“Yeah, except they have better fashion sense,” Charlie said.

“I’m not always going to be taped to this chair, Asher,” Minty said. “Woman, who or what the hell are you?”

“Be nice,” Charlie said.

“I suppose I should explain,” Audrey said.

“Ya think?” Minty said.

Audrey sat down on the floor, cross-legged, and the squirrel people gathered around her, to listen.

“Well, it’s a little embarrassing, but I guess it started when I was a kid. I sort of had this affinity for dead things.”

“Like you liked to touch dead things?” asked Minty Fresh. “Get naked with them?”

“Would you please let the lady talk,” Charlie said.

“Bitch is a freak,” Minty said.

Audrey smiled. “Why, yes; yes, I am, Mr. Fresh, and you are tied up in my dining room, at the mercy of any freaky thing that might occur to me.” She tapped a silver demitasse spoon she’d used to stir her tea on her front tooth and rolled her eyes as if imagining something delicious.

“Please go on,” said Minty Fresh with a shudder. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“It wasn’t a freaky thing,” Audrey said, glancing at Minty, daring him to speak up. “It was just that I had an overdeveloped sense of empathy with the dying, mostly animals, but when my grandmother passed, I could feel it, from miles away. Anyway, it didn’t overwhelm me or anything, but when I got to college, to see if I could get a handle on it, I decided to study Eastern philosophy—oh yeah, and fashion design.”

“I think it’s important to look good when you’re doing the work of the dead,” Charlie said.

“Well—uh—okay,” Audrey said. “And I was a good seamstress. I really liked making costumes. Anyway, I met and fell in love with a guy.”

“A dead guy?” Minty asked.

“Soon enough, Mr. Fresh. He was dead soon enough.” Audrey looked down at the carpet.

“See, you insensitive fuck,” Charlie said. “You hurt her feelings.”

“Hello, tied to a chair here,” Minty said. “Surrounded by little monsters, Asher. Not the insensitive one.”

“Sorry,” Charlie said.

“It’s okay,” Audrey said. “His name was William—Billy, and we were together for two years before he got sick. We’d only been engaged a month when he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. They gave him a couple of months to live. I dropped out of school and stayed with him every moment. One of the nurses from hospice knew about my Eastern studies course and recommended we talk with Dorje Rinpoche, a monk from the Tibetan Buddhist Center in Berkeley. He talked to us about Bardo Thodrol, what you know as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He helped prepare Billy to transfer his consciousness into the next world—into his next life. It took our focus off of the darkness and made death a natural, hopeful thing. I was with Billy when he died, and I could feel his consciousness move on—really feel it—Dorje Rinpoche said that I had some special talent. He thought I should study under a high lama.”

“So you became a monk?” Charlie asked.

“I thought a lama was just a tall sheep,” said Minty Fresh.

Audrey ignored him. “I was heartbroken and I needed direction, so I went to Tibet and was accepted at a monastery where I studied Bardo Thodrol for twelve years under Lama Karmapa Rinpoche, the seventeenth reincarnation of the bodhisattva who had founded our school of Buddhism a thousand years ago. He taught me the art of p’howa—the transference of the consciousness at the moment of death.”

“So you could do what the monk had done for your fiancé?” Charlie asked.

“Yes. I performed p’howa for many of the mountain villagers. It was a sort of a specialty with me—along with making the robes for everyone in the monastery. Lama Karmapa told me that he felt I was a very old soul, the reincarnation of a superenlightened being from many generations before. I thought perhaps he was just trying to test me, to get me to succumb to ego, but when his own death was near and he called me to perform the p’howa for him, I realized that this was the test, and he was trusting the transference of his own soul to me.”

“Just so we’re clear,” said Minty Fresh. “I would not trust you with my car keys.”

The iguana musketeer poked Minty in the calf with his little sword and the big man yelped.

“See,” Charlie said. “When you’re rude it comes back on you—like karma.”

Audrey smiled at Charlie, put her tea on the floor, and folded her legs into the lotus position, settling in. “When the Lama passed, I saw his consciousness leave his body. Then I felt my own consciousness leave my body, and I followed the Lama into the mountains, where he showed me a small cave, buried deep beneath the snow. And in that cave was a stone box, sealed with wax and sinew. He told me that I must find the box, and then he was gone, ascended, and I found myself back in my body.”

“Were you superenlightened then?” Charlie asked.

“I don’t even know what that is,” Audrey said. “The Lama was wrong about that, but something had changed me while performing the p’howa for him. When I came out of the room with his body, I could see a red spot glowing in people, right at their heart chakra. It was the same thing I had followed into the mountains, the undying consciousness—I could see people’s souls. But what was more disturbing to me, I could see that the glow was absent in some people, or I couldn’t see it in them, or in myself. I didn’t know why, but I did know that I had to find that stone box. By following the exact path into the mountains that the Lama had shown me, I did. Inside was a scroll that most Buddhists thought—still think—was a myth: the lost chapter of the Tibetan Book of the Dead…It outlined two long-lost arts, the p’howa of forceful projection, and one I hadn’t even heard of, the p’howa of undying. The first allows you to force a soul from one being to another, and the second allows the practitioner to prolong the transition, the bardo, between life and death indefinitely.”

“Does that mean you could make people live forever?” Charlie asked.

“Sort of—more like they just stop dying. I meditated on the amazing gift I’d been given for months, afraid to try to perform the rituals. But one day when I was attending the bardo of an old man who was dying of a painful stomach cancer, I could watch the suffering no longer, and I tried the p’howa of forceful projection. I guided his soul into the body of his newborn grandson, who I could see had no glow at his heart chakra. I could actually see the glow move across the room and the soul enter the baby. The man died in peace only seconds later.

“A few weeks later I was called to attend the bardo of a young boy who had taken ill and was showing all the signs of imminent death. I couldn’t bear to let it happen, knowing that there might be something I might be able to do, so I performed the p’howa of undying on him, and he didn’t die. In fact, he got better. I succumbed to the ego of it, then, and I started to perform the ritual on other villagers, instead of helping them on to their next life. I did five in as many months, but there was a problem. The parents of the little boy summoned me. He wasn’t growing—not even his hair and nails. He was stuck at age nine. But by then the villagers were all coming to me with the dying, and word spread throughout the mountains to other villages. They lined up outside of our monastery, demanding I come see them. But I had refused to perform the ritual, realizing that I was not helping these people, but in fact freezing them in their spiritual progression, plus, you know, kind of freaking them out.”

“Understandably,” Charlie said.

“I couldn’t explain to my fellow monks what was happening. So I ran away in the night. I presented myself to be of service to a Buddhist center in Berkeley, and I was accepted as a monk. It was during that time that I saw, for the first time, a human soul contained in an inanimate object, when I went into a music store in the Castro. It was your music store, Mr. Fresh.”