“Yes, I know. It’s the form in which a deity visits Earth.”
“I am no deity. I am no avatar in that sense, but I have been for you — and others before you — something like an avatar. I am only human. Once long ago, I gave birth to a daughter, and later she gave birth to a little boy, and I am now for eternity a universal mother, a mother to love those who, like you, were unloved by their mothers on Earth. You are, young man, as fine a son as any mother could wish to have, and you need not be afraid of what will happen now.”
The silver bell rang one more time, and suddenly I felt as if I were the flower, being dismantled as it had been, pieces of myself falling away, showering away into a terrible darkness, until nothing remained of me. Nothing remained, and yet I was aware in the utterly lightless void.
Before me appeared a form in the void, and it was, of all things, a golden question mark. It might have been an inch high or a thousand miles from dot to upper curve. Because I had no body, I had no sense of perspective.
The question mark remained before me — or above me, or below me — long enough that I began to wonder if I was supposed to respond to it somehow. As I considered what to say, the question mark morphed into a golden exclamation point, like the one on the cell phone that I’d been given by Edie Fischer.
After a moment, the exclamation point exploded soundlessly into a rushing abundance of light. The black void vanished around me, and I found myself flying through a smooth blue realm of radiance with no detectable source, gliding as if on wings, though still I had no body. The blue gave way to the crystalline light of the Mojave, and suddenly I was standing in downtown Pico Mundo on a sun-drenched day. The jacaranda trees were in bloom, and birds were singing, and the air smelled clean and sweet.
I was dressed now in my customary attire: sneakers, blue jeans, and a white T-shirt. No bandage wrapped my left hand, and I bore no wounds.
The town lay in an unnatural quiet, the silence of cemeteries. No vehicles plied the streets. No pedestrians. No sign of a living soul. I felt that I must be alone, having returned to my hometown after all of humanity had been killed off, and a deep uneasiness overcame me.
I started walking, not certain where I should go. Within half a block, I heard hurried footsteps, heels clicking against a sidewalk in the preternatural silence. I couldn’t quite discern from which direction they approached.
Uncertain who or what might be rushing toward me, I halted.
A moment later, Lou Donatella turned the corner; he waved at me. He wasn’t dressed either as a bear cub or as he had been dressed when he burst into the fun house to save me. Like me, Lou wore sneakers, blue jeans, and a white T-shirt, though on his shirt were the words LITTLE IS BIG.
Still disoriented, I thought that I had returned to my role as a counselor for the lingering spirits who would not move on to the Other Side.
Then Lou said, “Hey, dude!”
If I could hear the dead, not just see them, I had to be dead, as well. But like the amaranth … dead and not dead.
Lou grabbed my hand and pumped it with both of his and said, “Big orientation meeting at the movie theater on the square this evening. Can’t wait for it. See you there, pal.” He hurried past me, engaged in some task I could not imagine. As I looked after him, he turned once and shook two fists in the air, and laughed, and said, “Isn’t this great?” before he continued on his way.
I watched him until he turned another corner, and gradually an understanding came to me. Or I wanted to believe that it was an understanding, a perception of truth, and not just a wild hope.
At a run, fast as I could go, I headed toward the house in which Stormy had rented an apartment. In this Pico Mundo, I could run much faster than in the old, and without tiring.
When eventually I turned a corner into the street where she had lived, I found the sidewalk opposite her apartment house lined with people whom I’d known. All of them were people who had died and lingered, who had finally crossed over with my help. An old school teacher of mine. A high-school friend who had died young. A young prostitute who had been shot to death at a place once called the Church of the Whispering Comet Topless Bar, Adult Bookstore, and Burger Heaven. There were dozens of them, scores, including Mr. Elvis Presley and Mr. Frank Sinatra. They were all dressed in sneakers and blue jeans and white T-shirts, both the men and women, but each of their outfits had a detail or two different from the others. This one wore his cuffs rolled. That one wore his sleeves rolled. This one sported an embroidered flower on her shirt.
They started waving when they saw me, and I was so excited to see them that I almost dashed across the street to shake their hands and hug them. But of all the people I have loved, there was one for whom my love had been most pure, and I could not stop until I knew for sure that Gypsy Mummy’s promise had been kept.
I raced up the steps to the front door of the house, the one that featured a large oval of leaded glass here as it did in the other Pico Mundo. She didn’t wait for me to go inside and knock at her apartment, but flung open the door and came into my arms on the stoop. I lifted her off her feet and turned in a circle with her, astonished, amazed, in a state of bliss that I thought I would never know again.
Stormy Llewellyn in sneakers and blue jeans and a white T-shirt, with pink military-style epaulets sewn on the shoulders. Beautiful Stormy whole and radiant and laughing down at me as I looked up into her face.
She said, “What took you so long, griddle boy?”
Before I could answer, she said, “Put me down, put me down, come on, I have to show you.”
When I put her down, she took me by the hand and led me through the front door, into the house, along the hallway, through the door to her apartment. The place was as it had been in the other Pico Mundo: the old floor lamps with silk shades and beaded fringes, the Stickley-style chairs with the contrasting Victorian footstools, the Maxfield Parrish prints and the carnival-glass vases.
She talked excitedly all the way along the hall and into the apartment: “What did I tell you, odd one? Boot camp! And what did I say followed boot camp? A life in service! And what did I say that life of service would be?”
“You said it would be a great adventure, greater than all the adventure-story writers in the history of the world could imagine. You said it would out-Tolkien Tolkien, and that after it comes the third and eternal life.”
“You did listen, after all,” she said. “Sometimes I wondered, griddle boy.”
She tore open a coat-closet door and took from it something like a crossbow, though it was a work of art, apparently made of silver and elegantly engraved from the stock to the stirrup.
She said excitedly, “No guns here, Oddie. No guns. I know you’ll like no guns. They wouldn’t be useful, anyway.”
She handed me as well a quiver of short arrows that were tipped in silver.
“No one here kills other people. That’s all over and done with, all those terrible things. No more of that. No one eats the animals, and the animals don’t eat us. Wait’ll you talk to one. To an animal, I mean. It’s the freakiest thing, but good freaky.”
From the closet she took a second quiver of short arrows, these tipped in gold, and handed it to me.
Bewildered, I said, “What is all this for?”
“It’s sort of like Purgatory here, but not stuffy and sorrowful, the way we always thought it would be. Atonement, oh, yeah, we’ve got atonement to do, buddy, you better believe it, but the way we do it is nothing like you’d expect. The true and hidden nature of the world is as true here as it was back where we came from, but here it’s not hidden.”
I put the crossbow on a nearby armchair, the quivers with it, and said, “But what are we at war with?”