle knew of in the USA—he was revered, in fact, as a Rinpoche—and Candle valued his insight.

The lama was still living in the same place, in Venice Beach, in the penthouse apartment of an old five story building overlooking the Pacific. Kenpo insisted on calling the ocean “The Dead Sea.” The Pacific wasn’t entirely dead. But after a few superficial attempts at regulation, before they were undercut by despair over global warming, the EPA was privatized by corporate interests, and there was no serious effort at abating greenhouse gases, acidification, dead zones, vast tracks of plastic-debris, over-fishing, mercury toxicity, pesticide run-off, nano-particle clouds or industrial outflow. The consolidation of the corporations and their increasing influence on Congress had seen to that. A few “green” surges and a general shift to low-carbon vehicles hadn’t been enough to stop it, and international pollution treaties were largely ignored by the Chinese government, so that its countless unscrubbed coal-fired power plants continued huffing sulfites and acids and mercury into the air. In the quasi-libertarian free-market frenzy that weakened federal control, many U.S. states allowed similar coal-fired plants.

Candle rarely visited the beach.As a boy he’d found the shore lively with crabs, sea birds, fish, seaweed—the life of the sea. Now there was a stretch of drab sand flecked with cigarette butts, as if the beach had turned into a giant ashtray. The coast’s grimy deadness was depressing. And so was the imprisoning line of the levee protecting Los Angeles from the sea—he couldn’t see the infinite reach implied by an oceanic horizon.

He could hear the ocean churning but he didn’t look toward it as he climbed the old, creaking wooden stairs on the outside of the building, five stories to the locked gate of the penthouse’s deck. The elevator had a tendency to break down partway up.

“Is that you, Richard?” Kenpo called, from the other side of the graying fence.

Candle smiled. Kenpo would probably like him to assume psychic awareness had told him Candle was there. More likely he’d
looked through a crack in the fence when he’d heard someone coming up the stairs.

“You know it is! You going to let me in, Master Kenpo, or what?”

The gate creaked open and Kenpo gestured for him to follow, not even looking him over though they hadn’t seen each other for more than four years. A short stocky man, half-Asian and half-Caucasian, Kenpo was wearing his blue and gold robes today; the back of the robe showed Shiva and Buddha both riding a Chinese dragon. In the old days he’d worn the robe only rarely. Maybe he
had
felt him coming.

They were standing in the roof garden—it was protected from the periodic acid rains by a pitted transparent plastic overhang. Here there was life. In pots. Many large pots of plants, ferns and miniature roses and heliotrope, irises and flowering herbs from Tibet. Not that Kenpo had ever been to Tibet itself. Kenpo had studied Shiva Buddhism in Northern India and Nepal, but he’d been raised in California.

His wife Sing, a small, tidy, wearily-smiling Chinese woman in overalls, clipping away dead leads from a shrub, waved to Candle, and went through the glass doors into the apartment, probably to make tea.

“Your flowers are looking good,” Candle allowed. “Kind of ... lush.”

“Oh, I rolled back the covering yesterday, we had a freshwater rain ... they liked it very much ...” Kenpo was perhaps 65 years old—but it was hard to tell with him. He was scowling over some roses, trying to prop them up with a stick. “Some birds damaged these plants. The birds are desperate for food. They get sick, feeding at the dump. You get sick of the dump too, eh? That why you’re here?”

He looked up at Candle, flashing his yellow, widely spaced teeth. Candle was relieved to be here with him. “Maybe. Where I’m working now isn’t healthy.”

“You’re looking for your brother? That’s what I heard.”

“I think I know where to find him.”

“I tried to get him to come and talk to me. You brought him twice, I thought maybe he would come on his own one time. I
sent a message through that girl of his. But no. Ah, here is the tea already. Let’s sit here ...”

Candle and Kenpo sat at a wooden picnic table, eating small, mostly-tasteless cookies, drinking jasmine-scented green tea from small cups, and spoke of various things, as Kenpo waited to learn the real purpose of Candle’s visit. To one side, between two rose bushes, sat a three-foot-high cracked bronze figure of Shiva-Buddha—four-armed, with a third eye, but without the crescent moon, and the matted, twisted hair that some Shivas had. Usually it was either Buddha or Shiva, not both. This statue of the Shiva-Buddha was smiling, his face as detached and beneficent as any conventional Buddha, because, Kenpo had told him, “He is centered in Shankara”, the benevolent aspect of Shiva. But in one of his four hands was a sword; he could become the destroyer, as needed.

“How have you been?” Candle asked.

Kenpo sighed. He liked to indulge in a little self-pity with longtime students. “Oh—I had a relapse into opium-smoking.”

“Did Mai find out?”

“Yes, yes, she got very angry. I had a little withdrawal, not too bad this time. But you know—the world cries out for help. I hear the screams. I can do nothing for most people. Billions in misery, and I can do nothing. The sea dying, I can do nothing. The forests withering, I can do nothing! Nothing!” He shook his head. “Occasionally—I have to stop up my ears somehow. For a little while. Perhaps I’ll take up drinking again instead.”

“Oh, Master Kenpo—last time—!”

“I know! I was horrible! It was truly fucked up. But of course we know perfectly well what I must really do.”

Candle nodded: Kenpo meant meditation. More, deeper meditation. He taught that meditation was active and that even one man consciously meditating helped the world, if only just a little. “Are you still involved in Convergent Rivers?” Convergent Rivers was a spirituality wi-site where there was more argument than convergence, as Candle remembered it.

“Oh ... that.” Kenpo chuckled. “A Theravada monk led the charge against me, about two years ago. ‘You cannot be a Shiva Buddhist, there is no such thing, one is Hinduism and the other
Buddhism, they are separate traditions! You are a fraud!’ In so many words.”

“You told him it was a small sect—?”

“I didn’t bother. I told him the truth: I am a
Buddhist
. But we
use
Shiva, borrowed from the Hindus, as a symbol for our particular school. We are warriors for Buddha; we appreciate the destructive side of life as the partner of the constructive. He hated that idea—though many of them have taken up arms against the Chinese. Oh, they got so emotional, so identified! I stopped going back. Also some people, I think, were sending their semblants to the chats. I don’t want to talk to a damned semblant. They’re a social curse ....”

“You have sitting groups, still, I assume. I thought ...”

Kenpo poured Candle a little more tea. “You ready to come back?”

Candle sighed. “I have to try something. When they let me go ... my old life was gone. My career. My identity. I’m afraid I’m going to lose control. I have enemies. If they decide to move against me ...”

“If you must defend yourself, do not hesitate. Defend! I will help.”

“It’s not defense I’m worried about.”

“You’re worried you may lose control—and go after them? You may kill someone?”

“If they push me much more. They already tried to kidnap me.”

“Really! How tiresome.”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have come here. I put you at risk.”

“Nonsense,” Kenpo said, his face unreadable. “And as for your feeling disoriented—it’s about time! You should not be oriented to the world we have made. You should be oriented to the underlying reality. First you must see yourself and the human world as it is! You had a false orientation, before. You didn’t belong in law enforcement. I didn’t want to say. It was your life. But they are all corrupt, now, the police. Even worse than four years ago, Richard. The whole world, for decades now ... oh, it started in the late-twentieth century. People have always been sleeping, bumbling, shambling zombies, of course. But there was some
kind of guidance, some times. Not so much from institutions like churches. But from families. People took care of each other more. Families stayed together. People did things together. Now—children let their parents live homeless. For two generations now, home is the mesh, virtual space ...” He shrugged. “They have all lost their center. They’re not even representing themselves to the world—they’re represented by semblants, more and more. Societies at least, for better or worse, once had a center, a moral center, a character—they’ve lost it. They were eaten up and digested and now they have become what has eaten them, and its dreams are everyone’s dreams—its bad dreams! But that is like being in a bardo state, after death. Remember yourself—remember and you will find your way to the higher place. Come, Richard—let us sit. Let us just sit. Let the world crumble around us, let them riot and wrangle and roar and we will just sit, together. Come ...”

He led Candle to the other side of the deck, where sitting pillows were arranged in a semi-circle. A padded chair, facing the pillows, was set up for Kenpo. He sat down facing the semi-circle, grunting, muttering to himself, sniffling a bit. Then he settled into his sitting posture, scowled, closed his eyes.

Not bothering to remove his shoes or coat, Candle sat on a pillow facing him, arranged his legs to try to prevent them from going to sleep, straightened his back, closed his eyes, and found his way into the meditative state. It took several tries—he always got sidetracked into free-association at first.

Kenpo didn’t use the visualization that many other schools used; he regarded it as a crutch. He emphasized restful mindfulness. Candle allowed his muscles to relax, while keeping his back straight; he enclosed himself in a cone of attention. The cone was warped by passing thoughts, by restlessness ... and it disintegrated. He restored it, time and again.

He began to sense himself and to feel himself, as he really was. He realized he was in pain. He had been in pain since the ReMinding. In pain since walking out of that prison. But he had turned away from seeing the source of the pain. But the pain was there. Driving him. Which is why he’d gotten drunk that night.

He was in pain because his brother ... his brother had so easily, so cavalierly let him go to jail. Had seemed indifferent to
what was being done for him. No, not indifferent. Just ... as if it was normal, it was his due. And Danny hadn’t been there when Candle had gotten out of jail.

Candle looked at the pain, weighed it in his inner hand, felt its texture and energy, and color—it was indigo blue tinged with red—and detached himself from it, while remaining aware of it ...

He felt some relief. A new inner orientation.

Then an image sprang into his mind ...

He saw the birdseye drone that Rina had destroyed, that day. He saw it turning to watch her, in the bar; he saw her dancing up to the drone and netting it. Smashing it.

Then he seemed to see the undermarket room. To see it from above, near the ceiling. Through a crisp but slightly fish-eyed video camera ...

His eyes popped open. Kenpo’s eyes opened at the exact same instant. “What is the matter? You have not been sitting so long ...”

Candle stood, wanting to hurry to Shortstack and that room. But he didn’t want to offend Kenpo. He knew, though, that it was actually quite difficult to truly offend Kenpo. “I’ve just realized ... there’s something ...”

“That’s why you sit with me—to realize something, you knot-head.”

“No, I mean—something just came up that was in my ... it’s like I was thinking about it unconsciously and—I just realized I have to do something about it.”

“Yes, yes, that will happen—just go!” Kenpo waved him away, yawning. “But you come back when you can. Call me if you need help. And try not to go on the offensive unless it’s the
intelligent
thing to do.”