“What makes you say that?”
“If you and I were mere fantasy figments, we would not be up here, playing the part of nonparticipant watchers. We’d be down there, wallowing with the rest of the recently invented swine. To mangle Descartes a little, we observe, therefore we are.”
This statement was so far from anything that Jim might have expected that he was temporarily at a loss for a response. The stranger, for his part, seemed to have nothing to add, and the two of them sat quiet for a time while the bacchanal continued to howl and throb below them. Finally, Jim could contain his curiosity no longer regarding the familiar stranger’s identity. “I fear, sir, you have the advantage of me.”
This time the stranger didn’t bother to raise the brim of his hat. “You think so?”
“I do indeed. You would appear to know who I am, while I have no recollection of either your name or where we might have met. In fact, I’d be more than happy if you could tell me who I am. My own identity also appears to have escaped me somewhere in the mysterious transit that brought me here.”
The man chuckled and then coughed as a result of the unguarded laugh. “Are you saying that you want me to introduce you to yourself?”
“I suppose I am.”
“That’s some singular request, my friend.”
“But one that I need to make.”
The familiar stranger paused for a very long time, toying with Jim, perhaps, or pondering the ethics of reuniting an individual with his mislaid identity. Below them the orgy showed no signs of abating. The Debra Paget look-alike chained to the golden calf was now being forced to pull a train for a gang of burly Cro-Magnons with thick red hair all over their bodies. Finally the stranger made up his mind. “In that case, my friend, your name is Morrison . . . James Morrison.”
“James Morrison?”
“James Douglas Morrison, commonly known as Jim.”
“You’re telling me that I’m Jim Morrison?”
“That’s what you were calling yourself last time I saw you.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“Indeed I am not.”
“The Jim Morrison?”
“So you said. You claimed you were the Lizard King, whatever that might mean. You went on to boast that you could do anything.”
“I suppose I was drunk.”
“As a skunk. Indeed, a good deal drunker than you would appear to be right now.”
Jim nodded slowly and thoughtfully. This took some digesting. “No shit.”
“As I recall, you were inordinately proud that you had made something of a nuisance of yourself for a short while in the twentieth century.”
Jim was beginning to get the distinct impression that the stranger was making fun of both him and his disability. “I’m beginning to remember.”
In fact, a whole block of memory had abruptly tumbled back into place, memories of crowds and lights, fame and fortune and a myriad of women, of hashish and heroin and massive quantities of alcohol. Of flash and flamboyance offset by monstrous hungover depression and a constant dicing with the death that had ultimately become inevitable.
The familiar stranger took another pull on his flask. He also coughed again, but only a couple of times and without the previous painful violence. “Of course, you may not really be Morrison.”
Jim frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You know how it is.”
“No, I don’t.”
The stranger pushed back his hat. “That’s right. I was forgetting. You don’t have a memory.”
“I’m getting some memory back and it’s all Morrison.”
“Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?”
“It would?”
“We all indulge our fantasies, my friend. We strive for seamlessness.”
Jim was now totally confused. “We do?”
“It rather goes with the territory. In fact, it quickly becomes all the territory we’ve got.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. You lost your memory on the way to the orgy. You don’t remember the death trauma. You may have left it in the cab.”
“Left it in the cab?”
“A figure of speech.”
“Oh.”
“You really don’t remember, do you?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“And you certainly don’t remember the next stage, hanging cursed and discorporate, one of the million tiny, anonymous pods in the Great Double Helix.”
Jim shook his head. “Are you kidding me?”
The stranger scowled. “Why should I do that?”
Jim shrugged. “I don’t know.”
The stranger turned his head and looked directly at Jim for the first time. His eyes had changed from merely hard to downright dangerous. “You wouldn’t be about to suggest that I’m a damned liar, would you, sir? You wouldn’t think of suggesting some slanderous thing like that?”
Jim half-smiled. “Oh no. I’ve done some dumb shit, but nothing that dumb.”
The stranger nodded. “I’m glad to see that at least your animal cunning and instincts for self-preservation haven’t deserted you.”
For a while neither man spoke. The stranger tapped his right foot gently in time to the relentless drumming. Finally Jim decided that he should prompt the stranger to go on with his story. “You were saying . . .
The tapping foot stopped. “I was saying what?”
“I was a discorporate pod hanging in the Great Double Helix.”
The stranger nodded. “Indeed you were. We all are directly after death. And some of us like it so much we pay repeated visits, just to start again.”
“So then what happened?”
“You began to find that you had the capacity to make this stage of the Afterlife practically anything you wanted it to be.”
“I did?”
“Damn right you did. The pods dream.”
“The pods dream?” The drumming or the wine sloshing in his stomach, or maybe the ongoing confusion, was starting to give Jim a headache.
“The pods dream and find that their dreams might become their reality. The pods think and thoughts become things. A few, the really unadaptable, go the disembodied route, hanging around waiting for a seance to happen or spooking out and haunting some of their lifeside mortal hangouts. Those of a more Hindu mind-set take the Canal and get busy reincarnating themselves as kings or cockroaches, entirely according to their level of earthly self-esteem.”
“And the rest of us?”
The stranger unscrewed the cap on his flask. “The rest of us? Indeed, Jim Morrison, what of the rest of us? The rest of us create an environment out of our previous realities and fantasies.”
“You mean that, after death, there are people who take on the identities of the famous and notorious?”
“Why the hell not? Maybe on Earth you were some sorry, no-class, turd-shoveling creature of insignificance, but you don’t want to go damned from here to eternity like that. Oh dear me, no. What happens is, after a couple of incalculable timeless aeons hanging in the Helix, you realize that you can be Alexander the Great or Catherine de Medicis or the Old Whore of Babylon if you so wish. And so you wish and, presto, that’s exactly what you become. That’s what you are until maybe you think better of it and transcend.”
Jim frowned. “But surely you must retain some turd-shoveling memories?”
“Believe me, friend, they fade like a dream with morning in this wonderful new postmortem reality.” The stranger suddenly grinned. “Hell, I’m not even sure that I’m really who I claim to be.”
“And who might that be?”
Again the stranger turned and stared at Jim. “My name, sir, is John Henry Holliday, although many people call me Doc.”
He slowly extended a thin, rather feminine hand. Jim grasped it, noting that it was as cold as that of corpse, which, of course, technically it was. “So you’re Doc Holliday.”
“Indeed I am. To the best of my knowledge and belief.”
“I’m proud to meet you.”
“And so you should be, boy.”