He was crouching in the deeper shadows under an iron stairway, and all he was doing was breathing deeply and listening to his own heartbeat, which for several minutes now had been alternating between scary rapid bursts and even scarier three-second dead stops. Like bad-reception images on a TV, every object he looked at seemed to have a faint twin half-overlapping it to one side, and he suspected that the rainbow-edged twins weren’t precisely identical to the actual objects; and the cold, oily air seemed to be shaking with big dialogues he couldn’t quite hear, like the faint voices you can catch on a turned-up stereo in the moments between tracks.
He wasn’t at all sure he was still entirely in the real, San Francisco Chinatown.
When he had first noticed the Chinese woman in the white hooded raincoat he had been standing out of the downpour under an awning in an alley called Street of Gamblers; and he had ducked through a touristy souvenir shop to evade her, hunching through aisles of woks and wisdom hats and plastic back-scratchers, and when he had pushed through the far door and stepped out into the rain again, he had sprinted right across the narrow neon-puddled street, between the idling, halted traffic, into the dark slot of this alley. He hadn’t looked back, for when he had caught the woman’s eye in the Street of Gamblers she had for one hallucinatory moment seemed to be the globular black silhouette that had showed up on the motel TV screen this morning in the instant after Arky had poured beer into the set; and he had guessed that, whoever she was, she had assumed a psychic posture that had made her compellingly identical to one of the wild archetypes.
He had hurried down this alley—jogging past inexplicable open-air racks of whole barbecued ducks, under ornate balconies and indecipherable banners and clotheslines crazily hung with dripping squid, and stared at by ancient women smoking clay pipes in open doorways—and he had skidded to a panting halt here when it had finally occurred to him that no real alley in San Francisco could stretch this far without crossing a street.
He hadn’t eaten anything since a few slices of delivery pizza late yesterday afternoon, and he had been wearing this now-wet flannel shirt for twenty-four hours. He was dizzy, and exhausted without being at all sleepy, and he knew by the aching fractures in his mind that something awful had happened this morning. Something besides industrial pollution and dead sparrows was coming down hard with this rain, and the cooked ducks and raw squids were, he thought, probably being exposed to it intentionally, for some eventual bad sacramental purpose.
He jumped in surprise—and a moment later,
“You caught me,” came a high, lilting voice from close by.
He looked up to his left, and there she was, smiling down at him where he crouched under the stairs.
He had been startled a moment before she had spoken. He was on bar-time again, experiencing events a moment before they actually happened. That meant that she, or somebody, was paying a magical sort of attention to him—but he had bleakly guessed that already.
Her face under the white plastic hood was younger than he had thought, and the faint aura he saw off to one side of her was rainbow-colored now, and was clearly just a reiteration of her real shape.
He noticed that her feet were bare on the wet stones, and that the long black hair that trailed across her chest between the lapels of her raincoat seemed to be clinging to bare skin, rather than to any clothing.
He hiked himself forward and stood up in what he now thought of as the duck-and-squid-basting rain; and he opened his mouth to say something, but she spoke first:
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
Kootie thought about that. “Shelter, I guess,” he said. “Food, rest.” He glanced fearfully up and down the alley, clenching his fists against another burst of rapid heartbeat. “Real streets,” he added breathlessly.
“Go to this place,” she told him, pulling a folded sheet of white paper out of the raincoat pocket and handing it to him. Her fingertips were as cold as the rain.
Then she had hurried past him and away, and the wings of her raincoat spread out wide in the rainy wind, so that she was a white triangle receding away with eerie speed between the close, dark walls.
Kootie unfolded the piece of paper, trying to shield it from the rain with one shaky hand. It was a poorly photocopied line drawing of a scowling Chinaman with tiny smudged images of ships and animals all over his shirt and trousers. In the bottom margin of the paper, ballpoint-ink numbers were arranged unevenly:
60
31 10, 78 53:
49 80, 86/100 90 91.
—12
Kootie looked after the vanished woman. He understood this code, but he wondered how she had known that he would. It was the Cuban charada china, a lottery and rebus system that had been brought to Havana by Chinese contract laborers in the mid-nineteenth century. Originally of thirty-six characters, it had been expanded during the twentieth century to include a hundred symbols.
This reproduction of the famous drawing was so poorly copied that not even the little images on the chino’s clothing, much less the tiny numbers beside each one, could be made out—but Kootie’s foster-mother Angelica had done so much divination work with the antique system that Kootie effortlessly remembered what picture each number traditionally referred to.
Now he tried to read the indicated images as a message, a letter to him, and after a few moments he had mentally arranged them into phrases, filling in gaps with words that seemed probable:
(On this day of) dark sun
Deer Big Fish, Bishop of (Thomas Edison’s) electric light:
(Look for a, you’ll find a) drunk physician (or physician for drunks), (at the) hotel (or convent) (where you saw the) big mirror and the old man, (by the) gemstone tortoise.
—Saintly woman (or prostitute)
How long, Kootie wondered, was she following me? Right around sunrise, when the dead sparrows fell out of the sky with the sour rain, I did see an old man propping up a big gilt-framed mirror against a brick wall and staring at me in the reflection. I think he was in front of a Chinese restaurant, though, not a hotel or a convent—though in fact this was right next to a shop called…Jade Galore, with a big jade tortoise in the display window. It had been near the Street of Gamblers…Washington and Stockton.
Even as he wondered how he might find his way back to the normal San Francisco streets, he heard the rippling throb of car tires on wet pavement; and when he stepped forward and looked to his left, he saw the muted colors of cars moving past across the alley from left to right. A real street!—ask and ye shall receive, he told himself.
He thought about the old man he’d seen with the mirror…and about the woman in the white raincoat.
Saintly woman (or prostitute).
Angelica would see danger in this invitation, spiritual peril even more than physical peril. Not everybody that uses magic is bad, she had told him more than once over the past two years, but it’s always bad for them—even if you’re masked and working for the good of others or in self defense, it coarsens and blunts your soul.
Kootie was trudging toward the cross-street ahead, not taking his eyes off the vision of the passing cars, but he was very aware of the paper crumpled in his hand. Angelica would expect him to run away from whatever it was that this letter offered—run to a Catholic church, or to the police, even; ideally, of course, she would expect him to run to her and Pete, if he could find them.