Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [56]
“That’s Krishna?” he whispered.
Johnny shook his head. “His Divine Grace Srila Prabhupada. Before we worship Krishna, we worship his devotees.”
A drum circle was forming around the organ player, boys and men joining him one by one. They wore robes or jeans, sherbet orange sweatshirt over sherbet orange skirt. Some wore beads like Johnny’s around their necks; some wore a smudge of white paint on their foreheads; some had bald heads with a tuft of hair at the back. The drums were grenade-shaped, two-headed; someone was playing hand cymbals; then someone else was, too. Jude had a rubbery memory of the gymnastics class he’d taken with Prudence as a kid, the two of them tumbling across the slippery floor in their socks.
Then the music stopped. Slowly, the gold curtains drew back. Bodies scattered, found an empty space, bowed to the floor. On the stage, nestled in an elaborate, canopied throne, adorned with a jeweled crown and a brightly colored lei, was Krishna. Krishna was smiling a beatific smile. Krishna’s face was milky blue. He was rosy-cheeked, bare-chested, no bigger than a fifteen-year-old boy. Krishna looked like a mannequin in the window of Macy’s, a queenless king riding a float in the homecoming parade.
The organ started up again, then the drums. People sprang up from prayer, started dancing. They sang, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare. They sang to the stage, swaying, as though watching Krishna perform. Jude would not have been surprised if they had raised their lighters. Bodies pressed in. Painted women danced by, raising carnations to his nose; he breathed them in. He closed his eyes for some time, floating, and when he opened them, Johnny was gone. Jude turned, blinded by the golden stage—there were lighters, darting around the room like fireflies—and stumbled into a log. It was a soft log, damp and mossy. The log was Johnny! Johnny was still lying facedown on the floor, his arms spread out in front of him like Superman.
Heavily, Jude fell to his knees and cat-stretched out beside him. The floor was cold and smooth and smelled of a piney wax. Here were the parts of his body that touched the ground: his forehead, his armpits, his chest, his belly, his hips, his knees, his toes. His hands, each scored with an X. He had never lain like this before. A socked heel stepped apologetically on his pinky; a gauzy skirt tickled the nape of his neck. His eyelashes fluttered against the floor. He felt long, emptied, flattened.
A tide ripped through him, first a ripple, then a roar.
The subway.
The train sped under him, rattling his ribs. Head still down, Jude slipped the bag of mushrooms from the pocket of his jacket and gobbled the rest of them up. Maybe because he feared his trip would wear thin, because he wanted, why not, for the night to go out with a bang. Maybe because he knew already it was the last night he’d be high. He felt himself peel away from the past, saw the hollow corpse of his former self, lying like a log, as he stood.
The room was on fire. Krishna was aglow on the stage, smiling at Jude through the flames. Arms windmilled, shoes flew. Bodies passed, hand over hand, above the crowd. They levitated above him. The wax dummy smiled his Mona Lisa smile at Jude. Half-boy, half-god. Half-Indian, half-white. Jude danced for the god boy, and the god boy let him dance.
The flames came up to greet him. Jude passed one of his X ’d hands through them, felt the white heat melt his fingertips, then his wrist, then catch his sleeve. Then he fell to the ground.
Les Keffy had just