Craving (50 page)

Gasping, I dropped to his side and touched his shoulder. “Sam! Sam!” He rolled slightly, his hands clasped to the bloody opening in his side. Jinx leapt to his aid, adding pressure to the wound, while Matthew had already reacted and was staring down the barrel of his own weapon.

“Drop it!” he shouted, but it was pointless.

“Shoot me all you like, Detective,” Karl spat. “You’ll just be putting holes in you and your friend.” He turned and looked at me, his face glowing in a layer of feverish sweat. “Stand up!”

I got to my feet shakily, and stepped into his line of fire. “Karl . . .”

“I killed you! You’re dead!”

Confused, I held my hands out to him. “It was
Parinirvana
, Karl. I stepped back from the edge.”

“You can’t do that!” he shrieked, his arm shaking with the pressure of his grasp on the gun. “That’s impossible! No one has done that!”

“But…” I glanced back at Matthew. He was beginning to hesitate, his arm falling. “But, Karl, it’s what Ananda did, isn’t it?”

“Ananda never died! He pretended! We have machines now! I saw you flatline! I saw you die! You were dead for almost an hour!”

“But here I am. I’m not like you anymore, remember?”

“Damn you!” he growled. The gun exploded again, but this time, I was prepared. I leaned into it and stumbled backward at the impact. My shoulder went numb; the trickle of blood reached my hand before I felt it. I looked down and saw the gaping wound. Pressure built within it until it was almost uncomfortable, then the bullet slid out and clattered to the floor. The skin and muscle folded together and in less than twenty seconds, the wound was gone.

I raised my eyes to him. “Karl, put the gun down.”

“No! No, I won’t!” He waved it around, and with his other hand pulled out a tiny black object with an antenna. “It is bad enough we live in misery, but to constantly fight for something we can’t ever have is worse! I should have listened to them! I should have never allowed this to go on so long!”

He flipped a red switch cover, but before he could touch the trigger, the ground undulated in the throes of an aftershock. The cabinet doors of the nearby kitchen shattered as their frames warped. Glasses and plates fell from shelves and smashed to pieces. Matthew was thrown to his knees, the gun yanked from his grasp to skitter across the floor that split with a loud, tearing sound.

Karl stumbled, but instead of letting go, touched the button in vindictive pleasure. Percussive bangs resounded throughout the building, and the device sitting on the credenza exploded in flame, blowing an entire chunk of wall toward us. I ducked, but felt the large bodies of stone and wood slice past me and slam into the kitchen appliances.

Fire licked up the walls and it was clear that if we did not leave soon, immortality would be a moot point. But there was only one way out, and Karl was standing in it. He was hunched over, eyes glittering in rage, his face so flushed he looked sunburned. The veins on his neck were throbbing, and I could see the hurt and anger, built up over hundreds of years, oozing off him.

“Karl, please. Let them go!” I begged. The temperature was rising; moisture began to drip from my face.

“No! You will suffer just as I have, watching those I care about fall around me!”

I looked around for another means of escape, but every way was blocked by rubble and a growing inferno. I could hear the plaster upstairs beginning to bake and fall away, the wooden beams splitting in the heat.

“Why, Karl? Why are you so angry? Did you think that once you achieved liberation it would all be easy? There’s no such thing as peace. It doesn’t exist!”

“He lied to us! He promised us freedom and all we got was a new set of chains!”

A portion of the living room ceiling fell in and a roaring conflagration melted all of Jinx’s precious plastic creatures, turning them to colored streaks down charring walls. The beanbag began to brown, the fabric curling like a rotting lemon peel, the happy face scorching away.

“
Did
he lie to you?” I shouted back. “He said that you should obey the
dharma
, heed the words, but instead, you people turned him into a deity and organized a faith! What did it give you? What fears were you hiding and cultivating beneath that protective shield?”

“Shut
up
!” he roared, waving the gun at me like a talisman. We were fairly matched in strength and speed, and though I had more gifts, they meant nothing in these circumstances.

“I won’t listen to you anymore! Why would he show us this and then leave us here? Why did . . .”—his voice fell as anger boiled away and left the sorrow behind—“did he hate us?”

Beyond him, the grass glowed a vibrant orange, tempting us with its cool softness, when a sudden flash of lightning left a smoking black mark in its wake. Without warning, the sky tore open and thousands of gallons were dumped upon us, as if Nature, too, upheld the
dharma
.

Nature is the dharma.
It began with the Buddha’s sermons and was carried through time and space to the first Katsu, to the place with no roads. Like mathematics, Zen created nothing; it only uncovered the way the world actually was.

Karl turned and let out an incoherent cry of rage as his plans were thwarted yet again, and his weaknesses were laid bare.

Black smoke filled the room. At once, the air was acrid, a cloud of ash hot enough to burn. Steam and moisture dripped from the walls, and puddles began to form beside flashpoints.

Spinning in all directions, finally as mad as the creatures he had imprisoned, Karl leveled the weapon at me and pulled the trigger. Shot after shot ripped through me, a series of blows that winded, but did no real harm. One bullet clipped the side of my neck, another hit me in the stomach, and a third pierced my bicep. Arterial blood spurted down my front, crimson against the shimmering gold of my makeshift top, but it was not nearly so painful as watching Eva fall.

My joints and frame compromised, I collapsed to the floor to the sound of futile clicks. The gun was empty and no one else had been harmed. Throwing it aside, Karl made to lunge at me, to tear at my flesh with his bare hands, but suddenly, he stopped and his features slackened.

Ananda materialized in a cloud of smoke beside him like a magician, one graceful hand atop his head. The ravening spittle that clotted at the corners of Karl’s mouth dripped free, and as if faint, his knees buckled. He tumbled to the ground, but as soon as the contact was broken, he began to regress. Like a child, he crawled away from Ananda, until he could put his back to the security of the partially destroyed kitchen island.

He was sobbing, his breathing ragged. He put his hands up in front of his face as if to push the peaceful man away, but Ananda was not pursuing him. Instead, he sighed in sympathy and shook his head.

“Have you lost sight of the goal? Or has the goal lost sight of you? Where have you gone, Karl?”

Karl coughed and pummeled the air with his fist. “This was not how it was meant to be! It was supposed to end! We were going to change the world, but there was no way to change, there was just this . . .”

“You have changed the world, Karl. But is it more or less the world you envisioned, do you think?”

“No! No!” He shuddered and wrapped his arms around himself. I could sense the crackling energy building within him and feared that soon, if nothing broke, he would leap up and rip the heads off my friends and that I, a novice, would be unable to stop him.

“We would have followed him anywhere . . .” he whispered.

“You would have followed. You tried to lead, but I tell you, neither are required,” said a voice I recognized immediately.

“Arthur!” I gasped. I turned, expecting him to be the knight he was, to rush in and save us, but Arthur’s face was focused on Karl, and Karl looked as if he had been punched in the gut.

He had frozen, his face contorted in a look of horror. His limbs, like waxen prosthetics, fell to his sides. For a moment, I was confused, until I saw Ananda smile in a warm greeting.

“Cousin,” he said happily, and the world seemed to shift beneath my shaking limbs.

Cousin?

Tinier concerns melted, all my anxiety vanished before the most obvious of truths.

Siddhartha Gautama.

In the alley, it had not been an argument, it had been an accord, a bargain struck between two partners. Arthur had tried to tell Eva exactly the sacrifice she was going to make, warn her off it, but she had accepted the
dharma
and put him in his place. In turn, he had accepted her and vowed to hold up his end. Together they had guided me to the Crossroads, through careful manipulation and friendship. I was of myself, because of them.

“Art!” Matthew yelped. I snapped back to reality and found Matthew pointing to his gun resting near to the slack hand of our foe.

My heart was pounding, bones and sinew straining to make me whole again. Stunned, but responsible to the last, I began the slow crawl that would take me to the gun, as Arthur, the first and last real Buddha, stepped farther into the room.

His hair was down, rivulets of water dripping from it to the thirsty ground. Lakes had formed in the hollows of his throat and collarbone, and his clothes clung to him. The smoke and steam swirled in the gusts of wind from outside, obscuring him for a moment while my mind sought out the distortion that was Karl’s fractured reasoning.

Centuries eroded before my eyes. There he was as he had been in his middle years, a prince and a philosopher, wrapped in a saffron robe, his body thin and wiry. Kingdoms and thrones refused, he had wandered the earth for generations. He was nothing as I had imagined him, and yet, was everything he should have been.

Karl’s mind became stuck in a loop of reasoning. From why, to how, and back again, his thoughts swirled. “It isn’t so,” he murmured almost inaudibly.

My limbs revolting, I pulled and pushed myself forward inch by inch. A bullet worked itself out of my chest like a sliver and one less tear hindered my progress. I was within arm’s length of him, my bloody hand reaching for the gun.

“You aged! You withered away in front of us!” he cried out. “You were not like us!”

“Are you so certain? As certain as you have been about every other thing in your long life, my friend?”

My chest clamped down on his sadness and abandonment. It was a pain I understood, losing the one who guided you, to find that you could neither join them, nor claim the sweet release of death. My crawl came to a jerking stop, his feelings washing over me, putting out tiny fires that had been smoldering for weeks and even years.

“Lord, why would you leave us?”

Arthur’s tone was so musical, with no aims for power or desires for progress. It fell into our heads and let the words be absorbed in due time. “If I had lived, the seeming miracle would obscure the lesson. It was a choice and I do not regret it. The Buddha died that day. My name is Arthur now.”

“But . . .” Karl’s senses seemed to return. He looked around vaguely at the chaos, to find me close by. “We spent so long searching . . . if you could die, while we remained . . . but you . . . just like us . . .”

I couldn’t look away from him. The gun and its threat seemed so small then. I fell to one side and leaned a shoulder against the island, and either from shock or his affinity for the similarity I shared with my sister, he did not turn away from me.

“Nothing in this world is perfect,” I said gently. “Everything is perishable. No plan, no greater cause, just this moment. And if we have only this moment, to forget ourselves even once is to commit the most unspeakable of crimes.”

I dragged my lower body along until I could tip myself into Karl’s lap. I thought he might strike me, but he just looked at me, dumbfounded, seeing her smile in my face.

“The curses seemed so real,” he moaned.

“They are.” Another bullet pushed through to the outside and dropped into a fold of his shirt. “But they are by no means impossible to overcome. Nothing is, when you have forever.”

Beneath my ear, his skin was throbbing with the pressure of his pulse, but was cold as marble. I gripped his shoulders pitilessly and climbed up his torso, huffing and wheezing, until we were at eye level. With a deep breath, I closed my eyes and settled my mind over his. The images and flashes of meaning shuffled through my brain and were filed away in my now perfect memory.

I rested my chin on his shoulder, as the bullet began to squirm to the surface of my neck. “Desire is the cause of joy,” I said with a smile.

I twisted my fingers through his hair and pulled his mouth to the open wound. His lips closed around it and his hands clamped onto the small of my back. The tug of suction was almost sweet, and I found myself thinking that there was no sense in wasting it, if it was going to leak out of me anyway. His tongue touched the ragged skin, tickling it, sending a shiver through my spine that rebounded in my pelvic bone. Time obeyed a different rhythm until, weak and content, I fell away.

I did not look away from his dazed expression even as my friends tugged and lifted me. Even with the heat, fumes, and rain, my smile did not wilt. We left him there among the rubble, to confront his future the way we all entered and left the world: alone.

Spend this,
I thought, seeing Ananda in his glassy gaze.

“Katsu,” I whispered.

Chapter 30

I lay wrapped in a blanket in Arthur’s arms, healing bit by bit, watching through the car window as the fire trucks finished what the storm could not. The others had gone on ahead in the other two cars to care for Sam, granting me this opportunity to finally learn the truth. But resting there, listening to his slow, strong heartbeat, I realized I didn’t need it.

I knew then that I loved him dearly, in as many ways as there were people to feel it, and because I loved him, I had to trust him. It was a huge responsibility, to know that he would always rely on me to be my best, to withstand torment, to push for the success of others, but then again, responsibility was my middle name.