Interest by Kevin Gaughen

door. Several more minutes of silent sitting elapsed. Len wondered what was going on. When was the Great Master coming back into the room? Was this another one of the obnoxious games that had caused him to leave the monastery years earlier? Len stared at the floor in front of him and tried to clear his mind. Birds chirped outside. Another breeze came through the room.
    Stillness.
    Just as Len began to relax into the situation, motion in front of him caught his eye. He looked up.
    Len had to do a double take. The jellyfish sculpture, which had been sitting on the floor, was now hovering in midair. It wavered like a hummingbird and pulsed with a low-frequency wub-wub-wub sound.
    “What the hell is that?!” Len gasped.
    “ Quiet! Await the teaching!” Mutoku admonished.
    The jellyfish sculpture thing slowly approached Len and Mutoku, then stopped and hovered over the brightly colored mat. The pulsing noise stopped. Mutoku bowed. Len bowed too, not knowing what else to do. Mutoku stood up, removed his robes, folded them carefully, placed them behind him, and sat back down again. He sat there with perfect posture, eyes cast downward, totally buck naked.
    “Uh, am I supposed to do that, too?” Len whispered.
    “No. Just sit there.”
    One of the jellyfish’s thin, clear tentacles slowly stretched outward toward Mutoku.
    “ Hai! I am ready,” Mutoku said in tense Japanese.
    The long tentacle draped over the center of Mutoku’s shaven head and the whole way down his spine to his tailbone. On contact, Mutoku’s eyes opened wide and he inhaled sharply. The tentacle then began to pulse, bead-like, like a fire hose full of water in an old cartoon. The noise again, wub-wub-wub . Mutoku breathed heavily for a few seconds, muscles taut, as if he had jumped into ice-cold water. Abruptly, Mutoku’s body and face relaxed, his body slumped a bit, and his stare went vacant.
    “Who are you?” Mutoku asked while staring straight ahead.
    Len looked around. “Who, me? I told you who I am, Mutoku. What am I watching here? Is this some sort of joke? This isn’t funny.” He wanted to believe he was being put on, but he had never seen special effects like these outside of the movies.
    The jellyfish raised two tentacles in Len’s direction. Blue arcs of electricity leapt from each of the tentacles into both of Len’s knees, which had been facing the jellyfish as he sat on the seiza bench.
    “Oh God!” Len fell to the floor and wailed in pain.
    Once Len’s screaming and writhing had died down to whimpers, Mutoku spoke again. “We apologize, but the extreme importance of this conversation must be conveyed. We do not have the power of speech. We are speaking through Mutoku.” Mutoku’s voice was distant but oddly resonant.
    “Oh, Christ. I’m talking to a jellyfish?”
    “We are not a jellyfish. Please sit.”
    Len hesitantly got back on the seiza bench. Len’s knees where he’d been zapped were numb. “Then what the hell are you?” Len’s heart pounded.
    “We are Ich-Ca-Gan. Known in this monastery as the Great Master. We will ask questions first. Who are you?”
    “Jim Rivington.” He was beginning to sweat a bit.
    “No! You are not!” The creature leveled a tentacle directly at Len’s face.
    “OK, OK! Don’t zap me again! My name is Leonard Savitz. I’m a journalist.” Len suddenly felt the depersonalization that came before a panic attack. He put his hand down onto the bench to steady himself.
    The creature lowered its tentacles. “And you were sent here by whom?”
    “Someone calling herself Neith.”
    “Tell Us about Neith.”
    “I—I don’t know much. She speaks through a robot. I haven’t met her in person. She forced me to come to this monastery for some reason.”
    “And Neith is responsible for the terrorism in the United States?”
    “Yes.”
    “What information did she ask you to collect?”
    “Nothing, actually. She didn’t ask me to collect anything. She is holding my daughter and ex-wife