Free Sorcerer's Apprentice by Charles Johnson Page B

from all sides; then he let it float gently to the surface, and soon—as he slipped deeper into the vortices of himself, into the Void—even the image of himself on the lake floor vanished.
    Evelyn stifled a scream.
    Was she one of Rudolph’s bubbles, something to detach himself from? On the porch, Evelyn watched him narrowly, sitting in a rain-whitened chair, her chin on her left fist. She snapped the fingers on her right hand under his nose. Nothing. She knocked her knuckles lightly on his forehead. Nothing. (Faker, she thought.) For another five minutes he sat and breathed, sat and breathed, then opened his eyes slowly as if he’d slept as long as Rip Van Winkle. “It’s dark,” he said, stunned. When he began, it was twilight. Evelyn realized something new: He was not living time as she was, not even that anymore. Things, she saw, were slower for him; to him she must seem like a woman stuck in fast-forward. She asked:
    â€œWhat do you see when you go in there?”
    Rudolph rubbed his eyes. “Nothing.”
    â€œThen why do you do it? The world’s out here!”
    He seemed unable to say, as if the question were senseless. His eyes angled up, like a child’s, toward her face. “Nothing is peaceful sometimes. The emptiness is full. I’m not afraid of it now.”
    â€œYou empty yourself?” she asked. “Of me, too?”
    â€œYes.”
    Evelyn’s hand shot up to cover her face. She let fly with a whimper. Rudolph rose instantly—he sent Mr. Miller flying—then fell back hard on his buttocks; the lotus cut off blood to his lower body—which provided more to his brain, he claimed—and it always took him a few seconds before he could stand again. He reached up, pulled her hand down, and stroked it.
    â€œWhat’ve I done?”
    â€œThat’s it,” sobbed Evelyn. “I don’t know what you’re doing.” She lifted the end of her bathrobe, blew her nose, then looked at him through streaming, unseeing eyes. “And you don’t either. I wish you’d never seen that movie. I’m sick of all your weights and workouts—sick of them, do you hear? Rudolph, I want you back the way you were: sick” No sooner than she said this Evelyn was sorry. But she’d done no harm. Rudolph, she saw, didn’t want anything; everything, Evelyn included, delighted him, but as far as Rudolph was concerned, it was all shadows in a phantom history. He was humbler now, more patient, but he’d lost touch with everything she knew was normal in people: weakness, fear, guilt, self-doubt, the very things that gave the world thickness and made people do things. She did want him to desire her. No, she didn’t. Not if it meant oral sex. Evelyn didn’t know, really, what she wanted anymore. She felt, suddenly, as if she might dissolve before his eyes. “Rudolph, if you’re ‘empty,’ like you say, you don’t know who—or what—is talking to you. If you said you were praying, I’d understand. It would be God talking to you. But this way…” She pounded her fist four, five times on her thigh. “It could be evil spirits, you know! There are evil spirits, Rudolph. It could be the Devil.”
    Rudolph thought for a second. His chest lowered after another long breath. “Evelyn, this is going to sound funny, but I don’t believe in the Devil.”
    Evelyn swallowed. It had come to that.
    â€œOr God—unless we are gods.”
    She could tell he was at pains to pick his words carefully, afraid he might offend. Since joining the kwoon and studying ways to kill, he seemed particularly careful to avoid her own most effective weapon: the wry, cutting remark, the put-down, the direct, ego-deflating slash. Oh, he was becoming a real saint. At times, it made her want to hit him.
    â€œWhatever is just is,” he said. “That’s all I know. Instead of worrying