Cochran belatedly noticed that Angelica had brought a glass of something with her from the kitchen, tequila probably, and he watched her take a solid gulp of it now. “I think,” she went on, ‘that you were standing on the pavement below the building he fell from—I think he partly landed on you, which is why you were in the hospital with broken bones. And it was almost certainly a sunny day, because you seem to have identified him with the sun, hence your dream of the sun falling out of the sky onto you, and hence too your no doubt stress-triggered hysterical sunburn and constricted pupils. Conversion disorders, we call that class of physical symptoms.”
Angelica leaned forward—but her head was now over one of the drip-catching pots, and the next drop spattered on her scalp. She leaned back again on the couch. “That much is orthodox—Angelica Anthem Elizalde the doctor talking. Now it’s Bruja Angelica, del ‘Testículos del León’: I think that in the instant before his body died, when you were both lying there on the sidewalk or whatever, he managed to look into your eyes, and then he…jumped across the gap, threw his soul into your two-year-old body.” She was frowning deeply, staring at the liquor in her glass. “So at the tender age of two you lost your psychic virginity, in what must have been a traumatic violation of your self. I doubt that your home life in the hippie cult-commune was real conducive to mental health, but this virtual rape by your own father was undoubtedly the event that triggered your multiplicity.”
“I’m still here,” said Plumtree cautiously. “Valorie hasn’t made me lose time. So this must not be bad news.”
“We-ell,” said Angelica, raising her eyebrows, “the news is that your father is discorporate, but he’s in you; like one of those flanged wedges they use to split logs into several pieces. And he’s alive, he’s not a ghost; he never did die, never did experience the psychic truncation of death. He is, though, almost certainly the person that killed Scott Crane.”
“My father is alive,” said Plumtree, clearly tasting the thought. “I didn’t let him die! I did catch him—save him!”
And he’s Flibbertigibbet, thought Cochran nervously. Don’t lose sight of that, Janis.
A jangling metallic screech at the back door made Cochran jump and almost shout; Spider Joe was coming back inside, and the long, stiff wires that projected from his belt were scraping paint chips from the doorframe. “Goddammit,” the blind old man was muttering. Once through the narrow doorway he plodded across the floor, as Mavranos stepped out of his way and the antennae bunched and snagged the carpet and whipped through the air, and finally he sat down heavily on the floor beside the couch. Perhaps self-consciously, he groped around until he found Angelica’s deck of Loteria cards, and began shuffling the frail cards in his brown-spotted hands.
Angelica turned back to Plumtree. “Do you know what those lines were that you quoted a few minutes ago?” she asked Plumtree sharply. “A list of defenses, all provisional and makeshift-frail—’Upon my back, to defend my belly,’ and so forth?”
“Don’t say any more,” said Plumtree hastily, “please. No, I don’t even recall quoting anything.”
“Well, they happen to be from Troilus and Cressida” Angelica said, “a Shakespeare play that isn’t considered one of his good ones, mainly because it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. But some spiritualists, mediums brujas y magos—the real ones—are very aware of the play.”
“What’s it about?” asked Cochran—in a strained voice for it had been at the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas that he had married Nina Gestin Leon—his beloved dead Nina—and had next morning had his first debilitating hallucination of the big, masked man.
Angelica sighed and finished her drink. “Only a few people know what I’m about to tell you,” she said. “See, Shakespeare didn’t write the play for the general public—its only intended performance was for a small, sorcerously hip audience in London in 1603—and in the published version he had to add four or five lines to the end of the first scene, tacked on after the rhyming couplet triat originally ended it, in order to take away the real point of the play—which is that Troilus didn’t go out and fight, but got his wound at home—fatally, by his own hand. Hardly anybody knows, anymore, that it’s really a play about ghosts.”
She glanced at Plumtree, with what might have been sympathy. “I’ll have to reread it, but it takes place during the Trojan War you know? like in Homer?—and it’s about a Trojan girl, Cressida, who is being prepared to be a vehicle for the ghost of her dead father. The Greeks who are besieging the city have got hold of the ghost, and they want to use it against the Trojans, but they’ve got to get the ghost into a living body that’s both compatible with it and not a virgin, psychically. It’s a dirty-pool move, like using biological warfare, and some of the Greeks such as Ulysses don’t approve of the tactic; the Greek soldiers are suffering disorientation from the powerful ghost’s proximity, and they’re using masking measures—’emulation,’ Ulysses calls it—to insulate themselves. So anyway, a traitor spiritualist in Troy is talking Cressida into having sex with the ghost of her dead boyfriend, Troilus, who near-decapitated himself with his sword before the action starts. In the play it’s never outright stated that Troilus is dead, a suicide ghost, but his very name should have been a clue to the theater-going public, really—in Homer’s Iliad, the Troilus character is dead long before this point in the story, though Homer doesn’t say he killed himself out of unrequited love of Cressida, as Shakespeare secretly has it. Anyway, a trade is set up—the clueless Trojans agree to turn over Cressida in exchange for some VIP prisoner-of-war Trojan, and the spiritualist manages to get Cressida into bed with Troilus’s ghost just barely before she’s got to leave the city. And, of course, the Greek scheme works: Troy falls, the noble prince Hector is killed. Though,” she added, visibly restraining herself from glancing toward the kitchen doorway, “Apollo and Aphrodite preserved Hector’s body from corruption.”
Mavranos was still holding the revolver. He looked across the room at Plumtree and asked, “What was your plan for reviving Scott Crane?”
She shivered under Cochran’s arm and muttered, “In the name of the Father, the Sun, the Holy Ghost.” The lights flickered; then she squinted at Mavranos. “Okay, sorry—what did you say?”
“I asked you how you planned to restore Crane to life.”
A time for hard questions.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I believed a living king would be able to restore him. A king in a living body. I knew he was a, a magic guy, and I figured he knew how to do shit like that. So I wanted to find the Flying Nun’s—Crane’s—presently disembodied spirit, and let him take my body, so he’ll be occupying a living body—this one—and he’ll be able to do the magical trick, whatever it involves. I know how to…open myself up, ‘wide unclasp the table of my thoughts,’ step aside and let another personality take control of my body—I do it a hundred times a day. And he wouldn’t be compromising himself by violating my spiritual virginity—I’m a regular Grand Central Station for personalities passing through this little head. So far they’ve all been homegrown, as far as I know, but I’m confident that any…psychic hymen!…is long gone.”