Craving (35 page)

What do you see?

Human wasn’t good enough, but they were still trying to be human even though their perception of reality had changed drastically. They were still doing business, living lives, interacting in the old ways. From different to self-hating, from perfect knowledge to detachment, their very nature made eternity a dismal fate instead of a wondrous opportunity.

It was no wonder they come to hate the Buddha, felt abandoned by him, but could he really be blamed? Had he known about the death inside that golden fruit when he presented it to the kingdom?

Chapter 23

I don’t know how long I was suspended above my motionless carcass. I saw no change, noticed no passage of time, but after a while, I realized I could still hear—if that was that right word—the screams of the other inmates. I knew the temperature of the room, though I had no sense of flesh or blood. I could still
discern
, but was unable to do anything about
what
I discerned.

Helpless.

Like I was standing on a mountain top, I looked out over a great horizon and had no idea what I was supposed to do now. Was I meant to observe, but do nothing, change nothing? Was I meant to float around forever, hovering above my own head, pondering the nature of all things? I mean that was great and all, being able to ditch the meat sack anytime, and I’m sure in the right circumstances it’d be tremendously enlightening about the nature of consciousness, but to me, it was shaping up to be a pretty boring eternity. And yet the Buddha had endured the
jhana
time and again, even charged his followers to embrace its seeming passivity.

What can this possibly teach me?

It occurred to me then, as I pondered all that I had seen, that surely, in this incorporeal state, I could escape not only my flesh, but the proximity to it. Could I, I wondered, stretch out my thoughts to my friends and . . .

I would have blinked, but as it was, I had no eyelids
to
blink. The blue, spiky beacon below me, however, banished all confusion. I was in Jinx’s home, hovering above his shoulder, listening to him as he mumbled to himself in multilingual, expletive-rich outrage.

He was sitting in his records room. A haphazard pile of file folders had been pushed over in front of him. He was sifting through them with one hand and typing on a laptop with the other. I had never been so glad to see anyone. It was an entirely new experience for perfidious me, thinking of the self as separate from the body, the ghost in the machine, and it was nice to see that the contents of my life were constant.

“Why can’t we just break down the door?” Unger growled from the head of one of the mountainous tables. Until he spoke, I had no idea he was present and wondered
why
he was there. Jinx: eternally youthful, quick to a fault. And Unger: dragged through the muck of life, barely standing and ambiguous on his path; if any people could be more different, I’d never met them.

“Because it’s not that simple,” Jinx replied in a long-suffering voice and turned up his music.

“Why not?” Unger flipped over a few pages with an angry finger, as if the whole room offended him. I could understand why it might. He’d been swallowed whole by an entire case file and was realizing how detail-oriented his life had been, and how little he had actually accomplished.

“Because.”

“That’s easy for you to say; you’re one of
them
.”

“So’s Lily, and for your information, I am an entirely different species of
them
, so shut it.”

“I didn’t come here to watch you do . . . whatever. I came here to plan a strategy.”

“Which I could do much better without you, ironically,” Jinx grumbled.

I read over his shoulder, scanned his laptop screen with my mind’s eye, still slightly stunned that I was able to. The skeptical voice within was yammering something about manufacturing a reality when in dangerous and uncertain circumstances to appease the conscious mind, but I was much too busy putting two and two together to care about its advice. I
wanted
to believe that this was happening.

Jinx had, due to his two centuries of acquired skills, hacked the banking records from my sister’s account and was tracing the deposits. Marveling, I realized it had never occurred to me to do so. I had always just assumed the money was Moksha’s, but now that I considered it, I wondered if it could be. After all, why would Moksha pay someone who might end up killing themselves like all the other experiments, knowing that money would come to her next of kin? I doubted that they’d feel such an expense was worth it.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t raise those questions with the one person who would have investigated them. He was leaning on his hand just then, sighing in what I would have considered exhaustion, if not for the fact that he never slept; it was probably just caffeine withdrawal. I tried to think in his direction, repeat his name over and over until he heard me calling, but he showed not the slightest sign of noticing my existence.

Unger wandered over, browsing the records as if shopping at a particularly odious fish market. Eventually, he found his way to Jinx’s side and put himself directly in the way of my view.

No sooner had I touched upon frustration, than my vantage changed, and I was facing them. Whatever was going on, it seemed that I was in the highest form of control, able to command merely by desiring, evade obstructions by
wanting
to know.

Unger whistled, impressed. “You know I could arrest you for this, right?”

Jinx raised an eyebrow stud before the detective finished; I was awed that the Boy Wonder didn’t cut him off. “Maybe, but I’m a hacker. By the time I was done,
you’d
be in prison instead.”

Unger’s face screwed up momentarily. “So what are you—?”

“Following a hunch.”

“A hunch?” The detective leaned forward and glared at the screen. “One of
his
or one of your own?”

“I assume you mean Art,” Jinx said, gently shoving the man back. “Things with Art don’t work that way.”

“So, how do they—?” Unger muttered, looking at the tiny hand in mild reproach.

Jinx made a noise in his throat to interrupt. “You wouldn’t understand. It’s an
us
thing.”

I watched Unger’s expression tick. There was no chance he cared about what
we
were, because I saw the look on his face when he’d broken down Ursula’s door. Unger cared about life. It was what drove him to exhaust himself, to fight for people in need, to discover. “Try me.”

“Art never asks anyone to do anything. He just seems to attract exactly the type of people to fulfill whatever tasks might be waiting.” Jinx frowned in concentration, obviously trying to put words to inexplicable feelings. “I’m pretty sure he knows what we’re going to do and so he just lets it happen and only intervenes when he thinks we need it.”

“So he
used
Lilith.”

It was a very different tone of voice than the one Unger had used to suggest I be more patient with Arthur’s
dharma,
but then again, that had been a vision. The
real
Matthew Unger probably never suggested anyone allow themselves to be compromised for
any
cause, noble or otherwise. If I had had more faith in him, I would have known it was a vision much earlier and would have been able to prevent all of this.

Some uncanny insight.

“Arthur uses you to get things done?”

Jinx shook his head in perplexed denial. “No. I mean, it’s more like, I dunno, outsourcing, or something. It’s his ability, I think, like, a combination of the whole fortune-telling thing and sooth saying.”

The detective eyed his blue hair in disbelief. “So,
you
have a hunch that’s really
his
, and then
you
do all the work, because it’s
your
hunch. Then you take the work to
him
and
he
does
what
with it?”

Jinx shrugged.

“But they’re
your
hunches
.
Don’t
you
want to take
them somewhere?”

“I do, but that’s kind of the point. I take them somewhere and get back to him. I’m an independent contractor.”

“Who isn’t paid.”

“Have you
had
Sam’s coffee?”

Unger’s brows drew together and though he was stoic, I could see the smile he was trying to hide. Their faces seemed so much clearer in the
jhana
, as my eyes did not get in the way of my sight. It was heady how much detail I could find. It would be easy to become reliant upon it.

“So he didn’t ask you to do something illegal, but you did it anyway.”

It was the demeanor of an investigator, acted out in tiny gestures and suggestions. Unger was interrogating an immortal without even seeming to, baiting him into answering questions, taking advantage of his weaknesses to gain information. I’d have called it supernatural, if not for the fact that I now had a different perspective on the word.

“If I told him I was doing it, he would have told me to stop, for my own safety; which is why I didn’t tell him.” Jinx looked up at him mischievously, completely oblivious to the manipulation, or obeying it without concern. “He also didn’t ask me to find out who sent Eva the money. Nor did he ask me to find out that the corporation in question is a front for another group. And when I find out what I’m looking for, I probably won’t tell him that either. I’ll get back to him when I hit a wall, and
then
we’ll plan something.”

Unger’s face blanked as he tried to sum up all he wanted to know in a single word that would make it past Jinx’s impatient guard. “Group?”

Gloating, the hacker turned away and gave a lazy shrug. “Yeah, but it’s all real confusing, so you probably don’t wanna hear about it. I mean, you’ll probably end up investigating it, and then you’ll find out all this secret stuff, and then you’ll eventually end up needing help or wanting to tell someone, and then it will get back to
him
, and maybe turn out that it was all a part of
his
game plan anyway. Besides, you work for a government agency, which tends to breed suspicion against any large-scale conspiracy theory.”

The scowl on Unger’s face was comical. He crossed his arms and glowered down at the boy.

“What?” Jinx said lightly, still enjoying his strategic advantage. “It’s a documented phenomenon. I mean you guys know how incompetent you are and how impossible it is for you to keep secrets, so you think you’re in a position to know how unlikely a conspiracy is. Which is exactly how they keep a conspiracy a secret from the very people who are a part of it! I don’t even want to go into . . .” He trailed off helpfully, just as Unger opened his mouth to interrupt.

“Jinx!”

Leaning back, the hacker tapped a few keys aimlessly. “I’m just saying . . .” But trailed off, anticipating Unger’s hasty rejoinder.

“Well say something useful.”

Jinx was already looking up at him speculatively and considered him for a long while. Then the sparkle of revelation awoke in his eye and he launched forward in his chair to point at the screen of his computer.

“Okay, so, like, the money that was deposited into Eva’s account originated in the Caiman Islands. It was a dummy account, a way of washing money.”

“Laundering?”

“No, ‘washing.’ They just wanted a few degrees of separation; they weren’t even trying. It’s almost like they wanted the Sangha to know.”

“‘They?’”

But Jinx was a snowball rolling downhill. “Normally, any inquiries into the money would end there, because it was just a number and was closed right after she died, but there is not a single safe that these hands cannot crack.”

Just to accent this, he squeezed his fists and cracked his knuckles.

Unger rolled his eyes.

“I took it upon myself to follow the money backward, and you’ll never guess where it ended.”

“Where?”

Jinx’s smile flashed. “You sure you want to know?”

“Just get to the—” Unger growled.

“Not easy to do, Sherlock.” Jinx got up from the table and went to the wall of lines, to the branch on which Eva and I were both positioned. Without a word, he pointed at our photograph and then traced the line backward, past other photos, pages of biographic information, and old newspaper clippings. He walked slowly, Unger trailing behind in something akin to awe at the sheer size of the “family tree.” When they came to the beginning, just to the left of the doorway, the boy’s polished nail lifted and tapped a name. And that’s when I understood.

There was the Buddha, a mounted bas relief sculpture, gilded in gold. From him sprang a list of names, written in both English and Sanskrit, but only one had “offspring” and it was a name I recognized.

Unger stared at it in bewilderment.

“The Buddha didn’t write anything down. Writing is antithetical to the ‘live in the moment’ ideology. It wasn’t until
after
his death that his followers transcribed his sermons, but . . .”

They couldn’t remember,
I thought to myself, just as Jinx echoed my words.

“The disciple Ananda was graced with an idenic memory, so they wrote down what he told them to, but there’s no guarantee that his reproduction was accurate.”

In triumph, Jinx turned back to Unger and watched him follow the logic, which the man did like the expert he was, but concealed like the old curmudgeon I loved.

Hand crooked over his rough chin, he brooded. “So, what are—?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time; I mean, it’s not like you hear about any of these guys”—he pointed to the list of names beside the Buddha—“rampaging over earth, laying waste and shit. It’s all the younger guys raising hell.” Jinx’s childlike eyes were glittering in fierce amusement and pent-up excitement. “So what if it wasn’t Buddha’s fault? What if it was Ananda’s? What if he did something, and every Arhat after that was fucked?”

I waited, desperately willing Unger to ask the question I longed to ask. After a few pensive moments, he did.