“So you could do what the monk had done for your fiancé?” Charlie asked.
“Yes. I performed p’howa for many of the mountain villagers. It was a sort of a specialty with me—along with making the robes for everyone in the monastery. Lama Karmapa told me that he felt I was a very old soul, the reincarnation of a superenlightened being from many generations before. I thought perhaps he was just trying to test me, to get me to succumb to ego, but when his own death was near and he called me to perform the p’howa for him, I realized that this was the test, and he was trusting the transference of his own soul to me.”
“Just so we’re clear,” said Minty Fresh. “I would not trust you with my car keys.”
The iguana musketeer poked Minty in the calf with his little sword and the big man yelped.
“See,” Charlie said. “When you’re rude it comes back on you—like karma.”
Audrey smiled at Charlie, put her tea on the floor, and folded her legs into the lotus position, settling in. “When the Lama passed, I saw his consciousness leave his body. Then I felt my own consciousness leave my body, and I followed the Lama into the mountains, where he showed me a small cave, buried deep beneath the snow. And in that cave was a stone box, sealed with wax and sinew. He told me that I must find the box, and then he was gone, ascended, and I found myself back in my body.”
“Were you superenlightened then?” Charlie asked.
“I don’t even know what that is,” Audrey said. “The Lama was wrong about that, but something had changed me while performing the p’howa for him. When I came out of the room with his body, I could see a red spot glowing in people, right at their heart chakra. It was the same thing I had followed into the mountains, the undying consciousness—I could see people’s souls. But what was more disturbing to me, I could see that the glow was absent in some people, or I couldn’t see it in them, or in myself. I didn’t know why, but I did know that I had to find that stone box. By following the exact path into the mountains that the Lama had shown me, I did. Inside was a scroll that most Buddhists thought—still think—was a myth: the lost chapter of the Tibetan Book of the Dead…It outlined two long-lost arts, the p’howa of forceful projection, and one I hadn’t even heard of, the p’howa of undying. The first allows you to force a soul from one being to another, and the second allows the practitioner to prolong the transition, the bardo, between life and death indefinitely.”
“Does that mean you could make people live forever?” Charlie asked.
“Sort of—more like they just stop dying. I meditated on the amazing gift I’d been given for months, afraid to try to perform the rituals. But one day when I was attending the bardo of an old man who was dying of a painful stomach cancer, I could watch the suffering no longer, and I tried the p’howa of forceful projection. I guided his soul into the body of his newborn grandson, who I could see had no glow at his heart chakra. I could actually see the glow move across the room and the soul enter the baby. The man died in peace only seconds later.
“A few weeks later I was called to attend the bardo of a young boy who had taken ill and was showing all the signs of imminent death. I couldn’t bear to let it happen, knowing that there might be something I might be able to do, so I performed the p’howa of undying on him, and he didn’t die. In fact, he got better. I succumbed to the ego of it, then, and I started to perform the ritual on other villagers, instead of helping them on to their next life. I did five in as many months, but there was a problem. The parents of the little boy summoned me. He wasn’t growing—not even his hair and nails. He was stuck at age nine. But by then the villagers were all coming to me with the dying, and word spread throughout the mountains to other villages. They lined up outside of our monastery, demanding I come see them. But I had refused to perform the ritual, realizing that I was not helping these people, but in fact freezing them in their spiritual progression, plus, you know, kind of freaking them out.”
“Understandably,” Charlie said.
“I couldn’t explain to my fellow monks what was happening. So I ran away in the night. I presented myself to be of service to a Buddhist center in Berkeley, and I was accepted as a monk. It was during that time that I saw, for the first time, a human soul contained in an inanimate object, when I went into a music store in the Castro. It was your music store, Mr. Fresh.”
“I knew that was you,” said Minty. “I told Asher about you.”
“He did,” Charlie said. “He said you were very attractive.”
“I did not,” Minty said.
“He did. ‘Nice eyes,’ he said,” Charlie said. “Go on.”
“There was no mistaking it, though—the glow in the CD—it was exactly the same presence that I could sense in people who had a soul. Needless to say, I was freaked out.”
“Needless to say,” Charlie said. “I had a similar experience.”
Audrey nodded. “I was going to discuss all of this with my master at the center, you know, come clean about what I had learned in Tibet—turn the scrolls over to someone who perhaps understood what was going on with the souls inside of objects, but after only a few months, word came from Tibet that I had left under suspicious circumstances. I don’t know what details they gave, but I was asked to leave the center.”
“So you formed a posse of spooky animal things and moved to the Mission,” said Minty Fresh. “That’s nice. You can let me loose from this chair now and I’ll be on my way.”
“Fresh, will you please let Audrey finish telling her story. I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocent reason that she hangs out with a posse of spooky animal things.”
Audrey pressed on. “I was able to get a job as costumer for a local theater group, and being around theater people, basically a bunch of born show-offs, can put you back into the swing of a life. I tried to forget about my practice in Tibet, and I focused on my work, trying to let my creativity drive me. I couldn’t afford to make full-sized costumes, so I began to create smaller versions. I bought a collection of stuffed squirrels from a secondhand store in the Mission, and used those as my first models. Later I made my models out of other taxi-dermied animal parts—mixing and matching them, but I’d already started calling them my squirrel people. A lot of them have bird feet, chicken and duck, because I could purchase them in Chinatown, along with things like turtle heads and—well, you can buy a lot of dead-animal parts in Chinatown.”
“Tell me about it,” Charlie said. “I live a block from the shark parts store. Never actually tried to build a shark from spare parts, though. Bet that would be fun.”
“Y’all are twisted,” Minty said. “Both of you—you know that, right? Messin’ with dead things and all.”
Charlie and Audrey each raised an eyebrow at him. A creature in a blue kimono with the face of a dog skull gave Minty the critical eye socket and would have raised an eyebrow at him if she’d had one.
“All right, go on,” Minty said, waving Audrey on with his free hand. “You made your point.”
Audrey sighed. “So I started to hit all of the secondhand stores in the City, looking for everything from buttons to hands. And at at least eight stores, I found the soul objects—all grouped together at each store. I realized that I wasn’t the only one who could see them glowing red. Someone was imprisoning these souls in the objects. That’s how I came to know about you gentlemen, whatever you are. I had to get these souls out of your hands. So I bought them. I wanted them to move on to their next rebirth, but I didn’t know how. I thought about using the p’howa of forceful projection, forcing a soul into someone who I could see was soulless, but that process takes time. What would I do, tie them up? And I didn’t even know if it would work. After all, that method was used to force a soul from one person to another, not from an inanimate object.”