The Devoted

by Blair Hurley

  The bus took her in loops around the city. It was night now. Her body bumped and lurched around the corners. As long as she was in motion, she was all right, she was free. She couldn’t go to her apartment; her Master knew the address. She couldn’t go to Paul; her Master knew that place, too. She watched the rain drumming on the black armadas of umbrellas, people hunched and hurrying home.

  The bus stopped, and the conductor made his way down the aisle. “Last stop, ma’am. Got to get off.” His voice was not unkind. She got up and followed him off the bus, into the dark Hopper painting of a street corner. They were in Brooklyn, she realized. There was Manhattan on the horizon, the brother of the skyline she’d seen from the water. She was back downtown again, close to Dumbo. She thanked the driver and started walking.

  The rain had stopped, and the streets were shiny and black. Each street she turned down was empty; streetlights winked at their own reflections in the mirrored windows. Something about this industrial silence felt ominous.

  She was walking back to the bus stop, hoping for another line to take, when a man peeled himself from the dark to her right, hand out and catching a streetlight’s sodium gleam, his face in the shadows.

  “Hey, you’re looking nice tonight.”

  The voice, low and intimate, as though they were already friends. She felt herself smile politely. She didn’t slow down. But the voice followed her. “Where you going tonight in such a hurry? Where you going? Got a date with your girlfriends?”

  She could feel him now, riding just beyond her right shoulder.

  “You sure are looking nice tonight, Miss In a Hurry.”

  She had a nickname. She was named; she belonged to him now. And still she was smiling. Politeness. The need to be liked.

  She ducked her head and took the first turn she found, a hard right onto another narrow, high-walled road, and by this time she knew he was following her, not just throwing out a few catcalls for fun but matching her step for step. “What’s your hurry? You late for something? What’s your rush?”

  She stopped walking. She was so terribly tired. She couldn’t run anymore. She turned, took a step forward.

  The man approached cautiously, his jaw jutting into the circle of the streetlight’s gleam. “You want to get some coffee? You lonely?”

  “Yeah,” she said. The beginnings of an expanding feeling in her chest. “Yeah, I’m lonely. What do you want to do? Want to get some coffee? Want to go back to your place and get a blow job? Or would you rather do it standing up, in this alley, say? Does that turn you on? Want to push me down on my knees? Or does just following me around do it for you? Maybe you just like to watch. Tell me your best-case scenario. Tell me what you’ve already done to me in your head.”

  He put up his hands. “Whoa. Whoa.”

  She tilted her head. “Tell me. Tell me what you’ve already done. Tell me how you’ve fucked me.”

  He took a step back, his hands still up. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Have a good night, lady.” She could see only his red sneakers for a while, beating along the road. Then he turned a corner and raised his hand. He was giving her the finger. It was a strange little salute.

  She listened to her heart’s steady pounding. She was half-wild. Not much further to go the rest of the way.

  In another block she was under the first great struts of the bridge. There was a small gated park here, the kind of place that transformed at night. She could see bodies moving in the children’s jungle gym, people settling with their blankets and shopping carts, thin, ghostly figures smoking and laughing near the water. Her people.

  One of the users by the water had spotted her. “Hey, you want a light?” he asked.

  She nodded, coming over. She didn’t have any cigarettes on her, but he gave her one and they leaned on the iron railing, gazing at the dazzling buildings across the river. “It used to be beautiful here,” he said bitterly. “Rotten old buildings and collapsing wharfs and vacant lots. Now look.” With a jerk of his chin, he indicated the manicured park, the bright plastic jungle gym, the bag dispensers for picking up waste.

  “The New Yorker’s Lament,” she said.

  He laughed. “You got that right. It’s like, we’re too good at transforming ourselves.”

  “Did you grow up here?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Naw, man. I got here ten years ago. I was gonna be somebody.”

  “And?”

  He shook his head again, but now he was smiling. “Hey, I was here. I lived.”

  It was easy to fall back into the old way of speaking. “You’re full of shit.”

  “Yeah.” They smoked in silence, and she pulled out the bag of Easter candy and shared it. The sun was coming up behind them. She knew she had to disappear, but she didn’t know how or where. Jocelyn had said that running away would not work. And she could see that; wherever she went, eventually he would find her.

  She wondered: What would Paul do, when she was gone? In that way she had of occasionally looking into his life, she could picture him searching for her.

  Her friend offered her another cigarette, but she refused. “I’d better go.”

  He smiled. “It’s five in the morning. Where have you got to go?”

  She shrugged. “Home.” And as she said it, she knew it was true.

  Dear Sean,

  It is the 1950s. Tibetan monks, lamas, teachers are fleeing to the United States; China’s takeover of Tibet, the war and devastation, marches behind them. They are coming to the American West. There, in the high, dry mountains and deserts not so different from their homeland, they are finding the kinds of followers Buddhism has never seen.

  The followers keep their shoes, their jeans, their hair. They have crew cuts. They play guitars. They have come from little white houses and mothers with aprons and towns with bowling alleys. The congregations swell with outcasts, losers, refugees from other lives.

  Some of the monks from the old country do not know what to do with all the women. The tradition of nuns has all but died out. In Tibet, Chinese soldiers raped the nuns. Now you are not chaste, now you cannot keep your vows, they said.

  The women wear their Sunday best to meetings. They are young, desperate for worship. It surprises no one when the monks and the priests begin to see not students but girls. You can picture the scene. The girl pushes a sliding door aside and bows deeply. She does not wear the red robe of a monk. She has taken refuge here, from a world that is oppressive and strange. She is trusting in the sanctuary her master will provide. In the silence of their shared meditation is a fine, high quivering. The breeze of power and authority is heady.

  Her master can tell her, “You want enlightenment? Then kneel. Give me your mouth. Bend to your work.” And she will.

  And I did.

  What happened to all those women, when the scandals finally broke? When the disgraced monks packed up their wares and moved sheepishly on? When the Zen roshis and Tibetan rinpoches refused to comment, when they claimed the same private privilege of the confessional? Did they change religions? Did they fumble their way back home in humiliation? Did they disappear? Was that moment after the command—the surprise, doubt, betrayal—itself its own revelation?

  I had been selected for a special honor. Wasn’t that what I’d always wanted? I’d said, Dear Lord, please show me the living light. Even if it hurts. But I didn’t know it would demand everything I could give. My Master told me, I will require your life. This was the shock: he meant it.

  Girl, where are you? Where did you go?

  PART THREE

  One day, I’ll be ready, she says to the Master, in her ninth year of training. Won’t I? One day won’t I not be your student anymore?

  That’s not the way it works, he says. You’ll always be my student. Like a mother is always a mother, and a child a child. You made a promise.

  In the dim light of the meeting room, he watches her complete her prostrations. It’s been long enough that he knows her every gesture, he hears the pop of
her bad ankle and feels it like it’s his. Neither of them are young anymore. Is it really enlightenment that she wants?

  Recently he has sensed that she is close to being lost. Something different in the restless way she sits on her heels when he’s giving a sermon and gazes out the window. When she pours tea, she drinks before him in thirsty gulps. She’s getting impatient. He knows what the beginning of anger looks like before she does.

  And he realizes he’s terrified.

  He has to find a way to make her his again. “Tell me about what happened when you were young,” he demands, but she won’t.

  He tells her the koan about the master who is able to transform lead into gold. An impatient young monk demands the secret, and the master shares the incantation with him. “But it only works if you do not think of a black cat,” he says.

  The Master tells her he can turn her from lead into gold, if she won’t think the things she’s thinking. If she stays patient and disciplined. If she lets the questions she has melt on her tongue, if she swallows them down.

  PAUL

  Nicole wasn’t answering calls, but Paul expected that, after the way they’d parted. He’d seen his mother to the airport, saying he’d make Nicole come around, the way he always did. He gave her all the usual assurances. Then he went to Nicole’s apartment and found that she’d left: laundry pawed through on the bed, no toothbrush in the cup in the bathroom. The cat was missing, too. He slouched sheepishly through the apartment, feeling like a thief. Remembering her childhood hiding places, he even dug into her underwear drawer, looking for cash. A crumpled five was all he could find; whatever else she had was gone.

  More than that, though, was the feeling of the place. Something like waiting about it, in the watchful squares of light in the windows, the drying flower pot on the sill. On the kitchen table were her key to the apartment and her phone, sitting prominently where he would find them.

  The phone was locked, and he couldn’t guess her code with a few tries. But buried in a box, he found her previous year’s datebook, with two phone numbers written on the inside cover, both Massachusetts area codes. He thought one might be the old teacher, the Zen place she’d mentioned. The other he didn’t know, but he’d try those first.

  On the way home from his sleuthing at the apartment, he bought a bus ticket at Port Authority, then stood under the giant ugly steel overhang as a quick rainstorm passed, eating a pretzel. The tourists coming out often stopped in the flow of traffic here, looking around and pointing, while the businesspeople dodged around them. A couple in matching tie-dyed T-shirts asked him which way to the Empire State building. He was tempted to say, “Fuck off.” But he didn’t. He politely gave directions.

  Marion and the kids dropped him at the station on their way to school, the way they always did when he left for a business trip and didn’t want the aggravation of renting a car. Charlie left intricate lip prints on the windows, boisterous in his good-byes, while June sulked. Only Marion knew that this trip was different from the others. She looked up at him from the driver’s seat and offered a single raised eyebrow. He matched it with a “who knows” lift of one shoulder, surprised, as always, at how marriage had made them able to communicate in these tiny ways. Why didn’t it help them speak in the more important ones?

  On the bus he pressed his cheek to the cold glass and watched the city roll back around him, felt the bus begin its familiar shudder and sway on the highway north. He liked taking the bus to Boston instead of the train because it reminded him of being a college kid again, heading home. And it usually meant he was coming back to Jennifer. He liked the light shifting down into late afternoon, and one lake he always passed with a round wooded island in the center, the sort of thing he and Nicole might swim to on a summer day and come home damp and coated in pine needles. He liked it when the sun set and he knew he was close and the little seat lights came on and he could look at the other passengers, who were mostly young and snared in headphone cables, wondering what lives, what jobs, what Jennifers they were heading to. On Sunday in the line for the bus back, he would see the same people clinging to the lovers they’d been visiting, the kisses good-bye, the longing tugs on backpack straps, and he would feel very old among them.

  Nicole wasn’t crazy. She’d taken a bag, her winter coat, some clothes, her toothbrush. She was going somewhere.

  He wasn’t going to tell their mother, not yet, not ever if he could. He’d fix this himself.

  It was getting dark now on the bus and the laptops were coming out, everyone’s faces washed in their aquarium glow. He read off the screen of the young woman next to him: I know you’re never going to forgive me, but it has to be this way. He watched her delete and retype: I know I’m never going to forgive myself but. She paused, pressing a hand to her forehead, and he looked away.

  Soon they’d reach the toll for the Mass Pike, and later they’d all stumble out into the bright fluorescence of the station, sleepwalking as they fumbled for their bags in the freezing belly of the bus, and they’d shuffle gratefully into the arms of the people waiting for them.

  The business conventions and sales appointments he told Marion about were usually real. So were the times he had told her he was visiting Nicole, checking up on her, making sure she wasn’t in a ditch somewhere. It was just that when he went to Boston, he stayed with Jennifer. That was the only lie.

  She picked him up from the station and they went out for pizza in the North End, near her apartment. They always went out for dinner on the night when he arrived because they knew they’d be pulling each other’s clothes off the minute they got inside her door; there was no helping it. So they sat in a near-empty restaurant looking each other over first, prolonging the pleasure.

  This time, though, they were both distracted. He kept glancing at his watch, planning the use of his hours the following morning. Jennifer kept spinning the trifold beer menu in her fingers. “Have you called the police?”

  “No. I don’t think that’s necessary. She’s just—she’s got some plan of her own.”

  “So it’s some sort of walkabout. A vision quest.”

  “I don’t know. There was this thing she did when she was eighteen. Maybe it’s connected. Whatever it is, I have to find her.”

  “So you don’t trust her to take care of herself.”

  “No, it’s not that—”

  “Isn’t it?” Her dark eyes were wide and patient. They were sitting by the window with their parkas on because of the cold radiating from the glass. She kept her shoulders tucked neatly into the large shoulders of her coat. It was remarkable to realize that she, like he, was nearly forty now, with lines around her mouth, two miscarriages and a divorce behind her.

  She sighed and shook her head. “I’m sorry. You take good care of her.” She ran a hand through her hair. It was long and glossy brown and went behind her ears and down her back. As long as he’d known her, since high school, she’d worn it this way. He wanted to reach out for it, but this was the game they always played, pretending they were polite strangers.

  “Does it ever occur to you that you spend a lot of time trying to fix your sister’s life when there are a few things in your own life you need to get in order?” she asked.

  He sat back. “You’re making fun of me.”

  She spun the menu. “What shall we have? Blue Moon? House draft? What goes with pizza?”

  “Red wine goes with pizza.”

  Then they were at her apartment. He had no memory of how they had gotten there, and as always they were pulling each other’s clothes off slowly, concentrating with intensity on each button and hook. For Paul, nearsighted sex was what he preferred, zeroing in on one part of the body, attending to it with care. He was systematic. Nicole had often told him how compartmentalized his mind was. Did he ever try to think large things? she’d asked. Had he thought about the universe, life? Never. Almost never. It was better to think small, to see one thing at a time, to see it very well.

  Jennifer’s breasts w
ere always a good place to start. They did not have Marion’s consumptive pink and white but were a healthy brown on brown. Everything about her was practical and wise, from the way she entered her apartment, hanging her key, scarf, umbrella on their hooks, to when she chose to close her eyes and look away, to save them both embarrassment.

  Later they sat at her kitchen counter drinking coffee, as though it were morning, not the middle of the night. “What’s the plan?” Jennifer asked. “Where do we look first?”

  Paul placed the datebook on the counter and smoothed the pages. “Two people she knows in Boston. I think one is her guru or something. The other I don’t know. But they might be able to tell us.”

  “Here’s how it will go,” she said. “I’ll go along tomorrow, see if I can help. And then I’ll see you off, and you’ll go home to your wife, and this will be the last time we’ll meet like this.”

  “What?”

  “Yes—I’ve decided. I decided before you arrived.”

  He got up and came around the corner, tried to put his arms around her. She accepted the embrace; her body was still warm and soft. She was not angry at him, just—decided. “Jenn, why—? What’s changed?”

  “Nothing’s changed. I’ve just done some thinking, and I’ve made a decision. This is what grown-up people do, you know—they realize when they’re hurting people. I’m too old to go on hurting people.”

  He tried to speak, but she put her hand on his mouth. “No—that’s all we’re going to say about it. Your sister is missing. We’re going to find her, and then we’re going to say good-bye, and everything will be all right.”

  He didn’t sleep. He lay beside her, staring wide-eyed into the dark the way he used to do when he was a kid, wondering what it felt like to be dead. He would wonder how many stars were in the sky and whether they were really holes punched through the wall of night to heaven on the other side. That was the thought circling his head when the birds began to sing.