The Breath of God (43 page)

Grant
. She had to get to Grant.

Kristin lunged through the door to her freedom. Once outside, however, she couldn't resist a glance into the apartment behind her. The gas lantern cast a pale glow into the room. Her attacker lay unmoving on the dusty wood floor, the side of the chair leg embedded in the man's gaping mouth where she must have struck him. A dark pool of blood spread outward from his head.

Oh God,
she thought,
I've killed him.

Kristin ran as fast as her legs would take her. From the maze of narrow streets she knew that she was in Old Varanasi. If she kept heading in one direction, she would eventually hit either the river or the main road at the edge of the small town. In either case, she would be able to find her way back to the hotel, which was within a mile or two of the city center. She ignored the bewildered stares of the shopkeepers, pedestrians, and pilgrims. In a city where amputee beggars, corpses, and stray livestock all competed for space on the street, the sight of a bruised and battered Asian American woman running in an open shirt with wood handles taped to her arms couldn't have been too great a shock.

When she finally burst through the lobby doors of the Hotel Taj Ganges twenty minutes later, the first thing she saw was Grant talking animatedly with a short uniformed police officer and the hotel manager by the reception desk.

Grant had accompanied the younger officer back to the hotel. He'd held out a slim hope that she would be there waiting for him, but they found nothing. He explained to the officer and the hotel manager that he needed a driver to go with him into the city to search for signs of her. He had a picture of her on his laptop that he could print in the business office, but the manager explained that with the power failure, the hotel's generator only ran the lights in the lobby.

A commotion at the lobby entrance caused them to turn.

The sight hit him like a shot of adrenaline directly into his heart.

“Kris!”

She ran across the marble floor, collapsing into his arms.

“What happened?” She had pieces of wood taped to her arms. “Are you okay?” With a quivering hand, he lifted the chin buried on his shoulder. The side of her face was blue and swollen. His voice was barely above a whisper. “What did he do to you?”

He repeated the questions over and over as if his own voice would make the answers okay. But rather than respond, she just gripped him tighter. Grant had a vague awareness of those around them watching the bizarre scene in the hotel lobby, but that didn't matter to him. His senses narrowed to Kristin. His hands pressed into the smooth skin on her back, damp with perspiration; he inhaled the scent of her hair; he felt her breath on his neck.

Then he gently pulled her arms from around him and carefully removed the duct tape and wood sticks from her forearms.

“Kris,” he repeated, “please talk to me.”

Keeping her silence, she tilted her face to his and kissed him deeply.

Jesus,
The Gospel of Thomas,
AD 1st-2nd century

The Buddha,
Digha Nikaya, Sutta Pitaka,
2nd-3rd century BC

I
SSA STARED UPWARD at the moon; only a faint glow emanated from the edge of the dark disk. Issa sat on the damp leaves in the mountain forest that he'd been traveling through the past forty days and nights since he'd left the town by the holy river. He was hungry. Before leaving the town, he'd packed his sack with bread and a skin of wine. He didn't expect to be traveling this long. He'd encountered a few camps of monks along the way who generously shared their food, but he knew if he didn't make it to another town soon, he would starve to death.

Issa pulled his cloak tighter around him. The wind, the
ruach
, whistled as it moved through the canopy of pine needles draped from the trees like a disembodied spirit circling above him. Glancing around in the faint light of the stars, he sensed that the forest had taken on a different character in the night than during the day. He felt its aliveness, a presence in the plants and the creatures that moved in the shadows.

Issa knew that he was on the verge of a breakthrough, an understanding that had eluded the rabbis at home, a discovery that would justify his journey and the hardships he had endured. Sometimes when he was practicing the techniques he'd learned by the river, he caught a glimpse of this understanding—like the flicker of a single candle flame from across a nighttime field. But the light was always out of his reach. Just when he thought he was close, his thoughts would intrude, jumping from one inconsequential topic to another. His teacher had called this his monkey-mind.

Issa thought back to a lesson his teacher had taught soon after he'd arrived in the town by the sacred river. “So my atman is like my soul?” Issa had asked.

“Originally the word
atman
meant breath, but today we use it to signify the force that brings you life and animates your actions,” his teacher replied, reminding Issa of a lesson the rabbis at home had taught.

“In the tongue of my scripture, we call that
nephesh
.”

“Your atman resides deep within you, eternal and unchanging. But more important to realize is that the atman deep inside you also contains the light of Brahman.”

Issa struggled with the strange idea that a piece of God, or Brahman, as the people of this land spoke of him, was present in every living thing. “If God is more than just the creator and protector of the world but is part of life itself, why have I never recognized this presence inside myself?” he asked.

Before his teacher could respond, Issa added, “For that matter, with God present in all living creatures, why do we see death and sickness around us?”

Amused by Issa's rapid-fire questions, the teacher responded, “Being able to debate about God doesn't mean you understand God. Your atman is hidden deep inside the layers of what you consider to be your self: your thoughts, your personality, your emotions, your memories. You, my son, are a child of God. You just do not yet see this.”

“But how is that possible?”

The teacher considered Issa for a moment and then pointed to a magnificent tree about fifty paces down the bank of the river. “Bring me a fruit from the banyan tree.”

“A fruit? I don't understand.”

“I know.” The teacher pointed to the tree again.

Issa stood and jogged down the riverbank to the solitary tree whose branches extended the length of the entire clearing and whose multiple twisted roots grew from the high limbs to the ground like gnarled fingers reaching for the dirt. Issa stood on his toes and reached for one of the lowerhanging fruits. He picked it and then examined its firm and wrinkled flesh. It was burnt orange in color but had no discernible scent.

He carried it back to his teacher.

“Break it open.”

Issa tore into the fruit. The stringy flesh stuck to his fingers.

“Now open a seed.”

The seeds were tiny and the juice of the fruit made them slippery. After several tries, Issa grasped one between his fingernails and snapped it in half.

“What can you see?”

“Nothing.” Issa shrugged.

“Exactly!”

Issa didn't try to hide the look of confusion that passed over his face.

The guru pointed to the split seed. “From that nothingness that you cannot see, we get the mighty banyan tree. That which you cannot see in the seed exists within you too. It also gives rise to the universe around you.”

“If I cannot see it, how do I know it's there?”

“Eternal and infinite, God cannot be comprehended, but you can touch and experience your own being directly. Once you understand your own nature, only then will you understand God.”

As the memory of his teacher faded from his mind, Issa leaned backward against the trunk of a pine tree. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. The aroma of damp earth filled his nostrils. He allowed this to pass through him. Issa lost track of time; he was relaxed but not sleepy. Then the flicker appeared to him. The dancing flame was faint but steady in the darkness of his mind. This time Issa didn't strive for the flame; he just allowed it to be.

Suddenly Issa understood. He understood that the truth lay not in the religious texts that he'd studied—the Torah, the Vedas. Nor did it lie with the teachers—the gurus of this land or the rabbis in his own—but it lay deep inside him, just as its presence also surrounded him. He'd just never known where to look before.

Issa was filled with an energy unlike any he'd ever experienced before. As he continued to breathe, he felt the candle flame within him grow into a raging fire.

G
RANT TIGHTENED his fingers around the man's neck.

The man's red and scaly face turned a more gruesome shade of purple as Grant choked the life out of this person who had kidnapped Kristin, shot Jigme, and killed Deepraj and Razi. The feeling of the power surging through Grant's forearms was as addictive as any narcotic.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.”

Grant's eyes opened. The bright lights of the plane's cabin caused the fantasy to fade. A tightness in his chest replaced the fullness in his arms. Not only was the idea of extracting revenge on this man just a fantasy, the reality was that he'd sat helplessly in a hotel room during Kristin's assault, just as he'd lain on the ground when Jigme was shot.

The pilot of Druk Air flight 203 broadcast over the intercom in a clipped British accent. “On the left side of the plane, you can see Mount Everest, at twenty-nine thousand thirty-five feet the tallest point on earth. Next to Everest you will find the ridgeline of Lhotse.”

Grant peered out the window at the mountain range beside the plane. They'd left New Delhi midmorning, on the flight that Grant had booked two days earlier just before he'd learned of Deepraj's murder and Kristin's kidnapping. Grant had wondered whether they would even make the flight, but the interviews with the police had been almost as brief as they had been in Agra. The authorities seemed to be happy when he told them they were leaving the country. After a short stopover in Katmandu, Nepal, to let on new
passengers, they were now en route to Paro, Bhutan. At cruising altitude, the snow-covered peaks were almost parallel to the plane's wings. The cloud ceiling was thousands of feet below them, obscuring the ground, but the view of the highest summits in the world thrusting up through the clouds was clear.

“Which one?” Kristin asked. She leaned across Grant's lap to look out the window with him. He tried not to stare at the purple bruise along her jaw.

“That one. In front of the wing.” He pointed to the pyramid-shaped mountain, steep black rock on one side and brilliant white snow covering the rest.

“Magnificent.” She raised her camera to the Plexiglas and snapped a series of pictures.

An unexpected emotional response from seeing the tallest mountain in the world displaced Grant's fantasy of revenge and his memory of helplessness. The thought of the forces of nature that had created this mountain over billions of years put some perspective on their travails. As he watched a wispy plume of snow rise from Everest's summit, he thought of the men and women who had struggled past physical and mental exhaustion on their quest to reach the peak, and of the many others who had perished trying to do so.

“Do you think he'll be waiting for us?” Kristin asked.

“Jigme's last email said he'd meet us outside baggage claim.”

“I wasn't talking about Jigme.”

One look at her furrowed brow and tight lips cleared up the misunderstanding, and he understood which “he” she meant.

“I don't see how,” he said, taking her hand. “Since I erased his spyware programs from my computer, he can't track us anymore.”

“I don't know what I might have told him when I was drugged.”

That thought had worried Grant as well, but he didn't want her to know that. “This flight was the next one out of India for Bhutan. The train would take much longer. And you know how difficult it is to get a visa.”
But
, he thought, as soon as he spoke the words,
that madman has been remarkably persistent in tracking us so far
.