The 37th mandala : a novel (8 page)

"What? You're back already?"

"You were sleeping."

She turned toward Derek. "Was I?"

He couldn't tell if she meant it or not; if she was pretending for Michael's sake, or genuinely didn't remember. He hadn't instructed her either to remember or to forget.

"Yes," he said quietly.

"Oh. God." She squeezed out of the car, lighting another cigarette after a moment. Derek watched her closely, to see if she was going to reassure him somehow or otherwise betray her state of mind. Michael sat behind the wheel and began to babble again, picking up his inane conversation where he'd left off, although now Derek was able to pay even less attention thanks to a horrible free-floating sense of something left undone, something he might never be able to put to rights....

It was a relief when a truck came rattling up the road and pulled onto the shoulder facing them, blinding Derek with its lights. Lenore went toward it and returned a moment later with a tall, shaggy-looking hulk.

"Let's take a look," he said. "Scarlet's waiting on me."

"Mr. Crowe, this here is Tucker Doakes. He's going to take care of everything."

"Hey. You one of Mikey's Satan-lovin' friends?"

"Cut it out, Tuck," Lenore said. "Mr. Crowe's famous."

"Not exactly," Derek said.

"Either way, I'm gonna have to get to that backseat. Can you come out of the car? Thanks. What about this laundry, Lenore?"

"Throw it in the well."

"No engine parts in there or anything? No KFC buckets?"

"It's clean."

Derek moved away from the car, watching Doakes lean into it and shove the piled laundry into the little well under the rear window. Then Doakes pulled up the entire backseat, hauled it out of the car, and laid it on the roadside. Michael aimed his flashlight into the dark compartment thus revealed. Derek heard the clank of metal parts in the shadows.

"It's what I thought," he said. "Broken cotter pin. This whole assembly just fell apart. Easy to fix, though. You got a bobby pin, Lenore?"

"Are you kidding?"

"I knew I shoulda brought Scarlet along on this expedition. Well, come on, something."

"How about a paper clip?" Derek suggested.

Doakes shrugged. "I guess, sure, I could wrap it around—might hold for a while."

Derek dug into his valise, removing the paper clip from the manuscript of the evening's lecture, and handed it to Doakes, who went back into the car and worked there for a few more minutes. When he was done, he wiped his hands on his jeans and picked up the seat, shoving it back into the car.

"That should get you home," he said. "I'll put a real cotter pin in there tomorrow."

"We've got to get to the airport first," said Michael.

"Whatever. You try that out, see if she's okay. Come on, I got a feeling Scarlet's cooling fast."

"Sure." Michael started the car, put it into gear. It lurched forward, then into reverse. "Working!"

Tucker was already climbing into his truck. "See y'all later." The truck backed into the road, then screeched around and drove off.

Derek held his seat up so Lenore could climb in; she did so without looking at him.

"How are we on time?" Michael asked. "Airport's another fifteen minutes, ten if I floor it."

"We should just make it," Derek said.

Lenore didn't say another word on the drive; she didn't need to, because Michael more than filled the silence until the stark white lights of the airport finally appeared through trees ahead of them. In the mirror, ovals of glare slid over Lenore's cheeks like dislocated eyes. She seemed oblivious to their conversation; he wished he could be equally detached. He wished he could speak with her in private again; wished he could somehow take her back into trance, tie up any loose ends, wake her up properly. But she seemed fine, and what did he expect? It wasn't as if he'd been performing brain surgery.

Instead of heading straight toward the terminal, Michael brought the car into the short-term parking lot. Derek assumed it was because he was distracted by his own chatter.

"You can drop me off at the door," he said.

"No problem. We'll keep you company till your plane leaves. Nothing else to do."

Derek sank back. "If you say so."

"I guess I wasted my breath in those letters I sent, huh? I have some ideas about the mandalas, maybe I could bounce them off you sometime if you wouldn't mind, you know, giving me your address? They're questions you could ask the mandalas next time they come around. I swear I won't abuse the privilege."

The privilege? Derek smirked, thinking of all the winos who had been "privileged" to puke in the piss-stains on the front steps of his address.

"All right," Derek said. "It's the least I can do in exchange for the ride." He picked up the paper sack that held Michael Renzler's copy of
The Mandala Rites
and scrawled his address on it, taking care not to include his phone number. The car jerked to a halt. In the backseat, a match flared and a cigarette began to burn.

"You want one?" Lenore said, putting her hand between the seats. He was tempted even though he didn't smoke. Michael took the cigarette absentmindedly, as if he had summoned it out of midair. Most of his attention was on Derek's address.

"Okay," he said. "I'll send you something."

"Wonderful." Derek opened the door.

Outside, he started to freeze again instantly. He hauled his bags over the seat, helped slightly by Lenore, then hurried toward the terminal, the Renzlers following. As he waited on a curb for another car to pass, he felt one of his bags taken from his hand. It was Lenore, smiling at him now; he could read almost anything in those eyes.

In the city, he would hardly have noticed her among so many of her kind. But he would have been wrong to dismiss her. Here, displayed to best advantage in the watery light of a small-town airport terminal, was an original, an archetype of which all the others were pallid derivatives. Lenore was like a human essence, distilled in secrecy; a fragile bottle waiting to be uncapped, to release her scent. He wished, with a pang, that he could have been the one to free her.

"You better hurry," she said. "You're gonna miss your plane."

He took her hand. "Good-bye," he said.

"See you later."

"This is a beautiful book, " said Lenore, flipping through
The Mandala Rites
as streetlights lit the pages in a protracted strobe.

Michael shifted into fourth on the dark narrow road he knew by heart and quietly said, "It is, isn't it?" Her comment sounded like the opening to an attack; she was trying to lull him. Next she was going to ask how much he'd paid for it, and if he told the truth—which he'd have to, slipping it in between the grinding of gears—the battle would begin.

"Really, really beautiful," she said.

Oh, no, he thought helplessly. She's onto me. This is going to be bad. Maybe the worst yet.

He knew they couldn't afford it; knew it wouldn't help to say he'd been secretly saving money all along, collecting spare change here and there for expenses like this. Lenore would have spent his stash by now if she'd known about it. She'd been griping for days that she was out of pot and desperate for more, but couldn't buy from Tucker till they paid their rent. And forty-five bucks was a sizable chunk of the rent they owed.

But her attack never came—or at least not from the expected direction. He glanced over and saw Lenore gazing down at the open pages, dark now that the last of the streetlights were behind them and only a thickness of trees stood along the road, branches bare but so densely woven that they blotted out the moonlight.

Maybe she would humor him for once; she was unpredictable that way. She flipped out if Michael bought a crystal ball or a magic dagger; she would battle nonstop about him wasting money on occult tools, with much the same ferocity he reserved for fighting when Lenore blew money on drugs. And, like him tonight, sneaking to buy the deluxe Mandala Rites, she had learned to make her purchases secretly and present them as a fait accompli. She no longer told him when she'd scored a fresh bag of pot, leaving it up to him to determine her chemical state by observing alterations in her behavior, her typically manic mornings and dark depressed afternoons. They'd been weaving this pattern in their relationship for so long that now, even in a dry spell, he could no longer look into her eyes without wondering where her mind was at ... if she was straight or stoned.

She hated his tools, his occult equipment. It struck her as a wasteful fetish—even basic necessities like incense and charcoal. On the other hand, she didn't seem to mind when he spent his money
on books
. It was fortunate for their domestic peace that virtually all of Michael's spare cash ended up invested in his library.

Maybe she felt some affection for his books because he'd started his collection around the time they met, scavanging treasures from dusty bookshop shelves in Manhattan and environs while he was ostensibly a student in the city. In those days he hadn't developed much in the way of common sense, but at least he'd possessed enough to ship the volumes to his mother as he acquired them, so they couldn't be sold again in a moment of weakness or stolen for someone else's drug money. Drugs had never meant that much to him. They were something to do while he was hanging out. He resented their grip on him and always knew he'd give them up. Magic was his real addiction. He often wished Lenore could have shared his spiritual passions; she didn't really have any other pursuit to compete with her all consuming interest in drugs.

When he came slinking down to North Carolina with Lenore in tow, all his precious books had been there waiting for him—waiting with his mother poised over them, cigarette lighter in hand. She had threatened to put them all to the torch unless he kicked his various habits. It had been one of her most lucid moments. Since kicking and getting Lenore to kick speed had been his chief aim in fleeing New York, he was able to convince her to spare the innocent pages. His mother must have realized that he'd need some new order in his life. What better than the wealth of magical systems detailed in his books, with their periodic tables of angelic powers and hierarchies of phantom guides and gods all striving toward various grails like players on a vast n-dimensional chessboard?

Despite her distrust and even disgust with anything smacking of religion, his mother had spared the books.

Crowe's
Mandala Rites
was only the latest addition to Michael's library, but already it had pushed all other systems of magic to the edges of his mind. It was the best new system he had ever encountered. Would-be gurus were always inventing new myths and methodologies to suit the current crazes, usually with results as lame as dressing a crone in a Day-Glo neoprene bikini. But the mandalas had an integrity that couldn't be explained away, as if they had always been lurking about, waiting for the proper time to reveal themselves.

He was more curious than ever to understand what had attracted the mandalas to Derek Crowe in the first place. Why choose him of all people? His first few books had been pure trash. Michael would have sworn they were insincere efforts, bland and uninspired, recycled occult pap cobbled together out of other older books. There was no clue in any of them that Crowe had ever possessed one real insight or would ever produce anything original. Outwardly the man himself seemed as unconvincing as those books. Cold and reserved, difficult to read, Derek Crowe displayed none of the passion that permeated
The Mandala Rites
, whose diagrams were so intense that they sometimes seemed to vibrate and spin free of the pages.

"So what do you do with these?" Lenore asked, breaking him out of his thoughts.

"Do?"

"Yeah, the mandalas. What are they for? I couldn't follow everything Crowe was saying tonight—there was just so much of it."

He shrugged. "Yeah, it's hard, coming in cold like you did. They're, you know, symbols. You meditate on them. Each has a certain energy, a—a kind of function. You invoke, I mean, call them and, uh, meditate, and—"

"Call them? Is that what all this is supposed to be? These words here?"

She had the radio on with the sound turned down; enough dim light leaked from the cracked plastic panel to show the pages spread across her knees.

"Yeah, those are the Keys—the Invocations. They're not in English."

"No duh."

He sighed at her mockery. She was setting him up, ready to poke holes in what she perceived as silly superstitions. She tolerated his books, but that didn't mean she respected their contents. Lenore had never shown the slightest interest in magic or the occult. If he pressed for her opinion, she usually said that all mysticism was bullshit invented to keep people stupid and afraid so they could be conned by hucksters like ... well, like Derek Crowe, whose jacket photo she had once satirized for ten minutes. "This guy's got to be a con artist or an idiot," she'd said. "Who else would pose like that?" And the photograph was corny, showing his face cloven by melodramatic shadow, his long nose like a beak (it was even more obvious in person, Michael had noticed), a big shiny onyx clasp holding his cloak cinched at the throat as he leaned forward on a carved wooden staff. But Michael had defended Derek Crowe at the time; the mandalas had swayed him.

Now he waited, tensed, not really knowing where the stab was going to come from.

"You're doing a ritual tonight, right?" she said.

"Uh-huh."

"Can I do it with you?"

He tapped the brakes as if her words had leapt out in front of the car. "What?"

In the faint light she had a secretive, even mischievous look. He knew she wouldn't clue him in on her thoughts until she was good and ready, but he felt he had to press her for more. "Are you kidding?"

"Kidding? Why?"

"You never cared about this stuff before."

She shrugged. "Don't you like me taking an interest?"

"Of course I do! God, I've been trying to—to involve you for years. I just gave up, it seemed so pointless. I think I'm in shock."

"Well, get over it."