Craving (27 page)

I clenched my fist.

Had her last act been to foster in me the unavoidable compulsion to seek, where once I had been apathetic toward her?

Serves me right.

The two of them reappeared and with a glance at each other over my somber face, took their seats.

“Should we get Sam and Unger?” I asked aloud, for Arthur’s benefit.

Jinx plucked the headphones from his ears. “I don’t think you’re going to wanna.”

“Why?”

Arthur looked at Jinx and immediately the boy’s eyes widened. “Sorry, didn’t realize.”

“What?” I insisted.

Arthur turned back to me slowly and with his hand extended, formed a smile on his face that surprised me. It was the kiss before a forceful blow, a look that told me something was coming, and for a moment, I feared what to expect.

“We can’t risk exposing them to it,” Arthur said quietly.

I looked at the open books, the half-deciphered shadows of code slithering across them. “Exposing them to what changed her?”

He nodded and in the silence, the notion struck at my chest like a cobra.

“What about you?” I whispered.

The smile remained as an apology, even as he bowed his head in a plea for forgiveness. My lips moved, but I couldn’t form the idea. Scores of conflicting emotions commanded a variety of responses from shouting, to hitting him, to sobbing, to sitting in shock.

He, Arthur, my friend, was an Arhat.

Jinx was staring at my shaking hands, his childlike eyes round in the darkness. “Lily, it’s not
that
surprising. You’ve known it all along.”

I realized only then what he meant. The strange draw I felt toward Arthur, the unshakeable composure, the philosophical banter, and the strange way he seemed to separate himself from the world; they were all signs of his age and wisdom. But if he was one of us, he had to have an ability. As I looked away, my gaze unfocused, I was certain it had something to do with knowing exactly what I needed to hear and saying it in exactly the right way, at exactly the right time. I had thought ours was an immense connection that defied logic or physicality, but all along, it was magic.

I looked into his face in betrayal.

“Lilith, please don’t lose faith in me. I
am
your friend. I swear to you that has always been real.”

He seemed to mean it, but it could just as easily have been another enchantment. I looked at Jinx, partly to see what he thought of such a thing, and partly to ascertain if he was under the same spell.

He didn’t look bewitched. “He’s one of the good guys, Lily.”

I shook my head, about to ask him how I could be sure of that.

“You can
feel
it.”

“Does Sam know? Did you tell Eva?” I spat in accusation. “Is that why she—”

“Stop.” Arthur reached out suddenly and took my hands, looking me in the eye as sternly as he could. It was what I needed to see and hear, but I could find no reason for it to be false. As far as I knew, there was no alternate plot. Arthur had, as he had said, made no demands of me and had only ever tried to keep me safe. He had
no reason
to use his magic on me then, if indeed, he could control it at all.

Uncanny insight,
I took a deep breath,
that’s why he pushed you away.

I nodded, sure he was still my friend even if he was not the exotic thing I had needed to break free of my boring life of failures.

Of myself.

When he saw the comprehension and acceptance in my face, he nodded. “Sam knows, though he pretends not to. Eva knew. It was part of what drew her here.” He sighed heavily and squeezed my hands. “It was what we talked about, in the alley, the last time I saw her.”

“That was you,” I breathed.

He nodded.

“Why aren’t you insane like them?”

“Insane is a relative term, I’m afraid. Forgive me. If I had told you everything all at once . . .”

“You would have shit a brick,” Jinx paraphrased, ever the comic relief.

I knew they were right. Without seeing what we could be, without knowing what I
had
to be, I could never have embraced Arthur or his quest.

“What’s your
trishna
?” I inquired, looking into his face boldly.

“What keeps me here is the
dharma
.”

“Spirit ninja,” I charged softly.

It was the perfect smile again, and he seemed grateful to give it.

I clenched my hands around his and without a thought, brought the backs of them to my forehead. “Ursula taught me one thing, that the only way to keep from lying is to never have a secret.”

Jinx was already shaking his head. “It’s not a lie, not if he already knew when and where you’d find out. Then it’s just letting it unfold as it should have.”

Arthur’s face had relaxed. “I will never conceal the truth from you, Lilith. You will find what you need to as you need to. I have more than enough faith in your powers of perception.”

I raised my eyebrows, because I could feel the old me reasserting dominance, and the old me couldn’t handle too much strain before it attempted to withdraw. I knew it was a character flaw, not being able to set my character aside whenever necessary, but I was no Arthur.

“Not as much faith as I have in yours. I’m freaking out right now.”

Jinx began giggling halfway through and crisis averted, turned back to his computer. “Can I pull the curtain off this motherfucker, before I get lost in the wicked debates that could come from the unique interaction of our varied super powers?”

Chuckling, I agreed, but could not help looking askance at the man about whom I continually rediscovered I knew nothing.

“Great, so,” Jinx launched into his explanation that to an observer, because of his abilities, would have seemed like a lecture, “the gloriousness of a cyclic permutation is that it’s cyclic, right?” He turned the monitor toward us and pointed at his scan of the last page in the last book. One word on the page was highlighted in red. “See, we could pick one word for each coordinate in a repeating pattern, or we could go through the whole set of volumes with the first coordinates, right, until we get to the end. At the end, we find that we have three lines left, so we have two choices. We can do an ‘aces high or low’ and go back to the beginning, counting the first two lines and repeating”—his finger dragged across the screen to the first page, and pointed out the word it would indicate—“or we can assume that she meant us to see this as another modulus problem and infer another number for later use.”

He looked to us and as always, with his second or two time lapse, launched back in to answer our questions.

“I’ve done both and both yielded results. That’s when I realized there was more to it and figured out which one she intended.”

We looked at him. He wiggled in his seat. “We could go round and round and round with the same two numbers, but your sister knew that eventually, they would no longer yield sense. We’d go round until we came back with gibberish. From looking at it, I realized,” he picked up the green book and pointed. “The number of commas in each set of numbers shows how many times we cycle through the books with these numbers, and a period indicates that we should stop when we reach gibberish and seek out no more complexity. It tells me to move onto the next set of modulus coordinates.”

I blinked again.
So can you . . .

“Yes, I can read it now, but that isn’t the coolest thing,” he continued, pounding his knees with his fists to impress his feelings upon me. “The coolest thing is that
any
set of coordinates yields something perfectly rational, but useless.”

“That’s—”

“I know! This code has infinite complexity and to someone who didn’t know what they were looking for, it’d be a nightmare! She’s hiding the real message in plain sight, because without the key and the right set of eyes, you have
no
idea
what message is the one intended.”

Everything means something.

Jinx looked positively manic. “Do you know how long it would take me to put something like this together with just my head and a bunch of paper and ink?”

My neck muscles tightened to shake my head.

“I don’t even know,” he anticipated. “I can do it with tech, but to do this old school . . .” He paused and looked at the book in his hand in bewilderment. “What did she study again?”

I wanted to answer, but as before, I couldn’t recall.

“She wanted to take care of artifacts and translate pictographs. It was her dream,” Arthur said, relieving me of a burden I couldn’t possibly carry. “She double-majored in Art History and Linguistics and double-minored in Comparative Literature and Book Arts. That is why it took her so long to finish.”

I sat back, utterly broken, two giant sets of misconceptions destroyed in one fifteen-minute span of time. In that moment, I knew what a heinous, awful, horrible bitch I was. Eva was amazing, a beautiful person I should have showered with affection, and I had not seen it. I had been so caught up in my own suffering, I never even guessed that she was anything but a failure like me.

Jinx was already shaking his head. “No way she learned that in
any
of those fields.” He stabbed the book with a finger. “This is
not
learned behavior. This is fucking
brilliance
. It’s gotta be a
gift
!”

I frowned, forcing myself to think of that word, not by its first definition, but by the definition relevant to our world.

“You’re saying it was her power?” I said, surprised that he let me get the sentence out.

He turned to his special keyboard and hit a button. The screen changed and in a new window, a document formed from the scattered words. “This is only the first segment of what I believe is the intended message, cycling through the books twice, as directed by the commas, using the first modulus coordinates.” He turned to Arthur, “Look familiar?”

For the first time since we began our association, Arthur looked stunned. “The Buddhavacana Sutras.”

“It’s different from the ones in circulation. These are the
lost
Buddhavacana Sutras,” Jinx corrected.

“What?”

“See, just like the Biblical scriptures of the Christian canon, all the Buddhist texts have been royally fucked by time and stupid assholes who want to include
their
two cents, not to mention interested ‘Bodhi Sattva’ or Arhat who wanted a piece of the action. Buddha predates Christ by like five hundred years, according to legend, but the oldest texts ever recovered about him weren’t written until the first century.”

“So, it was all by—”

“Oral tradition,” he interrupted. “One of Buddha’s sidekicks, Ananda, had an eidetic memory and could recall all of the words the Buddha spoke. At the First Sangha of the Buddha, Ananda was asked to recite them, and did so from memory.”

“
Srotapanna
,” Arthur said in a tone of voice that was unreadable. In his perfect accent, the word sounded lovely. “Ananda was the first Stream-Enterer, so called by the Buddha himself. He did not achieve the
jhana,
and thus, right liberation, until after the Buddha died.”

I watched his face closely, but could find nothing. “You’re saying . . .” I prompted.

“Ananda recited them and someone from the First Sangha wrote the
Buddhavacara
Sutras
down. Over time, the Sangha adapted, translated, altered, and tweaked them, until they were written down by humanity. The originals,” he confirmed, “were kept by the Arhat of the Sangha. What your sister was reading, were the purest words of the Buddha. She infected herself from the source.”

My mouth fell open so wide, they could probably see my molars.

“But without guidance . . . hell even
with
it,” Jinx said with a whistle, “that’s a memeplex that’d fuck
anyone
over. The Buddha should have kept his mouth shut.”

“Meeem . . .”

Jinx made an annoyed sound and glared at Arthur. “You haven’t taught her about memetics? I mean that’s from the seventies! Fuck Art, what the hell
do
you read?”

Arthur said nothing. He seemed to be rethinking all his interactions with Eva in blank silence.

Without an audience, Jinx turned back to me, shivering like an eager puppy. “Memetics is just one catchy word for the study of how ideas compete and propagate, but I like how it sounds, so it’s the one I use. Cognitive Science has only become a study in the last thirty years or so, as we come to understand how the brain works, and how ideas seem analogous to genes.”

“Huh?”

“Said simply, a memeplex is a group of ideas, or memes, that work together as a unit, almost like an organism and its constituent molecules.”

“Not sure I understand. You're saying ideas are alive?”

“No.” He squinted at me. “I’m saying ideas are forced to obey the same rules that govern your immune system, DNA copying, and so on, just like electricity must follow the paths of wires. Thus, they function
like
an
organism. If a memeplex can acquire more ideas, or interpretations, or versions of the truth, it grows, and can survive longer in a more hostile environment, can inoculate itself against invasion, can even copy itself into the mind of another through association.”

“Right, alive.”

“No! It’s feedback feed-forward. By coping with an idea,
you
create a more perfect idea that can be more easily passed on
and
has the capacity to survive other people’s skepticism. Get it? The  communication between two sides of the system mimics life, but is not alive. Kind of like in computer coding, when the machine talks to itself. It’s just processing data along a set of parameters, but to us, it looks schitzo.”

I understood finally, what Eva must have endured. Sitting in that white room, day after day, translating and reading those words over and over, uncovering the imaginary road to nowhere without anyone to point her in the right non-direction. What would it feel like, to be inundated with one rationality-shattering revelation after another? What would she have inferred? What would she have cast aside? And how could she be sure her filtration of the details was even close to accurate? It would have buried her.