At the dance hall he drinks beer and eats sausage. Jill does the polka with a barrel-chested man in long pants and suspenders while Adams taps out a beat on a wooden table to the fiddle. He’s thinking of all the dances in all the halls he ever attended with Pamela, but the people at the table with him raise their mugs and laugh heartily, and he can’t help but feel good. Jill takes his hand and drags him onto the dance floor. It is covered with sawdust, and when she swirls, tiny wooden slivers lift into the air like snow and settle in her hair.
Watching her, Adams feels happy.
“Let’s get our fortunes told,” Jill urges him.
“I’m enjoying myself here.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun.”
Rosa’s in the middle of a seance when they arrive. “Come in, come in,” an old woman whispers through the screen door. They sit on the floor behind a row of women, all of whom are holding hands.
Adams watches Rosa. She might have been attractive once, but years of tension have tightened the skin around her mouth. In the dim light her age shows — she must be in her sixties. The way she rotates her jaw as she slips into a trance is repulsive, and he looks away. Through the front screen he sees boys banging cans behind the cemetery. One of them pulls a frayed head of lettuce from a pile of garbage and they begin to toss it like a football. Outside it’s getting dark and a cool breeze moves through the room.
The spirit that is speaking through Rosa, fluttering candles she has placed in small dishes on the floor, runs out of things to say and begins recommending her spaghetti. She comes out of her trance.
“Let’s take a break,” she says. “There’s strawberries and cream in the kitchen.”
She’s delighted to see Adams and asks about the children. He introduces her to Jill, who’s wholly taken with the scene. “How did you get into this?”
“I started out with a crystal ball, but if you get someone with a clouded past the ball will literally cloud up. You can’t hide it from the client. It’s very embarrassing. I prefer to let people experience their own pasts directly, and that’s what we’re going to do next. Grab some strawberries and join us.”
Adams is uneasy but Jill wants to stay. He sits on the floor next to her. “Nadine.” Rosa gestures to a woman with swollen ankles. “You’ve regressed with me several times. What have you been?”
“I grew cabbages in Italy during the Dark Ages. I sank with Atlantis.”
She lies on the floor in front of Rosa and folds her arms over her abdomen. Her ankles are extraordinärily thick; her heels just touch the ground. Rosa leans over her. “Close your eyes,” she says. “Breathe slowly.”
Nadine’s ankles pulse as if something were trying to hatch from them.
Rosa says softly, “There’s a warmth like water in your stomach, calming every muscle. It fills your chest like foam, washes into your neck and shoulders.”
Nadine appears to be asleep.
“Now then, I want you to take a little journey with me. Imagine yourself in a forest by a creek. Tell me what you see.”
“I see a lizard on a rock. I see the sun.” “Good, good. What else?”
“Arrowheads in the dirt, sunflowers in tall grass, butterflies …”
“You’re high in the air over a forest. When I count to three, you’ll float slowly down until your feet touch the ground. And when they do, you’ll find yourself in the past. One, two, three. Where are you, Nadine?”
The woman writhes on the floor. “It’s hot,” she says.
“Do you know where you are?”
“No … no, I don’t know where I am.”
“What are you wearing?”
“Black and white stripes.”
“Is it a dress?”
“Skin. Animal skin.”
Rosa nods. “Describe what you see.”
She lived in an African village by an antelope herd and a pond, until one day she ran from her tribe. She’d been promised to a warrior whom she didn’t want to marry. The tribal elders found her hiding behind a date palm, bound her to a stake, and tortured her with hot sticks until she agreed to accept the warrior. The wedding night passed pleasantly enough, despite the burns on her back.
Rosa counts Nadine out of her relaxed state. She smiles like a coed who’s just passed an anthropology exam.
Jill is a Mexican peasant with callused feet and a swollen belly. For a few pesos each night she sweeps the streets of the city, smiling up at the candles in the rich folks’ homes. Rosa advances her in years to her marriage, middle age, and death. Her husband dies young, her son becomes a farmer. She lives her late years in a convalescent home, attended by nuns.
Now it’s Adams’ turn. Because he’s so self-conscious, Rosa takes a long time to relax him.
“Where are you,” he hears her ask.
“I don’t know.” His hands feel weightless. “I’m moving.” His mind supplies no image. “It’s like I’m underwater.”
“You’re underwater, then?”
“Yes, I’m in a river.” The image still isn’t clear and Rosa’s questions only bother him. Hard balls of mud slap his crotch. He feels this rather than sees it: his nerves move ahead of his mind. He bounces off a barge and tumbles to the bottom of the river. Muddy dregs sweep into his mouth.
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
The sky turns bright as cellophane. On a pine bridge above him two white deer chase each other. Dirt from their hooves sifts through a space between the boards and peppers his face.
Angry female voices mingle in the air above a wooden house. In a room full of rifles a white-haired man reads a map.
“I can’t read,” he tells Rosa.
“Move yourself forward in time,” she suggests. “Where are you?”
“In town.” He’s carried the mud with him. His clothes are spattered. The streets are little more than damp ruts, and dirty geese straggle across them.
“What do you see?”
Rain barrels, wagon wheels, a tobacconist. “I’m standing in a hotel lobby,” he says. “Are you waiting for someone?” “No. I don’t know anyone.”
A diamond-blue horsefly orbits a kerosene lamp.
“What’s your name?”
“I don’t know. The hotel looks full.”
“Are you the clerk?”
“I can’t read the register.”
He turns on the television, hoping to run across Pavarotti again. Instead, PBS is airing a layman’s guide to the universe hosted by Peter Ustinov, who looks a great deal like Pavarotti but without the mole. Ustinov holds up two billiard balls and rolls them across a curved table with a grid painted on it — a demonstration of what happens to matter when it encounters a black hole. The balls are sucked down a pipe in one corner of the table.
The weekend: Superman III with the kids. Superman, under the influence of not-quite-Kryptonite, has gone on a whiskey binge. The hero in him struggles to regain control of his mind, and in an urban scrapyard the two halves of his personality fight it out. Clark Kent, representing all that is pure within him, falls onto a conveyor belt, knocked silly by the unkempt superhero.
Deidre asks, “Why are they both on the screen at the same time?”
Adams explains split personality.
“That’s stupid,” Deidre says.
At home, she helps him peel shrimp. Toby, with exaggerated kindness, offers to mix him a Scotch-and-soda.
“Where’d you learn to mix drinks?” Adams asks.