The Two Krishnas (25 page)

“Huh?”

“Crazy,” Atif twisted his finger at the temple and looked at him in such a way that it was obvious he wasn’t trying to be funny. “Mad. You’ve gone mad, haven’t you?”

Nuru and Upul looked at each other, stunned at his bluntness, the lack of social Patio-etiquette.

“Oh, don’t worry about her. She feeling different today,” Nuru offered as explanation. “Forget it, yeah?”

“Oh!
C’est la vie!”
Upul shrugged. “Whatever! I don’t need no attitude from her tired tandoori-ass.” He snatched his drink from Nuru, did a couple of pirouettes to show his feathers hadn’t been ruffled, and pranced away.

Nuru shook Atif by his shoulders. “Hey! Hey! Hey! Easy, girl. She is drunk. What is matter with you? Come on, you know that she doesn’t have any harm, yeah?”

Atif looked away.

“Why can’t you just have some fun? You used to love this place!”

“A long time ago, Nuru.”

“So what is wrong with it? What?” He looked around, apparently still impressed with the menagerie of men who were bathed salaciously in red lights. “Is still better now.”

“It’s proof that hell is finally full and the overflow has been sent to earth to hang out at The Patio.”

Nuru snorted and said nothing, perhaps because, as Atif suspected, he hadn’t understood what had just been said.
God,
Atif thought, watching Upul weaving through the crowd and stirring the cocktail with his long, dark finger.
Life happens and we all go a little bit crazy on our own. Even solitude, while certainly a luxury, was eventually prone to madness. This is funny. I should laugh. I should really laugh. My being here of all places instead of with Rahul. Surrounded by all this desperation instead of his arms. All tragic situations are incredibly comedic if one has the benefit of the right perspective.

But no matter how much he tried, he could not hoodwink himself into lightening the situation. “Where the hell is this guy?” he asked impatiently. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.”

“You are really having period today! We no ordering pizza here, you know! He gonna call me any time. Relax! Relax!” And then to Atif’s irritation, Nuru launched into the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song with less-than-accurate lyrics.
Relax, you can do it. Why don’t you just suck to it? Relax, you can do it. Do you want to come?

And the parade continued with another one of Nuru’s friends. This one, a tall, blonde investment banker in his early fifties but always claiming to be in his thirties, was loaded with gossip and some substance that had dilated his pupils to the size of dinner plates. “She’s gone crazy,” he dished on someone else, gesticulating generously. “Completely cracked out. Too much Tina, girl. Oh, as if that god-awful rotten eggs smell isn’t bad enough!”

“Really? Oh, poor girl!”

“She thinks everyone is spying on her!” the investment banker continued. “She thinks her apartment is bugged. Bugged! Like anyone would be bothered with her tired ass. So she’s pulling out all the sockets from her wall because she thinks there are devices planted all over the place. Can you believe that?”

“Oh! No wonder she not calling me. She probably is thinking I am like FBI or something. Somebody get her to rehab! I mean quick!”

“Her whole apartment is a fire hazard now. And that’s not all, honey,” he continued. “She bought this cute little puppy not too long ago and now, guess what?”

“Oh, don’t tell me!” Nuru shrieked with mock-horror, clutching his chest.

“Uh-huh. She thinks there’s a camera or something planted in the poor dog, can you believe this? So she’s come this short of sticking her finger up its ass and tearing it to pieces.”

“Too much of that reality TV.”

“Thank heavens she called one of our friends to come and take the little darling away before she bites into it. E-e-e-w! Druggie- druggie!”

What hypocrites! What in God’s name made me think I could come back to this and feel better about anything?
Atif thought, disgruntled.
I’ll just take the damn taxi back, I don’t care, but I have to get out of here.

But then Nuru’s cell phone went off. He checked the number and grew palpably excited and did his little signature dance, lifting one leg off the ground and shaking his shoulders from side to side like some harem girl confirming his ships had pulled in. He quickly exchanged air kisses with the investment banker and pulled Atif out of the bar. “Come on, we have to go airport now.”

“Airport?”

Nuru’s coded destination was across the street where, standing in the dark backside of the hamburger joint, next to a Harley, was a tall, thuggish guy in a leather jacket. As he took off his helmet, Atif saw that he had a hard, almost menacing look and that he was conspicuously out of place in the predominantly gay area. Approaching him, he felt instantly uncomfortable. The feeling, although without cause, invaded him so strongly that he fought the urge to flee.

“Hi, T,” Nuru drawled, batting his eyes like a lovelorn schoolgirl. He elicited barely a nod.

Nuru shook hands with the dealer and in the process dexterously made the barter. It was only when Nuru said, “keep the rest” that the guy managed to crack a smile and nodded at them toughly.

When he had mounted his bike and ridden off after causing what seemed to Atif an unnecessary amount of ignition roaring, Atif looked at Nuru with alarm and said, “Are you mad? What the hell are you doing with this guy?”

“What?”

“I don’t know…this guy,” Atif said. “He’s so creepy. Don’t you know any gay dealers?”

“Oh, he just big pussy, girl. Don’t worry. Plus, you know, he’s got the good stuff. Down there also,” Nuru laughed wickedly and did his dance with a smirk on his face. “Big one, like torpedo, you know? So maybe he is not pussy after all, yeah?”

Atif shook his head.

Nuru brandished his loaded fist. “Oh, honey! A little bit of this and there is nobody you will not like. Come on, let’s fly!”

* * *

An ocean of half naked bodies swirled around them and Atif couldn’t help but think that perhaps for some, this is what circling the Ka’ba must feel like. A sense of dissolving into the masses, destroying the identity of self to become a part of a larger conglomerate being. Some were lucky to find that feeling of corporeal melting, no matter how fleeting, with someone they loved; others could find it, at least for a few hours, dissolving under a giant glittering disco ball.

Once Nuru had tapped on the little green bullet and, placing it under Atif’s nose without any fear of detection, let him sniff from it twice, the feeling began, or rather, ended. A numbness from everything that ailed Atif came gently over his body like a comforting blanket. Anything could happen now. People were known to have been thrown into the pits of hell or to find God. What a little cat tranquilizer could do.

It started with Atif feeling rubbery, as if his body was losing its structure; the thought of taking a single step became daunting. To do this, he would have to wade through what was slowly becoming a marsh of flesh and free-floating, loosely attached faces. Whenever his eyes met another’s, the stare seemed to linger forever, like a romance scene in a film. As the wooziness invaded his body, he felt as if the vital stream of signals from his brain to his body was being excised. But at the same time, a strange sense of clarity and calm was replacing the cacophony of thoughts, giving his imagination freedom to soar.

All familiar objects became strange and new, as if he was a child again and discovering the world for the first time. His anxiety, fear, attitude, even the burden of hope began to evaporate from him and leave him vacant and free. Passages in his brain were being cleared and rerouted and he could feel nothing but indifference toward the reconstitution of his being. Around him, the bodies that were pounding away frenetically seemed to surrender to a gentle swaying. The music, once fast, hammering, deafening, slowed into a ballad, muted, as if coming from another room.

Nuru placed the bullet under his nose again. He took more of it, feeling the powder shoot up and drip into his throat. Now his spatial perspective began to change. The walls, once closing in, now stretched out so that the room opened up into the night sky itself. As he dangled on the edge between consciousness and oblivion, he could no longer speak, nor did he care to. It was as if he was preparing to say goodbye to the physical world and all tangible connection to his surroundings were being terminated. Opinions, analysis, judgment, attachment—all poisons of thinking were rolling off him like beads of sweat.

The music slowed to a crawl, as if the DJ had slapped down on the turntable. And then, only silence. A tear in the fabric of reality sucked Atif in and he found himself traveling with considerable speed through a dark pipe until, at the end of the journey, he stood facing an ocean of flashing yellow beacons. Atif watched the little bulbs with wonder, recognizing instantly that the people around him had turned into throbbing buds of energy. He perceived a presence, knew at once of its power. Shame washed over him.

I’m sorry
.
I’m so sorry, dear God that I had to find you like this. That it has taken this for me to reach you. I love him but I will accept your will. I will not fight it. Let me crave only what you want me to have. Help me surrender whatever it is you do not desire for me to have.

The room swirled back into Atif’s consciousness and there, standing across from him shirtless, in a strange, new body, stood an incarnation of Rahul, smiling. It was him and it wasn’t him and some part of Atif knew and believed both of these, comfortable with the paradox. For how could he possibly be Rahul since he had begun multiplying himself infinitely? Five smiling Rahuls. Ten smiling Rahuls. A hundred smiling Rahuls. Thousands of him, everywhere, wherever his eyes fell. Even the lights above him, only a multitude of Rahuls smiling down at him.

Atif stood still, at peace and surrounded by the magnificent whorls of dance, and the multiplication accelerated infinitely, until there was nothing for him but a universe of smiling, dancing Rahuls.

* * *

He came home with the sun, breathing with such ease, the air moving in and out of him, that he felt almost lightheaded. By the time Atif strolled by the roses blooming along the iron mesh fence dividing his complex from the neighbor’s and scaled up the stairs to his apartment—a trek that he couldn’t help thinking Rahul had made so many times—the sky was filled with light and the air was warm.

Taped to his door, he found a yellow note from Nona. He pulled it off and some of the dark green paint peeled off with it. She had gotten into an accident yet again:
Fuck, I’ve rear-ended another one! Can you believe it? Call me. Need a ride. XOXO. So this Asian definitely can’t drive!
N.
He took the time to fold the note neatly and went into his apartment, feeling neither urgency nor irritation. He heard the dismal beeping of his depleted cell phone, looked at the flashing battery icon and turned it off.

As he fell back in the bed in which Rahul and he had lain just days ago, his sleep was sporadic but peaceful. This time he was on his back and not on his side with his cheek gnashed and pulled back against the pillow so that he could breathe. Air moved in and out of him like a blessing. He heard the mundane soundtrack of life: kitchen utensils clanging as someone prepared breakfast, cars whooshing by on the street, garbled conversation, birds chirping. Even when he heard commotion from somewhere outside, he laid still, his arms by his side, his palms open. He could hold on to nothing. Not even a melody.

This is the place people aspire to reach in mediation
, he thought.
A place where random thoughts came and went through your being, but instead of getting stuck in the swamp of contemplation, drifted away effortlessly. Where silence became the sweetest music and nonattachment was precious. Was it so wrong then to arrive here through a drug? Could anything that stopped the pain, eradicated judgment, filled you with such bliss and contentment be sinful?

For hours he just coasted, seeking meaning in nothing and yet finding something of meaning in everything, no matter how ordinary. The texture in the ceiling, the almost indiscernible brushstrokes captured in the white walls, the subdued light filtering through the drapes, the jacquard embroidery resembling henna-painted hands on the curtains, the exquisite melody of silence—what more could one desire? Yes, this was the state where desires could spontaneously come true. His mind became that still, glassy pool, into which any intention could be dropped like a pebble. Ripples would be sent out into the universe to bring his desires to fruition, the thought, like the pebble, finding its destination in the fertile bed of fulfillment.

He was thankful the pain had dulled so that he could barely feel, but he also knew that if he didn’t ask for what he wanted and lost this opportunity, life would become unbearable when the world returned. Once the anesthesia wore off, the pain would rebound, a jilted lover, determined to avenge its dismissal. Now was the moment. And if there was the remotest possibility that he could tap into that source where desires could be manifested, then there was no choice. He must grasp it.

I am content now but I know it won’t last. Here and now, in this moment, I am not afraid of tomorrow. But I know that when it comes, it will be unbearable; this peace will have abandoned me. It will break me into bits. So I must ask now, in the strange absence of yearning. I want to know what it’s like to be with him in a way we haven’t been. Together. Uninterrupted. Happy. No matter what the cost. No matter for how long. You see, I know I could have this with someone else but I could never feel for anyone the way I feel for him. So a little time with Rahul is worth all the time in the world with somebody else. A moment with him is a moment for eternity.