The Entropy of Bones Read online

  “Yup. That’s you, in fact.”

  What?

  “Child of the water.”

  The fuck I am. I reacted more to the assertion that he knew me than to the association. I’m a liminal person, remember?

  “Liminals are human to a point. And let’s see. Where do you live? Are you a strong swimmer? Your moods likely to ebb and flow?”

  You mean like every other woman on the planet? I snapped. The last part, I mean. I grew up on a houseboat, dummy. And it’s more house than boat. My mom bought it, not me.

  “Ok, but when you had a chance to move away, what happened? You decided to stay. Not only stay but to move on to the Mansai more boat than house. Stop here.”

  I pulled over next to a disheveled five-room Catholic church in a quiet Latino residential neighborhood. A community center in desperate need of a paint job and some community was across the street. While the scaffolding of the church was worn, the signpost in the front was bright, declaring, “You are not alone in the darkness. Your Father God loves you forever.” In Spanish. I looked at it, realizing how often I’d taken in other languages, automatically known what they meant. It didn’t bother me, it was just a given. Probably in the same way most people just heard my voice and never focused on my non-moving lips. A.C. got out and sat on the broken wooden front steps. Not even seven in the morning yet, the oppressive heat of the South Bay began to rise. He ignored the warmth and sat on the steps as he fished through his trench coat looking for who knows what.

  “One gift of recognizing your principal agent is the ability to recognize it in others. Fight it as much as you want, but the waters have your head,” he said, trying to beckon me out of the car.

  What are we doing here? I yelled from the ride, refusing to get out until he started making sense.

  “I told you, grounding myself to the here.”

  How?

  “It’s easy. I just have to let the guardians of this space know that I’m not here for any harm.”

  So what, you’re gonna light candles? Hold a séance? Say some magical words? What? ’Cause from here it looks like you’re just sitting in front of a janky-ass church.

  “Calm yourself, Chabi. This will take ten minutes max.” A.C.’s eyes sparkled with a bit of surprise as he pulled a knot of hundreds from deep within his coat. I waited in the car somewhat patiently until he said, “You can still ask me questions.”

  So if I don’t speak Korean, what do I speak? I asked after a few minutes of serious reflection. That got to him. His smile wavered and his eyes went down for a second.

  “You speak the first tongue. All other language is derived from the language that you speak inherently. What’s more, it resonates with whoever hears it as their own language.”

  Where the hell did I learn that? I said, finally getting out of the car and stretching my legs. Old Mexican women walking with what looked like their “before” picture granddaughters walked by, silencing their chatter and making the sign of the cross when they saw me.

  “Hell if I know. Mico thinks if all you liminals work together you’ll be able to give every human being the choice about where to go next. Your skill would almost be proof positive of that.”

  Yeah, but he’s in the future. So if I joined up with you, you’d know me already, wouldn’t you? I laughed at him. I expected some form of snap back. Instead his sly smile returned.

  “I wish. You know as well as me Narayana likes to bury his treasure.”

  So in the future he’s alive? I say, trying not to think of myself as Narayana’s booty.

  “Yeah, but I don’t trust him.”

  First smart thing you’ve said, I tell him. But A.C. was already distracted. He went to an old homeless man coming down the street. His overstuffed backpack and pale gray eyes let the world know he was alone. His sagging face was rough with spiky white beard hair. I could smell the urine and alcohol radiating off of him from over twenty feet away. A.C. went in undaunted, chatting and whispering to the man like they were old friends. He escorted the old man to the front door of the church, but refused to cross the threshold. Instead he put the knot of bills into the old man’s hand and sent him in. Before he got back in the car, A.C. spit in one hand and made some form of occultation with the other over his closed fist, then cast that fist’s content toward the church with an exaggerated flair.

  You know, I’m kinda short of cash right now. Think I could borrow a few grand?

  “Jokes!” He smiled. “A sign of a healthy mind. Next stop Livermore.”

  Out by the 84, I tried a different tack. Narayana spoke of his family.

  “Alter men.” Heat came from the child of the wind.

  They pray a lot?

  “No.” He almost giggled. “Alter like alternative to men. In no way sacred. They could only pray to the void, the grand nothing, their power and protector.”

  I don’t understand . . .

  “Narayana comes from what are basically the opposite number of you liminal people. They are not born, they simply pop into creation as fully formed human-looking babies. No father. No mother. They grow and behave like humans in most ways, until they realize what they are. Then they become active. By themselves they are problematic. But when they are together, organized, they are dangerous. They disrupt all bonds around them. There are five thousand of them and they have an inborn hatred of humanity.”

  Narayana wasn’t like that . . . I protested. But then I thought about what I had read about Kothar. About how he had been adopted, and how he in turn had adopted Rice.

  “Narayana is the exception that proves the rule. And I’m not too sure about him right now.”

  I need gas, I told him, more to get off the road for a second than anything. But as I’m filling up, my phone rings. Two missed calls from Mom flash away as the new call comes in. Rice. Almost on instinct I picked up. But I felt the stillness in the air and looked across the car. A.C. is standing, tense, ready to fight.

  “Please don’t,” he asked. That consistent smile gone. “Not right now. Please.”

  It was harder than it should have been to let it go to voice mail.

  Fine. But I want some answers. I jammed the fuel spout into my car like it pissed me off.

  “You’re stronger than you look,” the rectal irritant almost whispered once we were back in the car driving north.

  Yeah, I get that a lot.

  “I don’t mean physically. You’ve resisted Rice’s charm,” he said a little louder, looking out the window. “A lot of people, strong folks, well trained, have fallen for him.”

  He’s never done anything wrong to me, I let him know as I made the last exit for Livermore.

  “Nothing that you’ve seen. He’s like Narayana . . .”

  Narayana never did . . . .

  “Chabi, don’t even try it,” he said almost with pity. He pointed out a turn I was supposed to take before he spoke again. “You think it makes sense to turn a thirteen-year-old into a killing machine? He wasn’t even cleared to train you. There’s no way you should be as good as you are, liminal or not.”

  How did you know Narayana? I finally got out from my clenched teeth.

  “We were trained together. Him in the ways of fire, me in the ways of wind.”

  You on some natural opposites–type beef? What, you guys always scrap or something?

  “Far from it. Park here,” A.C. said, pointing to the back alley of a grand Indian ashram. It was multicolored with floors seemingly made of nothing but smooth tile and marble. Somewhere close by, a dish of curry was being set to flame. The ashram seemed the entry point to a grand community of large houses built behind it. “Narayana and I were drinking buddies. Fire and air aren’t opposites. That’s fire and water. But it doesn’t even matter. Narayana is an Alter. His nature is ash and dust.”

  I got out of the car this time and followed him to the steps of the ashram. It was wide and white. It seemed ornate almost to the point of excess, but the smell of incense calmed me and somehow ma
de me feel grateful for the place. A.C. bowed gracefully to practitioners entering and leaving and they responded in kind. When people spoke to him, he responded in their language. I began to notice that now that he mentioned this other aspect of my ability. It felt more like noticing an accent than an entirely new language. When we reached the top of the stairs, he just sat.

  So why did he practice fire if his nature was ash and dust?

  “Because his nature is inert and fire was the closest he could get to redemption.” A.C. pulled his sword. I had forgotten he was carrying it with him, just like I’d forgotten the guns were with him. Most likely because everyone else was ignoring them. A.C. spoke lightly into his hand again then ran his palm over the top part of the blade. I barely saw the blood before he let it slide off his palm and onto the steps.

  Bit messy? I smiled, trying to make his tiny sacrifice less significant.

  “Gets the job done.” He was about to say more about Narayana but an old brown woman wrapped in an orange-and-purple sari came from out of an aged Audi running as fast as her plump legs could carry her.

  “No, no, no, gentle spirit, please, you must come inside, let us welcome you properly.” The woman dropped to her knees in front of him trying to clean his feet with her long, thick black and silver hair. She couldn’t have been any younger than seventy.

  “There’s no need, little mother. Your house of worship called me as only a truly devout house could. I give thanks for this space,” he said, pulling her up gently from his feet. She refused to meet his eyes with hers.

  “But some food? Rest, perhaps? How will the rest of the wind spirits know that this is a refuge for them?” She tried to hit my feet with her hair at first, but when she caught sight of my eyes, she jumped back quickly.

  “Let no one sweep these steps for three days. I’ve marked them with the blood of the wind. May it bring peace and prosperity to all who worship here. Let’s bounce, Chabi.”

  What the fuck? I asked on the way back to the car.

  “What? Can’t handle my celebrity status?”

  How did she know what you are? I asked.

  “Every true believer, of any faith, gets to a point when they recognize the inherent qualities in another. She saw me for what I am because she knows herself for what she is.”

  Yeah, because that makes total sense.

  “Drive, Jeeves. Next stop, Berkeley.”

  Don’t think I won’t choke you out, wind boy, I told him as I started the engine.

  When we hit Dublin, A.C. lit his weird joint again. I let out a sigh to let him know I was getting sick of it. His response was to open his window and generate a breeze that caught the smoke and pushed it outside without having too much air come into the car.

  “Narayana is an Alter. They look like humans, sometimes act like us, but they aren’t,” he said slowly.

  Ok, so what are they?

  “Oxymorons. Creations of entropy. They exist . . . their sole purpose . . . is to hurry humanity to its eventual entropic end. To join with the cold of the universe,” A.C. said.

  But Narayana didn’t do that. Rice hasn’t done anything evil, I tried to argue.

  “It’s not evil I’m talking about. Evil exists to corrupt, pervert, transform. It can actually be useful in some cases. I’m talking entropy. The end of all things. Let’s say you want to blow up a building. You’ve got an explosive. Do you throw it at the building or do you go to the foundation and let it go off there? Alters are not dumb. They want to hit where it will do the most damage.”

  In the middle, I whispered to myself, thinking of Rice’s analogy. Still, I didn’t want to believe it. But how? By throwing parties and building hotels? By teaching me how to fight?

  “You know where every one of Kothar’s hotels lies?” A.C. snapped back.

  So Rice’s dad is in on this as well?

  “Look, I know you’re new at all this and I’m dropping a lot on you, but I need you to pay attention.”

  You mean pay attention beyond driving you from one ass end of the Bay to the other, Ms. Daisy? That got a laugh out of him, though it wasn’t my intent.

  “Fair point. Ok, Kothar Montague is Rice’s father. I’m using that term loosely, by the way. Rice has continued the tradition set out before him of building short circuits all across the ley lines on the world.”

  So people can’t get laid?

  “Narayana really taught you none of this?”

  Taught me how to break bones.

  “Ley lines are like the mystical veins of the planet. They are where all the free-floating thaumaturgic energy on the surface of the planet pools.”

  Ok now you’re just making up words.

  “The energy of miracle. Chabi, you’ve been to the hotel. You’ve seen how hard it is to leave. You saw what it did to your boy. Those places have power. And Kothar controls that power. Rice, at least in this time, isn’t as powerful as his father but he extends his control in a different way.”

  The silver snake, I said, wishing I hadn’t.

  “Exactly. That’s his totem. He brands anyone who walks into his club. Anyone who walks into those hotels has to pay homage to his totem. And each time they do, his charisma, his charm, his miracle-making ability gets more powerful.”

  Yeah, and he’s developing a video game based on it as well. But so what? I said, almost shouting. I mean you’re talking in these vague generalities, power, influence, so the fuck what? How does this all lead to worldwide entropy?

  “Look,” A.C. responded, almost exasperated. “Ok, psychopaths. You know how like you never hear about psychopaths in the middle of Virginia or some place like that?”

  I guess.

  “Right. Know why? Because they’re always attracted to big cities. Serial killers and fringe folks are usually out in the cornfields and the like, trying to build up the courage to confront humanity. But true psychopaths, they love being around large groups of people. Now all your social scientists are convinced it’s because they’re trying to figure out how to act and feel more like normal human beings. But they’re wrong. They’re dead wrong. Psychopaths, sociopaths, their main issue is they’re attracted to Alters. They want to be them. They aren’t attracted to cities. They’re attracted to the buildings Kothar and his line puts up. They’re giant beacons of misery and pain for them. And it’s been that way for over five hundred years.”

  He stays quiet until we get to the Ashby exit. I take it all the way up to MLK and make a right. Up a small street is a large temple with two golden dragons guarding the iron gates, packed to the gills with college students and semi-dirty hippies.

  “This one is going to take a while,” he tells me.

  Blood or money? I ask.

  “Time. Service. Feeding the hungry. It’s a Thai cultural center. In a few years hipsters are going to make this place unbearable, but right now poor students and the near homeless use the weekend feast as a way to get a little flavor in their lives on the cheap. I’ve got to serve them all food.”

  I’ll hang back. He’s about to get out of the car when I grab the cuff of his sleeve. I hurt one of them. The Alters. Samovar, I think his name was.

  “That was you?” He looked shocked. “Well, maybe we’ve got a shot in hell after all.”

  A shot at what?

  “Stopping them, of course.”

  I walked around the grounds of the small temple. One part was an outdoor cultural center backed by a tool lending library. The inside was adorned with red and gold lions and dragons. One room had a large bowl filled with sand and sticks of incense stuck in it. A.C. most likely lent me some of his “invisible when you want” mojo because I wandered in parts of the temple no one else had permission to enter. It helped calm the confusion going on in me.

  My reaction to A.C. was wrong-headed. He obviously knew more than I did. But he was assaulting the two men who had done the most for me in my life, telling me they were less than human. Worse, that they had designs on hurting me. How could the man who taught me h
ow to defend myself have wanted to cause me pain? I remembered the riots not two miles from where I was standing. Narayana’s voice, desperate and pleading in the night calling out to me as he scrapped with scores of SWAT. How could Narayana want me hurt? The worst part was how true it rang.

  I remembered the pain of Narayana leaving. How it almost killed me. That was no normal pain. And only a few days earlier I found it nearly impossible to get out of the Suites. A.C. had called out my weakness for both men with such specificity I felt like a cliché. It was making me resent him. Then I caught him out of the corner of my eye. Not flickering, his sword and guns ignored by all. He stood behind the food line. People paid cash and got temple coins to pay for their food. They were supposed to give the coins when they received their hot bowl of fish ball soup or chicken curry. He wouldn’t take coins from anyone. He smiled, giving the food away, infecting each person that went by him with his helpful smirk. I didn’t want to like him but I did. It was different than with Rice. In this relationship, I knew I had a choice.

  “Brought you some mango with red sticky rice,” he said an hour and a half later. I’d occupied my time doing katas in the temple and just all-around people watching. I went outside and had a brief conversation with Mom. She wasn’t too concerned, just told me people handle their grief in different ways. I thought I was too depressed about Shotgun, about all of it, to even try to eat despite what A.C. thought. But as I sat on the lawn the temple shared with the library, I realized his wisdom. I was hungry.

  We done? I asked.

  “Here? Yes. One more spot, though. The last, I promise. Come on, eat up. Your katas burn up energy quick. Bet you didn’t know that’s why you’re so skinny.” A.C. laid belly down on the grass next to me, slurping a noodled broth out of a large ceramic bowl.

  I think I saw an . . . Alter . . . get hit by a car when I was younger.

  “Didn’t do much, did it? The car, I mean,” he said, not at all surprised.