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Absalom isn't totally callous. After tricking you into eating the Chankiri fruit, he lets you drink a glass of orange juice in his kitchen to wash the taste out. He watches you for a time from across the breakfast nook's island countertop, ankle on knee. You miserably peer back at him from over the rim of the glass. The remorseless way his eyes drink you in reminds you of Auburn. With even less of the charm.
When he speaks up, his voice booms, and it startles you. "You know -- Gautama Buddha was a sage of some repute even before he became the Buddha. But he was critical of the Vedic Brahmins and their caste system, which ultimately led him to embark on a spiritual journey to discover an escape from human suffering." He sweeps a palm as if beckoning you to look at a wide Savannah from atop a cliff: "At the nadir of his despair, when after decades of searching he still had not found his answer... he sat beneath a Bodhi tree, and decided to meditate there until he either died or he attained Nirvana. He found Nirvana after 49 days. In an instant, he was able to recall all of his past incarnations -- and also the key to the end of suffering. An end to the otherwise endless cycle of death and rebirth. The abasement of the self. The total and irrevocable renunciation of the very existence of the self.
"There is precedence for self-abasement in Judeo-Christian tradition, too. We sinners stand humiliated before the sinlessness of the son and the glory of the father. We mince and cringe and bow our heads in guilt and shame, and deny our flesh, and flagellate ourselves -- some literally, most only mentally. And even stretching back to the fall of man: why did Adam and Eve get evicted from Eden? Do you know?"
He waits for you to answer. You try: "They ate the forbidden fruit."
"No!" Abrams barks. He slaps the countertop with a palm. He points. "They asserted a self, a will and being separate from the Godhead. How dare they?" He jerks his thumb like an unfriendly usher in a movie theater: "So out, out they go. If they want to exist as separate selves, says God, they will be truly separate from God's goodness. The original sin was selfishness."
