Gunning for the Buddha

We killed the Buddha for the first time outside of Berlin. It was fitting that we caught sight of him walking barefoot next to the autobahn, where it would be a real bitch to stop in time to pick him up. But we were nothing if not up for a challenge. I brought the Firebird screeching to a stop next to him on the nearly non-existent shoulder and opened the passenger door. Traffic screamed past us like bullets as the little man lifted his robes and stepped into the car. Yeshev had jumped into the backseat and onto Marco's lap, crushing Annina and Ari in the process. The Buddha rode shotgun.

He was bald, of course, but a lot skinnier than I'd ever imagined. He'd been walking west, out of Berlin into the German countryside, probably headed for Madrid or Amsterdam or some damn place like that. His face was made up of delicate bones, like a china doll I'd had as a little girl, before I broke it with my baseball bat. The Buddha smiled at me and I felt the world teeter, but that could've been caused by the two oversized bottles of beer I'd already downed. I had to grin at the dirt trapped under his fingernails like brown scars.

Stepping on the gas, I checked the rearview mirror for the first time all day, looking around the multi-colored faces in the back seat, trying not to get us into a wreck. I wanted to savor the moment, stretch it out like day-old taffy. It wasn't every day you came across a major player from the spiritual realm thumbing a ride.

And you know, of course, what you're supposed to do when you meet the Buddha on the road.

In seconds the Firebird was hitting 190 kilometers an hour, the dashboard shimmering like an ocean at low tide. I watched him out of the corner of my eye while the others hissed laughter in the backseat, waiting for my patience to run out. They knew me too well, my fellow travelers. We were between gigs, regrouping. Our next rendezvous was with a bridge in downtown Frankfurt later that afternoon. Time was of the essence.

When we passed the first sign for Frankfurt am Main, still some fifty kilometers away, I’d finished off most of the bottle of German ale I’d been balancing between my legs, and my bra was flapping in the wind next to me, wedged between door and window like a flag of surrender. The breeze cooled me off, reminding me of the metal pressed against my side under my thin T-shirt. I was always amazed at the way our assignments took shape, usually at the last possible minute before or after a jump, in spite of -- or was it because of? -- all the chaos in the world.

Next to me, the Buddha had started talking. His soft voice carried clear as a bell over the wind howling through my cracked-open window.

“In some ways, my girl,” he said, “I am helpless. I have what I have if only I will surrender to things as they are.”

His lash-less eyes stared at me, into me in a way I’d rather not remember. I hated it when men called me “girl.”

“We must return to the sea,” he continued, “or the sea will return to us.”

“You’re damn skippy,” I said.

The others in the backseat exhaled in disappointment. They’d wanted me to blow him away from the moment he got in the car. To hell with them -- I wanted to hear what this Buddha had to say. Plus I was distracted; Frankfurt’s Eiserner Steg was approaching, and I’d forgotten that this was a footbridge, and the pedestrians weren’t cooperating. But the Buddha’s time was coming.

We had to get it just right, hitting the midsection of the Iron Footbridge where the blue metal arches of the supports for the bridge dipped down. Then we’d be back into the ether, casting about for a new when and where, for more chaos to unravel. I needed to be rid of the skinny little shit by then. Who knew what sort of cosmic balance he’d tip over if we jumped with him in the car?

“Trusting the young is the only hope of each aging generation.” Pointing a delicate finger at me, the Buddha gave me a smile that made me think of cheap ceramic statues and sleeping lions. “However, pointing at the moon is not the moon itself.”

Continued...

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What the critics said about "Gunning for the Buddha":

"Our first person narrator is a woman driving a powerful, sky blue '75 Pontiac Firebird that revs up to a certain speed, jetting over bridges for preference, and blasts through the limits of time and space... Fast as she drives, she cannot outdrive her own anger and desperation, even when her plan begins to unravel with violent speed. The story races at headlong pace, shifting around in time just as the characters do... the story's got velocity."

— Sherwood Smith, SF Site

"Gunning for the Buddha" is an interesting spin of the old maxim, "If you meet a Buddha on the road, kill him." The violent protagonists of the story do exactly that—they meet a hitchhiking Buddha on their mad dash to another temporal jump. The protagonists have discovered a way to travel through time and space with nothing more than a bridge and a car. I don't want to give too much away, but the tables turn in the end, leading to a sad and profound resolution.

— E. Sedia, Tangent Online

"The title story, named for a Shriekback song (which I recently saw on another book's "soundtrack" list), derives from a far older concept. For the protagonist, this translates as "I had to kill all the Buddhas because it was their fault the world was riddled with chaos." ... You don't have to be young and fiery to feel that kind of anger these days, but finding a way past it can be a tortuous journey. Jasper crams that into a few short pages -- then reality turns inside-out.

— Faren Miller, Locus