Nirvana Nowhere

A story by Keith Croes

He was there, hurtling down the warp in endless calm. The pain began--he tried to localize it--in his solar plexus, but it didn't begin. It originated. It had always been.

It stretched through the rushing blackness and found a sharp depth through the length of his body. Pain with a certain quality, like a familiar smell. Deep, beyond screaming.

It had always been, drawn along the edge of a never-ending razor. Deep, himself extended on the agonized line, hurtling. Hurtling.

Pain deepened, made poignant by the sense of endless calm that ran also somewhere close in the mad turbulence. Below, perhaps, a single spinal cord below. He could not reach it.

Fractures of light appeared in the black tunnel, the path of an earthworm, so black he had no right to appreciate its existence, but it was the very channel of his pain, extending behind and ahead, wound around him, encasing him.

"You're fighting it."

The spiraling electrified mosaic split into jigsaw puzzle pieces, falling light as leaves, swirling and settling. A bookcase. A lampshade slightly tilted.

Eight-twenty-two on the click-clock.

He was seven seats back now. The smooth acceleration of the electrobus caught her off-balance and under the long navy coat her handful of shapely butt took a quick swing into the front seat near the door, where she always sat if she could. Tight blonde curls hid the collar. He watched her profile in the passing lights.

A man's face took on vague disappointment, hurried to hide it, all very professional. Doctor Tom's face.

Lee smelled the cologne, the cedar in Doctor Tom's sweater.

"Lee?"

Lee sat up and shook his head violently.

"Here."

He took the glass of water, drained it.

"The matrix is capable of giving you new insight into your multidimensional self. And you fight against it with the aching, intuitive zeal of a spawning salmon."

Doctor Tom was sitting wrongways in his swivel desk chair, forearms crossed on the wooden back. He had the kind of compact body that reminded Lee of intellect compressed. And Lee was not convinced that there was that much intellect, no matter the density. He looked bright and pinched and too fragile to be comfortable manipulating the human Sturm und Drang that was his workshop, a place he entered with tasteless conceit, a strutting bantam rooster swelled with well-practiced well-meaning. But his clothes, his smell, were lovely.

Lee enjoyed the rich, paneled room, the dim lighting. Hands behind his head, he leaned back into the black-foam cushions.

With a look of measured disapproval--o-so-professional--Doctor Tom accepted the empty glass and placed it on a coaster on the desk.

"Your actions have spiritual significance," Doctor Tom said. "Do you believe that?"

Lee grinned and nodded.

"Do you believe in God?"

"When I have to."

"When is that?"

"Sometimes."

"Do you believe in this therapy?"

''If torture is therapy."

"When do you believe in God?"

"Sometimes. I don't know. When I'm about to die."

"Do you believe in yourself?"

"I am myself."

"Do you believe in others?"

"Fuck, no."

Doctor Tom rose and began his random pacing, one hand on his chin, regarding his Degas prints like a museum patron with several hours to kill.

"You really ought to try a little harder, Lee. If you and I can't do this together, they'll bring in someone else." He shrugged across the room. "Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. There are karmic realities you're going to face, have to face. That's a given."

"What if I choose not to?"

"There is no such thing as choosing not to have the effect that you have." He approached the lounger and leaned forward with his hands on the black armrests. "You're quite right, though, the trick is making you see it, see the ripples of your lives through the ages. That's what the matrix is for. Trust it."

"Yeah." Click-clock. Eight-thirty-five.

"You are much more than you think you are. Do you believe that?"

"I'm prepared to examine the evidence."

"What did you see?"

"Same as always. Pain. But, uh, it's coming from my chest--here."

"Uh-huh."

"Speed."

"Did you get the sense of a destination?"

Lee nodded.

"And what was the destination?"

"Doom."

"And at that moment, did you believe in God?"

Lee exhaled sharply. "No. After all--" He smiled. "--you were here."

Thudding softly away, Doctor Tom paced. "The Akasha matrix is so basic to human consciousness," he said to an upper corner of the room, "there's no reason--"

"Yeah, Doc, I'm one for the books, but I think my time is up."

Doctor Tom halted on a far edge of the Persian rug and glanced at the click-clock. "Wednesday then," he said.

He sat six seats back. For the first time she looked at him in the indirect lighting above the windows, the streetlamps strobing by outside. He nodded and smiled. She smiled back.

He twisted the key in the wobbly lock and pushed open the door. His eyes fell first on the brown metal canister in which he kept his poetry. It lay pulled out next to a tiny child's desk and wooden chair. Removing his jacket, he looked at the bed, which was draped with an opened green sleeping bag. The zipper was cold. The mattress underneath was three inches thick with narrow dark-blue and gray stripes like a train engineer's overalls.

He stripped, bunching his jeans down his legs with one hand and spinning the radiator knob with the other. Dust eddied around his bare feet as he crossed the hardwood floor to the desk. The computer monitor was calling for a sobriety test.

Following a detailed set of instructions, he keyed in the responses, then abandoned the machine and entered the bathroom where he started the water in the tub. After brushing his teeth, he sat in the hot water and listened to the upstairs--scuffling, coughing, chuffing laughter.

His soapy fingers ran around the inside of the transmitter band on his ankle, and he scratched there, a feeling that would be sweet if it were a taste. Leaning back, he smiled at the seamless fiberglass ceiling of the shower enclosure.

Wednesday he pushed open the heavy wooden door of Doctor Tom's brownstone and entered the vestibule in response to an unintelligible shout he received after ringing the doorbell. In the office, through sliding doors to the left, Doctor Tom was sitting at his desk looking at some papers.

"Lee, aren't you curious?"

Lee tossed his jacket into the lap of a Victorian chair, appreciating briefly Doctor Tom's irked expression, then crossed the room gracefully and plopped down onto the black-cushioned lounger.

"Curiosity killed the cat."

Examining the papers in front of him, Doctor Tom continued. "Haven't you ever wondered what most people see in the Akasha matrix?"

"What do most people see in the Akasha matrix?"

"The sweep of their lives, a sense of the purpose of their numerous incarnations past, present, and future. Virtually everyone. I myself sat in that chair yesterday and again today and entered the matrix, effortlessly."

The taut man slapped the desk hard, which both startled and pleased Lee.

"What do you want, Doc?"

"I want the scales to fall. It is why there are no prisons. The reason for it all, for all your actions, lies in understanding your spiritual self."

"I'm trying."

"It is all here--" He stabbed an index finger at the lounger. "--all here, all the understanding, and the very act of understanding changes the circumstances, changes you. I've seen it work a thousand times. Do you believe that?"

"What do you want, Doc?"

Doctor Tom stood, lowered the lights, and walked to the simple upholstered chair next to the control panel of the black lounger where he always sat since they began to use the matrix. He was graceful too, Lee thought, like a gymnast. Like a cat.

"Concentrate on the pain again, on the root of the pain. This is eternity now. Don't think of the destination. You'll never reach the destination unless you can work through the pain. Spiritual pain, like physical pain, is a symptom. You have all the time in the world, you have forever. If images arise, let them come. Think of yourself as being much more than you are. You are not what everybody tells you you are. You are a being of light, a personality with multidimensional influence. Here is the first level."

Lee fell backward into an alpha ocean rising around him, infinitely soft. Fluorescent pulses in the shape of his body lifted away from him, a living topographical map of his descent into elseconsciousness. Doctor Tom's voice was an intimate resonance.

"Embody the pain, let it take you. Make your own matrix, a matrix within the matrix. The pain is only a side effect, a byproduct of your resistance. I'm going to keep you in a little longer tonight. Just a little longer. Here is level two."

Click-clock, Lee thought. Then a pain that had no beginning, that had always been. Falling down the warp.

Eight-thirty-eight on the click-clock, the briefly disappointed professional face. 0-so-professional. Like a camp counselor who had failed to teach some clumsy adolescent how to tie a square knot.

Lee waited limply for the pieces to fall in place, then realized that they needed help, and that helping was an act of will. Too suddenly, as if he were a marionette pulled upright or had received a great shock from the black cushions, he came to the vertical and found himself standing in front of the lounger, his muscles still twitching.

"Well, no breakthroughs tonight, Doc," he wheezed.

"Sit."

Doctor Tom was seated at his desk with the small desk lamp illuminating a piece of yellow ruled paper. Lee saw the black scrawls and sank back, back into the black lounger.

"What?"

"I want to read you something."

"My time's almost up." Lee squirmed.

"Your parole agent sent something over that you may find interesting. You wrote it. 'It is not the...

It is not the senses that deceive,
it is judgment, said Goethe,
who promptly died.
Poor judgment on his part, no doubt.
Another casualty on the battlefield of human evolution.
It is difficult to admit
that we will all be casualties
and achieve Nirvana
elsewhere.
It is equally difficult to admit
that we will all be casualties
and achieve Nirvana
nowhere.
It is a matter of judgment.

...of judgment.' Intuitively you allow for the possibility of reincarnation, isn't that so?"

Click-clock. "It's a matter of judgment."

"What happened?"

Lee shrugged. "The pain. Behind me. Through me. Like a stake through the chest. Maybe I was a vampire in a past life, eh Doc?"

"Any images?"

"No. But, uh, I don't want to stay under any longer than that, okay?"

"No images at all? Inklings of images?"

"Next time, Doc." Lee sat sullenly with his forearms on his knees.

"Friday then," Doctor Tom agreed, looking up from the crook of his arm resting on the back of the swivel chair.

At the end of the block and across the street from the brownstone, he stood under a streetlight and looked at his watch. He had missed the 8:45. Letting his head roll back against the furred collar of his leather jacket, he cried out, an echoing wail that in the end sounded false to him.

Inside the brownstone, Doctor Tom punched a hole in the drywall of his bedroom, then extracted his fist, limp and dusted white as if by powdered sugar.

Another electrobus at 8:55. No one like her. No one like her anywhere.

Thursday to the allotted store. Life among the beetles and mutants. Everything seemed dry, drier than usual. Crispy. The crinkling of the grocery bags as he walked back to the apartment was like a brush fire.

A dog took interest in his feet. He stopped, listening to the animal's sniffs, then walked on.

The night, the zipper, was cold. As he watched TV, the radiator knocking at the edge of his attention produced a smell he slowly recognized as blood. He turned off the TV and masturbated.

Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Friday, through the heavy wooden door of the brownstone. The path of an earthworm.

"Here is level one."

Doctor Tom gesturing him with a bandaged hand into the black lounger. Peremptorily.

"It is why there are no prisons," came the intimate voice. "The reason for it all. You have an unhealthy link with those 14 women and they with you. And the understanding is here."

Falling free backward in the living topographical map.

"The understanding of your spiritual self, all the understanding is here in the Akasha matrix, so basic to human consciousness, so basic that it cannot be wrong, that it cannot be fought, and it cannot be otherwise."

Hurtling down the warp, pulsing with the fluorescent voice so internal it must be his own.

"For myself, for my peers, it cannot be otherwise. For the 14 who were raped and murdered, it cannot be otherwise. Here is level two."

Hauled along it, the razor edge of night lowering into him, pain forever leaping through the extent of himself, up and down the earthworm's path, a tunnel he had no right to appreciate. Hurtling.

"I've figured it out, Lee. This is your therapy. This is your destiny."

Deep, beyond screaming. Agony like a familiar smell. Like blood.

"This is what the Akasha matrix would show you because this is what you are."

Pain that had always been. Pain with no destination. Pain endlessly above and apart from the endless calm, pain deepened by the separation. Made poignant.

"Keep you in till your heart stops. Then see you in the next life. Asshole."

Lee felt a great sob work its way up through the tunnel and burst behind him.

Eight-thirty-six on the click-clock, the relenting reorganization of the room, Doctor Tom standing, leaning against a bookshelf.

Lee blinked rapidly in the black lounger.

"A new therapist will be assigned to you. The parole agency will let you know by Monday's session."

On his way out, Lee reclaimed his coat from the lap of the Victorian chair.

He sat three seats back, and she gave him a smile when she got on.

"You have a night class?" he said.

"Yes--" She tossed her twisting hair in its direction. "--at the university."

"Me too."

Soon she invited him to sit next to her, and he explained that he was working on his doctorate in philosophy. A sweet feeling along the whorls of his thumbprint, the edge of a razor.

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

keith@croes.com