Grants Pass

by Cherie Priest

  Existence is impermanent. Don’t become attached to this world. It’s not real. It won’t last.

  Pema chewed on her lower lip, watching the young monk hold his position after the symbolic crushing. She could barely see his lips moving against the marble under them, praying, meditating. Reminding himself that this was what they would all get, and that it was…all right.

  She took a deep breath, subconsciously missing the smells that used to linger there. Frying samosas and nag champa incense, replaced now by sickly sweet death. But watching the monk whispering his mantras into the ground, she felt a little better.

  But she had to get back to Tenzin and make him as comfortable as she could.

  ****

  Pema turned away for a moment and reached for another wet cloth for Tenzin. Sonam was on his own bed in the corner, under a wall covered in his own fantastic drawings and paintings. Cities he’d never seen and creatures that had never existed, pictures of deities and myths from Greece to South America, sensitive portraits of friends, spread over his head. His legs were propped up in front of him, one of his elbows resting on a knee. His hand hung low, holding a string of beads, his mala, and he pushed them through his fingers, one after the other. Staring straight ahead, he didn’t seem to realize what he was doing. His lips moved, but no words came out.

  She didn’t blame him. Even the incense couldn’t cover the smell of sickness in their one-room flat, all sour and wrong. The storms had started again, and the sky hung heavy and gray over the Boudhanath Stupa outside. Thunder rolled now and then, and bucketfuls of rain slammed against the roof. They couldn’t even open the window to let in some air.

  New cloth retrieved from the cool bowl beside her, she took the old one from Tenzin’s forehead and replaced it. He made a face, like her touch hurt him. Pema winced because she knew it did. It had started three days ago. Now Tenzin’s normally sun-brown skin looked like pale wax, wet from sweats that came out of nowhere. He’d sleep for a few minutes, then wake up and twitch in some awful unspoken pain, then sleep again.

  She hoped he’d sleep forever soon. When he did, she wouldn’t leave him at the ghats with all the others. Sonam wouldn’t want to either.

  Cloth replaced, she stood and wiped her hands on her jeans and went to the desk, flicking on the computer screen. The internet connection had gone down last week, but she still opened up her inbox and went through her old mail now and then. They hadn’t seen anything from their oldest brother, Thinley, who had been in Chicago, for weeks. The last she’d heard, the sickness and devastation was worse there.

  Here, they’d had landslides in the mountains, disasters along the roads to Tibet and floods on the roads to the Terai. The monsoons had begun early for the last two years, the rivers had been flushed with too much runoff from the Himalayas, but the Valley and her people had mostly survived. Pilgrims had still come from the villages, Hindus for the temples, and Buddhists for the stupas and monasteries. Shopkeepers had opened their doors in spite of the fact that there were no tourists, and hadn’t been in over a year. It was an act calculated to ward off their own despair, but it spread to the rest of the city — or at least the neighborhoods like Boudha that used to thrive on tourism.

  Pema wished she could find out about Chicago — whether things were better or worse there. Thinley’s emails used to be so funny, full of stories about the city, how different the clubs were there, the jokes people told him, and the strange Inji couple who owned the restaurant where he worked. But she didn’t open any of those; instead, she opened his last mail, scanning it again, even though she had it memorized.

  It still didn’t make any more sense than it had the first time. He must’ve been sick when he’d written it — Tenzin sounded the same, fevered and confused. There was something pasted into the text — a journal entry, maybe from someone he knew there, but definitely an American.

  When the end of the world comes, meet me in Grants Pass, Oregon.

  That, at least, made a little more sense, these days. But still, not much.

  As she had the thought, there was a sudden popping sound from the computer, from inside the walls, and the screen went black. The sound of the tower’s fan stopped short. The light overhead flickered and went out.

  A hard knot formed in Pema’s stomach, as she sat there in the gray-almost-dark, listening to the suddenly deafening sound of the storm outside. She looked over her shoulder at Sonam.

  He sat in the exact same position: Staring at nothing, fingering his mala thoughtlessly. He hadn’t even noticed.

  “It’s not Thursday, is it?” she asked, because she wanted to hear him say something. Thursday was Boudha’s scheduled evening for blackouts, to save power…but she knew it wasn’t Thursday.

  “No. Saturday.” His expression never changed.

  He could’ve at least smiled at her, she thought. He was the oldest here — he used to smile at them when things got bad. He used to at least try.

  She stood and went to the window, looking through the torrents of rain down to the circle below. The tiny crowd in front of the monastery had cleared when the storms started again, but a few monks were still there, meditating on their mortality. She looked to the stupa, the center of their world — its seven-foot high outer walls a stark white in the growing darkness. There were three levels of platforms up, a walkway of a mandala, to the whitewashed dome. She tried to see it as it used to look, with saffron lotus petal shapes sprayed across it every new moon; the eyes on the tower above still bright and blue, the fringe of material shielding them; and the strings of prayer flags above, bright red, green, yellow, and blue.

  But it was all faded and frayed now, endless rain and shortened manpower taking their toll. Her eyes started to burn, and a loud clap of thunder struck, rolling over them. It shook the walls.

  She returned to the desk and opened a drawer, looking for candles and a torch. She didn’t figure the power would be coming back. Not ever.

  ****

  A sudden crack of lightning forced its way behind her eyes, tearing her out of a deep sleep. Pema sat up in bed, breathing hard. She glanced over to the next bed quickly, saw Tenzin there, silent and pale. She watched carefully in the dark and…yeah. His chest rose and fell.

  She started to take a deep breath and reached for a bottle of water on the desk—

  Another crash, though, this one from inside the room. Her eyes darted through the shadows, her entire body tensed. There had been so many lootings this past week, with everyone falling sick one after the other. Anyone could be inside, and Sonam slept like the dead. What if—?

  He stepped out of the shadows on the far side of the room — a tall, broad-shouldered figure. Familiar.

  She took a deep breath, finally. Just Sonam.

  But Sonam was in his jacket, with his Adidas Sambas laced up. A backpack hanging from one hand, a small purse, the kind the Indian beggar-kids tried to sell to tourists for twenty times their value, from the other.

  The purse they kept all their money in.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. Her body began to tense again, although she wasn’t sure why.

  He stepped closer, skirting the edge of Tenzin’s bed until he came to the foot of hers. He looked down at her, biting his lip, his fingers clutching at the Indian purse fitfully. Like he was trying to strangle it, but couldn’t quite bring himself to.

  “Sonam,” she said through her teeth. A command.

  He shook his head. Sadly, she thought. “We have to go.”

  Her heart began to race, and a sick feeling rose in the back of her throat. “Go where?”

  “Lumbini—”

  “Lumbini flooded last summer, they barely saved the pillar. Do you think they’re not sick down there in the jungle too, if we are up here?”

  “Dharamsala then—”

  “Delhi was hit first; of course they have it in Dharam—”

  “Lhasa!” he shouted, making a cutting-off gesture with the purse-hand. Like this was the end of the discus
sion, some kind of irrefutable truth.

  The lightning was distant, she realized, as his eyes flashed with it. Her heart thudded loudly in her ears until the rumble of thunder finally came, several seconds later.

  She couldn’t believe it. Of all the things she’d seen in the last year, this was the most awful. It was a nightmare, it had to be. Not her Sonam.

  But he just stared at her, looking wild and cold.

  Finally, she forced herself to speak again. “Even if the roads hadn’t been swallowed up by the landslides, do you think that Beijing wouldn’t send the first sick Chinese right into the Tibetan quarter to finish the job for them?”

  Sonam recoiled slightly, his shoulders slumped.

  Pema knew damn well that this was playing dirty, reminding him about why they had to stick together — not just their family, but their people. But it wasn’t half as dirty as his game.

  He started forward, hands then knees on the foot of her bed. She pulled her legs up underneath her to make room for him. He sat, knees touching hers, and looked her in the eye.

  He didn’t look right, she thought. Didn’t look like Sonam. Something was wrong…although that should be fairly obvious, by then. If something wasn’t wrong, he wouldn’t be acting like this.

  “He’s going to be dead in the morning,” he said. He didn’t look or gesture toward Tenzin. He didn’t need to. “And so will the rest of this city. But we’re not sick. We need to go somewhere safe.”

  “We can’t leave him. Sometimes people get better—”

  “One in a billion.”

  This was an invented statistic and Pema knew it, but it was probably close enough that it didn’t matter. So all she said was, “Nowhere is safe.”

  He closed his eyes, shook his head.

  She reached out, pushing his hair out of his eyes, her fingers brushing his forehead. Her heart stopped. He was burning up. Even with that smallest touch, she could tell. “Oh my god,” she said it in English, like they always did. “Sonam.”

  He opened his eyes. He didn’t look like he understood.

  “You’re…” but she couldn’t make herself say it. Her thoughts were frozen, this new revelation rattling around in her head uselessly.

  But it didn’t explain why he would want to leave Tenzin. And, she suspected, why he’d been about to leave her, too.

  He shook his head and swatted at her hand, which hung in the air between them. One last look at her, and he was on his feet, swooping down for the purse and backpack.

  “Don’t leave us,” she said, almost without thinking. It just came out, and her eyes started to burn for what felt like the twentieth time today.

  He didn’t turn back though.

  “Sonam, don’t leave me.”

  But even before he walked out the door, she knew there was no point. She thought about going after him, dragging him back, hitting him and kicking him until he listened…but she didn’t.

  Her eyes overflowed, and she buried her face in her hands.

  ****

  Tenzin’s frail figure convulsed again; this time, he coughed something like blood onto the sheets. Something like blood because it was blacker and thicker than blood should’ve been.

  Pema wiped it up — first off his graying lips, then from his chin, and finally the bed. He winced slightly at her touch. There was no light behind his eyes when he opened them.

  It wouldn’t be long now.

  The coughing died out after that, and Tenzin seemed to fall asleep, his shallow breaths growing further and further apart, his body relaxing under the sheets. Pema laid a new cold cloth on his head and peeked out the window.

  The rain had stopped for the moment. Now was probably the last chance she’d get today — and there was nothing in the flat but biscuits. She’d better save those for when it got really bad — those things could survive a nuclear holocaust, let alone a plague.

  Another glance at her little brother, to make sure he was asleep, and she grabbed a bottle of water and slipped out the door, down the pale lime green hallway, into the cramped stairwell, and out the door onto the stupa-circle.

  Silence. Not even the thin, frantic gathering from yesterday. There were a few dead beggars against the stupa walls, but all the brown, blue, and green doors were sealed against them. Whether there was anyone inside to care, Pema didn’t know.

  She’d seen death before — it happened a lot near the stupa. The sick and poor came to beg, and once in a while they died there. Her mother had passed away in the flat upstairs, not long after Thinley had gotten his visa to go to the US. Bodies were paraded around the stupa in covered palanquins before being taken down to the ghats, in normal circumstances. Bodies in the street and on the sides of the road were almost common.

  That was what she told herself, as she picked her silent way over gray cobblestones, the faded eyes of the stupa looking down on her blankly. But she couldn’t fool herself into thinking this was normal death, no matter how hard she tried. Maybe, if Sonam was still there to smile and pretend with her, she could’ve done it. But Sonam had left them a long time before last night, really.

  The only open door was the monastery’s — the same one they’d stopped at yesterday. Pema approached on squelching-sneakered feet, eyeing the doorway suspiciously. Every corner could hold a new and horrific sight for her, and numb though she was today, she didn’t think she could handle something ghastly. Not here. Not where her mother used to take her for puja in the mornings. She’d fall asleep against her, listening to the monks chant and ring bells, breathing the smell of butter tea…

  But there was nothing ghastly, as it turned out. Two monks sat on the marble entryway now — an older man, in a fit of coughing, and a younger. The latter was the same monk from yesterday, who’d had his head symbolically crushed. He patted the old monk on the back and muttered something to him.

  They both looked up when Pema approached. The old man blinked and smiled. The younger just stared, as if he were surprised to see her. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen — he still had baby fat in his cheeks.

  “Lama-la,” she bowed her head to them. “Tashi delek.”

  It felt odd to greet him like that, almost like a bad joke. Like nothing was wrong.

  The older monk smiled, his eyes crinkling in the most charming way, and returned the greeting. “Are you hungry?”

  She nodded, tried to return the smile, but failed. It made her eyes start to burn — but they were still red and raw from last night. That was the last thing she needed, to cry more. “I was looking for something, but I didn’t think any shops would be open.”

  It hadn’t been a very good plan, now that she thought about it. Why had she thought she could get anything — without breaking into the stores, anyhow?

  The old man gave the younger monk a slap on the leg, and the boy took off in a shot of red and yellow into the monastery. “Are you alone?” he asked.

  “No. My brother…he’s sick.”

  The monk nodded, looked like he was about to say something else, but started coughing into his robe instead. Pema saw that his eyes glowed bright with fever, and his high cheekbones made him look sunken. Too sunken for an old lama living in a rich monastery. She held out her water bottle to him and he accepted gratefully, chugging it. By the time his coughs had calmed, the boy had returned with round, flat bread for her.

  Pema accepted it, and caught herself smiling when she met the boy’s eyes. He was only a little younger than Tenzin, three years at most. They looked nothing alike, with the little monk’s bald head and round face…

  But Tenzin used to have pink in his cheeks like that.

  “I’ll come back tomorrow, to check on you,” Pema promised, before she could start crying.

  The old monk nodded, raising the water bottle as if to thank her for it. The little monk tried to smile back, but he couldn’t seem to manage. He’d lost the composure of the boy who’d had his head symbolically cracked for vultures yesterday evening.

 
; Pema decided to do some kora around the stupa. Just three rounds. Maybe she’d feel better then.

  ****

  It took Tenzin one more day to die.

  Pema held his hand for an hour, even after he took his last painful, rattling breath. Not because she wanted to pretend he wasn’t gone — she was glad for him, she only wished it hadn’t taken him so long to be free. But she held his hand because she didn’t know what else to do, and that was what she’d been doing when he’d stopped breathing.

  There was nothing left. Yesterday she’d wandered Boudha — winding alleys that used to be lined with booths selling cuts of meat, piles of garbage that needed to be burned, restaurants advertising everything from momos to apple pie, glass-windowed shops with turquoise jewelry and Newari-made bronzes of Chenrezig and Thankgas painted with Green Taras. But now prayer flags fluttered over empty carpet factories and monasteries, streets were clogged with abandoned autos and the bodies of people who didn’t have anywhere better to die. Packs of dogs fought over the leftovers of the neighborhood. Flies were everywhere, encouraged by the lack of humans to whisk them away.

  The smell was awful. She’d thought she’d get used to it, but no matter how much incense she burned in the flat, it was everywhere. In her hair, in her clothes, in her nose.

  She wondered, letting her brother’s hand go, why she hadn’t gotten sick. She’d kissed Tenzin’s forehead, she’d talked to the sick monk yesterday, when he’d looked like he was on his own deathbed. She hadn’t tried to keep from it. She wanted it. Now that Tenzin was gone—

  She covered her brother with a sheet, took a bottle of water and some of Sonam’s drawings from the wall, and left. Wishing she could set the whole building on fire, knowing that she never could. It was home.

  The monastery door was open, a few candles burning in the dark depths of the front chamber. She left her sandals at the entryway, noticing vaguely that they looked lonely there, all by themselves. When she went inside, the smell of butter lamps and juniper warded off the cloying death-smell that coated Boudha like a film.