William Lashner - Bitter Truth

She sat down and looked at me closely and put a hand on my cheek. “What happened to your face?”

“I cut myself shaving.”

She squinted. “That must have been some blade. How was James’s funeral?”

“Touching.”

“They said Raffaello was coming back from the cemetery when they shot up his car.”

“Oh yeah? I didn’t see him there. You hungry? Let’s order something. How does the veal look?”

She rubbed her thumb along the cuts on my cheek. “They didn’t say exactly who was in the car with him.”

I just shrugged and was surprised to feel tears well behind my eyes. I was about to lose it, but I didn’t. I held it in and looked away. I blinked twice and twice more. I raised my hand for the waitress and by the time she came it was all back inside where it belonged and I was once again as dry-eyed as a corpse.

Our waitress was a tall leggy woman, wearing all black, with heavy earrings and some demented metal objet d’art on her blouse to make it clear how au courant she was and we weren’t. “Yeah?” she said, and I didn’t like the way she said it, like we were disturbing her evening.

“We’re ready to order.”

“Sure,” she said, “I’ll be right back,” and then she shuffled off to serve someone more important.

“Is it just me,” I said, “or was she rude?”

“She has a tough job,” said Beth, which was very unlike her. Beth had the marvelous ability to take umbrage at even the mildest slights in our slighting culture. It derived directly, I think, from her natural optimism. She was a generous tipper, generally, but when a waiter was rude or a bartender nasty it was fun to sit back and watch the sparks fly. She was not the type to say, “She has a tough job,” not the type at all.

“What are you,” I asked, “in love?”

“No,” she laughed.

“All right. Tell me about the kooks in Mount Airy.”

“They’re not kooks,” she said quickly and quietly.

“Aaah,” I said slowly. “I begin to see.”

“Begin to see what?”

“Tell me about Mount Airy.”

Her head tilted as she stared at me and I could see something working its way in her eyes and I flinched from the expected tongue lashing but then that strange smile arose and all was once again serene.

“Well they’re not a cult, or anything like that,” she said, fiddling with her silverware. “They’re just a lot of nice people trying to find some answers. They believe that the voices of the spirit and of the soul are always there to tell us the secret truths of our existence, but we need to learn how to hear them. We need to somehow cut through the murk of our omnipresent reality and learn to listen and see in a spiritual way. The purpose of the Haven is to teach us how.”

“Okay,” said the waitress with a roll of her eyes. She had slinked upon us as silently as a predatory cat. “You said you were ready.”

“We’ve been ready,” I said. “I’ll have the Caesar salad and the veal in the apple cream sauce. Is the veal any good?”

“I haven’t gotten any complaints,” said the waitress.

“A ringing endorsement. And another Sea Breeze.”

“I’ll just have the bean chili,” said Beth.

“They have that Texas ribeye I thought you’d like,” I suggested.

Beth made a face, an I-don’t-eat-red-meat kind of face. I had seen that face on many women before but never before on Beth.

“Aaah,” I said slowly once again. “I do see.”

“You see what?”

“Go on about your new friends.”

“What they’re trying to gain is a way to see into the spirit world, what they call initiation into the temple of higher cognition, where they drink from the twin potions of oblivion and memory.”

“The twin potions of oblivion and memory,” I said, nodding. “And this is not a cult.”

“Not really. They teach a series of practical exercises that will help you climb up the twelve-step path to initiation. You can do it with them or on your own, with proper knowledge. There’s some chanting and incense, sure, but no magic. And no Kool-Aid. Just a natural way to a higher wisdom. Twelve steps with explicit instructions for each step. There’s actually nothing so unique about it. They’ve been doing it for centuries in the East. This is just a way for the Western mind to train itself.”

“And I assume you’re in training.”

“As part of my cover, of course.” She fiddled with a packet of Sweet’n Low. “But I will admit it seems to speak to a certain void I have been feeling. Maybe even what we talked about before, the something I had been missing.”

“Wouldn’t a few dates be more practical?”

“Shut up, Victor, you’re being an asshole.”

I was, actually. I didn’t know if it was the vodka talking or an outgrowth of my false brave front or the feeling I had that the last bastion had fallen, but I didn’t like to hear about Beth’s voids or her search for spiritual meaning. I could always count on Beth to stay rooted in the real world. Her idealism had nothing to do with any mystical esoterica, just the realization that we had a job to do and let’s get to it. And if her job was helping the disadvantaged it was no big thing. I never thought I’d see her groping for meaning in the spirit world. That was for mixed-up losers who couldn’t make it on their own and wanted an excuse. That was for hipsters too cool to accept the Western way in which their minds moved. That was for phony shamans in orange robes, not for Beth.

When my drink came, plopped in front of me without ceremony, I took a deep gulp and felt the bitter sweetness of the juice and the cut of the vodka. “All right,” I said. “I’m sorry,” and I was. Beth was the last person who took me seriously, I think, and for me not to take her seriously was a crime. “Tell me about the twelve steps.”

“I don’t know them all yet, but I’m trying to learn. The first step is just wanting to find meaning. It’s walking in the door. The second is understanding that the answers are all around us, both internal and external, but in the spiritual, not physical world. To access that world we are required to develop new ways of seeing, to develop our spiritual eyes.”

“The creep who came into our office and threatened me said I was a two.”

“Gaylord. He’s one of the teachers. A sweet man, really.”

“Sweet enough to remember cutting my head off with a broadsword.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You must have deserved it in your past life,” she said, “and as far as I can tell not much has changed.” It was good to see her laugh.

“Well, at least I’ve been consistent through the ages.”

“That’s nothing to be so proud of. Your level refers to the steps you have mastered on your way up the ladder. Practically anyone who enters the Haven has satisfied the first two steps or they wouldn’t be there, so it’s no great honor to be a two. It is on the third step that the exercises begin. You have to prepare your mind for the journey and you do that by learning devotion. You take the critical out of your thinking, you clear your mind of the negative, you fight to see the good in everyone and everything you come in contact with.”

“That rules me out. My one true talent is seeing the negative in everyone and everything.”

“You should try it, Victor. It’s rather refreshing. One result of being completely uncritical, I’ve found, is that I stop surrendering myself to the outside world, stop chasing one sense impression after another. Instead I try to take each sense impression as a unique gift and orient myself by my response to its singular beauty. I don’t rush to see a hundred flowers, hoping to find the prettiest, but examine one completely, uncritically, and feel my inner self responding to it. It is that response which is most enlightening. Respecting our own responses to sense impressions is the first step to developing an inner life.”