The 37th mandala : a novel (11 page)

"Eli," Derek muttered. "You started it all. It's too late. I can't take it back. I can't stop it now."

Fatigue was finally creeping up from within, insidious enough to alter the world he thought he saw. The room looked softened and blurred at the edges, part of a drifting dreamscape; he couldn't believe it was dawn already.

Goddamn you, old man, he thought as he threw himself down on the mattress. I wish I'd had a crackpot file back then; your letter would have gone straight into it. It was your fault, writing to me. You should never have let me near you. You should have known what would happen, if you were so psychic.

As he fell into sleep, he dreamed he opened his eyes and saw a mandala following him down. It hung above like a leprous chandelier, a gray wheel covered with a hundred crawling mouths. It was falling faster than he—gaining on him. A hundred mouths opening, tongues lashing out to catch a taste of him.

I know you, Derek thought. You're in my book.

Small comfort.

It was a slow day for Lenore. She had one class at eleven, a course in number theory, and then she worked from one to seven as a waitress at the Cutting Board. Math kept her mind sharp; the job kept her grounded in reality. The rest of her life, the domestic part of it, was vague and confused, its limits ill-defined. She never knew quite what to do to fill the hours. She did not do well with a lot of free time on her hands—time to think, to remember, to dredge up things she would rather forget. Especially now that she had few means of blotting out those memories. She couldn't drink—couldn't and wouldn't. Shouldn't, anyway. Even when she had pot, she didn't let herself smoke it before going to school. Maybe some of the discipline she learned there was seeping over into the rest of her life. She'd never had a schedule before, not one she'd chosen for herself. There had been plenty of curfews and house rules in the foster homes and halfway houses. She needed structure in her life, she admitted that now—but those had been poor excuses for it.

Facing herself in the bathroom mirror, she had a moment of queasiness. There was a huge scabby bruise on her forehead, right in the center. It didn't hurt. She couldn't remember for the life of her how she might have gotten it; she only knew it must have happened sometime during the night. Had she fallen out of bed, gotten a slight concussion? She must have hit something on the way down to make such a mess. No wonder Michael had kept staring at her all morning before he left for work. Why hadn't he said anything?

She leaned close for a good look, but it was just a moist scab. Capillaries had burst in her skin, forming delicate red filigrees under the oozing crust, like the tendrily bodies of bloodworms, wriggling.

Get a grip, she told herself. It's just a scab. It's not moving.

She was dizzy, though, and a little nauseated as she stepped into the shower.

She found a black wool cap and pulled it low on her brow; anyway, she needed it in the unheated classroom high in the old math building. It wasn't a crowded class, not at all like the crammed survey course she had taken her first term, before she found she could pass a few aptitude tests and skip entire courses. The other students were mostly younger than she, or seemed that way—if they were older, they'd hardly lived her kind of life, and might as well have been children. Geeks and nerds and quiet, plain girls. She felt like a barbarian among them, except when she was working, and then her mind seemed to whisper along in cool efficiency, and she knew she was as good as any. She knew she intrigued them, but she kept aloof.

The textbook they were using was off-the-wall, she thought; the young, acne-scarred professor had written it himself. He was taking them now through a discussion of the prime numbers represented as visual images, as groups of points. He chalked one dot on the chalkboard, then two, then three, then five, seven, eleven. The dots fell into irregular patterns. Each cluster elicited a running commentary; each had its own quirks and characteristics, its distinct personality. The professor's voice was monotonous, but it didn't lull her. The pictures fascinated Lenore. Thirteen: the professor couldn't resist a short talk on the historical significance of the set, touching on the obvious associations of bad luck, thirteen loops in a hangman's noose, Judas as the thirteenth disciple, and so on. Seventeen. Nineteen. Twenty-three. Twenty-nine. Thirty-one. Thirty-seven. Forty-one. Forty-three.

Thirty-seven.

The professor kept on, drawing his figures, making his dry remarks at which most of the class chuckled knowingly, their furtive secret little math jokes. But Lenore's mind hung back at thirty-seven.

37.

Suddenly a circular pattern hung in her eyes like the afterimage of a camera flash, an ornate sun-fleck. It was something she'd seen in that Derek Crowe book—one of the mandalas. She hadn't really paid much attention to how the things looked, not consciously anyway, but apparently it had seeped into her unconscious mind. She was already bent over her notebook, scribbling notes with one ear cocked to the professor's voice, but now she flipped to a fresh page. She saw the mandala hanging there as if projected from a slide. Fascinated, she set her pencil at the very center of the wheel and began to trace the lines, wondering at the optical illusion, marveling that her memory could be so sharp.

You see how clear your mind can be when you're not fucking it up with drugs? she told herself.

She traced quickly, deliberately; if she blinked, she wasn't aware of it, but she didn't think she blinked at all. She couldn't wait to get home and compare it to the book, find this particular mandala and see how accurate she was. The pencil spun and twirled; she rolled it in her fingers to keep the tip sharpened. The professor was wrong. Thirty-seven wasn't an ill-formed cluster of dots. It looked like
this
—like thirty-seven little eyes around a serrated center.

It was then she remembered the feel of the knife in her hand, Michael's knife, carving liquid light in the wounded air.

Her breath drained out of her and hung in space where she couldn't reach it. She was suffocating. Sparks tingled in her eyes, and she remembered something coming toward her, wheeling about, a whirling vastness placing her at its center.

Lenore dropped the pencil. Several students glanced over, kept gazing when they saw she made no move to retrieve the pencil, but only sat there trembling slightly. Finally a boy in the next aisle reached down, picked up the pencil, and set it back on her desk. He did it with a slight smile, and turned away blushing after a few seconds when she offered no thanks.

Her hand went to her forehead, fingering the scab.

The mandala, incomplete, seemed to burn on the page as if angry, insistent that she finish it. Instead she shoved her pencil into her purse, slapped the notebook shut, and slid out of the seat. The professor gave her an irritated look. She fled the room, thudding down the square spiral stairs of the central tower in her heavy boots, then out into the sun where it was almost warm. Pines cast cold shade on the parking lot.

As she drove home, her nervousness increased. She kept glancing at her forehead in the rearview mirror, picking at the scab. The skin was bright, raw pink beneath it; she tried to stick the scab back in place. Another blackout, she thought. But she hadn't done any drugs yesterday. It had been, all in all, a dull day, unremarkable except for Derek Crowe's lecture—and why that had stimulated her, she still didn't understand. For a few hours she'd thought she finally understood what Michael saw in all this occult stuff—a way of seeing into the darkness that always surrounded her. She had thought maybe there was some way to get back to the source of her troubles, and undo the harm. As if she could ever escape her depressions, her addiction not to any particular drug, but to oblivion.

She felt like a fool today.

And she had done something foolish last night.

That would teach her to let her guard down. She always had to learn these things the hard way.

The Cutlass was banging and groaning by the time she pulled up in front of the house. It was the only car she'd ever heard of that could overheat in freezing weather. She stumped up the driveway, hearing Tucker's music. The stereo played perpetually. She checked her watch—she had plenty of time to get to work, but she was already thinking she might call in sick. She felt sick.

She stood in the kitchen, anxious for a little hit of something, anything. She brought down a plastic film canister she kept in a high cupboard, plucked off the lid, found it empty of even the green dust of last summer's homegrown.

Blackouts when she was drinking, those she could understand. Blackouts for no reason, with no explanation, were another matter. They suggested some sort of chemical or physical problem—brain damage ... maybe a tumor. Some long-term effect of the designer drugs she'd tried in New York City—dirty, untested stuff.

She could smell incense from Michael's temple. She almost gagged at the odor, which brought traces of memory. Again she remembered carving the mandala sign in the air. And something else—an impression of something enormous sharing the room with them.

She went down the hall, pushed open the door to the library, and stopped. She felt suddenly dizzy, almost stoned. Optical illusions flickered in the dark room, coiling and uncoiling like tendrils of ghostly ferns. She shut her eyes. Was this some kind of flashback? Had Michael slipped her something last night—some sort of ritual drug, like peyote?

Even before finishing the thought, she dismissed it. No way. Michael wouldn't feed her habits. He'd quit actively urging her to give up every pleasure she had, every so-called vice, but he was still a fucking Puritan in black leather. You'd think he was a born-again Christian or something, the way he went after her for doing even the mildest drugs. And him with his magic and witchcraft. Some people thought they were worse than drugs!

He had everything so easy, seeing life in religious terms, in black and white. He was as bad as the Baptists, going door to door converting people. He had no idea how mixed up the world could get, how everything bled over into everything else, forming one enormous gray zone that couldn't be cleared up with candles or crosses or ritual knives. There was no symmetry in life, nothing so easy as good and evil. Sure, Michael knew all kinds of things—intellectual things, bullshit out of books. But logic and common sense were not his strongest subjects. He was off in another dimension somewhere, going on and on about the astral. But for all his occult knowledge, his philosophical talk about how the essence of life was suffering, he didn't know shit about pain. He'd never been through anything like what she'd gone through. He'd never suffered the kind of abuse that had been her lot. Mrs. Renzler was a drunken cow, but not violent. He hadn't been taken away from parents he couldn't remember and sent to a string of foster homes, bounced from one guardian to another. She didn't believe his life had ever been that bad. They argued about it sometimes, trying to top each other's store of suffering. Michael's mother had gone through three husbands, hauling him all over the place when he was growing up—from Miami, to Buffalo, to Baltimore, to Athens, to D.C. She worked sporadically in jails and prisons, and tended to fall for inmates, though not the violent type. Con artists, small-time crooks, they'd left Michael more or less alone. So his mother married criminals; everybody had their problems. Lenore wished her own childhood could have been half as placid.

"Just because I never got beat up or lost my babies doesn't mean I haven't been hurt," he'd say. "Shit's happened to me that's just as hard for a guy to go through, things a woman can't understand."

Maybe. Just maybe. But she doubted it.

The ironic thing was that Cinderton people thought Michael was the wild one. To them, he looked dangerous, the sort of kid who'd had a hard life, just because he wore toned-down versions of city styles and lived in a house with a quasi-biker upstairs. Around here, it didn't take much to stand out from the norm. It was worse when they got out of town and into the sticks. Cinderton tolerated a minimal amount of weird behavior because of the campus; freakish college kids bankrolled the town. Past the town limits, all bets were off.

She took a step into the room, as if it might help her remember what had happened last night.

She walked up to the altar and saw Michael's knife gleaming down in her shadow. Peering more closely, she saw that the tip was broken off, snapped right across. How had that happened? Michael was usually so careful with his things.

She flipped open the beat-up edition of
The Mandala Rites
lying next to the knife, upsetting the wooden wand that lay across it. The stick clattered softly on the floor, but before she could bend to pick it up, she saw the black mandala trembling on the page.

She bolted down the hall with a hand over her mouth, making it to the bathroom sink just as she vomited.

She hung there for a minute after it was over, running water from the tap, cupping it to her mouth. She sipped and spat, then splashed her face and reached for a handtowel.

As she patted herself dry, she glanced in the mirror. In shock, she put the towel down and leaned closer to the glass.

The scab was hanging from a thread of skin. She twitched it off and dropped it down the drain. The skin beneath was bright as a candy heart, except for the traceries of exploded veins, like the remnants of a hickey. She patted the spot with a damp washcloth. The capillaries looked weird, still oozing. Her eyes hurt from being nearly crossed, but she thrust her face still closer and stared without quite believing what she saw.

Sharp lines like spokes in a wheel, small speckled dots like ... like eyes. It was a mandala. The same she'd been drawing that morning—or damn similar. The thirty-seventh mandala, in amazing detail. It looked more like a high-contrast photograph than a tattoo. The harder she stared, the more she saw. She could make out the texture of the spokes, the glistening of teeth in the central mouth, all the moist eyes that seemed to be watching her.

Teeth, mouth, eyes?