Life of Buddha

by Lucius Shepard

  Buddha picked up his pace, and soon the voice mixed in with the faint sounds of traffic, distant shouts, other musics, absorbed into the troubled sea from which it had surfaced.

  * * * *

  From the shooting gallery to Taboo’s apartment should have been about a twenty-minute walk, but that day-still troubled by his encounter with the boy-Buddha cut the time in half. He had learned that it was impossible to avoid involvement on his day off, impossible not to confront his past, and in Taboo he had found a means of making the experience tolerable, letting it be the exception that proved the rule. When he had first met Taboo seven years before, Taboo’s name had been Yancey; he had been eighteen, married to a pretty girl, and holding down a steady job at Pontiac Motors.

  Three years later, when he had next run into him, Taboo had come out of the closet, was working as a psychic healer, curing neighborhood ladies of various minor complaints, and through hormone treatments had developed a small yet shapely pair of breasts, whose existence he hid from the world beneath loose-fitting clothes.

  Buddha had caught a glimpse of Taboo’s breasts by accident, having once entered his bathroom while he was washing up, and after this chance revelation, Taboo had fixed upon him as a confidant, a circumstance that Buddha had welcomed-though he did not welcome Taboo’s sexual advances. He derived several benefits from the relationship. For one thing, Taboo’s specialty was curing warts, and Buddha had a problem with warts on his hands (one such had given him an excuse to visit that day); for another, Taboo-who dealt on the side-always had drugs on hand. But the most important benefit was that Taboo provided Buddha with an opportunity to show kindness to someone who brought to mind his dead wife. In their solitary moments together, Taboo would don a wig and a dress, transforming himself into the semblance of a beautiful young woman, and Buddha would try to persuade him to follow his inner directives and proceed with the final stage of his sex change. He would argue long and hard, claiming that Taboo’s magical powers would mature once he completed the transformation, telling Taboo stories of how wonderful his new life would be. But Taboo was deathly afraid of the surgeon’s knife, and no matter how forcefully Buddha argued, he refused to pay heed. Buddha knew there had to be an answer to Taboo’s problem, and sometimes he felt that answer was staring him in the face. But it never would come clear. He had the notion, though, that sooner or later the time would be right for answers.

  It was a beautiful spring day in Taboo’s living room. The walls were painted to resemble a blue sky dappled with fluffy white clouds, and the floor was carpeted with artificial grass. In Taboo’s bedroom where he did his healing, it was a mystical night. The walls were figured with cabalistic signs and stars and a crescent moon, and the corner table was ebony, and the chairs upholstered in black velour. Black drapes hid the windows; a black satin quilt covered the bed. Muted radiance shone from the ceiling onto the corner table, and after he had fixed, it was there that Buddha sat soaking his wart in a crystal bowl filled with herb-steeped water, while Taboo sat beside him and muttered charms.

  Taboo was not in drag because he was waiting for Johnny Wardell to show; but even so he exhibited a feminine beauty. The soft lighting applied sensual gleams to his chocolate skin and enhanced the delicacy of his high cheekbones and generous mouth and almond-shaped eyes. When he leaned forward to inspect Buddha’s wart, the tips of his breasts dimpled the fabric of his blousy shirt. Buddha could make out his magic: a disturbance like heat haze in the air around him.

  “There, darlin’,” said Taboo. “All gone. Your hand back the way it s’posed to be.”

  Buddha peered into the bowl. At the bottom rested a wrinkled black thing like a raisin. Taboo lifted his hand from the water and dried it with a towel. Where the wart had been was now only smooth skin. Buddha touched the place; it felt hot and smelled bitter from the herbs.

  “Wish Johnny’d hurry up,” said Taboo. “I bought a new dress I wanna try on for ya…”

  “Whyn’t you try it on now? If the buzzer goes, you can pretend you ain’t at home.”

  “ ‘Cause I just have to deal wit’ him later, and no tellin’ what kinda mood Johnny be in then.”

  Buddha had no need to ask Taboo why he had to deal with Johnny Wardell at all. Taboo’s reason for risking himself among the bad dogs was similar to Buddha’s reason for retreating from life: he felt guilty for the way he was, and this risk was his self-inflicted punishment.

  Taboo pulled out a packet of white powder and a drinking straw and told Buddha to toot a few lines, to put a shine on his high. Buddha did as he suggested. A luxuriant warmth spread through his head and chest, and little sparkles danced in the air, vanishing like snowflakes. He started getting drowsy. Taboo steered him to the bed, then curled up beside him, his arm around Buddha’s waist.

  “I love you so much, Buddha,” he said. “Don’t know what I’d do without you to talk to…I swear I don’t.” His soft breasts nudged against Buddha’s arm, his fingers toyed with Buddha’s belt buckle, and despite himself, Buddha experienced the beginnings of arousal. But he felt no love coming from Taboo, only a flux of lust and anxiety. Love was unmistakable-a warm pressure as steady as a beam from a flashlight-and Taboo was too unformed, too confused, to be its source.

  “Naw, man,” Buddha said, pushing Taboo’s hand away.

  “I just wanna love you!”

  In Taboo’s eyes Buddha could read the sweet fucked-up sadness of a woman born wrong; but though he was sympathetic, he forced himself to be stern. “Don’t mess wit’ me!”

  The buzzer sounded.

  “Damn!” Taboo sat up, tucked in his shirt. He walked over to the table, picked up the white powder and the drinking straw, and brought them over to Buddha. “You do a little bit more of this here bad boy. But don’t you be runnin’ it. I don’t want you fallin’ out on me.” He went out into the living room, closing the door behind him.

  There seemed to be a curious weight inside Buddha’s head, less an ache than a sense of something askew, and to rid himself of it he did most of the remaining heroin. It was enough to set him dreaming, though not of Africa. These dreams were ugly, featuring shrieks and thuds and nasty smears of laughter, and once somebody said, “The man got tits! Dig it! The man’s a fuckin’ woman!”

  Gradually he arrived at the realization that the dreams were real, that something bad was happening, and he struggled back to full consciousness. He got to his feet, swayed, staggered forward, and threw open the door to the living room.

  Taboo was naked and spread-eagled facedown over some pillow, his rump in the air, and Johnny Wardell-a young leather-clad blood with a hawkish face-was holding his arms. Another man, darker and heavier than Wardell, was kneeling between Taboo’s legs and was just zipping up his trousers.

  For a split second nobody moved. Framed by the vivid green grass and blue sky and innocent clouds, the scene had a surreal biblical quality, like a hideous act perpetrated in some unspoiled corner of the Garden of Eden, and Buddha was transfixed by it. What he saw was vile, but he saw, too, that it was an accurate statement of the world’s worth, of its grotesque beauty, and he felt distanced, as if he were watching through a peephole whose far end was a thousand miles away.

  “Lookit here,” said Wardell, a mean grin slicing across his face. “The ho already done got herself a man. C’mon, bro’! We saved ya a piece.”

  Long-buried emotions were kindled in Buddha’s heart. Rage, love, fear. Their onset toe swift and powerful for him to reject. “Get your hand off him,” he said, pitching his voice deep and full of menace.

  Wardell’s lean face went slack, and his grin seemed to deepen, as if the lustful expression engraved on his skull were showing through the skin, as if he perceived in Buddha an object of desire infinitely more gratifying than Taboo.

  Wardell nodded at the man kneeling between Taboo’s legs, and the man flung himself at Buddha, pulling a knife and swinging it in a vicious arc. Buddha caught the man’s wrist, and the man’s violence was transmitted t
hrough his flesh, seeding fury in his heart. He squeezed the man’s wristbones until they ground together, and the knife fell to the floor. Then he pinned the man against the wall and began smashing his head against it, avoiding the fingers that clawed at his eyes. He heard himself yelling, heard bone splinter.

  The man’s eyes went unfocused, and he grew heavy in Buddha’s grasp; he slumped down, the back of his head leaving a glistening red track across a puffy cloud. Buddha knew he was dead, but before he could absorb the fact, something struck him in the back, a liver punch that landed with the stunning impact of a bullet, and he dropped like a stone.

  The pain was luminous. He imagined it lighting him up inside with the precise articulation of an X-ray. Other blows rained in upon him, but he felt only the effects of that first one. He made out Wardell looming over him, a slim leathery giant delivering kick after kick. Blackness frittered at the edges of his vision. Then a scream-a sound like a silver splinter driven into Buddha’s brain-and there was Taboo, something bright in his hand, something that flashed downward into Wardell’s chest as he turned, lifted, flashed down again. Wardell stumbled back, looking puzzled, touching a red stain on the shirtfront, and then appeared to slide away into the blackness at the corner of Buddha’s left eye. Buddha lay gasping for breath: the last kick had landed in the pit of his stomach. After a second his vision began to clear, and he saw Taboo standing above Wardell’s body, the other man’s knife in his hand.

  With his sleek breasts and male genitalia and the bloody knife, he seemed a creature out of a myth. He kneeled beside Buddha. “You awright?” he asked. “Buddha? You awright?”

  Buddha managed a nod. Taboo’s eyes reminded him of the eyes of the fish in his dream-aswarm with terrors-and his magic was heavy wash in the air, stronger than Buddha had ever seen it.

  “I never wanted to kill nobody,” said Taboo tremulously. “That’s the last thing I wanted to do.” He glanced at the two corpses, and his lips quivered. Buddha looked at them, too.

  Sprawled in oddly graceful attitudes on the green grass amid a calligraphy of blood, they appeared to be spelling out some kind of cryptic message. Buddha thought if he kept staring at them, their meaning would come clear.

  “Oh, God!” said Taboo. “They gon’ be comin’ for me, they gon’ put me in jail! I can’t live in jail. What am I gon’ do?”

  And to his astonishment, looking back and forth between the corpses and Taboo’s magical aura, Buddha found he could answer that question.

  * * * *

  The answer was, he realized, also the solution to the problem of his life; it was a means of redemption, one he could have arrived at by no other process than that of his fifteen-year retreat.

  Its conception had demanded an empty womb in which to breed and had demanded as well an apprehension of magical principle: that had been supplied by his dream of Africa. And having apprehended the full measure of this principle, he further realized he had misunderstood the nature of Taboo’s powers. He had assumed that they had been weakened by the wrongness of his birth and would mature once he went under the knife; but he now saw that they were in themselves a way of effecting the transformation with a superior result, that they had needed this moment of violence and desperation to attain sufficient strength. Buddha felt himself filling with calm, as if the knowledge had breached an internal reservoir that had dammed calmness up.

  “You need a disguise,” he said. “And you got the perfect disguise right at your fingertips.” He proceeded to explain.

  “You crazy, Buddha!” said Taboo. “No way I can do that.”

  “You ain’t got no choice.”

  “You crazy!” Taboo repeated, backing away. “Crazy!”

  “C’mon back here!”

  “Naw, man! I gotta get away, I gotta…” Taboo backed into the door, felt for the knob, and-eyes wide, panic-stricken-wrenched it open. His mouth opened as if he were going to say something else, but instead he turned and bolted down the hall.

  The pain in Buddha’s back was throbbing, spreading a sick weakness all through his flesh, and he passed out for a few seconds.

  When he regained consciousness, he saw Taboo standing in the doorway, looking insubstantial due to the heavy wash of magic around him; in fact, the whole room had an underwater lucidity, everything wavering, like a dream fading in from the immaterial. “See?” said Buddha. “Where you gon’ go, man? You barely able to make it here!”

  “I don’t know, I’ll…maybe I’ll…” Taboo’s voice, too, had the qualities of something out of a dream; distant and having a faint echo.

  “Sheeit!” Buddha reached out to Taboo. “Gimme a hand up.”

  Taboo helped him to his feet and into the bedroom and lowered him onto the bed. Buddha felt as if he might sink forever into the black satin coverlet.

  “Show me that new dress you bought,” he said. Taboo went to the closet, pulled out a hanger, and held the dress against his body to display its effect. It was white silk, low-cut, with a scattering of sequins all over.

  “Aw, man,” said Buddha. “Yeah, that’s your dress. You be knockin’ the boys’ eyes out wearin’ that…if they could ever see it. If you’d just do what’s right. You’d be too beautiful for Detroit. You’d need to get someplace south, place where the moon shines bright as the sun. ‘Cause that’s what kinda beautiful you gon’ be. Moon beautiful. Miami, maybe. That’d suit ya. Get you a big white car, drive down by them fancy hotels, and let all them fancy people have a look at ya. And they gon’ lay down and beg to get next to you, man…”

  As Buddha talked, conjuring the feminine future with greater seductiveness and invention than ever before, the heat haze of Taboo’s magic grew still more visible, taking on the eerie miragelike aspect of the mists beyond the lake in Buddha’s Africa; and after Buddha had finished, Taboo sat on the edge of the bed, holding the dress across his lap. “I’m scared,” he said. “What if it don’t work?”

  “You always been scared,” said Buddha. “You bein’ scared’s what got them two men dead out there. Time for that to stop. You know you got the power. So go on!”

  “I can’t!”

  “You ain’t got no choice.” Buddha pulled Taboo’s head down gently and kissed him openmouthed, breathing into him a calming breath. “Do it,” he said. “Do it now.”

  Hesitantly Taboo came to his feet. “Don’t you go nowhere now. You wait for me.”

  “You know I will.”

  “Awright.” Taboo took a few steps toward the bathroom, then stopped. “Buddha, I don’t…”

  “Go on!”

  Taboo lowered his head, walked slowly into the bathroom, and closed the door.

  Buddha heard the tub filling, heard the splashing as Taboo climbed into it. Then heard him begin to mutter his charms. He needed to sleep, to fix, but he kept awake as long as he could, trying to help Taboo with the effort of his will. He could feel the vibrations of the magic working through the bathroom door. Finally he gave in to the pressures of exhaustion and the throbbing in his back and drifted off to sleep; the pain followed him into the blackness of sleep, glowing like the core of his being. He woke sometime later to hear Taboo calling his name and spotted him in the darkest corner of the room-a shadow outlined by painted stars.

  “Taboo?”

  “It don’t feel right, Buddha.” Taboo’s voice had acquired a husky timbre.

  “C’mere, man.”

  Taboo came a step closer, and though Buddha was still unable to see him, he could smell the heat and bitterness of the herbs.

  “It worked, didn’t it?” Buddha asked. “It musta worked.”

  “I think… But I feel so peculiar.”

  “You just ain’t used to it is all… Now c’mere!”

  Taboo moved still closer, and Buddha made out a naked young woman standing a few feet away. Slim and sexy, with shoulder-length black hair and high, small breasts and a pubic triangle that showed no sign of ever having been male.

  The air around Taboo was still and dark. N
o ripples, no heat haze. The magic had all been used.

  “I told ya,” said Buddha. “You beautiful.”

  “I ain’t…I just ordinary.” But Taboo sounded pleased.

  “Ordinary as angels,” Buddha said. “That’s how ordinary you are.”

  Taboo smiled. It was faltering at first, that smile, but it grew wider when Buddha repeated the compliment: the smile of a woman gradually becoming confident of her feminine powers. She lay down beside Buddha and fingered his belt buckle. “I love you, Buddha,” she said. “Make me feel right.”

  Love was a steady flow from her, as tangible as a perfume, and Buddha felt it seeping into him, coloring his calm emptiness. On instinct he started to reject the emotion, but then he realized he had one more duty to fulfill, the most taxing and compromising duty of all. He reached down and touched the place between Taboo’s legs. Taboo stiffened and pushed her hips against his finger.

  “Make me feel right,” she said again.

  Buddha tried to turn onto his side, but the pain in his back flared. He winced and lay motionless. “Don’t know if I can. I’m hurtin’ pretty bad.”

  “I’ll help you,” she said, her fingers working at his buckle, his zipper. “You won’t have to do nothin’, Buddha. You just let it happen now.”

  But Buddha knew he couldn’t just let it happen, knew he had to return Taboo’s love in order to persuade her of her rightness, her desirability. As she mounted him, a shadow woman lifting and writhing against the false night of the ceiling stars, strangely weightless, he pinned his dead wife’s features to her darkened face, remembered her ways, her secrets. All the love and lust he had fought so long to deny came boiling up from nowhere, annihilating his calm. He dug his fingers into the plump flesh of her hips, wedging himself deep; he plunged and grunted, ignoring the pain in his back, immersed again in the suety richness of desire, in the animal turbulence of this most alluring of human involvements. And when she cried out, a mournful note that planed away to a whisper, like the sound a spirit makes falling through eternity, he felt the profound satisfaction of a musician who by his dominance and skill has brought forth a perfect tone from chaos. But afterward as she snuggled close to him, telling him of her pleasure, her excitement, he felt only despair, fearing that the empty product of his years of ascetic employment had been wasted in a single night.