“The soul is connected to the body in four different ways: as a fetus in his mother’s womb.”
“Ah …”
“After birth.”
“Mmm …”
“When a person is asleep.”
“That’s three …”
“And …”
“And …?” Tibor could hear the rustle of money exchanging hands.
“And on the Day of Resurrection, soon to come, insha’allah, after the Caliph of all Islam reveals himself.”
“But tell me, Mister Jed-dah,” Rache went on, “in case I missed something. If I’m not mistaken, at this moment, you aren’t being born or sleeping. And the Mahdi isn’t hanging around this joint. Am I right?”
“Yes,” the man said, with a glance over his right shoulder at Tibor. “That is correct.”
“So while the soul is AWOL, whaddya say we take a trip back into the VIP room and check out the body?”
Tibor continued to stare at the water. But he could tell that the man was standing, the man was walking.
“Let me just clear out the mop,” the Bartender said, and ran down the far end of the bar and out the back.
Tibor looked down the bar. Rache had locked her arm in Mr. Jeddah’s — these may have been the first V&Ts in his life — and was whispering something in his ear that Tibor was sure signaled the exchange of a few more hundred dollars.
And then Tibor saw the bag.
The man had left his bag on the bar, the plastic bag he had been cradling in his lap until College Girl came along and began her dance. And through the opening of the bag, Tibor could see a barrel, a handle, a trigger. Mr. Jeddah had a gun. Tibor thought of saying something — to the Bartender, to Rache, to Mr. Jeddah himself. But that would involve speaking.
He also thought about taking the gun.
He looked back at his water glass and up to the bottles of liquor ranged along the mirror at the back of the empty bar. He looked up into the mirror. And that’s when he heard the music change.
A guitar. An electric guitar, a low note, a slow trill, approaching from a distance, like a Ducati along the Lungotevere, or the first notes of “Foxey Lady.” As it grew closer, the guitar was joined by the treble tattoo of a light stick against a ride cymbal, tinsel and sparks. And then a pulse — not too fast, slower than a heart, but insistent, warming. An electric bass pushing rhythm into song. Tibor looked up into the mirror.
There were four of them, on the stage where Rache has been crossing and uncrossing her legs, four girls. The guitarist was a very young Charlotte Rampling starring in The Sound of Music—all dirndl and translucent eyes. The bass player was a female David Hemmings — Carnaby Street cream shirt open past her delicate cleavage. The drummer was knee socks down to the bass pedal and tartans past the snare — the kind of Japanese anime porn outfit that always made Tibor’s visits to Ottavia’s Scottish academy more interesting.
And then there was the bulletproof lead singer of the group, Ramboed to the nines, booted to the max, with a hat from a lost Ark big enough to disguise a meter-long plait of raven hair bound up in a double-helix with a jackknife and a bungee stick.
“Unimaginable …” she sang, or said, or said and sang in a way that sounded like Patti Smith cynicism. “More than imaginary. Unimaginable …”
ACROSS RIVER ROAD, IN THE FARMERS’ MARKET, LOUIZA SAW THE GIRL and something gave out inside her. Or maybe something gave out even before she saw the girl, something that made her just want to fold her knees and settle on the hard earth of the round barn. Louiza steadied herself by one of the six poles that held up the roof of the shed and focused her eyes on what she was certain had sent a wave, a field, a beam of particles, a message of some sort to her and caused her to lose balance. She saw the girl from her right side. The girl was in profile, short fair hair hanging straight down to her earlobes, cut in a saw-tooth fringe at the forehead. She was filling a paper bushel sack with apples. She was wearing linen in a canvas color, a long-sleeved smock over rope-colored moccasins, no jewelry, no makeup. The canvas, against the yellows and greens and spotted browns of the late summer apples, was almost mathematical in the way it divided what the girl was examining from what was behind. Louiza stared.
“Hello,” the girl said. Louiza said nothing, but continued to stare. “Hello,” the girl said again. Other people turned to look. This was Louiza’s cue that she was back in the real world and that she could safely speak without being taken for a madwoman. The Unimaginables had been playing louder in recent months. Vince came to her more and more frequently with problems to solve. Mr. MacPhearson spoke to Vince in a way that Louiza wasn’t supposed to hear. There had been an exponential rise in the chatter on the Internet, on mobile phones, and even hidden within the print of major newspapers. With the help of the Unimaginables, Louiza was taking the chatter from all these key sources and from a significant number of insignificant ones as well, and with her elegant method of dividing by zero, focusing the messages into a lyric that Dodo could sing in her crystalline voice. Only Louiza could hear Dodo, of course, since Dodo was Unimaginable. But the woman speaking to her now was very real.
“Hello,” Louiza said. “Do I know you?”
“That depends,” the girl said. “Have you ever been to England?”
England? Louiza thought. What an odd thing to ask.
“No, I guess not,” the girl said. She smiled. Imperfect teeth, Louiza noticed, but a perfect smile. “Do I know you?” the girl asked. She lowered her sunglasses — Louiza realized that the girl was wearing sunglasses, very large sunglasses — and looked at Louiza. Her eyebrows were straw, almost canvas-colored themselves, but her eyes were a pale blue that … yes, perhaps Louiza did know her. The accent. The girl was a foreigner like her, but not from one nation in particular, an equation with more than one solution.
Unimaginable, she thought. Was this girl one of her Unimaginables? Louiza had lived alone with her girl band of zero-dividers for so long that she was less than completely surprised to find one of them buying Granny Smiths at the Farmers’ Market on River Road. She tried to make sense of the girl’s pale blue eyes, match them with the appropriate electric instrument, match the sound of the girl’s voice with the Unas and Dodos of the Unimaginable world. But it wasn’t the name of a girl that came out of her mouth but, unbidden, the name of a city in which she had once experienced, or so she thought she remem bered, the unimaginable.
“Rome,” Louiza said. “I know you from Rome.”
Now it was the girl’s turn to stare. It didn’t bother Louiza. It had been years since she had a chance to look at anybody. The one photograph she had of her mother among the sugar beets on the farm in Norfolk had long since stopped looking back at her.
“I grew up in Rome,” the girl said, “on the Aventino.”
“Malory,” Louiza said. “Malory,” she repeated. “Do you know someone named Malory?”
“Lou, honey?”
“Malory?” the girl said. And suddenly something in the entire shape of the girl aligned itself into an equation that Louiza recognized.
“Lou?”
Louiza felt the grip on her arm. She closed her eyes and opened them again, hoping the nightmare wasn’t real. But it was Vince and the smell of his aftershave and the pitted hollows of his cheeks.
“You’ll excuse us,” Vince said to the girl, “we have to get home.”
“Please,” the girl said. “We were having a very nice conversation.”
“I’m sorry,” Vince said, with his military politeness that ended all conversation. “But my wife hasn’t been well, and we’re pressed for time.” And quickly the world turned and River Road was in front of Louiza and they were walking to the car.