Craving (30 page)

“Jealous?” I shot back.

The boyish face scowled at me suddenly. “No!”

“What, don’t swing that way, funny how you’re blushing and fall right in line wh—”

“I’m a mathematician,” he spat. “I don’t swing
any
way. Art just has a way . . .” As he trailed off in the vague confusion of a person trying to recall what had happened to them under hypnosis, I nodded, sympathizing completely.

“I think it’s his gift,” I said quietly.

“I know,” he muttered, “but knowing that doesn’t make me immune.”

I sighed in complete agreement. “Who says I want to be immune? I’d settle for a good . . .” He held up his hand to stop me, making a sickened face. “But he’s celibate.”

“That’s common,” Jinx said. “Doesn’t have to be. We can have kids just like normal people, but most of us have seen how bad it is for others to associate with us.”

I watched Eva’s sentences line up like soldiers called to ranks on his monitor, turning from a jumble of stanzas into the alien tale of a man on a mission to attain perfection. In my periphery, Jinx sat, tapping keys, doing whatever it was that he did so uniquely. I wanted to just get it out there, line up all the facts like ducks to be shot down, but I had absolutely no idea if my assumptions meant anything. I opened my mouth and he glanced my way.

“I know you think that, but it really isn’t glamorous or romantic in any way! Lily…” He put his hands together as if he was about to pray and turned his chair toward me. “The meme the Buddha began destroyed the capacity for cogent thought. It made flaws in perception evident, which is something the human brain can’t handle, since it works
because
of those perceptions. You shouldn’t be surprised to find that the majority of the Arhat are completely bonkers.”

I shook my head slightly, still not seeing it, and in desperation, he reached out and grabbed my hand.

“They attended a class, were told that the grade would change their lives, then the teacher disappeared and left the test behind. They are trapped there, always failing, missing the last answer, and will never find it.”

I looked at his hand distantly, knowing exactly what it was like to feel an unavoidable sensation that something was missing. “Am I going to go nuts too?”

I lifted my gaze to his and was surprised to find the dubious expression. “I dunno,” he whispered. “Hope not, but if Eva did, then . . .”

“Not much hope, I guess. When I get there, put two in my skull like I clawed my way out of a casket, okay?”

“No. You can be okay, if you try.” He let go of me. “You just have to find it for yourself, or you’ll be trapped too. They know that, that’s why they hired Eva. That’s why they haven’t come for you.”

He looked into my eyes until it was clear I was
not
going to look away, that I
wanted
to understand the meanings.

“Error correction,” he said with a heavy breath, “that’s what they want. They have tried to find the solution to the riddle, but I can track their failures, about forty years back. They’ve been trying for so long without success that I think they’re going to employ another strategy, and given what they have to work with, it’s no surprise.”

“Trying what?” I rasped. I was sure that at any moment, he was going to clam up and return to the code of silence, but it seemed he was a species distant enough to not care about our laws.

He turned in his chair and brought another terminal to life. On the screen was a newspaper microfilm image dated several decades earlier. He swiveled the screen to me and anxious, I read. It was something of an obituary, annotating the young man’s life, detailing his exceptional college career in languages and his strange downward spiral into depression and suicide. It told of his drinking, of the strange cuts on his wrist, and most importantly, of his stroll into traffic. My eyes fell to my lap.

“Detective Unger?”

“I’ve sent them all to him, on Art’s orders,” Jinx said, careful not to startle me. “There’s about twenty in all, but based on the dates, I’m almost certain there’re more that have been covered up.”

My throat ached and suddenly it was a struggle to swallow. “I don’t understand.”

“They’re manufacturing a cure,” the creature across from me replied gently. “They hire a person to translate their supposed historical finds, in hopes that that person will incorporate the ideas therein. Inevitably, they do, and in each circumstance, they turn.”

My wrist pulsed and with a careworn glance, I found it oozing again. “And then what? Why do they all commit suicide?”

“We don’t know that they do, but it seems like quite a few have. The rest could have been the Sangha disposing of the evidence.”

He brought up another article, this one from the turn of the century about a man who had apparently drowned. While I stared at the picture in mute shock, he receded into his chair.

“Whatever the Sangha does to their subjects in order to extract their cure, seems to scramble their minds. Either that, or their brains were already scrambled. That’s all I can figure.”

“So . . .” My eyes remained fixed on the image. His hair was different, his clothing like a slide from a stereoscope, but that wicked, apathetic smile was the same. “They put the source meme into a person’s hands, wait and see what happens, swoop in like the fucking Gestapo to gain information, fail, and then torture them? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Sure it does.”

He followed my gaze to the monitor and with a click, resurrected another picture from the past,
my
past. It was an image I’d been sickened by from the moment I first saw it. The car twisted like warm pretzel dough, the sparkling auto glass scattered on the pavement like rock candy, the splatter of blood over which the photographer had probably salivated, and in the background, a crowd of people. “
Local Historian and Wife Die in Drunk-driving Accident
,” the headline read, and in the caption, “Robert and Susan Pierce are survived by two daughters.” The mouse directed my attention to a grainy corner of the crowd and with a few waves of mechanical wind to ruffle the pixels into place, I saw what he wanted me to see.

That same fucking sleazy face.

“Lily,” Jinx whispered, “Moksha killed your parents and brought your sister here. She was a lab experiment to fix them.”

“That’s impossible!” I exclaimed, even though I could see the proof myself. My experience with the careless hand of Death had taught me that destruction was random, that nothing was fair. Life was organization and death was a scattering of pieces. The very act of living made the chaos of death unacceptable to me, and the notion that such disorganization was according to someone’s plan, was equally unacceptable. I couldn’t believe in God for that very reason, so why should I grant the Sangha any power in my life?

“It’s not impossible on our timescale,” Jinx insisted politely, giving me enough time to say such a ridiculous thing, simply because he knew I needed to. “He made sure that all the therapists, advisors, and mentors she encountered were his agents, and when the time was right, and she was prepared, he snatched her up. He’s just their recruiter, going around finding the right type of person. She was just one of many and he’s gotten so good at it, I’m tempted to think she was the last.”

“Last what?” I gasped. My skin crawled with uncanny awareness as I stared into the smug expression, frozen in time just like its owner. “What are they trying to achieve?”

“Another Buddha to teach them the final lesson.”

Winded, I sucked air in great gasps like a bellows. My vision began to darken, and I knew that if I didn’t get a hold of myself, I was going to pass out. It was all just words, surely. I could push them away and be objective, I was sure, but the feelings wouldn’t let me. Like ghosts, they swarmed around my mind, until the anxiety became the only calm place in the storm.

“How do you know this?”

He looked away from me. “Your sister had this article in one of her journals. Art found it. He asked me to research it.”

“Why?” I demanded, fighting for consciousness. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

“Eva figured it all out, and even though she believed she wasn’t the cure, that doesn’t mean she couldn’t see who could be. You’re pure, infected but unschooled, standing in the stream, finding your own way across just like the Buddha did. Art couldn’t tell you anything, because any influence he has over you destroys whatever change you’re capable of making. You’re the cure, Lilith. It’s you. At least, that’s what
they
believe. I think.”

I shook my head adamantly, unable to speak. His face tilted toward me as if he couldn’t quite make out my thoughts for the first time and was trying to listen. In his eyes was the look of keen scientific interest tempered by his sympathy. It was obvious then, that whatever leap of logic I was meant to make, I hadn’t.

“Arthur . . .” I attempted, “why would he . . .?”

“Lily,” he replied soothingly, “he’s one of them too, remember?”

Chapter 20

“Have you talked to him about it?” Unger asked me, and to my surprise, his voice sounded more like a mediator than a pessimistic cop close to retirement with nothing to lose.

Annoyed with him, I spun in Jinx’s captain chair, wishing I could command that photon torpedoes be aimed at the coffee shop. “No! I don’t want to talk to him! You were right and I didn’t listen to you. I feel like such an ass!”

On the other end, his voice broke up in the bad reception.

“What?”

“I said, are you sure?”

“First you tell me not to trust him and now you’re taking his side? What the hell, Unger, you leave your balls at his place?”

The man grumbled and I could hear the crackling of his police radio. “Well . . . maybe I was wrong. Lilith, this goes farther than I can see. The evidence in those cases Jinx gave me doesn’t even exist anymore. I’ve done as much research as I can, but I’m stumped. Arthur is the only one who knows what he’s talking about and . . . well . . . so what if he was using you?”

My mouth fell open in horrified shock. Was everyone losing their minds around me? Why was I the only sane one when I was the one who was supposed to be going nuts? Then again, like my mom had always said, when everyone around you seems nuts, maybe it was you.

“I mean, he’s trying to save his . . . I don’t know . . . people?”

I swiveled the chair again. Jinx came through the door, blue plastic glass with swirly straw in hand, sucking at what appeared to be another energy drink. I frowned at him and wiggled my fingers. With a petulant scowl, he did an about-face and disappeared to uncover a canned drink with which he was willing to part. “So what? I’m
so
not thinking of helping them out.”

“Well, it’s not like Arthur’s going to hand you over to them,” he replied in an aggravated tone.

“What the hell?” I gasped. “Since when are you his best friend?”

“I’m not, but he already said you’d go to them. If he’s in on their conspiracy, then maybe he’s there to teach you to be more generous.”

Insulted
and
shocked, I made faces at Jinx’s monitors. “Are you trying to tell me something, Unger?”

“Just that you could try and see it from his perspective.”

“You know, I just remembered that my car’s a rental and that my plane tickets are non-refundable.”

He was on his way somewhere, his attention on his driving; either that, or he was thinking about what he would feel at my departure, though that hardly seemed the case.

“Huh,” he said mirthlessly, “I forgot you live in California.”

“Me too, but like I said, I’m starting to remember.”

The car pulled into wherever it was going and the engine cut off. In the silence, his voice seemed much louder. “So you’re going to drop all this? You’re just going to leave when you’re in this deep, when everything’s this fucked up?”

I sighed. “No.” Jinx reappeared as I spun in a lazy circle. A metal projectile was hurled at my face and a thumb jabbed me out of his seat. Instead of sitting sidecar, I got up with my energy drink and wandered toward the stairs. “I know I can’t leave. I know he’s the only one who can explain anything, it’s just that . . . well . . . he’s
not
. So far everything I’ve learned about what’s really going on has been from Jinx and Eva, not Arthur.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes it is. He only told me things when it was inevitable that I would find out, when I absolutely had to know, or when he thought I might run away from him. I’m tempted to stay here and ignore him completely out of spite.”

“Maybe go look up Moksha when you start sprouting fangs, and ask after their dental plan?” Unger said sarcastically, summing up how my logic would doom me to the fate Arthur had foretold.

I stormed up the stairs vengefully, thinking of that damn stair-climber in my bedroom back at the house, and marched down the hall in a rage. “Yeah, you know what? Maybe I will. I mean, what the hell? I know I’m not going to cure anyone, so why not just walk right in and say ‘here’s your next failure, jackasses!’”

I halted outside an open doorway. What lay beyond the threshold had to be an entire store of carefully sorted video games. Eyebrows raised, I backed away and with a shake of my head, found my nerves were cooling off in spite of me, thanks to Jinx’s humorous influence. I popped open the can while Unger gathered his belongings, muttering curses under his breath at my rashness, and sipped at it, marveling that the stuff reminded me of Flintstone vitamins.

“You don’t want to do that, Lilith,” he admonished. “They’re not shy about killing people, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’ve been learning all kinds of crap about these guys, thanks to Arthur’s guidance.”

“Like what? And when did he ‘guide’ you?”

“For your information, he called me on my cell.”

“What the
hell
is going on? Am I in the twilight zone?”

He sighed. “AMRTA is just a front. There are so many shell corporations and false accounts here, that I’d need ten forensic accountants and Elliot Ness to even find where it begins. Whatever they’re doing, it’s a sure bet they’re not just doing
one
thing, and I’m almost positive that they’re not just doing it here.”