Bad to the Bones(2)

I frowned at the alcoholic. “You’re one of us now. Of course you want to vote for our guy.”

“Forced sterilization!” swore the wino. “Some girl who looked like a zombie told me she was forced onto an operating table and knocked out with knockout drops! When she woke she wasn’t able to bear children anymore!” He kept saying that, “knockout drops,” as though we lived in some forties spy film. Someone would come along and put the drops in someone’s Kool-Aid, like at a retreat in the South American jungle.

But I started wondering. Why was I, a chosen one, being herded along with these “new friends”? I knew we were starting to consider that our experiment with the addicted, unreliable, and unstable “friends” had in general been a failure. But why had I, one of Shakti’s closest advisors, been rounded up with them?

I tried to ask the daimyo. This minivan had two of them and their assault rifles had never been more terrifying.

“Bulsara,” I begged of one armed peacekeeper. “Where are you taking us? Was it an accident? Was I included in this group by accident?”

“No accident,” was all Bulsara would say. He had been a stockbroker in Cincinnati, handing over his fortune and those of his children’s to come to Bihari.

I started to panic. “It’s a mistake! I am Asanga. You know me, Bulsara! I live in Wang Cho House with Swami Shakti, the inner sanctum. Why am I being ejected along with these street people?”

“So you do admit it?” bellowed the juicer. “I knew it, I knew it! Typical big business right-winger procedure! Tolerate the little guy as long as he’s useful and when he’s run his course, bam! Toss him into a mass grave with thirty other bodies! It’s the military-industrial complex, I tell you!”

It wasn’t exactly a mass grave the daimyo had in mind. But as we pulled off the road, I saw we were converging with two other minivans. They all had a purpose now and drove in tandem as though in a car commercial toward the lip of the canyon. They drove like a formation of slow bombers. Would they drive us over the edge? The whole time the bum kept screaming “Knockout drops!” and “They put it in the beer. They put it in the mashed potatoes!”

I was truly starting to become terrified. Emotions in general were not my strong point. I was considered the “mellowest” of Shakti’s inner sanctum because I did not feel strong emotions. I had been purged of all past trauma through my constant re-living of them. But as the sterno bum screamed about mashed potatoes and the ski instructor Ted bellowed about freestyling, mogul runs, and slaloming, I really began to panic. That was definitely the edge of a cliff out there. This area west of Slide Rock was a beautiful frothy cake of pink and violet layers of sediment.

But by the time the three minivans came to a halt, I was actually beginning to feel groggy. It struck me that the alcoholic might be right. I had been inexplicably groggy off and on lately, usually after drinking a beer someone had poured for me. And right before the daimyo had snatched me from my mechanic’s shop, Rhetta had brought me a hand-poured beer. She lived with me at Wang Cho House.

In fact, I wasn’t really questioning anything by the time Bulsara herded me off the bus. Stumbling, clueless transients came from the other buses, some with their hands held high, as though accustomed to surrendering. This would be a fitting end to my pointless life. It had been too good to be true, finding Shakti after so many years of neglect and abuse by careless parents. I wasn’t good enough for Shakti.

Purple was the color of the rising sun. But right now a wave of purple was rushing toward the direction of the sunset, which happened to be a drop-off steep enough to kill a whole herd of unwanted disciples like us.

“The Master is a boat,” chanted Bulsara, waving his rifle at us. “Once the disciple crosses the river, the boat is unnecessary.”

“I’m totally out of here!” shrilled the street bum. “This shit is batshit crazy!” And he ran.

He ran toward the road and a couple of daimyo splattered bullets at his heels. This woke up the rest of us bums. Reflexively we ran away from the bullets, toward the cliff. But I was so groggy I ran like a sloth.

The rest of my bus mates seemed to be running in slow motion, too. Our limbs splayed like frogs, arms flapping like crows. We ran toward the edge, taking ridiculously high steps. Dust from bullets stinging the ground buoyed us up like a cloud toward heaven, but nobody was being hit. It was just a game for the daimyo, a brutal video game to pass the time.

“Fucking dirtbags!” yelled Brian, the only one running near me now. It seemed as though we ran through solid water, we were so slow. My head felt like a bucket of cement, and I even stopped caring that someone was trying to kill me. My wooden beaded necklace that enshrined a photo of Shakti bounced like a close up shot of a coin toss. Shakti used to tell us the picture wasn’t really of him because he was a vast emptiness that can’t be photographed.

“They f*cking lied, like everything else was a lie,” drawled Brian. Suddenly he was drunk as a skunk, too. “There’s no f*cking eternal bliss. That f*cker just rides around in his Hummers drinking his hash milkshakes. There’s no democracy, no dialogues. It’s a dictatorship, and he doesn’t care about us.”

For the first time I understood that. As I fell to the ground—out of sheer stupor, not in a hail of bullets—I felt maybe, maybe just a little bit angry at Shakti. He always said he knew all, saw all. He knew everything going on in the ashram. Well, didn’t that mean he knew that I was being rounded up with average street bums and herded into oblivion?