Gunning for the Buddha Read online

  We stopped outside a small village and got out to listen for any news about the burning fields and troop movement of the various alliances fighting or serving the Taliban. We kept to the shadows in the early morning light. On my way back to the Firebird, a blanket over my head like a birka to disguise my gender, I passed a donkey and a camel.

  The camel was smiling at me.

  “The river is wide and unmo-o-o-oving,” the donkey next to the camel said in a high-pitched, whinnying voice. “I am but a rock in the river, worn smo-o-o-oth by its passing.”

  “Peace is everywhere,” the camel responded. “You need only find it inside you.”

  “Peace is the bridge,” the donkey agreed with a yellow grin. “And the bridge is inside of you.”

  I stared at their pleased grins and half-closed eyes. Damn that Buddha. Even the livestock had learned his ways. I reached for my gun, wanting to erase those smiles. But the crackle of automatic weapons made me let go of my gun and cover my head again in the blanket like a good Taliban maiden.

  Screw it, I thought. I didn't have time to shoot the Buddha and his various incarnations every minute of every day.

  I sprinted back to the Firebird, the gunfire building. I had a feeling Annina had lost her composure. She'd probably tried to do something to honor Ari's memory. I just hoped she didn't take anyone else from the Firebird with her.

  I found them half a kilometer from the car, Marco bent over Annina and screaming Russian in her face. From his tone I didn't think the words were sweet nothings. Yeshev was crumpled on the ground next to them like a forgotten wad of paper.

  I ran and got the Firebird, and Marco put the injured riders into the back seat. Yeshev was moaning and whimpering, but Annina was deathly silent. On our way away from the village, I passed the donkey and camel, still wearing their shit-eating grins. I fought the urge to turn the wheel and let the big bumper of the Firebird have them for breakfast. We were coming up on another bridge, the bridge that would lead us somewhen else, and I couldn't afford a delay, not with Annina and Yeshev banged up the way they were.

  And anyway, I could only kill so many Buddhas before the bad karma finally caught up with me.

  * * * *

  Yeshev didn't make it. The wounds were too many and too deep, and he died short seconds after we jumped away from the battlefields of poppy. I got the whole story from Marco as we drove. Annina had led Yeshev and Marco into a Taliban stronghold at the heart of the Afghan village and, bold as badgers, they'd tried to hold back the dam of chaos with their handguns and misplaced courage. Annina, as usually happened in cases like that, came out untouched.

  Without Yeshev and Ari slowing us down, we were able to make it back to the eighties, but only the tail end. I tell you, that decade was a damn smorgasbord of chaos to unravel and rewrite in our own unique ways, and I made sure I had the dominant thought when we screamed across the muddy Afghan river on a bridge of rotting timbers. I was surprised to see that we actually made it to the time and place I'd been concentrating on when we hit the middle of the bridge.

  We arrived in Berlin, in the fall of ‘89.

  The wall was going down by the time we drove up. I took one look at the holes being punched in the wall and saw what I needed. Everyone in the crowd had pushed forward to get a piece of the wall, the crush of bodies like corpses standing up and leaning forward with their dead, stifling weight, but I was able to sneak in and get the chunk I needed.

  I snatched the triangular piece of broken, graffiti-laced concrete with his face spray-painted on it. The corners had broken off in straight lines, cutting the face in half, but leaving that patented Buddha smile. Still he was smiling at me.

  But this time I smiled back. I understood him now. He would always keep coming back, in one form or the other, and I would always be there waiting for him, as long as I had the Firebird and a friend or two. The secret was to stop looking. Then I could stop running and find the missing order in my life.

  Even as someone grabbed my ass and tried to turn me around for a celebratory kiss, I slipped away with the Buddha in my coat pocket, leaving a horny German man behind me on the ground, clutching his nuts. I pushed through the crowd, the broken wall behind me.

  But when I made it back to where I'd left the others and the car, I saw that the revelation I'd made at the wall had already become meaningless. Young men and women swinging sledgehammers had moved to the Firebird, doing to the car what they'd done to the wall. Marco must have realized that this was the end of communism, and he knelt ten feet back from the crowd, tears in his beard. Annina was one of the women swinging the hammers at the Firebird.

  I wasn't going anywhere for a long, long time. And for the first time in my life, I was at peace with that knowledge. I walked away from the wall and, avoiding all bridges, I headed west, a tiny sliver of the Buddha held tight in my hand.

  * * * *

  I lived in Berlin for a dozen years after that. After the wall came down, traveling the world in the ruined Firebird was no longer an option. I couldn't bring myself to look for some other car. Everything has to end, I knew.

  And so, the others drifted away, promising to write and steer clear of all bridges, but most likely doing neither. I got used to walking most places, and it was getting harder for me to say no to the gearheads as well as a growing number of tourists near the Brandenberg Gate who were dying to buy the Firebird from me as a souvenir of the New World Order. I turned them all down, until yesterday.

  I needed the money after all my chemo, and I was tired of waiting, one long fucking day at a time, for Buddha. The Buddha, not a Buddha. We had to talk.

  I realized that gunning for the Buddha had gotten me nowhere, and somewhere in my travels I'd picked up the big C, probably from all the cigs and the power lines next to my apartment here in Berlin. But that wasn't going to stop me from trying to catch up with him one last time.

  This morning I decided to go. But first, following my gut instincts, I plucked out what little hair I had left on my body, even eyebrows and pubes (I felt lop-sided with all that extra hair and none to cover my scalp, so it all had to go), and pulled on a robe. I was doped up on a lovely mix of my own creation—morphine, Maker's Mark, and marijuana—and I'd lost so much weight, my chest was non-existent beneath my robe. So much for my girlish figure.

  Without anything on my feet, I started walking. Within minutes I came within sight of the Palace Bridge over the Spree. On the Bridge I could see the statues of men with swords growing closer, male guardians of a lost time. Memories of jumping through more recent timeframes flitted through my throbbing head. I hadn't crossed a bridge in over a decade.

  I didn't even have to lift my thumb to get the big car to pull over. It was a mint-green ‘72 Monte Carlo with mag wheels and a crackling muffler. Nice. After climbing inside, I dug into the pocket of the robe and found one of the hundreds of fortunes on rectangles of paper from Guten Wok, home of the best tofu stir-fry in Germany. I savored the fortunes like most folks did the Bible, or USA Today.

  “In some ways...” I began, reading from a fortune I held cribbed in my right hand, hidden from the unsmiling young woman behind the wheel. The pain in my head was gone.

  In the driver's hard face I saw young boys and girls with guns, helicopters dripping with flames, and desert livestock spouting wisdom. I thought of bridges crumbling slowly, one second at a time, into dust. I had to find the Buddha.

  I swallowed and started over. “In some ways,” I said, my voice thick from lack of use. “I am helpless.”

  When she pulled the gun out, we were already on the bridge and decelerating. The four people crowded into the back of the car hissed laughter, like snakes or punctured tires. The driver steered with her left hand and pointed the gun with her right. I forgot all about my fortune-cookie messages and devised my own.

  “Be a lamp unto yourself,” I said, kicking out with both bare feet as my body slid low in the car's big front seat, “and seek your own liberation with diligence.” />
  The shot went high, shattering the window above me. The blast nearly deafened me, but at last I knew the blissful release of a fortune told, a lesson learned, a deity found. At last. We hit the middle of the bridge, and we were gone.

  * * *

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