The Karma Booth

Tim was vaguely perplexed over why the man still wore his set of woolen mittens indoors, his sleeves pulled tight to the wrists, as if he felt a chill specifically reserved for him. The gloved hands rested casually on the scratched, worn table.

“Mr. Cale.”

Curls of incense smoke floated between them from pink joss sticks planted in a wide pan to catch the ashes. The air was thick with the aroma of sandalwood.

“Listen,” Tim started. “I won’t pretend to understand the history of your conflict with these people, but if you’ll outline your grievances, maybe we can find some common ground. My goal here is to avoid any more bloodshed. Now if you’ll tell me who you—”

“That’s not important,” said a woman near the doorway.

“Especially when you don’t know who these people are,” said a boy on the other side, close to a corner. He couldn’t have been older than thirteen, his golden face round and smooth, almost androgynous.

All three fluent in English. With no accent.

“We will tell you who these people are,” said the tortoise-head ancient at the table. “We will tell why they have to die and why some have already died.”

“I came all this way to prevent death,” explained Tim.

“That is not your function here,” said the woman near the door.

Before Tim could ask the obvious follow-up, the man at the table was speaking, his voice vaguely hypnotic with its evenness, and Tim found himself struggling to see him through the veil of incense smoke.

“This village exterminates its girl children. In ages past, it left them to die of exposure in the surrounding hills or took them down to a river to drown them. They spared a few for dowry marriage and breeding and servants. But no love thrived here for daughters, Mr. Cale. When doctors could offer amniocentesis, the villagers used that to prevent girl children. Last year, they sold a group of girls—some as young as four—to a pedophile ring that offers its wares between Sonepur and Kathmandu. Their evils singe and putrefy the air. And there is not one blameless adult, not one that is not stained by this barbarism.”

“So your solution to the stain is ethnic cleansing?” demanded Tim quietly. He was incredulous. “Damn it, it’s clear you’re educated people! And you must know these things happen in the rest of India, in other parts of the world. Why are you talking about wiping out an entire village? And who are you people?” He calmed down, realizing it must be only a threat. He was here, and if he was here, that meant nothing was decided. “What do you want? What are your terms?”

“There are no terms,” said the woman at the door.

“We’ve explained our reasons,” said the boy in the corner.

“At certain times, there can arise a collective evil,” said the man at the table. “The rot grows and eats, feeding like mold off the soul of a land. It is not a question, Mr. Cale, of what needs to be done. The course of action will take place.”

He didn’t understand. They were talking. He could hear them talking, yes, but competing for his attention was the sound of the pattering rain beyond the door of the room, and the incense was making him feel lightheaded. He heard distant screams coming from a street away. The woman didn’t turn to look. The boy didn’t react at all. One of the soldiers of his army escort stormed into the room, but the people in robes stopped him with a glance. The soldier looked to Tim, making a silent appeal.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Tim pleaded. “This isn’t necessary. You can’t slaughter a whole village! There must be someone! At least one innocent here! And even if they’re all complicit, these people must have children who have done nothing—”

He sifted his mind desperately for arguments; tried to summon a bulwark of compassionate rationality to prevent this. Come on, he ordered himself, come on. A handful of men with rifles could prevent nothing here if they started their promised massacre—it was up to him. But the situation was unraveling. He couldn’t accept that it was deteriorating so quickly, his role reduced to that of an audience member for this grotesque play.

“The children have been removed,” said the old man at the table. “They will be cared for at other villages.”

“Wait—wait! Why am I here then? Why was there any need for me to come? I don’t understand. If you didn’t want mediation—”

“You are here because you are still untainted,” said the woman.

“We had to go miles to find one who was,” said the boy.

“Untainted?” snapped Tim. “Do you actually think I could agree with your type of morality? That I’m going to watch you carry out mass murder?”

The eyes of the old man blinked, disappearing briefly into the fleshy pouches of aged skin. The thin mouth pursed its lips, and he said patiently, “That is not what we mean by untainted.”

“The word ‘receptive,’” said the boy, “might be more applicable. We assumed you would be receptive to us.”

Tim knew he wasn’t getting anywhere, and it crossed his mind that perhaps he had blundered into a trap. Maybe they always intended to assassinate an American official as their main goal. His panic rose like acid-burning vomit in his throat, and a gloved hand reached across the table and took his wrist. It took his arm gently, with no threat in the motion at all. But it happened so fast.

“You’ll leave here safe and sound in a few minutes,” said the old man.

“Do you remember your Greek mythology, Mr. Cale?” asked the woman near the doorway. She tugged on the winding folds of her wrap.

“Argus Panoptes,” said the old man. He let go of Tim’s wrist and began pulling off the mitten of his right hand.

“He’s a giant,” said the boy with a triumphant smile of white teeth, sounding for the first time like a child. He tugged off his knit woolen cap with the strings, and a few strands of his black mop were pulled up for an instant. Just like any boy.

“Servant of the goddess Hera,” said the woman. The English and Greek words sounded strange from that wise Asian face. Then her scarf was removed, her neck bare—

“Panoptes, meaning in Greek, ‘all seeing.’”

The old man’s glove was off, and he cast aside his woolen jacket as the classical reference finally clicked in Tim’s mind—

He pushed back his chair and jumped up. The wooden legs scraped the floor, and the chair timbered back with a crash.

Yes, Hera’s giant, his body covered with eyes.

And in front of him the old man stayed calmly in his seat, the dark forest green and mauve garment folds running like a toga over one shoulder, but the shoulder itself, his chest, his arms covered in eyes. There were eyes on the body of the woman. Eyes were blinking from the flat, adolescent chest of the boy. The effect was like seeing skin marked with a pattern of yellowish whiteheads, of boils, but each pupil had a lid and an eyelash, some of them blinking out of sequence with others.

The Indian soldier near the entrance backed away from the woman, one foot out the door.

“What are you people?” Tim whispered.

“We told you, it doesn’t matter,” said the boy. “Not now, in this moment. It’s sufficient that you are… receptive.”

“There is a cost for the rebalancing,” said the old man. “And so we have adopted an eye for each of these villagers who have lived in destructive blindness. Understand: we are not without a comprehension of degrees of guilt. Those who did less are the ones you found as you arrived. For the others…”

His gnarled hand reached into the drapery of his robes and slowly withdrew a dagger.

Oh, God. He grasped immediately what the man was about to do, and because it was impossible, he could not understand how to prevent it.

He was left to watch as the blade dug like a scalpel into the soft white of a blinking egg imbedded in his flesh, and Tim heard himself scream no no no as the old man hissed and gritted his teeth in genuine pain. Warm blood poured down the arm, hideously blinding more of the blinking eyes and dripping down to the sawdust floor, and Tim heard the corresponding wails from beyond the shelter.

“Stop it! Please stop it! You can’t believe this is right!”

“This is for those who did these unspeakable acts,” said the old man. “And for those who allowed them to happen, seeing is believing.”

The soldier made a guttural sound—not quite a yell but a kind of bark of his revulsion and fear. He ran out, and Tim heard his boots stomp in the moist earth. As the woman and boy brandished their own knives, Timothy Cale rushed past them into the rain. He knew where the soldier was going—the soldier was joining the others who had been guarding the SUV. People ran now into the main thoroughfare of the village as distant screams rose over each other. Shouts grew louder in the native dialect, and there was a string of gurgling cries. The soldiers could do nothing.

Tim couldn’t bring himself to step closer to the silhouettes of villagers, some staggering into the road, others falling to their knees.

All of them were clutching their heads, their fingers on their foreheads or at their temples…

Dazed in his shock, he looked back at the rectangle of spilled light from the doorway, and he saw a curving, trickling stream of blood pouring out. It mingled with the puddles of rain.

He couldn’t stop the impulse to be sick.

His eyes felt the salt-burn of tears, his forehead still soaked with rivulets of rain, while his throat was scorched with bile. He pulled himself up and forced his senses to register again, but this time the people of the village were missing. No, not all of them, they couldn’t be. Could they? The first ones, yes, he could tell that the first ones who had shouted and run into the street were… gone. A mysterious banishment that was the crowning touch of the strangers. But the others? A whole village gone. He heard the ugly metal chunk as one foolish soldier prepared his rifle to fire, but there was no staccato burst. Something stayed his hand, forcing a reappraisal.

You’ve got to do something, thought Tim. You can’t stay just a witness to this.

He started to run through the unpaved narrow streets, his shoes splashing through the puddles of mud and rainwater, looking for… he didn’t know what. Survivors, those who hadn’t been claimed yet. He had pleaded with them: There must be someone! At least one innocent here! He couldn’t find anyone. Bodies, yes. Bodies and more bodies like those they first spotted on arrival, each one with staring blue eyes, but others were missing. Others were taken. He felt a growing hopelessness—then panic, because the soldiers might start up the SUV and leave him behind. Through the sshhhh of the relentless rain, he spotted an old woman, curled up, hugging her knees near packed metal chairs behind a market stall table.

Oh, Christ, he didn’t speak the language. Maybe… Maybe if he just held out his hand, and if his tone was gentle enough, he could persuade her. “You have to come with me! It’s not safe for you here!”

She said something that sounded like a fatalistic complaint. Telling him he was mad, that it was pointless. Her voice was high and sharp and raw, the whine of a gnarled tree branch being snapped off. She was horrified at what was happening around her, but she couldn’t see escape.

“Please,” he called over the rain, still holding out his hand. “Please!”

After a moment, she picked herself up with an effort, her limbs trembling either from fear or the palsy of her age, stepping out from her hiding place. She could walk surprisingly quickly, but he wished she could run. They had to get away from this place. The strangers in the robes had either overlooked her or were busy reaping other souls. He found himself pulling her along by the arm, cursing himself for his fear.

He heard the small boy from a side alley, calling out for someone. Mother, father, it hardly mattered. Scared brown eyes under a mop of black hair, his tiny limbs at his sides, but his neck turning this way and that, looking, hoping… He was small, and given the diet and environment here, it was difficult to tell the his age. He could have been anywhere between four to seven years old. Tim scooped him up, and the boy cried out, but the old woman said something to shush him and comfort him.

As they approached the SUV, the interpreter looked close to a nervous breakdown. He barely heard Tim calling for them to leave, shouting that there was nothing they could do but go. The man was gibbering and nodding, but he didn’t move to call to the soldiers in Hindi. Tim yelled in English to one of the soldiers up ahead in the road, brandishing his rifle but with nothing to fire on, telling him the obvious: We have to go.

He heard the soldier call out four names, but only three men returned. They piled into the SUV and drove away, and no one looked back.

There was silence in the vehicle for a long time, and then at last, Tim tapped one of the soldiers on the shoulder. No point asking the interpreter—the man was traumatized to a sobbing wreck.

“Ask her their names.” He meant the old lady and the boy.

Most of the soldiers looked haunted by what had happened back there. The soldier he addressed looked vaguely angry, and he took it out on their guests, snapping Tim’s question at the old woman. She answered him back in a low but firm voice, and Tim didn’t think he needed a translation. She had told him in so many words to go to hell. His kind wasn’t trusted in their province, and they would be avoided even more after tonight. The soldier gave her a contemptuous look and shrugged at Tim. The old woman looked out the window, and the little boy moved closer to her, trying to nestle to her bosom. She patted his arm absently.

About twenty miles passed, and then the woman spoke up in rapid staccato bursts of her dialect, pointing out the window. Tim couldn’t imagine how she could identify anything through the storm, but she clearly wanted them to stop.

The angry soldier barked back at her, refusing, and Tim leaned forward. “What? What is it?”

“There’s another village here,” explained the soldier. “She wants to go there, says she and the boy will be safe. I have told her to shut up and do as she’s told.”

“Let her out,” ordered Tim.

“You do not understand these people, sir. They should not be indulged with their—”

“Let them out. You’re here as my escort, and we have no right to detain this woman. I coaxed her into the car so that she would be safe. She probably knows every village and resident from here to Patna! If anyone can find a relative for this kid to take care of him, it’s probably her. I mean, what do you guys want to do? Take the kid back and stick him in an orphanage? Now stop the goddamn car!”

The soldier driving pulled up on the side of the muddy road leading to a set of pinprick lights in the distance. Tim opened the car door for the old woman, and she mumbled something to the boy. He slid his small bottom along the upholstery of the seat and jumped out, taking her hand.

“You’ll be okay here?” he asked needlessly. He knew she couldn’t understand a word, but he asked anyway.

She muttered something back and then made a scattering, waving motion with her hand. Go away now. Leave. The soldier reached for the door handle and shut it with a slam. Then the SUV roared away, and Tim could barely see the old woman and boy navigating the muddy path to the new village. There was silence in the vehicle all the way back to Patna.

Coming into the outskirts of the city, Tim pressed the button on his window, listening to the whrrr of the electronics for the door and held his palm out to feel the beaded curtain of rain. These drops, he knew, were real. They were the most tangible things in his world now that the old woman and boy were gone, and so he focused on them. Feel the rain, his mind insisted, trying to shut out the memory of the horror they had witnessed. Listen to the rain, feel the drops, feel them…

This much, he knew, was still real.

It wasn’t over after he returned to Delhi. The Indian government managed to keep it out of the media, but its leaders, as well as the US ambassador and the State Department, were fiercely interested to know how the entire population of a border village could disappear. After all, the houses, the market stalls and the modest headquarters of the single local official were all intact, which proved no rebel group had gone on a mad spree.

Even the bodies with their blue eyes were now missing.

While pools of blood had been detected from satellite photos near the sad building where Tim met the robed strangers, it wasn’t a large enough quantity to suggest this was where systematic butchery was carried out. No, all the people had been taken elsewhere. Everyone wanted to know where.

The soldiers who had been Mr. Cale’s escort told a preposterous story, and the interpreter tried to hang himself but botched the job. He was left with the mind of a retarded child after his brain was deprived of oxygen.

What could Timothy Cale tell them? He couldn’t say the escort fought back. Their rifles hadn’t been fired, and the proof of that was that each gun magazine still had all their rounds. He didn’t have a scrap of evidence to back up a plausible lie. For a week, the ambassador let him have compassionate leave, inclined to believe Tim had suffered post-traumatic stress disorder from having seen something terrible. “But when you come back, we need answers,” he was told.

Sitting behind his desk again, feeling as if he had been away for years, Tim felt the draft of the rumbling air conditioner and sipped the strong coffee the Indian staff always liked to brew. He looked at his incident reports and knew he had no answers. He didn’t know what to tell his boss at his two o’clock appointment.

And then there was “a development,” as it was discreetly put.

During his leave, a warrant officer and lance corporal of the Army of Nepal had discovered the old woman and the little boy living not far from where the SUV had left them on the muddy road. They claimed to be from the empty village. The boy turned out to be close to seven years old, and the old woman had been born into a lower caste. She had suffered much from her neighbors. The two were driven to Patna where police and government bureaucrats questioned them. Yes, they had seen the visitors in robes. No, they didn’t know who these bizarre strangers were. They had felt searing agony and then nothing.

Obviously, they had been returned… Minutes before Tim Cale had discovered them and had them whisked away in the vehicle.

So, thought Tim. Those deadly beings had found two innocents after all.

You thought you rescued them, but maybe you were part of the plan.

The Indians decided the matter was closed. The Americans did not. They sent Tim home under a neat disciplinary rule of the service that involved a gag order, and they kept him on a desk in Washington until it dawned on him that he would never get a foreign posting again.

He had done minor studies in medical ethics, as well as business ethics, and he had a large enough network of Washington and New York contacts that he could launch his own consultancy business. As far as the Beltway was privately concerned (but never to his face), the boy and the old woman who survived the village massacre were a peculiar vindication for Timothy Cale. He began to land assignments that involved the seemingly unexplainable, the fringe science that occasionally spelled disaster when it found gullible congressmen as advocates or when his former colleagues in the diplomatic corps fell prey to “magicians” in Bangkok or Manila.

He racked up a lot of billable hours and air miles casually exposing frauds when he wasn’t tapping out reports on stem cell research. He prospered. He didn’t think too often about the village near the Indian border. He tried not to think about why the strangers in robes had selected him to be their witness. Receptive, they had called him. Whatever that was supposed to mean, it made his flesh crawl.

And now the booths.

The government had brought him into this mess because of what had happened in Bihar. But the border incident years ago fell under the category of the supernatural. These amazing transposition booths were science. “Doesn’t matter,” he was told on the phone. “You are the only sane American we’ve got who’s had experience with, well, for lack of a better word, resurrection.”

Word of the booths didn’t follow anyone’s schedule, least of all the one Weintraub had. Yes, he had an announcement ready in case of a leak, but he argued the biggest issue to resolve before breaking the news was organizing what little concrete data they had.

“Wrong,” countered Tim, who argued there was a more urgent priority. “They’ll come at you like jackals. But they’ll descend even more on the girl.”

On Mary Ash. Reporters would expect her to have answers, and Tim guaranteed they would form a mob outside the Ash family residence until they got their clips and their quotes and their background stories on poor Mary’s high-school romances, her college ambitions and her day-to-day habits, what music she listened to and who she voted for and any other scrap of useless info to fuel further speculation. Nickelbaum’s victim, Tim argued, needed privacy to recover. She was entitled to it.

But the compassionate grace of fate was too much to hope for. By Thursday of the following week, the BBC broke the story first on their investigative show, Panorama, admitting they had been tipped off to a possible new execution method that bypassed federal and state requirements. CNN was next, and then Fox News weighed in, suggesting a cover-up. Great, Rupert Murdoch’s crew is taking its usual hysterical approach, Tim grumbled to himself.

Matilda, his personal assistant, came into his office without knocking as usual and switched on the news. “You’ll want to see this,” she told him. More often than not she anticipated Tim’s needs correctly, but she had the knack of making it sound like a command, which always amused him.

She was plump and graying, the least likely woman of fifty-eight you would expect to know how to score pot to help her friends handle chemotherapy. Tim hired her on the spot at the end of her job interview—right after she noticed Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the Civil War on his bookshelf and told him how, for a high-school essay, she had tracked down an extremely elderly aunt, blind and half deaf, who recalled Sherman’s March to the Sea. Matilda was brusque and opinionated, but she made sure Tim was on time for his appointments. She cleared his desk and kept him organized. She was his secret weapon and professional treasure.

Tim sat back in his leather office chair and deferred to her wisdom in switching the mute button off and changing the channel. Gary Weintraub was on, a weed patch of microphones surrounding him, giving a clue as to how enormous the media scrum was. But Gary was in his element. Tim once teased him about seeking the spotlight, and Gary Weintraub had given him a cockeyed grin and arched his eyebrows.

“Of course, I do, and you should be glad I do,” he insisted, jutting his sausage fingers in a tight fist, thumb on top, as if he needed to push an elevator button right away. “You know why the majority of teenagers come out of the secondary education system, and they can’t solve a basic algebra equation or know five elements on the periodic table? Because there are so few superstars in science. These children come out with dreams of being in the NBA and the NFL. Nobody wants to be in science. It’s all government subsidized or academically funded or pharmaceutical-based. Group endeavor. Now I ask you, Tim, who would want to be a part of that?”

But these days, Weintraub could have it both ways. Even those who never watched PBS or read Scientific American knew who Gary Weintraub was—their lovably eccentric moon-faced TV “uncle” who hosted shows about space and dolphins. They probably assumed the breaking news was about a discovery of his own. Those who knew better likely felt he was the best of all possible front men.