Twelve Days

by Steven Barnes

  “Two.” Her eyes were not those of a fifty-year-old. Or forty, or even thirty. She was more like a mischievous urchin.

  “Shit.” Terry dropped into a series of spinning sweeps, low to the floor. Gupta vaulted him, an actual somersault, an acrobatic clown trick, one hand pushing off on his shoulder.

  And stuck the landing, perfectly. “Three.”

  “What the hell…?” He dove into a leaping kick. A lunging punch. A spinning attack, a blur of back knuckles, kicks, sweeps.

  A smiling ghost, Gupta appeared to melt away before Terry, as if slithering in and out of his blind spots. She was right there, right in front of him, but Terry couldn’t hit her, couldn’t touch her. He stomped down on his frustration and increased his pace again and again, until she blurred into some kind of movement his mind couldn’t quite make sense of. How the hell do you cartwheel between someone’s legs…?

  Then she was on his back, riding him like a cowboy. He fell to his knees as Gupta’s slender brown fingers sank into the places in his shoulders where muscles met bone, freezing him for a moment with what felt like electric shock. She touched Terry’s forehead with her palm.

  “Five,” she said.

  Terry blinked. “What was four?”

  “Is this yours?” She handed Terry his brown leather belt. Terry looked down at his sagging pants, chagrined, and retrieved it. He stood, anger swelling … and then bursting like a punctured balloon.

  “I’ll be dipped in shit,” he said, and bowed. The audience applauded wildly. And Terry’s was loudest of all.

  CHAPTER 12

  Demo completed, the subsequent Q & A session began. Olympia, still stunned into silence by what she had seen, felt her mind race with a thousand questions: who are you? Where did you learn to do that? Am I dreaming? But none of them made it all the way to lips and voice. The audience bubbled with questions, but most of them were either too mundane or too esoteric. All of hers connected in a single desperate query: can you help my son?

  She knew she could conjure nothing meaningful and specific, and assumed much of the audience was having the same reaction. None of their questions were remarkable, either.

  The session’s final exchange was the most useful, and honest. A man in farmer overalls asked: “How can you do things like that? This was amazing!”

  “To be honest,” Gupta replied, her childlike smile radiating warmth, “it’s rather amazing to me as well. But in partial answer, I offer you a quote from the Spanda Karika, verse thirty-eight:

  “‘Through merging with Spanda, the universal vibration, the yogi, though apparently weak manifests the power to accomplish what is needed. Even without food, she is nourished.’”

  She giggled. “And that reminds me that it is dinnertime. Go, and be nourished. Blessings.” She pressed her palms together, raised them to her forehead, and bowed respectfully. “I’d like to close our session with the Sanskrit expression that means ‘the divinity within me salutes and acknowledges the divinity within each and every one of you.’ Namaste.”

  Murmuring “Namaste” in return, but shaking their heads in astonishment and appreciation, the audience filed out. A few of them slapped Terry on the back, part admiration, part consolation. Blood roared in Olympia’s head, and all she knew was that a voice hammered at her: you must meet this woman. You have to find a way to catch her interest. Maybe you could tell her you’re from CNS, and think they should do a segment on her. That might work …

  To Olympia, Terry seemed thoughtful, confused … somehow younger than he had been an hour before. Like he’d had some of what Nicki called his swagg knocked out of him.

  Was it wrong of her to enjoy that?

  “Thank you for inviting me. This has been fascinating,” he said.

  “Are you staying?” Olympia asked. Gupta wanted to talk to Terry. Could she and Hannibal piggyback on that? She could sure as hell try.

  He snorted. “Wouldn’t you?”

  Madame Gupta approached them. “Please. Come to my office.” When Olympia hesitated, Gupta clarified. “Please. All of you.”

  Problem solved.

  The three followed the little woman down a narrow corridor. Olympia had interviewed professional athletes, dancers, and a tai chi master from Taiwan. Gupta didn’t move like they did. She wasn’t controlled, trained, sculpted. In fact, when first entering the room, she hadn’t seemed particularly graceful. This was something else. Something simultaneously animalistic and angelic. Again, Olympia had that momentary impression of a giant compressed into a tiny body.

  She’d had that impression before with other short, charismatic people. Hell, she’d stood in line for an hour to have science-fiction titan Harlan Ellison sign an ancient copy of The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World and gotten that impression. But this was far more intense.

  Olympia turned right and entered an office with a frosted glass door marked DIRECTOR. There, three leather-upholstered chairs had been set before a simple wooden desk. The walls were covered with plaques and photos of various notables posing with Madame Gupta: governors, sports figures, chamber of commerce types. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, hugging her and giving a thumbs-up. Clasping hands with an aged, bent, but unbroken Billy Graham. A picture of her under some kind of enormous barbell in a ceiling harness. Thousands of pounds, and she was clearly lifting it at least an inch off the rig. Amazing.

  Terry and Olympia sat, Hannibal sandwiched between them. Hani was rocking back and forth, “stemming” hard.

  Madame Gupta’s head tilted slightly to the side. “You are not … a family.”

  “No,” Olympia said, and hoped she hadn’t said it too quickly. Sharply.

  “But you have been … together.”

  Olympia felt a flash of heat. “That’s personal…”

  Terry’s brows drew together. “How do you know that?”

  “I have eyes,” the little brown woman said slyly. “Well, Olympia … that is your name?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have a very unusual boy,” she said. “Have you ever heard the term ‘indigo child’?”

  Olympia felt a moment’s familiar irritation at a label, any label, swiftly calmed. “Mr. Ling used it, yes.”

  “What it means,” Gupta said, “from the perspective of our philosophy, is a child whose energy has been knotted. Trapped. I believe that we can help him.”

  “What is it you think you can do?” Olympia asked, her throat tight.

  “More testing could be required. Would you be willing to come to our center for this purpose?”

  “In the Georgia mountains?”

  The little woman smiled. “We would provide transportation.”

  “Why?”

  “It is a joy to serve those receptive of service,” Gupta said. “Will you allow me to give your son a gift?”

  There it was, hanging suspended in the air. Olympia turned to look at Terry.

  He shrugged.

  “Yes,” Olympia finally said. “Can you help him?” It seemed absurd to ask, but she just couldn’t help it.

  “Yes,” Gupta replied. “But to do this, I must speak to both of you.”

  She waited, and miraculously, Hani raised his face, until he gazed only a little to Gupta’s side, almost meeting her eyes.

  “When I was a girl,” Gupta began, her voice so singsongy that it was almost like a lullaby, “my father had many occupations. Once, he was a fisherman. He used fishing lines, and he used nets. And the whole family helped, and the way I helped was untangling the nets and the lines. You see, sometimes the lines broke, and we had to tie them together with special knots. And sometimes the nets tore, and it was our responsibility to mend them. But what we always knew was that no matter how tangled everything was, we had more line, more net than we actually needed. Enough to be able to throw away anything that was damaged, and still have enough left to weave a new net or make a new line. Snip, untangle, knot, weave … and we could do it so well that you couldn’t see that there had ever been
a break.”

  Her voice was calm, smooth, loving, healing. She watched Hani relax, almost as if he was asleep sitting up. Swaying very slightly to and fro, to and fro …

  “And you know how I’d do it, Hani?”

  “No,” he said. He’d answered her! Olympia couldn’t believe it.

  Madame Gupta leaned close to Hannibal, close enough to whisper in his ear.

  “Feel your heartbeat,” she said.

  “He may not be able to follow you,” Olympia said.

  But even as she spoke, she saw that Hani’s constant movement had stopped. His “stemming,” his constant soothing rocking motion, had ceased, and the swing of his foot slowed to a bare pulse. He was as still as the pause between two heartbeats.

  Madame Gupta paid no attention to what Olympia had said. “In your heart lies the path where we will walk together. Can you hear me?”

  He nodded his head.

  “There is light inside you,” she said. “Perhaps like a spray of mist. Squeeze it down into a more solid, brighter ball.”

  Odd. Olympia closed her own eyes for a moment, and in the darkness danced a glowing sphere.

  “I would imagine I was small enough to crawl inside the ball. Surrounded by light. And I could go even deeper, where it is brighter and more beautiful. And I could see all the different parts of myself, and if they are separated and want to be together I can connect them, in any way they want to be connected, and everything is good.”

  Hani’s respiration had slowed. He barely seemed to be breathing at all. Madame Gupta’s hands rested on his chest, and on his back, sandwiching him between her palms. “All I had to do was know what a good net looked like. Feels like. Know what an untangled line looked like. Feels like. And I could just find anything that looked like that, and save it until I found another piece, and another. And save them all together. Because we had a lot more net than we needed. And even if there was damaged net, there were other nets that were healthy. That was the way nets are made.”

  Hani’s eyes closed.

  “But what we need to do is store up enough water to flow through the lines. And that means damming it. Not like a bad word…” She chuckled.

  “Like a beaver,” Hani murmured.

  Oh, God! Her boy had responded again! Two miracles in a single evening.

  “Yes!” Gupta said, delighted. “Like a beaver! What a good, good boy!” She rubbed his hair, and instead of flinching away, he beamed.

  “Holding the water back,” she went on. “And then when you finally let it out it has so much power. So that’s what I want. I want you to store up your energy until I tell you to let it go. Every breath. Every motion. Every step, a little of your energy is stored up and away. Until it gets so big, so wonderfully powerful that it breaks through any barrier.

  “This is just for you, Hani. Breaking through that wall. There is another thing I want you to see. Imagine a control panel. It is covered with switches and dials. This is your mind, your wonderful, wonderful mind. And up until now, the dials have all been turned up to eleven. Because of that, your only choice was to wear earmuffs, shutting everything out.

  “But if we can turn it down, then you can take the muffs off. If it isn’t so loud, you don’t have to be afraid. It won’t hurt. So imagine if nothing hurt. Imagine if all the wiring and netting was untangled. Imagine if you had control, could turn everything up or down…”

  And she went on, speaking of control. And power building up and being released. And as she did she touched him, at the top of his head, on his chest, making odd rubbing and tapping motions, almost like a doctor checking the pulmonary cavity, or a plumber tapping a pipe seeking leaks or obstructions.

  Olympia blinked herself awake. The voice, slow and smooth, had droned on until she lost track. She hadn’t even realized she’d closed her eyes, or drifted away. Hani sat quietly, a model of relaxed attention.

  Madame Gupta smiled at her. “We’re done,” she said.

  “What now?” Olympia asked.

  “Now … we wait. You should start seeing some results very soon. But this is just a beginning, enough to gain momentum. There is much more to do.”

  * * *

  She turned to Terry, and the impact of her attention felt like someone slapping his forehead. “Have we met, you and I?”

  “No,” he said. “But I attended a school run by one of your devotees, a guy named Marshall Weaver.”

  “Oh my.” She chuckled. “Mr. Weaver. When was this?”

  “Over twenty-five years ago,” he said, memory flashing back. A white-fronted school sandwiched between a dry cleaner and a sandwich shop. White mats and mirrored walls, photos of stern, unsmiling Asians and a tall, smiling man who promised to teach the secrets of strength. “I was thirteen years old. A tae kwon do school in Dallas.”

  “Yes.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Weaver. I’m afraid he was not so advanced as he imagined. How long did you train there?”

  “Two years,” he said. “I saw you once.”

  “At a graduation ceremony. You were in the black belt program.”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. “I see.” Against reason, he was certain she now remembered him.

  Gupta stood up, prowled around Terry as languidly as a curious wolf.

  “What is it?”

  “You left that school,” she said. “Before your graduation exercises, didn’t you?”

  Terry nodded again. “We had to move. I was an army brat, and my dad was constantly shuffled from one base to another.”

  “That … is unfortunate.”

  “Why?”

  She ignored the question. “And since that time, you have studied many styles, and worked very hard, and never gotten the results you hoped for.”

  Was he that transparent? “No. Never. But…”

  Madame Gupta’s eyes fell. “I am afraid that I should apologize to you.”

  “Apologize? For what?”

  “That program was experimental,” she said. “We were evaluating an advanced technique taught in Savagi’s book Transformations.”

  Terry brightened. For some reason, he had refrained from mentioning the name he remembered so well. “What was it?”

  “I think it would be called a ‘kundalini trap,’ a sort of collection point for techniques in your unconscious mind.”

  “‘Kundalini’?” Olympia asked. “What is that?”

  Terry felt a flash of irritation at Olympia’s voice. This was his time. It felt as if his entire life had been leading to this single moment.

  Gupta smiled. “It is a Sanskrit term. The spiritual evolutionary force in human beings, resulting from balancing the male and female aspects of our psyches.”

  “So a ‘kundalini trap’ would be…?”

  “A meditative technique, implanted by hypnosis, meditation, or psychological domination by a true master. It creates a ‘dam’ that stores up spiritual force, or emotional energy, like compressing a spring. It compresses until it has grown sufficiently powerful to be turned against a specific personality block, or a ‘kink’ in the wiring. One finds similar concepts in spiritual and psychological disciplines from Sufism’s ‘nafs’ to Scientology’s ‘engrams.’ The ‘kundalini trap’ is a conceptual structure designed to accelerate learning.” She paused. “Unfortunately, if not removed, they may turn into what you might term a bottleneck.”

  The simplicity of the concept stunned him. And made too much damned sense when he thought back over his own life. What was it? Six brown belts, but no black? Two broken marriages? His inability to completely accept the moral responsibilities of his military service?

  God, once he started thinking about it, there was no stopping. “That would explain—”

  Madame Gupta burst in excitedly, interrupting. “This presents us with a unique opportunity. You are a quite unusual case. To illuminate through analogy, what happened to you was an artificial version of what happened to young Hannibal.”

  “Hannibal!” the boy said
. Olympia hugged him again, dizzy with joy.

  “Yes. Of course he knows his name. Some doctors say he is insufficiently aware. But that is incorrect. He is too aware. The world is too intense, so he screens it out, all but the fraction he chooses to deal with. He likely has an extreme fantasy life. An electrician might say he’s tripped a circuit breaker. But that very hyper-acuity is a blessing, if we can find the right way to help him. It’s all in there, waiting to be released. As all your skills, your true potential, lie dormant within you, Terry, awaiting your command.”

  Her way of speaking was eerily hypnotic. Terry felt himself swaying, then shaking his head to clear it.

  “So for you, Terry, a release from the trap. For Hannibal, we build a protective fortress. The ‘circuit breaker’ analogy is powerful but imprecise. The limitations of language, unfortunately. In a broad sense, we control him in order to set him free.”

  “Released!” Hannibal said. Olympia looked like she wanted to swoon.

  Olympia hugged her boy again. “He rarely talks. Sometimes he sings. It’s … confusing.”

  “It won’t be. Not for much longer. This is not an accident. It is not coincidence that brought us all together. I wish to give your son a gift. And this man, if he agrees, will be evidence that my intentions are trustworthy, my methods sound.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. Think of a dam, holding back a massive reservoir. No matter the rain or snowmelt, it seems there is no water, because you cannot see beyond the wall.”

  “But it’s there?” Terry was dismayed by the plea creeping into his voice. Hope could be a terrible thing. And he didn’t want Olympia to think he had come to help himself, not Hannibal.

  “All there,” Madame Gupta said. “Uniquely … there. You are a competent martial artist…”

  Competent. The term “damning with faint praise” came to mind.

  “… but you could be brilliant, if only your years of work could be unleashed. Integrated. Are you willing?”

  Brilliant? Well, he liked the sound of that. “Willing?” Along with everything else, the woman possessed a serious talent for understatement. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Trust me.”