I tell her I don’t know. I tell her that whatever she saw happened a long time ago and that she’s okay now, that Jimi’s okay now. I say, “I’m so sorry I put you through that.”
Vauxhall kisses me.
“Where is Jimi?”
I look around the house, my eyes darting. I want so badly to kick Jimi’s ass right now. I want so badly to just smash him into a thousand tiny specks. Just mash him down into the ground, where he’ll never touch Vauxhall again. Where he’ll never even see her again. My temples are pounding with adrenaline.
“He left,” she says.
“Where?”
“I don’t know.” Then she says, “Nothing happened.”
“What do you mean nothing happened?”
Vaux, through these tear garden eyes, says, “After you and I were together. You know, after what happened last night, it all changed. Have you had a concussion yet today?”
“No,” I say. “How come no one remembers I quit?”
Vauxhall says, “The two of us coming together was like what happens when an unmovable object meets an irresistible force. Both get changed, though not on the outside. I didn’t need to sleep with Jimi to see his memories. No high.”
“What?”
“No high. No Buzz. Whole time I was there I was thinking about you. Needing you. And as soon as I was leaving, as soon as I said good-bye, I felt so free. I felt so unburdened, so light. Like what you feel after a massage. It was just being totally relaxed.” Then her face changes, her expression dips, and Vauxhall says, “Don’t go back to Grandpa Razor. You don’t need to go to him, you can change things without him.”
“What did you see?”
“The two of them are plotting. Grandpa Razor told Jimi at the diner that he would unravel what they’ve been working on for years if he wasn’t careful. He said it was a process. He said that Jimi couldn’t go soft now, that despite what happens next he couldn’t try and stop it.”
“Why was Jimi so mad?”
Vauxhall tells me that whatever this thing is, Jimi isn’t as into it now. She tells me that Jimi is getting cold feet and that he doesn’t want it nearly as badly as he used to. She says, “He wasn’t being his usual asshole self. He was worried about you.”
“Did you find out what they’re planning? Couldn’t you read back further, see that in his memory? Get the rest of it?”
Vaux shakes her head. “It was like he knew why I was there. Like he was blocking the rest of it. Almost, it was like he was letting me see just enough.”
“I have to see Grandpa Razor. I have to go.”
“But it’s a trap, Ade. They want to hurt you.”
“I’ll be fine.”
For the first time ever I notice a twitch in my left cheek. It’s a flutter like a flap on your heart makes. Something just under my skin waving. I put my hand up to stop it and press down on it, but it vibrates under my fingers, trapped there. I turn to Vauxhall and ask her if she can see it. She says, “Yeah. Kind of cute.”
We kiss and fall back into each other on the couch.
Me on top of her, me kissing her ears and the nape of her neck and the place where the two wishbones come together on her chest, she giggles and then, sitting up, pulling me up with her, says, “I forgot something.”
I sit back. Try to stop the twitch again.
“It’s crazy,” Vauxhall says, “but I think Jimi has your mom tattooed on his left arm. And I think he has, yeah, he totally does, he has a dragonfly as well.”
Pushing at the tremble in my cheek, I say, “I just hope this stops soon.”
CHAPTER TEN
ONE
Dear Dad-
No one ever gets letters anymore, so I’m kind of proud of the fact that I don’t really use e-mail. That I actually take the time to write out letters to people.
Lately, it’s been experts. Everyone from scientists to black magicians. What I’ve been asking them is this: Why can I do what I do? And sometimes: What can I do to change the future? You’d be amazed at the responses I’ve gotten. But what you wouldn’t be amazed by is the fact that most of the people I write to take me at face value. Most of them are more than happy to talk to me even if they think I’m totally bonkers.
I want to tell you a story: I read about this guy who lived something like eighty years ago. He was German or maybe Austrian and he was a farmer. A really simple dude. He was also mentally ill and tried to assault a girl. That got him put in jail and then, eventually, he was put in an asylum. This simple farmer guy, he starts writing in prison. It’s collages and hand-made paper, and he’s writing these long stories about another world. He’s writing these stories about people in this other world and he just never stops. Writing, writing, writing. And then drawing. All these little illustrations cramming every corner of the pages. Not a single inch that’s not filled in with tiny pictures of birds and people and buildings. The stories that he writes about this other world, they’re very basic. Just descriptions of the place, of the habits of the people, of the religion, the army, the navy. And the interesting thing is that the more he writes, the more this guy, the farmer, becomes part of the story. At first he’s like the king of this world, but soon he becomes the pope and after something like thirty years of being locked up in the asylum, just writing and drawing in his notebooks, this guy, he becomes the God of his imaginary world. When the man dies and they clean out his tiny room, this one tiny room where he spent most of his life, they find just stacks and stacks of these journals. This whole history of another world so detailed there are even reams of tax information. What’s amazing, what I want you to get from this, is that even though this poor bastard was locked up in one room his whole life, had only one view of the world, he was able to escape to a place where he had complete control. This guy with nothing became a God.
What this guy did was not limit himself.
What this guy did was to say fuck it to the boundaries and embrace the one thing he really owned: himself.
That dude died as happy as anyone. As content as anyone.
I don’t really know why I want to tell you that story, but that guy reminds me of you sometimes. Not that you’re schizoid, just that you’re trapped in a room with one view. You need a way out, but can’t see the door that’s right there inside you.
Love,
Ade
TWO
As expected, Dr. Borgo is not at all down.
Grandpa Razor’s got it set up like this: A bedsheet’s laid out over most of the massive table at the center of his sleazy penthouse apartment and there is an IV-drip thing standing, waiting. There are syringes and there are little glass bottles labeled with things like FLUNITRAZEPAM and ZOLPIDEM.
Fact is: This place looks like a mad scientist’s laboratory.
Dr. Borgo is really not happy about any of it.
“None of this is kosher, Ade,” he says, picking up one of the little glass bottles and turning it over in the light. He shakes his head. “None of it.”
Getting Borgo to come here wasn’t easy.
I stopped by his office unannounced and kind of barged in on one of his sessions. He was sitting in his leather chair, legs crossed, looking very professional like a psychiatrist in a movie, and talking to a redheaded fat woman about how bad her marriage was. When I busted in, Borgo jumped up and waved a finger at me to leave. I said, “Sorry, Doc, but we need to talk now.”
He excused himself and pushed me into his other office, the little one just off his bigger one. First thing I told him was how I’d gone clean. I told him that I felt like I’d just woken up in a new body and I thanked him. And then I said, “But…”