What if she was a cop? What if this was a set-up? My appetite shriveled, and I put the salad down on the ground. “Is this a joke?” I looked around, trying to do it casually. I couldn’t see anybody who appeared to be watching us, but that was the point of surveillance, wasn’t it?
“No, it’s not a joke.” She held out her hand.
I glanced over my shoulder, then at a guy who was sitting nearby on the ground, leaning back against a tree.
I looked back at her. She hadn’t moved. She was just sitting there, her small hand extended, palm up. But she was doing that shimmering thing. One minute so transparent that she almost wasn’t visible, the next as solid as… well, not as solid as me. Few people were as solid as me.
It must be something about the area, about the way the bench was positioned against the sun and the water. There was something about her. Something about the way she was barely there, but so much more there than anyone else I’d ever met, that drew me like a magnet. I took her hand. And the world shifted.
It felt like-it felt like sparkling. Like sparkling should feel, if you could feel it. It felt as though I’d become one of those sparklers that all the kids played with on holidays. As if I were giving off sparks, showers of them, but they didn’t burn. I didn’t burn. I gave off sparks of multicolored light, but I didn’t diminish. I was still solid and stable.
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.