PART ONE: AUTOPOIESIS
Chapter Two: Missing...Time
Boston University
Boston, Massachusetts
March, 2018
The trouble had come to a head just after winter break. Without warning Jolie was placed on academic probation by the Dean of Liberal Arts, James Rutherford, on the grounds that she was teaching inappropriate, obscene content in her Ancient Asian Art class. Up to that point, Jolie had been the rising star of the Art History department, the only doctoral student T.A. to fill Logan Auditorium, the largest lecture hall in the College of Humanities. Jolie had worked hard developing the course and it was a favorite with the undergrads, filling up two years in a row, with two-dozen more students on the wait-list hoping others might drop it. So what the heck happened? Its not like she was demonstrating the 57 positions of the Kama Sutra, the ancient yogic text on tantric sex, with some Efron-esque undergrad boy toy, on the stage at the front of lecture hall!
Jolie had created the Ancient Asian Art class from scratch, drawing on the vast exposure she’d been given to Buddhist and Indian Art growing up with a mother and father obsessed with Eastern culture. The art that most interested her was from the height of the tantric period of Buddhist Vajrayana, in the early 2nd millennium in Tibet and India. The students loved it too, largely because Jolie was so passionate in teaching the material, which celebrated the ritual worship of innumerable Eastern deities. But also, Jolie believed, they were pulled by the deities themselves, by the enlightened Buddhas and powerful Gods and Goddesses of the Hindu religions. Intuitively, though, Jolie felt it was the mysterious dakinis, the sky-goers, the interdimensional female teachers, who appeared in often terrifying forms in the ancient artwork, who especially magnetized the students to her class. It was a subconscious knowing, an instinctual sense.
But, why now, after two wildly successful semesters, was Jolie’s course material being censored? This was Boston University, not some Bible belt college steeped in Creationism. The images in her presentations were not offensive. They were powerful female figures who’d been revered by millions of spiritually devoted people throughout Asia for thousands of years. Dr. Sherman, Full Professor, head of the Art History Department and also Jolie’s advisor, showed slides of revered Western masterpieces featuring naked women of every description imaginable, as if the entire Renaissance period was observed through the cleavage of a nubile, barely pubescent nymph. But, somehow, her visual material on kick-ass female deities was unacceptable at an institution that prided itself on progressive, Liberal Arts philosophy and artistic freedom? Something didn’t add up.
Soon after Jolie got this warning from Dean Rutherford, really strange things started happening. Research materials went missing from her desk in the Art History Department. Threatening notes, demanding she leave Boston University, were left on the windshield of her old Jeep Cherokee. Peculiar students showed up in her class several weeks after the semester started. One, a clean-cut, starched button-down sporting, fifty-something white dude, who looked more like law enforcement than a continuing-Ed early retiree. Even though Jim Sterns was apparently doing the assigned coursework, Jolie knew he wasn’t as he presented himself to be. Why would the law be interested in her class? in her? She was just a scholarship Art History doctoral student, about to present her dissertation in three short months. Then there were the two Chinese nationals, also older than traditional students, one man and one woman, that the Dean personally requested that she allow to audit the class ten days after the two-week late-admission cut off. They barely spoke English and turned in none of the assigned homework, which, of course, as auditors, they weren’t required to do. When Jolie asked the Dean for more information about them, uptight Rutherford reprimanded her again. Telling her that if she didn’t start “towing the line” and stop asking stupid questions, she’d lose not only her teaching gig, but also the financial aid that came with it.
Then in early March the package arrived. It was almost identical to the one Jolie had received the Spring after her mother died, almost exactly six years ago. Dark red box, plain brown wrapping and Chinese looking lettering. Alarmingly, the package just appeared on top of her desk one Monday morning, in a locked meeting room in the department, when she arrived early for her dreaded student-T.A. meetings. When she pulled back the brown paper, she found a beautifully kiln-dried and sandalwood-scented Burmese Teak wood box. Teak was treasured throughout the ancient East and the world for its strength and durability, its resistance to pests and rot and, for warriors especially, teak was highly valued for its neutrality to metals, never blackening when in contact with blades and other prized weaponry.
Jolie had held her breath while examining the box. She felt a sublimated panic. The hopeless yearning for some clue of her mother’s disappearance resurfaced from her unconscious, manifesting as a dull pain in her chest. It was beautiful. The painful, exotic box. Intricately carved into it’s finely crafted lid, Jolie recognized two nagas, the mysterious snake-like water dragons of Eastern folklore, positioned to form a perfect circle, each with it’s strong but delicate mouth biting the tip of the tail of the other.
Inside the box was an implement Jolie recognized from the Vajrayana art and stone carvings she lectured about in her AAA class. It was called a trigug in Tibetan, a ritual knife with a blade shaped like a crescent moon, one end curling outward and forming a little hook. This one appeared to be centuries old and, if not solid gold, then most certainly gold-plated. Jolie carefully lifted the awesome tool from its cushioned seat in the box. It was heavy, real, broken-in. And it fit her hand so perfectly…
The handle was centered on the inside center of the crescent and attached perpendicularly, and at its top was a four-pronged vajra, a symbol of indestructibility in Vajrayana that looked something like a king’s crown. This knife was clearly a ritual tool styled on the traditional knife used by butchers in India and Tibet long ago. In the tantric ritual of Chod, the trigug was used to metaphorically slaughter one’s own body into pieces to feed to the demons of attachment and aversion. In so doing, the chodpa, the tantric practitioner, demonstrated her skillful means in cutting away what no longer served her spiritual development. Who had sent it? And why to her? Jolie could think of only one person. And against all common sense, her pulse pounding in her head, her heart literally aching, she blurted: “Mom!? Did you send it?”
Then she remembered. The course material that had gone missing from Jolie’s office was a copy of an ancient manuscript of rituals performed during the height of the Vajrayana period in Buddhist Tibet, in the 9th century, and the trigug was a central implement used in the rituals. As was the damaru, the small drum Jolie received in the first package when she was at Smith Academy on Cape Cod, as a teenager, only nine months after her mom went missing. Her mom’s body was never found. So why had her dad been so adamant that she was dead? Why was she being sent this second relic, six years on, and being harassed at the University, the very school that had so aggressively recruited her from the Academy when she graduated early with honors and gave her an almost full-ride in large part because she was Marlese McLeod’s daughter?
Bottom line, the golden trigug with the intricately engraved handle (those powerful water-spirits, the nagas, again) seemed genuinely ancient, and, weirder, really familiar. When she held it in her hand, it fit perfectly in her grip, as if it had been made just for her. Just like with the mystery drum back in high school, Jolie immediately felt sort of dizzy and spaced out, images flashing before her minds eye like the day at the cemetery in Smith port. And so Jolie put the trigug immediately back in the red box, locked it in her metal filing cabinet in her apartment in Cambridge, across the river from Boston University, and tried not to think anything more about it.
Avoid, forget, repeat. Survive.
…
Another week passed without incident but Jolie could feel the pressure mounting with each passing day leading up to Spring break. Every morning, Jolie reluctantly left her small flat, filled with dread, which weighed on her every waking moment and didn't dispel until she fled campus in the evenings, peeling out of the faculty parking lot in her battered old jeep as quickly as she could get away, often excusing herself from student meetings mid-way through when a suffocating anxiety threatened to envelope her completely.
On the Friday night before Spring break, Jolie’s fear took form when, after staying late in the department to grade Professor Sherman’s Introduction to Impressionism mid terms (part of her T.A. grunt work), so that she could leave work behind ASAP and escape home to Scotland to see her dad, the unspeakable happened in the hallway outside Dr. Sherman’s office.
…
That night, with the 2nd night of the Lenten full moon illuminating the quad outside her single office window, Jolie dropped the last repetitive, monotonous undergrad essay into the outbox pile for Professor Sherman to collect the following Monday morning. She threw on her oversized, navy wool peacoat, flipped the switch off for the head-ache inducing fluorescent strip light, and noticed the absence of its hum as she pulled the door closed behind her, not looking back, her mind already buzzing with the million details she had to take care of before her 6am flight to Glasgow the next morning. Then the hallway went dark.
“What the hell? Hey! I’m still here in the department!” Jolie was exhausted and didn’t bother concealing her aggravated tone of voice. She waited, expecting an undergrad to mumble sorry and illuminate her path once again with florescence. No answer. No light. Jolie went cold, falling into the state of nervous terror she’d been treading just above the surface of all winter. Survival mode kicked in. Jolie fished her iPhone out of her coat pocket, and tapped the flashlight icon, grateful the Apple geeks had programmed the thing to come on with the swish of a finger. She shone the flashlight down the hall in front of her but saw nothing but empty space. Literally. Where she should have seen the worn squares of spotted green linoleum that covered the hallway floor of the Art History department, instead there was formless blackness, and Jolie couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. The view to her left was the dingy colored, in dire need of a paint job, department walls, covered with the same bill boards and office-hour schedules Jolie had walked by thousands of times over the last five years. To her right, there was nothing. It was a runway into starless space. Trying to keep it together, Jolie looked back at her phone. She pulled up the camera and slid the setting to video. If she was about to be sucked into a black hole, the least she could do was film it. Then she heard footsteps running towards her from the other direction. The last thing Jolie saw was the startled, incredulous looks on the way-past-college-age faces of the two stealthy Chinese students from her Ancient Asian Arts class as they rounded the corner at the end of the hall, sprinting towards her.
Then everything went black.