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  “Come with me, Buddha,” she said. “Come with me to Miami. We can get us a house on the beach and…”

  “Lemme be,” he said, his despair increasing because he wanted to go with her, to live high in Miami and share her self-discovery, her elation. Only the pain in his back-intensifying with every passing minute-dissuaded him, and it took all his willpower to convince her of his resolve, to insist that she leave without him, for Taboo and his dead wife had fused into a single entity in his mind, and the thought of losing her again was a pain equal to the one inflicted by Johnny Wardell.

  At last, suitcase in hand, she stood in the doorway, the temptation of the world in a white silk dress, and said, “Buddha, please won’tcha…”

  “Damn it!” he said. “You got what you want. Now get on outta here!”

  “Don’t be so harsh wit’ me, Buddha. You know I love you.”

  Buddha let his labored breathing be the answer.

  “I’ll come see ya after a while,” she said. “I’ll bring you a piece of Miami.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “Buddha?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In the bathtub, Buddha…I just couldn’t touch it.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  She half-turned, glanced back. “I’ll always love you, Buddha.” The door swung shut behind her, but the radiance of her love kept beaming through the wood, strong and contaminating.

  “Go on,” he murmured. “Get you a big white car.”

  He waited until he heard the front door close then struggled up from the bed, clamping his hand over his liver to muffle the pain. He swayed, on the verge of passing out; but after a moment he felt steadier, although he remained disoriented by unaccustomed emotion. However, the sight of the pitiful human fragment lying in the herb-steeped water of the bathtub served to diminish even that. He scooped it up in a drinking glass and flushed it down the toilet. Then he lay back on the bed again. Closed his eyes for a minute…at least he thought it was just a minute. But he couldn’t shake the notion that he’d been asleep for a long, long time.

  * * * *

  Buddha had to stop and rest half a dozen times on the way back to the shooting gallery, overcome by pain, by emotions…mostly by emotions. They were all around him as well as inside.

  The shadows of the ruined houses were the ghosts of his loves and hates; the rustlings in the weeds were long-dead memories with red eyes and claws just waiting for a chance to leap out and snatch him; the moon-lopsided and orange and bloated-was the emblem of his forsaken ambitions shining on him anew. By loving Taboo he had wasted fifteen years of effort and opened himself to all the indulgent errors of his past, and he wished to God now he’d never done it. Then, remembering how dreamlike everything had seemed, he had the thought that maybe it hadn’t happened, that it had been a hallucination brought on by the liver punch. But recalling how it had felt to make love, the womanly fervor of Taboo’s moves, he decided it had to have been real. And real or not, he had lived it, he was suffering for it.

  When he reached the shooting gallery he sat cross-legged on his mattress, heavy with despair. His back ached something fierce. Pete was angry with him for being late, but on seeing his discomfort he limped upstairs and brought down a needle and helped him fix. “What happened to ya?” he asked, and Buddha said it wasn’t nothin’, just a muscle spasm.

  “Don’t gimme that shit,” said Pete. “You get hit by a goddamn car, and you be tellin’ me it ain’t ‘bout nothin’.” He shook his head ruefully. “Well, to hell wit’ ya! I’m sick of worryin’ ‘bout ya!”

  Buddha began to feel drowsy and secure there on his mattress, and he thought if he could rid himself of the love that Taboo had imparted to him, things might be better than before. Clearer, emptier. But he couldn’t think how to manage it. Then he saw the opportunity that the old man presented, the need for affection he embodied, his hollow heart.

  Pete turned to go back up the stairs, and Buddha said, “Hey, Pete!”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “I love you, man,” said Buddha, and sent his love in a focused beam of such strength that he shivered as it went out of him.

  Pete looked at him, perplexed. His expression changed to one of pleasure, then to annoyance. “You love me? Huh? Man, you been hangin’ out with that faggot too much, that’s what you been doin’!”

  He clumped a couple of steps higher and stopped. “Don’t bother comin’ upstairs for your goodnighter,” he said in gentler tones. “I’ll send it down wit’ somebody.”

  “ ‘Preciate it,” said Buddha.

  He watched Pete round the corner of the stairwell, then lay down on the mattress. He was so free of desire and human connections that the instant he closed his eyes, golden pinpricks bloomed behind his lids, opened into Africa, and he was flying across the grasslands faster than ever, flying on the wings of the pain that beat like a sick heart in his back. The antelope did not run away but stared at him with wet, dark eyes, and the stick figures of those who guarded the village saluted him with their spears. The shadows of the masked women danced with the abandon of black flames, and in one of the huts a bearded old man was relating the story of a beautiful young woman who had driven a white car south to Miami and had lived wild for a time, had inspired a thousand men to greater wildness, had married and…Buddha flew onward, not wanting to hear the end of the story, knowing that the quality of the beginning was what counted, because all stories ended the same. He was satisfied that Taboo’s beginning had been worthwhile. He soared low above the green mountains, low enough to hear the peaceful chants of the gorillas booming through the hidden valleys, and soon was speeding above the lake wherein the solitary fish swam a slow and celebratory circle, arrowing toward the mists on its far side, toward those hallucinatory borders that he previously had neither the necessary courage nor clarity to cross.

  From behind him sounded a distant pounding that he recognized to be someone knocking on the door of the shooting gallery, summoning him to his duty. For an instant he had an urge to turn back, to reinhabit the world of the senses, of bluesy-souled hookers and wired white kids and punks who came around looking to trade a night’s muscle work for a fix. And that urge intensified when he heard Pete shouting, “Hey, Buddha! Ain’t you gon’ answer the goddamn door?” But before he could act upon his impulse, he penetrated the mists and felt himself irresistibly drawn by their mysterious central whiteness, and he knew that when old Pete came downstairs, still shouting his angry question, the only answer he would receive would be an almost impalpable pulse in the air like the vibration of a gong whose clangor had just faded beneath the threshold of hearing, the pure signal struck from oblivion, the fanfare announcing Buddha’s dominion over the final country of the mind.

  Lucius Shepard

  ***

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