Nirvana Effect

by Craig Gehring

  Anger had caused him to play the fool. His reaction could have far-reaching repercussions. Moreover, he knew now he might never learn the truth.

  “It cannot be coincidence that your three greatest critics are now dead by challenge.”

  The flow of the walking was draining Nockwe’s outrage. Manassa did not stop. He climbed down into a ravine and changed directions. Nockwe followed. “Coincidence?” said Manassa. “I don’t believe in coincidence. It was obviously planned.”

  “Inge was wise and cautious. Wisdom and caution make him no enemy of ours. He did nothing to malign you or Glis, and yet Glis killed him.”

  “Glis?” asked Manassa dispassionately.

  “You didn’t know?”

  “I did foresee Inge’s death, but not this way. All your sentiments aside, Inge was a stumbling block to our vision. But I didn’t think he’d be killed by Onge.”

  Nockwe decided not to take up that point. It was moot. “He was challenged for sleeping with Glis’s wife,” said Nockwe.

  “Did he?” asked Manassa.

  “Glis and two others caught him in the act,” said Nockwe.

  Manassa finally stopped and turned. His voice was hollow, empty. “Then why do you come to me in this manner, my chieftain?”

  “Glis’s wife seduced him,” said Nockwe.

  “How do you know?”

  “It is a fact. Inge has three times the years of Glis’s woman. She is only sixteen. It is fact.”

  Manassa nodded. “You see conspiracy. I see it, too.”

  “The blood of the tribe must be preserved, as must its wisdom be. Glis committed murder, Manassa.” At your request.

  “Kill Glis.” Again, Manassa was emotionless. He spoke in the traditional tongue. “I trust your judgment, my chieftain. His zealotry may be commendable, but his methods cannot be permitted. We are the greatest nation on Earth, Nockwe, but we are the smallest of nations. Our blood must be preserved. No murder shall be permitted.”

  “No more murder is necessary. The inner circle has slain your opposition,” said Nockwe. He searched Manassa’s eyes for insight. They gave no clue, no betrayal. The foot of space between the chieftain and the god felt like a great void.

  Manassa spoke quieter still. “If you do not control the inner circle, then soon the inner circle shall be our enemy. Look not to me to displace the fault, Nockwe, for the murder of Glis and the deaths of the others. Look into the truth-water back to your own reflection. The inner circle is your dog, whether or not you desire it so. We agreed it was so. I trust you, Nockwe, but I fear that if you in turn trust too much, you will lose your faith in me and even in yourself. Don’t trustthe inner circle. Don’t trust my priests. Get them into line, else they will be the dog that will eat us all up.”

  Nockwe was silent. He didn’t know what to do. His mind was telling him to drop it, but his hunter’s instinct still told him something was wrong.

  “Nockwe,” sighed Manassa. “I understand your frustration. I have foreseen it, in fact, for if I were you I would have done the same thing. But the fact of the matter is that even if I had ordered these peoples’ deaths, you could have stopped it. You must own and control our priests. And we must trust one another. Do you see that with you over my priests, I leave myself defenseless to you?”

  The sun was setting behind Manassa. The early calls of the beasts of the night disrupted the silence between the two men. This inner circle, these priests, they are the jungle beasts. Nockwe foresaw that one day he might become their target. He did not fear it. He would do what he must for the tribe.

  “You have done me no wrong with your anger, Nockwe. You have done me no wrong. You are the sort who only trusts another man if you hold a knife to his neck. It is why you are so valuable to our people. I will permit you to hold it as close to my neck as you like. I know you will only threaten me if I threaten the tribe.”

  Manassa’s voice remained quiet and firm. He edged even closer to Nockwe.

  “Do not ever put the tribe at risk like this, again, Nockwe. I love the Onge as much as you do. My vision is the future of our race. Do not endanger it with stupidity. You may blame whoever you wish, but deep down you know the truth.” Manassa walked past him.

  Nockwe did not turn.

  “Nockwe,” said Manassa. “Do not waste any time in getting your dogs in line. Our world turns ever more quickly. I fear that we will need to move much sooner than planned.”

  Manassa left.

  Nockwe knelt and mourned.

  Inge had been Nockwe’s father’s best friend. He was as an uncle to Nockwe. The chieftain could see the corpse of Inge on the backs of his eyelids. The body had eight bleeding holes. Glis had stabbed him eight times. Inge’s face was frozen in an awful contortion of pain. His body had reeked of feces and urine; his eyes stared out into the sky. Nockwe knew Inge’s eyes were looking for his chieftain, for help and for justice. But Nockwe had been outside of the village on errand for Manassa when the challenge had occurred. Inge was dead before Nockwe ever set foot back into the village.

  I must be smarter, and stronger, in many more ways than before. Else I may lose everything. He thought of his wife, children, and village. He thought of them all with bloody holes in their bodies.

  He knew Manassa was right. He shouldn’t have to trust Manassa. He should know. In such a situation as his, it was weak to trust anyone. It was better simply to know and control everything.

  I will do this, starting with the inner circle. Starting with Glis.

  Manassa may be a snake, but he is an enlightened snake…Onge through and through…fitting a god as any…

  33

  Edward rushed through the back door in exam room two. He tripped down the back steps to the dirt service road behind the clinic.

  A car was pulling away, kicking up dust. Callista. Edward ran after her, yelling her name. Edward had an awful feeling that she wouldn’t hear him.

  The car stopped. The passenger door kicked out. He caught up and jumped in. His heart was racing faster than when Nockwe threatened him with his spear.

  Callista was sitting in the driver seat. She smiled unnervingly. He looked away, reminded of the deliberate “It’s good to see you,” that she’d given him earlier. In his college days, that mannerism had meant the perfect storm was brewing.

  She drove out of town. He stopped studying the road and instead turned his gaze to her. His eyes caught the curve of her lips. It was a real smile. She was genuinely happy. He could tell even though they hadn’t spoken, yet.

  He noticed he was smiling, too. He had a distinct falling sensation, the nervous jitters of temptation. Again he turned his eyes away. We are on different courses, now. This is a nice twist, seeing her again, but that’s all it is.

  Edward’s future was too short in too many directions, now. No path he foresaw, however brief, included someone else. Too risky for me and too risky for her.

  It didn’t take long to get to the outskirts of Lisbaad. Once they reached the limits of the town, it was as though someone had turned off the car’s mute switch.

  “I’m going to help you, Edward, if I can,” she said. Her voice sounded chipper, much younger than it had been just hours before. “And you’re going to help me.”

  He was afraid of where the conversation was leading, so he pre-empted her. “Thank you, Callista. Maybe you can help me. And I’d be more than happy to help you if I can.” He didn’t want to know what that was, so he didn’t give her time to say it. He just went right on. “I need help distilling an active ingredient and making it into a tablet.”

  “A tablet?” she asked.

  “Right. I need some excipients, something to tabletize an active ingredient, to take under the tongue.”

  “A medicine?” she asked, curiously.

  “Of sorts,” he replied.

  He knew her mind. There were many questions she would want answered. She’d keep asking questions until it made sense to her. And the prime question had nothing to do with the “me
dicine”, but rather why he had avoided a member of his own priesthood. He hadn’t thought up an answer for that one yet.

  The car jostled over a few bumps in the road. Callista didn’t ask any more questions. Instead, she said, “Okay. I can help with that.” The simple statement surprised him.

  That was easy. “Thank you.” Edward had expected to have difficulty finding the necessary equipment. He’d feared that even after overcoming the hurdle, he wouldn’t have the technical skill to make it happen.

  He was sure that if anyone could tabletize the substance, though, it would be Callista, and with the greatest of professional ease. If anything, she was competent. If she said she could do something, she could.

  “You know, Edward, I was very distraught when I saw you today,” she said, not missing a beat. “I didn’t expect that. Well, I didn’t expect to ever see you, even though maybe I hoped I would. I don’t know whether what you said about wanting to see me, looking for me, and all that was true.” It was. “I don’t know about that. But I think that maybe what it is…well…I’m just going to tell you everything. And you can take it or leave it.”

  “All right,” Edward said. He had no idea where she was going with this.

  “Edward Styles, when I first met you, I paid you no mind. I didn’t. I’ll admit that. I’ll tell you why: I’d never heard of you. My friends, my parents had never talked about you. I’d never seen you at one of the parties that my father was always dragging me to. It was as though I couldn’t see you. You were invisible, one of those handsome boys. Out of the question. I would marry someone with family.”

  Edward couldn’t help but comment. “You sound very British right now.”

  Her smile broadened. He’d almost forgotten what it was like to create that kind of reaction in her. “Well, ‘roight’ you ‘ah’, then,” she said, feigning a horrendous English accent. “And I know you know this. We’ve talked about it countless times, when we were younger. But I think it’s important to mention again so that you can understand…with it all in perspective.”

  She drove for a little while longer. He had nothing to say. He couldn’t say anything. It wasn’t any sort of conversation he felt he could encourage. It wasn’t that he was a priest; he wasn’t a priest anymore, not in his mind. It was that to make her a part of his life would mean to pull her aboard the runaway train.

  And yet he couldn’t make himself stop her, either. The idea of getting some answers to all those questions he’d walked away from nearly a decade ago was irresistible.

  “You told me you loved me from the first moment you saw me. You meant that?” she asked.

  He was quiet, looking out at the road ahead. He hesitated too long.

  “I know you’re a priest, now, Edward, believe me, I know it. But I knew you before you were a priest…” Her voice threatened to lose the jocularity she had so enjoyed just moments earlier.

  He laughed and turned to face her. She was still looking out at the rode as she drove. The sun was starting to set. They were making their way to a fenced residential area. “Of course I meant that. You’d always ask that and I’d always answer I meant it.”

  “Well, it wasn’t that way for me. I might have told you it was the same for me, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t the same. And I think because of that it was far worse.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “When I first met you, I didn’t see you. But you made me see you. Your soul made me finally see you. It was nothing you tried to do. You just…you just shone.”

  Edward could not voice a single one of the replies that whizzed through his mind. He couldn’t reminisce with her. He couldn’t tell her, you shone, too. You were the sun to me. You had me in orbit. You made me happy.

  She glanced his way before continuing her monologue to the windshield.

  “It was my own choice, to be with you. It was probably the first choice I made of my own - my choice. Not what my parents wanted, not even colored by what they wanted. I knew from my own observation, from a total certainty deep within me, that you were my one - and that you would achieve great things - that together, we could be happy.”

  She’d never been so frank with him. In fact, she’d never been the one to tell him such things. He’d known them, he’d thought them, he’d felt them, but she’d never said them. Perhaps it had never occurred to her it needed to be said. But as she finally said it he felt an unexpected relief - that big question mark in his life was finally getting erased. Had it been real?

  The relief disappeared as the next realization hit him like a truck. A painful exclamation point had taken the place of the question mark.

  It had been real!

  Because of that one question mark, he had buried his dreams. He had joined the Jesuits on that question mark. He had given up science on that question mark.

  That question mark was disintegrating as he rode in the car next to the woman he had once loved to the exclusion of all else. A decade ago, his dream had consumed him. He’d studied her much more than school, he’d worked hard so that he might buy her things. His friends were only a way to pass the time when he didn’t have her company.

  It had been an immature love. In their senior year it had blossomed…He had to stop thinking about it. He was glad she started talking again.

  “I know I never told you that. I’m sorry I didn’t, I really am,” she said. “I never thought you had a doubt. Looking back on it, I see you could. Looking back on it, I see a lot. As part of my schooling, we studied psychology…I had to counsel some people during my residency…seeing their troubles objectively - I saw my own. I didn’t…”

  “It’s all right. It’s fine.” You were wonderful. He couldn’t say that. Without saying it he came off conceited, but he restrained himself from saying it.

  “It’s not fine,” she insisted. “I’ve looked back on it a lot. Maybe that’s why…well…anyway, I didn’t tell you. It was just a stupid thing. You were my one decision. I saw it all the way through. But I was trapped, Edward. I realized this now. I was trapped - so trapped that I didn’t even see I had six cage walls all around me.”

  Edward felt raw, naked, his body locked in the seat. His mind rushed, but it all flowed to nothing. He was forgetting to breathe. He’d lost all context to their conversation. He felt ripped into another world.

  For a moment, he’d never taken the substance. He’d never been a missionary. He’d never left her side. He was there, at his knee, opening up his ring box in the empty park in his stupid tux, looking for a “yes” in her eyes.

  “You see, you were my one decision, Edward,” she said. “But there were so many others. You were one drop of dew caught in a web. What school I went to, what career I took on - and then discarded for married life - where I traveled, who I knew, all these had been determined for me. They were determined for me in such a way and so thoroughly that I thought I’d determined them myself. That day…” Her voice trailed off. She looked over at him. Two tears ran out of his eyes, one creeping down each cheek. He turned his eyes down to the floorboard. It was too much to take in. The relief left him too open to the pain, and it was all he could do to still track with her voice.

  She stopped the car at her house. He didn’t see it - his line of vision stopped at the dashboard. Not that he even saw the dashboard.

  She continued. “That day, I knew that day would come.” He heard her voice beginning to crack. She still had her cheerful intonation, but under that rode an edge that made every syllable waver. “That day came, and you asked me, and I thought the word, ‘yes’. And with that one word, the whole web of my life shook, it crumbled, it disintegrated. And I was left holding one single drop of dew. And I panicked. And I dropped it.” She sobbed. He heard her sobbing. Nothing else was real. He was back at Oxford sitting in his car with her. He groped for her hand and gripped it tightly. He was sobbing, heaving for breath. He couldn’t look at her. He sensed she was crying, too, that she was looking at him, but he couldn’t think about it. Th
ere was too much to think about. Her hand dug into his.

  They both finally stopped crying. He didn’t let go of her hand. The sky reddened into darkness. It was much later when she said, “If I had known that dropping you once was dropping you forever, I’d have never let go. I’d have never said no. I was afraid, but that was worse. Far worse. That was torture.”

  She didn’t cry anymore. She just told him that and rubbed his hand. She sounded exhausted.

  Each syllable of what she said echoed a hundred times inside Edward’s skull. He played them over and over in his mind. Over and over again he replayed the whole car ride.

  In half an hour, she had vaporized his life’s big question mark. The nirvana effect had started it and she thoroughly finished the job.

  He reflected ironically that every constant in his life had become a variable now that his variable, his question mark, had become a constant.

  He answered her silently with his thoughts - words he would not utter. They were words that would bind her path to his. It was his own monologue, one he could not voice to the windshield.

  Callista, Callista. When I decided to become a priest, I felt free. After having gone through the darkest hour of a storm at sea, it was like I had seen the first glimmer of light on the horizon. I closed that chapter of my life, shut out the chapter of you. Every meditation, every exercise I went through in my training as a priest, I oriented to forgetting you and my dreams, to expunging every emotion I carried for you, to disciplining my mind from wandering to you. The sharp discipline of the Jesuit order was far easier than dwelling on you, than being stuck on maybe.

  His mind wandered. If only you hadn’t rebuked me so sharply, so quickly. I’d have still held hope…

  But it was a false freedom. It was freedom in a prison cell. It was freedom from the outside world, and freedom from my dreams.