My Lady of the Bog by Peter Hayes Page A

. conservation .”
    It got to the point where I loved to watch Jai handle things , almost anything. Just to see the way he picked it up and laid it down made you want to do the same (although when you did, it was nothing special, just a scarf of gray Irish wool, nice and all, but hardly the sensual treasure it had seemed to be between Jai’s fingers).
    Then there were Jai’s ideas, which weren’t like anyone else’s. He’d once defined government as “the science of punishment,” referring to the ancient secrets of statecraft by which a rajah rules his kingdom—and prevails.
    And his most recent declaration, “Love is sacrifice.” It wasn’t a remark I myself could have made—springing, as it did, from a worldview as alien to me as it was venerable and old, one that harkened to the caves of Lascaux, Father Abraham, burnt offerings and flaming oblations of ghee and gold. Nor was Jai’s wisdom book knowledge only. Born in Mumbai, schooled in London, he had traveled widely with a father in the Indian diplomatic corps. Young men tend to define themselves by what they’ve experienced, and I was envious of his many exotic (and erotic) adventures. Jai had not only sampled the girls of a Turkish brothel (one whore, Jai claimed, had slipped a pillow beneath her buttocks, something which at the time had seemed to us the nadir of depravity), but had spent a night in meditation in a Maharashtrian cremation ground.
    “Someday, when my work is done, I’ll retire to the forest,” Jai once told me.
    “What forest, Jai? Muir Woods?”
    He laughed. “Hardly. I doubt the National Park Service would permit me to wander around it skyclad.”
    “You mean nude ?”
    “I mean clothed only in the wind and ether,” he’d said, spoofing himself.
    Despite his tone, I sometimes wondered if he wasn’t serious. I imagined the distinguished professor emeritus wandering the woods bare-ass naked, living on roots and tubers. It was certainly a different model of retirement than that advanced by the Marin County Chamber of Commerce.
    Now, for the first time, I considered what I’d done. It’s true I’d disturbed the integrity of the trove—but the manuscript had flared before me in the dark, an archeological wonder I could have for the taking. I didn’t think of myself as “entitled” and “indulgent,” only “special” and “lucky,” which were just other words for the same damn thing. Somewhere along the way I’d lost my humility, focus and perspective. Jai was daring me to get it back.
    Then there was Vidya, whose face and form had haunted me since the party—though here, at least, I was fully aware of my pattern of attraction to unavailable women. The girls who’d loved me—and there’d been a few—never seemed to evoke in me that same wave of cosmic connection that the ones who hadn’t did, and do. And I saw now it was an emotional trick to keep me from becoming involved with a real, live, flesh and blood woman instead of her romantic imago. I thought, now, too, how that was a part of my Lady’s attraction: she was real, and she wasn’t—and her demands were few. High class, low maintenance. Just the kind of girl I adored.

Part III
    VIDYA
    A similar experience befell Menippus,
a disciple of Demetrius the Cynic.
For as he was going from Corinth to Cenchreae,
he met one in the form of a beautiful foreign girl,
apparently very rich,
who said that she was smitten with love for him,
and in a friendly manner invited him to go home with her.
He in his turn was taken with love for her
and lay with her often and even began to think about marriage,
for she had a house decorated in a royal fashion.
But after Apollonius had examined everything in that house,
he exclaimed that she was a Lamia
who would quickly devour the young man entirely,
or afflict him with some notable injury .
    — Nicolas Remy
Demonolatry

Chapter 13
    I n the early morning hours of July thirtieth, I was awakened by a phone call from Vidya Prasad,