The Breath of God (5 page)

“Yes, that's the common translation, but not entirely accurate,” Kinley said without missing a beat. “Actually,
dukkha
means
out of balance
, like a cart with a broken wheel.”

“So you're saying that my life is out of whack right now.” Grant put his pen down and looked Kinley in the eye. “I could have told you that.”

“Indulge me in a story,” Kinley began, as if he were telling a fable to a group of children gathered at his feet. “A farmer in the foothills of the mountains had a beautiful horse that ran away. The farmer's neighbor stopped by
to console him on losing such a magnificent animal, but the farmer surprised his neighbor by saying, ‘Who am I to judge what is an unlucky event or a fortunate one?' The next day his horse returned, bringing with it a herd of similarly beautiful wild horses. The neighbor returned and said, ‘You were right yesterday not to wallow in your loss. Look how fortunate you are now with all these horses.' But the farmer surprised him again by repeating his comment from the previous day, ‘Who am I to judge what is an unlucky event or a fortunate one?' A few weeks later the farmer's son fractured his leg while trying to break in one of the new horses. Of course, the neighbor returns to offer his condolences again, certain that the farmer cannot be unaffected by his son's injury.”

“Let me guess,” Grant intervened, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “Even with his son lying in bed, his leg in a splint, the farmer repeats his previous response, ‘Who am I to judge what is an unlucky event or a fortunate one?'”

Kinley grinned and rested a hand on Grant's cast. “The following week the army came through the farmer's village, drafting men to go to war, but they passed over the farmer's son because of the broken leg.”

“Well, I'll be safe then, if the Bhutanese army comes looking for soldiers,” Grant said. He added a smile so the monk who had just saved his life wouldn't think him rude.
But really
, he thought,
I need time alone to work through my predicament
.

“You are a student?” Kinley asked.

“Grad school. I'm ABD, sorry, all but—”

“Dissertation,” Kinley added. “I spent some time in a Western university.”

Grant raised his eyebrows. “Well, that explains the accent. Which one?”

“When I was a young monk, I often asked questions my elders felt were out of place. Spent quite a few hours in extra cleanup duty. The senior monk suggested to my parents that my taking a break from the monastery would be better for everyone. Fortunately, I earned the highest marks in my class and was given the rare opportunity to attend Oxford on scholarship.”

“Oxford? Impressive.” This gentle monk who had saved his life was also a scholar?

Kinley shrugged. “Once I finished, I returned to Bhutan and to monastic life. And you? You didn't travel to the East on a spiritual quest?”

Grant shook his head. “My PhD is in religious studies, but my interests are strictly academic—historical.”
Unlike my father's
, he thought. Grant's sole regret concerning his father's death was that he hadn't had the opportunity to prove to him the many ways in which the preacher was wrong where religion was concerned.

“You believe that the nature of religion lies in history?”

Grant's eyelids were becoming heavy from the effects of the doctor's tea, but he willed them open. His body wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, but this Oxford-educated monk intrigued him. “I'm interested in the early development of Christianity during the first century, and”—he hesitated for a moment as he pondered how to phrase the next part—“how contact with other cultures may have influenced this development.”

“What kind of influence?”

“I've been tracking several apocryphal stories.” Grant remembered his promise to himself not to reveal too much. In spite of Kinley's Western education, Grant knew that the culture of these monasteries was insular and cautious of outside disruptions. Finding what he was seeking would certainly cause a disruption. He decided to use an example from his first trip to India, rather than his most recent. “For example, some evidence suggests that in fifty-two AD, twenty years after the death of Jesus, the apostle Thomas sailed to India. A small Christian community on the coast in Kerala traces its founding to Thomas and the several churches he established before he was martyred.”

“Have you found what you came for?”

Grant shook his head. “I'm still missing a key piece of my research, which is why I'm ABD.” He closed his eyes, giving in to the weight of his eyelids.

Kinley rose from the bed. “Sometimes we find not what we are looking for, but what we should be looking for.”

Through closed eyes Grant noted that the pain was fading from his body. Whatever was in the tea was working. He heard Kinley's voice as if from a distance. “And I wish you good fortune on your search for the story of Issa.”

Grant's eyes snapped open.

The monk responded to the look of shock that Grant knew was plastered over his face. “You spoke aloud at night during your period of unconsciousness. Gave us quite a fright at times.”

Grant's pulse quickened.
How much did I say?
He'd planned to reveal that name carefully, especially after the monks at Himis clammed up at the mere mention of the Indian saint.

“Ah, yes,” Kinley continued, “the legend of a boy on a journey through India seeking answers to his questions, much like you.”

Grant forced his face to relax. “You know the story of Issa?”

“Rest now. Karma's medicine will help you sleep until tomorrow.” Kinley bowed from his waist and left the room in a flurry of orange robes. His apprentice, who had been standing so quietly in the center of the room that Grant had forgotten he was still there, followed him out.

Grant wanted to call after Kinley. Did the monk know the importance of the Issa story, that it could answer one of Christianity's great mysteries?
A mystery that would challenge everyone's assumptions of how the religion came to be.
Could it be possible that the evidence he'd been searching for—the evidence that his colleagues at Emory didn't believe existed—was here in this very monastery? Despite the flurry of questions swirling in his mind, the narcotic effects of the tea finally won the battle, and Grant slipped into unconsciousness.

T
IM HUNTLEY'S FINGERS stabbed at the keyboard. He used only the first three digits of each hand, but he entered code so quickly that the lines scrolled down the twenty-inch monitor as fast as he could read them. For the past three hours he'd sat military straight, immobile from the wrists up. He'd found the glitch in the program at five AM. Now it was just a matter of working around it. His coworkers had spent most of the past week searching for the bug. That was when his boss called him onto the project. Only he was smart enough to fix the issues the rest of them couldn't understand.

He heard their voices as they filed into the cubicles, laughing and recounting their Saturday night activities. Tim always arrived first to the single-story, red brick building. He slept four hours a night. Only weak-minded people needed more than that, he knew.

“Yo, Tim. Bring the pics?” Johnny Meckle poked his fleshy pink face over the front of Tim's cubicle. Johnny regularly complained to Tim about his difficulty in meeting the “hot babes,” as he put it. Tim tried to explain that if he washed his hair, lost some weight, and stopped talking about his programming prowess, he might have better luck. Johnny was two years older than Tim, but he followed his younger colleague around like a groupie. He hadn't changed at all since grade school. The two had been friends when they were kids, until Tim was forced to move away during his sophomore year of high school—after the trial that changed everything.

“Check your email,” Tim replied.

“That's what I'm talking about! Hey, y'all, come look at this.”

The other six staff members of Information Systems Group gathered around Johnny's cubicle.

“Ew w w!” drawled Elizabeth, a twenty-six-year-old data clerk who stood a full head taller than Tim and wore oversized glasses that made her look like a giant bug from a sci-fi movie. “What
is
that? A pig?”

“A wild boar. Tim shot it when we were hunting yesterday.” Johnny's face, illuminated by the monitor's blue hue, was giddy with excitement. “Just look at those tusks.” Johnny gesticulated with both hands. “Must be six inches. He could have killed us, if he'd charged. Right, Tim?”

“Sure.” Tim returned to his work, but he had difficulty concentrating with the stares of his coworkers. The hair on the back of his neck stood on edge.

“Tim was in the Special Forces, you know.”

“So we've heard.” Elizabeth flipped her dirty blond hair and proceeded to her cubicle.

“Yeah, Afghanistan, Iraq, places like that,” Johnny told the remaining five.

Tim tried to look busy, wishing his officemate would shut up. He was starting to question whether reconnecting with him had been a mistake. Tim had moved back to Birmingham two years ago. Two decades had passed since they'd seen each other, but Johnny was easy to track down. He was living in the same neighborhood they grew up in and saw his parents every Sunday night. The only good part about the reunion was that Johnny had turned Tim on to the New Hope Church. Tim hadn't missed a single Sunday since moving back to Birmingham. He sat in the front row every week. Now, however, he regretted having told Johnny about his military experience. Most of what he'd done was classified, but he had a few spectacular stories of mayhem from the front lines to share. But Johnny had been a loser when they were kids, and he was an even bigger loser now. Unfortunately, Johnny was the only one who'd hunt with Tim. At least hunting and blowing up homemade pipe bombs in the woods made time with Johnny tolerable.

Tim opened the metal drawer under his desk and removed a tube of Chapstick from the five he kept handy. His lips were cracking again. Even though he'd applied lotion to his face and arms before he left the house, the itching began to crawl across his skin. His fucking eczema.

“Tim can't talk much about it, though. Top secret stuff and all,” Johnny continued. “He was showing me some of the techniques they used to take down the terrorists. Our hunt was just like a real military op, right, Tim?”

The sides of Tim's neck flushed. Without looking at the others, he knew they were watching him with skeptical expressions. Judging him.

“Yeah, something like that,” Tim said. He began typing again.

Why did Johnny have to broadcast everything told to him? Tim began to have reservations about including Johnny in the plan he'd been hatching. Johnny was a true believer, but he was dumb. Yet Tim couldn't accomplish the plan on his own. Tim had been taking precautions, playing down his military experience, for example. He'd even kept a lid on his political and religious ideas around the office—ideas that had gotten him fired from his last job in Little Rock.

Tim had never been at home in the business world. The military should have been his career. And it had been, until a misunderstanding with his sergeant. The accusations. The bullshit. The early discharge handled quietly so that the Army would avoid embarrassment with one of its elite spec ops intelligence operatives. Having to return home to live in the apartment above his mom's garage had been the ultimate insult. He knew in his bones that God had greater plans for him. Now he was stuck in a glorified warehouse in the dark with these other losers, working in the back office for a medical data processing company. He could do his job in his sleep, but the pay was good, and he needed the money for his plans.

“Hey, Tim, buddy,” a voice from behind him said.

Johnny ducked into his cubicle, while the others hurried to their stations.

Tim swiveled his chair to face Duncan Summers, vice president of ISG, his boss. Duncan towered over Tim, who remained seated. Even if he'd stood, at five foot six and a half, Tim would only have reached Duncan's goatee. Tim's relative height disadvantage to his boss didn't bother him, though. He knew that his muscular build was far superior to the taller man's. He'd snapped the necks of men taller than Duncan.

“Just reviewed your code on the new financial modeling package. Nice work solving the compatibility problems with our reports. We'll implement it
in November—two months earlier than planned.” The slap on Tim's shoulder radiated a heat that rose to his face. “Great job, big guy!”

“No problem,” he replied.

Tim swung around to his desk. He removed the cap to a ballpoint pen. While he used one hand to scroll through the window of code on his screen, he used the other to scrape the edge of the cap across his forehead where the tingling was quickly developing into an itch. He worked the pen cap along the permanent crease between his brows. His mother had offered to pay for Botox during his last trip to the dermatologist for his eczema. She'd said he was “too young for such worry lines,” but the last thing he wanted was to look like his frozen-faced slut of a mother. Though she'd never remarried after his father's death, she'd always brought home plenty of men. Anyway, he thought, his face gave him a serious look, and that's what he was: a serious man.

“So, how's the project going?” Duncan was still there, leaning down, his cheery voice now inches from the back of Tim's head. Tim could feel the humid breath on his neck.

“Fine.”

“Great. Just great. Keep it up, buddy.”