A Thousand Steps

18

Matt squeezes into the standing-only crowd in the back of the meditation room, with Christian and Grail and some of the brothers. The high ceiling is pale with smoke and the branches of the potted ficus reach into it. Christian’s grand, explosive Cosmic Mandala presides over all.

Leary stands at the podium looking not at all like the college professor he is. He may be a man nourished by knowledge and admiration but to Matt he looks more like an outdoorsman, a surfer or fisherman maybe. He looks over six feet tall and is well built. He has over-the-collar sun-bleached blond hair and amicable blue eyes. Well-tanned, with a wide-open white Mexican wedding shirt and baggy linen pants. There’s a boyish merriment in his face, something of the prankster. He’s quick to smile. Even amplified by a mic, his voice is earnest and pleasant.

Leary says he’s a victim of the cops and the Establishment press, which gets a rowdy response from the crowd. Says he’s not a pusher of LSD or anything else, except the right of any adult to choose what goes into his or her body as guaranteed by the Constitution. Whether you want to kill yourself suddenly with cyanide or slowly with cigarettes, it’s up to you.

As if on cue, Furlong and Darnell come in from Coast Highway, the crowd parting for them. Furlong is scowling and Darnell smiling. Catcalls and curses and pig snorts from the audience. Someone turns the ceiling lights up high so the intruders are fully displayed. The MAW customers have been especially hostile toward the cops since Furlong pulled the allegedly obscene drawings and astrological sex-position chart off the gallery wall and booked them into evidence at the station. Christian and Matt and one of Christian’s lawyer friends had gone downtown the very next day and gotten them back, made copies, and hung them in the windows facing busy Coast Highway where they could offend thousands of people a day.

“Officers!” Leary calls out. “Welcome to Mystic Arts World and to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and to the very first night of the rest of your lives!”

Furlong stands with his hands on his hips, facing the boos and snorts; Darnell turns in a circle, smile gone but waving. Matt wishes they wouldn’t call her a pig. He uses the newly brightened lights to search the many faces for Jasmine. But she’s not here, just as he knew she wouldn’t be. For the hundredth time Matt feels in his gut that Jasmine hasn’t just run away from home. Feels it really strong now. Something else has happened. Is it the secondhand pot making him feel this way now? Afraid and anxious? He doesn’t think so. He should feel afraid and anxious.

The ceiling lights cut through the smoke and the Cosmic Mandala floats in the upper layer like an artifact from the mists of creation. Matt enjoys his secondhand high right now, decides marijuana isn’t so bad. Darnell catches his eye and all he can think to do is wave to her.

“People, people!” Leary calls out, the mic close for volume. “Nobody is as far out as a cop, so let’s not be critical. Officers, join us! Learn about the psychedelic experience. Don’t judge us and we will not judge you.”

Someone turns the lights back down and the boil of ridicule from the crowd lowers to a simmer. Matt watches Furlong and Darnell retreat from the meditation room then pass from his field of vision into the front of the store, and, he guesses, make for the exit. Chants of aloha follow them out.

In their smoky wake, four bikers swagger in, two of them huge and two skinny. The muttering falls to silence. They’ve got dirty black jeans and harness boots, wallet chains and hunting knives holstered on their belts. Long tangled hair and beards, vests and back patches that read: HESSIANS. The logo is a skull with a sword thrust through the back and out the front, between the eyes.

“Welcome, friends,” says Leary. “I’ve never met an outlaw I didn’t like.”

To Matt, they seem to be looking for someone, just like he is. He notes that Johnny has disappeared. The Hessians finally turn their attention on Leary, then they turn and walk back out.

“Brother bikers!” Leary calls out. “When confounded, go mystical! Stay and be! Rest your bodies and expand your minds! Experience!”

Nothing from the bikers but a slamming door.

Leary smiles and waves and continues his program, explaining how he based his book, The Psychedelic Experience, on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which he and two colleagues translated into English and is NOT “an embalmer’s guide,” but a book to teach the living HOW to die. It is FOR the living. It’s a passage guide, he says. A guide to attaining the next of the many higher planes of consciousness a person will experience in their several lives and incarnations. Another way of achieving this higher consciousness is through psychedelic compounds such as peyote, mescaline, and lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.

Leary introduces the three basic stages — “Bardos” — of the journey in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

First Bardo: The Period of Ego-Loss or Non-Game Ecstasy. Second Bardo: The Period of Hallucinations.

And the Third Bardo: The Period of Re-Entry.

Matt has almost no idea what Leary is talking about, but by the silence in the room he assumes that everybody else does. He looks around at their expressions, very church-like, based on the several times his mother and father took the kids to church.

After the program, reappeared Johnny Grail invites Matt and Christian to stay in the meditation room after the crowd leaves, just hang with a few of the brothers and Tim and Rosemary, have a toke and brainstorm and experience. Matt knows that to “experience” means to “trip,” which means LSD. Matt has heard that Leary and Grail ingest spectacular quantities of acid, almost a competition, and Grail always takes the most. Matt has heard them bragging how great acid sex is, especially if your old lady is tripping too.

The four men and four women sit in a circle on small, plentiful Afghan prayer rugs that MAW sells by the pallet load, perfect for meditating, decorating cribs, your dog. Matt has heard that the rugs are used in smuggling by the BEL daredevils who risk prison or beheading for importing the powerful opium-laced hashish dragon balls. He believes it, based on the numbers of rugs, and of street dealers who have recently tried to peddle him those balls. If Matt is seeing things correctly, even his mom has gotten herself hooked — or almost hooked — on them. Now she’s thinking of moving out to Dodge City? What if she gets into acid?

They pass the hookah stuffed with hashish around but Matt declines. As he passes the billowing contraption to Rosemary — Tim’s wife — he wonders exactly why Grail has invited him here. He’s too young, not BEL or prospective BEL, just an untalented minor with a volunteer “job” helping Christian run the art gallery.

Leary looks through the smoke at him. Grins at Matt with an unlikely combination of guile and candor. He has smile lines that radiate from his eyes like a cat’s whiskers.

“What did you think?” Leary asks Matt.

“Good program.”

“That’s what I needed to hear. You are everything, you know. You young. The hope of the world and its future.”

Matt’s high hasn’t worn off yet, and he feels its grip of suspicion. Everybody’s eyes are all pupil now and he wonders how much LSD they’ve taken.

“Has your lovely sister come back home?” Leary asks.

Matt senses unanimous attention on him. “No, sir.”

Even through the smoke Matt can see the small flinch of disappointment on Leary’s face. No cat whiskers now.

“My own son is about her age,” he says. “Matt, I have to say that Jazz is one of the most beautiful young people I’ve ever known. Her consciousness is high, even though her ego is very strong. I hope she’s become a pilgrim, not a victim.”

“She didn’t run away, if that’s what you mean,” says Matt.

Leary asks Rosemary if she agrees.

Matt looks to Rosemary, seated to his left. She’s wholesomely elegant, dark haired, and has a winning smile. Beautiful for someone over thirty, Matt sees. She’s got to be almost as old as his mother.

“Anyone can be born with a lovely exterior,” says Rosemary, setting her hand on his knee. “But you have to be skeptical in this age of brainwashing and Establishment lies.”

“Right on,” says Johnny.

“I saw her two weeks ago here in the store,” says Tim. “She was packing up a big box of books to take to a customer too ill to come here on his own. I admired her generosity.”

“She was getting paid for it,” Matt says.

“In books,” says Grail.

“Beautiful,” says the former Harvard psychologist. “She’ll be back, Matt. She will be back.”

Shades of Mahajad, thinks Matt. All these wise old men who think they can predict the future. And old women saying she’ll be back, but thinking that maybe she ran away on purpose.

Matt stands. Wobbles. He’s higher now, after another jolt of secondhand smoke. “Thanks. It’s late.”

Grail rises to walk him out, steers him through the main part of the store, the door key jangling on a piece of driftwood in his hand. Stops at the main cash register and picks up a book from a stack of books with notes rubber-banded to them. Sold copies, Matt surmises. Hold-for notes or delivery addresses attached.

“I’d like to ask you a favor, Matt. We have a very good but very ill customer up on Diamond — Patricia Trinkle. She’s ordered a book, but with Jazz not around, it’s just sitting here. You wouldn’t mind, would you, on your paper route tomorrow? Just set it on the porch? She leaves a box outside for deliveries.”

Matt studies Grail’s happy, trusting face.

“Diamond isn’t on my route, Johnny.”

“Oh man, I thought it was! I totally spaced. So sorry. I’ll deliver it myself. But look at this thing!”

He pulls the note off and hands the book to Matt. It’s a black leather-bound Tibetan Book of the Dead, with gold foil filigree on the cover and beautiful embossed gold letters. It’s wrapped in thick clear plastic.

The idea comes to Matt — maybe because he’s stoned — that this favor might, in some cosmic way, bring him closer to Jasmine. Bring him onto her plane. He, doing something that she herself has done. He might even ask the sick woman about her. Maybe Jazz had disclosed something important to her...

“I’ll do it.”

Grail takes the book with an impish smile, slides the index card under the rubber band and gives the heavy volume back to Matt. Gives Matt a grinding little laugh that sounds conspiratorial.

“I really dig this, Matt. Thanks and bitchen. I’ll give you some store credit as payment. You’re helping out Jazz, too. Sending some good Karma her way.”

“Okay, cool.”

“Anytime tomorrow is good. You’ll see a blue plastic milk crate on the porch. That’s it. Just knock three times on the screen door and she’ll know the book is there.”

Matt walks north on PCH in the foggy night. Stops at Fade in the Shade to look at Jasmine’s MISSING poster in the window. He thinks she looks afraid, but he knows it’s just himself. He tries to clear his fear but the hash smoke packs a wallop. He still can’t believe that he can see pictures of her all over town but he can’t see her actual, breathing, present self.

Third Street is just a few blocks from Mystic Arts World. So he takes the shortcut, Park to Mermaid.

Where, as he approaches the base of the Third Street hill, he sees the girl running up Third toward him.

She reminds him of Jasmine, but a lot of girls remind him of her.

It can’t be.

It’s the damned hash.

But really, it could be.

Then he knows it’s her, zig-zagging weakly up the middle of the street, breathing hard, barefoot, in a billowing orange dress. Her blond hair is flying.

“Jazz!”

She looks in his direction, stumbling and searching for him as if she’s blind or confused or not sure where to look.

Suddenly: headlights in pursuit behind her, catching up fast. The high-rev whine of a small engine. Matt squints into the brights, sprinting for Jazz. But the vehicle overtakes and passes her, then skids to a stop.

Jasmine is almost to their house when two men barge from the car and into the headlamp beams. Within a bright cloud of the tire smoke and fog, one of them lifts Jazz off her feet, as if she’s no heavier than a scarecrow, and locks his free hand over her mouth. The vehicle idles in the exhaust and fog and the two men carry struggling Jazz back into the darkness.

Matt hears a door slide open and slam shut, then the high-pitched scream of acceleration.

He dodges hard to his left as the car comes at him, the headlights nearly blinding him. He leaps onto the sidewalk in front of the phone company building. Suddenly, the vehicle carves a U-turn across Third and goes whining away from him, toward Laguna Canyon Road.

Matt sees that it’s not a car at all but a late-model Volkswagen van.

He pushes off from the building and runs after it with all his adrenalin-crazed might. Long strides, fists up. But the van doesn’t putter like his mom’s. Matt can see as it passes the cop house streetlamp that it’s a newer model, with probably twice the horsepower as the Westfalia. You can’t kidnap Jazz Anthony in front of the cop station, he thinks: you cannot do this.

The van goes left on Ocean, toward Pacific Coast Highway. So Matt cuts left at Forest, which runs parallel with Ocean and will hit PCH at a signal a hundred yards up, where it will have to stop if the light is red.

Forest is a crowded retail street — boutiques and galleries and restaurants and Bushard’s where he got Laurel’s Heaven Sent, and the stationers and the donut place and the jewelry stores and his art supply store. Matt flies past them all, dodging the occasional tourists and locals out with their dogs, his lungs swelling and emptying, his legs working, the damned Tibetan Book of the Dead still in one hand, its protective plastic slick with sweat.

Out ahead he sees the signal at PCH — red! He forces his young body into another gear, his highest, his fifth, to get to the light before it changes and he can catch the van and... and... do what?

Matt angles across Forest to save a few steps, gets honked at, and he’s still a hundred feet from PCH. The traffic light goes to green and the late-model hippie van — which Matt sees is a two-tone white over green — passes through.

He runs south on PCH at the light, watching the van trundle past Park with its precious cargo, taking away his last real chance to catch up. It accelerates away.

Matt stops at Park. The van is out of sight and he’s so winded he has to drop the Tibetan Book of the Dead to the sidewalk, put both hands on his stinging knees and breath as fast as he can. Two-tone white over green, he thinks, panting: two-tone white over green. The same vintage and color VW van that Joint-and-Martini Man saw down at Thalia the morning Bonnie Stratmeyer was found. Still panting, he realizes he was too addled by adrenalin and caught by the headlights to get a good look at the license plate.

You blew it, he thinks. You had her, you had her, you had her.

Matt looks up Coast Highway at the cars and the traffic coming at him. Picks up the book and runs for the cop house.