Nirvana Effect (20 page)

Manassa nodded.  “And who do you serve?”

“The tribe.”

“Very good.”  Manassa clapped him on the shoulder and hid his disappointment with an encouraging smile.  Nockwe was not yet ready to become awakened.  Manassa could not afford his loyalty.

The sun awakened Edward. 
Too late.
  He
started, but remained in bed to gather his thoughts
. 
He
had wanted to be rested when he began his work in
Lisbaad
, but more importantly he wanted to do his work in the early morning while his face would not be seen or remembered in the harsh shadows of the dawning light. 

Edward lifted hi
mself up
and examined the streets below.  Morning was in earnest in
Lisbaad
, and the calls of the street vendors at a nearby market drifted into his room. 

He looked at his room.  He hadn’t
yet
seen it in the light.  It was a true dump.  Rays of sunlight were actually visible from all the dust mites caroming through the air.  The curtains were molded around the edges, and the carpet was
hardly a
carpet anymore, but rather fuzz growing out of the cement floor. 
And all this is still splendid compared to the squalor of the Onge.  That‘s what you get when you don’t trade and don’t modernize.

The lingering after-pain was almost gone.  The long hike and good night’s rest had effectively cleared his head.

Edward
checked his pack for his medical kit.  The syringes of “
penicillin” were still in place
.  No
t a drop of the substance c
ould go missing.  Even a
tiny particle in
the wrong person’s hands could spread like a plague of chaos and warfare around the world.  Someone getting the whole kit would be disastrous.  Edward scarce could contemplate it - except in trance, he had.

He replayed those possible futures in his mind. 
A corporate mogul using it for economic monopoly and subjugation; a new Hitler with a weapon that w
ill let him win; a new “freedom”
that results in almost everyone a slave.  Or the most likely course: anarchy and destruction as the current power structure is toppled, followed by all of the above.

All if it falls into the wrong hands.

And who could possibly have the “right hands”?

That was a question he couldn’t answer.  He certainly didn’t feel
that
he had the right hands. 
What to do with such a substance? 
It was the holy grail of medicine, of enlightenment.  With it discoveries could be made to bring mankind to a whole new level of survival and happiness.  He was sure that many mysteries of the sciences and humanities would be solved in relatively short order. 

And yet, in its raw form introduced to the planet at large, Edward foresaw only destruction.

Even in the hands of only two
men
, the future was hazy and full of dangerous possibilities.  Mahanta was a wild variable in Edward’s trance calculations.  Edward could not predict him because he had the trance, too.

Certainly, Mahanta sought power. 
And yet he swore that he didn’t want the Onge to rule the Earth. 
Edward was sure he wasn’t lying.

Edward paced to the mirror over the room’s dirty sink and
examined his own dark brown eyes.
  In a matter of only days,
his life had
completely
changed vectors.  Not only was he accelerating exponentially, he was also beginning to align
all his decisions and thoughts
along the path of this drug and its effects. 
The nirvana effect
. 

It was as though he were a railway engineer on a runaway locomotive, and the longer he remained aboard, the faster the train sped, the more impossible his escape.  In trance, he saw the probabilities of the future - and in many of them, the locomotive went over the cliff, down into a gorge, straight into a wall.

He had to constantly accelerate his actions and remain unpredictable just to stay alive.

But if I were to stop now and disembark, surely someone far more dangerous
will hi-jack this train.

Edward looked down from the mirror and breathed d
eeply.  He was honest enough with himself to recognize the lie
.  There was no possibility that he would jump off that train, but not
for any reason so humanitarian.  He didn’t want
to
keep the nirvana effect out of the wrong hands
so much as keep it in his own.

The nirvana effect
completed
him, in a way so personal and so comprehensive that if he were to lose
it
, he would feel dead.

All his life, he’d dreamed of a golden path.  He’d stood on its first brick, peering
with squinting eyes
through the fog that obscured it.  He’d never gotten beyond that first brick, but he’d never stepped back, either.

Now that path lay
in wait, welcoming
before him. 

He could reach his purpose, now.  He was alive. 

It was a total addiction, he knew.  He’d known it innately since his first trance.  It was not a physical addiction or a chemical dependency.  Yet at no point for the rest of his life did he foresee walking away from this substance.

It was as though his entire life before the nirvana effect was simply background information for what lay in the
now
and in the future.

He had the fleeting thought that perhaps he was being too hard on himself.  Of course he was thinking about the drug.  In this span of his life, his decisions concerning it were matters of life or death.  Maybe it would be different after he was safe.  He did not see any future, however, in which he was ever safe.

It was ironic that the substance freed him into slavery.  In one sense, h
is life was now his own for whatever short breadth he kept it; not his brothers’, not his father’s, not the Jesuits’.  He had only himself and his God to answer to.  And even his God seemed amenable to the suggestions Edward made about his life’s course.

But there was the matter of the pressures he had to meet just to stay alive while he had those syringes in his pack.  Possession of the substance brooked no weakness.

He knew he had many things to meditate on - his family, the Jesuits, Callista, his future.  Much of this was surrounded in a black haze of pain that he resisted visiting while in trance.  All
that would come later, though.  He knew it would be necessary to revisit all his past in order to set course for the future.  But now all his
concentration
must be centered around the Onge “chosen one”.

Mahanta may not be all bad, and surely not as bad as Nockwe makes
him out to be
.  Mahanta may still be influenced.  He is young, and I am the only man on Earth who can understand him.

Edward foresaw a future, tenuous and hazy as it might seem, where
Mahanta
assisted
him
on his golden path. 

Edward grabbed his cloak, adjusting its hood so that as little of his face was exposed as possible without drawing undue attention.  He shouldered his
backpack
. 

“I’ll be here another night,” said Edward to the innkeeper on his way out. 

The little man bent slightly and nodded, then belatedly called after him.  “I hope you get to feeling better!”

“Me, too,” muttered Edward Styles
as he left
.

The clinic had a brightness to it that
distinguished it
from the surrounding property.  It
s walls were clean and freshly painted.  A
red cross made of wood hung prominently over the door.  The steps were swept
and clear of loiterers.
 

Edward checked the street several times
approaching
.  He did not really know what he was checking for, but he checked just the same.

A young Indian
woman
manned the
clinic’s
desk.  She was tall by Asian standards and wore a white hat with the same simple red cross insignia.  Whoever ran this clinic had the best marketing and branding on the whole island.  The innkeeper
referred
clients and her receptionist wore a uniform! 

“Is the doctor in?” asked Edward in Tamil.

“She is not,” answered the young woman in English.  “She is making house call.  But she will be back soon.  Please have a seat.”

Edward sat down.  The receptionist walked around her desk and handed Edward a clipboard with a checklist of possible
maladies
from which he might be suffering.  He left the contact information blank, checked nothing, and wrote at the bottom, “Need doctor’s consultation.”

She seemed puzzled w
hen he returned the nearly empty form
,
but recovered quickly.  “Thank you,” she said.  “Have a seat.  The doctor will be in shortly.”

“Shortly” was an hour, during which time the receptionist offered him a drink of water twice and a Coke once.  The timing seemed scripted, as though to interrupt a caller from bor
edom at just the right moment.

“This clinic, how long has it been open?” he asked
, after he’d long run out of things to mull over
.

“Three years, happily serving the community of
Lisbaad
,” she said.  Edward smiled.  He wondered how long it would take him to get her off-script.

Edward stood up
and idled over to the window
.  He looked out into the narrow street.  A car or two, some pedestrians.  “The owner, the doctor, she’s a white woman?” he asked, still looking out the window.

“What?” The receptionist looked up at him from her desk. 
Not long
at all
.

“The doctor?”

“Yes, she is a white woman.”

“Where is she from?”

“From the United States of America.  She is a fully licensed medical doctor, graduated from Oxford University.”  His American Cali had gone to Oxford, too, but not in medicine.

“That’s odd.”

“Odd?  What is this, odd?”

“It’s strange that an American would become an M.D. at Oxford, even stranger that she would open a clinic here.”

“Why is this so strange, you say?”

“This isn’t exactly the most profitable enterprise, is it?” he asked.

“No sir.  It is not for profit.  Those who can pay must, but most of the good doctor’s clientele are locals whom she treats for absolutely free,” she said. 

Edward turned from the window.  “Excellent use of whom,” he said.

The receptionist smiled.  “Thank you, sir.”  A door creaked from behind her.  “That must be the doctor.  Please wait a moment while I bring her your documentation.”  By that she meant the one
empty
sheet of paper where he’d
scribbled
on the bottom. 
Certainly less red tape than
America
.  Beats
our
health
system
any day…unless you’re actually sick.

The receptionist re-entered.  “The doctor will see you now,” she said with exquisite pronunciation, as though she were performing a Shakespearean drama.  He could tell it was her most-used line.  As she said it she swung her arm grandiosely, leading him to the doorway behind reception.  “This way, please,” she said.  There wasn’t a hint of accent in her voice
as she said that line
.  She must have drilled and drilled it.

Edward followed her.  She seated him in a small room and closed the door as she left. 

The room was simply furnished: a chair, the doctor’s roller stool, the examination pallet.  A couple of cabinets and a receptacle for waste were on the far side.

The door clicked open and the doctor glided in.  She was very young for a doctor, in her late twenties.  Her blonde hair hung loosely in a bun.  She was well, though moderately dressed, and had on no makeup.  Her complexion didn’t require any. 

She didn’t get past the door.  She stopped in mid-glide and examined him with an odd look on her face.  Her lips were perched sideways, frozen.  Her eyebrows arched as high as they could go, and then they furrowed down.  She disappeared.  The door closed behind her.

Edward rubbed his face with his hands.  He did not know whether to laugh or to cry.  Apparently, Callista Knowles
had stayed for med school
after he’d left.  Apparently, Dr. Callista Knowles had stationed herself on this island for the past few years.