That Jim had no idea of how exactly he had come to be under this particular volcano at the time in question had, after repeated draughts of the purple wine, pretty much ceased to bother him, in part because, as the crowd swayed around him, he was hallucinating to the point of near-blindness. At one point the effects of the wine had prompted the vaguest of recollections of being in the middle of a pitched battle in a high mountain pass between the Dionysians and the Apollonians. The Apollonians had come in with automatic weapons and air support, while the Dionysians had only coup sticks and ghost shirts. Needless to say, he had been on the side of the Dionysians in this unequal conflict, and his memory may have been the price that he paid for his ill-advised participation.
About the only thing of which he was sure was that he hadn’t created the orgy himself. His recall might be down, but he still knew his own personality, and he was confident that his tastes, although certainly of a Bacchanalian bent, didn’t run to such old-Hollywood, pornographic grandiosity. When he found himself at the base of the Golden Calf, caressing the exceptionally full and well-formed breasts of a naked and nameless young woman who resembled a very young Mamie Van Doren, he knew it was the work of some mysterious other. If he had been in control, he would never have allowed himself to be dragged from off her so early in the encounter.
Initially the young woman had been energetically eager, and in the mere space of their first minute together she had entirely ripped away his white linen shirt. Jim hadn’t been too concerned about the shirt, and when the woman had started unbuckling the belt of his ancient leather jeans, he had been quite prepared to swim with the prevailing sensual tide. The only thing that bothered him was that, when she spoke, he found himself unable to understand a word she was saying. At first he was alarmed that he had been deprived of language as well as memory. This theory hardly seemed to fly, though; he not only thought in English, but when he attempted to say anything, he formed English words and sentences despite the drunkenness of his condition.
The woman’s speech also seemed to lack the form and natural repetition of language; it was little more than a sequence of unstructured grunts and glottal cries. Jim’s next assumption was that she had consumed so much of the psychedelic wine that she was actually talking in tongues, but then he noticed that a similar glossolalia was being mouthed and uttered by most of those around him. Could it be that whoever had fashioned this lavish and ultimately impressive event, and possibly even brought Jim there from wherever he’d been, had problems with giving speech to his creations? Either that or he wanted to keep his celebrants in mindless noncommunication in his lush pit of Babel. It was while Jim pondered this question that he discovered that he who ponders can also lose. Two men, a bull-dyke lesbian, and a creature who could easily have been a Sasquatch had picked up the Van Doren replicant by her arms and legs and physically removed her, while the surrounding crowd brayed with laughter. Jim considered the action neither friendly nor sexually ethical, but he was too loaded to make an issue of it.
After that, he had wandered aimlessly through the chaos of the orgy, shirtless in his jeans and scuffed engineer boots, finding himself repeatedly splashed with wine and fondled by total strangers of both sexes and none. This licentious buffeting soon grew tiresome, and he looked around for some detached vantage point where he could observe the epic debauch without any compulsion to become part of the action. He noticed a hollow niche some twelve feet up on the rock wall, opposite the ledges occupied by the Ethiopian drummers and the youths serving the wine. A usable if rudimentary path led up to the niche and it seemed to be exactly the kind of spot to which he could happily withdraw. The only snag was another individual already had the same idea. A fully clothed man was sitting there, knees drawn up, shoulders against the rock face, and a wide-brimmed black hat pulled down so it concealed his face. He was the only fully clothed, not to say elaborately dressed, character in sight, which, in context, made him appear singularly perverse.
As Morrison observed the man who had beat him to the sanctuary, his rival pulled a silver one-pint flask from his coat and took a long drink. He then returned the flask to his pocket and almost immediately fell into a spasm of uncontrolled coughing. He struggled to extract a white lace handkerchief from another pocket and bring it to his mouth. When he finally withdrew the uncharacteristically dainty piece of linen, Jim could see, even from a distance, that it was stained with fresh red blood.
The man looked strangely familiar to Jim, although he was of course unable to put a name to him or locate him in any context. That someone in the Afterlife should be suffering from what appeared to be not only a terminal earthly disease but one that was classically Victorian was remarkable enough, and the man’s style was certainly in profound contrast to any of the other guests at the orgy. Where the rest were primitive or Old Testament, he was clearly a son of the nineteenth century. The cut of his black velvet frock coat and ornamental brocade vest could only be described as rakish, and the same applied to the long, old-fashioned cavalry boots that extended well above his knees. His soft floppy hat was turned down at one side in a decidedly dandified manner, and in Morrison’s estimation he had struck an almost-balance between western gunfighter and dissolute pre-Raphaelite aesthete. Jim wasn’t quite sure how he recognized these origins, but he was relieved to find that at least his cultural reference bank hadn’t completely gone off line.
While he was entertaining these thoughts, Jim also found himself being pawed at by a naked and grossly obese hermaphrodite who not only talked in tongues but did so with a repulsively sibilant lisp and a spray of drool. Jim quickly decided that enough was enough. He ducked away from the creature’s damply eager clutches and unappetizing, fish-belly flesh and began to negotiate the series of hand- and footholds that led up to the niche now occupied by the familiar stranger in the frock coat and soft hat. The hollow in the rock was large enough to accommodate three or four grown men; the worst the stranger could do, Jim reasoned, was scream at him to go away. As he approached the man, Jim called out, extending what he saw as a minimal social courtesy even if it wouldn’t be understood.
“Do you mind if I join you up there?”
The frock-coated stranger pushed back his hat, revealing a sickly pallid face with a dark drooping mustache, hard blue eyes, and the expression of one who is easily irritated. To Jim’s surprise, he answered not only in English but in a deceptively indolent drawl that might have had its origins in the old, and largely fictional, antebellum south. “May I assume that you’re looking for some peace and quiet and not some kind of homosexual liaison?”
Jim halted halfway between orgy and niche. Despite the lazy speech, the stranger’s overall demeanor was quite enough to warn him that this was not a character with whom to trifle. “I’m definitely looking for some peace and quiet.”
The stranger shrugged. “Then come ahead, young man. Come right ahead.”
As Jim reached the hollow in the rock, the stranger looked at him questioningly. “You seem, sir, not to be remembering me?”
Jim instantly adopted an improvised approximation of the stranger’s fanciful speech patterns. “I fear, sir, I have no memory at all.”
The man’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Considering the nature of our last encounter, I’m surprised that you would have forgotten it in such a hurry.”
Jim was quick to explain. “I mean I have no memory of anything. I appear to have materialized here with no recall beyond a sorry and confused blur.”
The man seemed content with the explanation, at least for the present. “That’s unfortunate.”
Jim sat down, allowing a civilized distance of almost two paces between them. The man seemed to accept this as a mark of well-mannered respect. “At least you and I are not the wanton creations of whoever started this thing.”