Jim groaned. “Oh fuck, I think I’m going to throw up.”
In truth, Jim was actually feeling somewhat better. As he confronted the fullness of what had recently happened to him, the pain noticeably mitigated, although it was still a matter of better as opposed to worse, rather than better moving through to good. He still didn’t feel absolutely ready to open his eyes and face the light, but then the voice cut in on his thoughts. “At least you’re back. For a while, we thought Moses had tossed you to the end of nowhere.”
The voice took Jim completely by surprise. It was, however, young and female, and it sounded friendly, with a faint trace of a Latina accent. Jim took a deep breath and very gingerly opened his eyes. At first he thought that the light would blind him, but after a few seconds he grew accustomed to it and was able to make out a woman’s face looking down at him with obvious amusement. The amusement increased as Jim struggled to sit up, and he altogether failed to share the joke. “I wish you’d tell me what you find so goddamned funny.”
“I guess this is what you have to expect if you go out honky-tonking with Doc Holliday.”
“I didn’t go out honky-tonking.”
The woman plainly didn’t believe him. “I heard the two of you were attending an orgy.”
Jim avoided her eyes. “Yeah, well, there was an orgy and we were there, but it wasn’t from choice, I can assure you.”
“That’s what they all say.”
Jim wearily started to protest. “It’s the truth.”
“I suppose the devil made you do it?”
“I think Moses made me do it.”
“That’s a new one.”
The woman was slim and pretty in a tough, no-nonsense way, with olive skin and straight glossy black hair that hung almost to her waist. She was dressed in a low-cut white cotton peasant dress trimmed with lace, but in total contrast she also wore a bandolier of cartridges, slung bandit-style across her shoulder. Her blue and white Cuban-heeled cowboy boots gave her a sexy, confident stance, and Jim started to pay more careful attention. Even in the Afterlife, an ex-human’s erotic radar still continued to function. “So what’s your name?”
“Donna Anna Maria Isabella Conchita Theresa Garcia, but you can call me Lola.”
“Lola?”
“That’s what Doc calls me. He has a very bad memory for names. I think it’s a side effect of the opium.”
Jim propped himself up on one elbow. “I’m Jim.”
“I know all about you, Jim Morrison.”
“You do?”
“You were famous long ago.”
“For playing the electric violin, Donna Anna Maria?”
She looked at him impassively. “Lola.”
Lola was carrying an engraved silver tray. Jim gestured to it. “What’s that?”
“Your breakfast.”
“It’s been a long time since I was offered a breakfast.”
Lola set the tray on the bed and Jim noticed that she wore a silver identity bracelet on her left wrist, but the name tag was blank. He leaned forward and inspected the tray’s contents. What part did food play in the Afterlife? Nostalgia for mortality? Part of a ritual? A hedonistic indulgence? A simple prop for an invented lifestyle? Eating was a piece of comfortable holdover behavior that had absolutely nothing to do with nourishment or survival, and Jim rarely bothered with it. His first look revealed, however, that this breakfast was a highly individual one. The bone china coffee set, the glass of orange juice, and the two slices of wheat toast were reasonably conventional. The collection of multicolored pills and capsules, the ornate flask of laudanum, the loaded opium pipe, the thin black cigar, and the four fingers of whiskey in a crystal shot glass that were also carefully arranged on the tray came, on the other hand, squarely out of left field. Jim looked at Lola questioningly and Lola shrugged. “We didn’t know what you wanted, so we gave you the same as Doc.”
Jim blinked at the spread that was now set before him. “Doc has all this for breakfast?”
Lola nodded as though it were really no big thing. “Every day when he’s in town.”
Jim picked up the glass and sniffed the whiskey. It was bourbon and, if his nose didn’t deceive him, at least twelve years old. “What are the pills?”
Again Lola shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I think Doc invents them. As long as he gets a jolt, he don’t care to sweat the pharmacological details.”
“Is Doc here?”
“He’s around.”
“And did Doc create you?”
Lola’s eyes flashed angrily. “What you say?”
“I asked if you were one of Doc’s creations.”
“You think that somebody made me? You think that I’m some irrelevant piece of set dressing?”
Jim knew that he had said the wrong thing. “I just asked. I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful.”
Lola leaned toward him and her expression was dangerous. “You listen to me, Mr. Jim Morrison, and you listen good. I ain’t nobody’s creation. I’m here because I want to be. You know what I’m saying, ese?”
Jim eased back in the bed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Just don’t do it again, okay?”
Jim nodded, looking as contrite as possible even with a headache, without compromising his devil-may-care charm and allure. “I surely won’t.”
Lola turned and walked out of the room, and Jim watched the sway of her retreating hips with singular appreciation. It would have been an understatement to say that she interested him. It might have been a side effect of his recent brush with what had been painfully close to a second death, but right at that moment she seemed about the best-looking woman he’d seen in a long time. Once she was gone, he pushed back the sheets and swung his legs over the side of the bed and tried sitting up. For a moment, he felt dizzy and disoriented, as though mind hadn’t quite locked into body and the two were operating out of phase. With an effort of concentration, he eased the two halves of himself together until he felt as though they were properly meshed, then he waited a moment and the dizziness passed. Deciding that he was now about as fully integrated as he was going to get, Jim slowly looked around the room.
The best word to describe the place was “incomplete.” It was obviously a bedroom, since it was dominated by the huge canopied bed on which Jim had been lately lying, and the stairs down which Lola had made her exit suggested that it was on an upper floor of some larger structure. What was less clear was why the place had no roof and only two and a half of what should have been four walls. In many respects, it resembled a film or stage set. It also hinted Dali, although no soft clocks flowed. Since he’d risen to a sitting position, Jim could see a blue and cloudless Technicolor sky beyond the canopy of the bed. One wall had been completely finished, right down to red velvet wallpaper, and even an ornate gilt mirror hung at approximately eye level. Another wall was missing entirely, and beyond the wooden framework that should have held the wall in place, Jim was treated to a view of flat, rust-colored desert, with mesas and hazy mountains in the distance. Instead of a third wall, a bannerlike bolt of what looked to be saffron-dyed silk had been hung in its place, and it undulated gently in a slight breeze. The silk extended beyond the level of the floor, and, for all Jim knew, might have reached all the way to the ground, wherever that was. Aside from the bed, the room contained little in the way of furniture. A pile of clothing rested on a plain, straight-backed chair, and an ornate Victorian washstand stood in front of the wall that wasn’t there.