The bald man in the hat approaches one of the kids. This kid is a little small, a little tentative. “Hey, kid,” the bald man says. “Want to try something really great?”
The grandmother thinks, Oh, dear. She hobbles on her cane to a large tree, hides behind it.
“My mom says not to take anything from strangers,” the kid says.
“Just a couple drops,” the bald man wheedles. “It’s as good as peppermint ice cream.” He takes a little bottle from his pocket and uncorks it. He holds it out.
I shouldn’t, the kid thinks, but he has already taken the bottle.
“Eeeagh!” Carry Nation emerges from behind the tree. Her cane has become a hatchet; her costume is a black dress with special pockets. “Son of Satan!” she screams, hurtling toward the bald man, hatchet up. Whooosh! The hatchet takes off the bald man’s hat. Kaboom! Carry strikes him with her fist. Kapow!
• • •
COLORS HAPPENED ON the inside of Harris’s eyelids. Harsh, unnatural, vivid colors. Colors that sang and danced in chorus like Disney cartoons, dark colors for the bass voices, bright neons for the high notes. Harris was long past enjoying these colors. Someone had put Harris to bed, but it was so long ago Harris couldn’t quite remember who. It might have been his mother. Someone had bandaged his hand and cleaned him up, although his hair was still sticky with liquor. Someone had apparently thought Harris might be able to sleep, someone who had clearly never dosed themselves with bufotenine. Never licked a toad in their life. Someone brought Harris soup. He stared at it, abandoned on the nightstand, thinking what a silly word soup was. He closed his eyes, and the colors sang it for him with full parts. A full choral treatment. Soup. Soup. Souped up. In the soup. Soupçon.
The phone rang, and the colors splashed away from the sound in an unharmonious babble of confusion. They recovered as quickly as the ringing stopped, re-formed themselves like water after a stone. Only one ring. Harris suddenly noticed other noises. The television in his room was on. There were visitors in the living room. His wife was sitting on the bed beside him.
“That was your superior,” she said. Harris laughed. Souperior. “He said to tell you, ‘Package delivered.’ He said you’d be anxious.”
He wishes he worked for the CIA, the colors sang to Harris. Package delivered.
“Patrick.” Harris’s wife was touching his arm. She shook it a little. “Patrick? He’s worried about you. He thinks you may have a drinking problem.”
Harris opened his eyes and saw things with a glassy, weary clarity. Behind his wife was the Oprah show, her favorite. No wonder he hadn’t noticed the television was on. Harris’s mind was moving far too fast for television. Harris’s mind was moving far too fast for him to be able to follow what his wife was saying. He had to force his mind back, remember where she thought he was in the conversation.
“I’m a moderate drinker,” he said.
“He sent over a report. Last night. A report the government commissioned on moderate drinking. It’s interesting. Listen.” She had pages in her hand. Harris was pretty certain they hadn’t been there before. They popped into her fingers before his very eyes. She riffled through them, read, with one finger underlining the words. “‘To put it simply, people who drink a lot have many problems, but few people drink a lot.
“‘People who only drink a little have fewer problems, but there are a great many people who drink a little.
“‘Therefore, the total number of problems experienced by those who drink a little is likely to be greater than the total number experienced by those who drink a lot, simply because more people drink a little than a lot.’”
Harris was delighted with this. It made no sense at all. He was delighted with his wife for producing it. He was delighted with himself for hallucinating it. He would have liked to hear it again. He closed his eyes. The colors began singing obligingly. To put it simply, people who drink a lot have many problems, but few people drink a lot.
“All I had was a Shirley Temple,” Harris told his wife. He remembered the voices in the living room. “Do we have company?”
“Just some women from my class,” she answered. She put the report down uncertainly. “He’s just worried about you, Patrick. As your supervisor, he’s got to be worried. The stress of field-work. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, if you have a problem. You’ve handled it better than most.”
Harris skipped ahead in this conversation to the point where he explained to her that he didn’t have a drinking problem and she was persuaded. She would be persuaded. She was a reasonable woman and she loved him. He was too tired to go through it step by step. Now he was free to change the subject. “Why are there women in the living room?”
“We’re just doing a project,” his wife said. “Are you going to drink your soup?” Soup, soup, soup, the colors sang. Harris didn’t think so. “Would you like to see the project?” Harris didn’t think he wanted this either, but apparently he neglected to say so, because now she was back and she had different papers. Harris tried to read them. They appeared to be a cartoon.
“It’s for the women’s center,” his wife said. “It’s a Carry Nation/Superhero cartoon. I thought maybe you could help advise us on the drug stuff. The underworld stuff. When you’re feeling better. We think we can sell it.”
Harris tried to read it again. Who was the man in the hat? What did he have in his bottle? He liked the colors. “I like the colors,” he said.
“Julie drew the pictures. I did the words.”
Harris wasn’t able to read the cartoon or look at the pictures. His mind wasn’t working that way. Harris’s mind was reading right through the cartoon as if it were a glass through which he could read the present, the past, and the future. He held it between himself and the television. There was a group of women on Oprah. They were all dressed like Carry Nation, but they had masks on their faces like the Lone Ranger, to protect their real identities. They were postmenopausal terrorists in the war on drugs. A man in the audience was shouting at them.
“Do you know what I’m hearing? I’m hearing that the ends justify the means. I could hear that in Iraq. I could hear that in China.”
The women didn’t want to be terrorists. The women wanted to be DEA agents. Harris’s supervisor was clearing out his desk, removing the pins from the map in his office as if casting some sort of reverse Voudon hex. He had lost his job for refusing to modify recruitment standards and implement a special DEA reentry training program for older women.
In a deserted field in Colombia, a huge woman gradually came to her senses. She stared at the clothing she was wearing. She stared around the Colombian landscape. “Where the hell am I?” her ti bon ange asked. “¿Que pasa?”
From the safety of his jail cell, Manuel Noriega mourned for his lost yachts.
A woman in a wet T-shirt played a new video game in the dark back room of a bar. MY MOTHER TOLD ME TO BE GOOD, BUT SHE’S BEEN WRONG BEFORE, the T-shirt read. Bar-Smasher was the name of the video game. A graphic of Carry Nation, complete with bonnet and hatchet, ran about evading the police and mobs of angry men. Five points for every bottle she smashed. Ten points a barrel. Fifty points for special items such as chandeliers and pornographic paintings. She could be sent to jail three times. The music was a video version of “Who Hath Sorrow, Who Hath Woe.” The woman in the T-shirt was very good at this game. She was a young woman, and men approved of her. Her boyfriend helped her put her initials on the day’s high score, although anyone who gets the day’s high score probably doesn’t need help with the initials. She let him kiss her.