“Turn here,” Julie says suddenly, as if we’re driving a car.
We duck into an especially unsavory alleyway, the smell of rancid oil and far worse assaulting the old nostrils.
“Do you have to throw up?”
“No, no!” She points her finger. “There!”
Then I see the neon sign, way at the end of the alley. A pink champagne glass, tilted on an angle, emits golden bubbles, rising and popping.
The vibration is very strong. I want to hold back, just wait a minute and think, but before the words get uttered, Julie has disappeared down the dark passageway and into the bar.
I hesitate, knowing I’m about to plunge back into something. First Barnett, now whatever. This is what I’ve been striving for: to go back into the other realm, but this time be in control.
What else do you expect to gain from accruing power, except the chance to exert it? Once, when I was studying karate, Aunt Edith pointed out: Prepare yourself to defend yourself and you will find yourself in a position that needs defending.
If you make yourself strong, doesn’t that mean you’ll have a heavy load to carry?
At the doorway, my eyes blink: the bistro is very dark inside. The only light comes from a few scattered neon signs and objects on platforms. They look like… well, they are, in fact, holograms.
The nearest one is entrancing. Inside a lucite rectangle is a plaster arm, attired in romantic-heroine fashion: velvet sleeve and trailing lace cuff. The hand presents a candle recently blown out—the wick is black. But the arm is positioned in front of a mirror covering the back wall of lucite. The mirror reflects the arm, the sleeve, the upright candle, and the dancing flame of the hologram. In the mirror, the lively laser mirage is merrily burning.
“Take a load off,” Julie suggests.
Her voice startles me, so intense is the experience of the fantastical candle.
“Fresh gimlet waiting.” She’s seated at a cozy table right next to the bar.
“Give me a minute. I need to walk around and take a look at these things.”
But the other dozen or so holograms are disappointing. Animals cavort in the jungle or naked bodies writhe, but it is the movement of the viewer, like a wiggle picture, that creates the surprising effect. The candle in the mirror will waver even when you are standing perfectly still because it is affected by your breathing: the merest vibration in your lungs gives the flame the illusion of life.
Not so the naked dancers, who seem, if you stand too still, like Keats’s urn: sadly frozen in the act of chase.
Tucked away in the farthest corner is the last hologram in the room: a man’s head. I lean over and his lips seem to be moving to the song playing on the jukebox—
Every breath you take… I’ll be watching you!
Cheekbones like slabs, straight black hair, and those clear clear brown eyes—
The face is Alonso’s.
Chapter Forty
“Julie, let’s go.”
“No way, José! We caught us some live mountain bass!”
Before there’s another chance to protest, two men hover over our table. Both are tidily dressed, chinos and pressed flannel shirts. The blond has a rather splendid mustache and the brunet has a neatly trimmed beard and a gold ring, very discreet, in one ear.
“Y’all aren’t local girls,” Blondie observes in a soft southern accent with a predatory undertone.
“Not girls, women!” Brownie admonishes.
“We’re from Lafayette.” Everything about Julie’s voice sounds like trouble.
“Not you!” Brownie protests in my direction.
“Yes, me.” A giant gulp of gimlet for protection.
“Not born there.”
“Okay, have it your way. Not born there.”
“I can always tell.” He smiles smugly.
“Bully for you.”
“Back, Hulko!” Julie commands. “Be nice.”
“Look who’s talking,” says Blondie.
“Hulko?” asks Brownie.
I look from one face to another, all the cute little games and whatnot, and here’s my thought: I do not want to be here!
On and on in my head:
I DO NOT WANT TO BE HERE!
I DO NOT WANT TO BE HERE!
I DO NOT WANT TO BE HERE!
I WANT TO BE THERE!
Then be there! A familiar voice seems to whisper in my ear.
The strangest thing happens: time simply stops. My companions are frozen before me like fish under glass. Yet my own body is capable of movement.
The music sustains itself on one note, indicative.
The entire bar has become a wax museum, atmosphere of the embalmed. Only the holograms undulate, as if the stasis of the room provides them with sudden life, sets them free.
A figure walks toward me, a man, stalking over the air as if it were water.
Alonso. Natch!
“What do you want?”
He stares at me, his eyes so clear you could see all the way to the Rio Grande.
“Why are you here?”
Again, the eyes, the expanding eyes big as Ferris wheels. They come to swallow you up.
“Can you help me?”
At that, he extends his palm, but it is as if his arm were a kind of accordion, the way it magically lengthens itself, then retracts, the body not having budged an inch.
My own palm opens up and this is what it holds: my long-lost juju.
I want to follow him. I want to ask him a thousand questions. I want to be with him forever, but already he is thinning out, turning into air, into memory, and even with all of my muscles pulling for power, I know that I will never, ever see him again.
Not in this world.
Chapter Forty-One
“What’ve you got there in your hand?”
The world cranks on again, the slow whine accelerating to normal noise, like a vacuum cleaner that’s been unplugged with the switch on, replugged.
My palm closes up quick. “Nothing.”
“Then why did you pick it up off the floor?”
Three pairs of eyes watch me curiously. “Pick it up off the floor?”
Julie sighs. “Yes! What’s wrong, you going sieve-brain on me? You leaned over, picked up something under the table, stared at it like it held your future, and now you tell me ‘nothing.’”
“Can we go to the women’s room?”
“I don’t have to go.”
“Julie!”
“Okay, okay. Isa comin, Massah.” She shuffles along behind me, hamming it up for the two guys now seated at our table.
We weave our way through the suddenly crowded bistro, and indeed it is an interesting clientele. The plaster hand and its hallucinated flame wink, imaginary as the unperceived-to-the-eye daily rotation of the earth.
The women’s room is maybe three square feet, and a staggering number of women, clowns piling out of Volkswagens, are crammed inside, slicking down their hair, spitting in their cake mascara, poofing talcum powder between their legs.
“You don’t want the brunet, you can have the blond.”
“I don’t want either one.”
“What was that on the floor, Mel Gibson’s telephone number?”
“There’s nothing wrong with those guys—”
“You can say that again!”
“Scuse me!” A fluffy redhead elbows me away from the sink.
“—But this isn’t me, not at all. Maybe you could stay and I could take a bus back. Or…”
“Look, what is it?” My friend gives me a look of sympathy. “If you’re this upset—”
“I am.”
“Then let’s split. No use ruining our lungs in here.”