Neon Lotus (25 page)

Gyan Phala
hesitated, trying to catch her breath. Taking a step backward, she caught sight
of Marianne in the window above. Jetsun had just reached her side,

“There you
are,” she said. “There!”

Gyan glanced
back at the dark side of the square while pointing up at Marianne.

“I thought
you’d want to get into the Labs,” she said. “You should see what they’re up to
in there. Well, now you will—now you will!”

Shapes moved
into the square: silent cars with headlamps extinguished. Suddenly a glaring
spotlight caught Marianne and Jetsun in the window. They threw themselves down
to the floor, hearing Gyan Phala’s laughter growing still louder.

“I told them
where you were,” she called. “I told them
who
you were! I’m sorry, Gyayum
Chenmo. I only wanted to help.”

Jetsun threw
open the door and they bolted into the hall. At the top of the stairs, the
innkeeper stood furiously kneading his hands,

“Is there
another way out?” Jetsun asked.

“Quickly,”
said the innkeeper, rushing ahead of them down the stairs.

As they ran through
the kitchen, Marianne heard footsteps in the dining room. The innkeeper opened
a door into darkness and they rushed out under the stars. He pointed at the
deepest black shadows directly ahead of them.

“There’s the
ravine,” he said.“Go uphill and it will take you out of Golmud, into the
mountains.”

“Thank you,”
Marianne said. She caught Jetsun’s hand and they hurried forward, blindly
searching for the edge of the ravine. She had just put her foot on the steep
slope when she heard a noise in the pit.

A light
snapped on, glaring up from the gulch, stabbing straight into her eyes.

She turned
back to see shadows pouring from the open door of the inn. The keeper sank back
against the wall, his hands at his mouth. A figure stepped toward him with his
hand extended and Marianne froze, thinking that he was about to be shot for his
complicity.

“Drink,” the
shadow said, forcing the innkeeper’s head back, putting a squeeze-bottle to his
lips. “Don’t be frightened. Don’t think about them. Just drink.”

The innkeeper
settled down, gulping and sputtering, licking his lips. He cradled his head in
his arms and sighed. Soon the manic laughter came bubbling out of him.

Meanwhile,
the other shadows had clustered around Marianne and Jetsun. Once their wrists
had been fastened, they were led back through the inn where Gyan Phala sat
smiling at a table in the main room.

“Good luck,”
she called. There were tears in her eyes.

Outside, the
cars were waiting.

13.
The Opening of the Wisdom Eye

When her
blindfold was removed, Marianne found herself staring into the third eye of a
young man in an olive uniform. A white teardrop emblem decorated the outfit’s
breast pocket. He smiled at her for a moment, as if pleased with his find, then
stepped out of sight. His footsteps faded behind her until she heard a door
shut with a snap.

Her cheeks
were clamped into position by hard pads that kept her head fixed forward; her
wrists were bound to the arms of the chair. She was forced to stare straight
ahead at a featureless black wall.

After a
moment she said, “Jetsun?”

There was a
crackling somewhere above her. A voice said, “You call yourself the Gyayum
Chenmo, do you not?” Marianne stared at the wall.

“It will be
safer for your friend Jetsun if you answer our questions. You claim to be the
Gyayum Chenmo, isn’t this true?”

“I don’t
know what you’re talking about.”

“You told
our driver that you are the divine mother of the revolution, that you have come
to lead the Tibetan people to independence.”

Marianne
said nothing.

There was a
silence of several moments, as if her interrogator were perusing documents,
turning pages at his leisure, biding his time.

“You travel
without identification. Your fingerprints are unknown to us. And you claim . .
. you claim to be a goddess.”

“I claim
nothing of the sort,” she said. “You drugged Gyan Phala and she babbled
nonsense.”

“If we fed
you on nectar, I wonder what you would babble?”

Marianne
felt the room grow colder.

The nectar .
. .

Surely this
was not the same substance that Chenrezi had sent them after.

“Well,
perhaps you are a goddess. We have no record of your birth. You may have
materialized out of fog and fire or stepped full-grown from a lotus.”

At
the mention
of
the lotus, she
felt a
surge
of
panic.
Where had it
gone?
She still
wore the clothes in which she
had been
captured, but it was impossible to check her pockets. She could not feel the
usual weight of its presence, nor hear its steady reassuring hum. They must
have searched her and removed it while she was unconscious.

The voice
chuckled. “I do not think these very likely explanations. It seems more
probable that you were born outside Tibet. Your eyes, for instance, intrigue
us. They are green beneath your contact lenses. The color is rare in this
country. And then there is the matter of your hair with its pale roots. If you
are a goddess or dakini, you must not be native to Tibet.”

It seemed
pointless to argue with them. They could easily wash the dark stain from her
skin and her hair. There was such irony in the man’s voice that she knew he was
playing with her. What conclusions had he already reached?

“This is not
the first time we have had to deal with false gods,” said the voice. “We are
quite practiced in eradicating incorrect notions of divinity. I advise you to
surrender your illusory ideals immediately, willingly, rather than endure our
methods of persuasion. Tell us who you are and why you have come here.”

“I do not
claim to be divine,” she repeated. “I am a human being like yourself.”

“Ah,” said
the voice. “Thus we discover your greatest
error. For
we
are
not human. Not at all. It is we who are gods.”

“Marianne
 . . .”

“I see you
resist this notion. Well, that is to your discredit. Do we not bestow happiness
on all within our reach? We possess the secret of amrita, the nectar of bliss.
We gaze on the world with the triple sight of the wisdom eye.”

“
Marianne
,
it is Tara. Let me surface
.”

“Have not
entire monasteries been formed to carry out our teachings? Do not humans stand
in awe of us? Have we not, in godly fashion, spread death where appropriate to
foster our holy cause?”

“Listen no further
,
Marianne
.
Notice the lights. They've
begun to act on you with rays of power like the one Chenrezi used to call me up
from within you. Let me take control now
,
Marianne, or you could be
severely harmed
.”

Marianne’s
heart had begun to race. The voice echoed strangely and there seemed to be a
strange flickering quality to the air. She had hardly noticed it at first, but
now the black wall had started sliding in and out of sight. She imagined that
this was something like the prodrome to an epileptic seizure. Euphoria welled
up from her spine; the edges of her vision began to decay. Tara rode ahead of
the frightening wave of blackness, keeping just out of its reach. Marianne
wanted to ask her yidam many questions but Tara had no time to listen.

The rainbow
girl rounded on her, a fierce look in her eyes. A brilliant hand shot out to
grip Marianne’s crown. She felt as if she were being forced down into depths of
blackness, suffocated by her own yidam’s rainbow hand.

“Go, Marianne
!”

It took all
her will to breathe in the darkness and let herself drown.

To dissolve.
. . .

For a time
she was aware of nothing: no dreams, no visions, none of the vivid insights
that she had experienced when previously in Tara’s care. She drifted in a void,
shielded from the outer world by layer upon layer of darkness. Her recurrent
thought, if such it could be called, was that this was an emergency like none
she had ever
faced.
She wondered if even Tara understood the extent of the danger.

Sometime
later, the screaming began.

Marianne
thrashed at the emptiness, searching for her body, wondering why the gates to
the outer world had fallen open.

Tara, the
gatekeeper, must have been distracted.

Deafness
closed in abruptly. It was as if plugs had slipped from her ears only to be
clamped hastily back in place.

Even so, the
screaming lingered in her mind. She clung to the memory, not wishing to return
to oblivion. She wondered why the screams had sounded familiar.

Were they
her screams?

No. . . .

Then whose?

“Tara!"

Desperately,
in a bodiless panic now, she struggled to push her way up from the depths. The
weight of an unseen ocean bore down on her. Tara had secured her well, wrapping
her in the heavy chains of her own mind. But the yidam’s grip had weakened
significantly in the meantime, while Marianne’s will remained strong.

“Wrong
way," came a faint inner voice, almost a gasp.

She stopped
trying to fight her way up through the darkness and let herself sink instead. As
she drifted toward the floor of her mind, she encountered the currents of her
breath. They caught her and pulled her now this way, now that. Skeleton,
muscle, blood and membrane: the world stitched itself together around her, a
puzzle waiting to be solved. She felt like a tumbler in an elaborate lock, a
stray photon baffled in a lightproof maze.

She groped
through the dark, plunging through sudden openings only to find that they ended
in cul-de-sacs. Occasionally she heard traces of sound from another dimension:
wailing, mad laughter, pleas and screaming, all in the voice of Rainbow Tara.

My god,
she thought.
They're torturing her, trying to
tear her loose. She should never have offered herself. If she lives in me, then
I can never truly be harmed. But if she dies, then who can ever make me whole
again?

Her
desperation tripled as the screaming began to fade.

Suddenly she
saw a mandala burning in a million neon colors, a circle of light enclosing a
complex schematic. It was that most ancient of images, the sacred circle that
charted the soul: the infinite line, the self-devouring serpent Uroboros.

In the
mandala, she remembered, one journeyed always toward the center. It was useless
to seek escape at the outer gates of the circle, for there lay only the charnel
grounds populated by fierce demons and hungry ghosts.

Therefore,
to find her way out, she must go steadily inward.

She released
whatever understanding she’d caught hold of. She surrendered her sense of
identity and merged with the formless void.

Abruptly the
neon mandala flared. Its colors blended into whiteness. She strayed into the
world of sight and sound, but it no longer seemed like an external place. It
was more like a realm contained within her, part of the mandala that comprised
her soul.

She was the
black wall. She was the cords that bound her limbs. She was the chair and the
electronics of torture.

She
screamed, not with Tara’s voice this time but with her own.

She ignored
the strange leaping of electric shadows. Her first concern was her yidam. She
closed her eyes and searched slowly through the shallows of her mind. She
recited the alphabets, Tibetan and English; she counted backward from a
thousand; she tried to recall every memory she possessed, filling in all the
moments of her life, seeking any stray corner where Tara might have taken
refuge . . . might have crawled to die.

Wherever she
found holes and blanks in her memories, she peered most closely. What had been
her father’s last words? What were the contents of the shelves in the Nowrojee Supermarket?
When and where had she taken her first sip of buttered tea?

Tugging at
the stubborn clusters of memory, she experienced an eidetic flash. Her mind
turned inside out. Everything that had ever slipped from her thoughts stood
clearly revealed to her, utterly luminous for an eternity. It was like walking
from a busy street into the midst of a forest
clearing. The sun came down
in long beams through drifts of pollen, shining like the golden calipers of
heaven.

At the edge
of that clearing, in shadow, lay a dull and tarnished figure, sobbing.

She looked
more like an old woman than a girl. Her color was gray, marbled as though with
mold. The grass beneath her was bright green, pulsing with light, as if the
plants were trying to infuse her with their life. But it was hopeless.

“Tara?” she
whispered, kneeling.

Her yidam’s
eyes were open but they did not see her. Marianne could not imagine what had
done this.

She knelt
and slipped her arms under the withered form. Rising, she walked away from that
place of total recall and headed into the soothing shadows of the forest.

As she went,
she sang to the girl who weighed less than cobwebs in her arms.

“My
daughter,” she whispered.

When Tara's
breathing became racked and difficult, she set her down on a bed of pine
needles. She smoothed gray hair away from the pale face.

“Tara. . .
.”

The yidam
opened her eyes and stared at Marianne. She hoped that Tara could see her, if
only for a moment.

Tara’s lips
moved. Marianne had to lean quite close to hear the words. Her tears fell on
Tara’s cheeks.

Tara
whispered, “I will see you again.”

Then the
yidam s eyes closed. Her skin turned black as jet and she began to dwindle. In
a moment she was large enough for Marianne to cradle in both hands. She held
the tiny black doll up to her face and wet it further with her tears.

“What will I
do without you?” she asked.