Nirvana Effect (26 page)

“You have to press every single one individually?” asked Edward.

“I’m not Pfizer.  This is what you call home cookin’.  Here you go,” she said as she dropped the pill into his hand. 

I hope this works.
 

The pill felt heavy
.  He knew it weighed only a few milligrams but its significance seemed to add to its mass.  It was his next step ahead of Mahanta, ahead of being predicted.  It might very well be his only lifeline.  It was certainly his only assurance of guiding his own destiny.  If it worked, it was a game changer; he would get to
be the maker of the game
.

Right now, he didn’t
even really know what game Mahanta had him playing.

This pill had
better work.

“What’s wrong?” asked Callista.

“What do you mean?”
asked Edward, looking up his hand
.  Callista had pressed a
pile
o
f “t-
pills”.  She was finishing up with the last powder in the bowl.

“Forty-five pills,” she said, pressing the last one.  “What do I mean?”  She laughed.  “You’ve been standing there staring at that pill forever.”

He rubbed his face. 

“You know, you’ve been rubbing your face a lot today,” she said.

“I’m tired.”  He set the tablet down and stretched his arms and legs.  He’d been standing for hours. 

“Me, too,”
she said.   “I’ll go get you a medicine bottle for the pills.  You know, I don’t understand why you can’t tell me about
this.  I’m a doctor, you know.”

When she left the kitchen, he
popped the
t-
pill into his mouth.

He had to find out if it worked.

Edward looked out the window while he waited for her to return.  It was dark, now. 
Lisbaad
nights were darker than London nights.  Of course, Onge nights were darker still.  His tired mind drifted momentarily to the panther chase, to the air so dark that he couldn’t see his hands in front of his face.

The window gave him a view of her back “yard”.  It was more a jungle clearing than anything else, with a few potted plants here and there.  Edward idly flipped the light switch off to let his eyes adjust to the scene.  It was beautiful, really, with the moon and the stars the only light in the sky.  Everything in her yar
d seemed to glow
.

It seemed
like that moment where she poured her heart out to him had been
eons ago.  It seemed a detached moment on the track of an alternate reali
ty. 
I’ll have to tell her something before I go.

He saw motion in the yard, and for a second he felt the adrenaline start pumping.  His spine snapped straight, his eyes widened, and he leaned against the glass. 

It was only a cat.  He relaxed, resisting the urge to chuckle at himself. 
Well, it pays to be alert. 

A moment later, his body tensed again.  A hand gripped his neck. 

Callista
.  He recognized her before he jumped.  She was massaging him.  Still, knowing it was only her didn’t relieve his tension.  He continued to look straight ahead, out the window, becoming slowly intoxicated by the caress of her soft fingers on his neck. 

Edward experienced the slow sensation of the room shrinking (or was he getting closer to it?) then expanding (was it going away?).  The back yard lightened.  It looked like it was a blue noon, with the moon as bright as the sun.  He felt like he didn’t have a body at all.

He felt momentarily queasy, and then it all passed.  All was back to normal with his perceptions, but only because he willed it so.

The trance.  It’s working…much more gradual than the injection.  It’s definitely working.

Her hands worked a rhythm into his neck that resonated through his whole body and irresistibly into his mind.

In the park.  On my knee.  I pop the question.
  He looked at her face in that freeze-frame. 
Her eyes do say “yes”.  And a lot more.  She told the truth.

He played through it again and again, a hundred times in less than a second.  A dim
realization that the trance was on in full was overshadowed by the clarity of the hundreds of recalls that defined his relationship with the woman whose skin was touching his.

He’d never meditated on Callista in trance.  He hadn’t let himself.  Now he could not help himself.  The lid was off Pandora’s box.

Four years of college.  1,461 days.  Only 97 of them spent without her.

He knew because he saw them all, re-experienced them all, so quickly it was almost instantaneous.

He drove her from the campus up to the Uni Parks, walked her to their sequoia. 
The grass, the blanket sometimes, the pressure of her head resting on my stomach.  She tells me not to laugh so much.  I laugh more.

The times she saw the look on his face that told her he’d just talked to his family. 
She just holds me. 
She delighted in the person that
was
actually Edward Styles - a person
who happened to be
totally unacceptable to Edward Styles.  She understood him because she’d gone through the same.

He sighed. 
All those conversations.  The conversations and conversations.

He had a million snapshots of her beautiful face and body.  He’d spent much of his college life staring at her.  He
stared at her now, in trance, through
his mind’s eye.

I’m indulging. 
He willed himself to stop.  He only needed to learn one thing from this meditation.  He needed to know only one thing and then he’d shut the book one way or the other.

Edward took a moment to visualize all of the factors involved.  Himself.  Her.  Mahanta.  Nockwe.  The tribe.  The Jesuits.  The drug. 

All these things created a future.  In one equation, he took her with him.  In another equation, he left her behind.

Probabilities did not pop up at the end of the equation.  Rather, he saw a vision.

The first one, with her in his arms, was dim
to the point
blackness. 
It’s not real.

The second, the same bright future, the future he didn’t even dare say out loud for fear of it disappearing, was still shining and brilliant. 
It’s real.  It’s without her.

It didn’t seem quite as appealing as it had yesterday.  But there it was.  He had to leave her.  That was final.

He decided.

The massage had stopped.  He opened his eyes.  He was looking straight into hers.

He kissed her.

She pulled away.  “Edward,” she said.

“Shh,” he said.

“I don’t…”

“Shh.”  He held her and watched her.  He could read her in the trance.  It was the first time he’d ever been able to read her.  She was afraid.  She had been afraid he was going to hurt her by walking back out of her life.  Now she was afraid that he was going to hurt her far worse.

“Callista,” he said.  He searched for the words.  He smiled and stroked her hair.  She leaned into his hand slightly.  She was hoping.

“Callista, there’s something I need to tell you.  It’s quicker than your story.  It’s simple, actually, quite simple.”  He breathed deeply and looked at that first vision
, the vision he desired
.  It was a little brighter.  It was possible.

“I love you,” he said.  He kissed her again.  This time she didn’t resist.  He tasted her tears
as they ran down into their mouths
.  For long after they kissed, they held each other.  She sobbed into his shoulder. 
Relief.

Edward saw a flash of metal in his peripheral vision.  He
jerked his head.  It was a boy peering through
the window across the room.  Edward’s eye only caught him moments befor
e he pulled out of sight, but
in the trance it was enough to identify the intruder. 

It was Tomy. 
The eyes and ears of Manassa.

Edward pulled her away
firmly
.  He held her cheek.  “Something
’s
in the yard.  I’ll be right back.  Stay here.” 
Edward checked the window outside.
  The kitchen opened directly to the yard.  “No, scratch that.  Go to the furthest room from this door and lock the door.  And don’t open it until I come get you.”

“Edward?”  Her voice quivered.  “What’s happening?”

“If I don’t come get you in an hour, call the police.” 
Not that they’ll
do any good. 

“Edward,” she said. 

He had to move. 
“Just do it,” he yelled with an urgency that she could no longer resist.  As she started to follow his instructions, he bolted out of the door. 
He got into the yard in just enough time to see Tomy disappear into the thick jungle.

Edward ran.  He concentrated on getting every
iota of momentum
possible out of his leg muscles.  He pushed with all his mig
ht.  He had to catch up with that
boy.  Tomy had a head start, but Edward was closing on him.  Though the Onge boy had been raised running the jungles, Edward had the trance and longer legs. 

The boy darted behind bushes and plunged through underbrush.  If he got out of eyesight long enough, he could hide.  Then Edward would be one step behind Mahanta again. 
Dangerous.
 
Gotta ge
t him.

Edward felt the sharp thorns of plants ripping at his skin.  He stumbled, but
managed to
launch himself back up
without slowing his pace
. 
For a moment Edward lost him.  T
omy
was out of sight, and all Edward
had to track
was the swayin
g of vines and limbs in the boy’
s wake. 

Their chase had tak
en them deep into the jungle, where t
he moon had a harder time piercing the treetops.  Even with his trance vision, Edward had a hard time seeing what was ahead of him.

He forced his eyes to dilate further as he ran, so that he could pick up motion more easily but caught less detail.  Edward didn’t feel the fear he’d felt during his first nighttime race into the jungle.  Rather, he felt calm, detached, as though he were playing a game of cat and mouse.

He heard moving water, some sort of stream.  He kept following the branches whipping back, the leaves waving under the moonlight.  It was harder to hear the footsteps and the boy’s path because of the water, but he could still make it out.

He started being able to hear the boy’s breathing.  Edward was getting closer, still, but the jungle was growing thicker. 
He strained his eyes to catch a glimpse of that boy’s dirty shirt and dark skin
. 

The finer calculations of his predicament were starting to enter rapidly into Edward’s mind. 

The spear
.  That flash
of
metal had been a spear. 
He
had to keep the boy on the run, or else
Edward
might have
Tomy’s weapon
run through his gut.

Edward heard Tomy shout.  He was close.  Edward lunged through a wall of brush, pushing hard into the jungle floor for more leverage. 

There was no leverage.  His foot pumped through the empty air. 

He gasped.  His right leg plunged downward.  His left knee smashed into the ground and th
en he was flipping in the air. 
Directly below was water shimmering by the moon.  It was a thirty foot drop to a rocky bed.  The jungle stream had carved a gorge into the bedrock. 

Edward stopped time.  At least, that was how his sense channels perceived it.  He could think so much more rapidly than the events unfolding that he may as well have been suspended in the air for an hour.  His mind took in everything. 
The rocks below.  Tomy on the ground near the water, hurt, dragging himself up.  The spear on the other side of the water.

The stream was
shallow and
only a few yards wide.  There was no sense in landing in it.

The roots. 
They projected out from the other side of the gorge.  They were insubstantial, but his only shot at avoiding injury.  He could reach them.  He spotted a long, fat root hanging out from the other side about ten feet down.  He extended his body out of
his aerial
roll to catch it
.

The root creaked, but he stopped his fall.

Below, the boy started moving away in a gimpy sprint, cradling his arm.  The way he moved reminded Edward of the beggar boy. 
He’d been the beggar boy.
  Edward hadn’t recognized him in the shirt, with his dirty skin and his hair so much in his face.  Tomy was picking up speed.  Edward kept his eyes locked on him, adjusting his grip on the root.