Thirty-seven.
The professor kept on, drawing his figures, making his dry remarks at which most of the class chuckled knowingly, their furtive secret little math jokes. But Lenore’s mind hung back at thirty-seven.
37.
Suddenly a circular pattern hung in her eyes like the afterimage of a camera flash, an ornate sun-fleck. It was something she’d seen in that Derek Crowe book—one of the mandalas. She hadn’t really paid much attention to how the things looked, not consciously anyway, but apparently it had seeped into her unconscious mind. She was already bent over her notebook, scribbling notes with one ear cocked to the professor’s voice, but now she flipped to a fresh page. She saw the mandala hanging there as if projected from a slide. Fascinated, she set her pencil at the very center of the wheel and began to trace the lines, wondering at the optical illusion, marveling that her memory could be so sharp.
You see how clear your mind can be when you’re not fucking it up with drugs? she told herself.
She traced quickly, deliberately; if she blinked, she wasn’t aware of it, but she didn’t think she blinked at all. She couldn’t wait to get home and compare it to the book, find this particular mandala and see how accurate she was. The pencil spun and twirled; she rolled it in her fingers to keep the tip sharpened. The professor was wrong. Thirty-seven wasn’t an ill-formed cluster of dots. It looked like this—like thirty-seven little eyes around a serrated center.
It was then she remembered the feel of the knife in her hand, Michael’s knife, carving liquid light in the wounded air.
Her breath drained out of her and hung in space where she couldn’t reach it. She was suffocating. Sparks tingled in her eyes, and she remembered something coming toward her, wheeling about, a whirling vastness placing her at its center.
Lenore dropped the pencil. Several students glanced over, kept gazing when they saw she made no move to retrieve the pencil, but only sat there trembling slightly. Finally a boy in the next aisle reached down, picked up the pencil, and set it back on her desk. He did it with a slight smile, and turned away blushing after a few seconds when she offered no thanks.
Her hand went to her forehead, fingering the scab.
The mandala, incomplete, seemed to burn on the page as if angry, insistent that she finish it. Instead she shoved her pencil into her purse, slapped the notebook shut, and slid out of the seat. The professor gave her an irritated look. She fled the room, thudding down the square spiral stairs of the central tower in her heavy boots, then out into the sun where it was almost warm. Pines cast cold shade on the parking lot.
As she drove home, her nervousness increased. She kept glancing at her forehead in the rearview mirror, picking at the scab. The skin was bright, raw pink beneath it; she tried to stick the scab back in place. Another blackout, she thought. But she hadn’t done any drugs yesterday. It had been, all in all, a dull day, unremarkable except for Derek Crowe’s lecture—and why that had stimulated her, she still didn’t understand. For a few hours she’d thought she finally understood what Michael saw in all this occult stuff—a way of seeing into the darkness that always surrounded her. She had thought maybe there was some way to get back to the source of her troubles, and undo the harm. As if she could ever escape her depressions, her addiction not to any particular drug, but to oblivion.
She felt like a fool today.
And she had done something foolish last night.
That would teach her to let her guard down. She always had to learn these things the hard way.
The Cutlass was banging and groaning by the time she pulled up in front of the house. It was the only car she’d ever heard of that could overheat in freezing weather. She stumped up the driveway, hearing Tucker’s music. The stereo played perpetually. She checked her watch—she had plenty of time to get to work, but she was already thinking she might call in sick. She felt sick.
She stood in the kitchen, anxious for a little hit of something, anything. She brought down a plastic film canister she kept in a high cupboard, plucked off the lid, found it empty of even the green dust of last summer’s homegrown.
Blackouts when she was drinking, those she could understand. Blackouts for no reason, with no explanation, were another matter. They suggested some sort of chemical or physical problem—brain damage… maybe a tumor. Some long-term effect of the designer drugs she’d tried in New York City—dirty, untested stuff.
She could smell incense from Michael’s temple. She almost gagged at the odor, which brought traces of memory. Again she remembered carving the mandala sign in the air. And something else—an impression of something enormous sharing the room with them.
She went down the hall, pushed open the door to the library, and stopped. She felt suddenly dizzy, almost stoned. Optical illusions flickered in the dark room, coiling and uncoiling like tendrils of ghostly ferns. She shut her eyes. Was this some kind of flashback? Had Michael slipped her something last night—some sort of ritual drug, like peyote?
Even before finishing the thought, she dismissed it. No way. Michael wouldn’t feed her habits. He’d quit actively urging her to give up every pleasure she had, every so-called vice, but he was still a fucking Puritan in black leather. You’d think he was a born-again Christian or something, the way he went after her for doing even the mildest drugs. And him with his magic and witchcraft. Some people thought they were worse than drugs!
He had everything so easy, seeing life in religious terms, in black and white. He was as bad as the Baptists, going door to door converting people. He had no idea how mixed up the world could get, how everything bled over into everything else, forming one enormous gray zone that couldn’t be cleared up with candles or crosses or ritual knives. There was no symmetry in life, nothing so easy as good and evil. Sure, Michael knew all kinds of things—intellectual things, bullshit out of books. But logic and common sense were not his strongest subjects. He was off in another dimension somewhere, going on and on about the astral. But for all his occult knowledge, his philosophical talk about how the essence of life was suffering, he didn’t know shit about pain. He’d never been through anything like what she’d gone through. He’d never suffered the kind of abuse that had been her lot. Mrs. Renzler was a drunken cow, but not violent. He hadn’t been taken away from parents he couldn’t remember and sent to a string of foster homes, bounced from one guardian to another. She didn’t believe his life had ever been that bad. They argued about it sometimes, trying to top each other’s store of suffering. Michael’s mother had gone through three husbands, hauling him all over the place when he was growing up—from Miami, to Buffalo, to Baltimore, to Athens, to D.C. She worked sporadically in jails and prisons, and tended to fall for inmates, though not the violent type. Con artists, small-time crooks, they’d left Michael more or less alone. So his mother married criminals; everybody had their problems. Lenore wished her own childhood could have been half as placid.
“Just because I never got beat up or lost my babies doesn’t mean I haven’t been hurt,” he’d say. “Shit’s happened to me that’s just as hard for a guy to go through, things a woman can’t understand.”
Maybe. Just maybe. But she doubted it.