ELENA
I have grown accustomed to the fear of death.
The fear is omnipresent like my shadow, something I have grown out of fearing even though it is still terrifying. It is there when I wake up and the morning and when I fall asleep at night. And it is there in my dreams, the ones when the world is engulfed in flames, the ones when every inch of the planet has been covered in ice, the ones when the meteor is so ominous in the sky that it eclipses the sun, so that for a few agonizing minutes everyone will look up at the same time and let out a collective scream of pure terror.
The end is nigh, I don’t care. I have to stay alive long enough to greet the end of the world. Perhaps I will lend my scream to the mass hysteria. Perhaps I will leap from a cliff into the Pacific just before Humanity’s End can catch me.
I do not run from death because I fear him. I’ve got to get to the sinners before He does.
My husband and I met at a charity banquet for Darfur. I was a pale, straight-laced WASP girl from Southampton with a father with a semi-permanent position in the single digits in the Forbes 400 and a supermodel for a mother. He was a tan, smooth-talking businessman with a P.h. D. and a penchant for girls ten years his junior. I was seduced by his charm, his influence, his ability to make me cry out in bed like I never had before. We were married within one year, and almost made it an entire decade before I caught on that he used me to get to my father.
It wasn’t my father’s money that Michael wanted, it was his power. And the best way for him to attain that power was to become closer to him than his own daughter; an apprentice, an heir-in-law to the monopoly that my father had created. He learned how to oppress the lower class and crush the dreams of future generations with only a few swift, nearly invisible, and wholly evil maneuvers, from the man who built an empire off of these talents.
And I was the naïve, unsuspecting empress. Until I decided to do something evil, too.
An undercover monk gave me a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita in a parking lot.
I was sitting in the open trunk of my car smoking a joint. I was 18 years old. The man told me I had a pure mind and a pure heart, and insisted I take his hard copy of this holy book.
“I only have five dollars,” I insisted, politely trying to make him leave me alone. I felt bad that he was trying to give me a book, but the defensive side of me was also suspicious that he wanted more money.
“No need to pay me. One day you will return the favor in a momentous way. You have a pure heart, one that can absorb all the pain of humanity and heal it.”
I chuckled. “That’s a lot of responsibility.”
“Not one person on this earth has yet been born in such perfect union that he was unafraid to sacrifice his dreams for the salvation of Man.”
I stopped smiling. The way that he spoke was so natural, his dialect unwavering, that I was completely at a loss for how to read him. My instincts told me that he knew exactly what he was talking about, as if someone had told him the answer to a notoriously unsolvable riddle.
I looked at the cover of the book in my hands. The artwork was beautiful, but the binding was cheap, the printing of the colors and the glossy sheen covering it giving it a somewhat sad appearance. I was unaware that the real beauty laid in the contents.
The man smiled gently, like a father who becomes nostalgic for the blissful ignorance of his youth when he sees it in his own child.
“Take your time. It’s a long book.” He nodded and continued on his way. He looked to be around 30, a little tan, with neatly trimmed chestnut-colored hair. The way he walked, so sure of himself, so light, his feet leaving no impression on the dead grass beneath him.
I would not open the book for three years.
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