She went upstairs to her bedroom. On a shelf in her walk-in closet rested a small black-lacquered box with silver hinges. She had never seen it before, yet she had known it would be there.
This did not strike her as peculiar. There were actions to be taken. What they were would become clear to her as she took them.
She carried the box to her vanity and opened it.
The first item that she extracted was a necklace of miniature human skulls carved from bone. Gleaming black onyx filled the eye sockets. The craftsmanship was exquisite, the skulls more beautiful than frightening. The box also contained four lovely gold bracelets fashioned as cobras.
Durga, the Goddess Mother of the Hindu pantheon, was maternal and kind and the source of much life, but she also had dark aspects. The most fierce of those was her incarnation as Kali, often depicted as wanton, naked but for the darkness in which she wrapped herself, wearing only gold bracelets and a necklace of human skulls.
In this religion, no separation existed between the sacred and profane. All things on the earth were aspects of the divinity. Kali, an aspect of Durga, had several aspects herself, one being Chandi, the Terrible One. The Chandi aspect of Kali was often depicted with her four arms raised—instead of Kali’s usual eight—hands gripping a sword, a noose, a skull-capped staff, and a severed human head. Of all the divinities, only Kali had conquered time, and she was, among other things, a slayer of demons.
Tanuja Shukla did not share her deceased parents’ Hindu faith; but she hadn’t forgotten it, either. She sometimes employed Hindu mythology in her stories, as metaphor, for color, to evoke a sense of mystery, but never to endorse it. If she could have believed in a goddess, it would have been in the most benign Durga, not any of her less compassionate aspects, not Kali.
But the necklace was quite beautiful. She draped it across her breast and reached behind her neck to click the clasp.
6
Hendrickson—hobbled ankle to ankle, zip-tied to his chair, hands palms-up on the table—at first sat silently as Jane paced the kitchen. She massaged her trapezius muscles and rolled her head side to side to work a stubborn soreness out of her neck.
The light at the windows would last an hour and a half; but the overcast would steal the golden radiance and scarlet dusk that could make a California day’s end so enchanting. Following the events of the morning and afternoon, and considering those to come, nature’s loveliest pyrotechnics couldn’t have bewitched Jane, anyway. Her mood matched the gray skies.
At the table, Hendrickson muttered. When she asked what he’d said, he only smiled at his upturned palms. His expression had no dangerous edge; it was wistful, pensive. She suspected that he hadn’t heard her, so lost was he in thought.
She continued pacing and, not for the first time, regarded her reflection in the brushed stainless-steel door of the refrigerator. Her form was warped and blurred, her face a mask of shadows from which all features had been shorn, as though she had died and become a revenant.
At the table, Hendrickson said, “Now is it true, or is it not, that what is which and which is what?”
She went to the table and stared down at him.
His gentle smile was a storybook thing, the smile of a cat who learned to be friends with a mouse, the smile of a mouse who won his prize of cheese, the smile of a boy who survived a fearful adventure and sat now hearthside and home again. Jane was creeped out by it.
Tethered to the chair as he was, he could make no move against her. Even if he had not been shackled, she could have handled him, taken him down.
Nevertheless, she wished that Gilberto would return soon with dinner.
7
At 5:15 P.M. precisely, Sanjay typed THE END in small caps, although he had not reached the end of the novel that he had been writing for the past three months. Neither had he arrived at the conclusion of a chapter or even the bottom of the current page. He wondered at the words, almost deleted them, but then left them dark upon the white screen and saved the document.
The time had come. There were actions to be taken. What those actions were didn’t matter. He didn’t need to think about them. They would occur naturally to him. Like his sister, Sanjay was an intuitive artist whose finest fiction was not first designed and then constructed according to blueprints. Writing was always work, always, but when he surrendered himself to the currents of creative energy that flowed from the mysterious headwaters of intuition, the source unknown and unknowable, he was at his best. Therefore, the time had come. The time not just to write intuitively, but to live intuitively. The time to do whatever occurred to him, without first considering where his actions would lead.
He left the room without switching off the lights.
In his bedroom, he changed into black jeans and a black shirt. Black socks and black rubber-soled shoes. He took a black sport coat from his closet but did not put it on.
Leaving the lights on behind him, he went down the hall and into Tanuja’s bedroom.
She was standing beside her vanity bench, waiting for him, as he had known she would be. She was quite beautiful, dressed all in black, wearing a necklace of skulls and gold bracelets fashioned as cobras. She wore black eye shadow and black lipstick and black polish on her fingernails.
They did not speak. There was no reason to speak. The time had come. There were actions to be taken.
Sanjay sat on the vanity bench. Tanuja knelt on the floor before him and began to paint his fingernails black.
Never before had his fingernails been painted. This seemed an odd thing for her to be doing and a peculiar thing for him to allow. His uncertainty—for it was not a strong enough feeling to be called doubt—lasted only until she had painted the thumbnail on his right hand and the nail of the adjacent forefinger, whereupon nothing had ever seemed more natural than this.
After his nails were black and gleaming, as he waited for them to dry, his sister applied black eye shadow to his upper and lower eyelids. She painted his lips black, and this, too, was as it should be, so that he said nothing, nor did she.
8
Numerous one-pint white boxes of Chinese takeout stood on the kitchen table. Foo yung loong har, which was lobster omelet with chopped onion. Subgum chow goong yue chu—fried scallops with mixed vegetables. Fried prawns. Shrimp balls. Chicken with almonds. Sweet and sour pork.
There were noodles and rice. Jane ate a little of the latter, none of the former, but indulged in every variety of protein.
At first Gilberto seemed to have over-ordered, but his appetite was as hearty as Jane’s. Halfway through the meal, she wondered if they might come to blows when they got to the last white box.
Hendrickson disliked everything he tasted, except the noodles, and he wasn’t enthusiastic about those. He dropped the chopsticks, with which he was having considerable trouble, and said, “All I want are some cookies.”
“There are no cookies,” Jane said.
“Why aren’t there cookies?”
“Eat what you have.”
“It’s all weird stuff.”
“You’ve never eaten Chinese food?”
“I’ve eaten it, but I don’t like it.”
Chewing chicken and almonds in a delicious soy-and-sherry sauce, Jane studied him, wondered about him, wondered what else he was becoming on his way to being an adjusted person.
He shied from the intensity of her stare and lowered his eyes to the chopsticks that he had discarded.
Gilberto said, “We have some cookies. Lemon drop cookies, also chocolate chip. Carmella made them.”
“That’s what I want,” said Hendrickson.