Kinflicks (74 page)

‘What have
you
been doing all day?' I asked Hawk. ‘It looks as though you've been cleaning my kitchen.'

“No,' he assured me with a faint smile.

We walked outside. The birds seemed to be screaming in the trees. And the grass shone in the sun with a green more vivid than I'd ever seen. I blinked my eyes several times, dazzled.

‘You'd better go pick up your child.'

‘It's okay. I arranged to leave her overnight. I can get her tomorrow morning.'

Hawk looked at me with a faint smile and said, ‘It
is
tomorrow morning.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘How long do you think you were down there?'

I considered the question, trying to pinpoint some frame of reference. I'd gone down at 8:30 in the morning. I'd eaten three sandwiches and drunk some water…According to my calculations, it would have to be early evening. But then why was the sun in the east, not even to the midday point overhead? I looked at Hawk with alarm.

‘It's eight in the morning.'

‘How can that
be?'
I gasped, outraged. I felt like the Parisians in the Middle Ages who rioted when Pope Gregory XIII subtracted ten days from the calendar to synchronize it with the solar year: They thought they'd lost ten days of their lives. I had lost one entire night of my undoubtedly foreshortened life!

Hawk was studying me with detached interest. Apparently he enjoyed driving people to insanity. I turned on him, sputtering.

He shrugged. ‘Do you or don't you want me to train you? I never said it would be fun or painless. And I never said you'd come out of it with all your most cherished notions intact.'

‘I don't like being used as a guinea pig.'

‘I'm
not
using you as a guinea pig. I already
know
what I'm teaching you. I'm just trying to get you to entertain in your conscious mind the things you already know unconsciously.'

‘Hmph!' I had enough trouble with my conscious mind, without its being swamped by inane information from my unconscious. But if this was what it was going to take to get laid by a war hero, I supposed I'd have to put up with it.

When I got to Angela's, Wendy raced to me and threw her arms around my knees shrieking, ‘Mommy! Mommy!' I swept her up and hugged her, feeling odd because according to my version of reality, I'd hardly more than left her. But clocks everywhere insisted on pointing out my error. The whole idea, according to Hawk, was that it
wasn't
‘my error,' that my version was valid. But how was one to, say, bake a presentable pie for Ira's hunting trips on inner space time?

Angela was cuddling her new baby, who wore a pink stretch suit and flailed her little arms as though at an invisible punching bag. Her tiny head was covered with tufts of fair brown hair. Her soft spot throbbed. Longing gripped me. I craved a new baby to hold. Sensing this, Angela reluctantly handed hers to me. I held her gingerly, having already forgotten, after so little time, how to position a baby to keep its head from snapping off its wobbly neck. I leaned down and sniffed, always having loved the odor of baby powder and the generally fresh new scent of an infant. I fondled her firm flesh through the stretch fabric of the suit. Today, as a result of my sensory deprivation in the cellar, the scent, the feel of the flesh, were almost overpowering. My dormant maternal longings were rekindled. I stared at the baby with adoring desperation and shook under the strain of wanting one so badly. Babies were my bailiwick, what did I want with transcendence?

Angela smiled, taking it all in with approval. ‘Ira tells me you have your hearts set on a son this time.'

‘I wouldn't drown either kind in the bathtub,' I admitted. Wendy was scaling my legs in a frenzy of jealousy. I handed the sweet-smelling bundle back to Angela, reminding myself firmly that all the world adores a kitten, but who needs another cat?

While Wendy played, Hawk lectured me by the pool on nostrils — which, it turned out, were not nostrils at all to the cognescenti but were rather extensions of astral ducts that conveyed cosmic energy to the body.

‘You breathe moon breath for twenty-four minutes through the left nostril; then you switch and breathe sun breath through the right nostril for twenty-four minutes.'

‘No,'
I said, scandalized not to understand the workings of my own nose. “Even with my adenoids out?'

‘Only when you're breathing through the right nostril should you undertake actions requiring physical exertion and emotional commitment. And only when you're breathing through the left should you begin calm steady activities.'

‘That sort of limits you, doesn't it?' I could just picture myself waiting around all morning for my breathing to switch to my right nostril so that I could start vacuuming.

‘No, it doesn't, because you can change back and forth at will once you develop the skill. For the commencement of the Maithuna, for instance, we both have to be breathing through our right nostrils.'

I shot him an ironical look. I could see us lying there all night trying to synchronize our nostrils and forever being out of phase, like Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler in
Gone With The Wind,
each wanting the other only when the other had decided to leave.

‘Ginny,' Hawk said sharply, ‘I think your attitude toward this whole thing sucks, frankly. I've been putting up with it, thinking that you'd outgrow your juvenile need to ridicule unfamiliar concepts. But if you can't cultivate some reverence, we might as well call the whole thing off.'

‘Please don't, Hawk. I'll work on my attitude, really I will, Hawk.'

“All right. But if I have to mention this again, that's it.'

Looking at me sternly, he lay on his side and showed me how to switch from one nostril to the other, with his thumb under his ear and his fingers on his forehead. Then he demonstrated another method, massaging his big toe on the opposite side from the nostril he wanted to activate. I practiced these until I had discovered that they really did work; then I sat pondering the unfathomed mysteries of my neglected flesh.

That afternoon while Wendy was napping and Hawk was meditating, I went to the cellar to retrieve Hawk's breakfast tray. On his cot were some stacks of paper. Unable to restrain myself, I poked through them. They were sections of his historical science fiction novel. Glancing nervously toward the doorway, I read a dozen pages, in which a Vermont farmer and his wife by accident shot down a ski jump one night on a snow machine. As they sprawled unconscious on the slope, the Management Outpost in charge of the Milky Way galaxy zeroed in on them in response to vibrations from the crash. Interpreting the curious pattern of ski trails as fumbling Earthling requests for divine assistance, the Management Representative, with uncharacteristic benevolence, materialized an Earth-style executive suite at the Outpost and whisked the Vermonters into it. As they stood in their snowsuits dripping and blinking, he tried to recall the formula for transforming himself from a blinding patch of light into a form discernible to limited Earthling sense organs. Finally he managed to materialize in a quilted skimobile suit, discovering to his chagrin that he had given himself a long tail by mistake. He decided to leave the tail and hope that his guests, and especially the Home Office, wouldn't notice.

‘Interesting place, Earth,' the Rep said charitably, actually regarding it as the most hideous hell hole in the entire universe. Then he described his stint there as a Trainee several millennia ago, just as Earth was coming down with its disease. He had been an Aymara Indian stonecutter near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. The force field of a passing comet had conflicted with that of Earth, resulting in continuous lightning for days, which set off forest fires all across the globe and drove wild beasts down into the towns. Earth's axis had shifted and its rotation had slowed and its crust had heaved and buckled in great booming earthquakes. Volcanoes had spewed; tidal waves had uprooted huge trees and tossed boulders as though they were pebbles. Then Earth's poles had switched, and the Rep was no longer able to communicate telepathically with the other Trainees or with Management. This altered force field also jammed his materialization mechanism, and he was trapped in his Earthling body.

The ensuing decades were a grim struggle for physical survival. Rain, evaporated from the seas by the heat of the fires and volcanoes, fell endlessly, and everything rotted and mildewed. Crops couldn't grow. Daylight was a perpetual twilight due to volcanic dust. Scavenging hordes of starving Earthlings plundered the countryside. The Rep hid his family in a cave and they lived like savages, while friends and relatives died all around them from epidemics and malnutrition and demoralization. Those who survived were those who were able to develop ferocity and greed and cunning — the opposite of the qualities valued in pre-catastrophe society. Their chests expanded like those of asthma victims from the strain of having to breathe more air to absorb the same amount of oxygen. New babies were stunted and sickly.

The Rep retained no memory of his original mission. Management sent a Supervisor to Earth to report on which Trainees could be rehabilitated and which would have to be abandoned.

The Rep, responding to the timbre of the Supervisor's voice as he stood at the cave mouth asking for shelter, fell to the floor among gnawed bones, clutching his bloodied stone ax, and wept. Management was eventually able to rewire his scrambled neural networks and recontact him. And when he died, he was given his current desk job on the frontiers, which he regarded as a steppingstone to more important posts closer to the Home Office.

‘“So you see, I know what it's like to be an Earthling, incarcerated on your burnt-out cinder of a planet with no way out that you can see,” the Rep said sympathetically, smoothing the distinguished full head of gray hair he'd indulged in during this materialization. “I know you loot and murder with positive pleasure. But your moral retardation isn't really your fault. It was just one of those unfortunate accidents that go on somewhere in the universe all the time. But it does provide the more promising Earthlings like yourselves with the opportunity to understand the full horror of being cut off from Management.”

‘“Jesum Crow, where the hang
am
I?” muttered the farmer, blinking.

‘The Rep looked at him with dismay. He hadn't succeeded in making his guests feel at home, in spite of the executive suite. What had he overlooked? He definitely needed to brush up on his knowledge of rural American folkways. He'd ask his Assistant for a report right away. But his guests weren't exactly Mr. and Mrs. Sociability. Sighing, he hung up an X-ray and showed them Earth — a black pinprick afloat in a dark gray patch, surrounded by trillions of blindingly bright patches and pinpricks. He explained to the uncomprehending couple that the gray area was quarantined in hopes of containing the infection. Management was administering radiation and antibodies in hopes of effecting a cure; otherwise, the area would have to be plowed under and reseeded.'

The Rep then ushered the bemused Vermonters into the lab where new planets were being created. In micro-climate cages plants and animals and insects to suit the unique physical conditions of each prospective planet were being materialized. One planet with high gravity, for instance, was stocked with short squat creatures. Once the general pattern was established, the different species had to be balanced in terms of reproduction and predation. The Rep described the difficulties he had getting technicians even to look at Earth, since the way Earthlings were hogging Earth's Life Force Allotment (LFA) from the other species was so aesthetically appalling.

‘“And, of course, our scientists have their personal tastes to consider in designing their planets — colors, shapes. It's rather a game.” He sighed plaintively. “I always did want to be in on the creative side of the business…”'

‘I couldn't help but glance at your book just now,' I confessed to Hawk when I returned to the pool. ‘I hope you don't mind. I found it very entertaining.'

‘It's not intended to entertain. It's intended to develop in readers the mental set that will allow them to regard my “fiction” as a possibility.'

‘I see. You mean you really think that's what's happening?' I was beginning to suspect that I might have erred in my selection of an instructor in transcendence.

‘I didn't say that! I just don't want you regarding it strictly as entertainment.' He tugged irritably at the jingle bell hanging from his ear lobe.

The next day we cleansed the astral ducts that led from my etheric double, whatever that might have been, into my ‘gross physical organism.'

‘You respire approximately 21,666 times a day,' Hawk informed me. ‘Most of these breaths are a rapid shallow panting that fills about one-sixth of your lungs and serves only to keep your physical body functioning at a level of minimal competence. You must learn to breathe in such a way as to send a potent charge of prana to your root chakra, to arouse your dormant kundalini and fan its spark into an all-consuming flame. Which will leap up your spinal channel toward the crown of your head and unite with the mahakundali of shiva in residence there, polarizing each of your cells.'

‘Pardon me?' Once again, I was wandering blindly in a sphere with its own jargon, every bit as specialized as Joe Bob's football terminology or Miss Head's pronouncements on Descartes. I had some vocabulary work to do, if my relationship with Hawk was to flourish. But did I want it to flourish? I was no longer so sure, after my encounter with his book. Was he insane, or was he a prophet without honor in his own country?

‘You will understand,' he replied, waving my questions away like so many gnats.

We sat by the pool with our legs crossed and emptied our minds of trivia. I was trying to decide whether concern over the possibility of Wendy's falling into the pool constituted a triviality in the realm in which we were dealing. Then we emptied our lungs by drawing in our abdomens. We inhaled seven times, paused, and exhaled seven times. This we repeated ad nauseam, mentally intoning ‘om.' I waited for my kundalini to leap into flames, but nothing happened.