Ten Thousand Saints Page 0,53

it felt miles underground, the perfect expression of testosterone and the structures of sound stimuli. The set wasn’t over; Johnny was still singing. He’d stepped down from the stage. Johnny drifted back toward him, his face appearing and disappearing like a strobe. Jude shoved him, without malice, only because that was physics, only because Johnny had a body and so did Jude. Between them, a pit opened, the size of a body that could have dropped from Earth but didn’t.

Then the train rocketed beneath the river, transporting him from one room to another. But the room he landed in was the same one he’d left: bodies, music, stage. Only here they left their sneakers at the door, and this room was bigger, big as a ballroom, and filled with an apricot light and incense so sweet Jude had the urge to wet himself. From each corner of the room, a voice wailed

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare

Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.

It was the walls. It was God. God was singing. Then he saw the man sitting in the middle of the room. He was an ancient Indian man in a white robe, playing an organ and singing into a mike. Around him, men and women sat chanting with him, some on mats, some on the lacquered wooden floor. In front of him, gold curtains hid the stage; behind him was another man, also old, also Indian, propped in a throne, draped in orange, topped with what looked like an orange bathing cap. He sat very still. Men and women and children approached him with candles and incense and flowers, sprinkling the petals at his feet. They bowed down to him, kneeling and pressing their foreheads to the floor. Jude watched from the sidelines as Johnny did this, as naturally as if he were putting on a kettle for tea. It was only when Johnny returned to him that Jude saw that the man was a statue.

“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