“Right.”
“I had my heart set on a little spiritual well-being tonight, not to mention seeing old friends from the ashram and Apadravya himself.” Laura leaned her forehead against his shoulder-fur in mock sorrow.
“Make no appointments—”
“I know, you doofus, I know.”
And that’s when, with a shadowed crowd of pedestrians penguining oddly toward them south on Bishop, twin snicks of metal sounded behind them and two burly men yanked them apart and brought sharp blades and faces impossibly close.
“Your wallet in two seconds, sucker, or you’re dead,” and as much as Travis wanted to look after Laura and the other mugger, the hopped-up urgency in the man’s eyes went right to Travis’s nervous system, the arm, the hand, tearing off a glove to reach between the lower but ons of his coat, to lip the heavy fabric back, an inconsequential drag on his wrist as he gripped and drew out his black eelskin wallet, no shake in his hand, no time for fear, too much a luxury when faced with that much need.
And then the smell of death stung him. His own? Had he been slashed? But his assailant’s eyes bulged as Laura screamed, and still he lived. His wallet fell. A purpled foot toed forward and Travis saw a matching hand jam down, like a receipt on a spindle, upon the switchblade, fingers closing on the mugger’s glove, a sharp snap of bone. Time enough to feel blooms of gratitude mixed with astonishment before the rescuer dropped his head upon Travis’s shoulder and bit, as easy as baklava, through the thick fur, thick leather, the multi-layered cloth beneath, into muscle and bone, a sudden frenzied cramp of pain there.
The moment they cornered off Drummond and headed west on Maisonneuve, anticipation lit his soul. They quickened their pace, he and Laura, grinning like idiots. “Namaste, dollface,”
he said, side-hugging her as they walked.
Laura, laughing, scolded: “That’s not nice, making fun of spirituality.”
“Get me started on Jesus sometime.”
“I know, I know. My favorite blasphemer.”
Inside, the crowd was lumbering along the guideropes, halfway vestibuled, halfway inside the auditorium: an odd mingle of young and old, his generation touching once more a thread which guided them to the gold of an earlier time, Laura’s coevals refreshingly glint-eyed in their twentyish claim upon the world’s possibilities. On their way to the line’s end, Laura exchanged joyous if hushed hellos with a number of young men and women he’d never met, scrubbed and more naive-looking than his wife, wearing yoga-whites some of them and holding coats, although, inching past the side door they’d come in, blasts of winter assaulted them every time anyone entered the building.
At last the double doors. Travis let Laura unpurse a five-dollar bill for them and place it on a small mound of money in a box labeled DONATIONS. He took a flyer about a potluck, avoiding the fervid eyes of the redeemed druggie, or so he appeared, sitting, one knee pistoning, behind the table.
“Let’s try close,” Laura said, ever one for ring-side seats at plays and concerts.
“Right,” he said, but she was already on the way down the carpeted slope of the aisle. She tapped the sweatered arm of a petite Oriental woman, blowing a kiss to her wave and signaling later as she backwarded and then rightwarded herself toward the sparsely populated—because spiritually too presumptuous?—front rows.
The air was redolent with incense, sandalwood mingled with a fruity vanilla scent. The stage, as he approached it, brought him back twenty years, the oriental rug at its lip, fringe hanging over, the cushions, the flowers, puffs of incense rising nearly straight up like Lionel trains in mid-chug from an ornately carved table—and out of context yet never somehow out of place, the angled mike on a squat stand so that the reputedly soft-spoken Apadravya could be heard throughout the auditorium and so that his talk could be preserved for those unlucky enough to be elsewhere.
Laura draped her coat over her seatback in row two, a clack as a button brushed metal. He did the same, gazing back at the rising sweep of attendees, noting how animated their faces were, yet how subdued their chatter. This, he thought, was how church ought to be but never was.
“You’re really going to like him, Travis.”
Sweet woman, her face so vibrant and alive. “I like him already,” he said, and gave Laura a squeeze.
Marcie hummed as she bumsteaded her sandwich, habits both she’d picked up from her father, a man chubby-not-fat who favored a puttering hum over silence in the car. Hand on meat drawer, drew it open, packaged sliced turkey ready for unsealing; salami, the same; tuppered ham on one shelf still looking worthy; lettuce head with a few hacks out of it, snatched up; jars of mayo and dill spears precariously balanced at her breasts. She brought her armful of prizes to the table, arrayed them, and dove in, rye slices peeled open waiting on the plate.
As her hands worked, she wondered if she should check on baby Jenny. Time enough for that later. Laura, lovely pert-nosed Laura, was such a hoverer, it would probably do the kid good to suffer a little neglect. She and Travis’d moved in, going on two years now, and it had been a relief and a blessing after the beer-guzzling, once-overing, trio of scum-buddies who’d lived here before. They’d been away at a hockey game in Toronto the weekend Pierre brought her here and had committed them to a lease.
Pierre again. Bring him up, even fleetingly, and his residue lingered and spread, reviving the sweet and bitter ache of times buried and buried and buried again. Stopped over the table, knife in hand, kitchen clock relentless in its forward hurtle.
Brought up Freya Cole, leggy sad-eyed sandy-haired first-chair violist she had found solace with for a while: a quiet, caressive time, very few words, two lives lived, one here in seeming isolation, one there idle and indolent on Freya’s bed, her Scandinavian fingers sure and angular and rich drawing tone from her viola, then dry and light and loving on Marcie’s freshly inflicted wounds. It died away. Trombonist dork Kyle Kinney pursued his pet violist with bizarre gifts, won her, took them both off to Chicago under Maestro Solti’s baton.
Hey, what could you do? Heartache sucked, and there were plenty of people out there willing to leech off your grief. Go on, sniff the air, keep your bullshit detector in fresh batteries: That was the way to get by.
Stupid lump stood in her throat. Wasn’t fair. If she were a drinking woman, she’d be drunk. Instead, she lifted the triple-decker to her lips, opened her mouth as wide as it would go, and chomped the biggest bite of meat and bread and bitter sorrow she could manage.
He left-armed Laura’s coat-bulged seatback and craned about to scan the crowd. Odd how gatherings culled from a city this size a mini-population of like-minded souls. He felt (grand illusion, that) immediate kinship here; rebuke followed instantly, no call for cynicism, there could be a grand gathering of these same people, one massive handfast to bind them all, spark to spark—enduring fascination and interest here, if they wanted it enough. These people, he fancied, lived, like him at his best, aside and apart from the weary fray of illusion, not tangled up in the snags of samsara, or not often, or with sufficient awareness to put a spin of redemptive humor on the human predicament.
“Elephant-shitting again?” Laura asked, knuckling his left temple playfully.
Fritz Perls’ term. “Yep.”
“Know you pretty well, don’t I?”
“What can I say?” Travis returned her smile. “I’m an outie, you’re an innie.”
It was enough. Laura tucked her cross-legged ankles tighter under her buttsplit, rocking to rectify them, and rested her hands, palm up and thumb-to-index-finger, upon her knees. Seemed affected to him, but what the hell, if it got her through the night, it was good.
He observed the trickle of aisle activity, new folks scanning or pointing or scarf-sweeping their hunched-over, side-swaggling, pardon-my-heels-on-your-toes way toward a brass-ring grab at enlightenment. Man four rows back was scratching his face, listening to a companion. A cluster of incandescent young women, mid-auditorium, set his mind-cock afrisking for a
n instant, then he veered off them in deference to their privacy and on to a couple of executive types, glint-eyed from the backglow of money in their day-to-day lives, he thought, Jacob Needleman readers who were easy straddling both worlds.
A quick movement, or jarring. The man scratching his face looked sallow, no great complexion to begin with, but his scratching wasn’t helping any. His fingernails seemed to be tracing welts from cheek to jaw, but then Travis saw runnels of blood down to the first knuckle and realized he wasn’t seeing welts but gouges and that they weren’t being traced but opened. When the man’s glance started to shift forward, Travis took quick refuge in the cluster of cuties further back.
But now their skin too, which had blushed a lively vivacity like reddish glows on golden apples, slung wan and dead from fish-glimmered eyes. Feeling the spread come down like a wave of sun over a windy field, he turned to shield himself and his woman from the impact; but Laura whiffed into his nostrils, and Laura clutched his arm, and Laura quick-leaned her puffed purple face, its reeky mouth glistening open, in toward his neck.
Moving from the wise old executives to the scratcher, he wondered if the fellow had a thing about his face. Did he unwax his earholes with an idle pinkie? Did he pry out boogers when no one was about, or chisel up layers of dead skin beneath his hair, opening and tormenting scalp wounds as his body mounted a slow steady assault upon itself?
Laura nudged him. He looked her way and she eyed him toward the stage. There was a stirring at the curtain off stage right. Then a tall blond-bearded man in Deva pants, whom Travis had seen somewhere before, came out far enough to step backward into the heavy red billow of the curtain, making way for the short Indian man who ambled out, hands cupped prayerfully before him as he walked. The tall man seemed stricken, though Travis couldn’t tell if his state reflected agony or ecstasy.
Seats flipped up behind them in the auditorium. His wife dug into her coat pocket and brought forth the baggie of rose petals she’d plucked from a bought bouquet an hour before. They went out her side, him feeling a little like a fool following her. Someone from McGill saw him, they’d hound him forever. Well, fuck ’em. Anybody in a position to see him was as blackmailable as he was. Laura put some petals in his palm and for the next many seconds, the tall air was filled with silent tiddlywink flurries of pink and white and red petals, flinging up and drifting down around the holy man’s upstretched arms and face. When the gentle rain was done, he lowered them and Travis had a first good glimpse of his eyes.
No one there, everyone there, a guru trick he’d seen before but never like this: the dark dead glint hinted of tarnished brass, and behind it lay at once the calm of total resignation and assent and the agitation of a star about to go nova. But he couldn’t be certain of that—it was one of the things he liked about Indian fakir types—and the man’s gaze had made its profound impression on him and moved on.
Hands thrust past Travis’s either shoulder stretched out to touch the swami. Devotees lightly laughed as they leaned by him to touch the moving hand. A few arms pulled away, a few laughs died on the vine, but mostly it was an ineffable grasp at joy. Travis figured what the hell, who was he to hold back. He leaned out, Laura’s patient white palm next to his, and two dark hands gripped them and held for an instant.
Travis focused on the hands, riveting his attention there: not the dry healthy brown he’d expected, but a slick grayish-khaki like ground round just beginning to move off raw-red on a grill; translucent amber droplets oozed from back-hand pores, tree sap on bark, and the oily heat around his gripped hand suggested the holy man exuded from his palms as well.
Travis looked faceward. Towelled off, perhaps, before he hit the stage, the brow and cheeks now, like saturated sponges, obtruded pinpricks of oil, as numerous as beads of flopsweat.
The eyes, though: Behind them lay that same cosmic struggle, but just as the guru’s firm grip passed over into discomfort and the static greet of contact turned to tug, Travis realized that composure’s hold was crumbling in those eyes.
But by then it was too late. Whether it was some odd attraction about the two of them that set him off, or just the luck of the draw, the wiry lightweight deadweight holy man pulled them, kneecaps slammed hard on stage-edge, over the upflipped rug and inexorably toward his hungry gape of a mouth.
His hands left theirs. Travis’s palm tingled. As he withdrew it, he pooled his ring finger into the exudate at his lifeline, a substance as thick as honey but not sticky or unpleasant in any way. Returning to his seat, Laura at his side, he sniffed his finger and thought of coconut oil slicked on moist pussy.
Laura took his other hand beneath the end of the seat-arm that separated them, giving him an odd look; her fingers slid lubriciously where they grasped him, assuring him and being assured.
Onstage, Apadravya was nodding and smiling, getting a sense of the room, taking its measure.
Laura tugged his arm. “He’s not breathing,” came her taut whisper as he lowered his ear to her.
He eyebrowed her, turning his attention back to stage center. Nonsense. The man was breathing. Had to be. He knew Laura was dead right, knew it like the flare of truth in a night of lies. Beneath the unsettled counterpoise of peace and Armageddon in his eyes had been this unsettling, unobserved other phenomenon: no breath, no om, no shanti. Days gone by, Shyam or Satchitananda would bring the crowd together with shared chants, shared breathing. That would have begun by now, if it was going to happen at all.
Ripples of laughter took the hall. Not nervous, just the delight of those deep and innocent souls who know that the guru turns time into timelessness, teaching impatience to cease, wordlessly wise before satsang begins.
The blond-bearded yoga teacher set a filled glass and a pitcher of water on a tray near Apadravya. A dismissive glance gave it and him invisibility. On the periphery, he slunk away.
The pitcher, the glass, remained untouched as long as Travis and Laura remained in the auditorium.
Apadravya’s eyes scanned the hall.
Any moment now he would speak.
Any moment now.
Marcie wolfed into her sandwich. Couldn’t taste the fucker worth shit. Chew your food, mama voice gentle from Winnipeg, fancied recollections of warm tit in her mouth, an overwhelming plane of flesh, Pierre’s penis swallowed past the gag reflex, dim ringlets of private hair like a sneeze tickling her nose. The back of her throat took a wrong turn in mid-swallow, and suddenly there was no air.
She dropped the sandwich, top lettuced slice falling off and bouncing like a mattress hurtling out a window to concrete below. Her chair scraped. Her hands flew to her neck, overlapping V’s like mercy-me, and she staggered to the sink.
Disposal side, already picturing the vomit but better here than on their floor; a cereal bowl, its spoon in water, unclog the windpipe, get air in, wash the sucker off after. But leaning over, willing expulsion, thrusting her fingers deep inside her mouth as blood oceaned in her head, had no effect. No time for cops, even if she could communicate with them. She jammed her abdomen against the sink edge, absurdly worrying about the baby growing there. Again and again, punish the body, wake it up, get it to do the right thing, oh yeah, windpipe blocked, jig this n jog that n she’ll be good as new, sorry for any trouble ma’am. But the outrage persisted and the saliva dribbled from her lips to the sink below, and the air was not there, and not there, and not there. Flat patches of black cloth dimpled on the periphery of her vision, then the sink edge slipped upward, eluding her fingers, and the flat hard palm of the floor, dull wool, coldly smacked her.
“In Muslim tradition,” his quiet voice rode unneeded intakes and outflows of air, disturbing at first to Travis but then quickly mesmerizing, “King Solomon died in this fashion: By means of a magic ring, he enslaved the djinn, the demons, and made them build his temple. Leaning upon a long staff, he stood there as they worked, his wise gray head bowed in meditation, for days at a time. Still they toiled, the gleam of Solomon’s ring calling to mind thei
r enslavement.”
Laura squeezed his hand. He could feel her disquiet, her thrill, without looking at her. He felt it too. This man, sitting not ten feet from them, showing every sign of sentience and launching satsang with some sort of parable, was not quite alive. Travis could almost see the suck of gravedirt on him, his body emerged from earthgrip just far enough to hide its hold on him. He embrowned the flowers around him, the pillows, the patterned rug. The movement of his facial muscles was minimal, sufficient to bear his message but no more—and this was not the just-enough of a living holy man, though closely akin, but the articulated willed urge of once-living flesh to reclaim its place and find in reassembly its fix on vitality.
“One day, Solomon came out and stood where he always stood, propped up by his staff, head lowered for nearly a year, unmoved. And in the same year, a white worm gnawed its way up inside the staff, eating, eating, hollowing it out until it was a shell. The djinn worked, not daring to interrupt Solomon in his involutions, and the temple was finished. At the moment the final brick was mortared and the work done, the staff could no longer bear the king’s weight. And so he fell. And the djinn discovered that he had been dead for an entire year, though his body had not, in all that time, corrupted in any way, so right and good and blessed a person this good King Solomon had been.”
Marcie started. Disorientation, like a hot nap ended on a bad note. And a great gape of need. Tangle of limbs moving, cabinetry blurring by, a fleeting realization that she was rising, but no memory stuck and there was movement only. Toward the satisfaction of her need. Fixtures went by, hanging beaters and spatulas, door frame, wall photos, light switch. Caught on a couch end, room sweeping like a fan, then a righting, and onward again.
Veer left, dark here but no matter. Buffered against flat cool something, a barrier. Dim wispings of some easy way past it, but it was flimsy stuff, a loud cottony noise as it splintered inward and gave and duddered aside. Odor of need, food call in the hot dark place—dancing mushroom spun by, foreskin, gone. Threaded the sound. Groped down to find it, found it, lifted it, twisted the right side to tear some off, sharp crack and sharp increase in the sound of its need to be taken in.
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