Then slowly the fiery pricks of light began to die down, and I could see. The world around me was hazy and thin, but I could see. The world was becoming more and more solid, more and more color leaching into the walls and the floor beneath my feet.
Floor? I was sitting in Golden Gate Park, watching the noon sun sparkle on the bay, holding hands with a girl named Arizona. There shouldn’t be floor beneath my feet. Especially not floor with shag carpet. Or walls with flocked gold and green wallpaper becoming more solid around me. There shouldn’t be-I looked around in a panic. Where was Arizona? But there she was, right beside me, her thin fingers still gripping my thick ones.
“ Arizona? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said, her voice calm and even. There was none of the panic in her tone that I’d heard in my own. “It’ll come clear. It always does.”
“What does?” I turned slowly, not going so far that I had to let go of her hand. At the moment, she was my only connection to solidity.
We were in a hotel room. It looked and smelled as though there’d been a raucous party there. The air was thick, almost unbreathable with the sour scent of aged cigarette smoke and the sweet scent of whiskey. There was an unopened bottle of booze on the nightstand and one overturned on the floor just under the foot of the bed. Cigarette butts and potato chips overflowed from several ashtrays and from what looked like a large, shell shaped soapdish on one bedside table. On the floor, beside the almost empty bottle of whiskey, was a newspaper. I leaned over and picked it up. A Los Angeles newspaper, dated October 4, 1970.
“I don’t understand. Where are we? Is this some kind of joke? Did you have this made up at that shop over on Page?” But of course, a fake newspaper wouldn’t account for how I’d gotten here.
Arizona ’s lack of confusion and fear only made me more frantic. Up until that point, she’d seemed fluttery and ethereal, like a butterfly or a wispy cloud or some fey creature. Here, in this place that I couldn’t account for, she seemed solid as stone and as dangerous as rattlesnake backed into a corner.
“How did we get here?”
“I don’t know exactly. It just happens.” Arizona said. “It has something to do with this.” She caught the edges of her jacket and held it out from her hips.
The red jacket with its gold embroidery had seemed strangely familiar and strange from the moment I saw it. But that was some jacket if it could take me on a LSD trip without the LSD. “I don’t understand.”
“It’ll come clear.”
“Stop saying that! This doesn’t make sense. Did you drug me? Have I passed out? Is this a dream?” Would I wake up in a few minutes, annoyed that the alarm clock had gone off and that yet another boring, plodding day was beginning?
“We’ve traveled in time.”
“What?” That made even less sense, and now I was starting to get angry. I kept trying to remember if she’d touched my food. Or if I’d put my water down on the bench between us.
“I don’t know how it works. I just know it happens. And we’ll know what needs to be done. Once it comes clear.”
For some reason, I wanted the panic of my first few minutes back. It seemed like a solid, logical response. At the same time, it didn’t seem right, that a guy as big and broad as me should turn into a gibbering mess while a tiny woman stood by so coolly.
Arizona seemed to understand. She took my hands in hers, and it was only because her hands seemed so hot that I realized how cold my own were. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “I promise. It scared me, too, the first few times, but I got used to it.”
“How many times has this happened to you?”
“I don’t know. I quit counting after a while.”
“How long is ‘a while’?”
“I don’t know. Ever since I bought this jacket at a junk auction. A long time, I think.”
I circled the room. I stopped in front of the door and put my hand on the knob. The dull, tarnished gold of it was cold and solid in my palm. It gave me an idea.
I rushed over to the window and shoved the heavy curtains aside. The sliding glass door opened onto a dinky balcony that overlooked the street below. In the hotel parking lot right below was a mint Volkswagon van that I would have killed for in my youth. It had the finest psychedelic paint job I’d ever seen, even down to the giant peace sign on the front. And down the street, a yellow Corvair and a red Ford Mustang mixed in with a dozen huge, heavy period cars. So much for the theory that it was all just an elaborate joke. A newspaper could be faked, but an entire street of 1960s vehicles?
As I stepped back into the room, there was rattling and coughing behind a door that I assumed was a bathroom. A woman cursed softly under her breath. There was the sound of water running. More cursing, then the bathroom door opened.
I gasped, so loudly that the woman who strolled into the room should have heard me.
She looked exactly like Janis Joplin. The Janis Joplin I’d listened to long after my parents thought I was asleep. The Janis Joplin who epitomized everything I’d wanted in the depths of my unsolid soul when I was thirteen.
The woman walked past as though I weren’t even there. I put out my hand to touch her, and it was like touching a cloud. It was like on the television when someone touched a ghost. My hand went right through her shoulder.
The Janis lookalike didn’t even flinch. She just walked past and threw herself down on her stomach on the bed. The springs squeaked under her weight, then settled.
“What the hell!” There’s only so much even a rock-steady guy like me can take. I crossed the room in what seemed like only two giant strides and grabbed Arizona. Her shoulder was thin, but solid. “What the hell’s going on here? What kind of game is this?”
“No game.”
But my mind wouldn’t stop gibbering. It carried my tongue right along with it. “What’s going on? I want to know right now. What is this, some kind of set-up? And where did you find that woman? She looks just like Janis Joplin.” I knew about look-alikes, those people who do impersonations of celebrities. I’d seen a couple that could make you stop in your tracks, but this one… This one could have been Janis Joplin’s twin.
“She is Janis Joplin,” Arizona said, as matter of fact as if she’d been discussing next week’s menu. “I told you. We’ve moved through time. You’re connected to her somehow. That’s why we came here, to this time. This place.”
“I’m not connected to her. She died thirty years ago! Today.” I picked up the paper from the floor and shook it at Arizona. “She died on this day. When I was just a kid.”
Arizona nodded, but she wasn’t paying me any attention. She was watching the woman on the bed.
She had rolled over on her back and pulled a large cloth purse up off the floor. Propping the bag on her stomach, she dug into it, scratching around as if whatever she was looking for was eluding her. Things began to fall out of the bag, an ink pen, a wad of papers, keys.
The next thing she found was a cigarette pack. She ran her finger down in it, then shook it, as if there had to be just one more cigarette in it. When it stayed empty, she gave a sound of disgust and threw it into the overflowing ashtray on the nightstand. Then she sat up and pulled open the nightstand drawer and stuck her hand in. She found another empty cigarette pack. She cursed, eloquently and musically.
That’s when I knew, really knew, that this really was Janis Joplin. Because a lookalike might fake her pockmarked face, or her eyes, or the frizzy hair. But no one, no one, could sound like Janis. No one could sound like that, rough and sweet, gravel on satin.
Then she pulled something else out of the nightstand. A paper bag, brown and so new it sounded crisp. She slowly opened the bag and upended it. What toppled out made my breath freeze in my throat.