The Stud Book (14 page)

They were near the back of his narrow temple. Here he seemed older than she’d thought. Maybe pushing twenty-five?

Not all businesses are actually businesses. There might be reasons to shop only at the mall, at Lloyd Center, that place of predictable chain stores. Some kids grew up without ever seeing places like this; they only read about mysterious dusty shops in
Harry Potter
, as though every unregulated and irregular indie business tapped into the supernatural.

The guy gestured for her to walk around a partition. Anything could be back there. But he led and she followed and on the other side of it they came to a collection of musty old clothes, rags hanging from hooks. Words on this wall, smoother now, read
THE BHAGAVAD GITA TEACHES US THAT WORN-OUT GARMENTS ARE SHED BY THE BODY; WORN-OUT BODIES ARE SHED BY THE SOUL
.

A fat white canvas bag rested on the floor. The guy riffled through and pulled out a dirty sock and a wrinkled yellowing T-shirt. “Would you wear these?” he asked.

Arena said, “Is that your laundry?”

“Would you put this on?”

“No.” She got around him, one step closer to the door. He was kind of crazy, he was so earnest. His laundry smelled like it came from a house with too many cats. They were in a maze of half walls. When she noticed the receding hairline at his temples—that other kind of temple—he seemed even older. Could he be thirty? She’d lost all sense of his age. He was a freak. He was confusing. She sort of wanted to like him.

Arena felt the weight of the room’s darkness against her skin.

She had her cell phone in her backpack somewhere, and her mother’s new work number on the slip of paper. She rubbed the paper between her fingers again, as though she could call her mom that way, like a cricket. Would it look paranoid if she got her phone out? She tried to stay cool.

“And what about this?” With a flourish and a fling of his arm, he slid back a dark blue curtain. Metal loops clanked up above where they jangled over a suspended curtain rod. Behind the curtain a suit and a halter-style dress hung side by side, dangling from pipes near the ceiling. The clothes were lit from the floor with mini-spotlights the size of flashlights. Maybe they were flashlights?

Arena said, “I saw that dress at Ross, last week.”

“Really?” His face lit up. “I got it in a free box, out at the curb.”

“Score.” She nodded. “You got all this on the street, didn’t you?” His whole temple was full of the kind of stuff you’d see out there.

He said, “My point is, you’d choose new clothes over worn clothes, right?”

“Especially if they’re not my clothes.” Really, she wouldn’t wear the free dress, either. It was floor length and decorated with a fake gold chain belt and weird plastic stones, ready-made for a Carnival Cruise.

“What’s your name?”

She almost didn’t answer, then she did, because what difference did it make if he knew her name? “Arena.”

“Perfect.” He pressed a button on a wooden box, and a voice
came on: “Along with dead skin cells, we shed ourselves. Where do dead cells go? As they fall, are they energy or matter?” She said, “Is that your voice?”

He nodded, and held up a finger to show he was listening. This was quiet time. His recorded voice continued: “Einstein solved that problem. They’re both. Just as light can be both wave and particle …”

He said, “Embracing duality,” raising his eyebrows and nodding. “That’s the hallmark of genius.” He was in conversation with himself.

They reached the Einstein light boards: “Mass and energy are but different manifestations.… Matter can be turned into energy, and energy into matter.”

He said, “Hydrogen is two parts of each water molecule. Water is the key to life. With the hydrogen bomb, we’ve turned it into death.”

E = MC2 was painted on a panel, balanced alone on a pedestal.

He pressed another button on a box, calling his own recorded voice to speak: “Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Energy in an isolated system can only change form.”

He said, “That’s the key to reincarnation.”

She said, “Einstein wasn’t talking about reincarnation.”

“If energy is always transferred, there’s no death, right? It’s impossible,” he said.

“Are we even an ‘isolated system’?”

He said, “Tell me. Do you
feel
isolated?”

She nodded slowly, and in that nod confessed: She’d been lonely her whole life. She didn’t know how to talk to people or even how to look at them. She had her best conversations with her father’s old records.

He took Arena’s arm. She felt his energy and her own. He said, “Don’t be nervous.”

He turned to an old TV on a white pedestal. The TV showed footage of guppies swimming over the gravel of a creek bed. “Guppies can evolve in their thinking in less than ten years.”

Arena said softly, “I didn’t know guppies had thoughts.”

The fish stayed in place as they swam against a current.

“Guppies are breeders. They’re fish factories. But guppies
housed upstream, away from predators, breed less often than those in deeper water. That’s interesting, right?” He tapped the screen. “This is morphic resonance. They’re passing down knowledge generationally. They breed out of fear of death.”

Was that what breeding was about?

She said, “Pet store guppies breed.”

“Exactly! Because they see you—us, outside the glass—as predators.” He said, “And we’re not guppies! For them, ten years is generations. But if we, humans, give up our fear—live emotionally upstream from the threat of violence—we can evolve, too. We’ll change from generation to generation, moving closer to an earthly awareness. Let me take your picture.”

Uranus in Infrared
, she thought. She could still see the photo tacked on the wall toward the front of the temple. “No. Thanks.” She stepped away, not at all emotionally upstream from fear.

He said, “I want to show you something, about yourself.”

“I know myself.” She looked to the door. He’d be back to shedding clothes again next.

He put his hand around her wrist. “A photo of your palm.”

“My mom’s waiting for me.” Her mom was waiting somewhere, anyway.

“It won’t take long.” He started to take the slip of paper, her mom’s address, out of Arena’s fingers. She closed her fingers tightly. He let go of her wrist and draped an arm over her shoulders instead.

She said, “Photos show up on the Internet—”

He said, “Your energy is already out in the world. We’re all one on an energetic level. Look.” He nodded toward photos tacked to a felt-covered board, each one of a tiny glowing sun against a black sky.

The pictures were pretty and mysterious. They weren’t people, just shapes. Some of them were clearly ginkgo leaves, with the whole shape visible.

He said, “It’s a visual representation of your bio energetic state.”

Would it matter if her bio energetic state showed up on the Internet? She was intrigued. “How much does it cost?”

“I don’t charge for enlightenment.”

He waved a hand over a strange setup, a black bag on a table attached to a few wires. She slid her hand into the bag. It wasn’t like
any kind of camera. It wasn’t a computer. What ran without a computer anymore? He tightened a drawstring around her wrist like a single handcuff, then pressed a button. A light went off inside the bag. They stood together, silent and close, until he reached underneath the strange flat machine, under the bag, like reaching under a skirt, and his hand came out with a photo.

He said, “You have a very orange aura. That’s your dominant field. You’re an adventurer, aren’t you?”

Arena shrugged, unsure.

“I’ll bet you enjoy a physical challenge.” He looked her in the eyes. This time she really couldn’t look back, and looked toward Einstein instead. He passed her the photo. Like the images tacked to the wall, it was a glowing sun, a comet against a dark sky.

She said, “I should go.”

“Sure. Can’t keep an Orange waiting.” He smiled, showing his white teeth. “You chart your own path.”

He ran a finger down her arm. She felt his energy tug against her own like a magnet. Instead of meeting his gaze, she looked at the photos on the wall. “They all look pretty orange. Everybody’s an adventurer?”

“It’s a self-selecting population. Only the adventurous give it a try.”

She was in with a select crew. Like joining the marines.

On the wall in crayon, he’d scrawled
LEAVES ON A TREE! DROPS IN AN OCEAN!

“Let me show you something else.” He slid her backpack down her arms. Her back felt sweaty and naked with the pack off, like she’d lost her shell.

Another space on the wall said
STEP ON ANTS! SLAP MOSQUITOES. IT’S ONLY ENERGY TRANSFERRED. THERE IS NO DEATH!

He said, “Put your hand in the bag again.”

She put a hand forward, letting him guide it. He slid her hand into the bag and tightened the string. He stood behind her, wrapped his hand around her waist, breathed his minted breath, and said, “We live in a quantum universe built of tiny, discrete chunks of energy and matter.”

His body pressed against hers. His discrete energy and matter pressed against her. Arena had never felt a guy so close. She was
afraid to move. It made her sweat. He said, “We think we’re individuals, each living our own story, but our lives are only subplots in one meta-narrative, as energy rearranges itself through the universe.”

He snapped another picture.

Then he let go.

When he showed it to her, it was a picture of two setting suns, two burning orange fingerprints. “That’s you,” he said, pointing at the bigger mark. “The other is me. My hand wasn’t there, but my energy was with you.” He found a pen on the counter and wrote his name and phone number on the margin outside the image. “We’re perfectly matched energetically.”

He smiled his white smile in the nearly dark room and held the photo out, keeping it just out of her reach, inviting her to step closer, step away from the door, to follow him, as though that photo were bait.

D
ulcet was the living, breathing, boozing, and sometimes doped question in their group: What was the point of life after thirty-five sans kids? Sarah actually asked her that once out loud after too many Manhattans. It was the booze talking, coupled with Sarah’s own freaked-out drive to reproduce, and Dulcet let it go by.

She was surrounded by baby addicts. There should be a support group for them all, Baby Addicts Anonymous. BAA, like the sound of an ever-expanding flock of reproducing sheep.

Having babies only palmed off the existential angst on the next generation. It was a way to cheat, not a solution to meaninglessness.

She’d been called decadent for her resistance to reproducing, but it wasn’t decadent—it was restrained.

She’d been called childish, indulgent, shortsighted, by drinkers with big opinions, and she let it wash on by. Shortsighted? That was a laugh. She took the long view. Every story ended in death, right? It was childish to imagine otherwise.

And if people thought that having babies would somehow subvert mortality, by creating a genetic lineage? The short lives and single spawn of her own dead parents illustrated otherwise. Dulcet carried forward none of their values.

They were of the slave-save-and-die set. They saved exactly enough to afford their own funerals.

Yay! No, not really. It didn’t play out as any sort of victory to their surviving child.

Dulcet made friends fast. She had no fear of going out at night alone. She’d worked in enough of Portland’s bars that she could move from one to another with the familiarity of home. This morning her head had the dull, thick ache of one too many absinthe-tinis, and her body carried the spent sense of having used all her muscles—dancing high, good sex with a guy she’d known for a while, a long walk teetering home alone, and a hard sleep in her own bed.

That was the meaning of life.

It was totally cleansing, the fresh start of a new day.

She had bruises on one shin, blood blooming under the surface of her pale skin. Those bruises offered a weird portrait of life and death—was that the Virgin Mary’s face?—and where had they come from, anyway? Some moment in last night’s party. Now a barista waited while Dulcet clicked through the stack of maxed-out plastic in her wallet trying to pay for a triple Americano.

One thing about not having kids: There was nobody to inherit her bills. Total selling point! She was a single, adult orphan, an only child, uninsured, self-employed, a renter. Bitchy Bitch was all she had.

Her body would be cremated at the county’s expense. She signed for the Americano and moved on.

At the cream and sugar station she tucked Sweet’N Low in her bra. It was an instant boob job—on one side, anyway. She’d been broke for so long, she made a habit of taking extra. A man came up with his eyes on her, ogling the Sweet’N Low lift.

His glance and her reciprocation: It was a transaction.

Life is one transaction after another, until somebody loses it—can’t take the constant social exchange.

He said, “I’ve seen you before.”

“Imagine that.” Portland was small. She lifted a fistful of Sugar in the Raw packets.