Lucius Shepard: Life of Buddha

The buzzer sounded.

“Damn!” Taboo sat up, tucked in his shirt. He walked over to the table, picked up the white powder and the drinking straw, and brought them over to Buddha. “You do a little bit more of this here bad boy. But don’t you be runnin’ it. I don’t want you fallin’ out on me.” He went out into the living room, closing the door behind him.

There seemed to be a curious weight inside Buddha’s head, less an ache than a sense of something askew, and to rid himself of it he did most of the remaining heroin. It was enough to set him dreaming, though not of Africa. These dreams were ugly, featuring shrieks and thuds and nasty smears of laughter, and once somebody said, “The man got tits! Dig it! The man’s a fuckin’ woman!”

Gradually he arrived at the realization that the dreams were real, that something bad was happening, and he struggled back to full consciousness. He got to his feet, swayed, staggered forward, and threw open the door to the living room.

Taboo was naked and spread-eagled facedown over some pillow, his rump in the air, and Johnny Wardell-a young leather-clad blood with a hawkish face-was holding his arms. Another man, darker and heavier than Wardell, was kneeling between Taboo’s legs and was just zipping up his trousers.

For a split second nobody moved. Framed by the vivid green grass and blue sky and innocent clouds, the scene had a surreal biblical quality, like a hideous act perpetrated in some unspoiled corner of the Garden of Eden, and Buddha was transfixed by it. What he saw was vile, but he saw, too, that it was an accurate statement of the world’s worth, of its grotesque beauty, and he felt distanced, as if he were watching through a peephole whose far end was a thousand miles away.

“Lookit here,” said Wardell, a mean grin slicing across his face. “The ho already done got herself a man. C’mon, bro’! We saved ya a piece.”

Long-buried emotions were kindled in Buddha’s heart. Rage, love, fear. Their onset toe swift and powerful for him to reject. “Get your hand off him,” he said, pitching his voice deep and full of menace.

Wardell’s lean face went slack, and his grin seemed to deepen, as if the lustful expression engraved on his skull were showing through the skin, as if he perceived in Buddha an object of desire infinitely more gratifying than Taboo.

Wardell nodded at the man kneeling between Taboo’s legs, and the man flung himself at Buddha, pulling a knife and swinging it in a vicious arc. Buddha caught the man’s wrist, and the man’s violence was transmitted through his flesh, seeding fury in his heart. He squeezed the man’s wristbones until they ground together, and the knife fell to the floor. Then he pinned the man against the wall and began smashing his head against it, avoiding the fingers that clawed at his eyes. He heard himself yelling, heard bone splinter.

The man’s eyes went unfocused, and he grew heavy in Buddha’s grasp; he slumped down, the back of his head leaving a glistening red track across a puffy cloud. Buddha knew he was dead, but before he could absorb the fact, something struck him in the back, a liver punch that landed with the stunning impact of a bullet, and he dropped like a stone.

The pain was luminous. He imagined it lighting him up inside with the precise articulation of an X-ray. Other blows rained in upon him, but he felt only the effects of that first one. He made out Wardell looming over him, a slim leathery giant delivering kick after kick. Blackness frittered at the edges of his vision. Then a scream-a sound like a silver splinter driven into Buddha’s brain-and there was Taboo, something bright in his hand, something that flashed downward into Wardell’s chest as he turned, lifted, flashed down again. Wardell stumbled back, looking puzzled, touching a red stain on the shirtfront, and then appeared to slide away into the blackness at the corner of Buddha’s left eye. Buddha lay gasping for breath: the last kick had landed in the pit of his stomach. After a second his vision began to clear, and he saw Taboo standing above Wardell’s body, the other man’s knife in his hand.

With his sleek breasts and male genitalia and the bloody knife, he seemed a creature out of a myth. He kneeled beside Buddha. “You awright?” he asked. “Buddha? You awright?”

Buddha managed a nod. Taboo’s eyes reminded him of the eyes of the fish in his dream-aswarm with terrors-and his magic was heavy wash in the air, stronger than Buddha had ever seen it.

“I never wanted to kill nobody,” said Taboo tremulously. “That’s the last thing I wanted to do.” He glanced at the two corpses, and his lips quivered. Buddha looked at them, too.

Sprawled in oddly graceful attitudes on the green grass amid a calligraphy of blood, they appeared to be spelling out some kind of cryptic message. Buddha thought if he kept staring at them, their meaning would come clear.

“Oh, God!” said Taboo. “They gon’ be comin’ for me, they gon’ put me in jail! I can’t live in jail. What am I gon’ do?”

And to his astonishment, looking back and forth between the corpses and Taboo’s magical aura, Buddha found he could answer that question.

The answer was, he realized, also the solution to the problem of his life; it was a means of redemption, one he could have arrived at by no other process than that of his fifteen-year retreat.

Its conception had demanded an empty womb in which to breed and had demanded as well an apprehension of magical principle: that had been supplied by his dream of Africa. And having apprehended the full measure of this principle, he further realized he had misunderstood the nature of Taboo’s powers. He had assumed that they had been weakened by the wrongness of his birth and would mature once he went under the knife; but he now saw that they were in themselves a way of effecting the transformation with a superior result, that they had needed this moment of violence and desperation to attain sufficient strength. Buddha felt himself filling with calm, as if the knowledge had breached an internal reservoir that had dammed calmness up.

“You need a disguise,” he said. “And you got the perfect disguise right at your fingertips.” He proceeded to explain.

“You crazy, Buddha!” said Taboo. “No way I can do that.”

“You ain’t got no choice.”

“You crazy!” Taboo repeated, backing away. “Crazy!”

“C’mon back here!”

“Naw, man! I gotta get away, I gotta…” Taboo backed into the door, felt for the knob, and-eyes wide, panic-stricken-wrenched it open. His mouth opened as if he were going to say something else, but instead he turned and bolted down the hall.

The pain in Buddha’s back was throbbing, spreading a sick weakness all through his flesh, and he passed out for a few seconds.

When he regained consciousness, he saw Taboo standing in the doorway, looking insubstantial due to the heavy wash of magic around him; in fact, the whole room had an underwater lucidity, everything wavering, like a dream fading in from the immaterial. “See?” said Buddha. “Where you gon’ go, man? You barely able to make it here!”

“I don’t know, I’ll…maybe I’ll…” Taboo’s voice, too, had the qualities of something out of a dream; distant and having a faint echo.

“Sheeit!” Buddha reached out to Taboo. “Gimme a hand up.”

Taboo helped him to his feet and into the bedroom and lowered him onto the bed. Buddha felt as if he might sink forever into the black satin coverlet.

“Show me that new dress you bought,” he said. Taboo went to the closet, pulled out a hanger, and held the dress against his body to display its effect. It was white silk, low-cut, with a scattering of sequins all over.