Free Children of the New World: Stories by Alexander Weinstein

look for Moksha?”
    It was the first time he’d been asked directly, and Abe realized he had no real answer. She looked like she was about to shoo him away, so he settled on, “You can’t get it in America.”
    She looked at him again and then closed her eyes. “Twenty-five thousand.”
    Jeff from the co-op had prepared him for the haggling, which wasn’t simply expected but a kind of courtesy here. “Fifteen.”
    The old woman shook her head. “For fifteen you get peaceful insight instead.”
    “No, no, I want Moksha,” Abe said. “Seventeen.”
    “Seventeen no good. Moksha use too much electricity, very expensive.”
    “Yeah, but my friend bought Moksha for fifteen thousand.”
    “This store?”
    “Well, no, but—”
    “Not same quality. Your friend only find lower stages of enlightenment. Here we have total enlightenment, better quality.”
    “No, my friend said he was totally enlightened,” Abe said, though he had to admit, for all his talk about kundalini, Jeff from the co-op hadn’t really seemed that enlightened.
    “For you: twenty-three thousand. Best price. We go lower and I lose Moksha. Come.” She rose from the stool and led Abe through the back of the store, which opened to a courtyard, and then into another building and up a dark, wet stairwell to knock at a closed door on the second floor.
    Behind the door were the sounds of shuffling and the distant chirp of dial-up connection. Then the door opened and a spiky-haired kid, no older than sixteen, stood in the doorway in a stained Bob Marley T-shirt. “You wait,” he said, and closed the door. There was more shuffling; then the door opened again, and a white kid, his blue eyes shining, emerged with the light of rapture. Upon seeing Abe, he wrapped his arms around him for a long moment before whispering into Abe’s ear, “Yes, brother, yes,” and disappearing down the stairwell.
    “You, Moksha, next,” the spiky-haired kid said.
    *   *   *
    LONG BEFORE HE bought his ticket to Nepal and dropped out of the dumpy state college, he’d met Sandra. They’d seen each other in the basement of a record shop, at an underground dharma class run by some renegade Anthropology students. Abe and Sandra drank sake and talked about Zen Buddhism until the shop was raided and the university expelled the leaders for practicing walking meditation on campus. Later that winter, she’d told him how much Moksha scared her. Her father had become addicted when she was in middle school.
    “He stopped talking for days at a time,” she confided from beneath the sheets in Abe’s dorm room. “He’d just sit on his cushion, wired up to our old Xbox, whispering om mani padme hum. ”
    Abe took a deep breath, held it, and let it out slowly. “So, you don’t want to go to Nepal and become liberated?”
    “My dad wasn’t liberated; he thought finding enlightenment was more important than his family.”
    “Maybe he’d transcended attachment.”
    Sandra got up and dressed. “Whatever. Go to Nepal; become a self-centered asshole like my dad. I love you, but obviously that’s not enough.”
    Abe had watched her, concentrating on his pounding heart to keep from speaking. After she left, he consoled himself with the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Sandra was just a hungry ghost, he told himself, offering the kind of love that kept people bound to the cycle of rebirth. All the same, he couldn’t shake the fact that he’d probably never again wake with her in the small concrete-walled dorm of that unenlightened college town. That, and he wished they’d had sex before he’d talked about liberation.
    *   *   *
    “OKAY,” THE SPIKY-HAIRED boy said, “You sit there.” He pointed to a corner in the darkened room.
    The room was filled with gutted laptops, stray mice, and a cluster of computer towers interconnected by cables. There was a beauty salon chair next to the towers, an old model from the seventies, and the cables had been fitted into the blow-dryer