I blessed June, Stan, and Linwood.
And let them go.
“Remember coincidence and texture,” Alonso said. “Remember the strength of sex. Remember owl flew and The Nineteen Layers of the Soul. Remember the power of the ritual! You have to align your cells.”
Or anyway, I think he said all that. It was getting kind of misty, the difference between what he said and what I heard. And, like all the Sammy stuff, what was the difference anyway? If I thought I heard it, wasn’t that the same as hearing it?
And I did hear it.
“Okay,” Alonso said finally. “Take this. Don’t chew it or you’ll gag.”
He gave me some kind of plant, dried, but it had a squishy center.
Was this peyote? Or mushrooms? “God, it’s disgusting.”
“Just swallow.”
“How long does it take to come on?”
“We’ve got a long drive ahead of us,” he said. “By the time you get there, you’ll be somewhere else.”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
Alonso shrugged, his sunglasses in place. He seemed to have an extra layer hovering around the shape of his body. “You should have thought of that sooner.”
Chapter Thirty
We were driving across the endless flat of the swamp. The jeep, which he’d borrowed from a friend, had been a big mistake while we were on the interstate, but once we got to the small roads and then the dirt roads, it was clearly the only solution.
Twilight was lavender and pearl gray with pinky tongues backlighting gnarled old cypresses with dangling beards of dark moss. Very witchy stuff indeed.
I would go from being able to see the landscape clearly to not being able to see it at all. Those times, you could as easily be in Disneyland, only the ride was like through key moments of your life, both those that had been and those that might have been, providing that there was any difference. If De Quincey could only see me now!
For instance, sometimes I saw everybody still alive and we were all, including Deane, living out in the country in Arkansas. June had a horse. And it was okay, it might as well have been. Other times it was just me and Deane and we were traveling all over Europe together, dancing in nightclubs in Paris and London and Vienna, where the nighttime was truly black and everyone wore the finery of exotic birds.
Other times, I wasn’t there at all. These were the oddest instants: I was Deane, and Deane was doing all this stuff, hard to say what, and sometimes Sammy was there, and one time—this is the only one I remember clearly—they were snaked around each other out in a weird kind of forest, and his pecan-colored skin was giving life and blood to the pale pearl luster of hers. My eyes, her eyes, were locked on those ice-blue orbits.
I wanted to say, This is why I was born!
Only it wasn’t me, and I wasn’t there. Then I’d get lucid and turn toward Alonso. “How can you drive after taking this stuff?”
“I didn’t take any,” he answered.
“Oh.”
“You have someone you want to see. It doesn’t matter what I see.”
“You mean if I hadn’t taken your Indian medicine, then I wouldn’t—” But whatever I was going to say was lost. Instead, Sammy’s hand touched Deane’s bare thigh, and my body got spun off into a tunnel of pinky light. All skin and jasmine oil and wet mouths.
But if you’re there, where’s your body?
Finally, you’ve got to not care.
Then there was this sense of the Pure Perfect Other, only you couldn’t get to it, you had to go through something, things or beings, in between—
“The Òrìşà!” I exclaimed. But then they were gone.
“Right,” Alonso said, amused.
At that moment I knew he was amused because I was Alonso, too.
Eventually we stopped, and my mind cleared a little. The movement on the road had made a kind of connection with the movement in my skull, and that was pleasant, and yet the very fact of that connection was keeping something else from occurring. What? You could see a glimmer of what it was out of the corner of your eye: look directly, it was gone.
Whatever it was, you needed it.
Whatever it was, it was Other.
“Now,” said Alonso. His voice was low and I leaned close, almost spun off again by the warmth and smell of his body. “After we leave this jeep, I don’t care what happens, you don’t say a word. Not a sound, not a loud breath. You listening?”
“Aye, aye, skipper.”
“Pet, listen.” His impeccable cigar-store profile gleamed in the moonlight. “This is very, very serious. Probably, this is going to be the most serious moment of your life.”
I thought about the car wreck, but then I wouldn’t let myself.
“You don’t think you’re up to it, say the word. We turn around, go back to my place, fuck and eat oysters until I go out on the rig. Say the word.”
I wanted to say the word. I wanted to turn around and be done with it. Same time, for sure that was not going to happen. The only way was through.
“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
He waited a moment, as if listening to something very far away. “Okay. Now take off all your clothes.”
I started to say come again, but then seriousness mercifully got a hold on me. Shoulders squared, with sober thoughts, I solemnly divested myself.
“The juju goes too.”
No! my mind screamed. But it was like he said earlier—if I wasn’t going to trust him, I should have thought of that sooner. The juju was warmer than ever, and it left a cold circle around my neck when I took it off. “But you said Sammy made this….”
“The only chance you got, babe, you go naked as the day you were born. You’re not ready to play with their toys yet.”
It was like the rich man in the Bible and the needle’s eye.
Alonso slipped the juju into his pocket. He looked satisfied. “Now get me that book you keep, the one you wrote that stuff down in.”
This required more trust, and most of me wanted to resist. Once again, my only evidence that Deane existed, or the idea of Deane, or her magic, was being threatened. “You want it, don’t you?”
“Don’t you think I’ve earned it?”
My duffel was in the backseat. I rolled up the clothes I’d just been wearing and put them on the Dirty side of the bag. I took my journal out of the Clean side. “The Nineteen Layers of the Soul,” I said, forking the book over. “Maybe you can make some sense of it.”
“Maybe I don’t need to.”
Yet it was true. He’d earned it.
“And now put this on.” Alonso handed me a white garment that he pulled out of the glove compartment.
The robe was hooded and made of such a light, flimsy silk that you felt more naked with it on. “One more thing.”
He waited.
“Are you one of them? Are you going to give that book to Sammy?”
Alonso’s lips brushed my forehead. “I’ll be right beside you all the way. Until it’s time…”
Chapter Thirty-One
We walked for miles Indian-style through the swamp, wearing the handsewn moccasins Alonso provided for the occasion. Sometimes I was there, feet stepping lightly in the soft damp earth, and sometimes I was not-there. The light of the still-full moon helped us find our way, but I had to admit that the man appeared to know what he was doing.
Sometimes a structure, like a fibrous net of Tinkertoys or a geometrical spider, clung around his back and you knew that the decision to trust him had been the right one.
Or the only one.
And then we were there.
First you heard a kind of weird, eerie chant well up through the dense shrubbery and vines. Then you could see the flickering of light from some sort of fire.
Alonso put out a hand to stop me and then directed my body to a spot behind a clump of bushes. He took off his shirt and placed it on the ground and we both sat. The fuzzy suede was surprising against my bare butt, but then it felt good. In fact, I don’t think I’d ever felt quite so wonderful in my life! It was like everything I’d ever seen or done or wanted to was pushing me right against a cliff—the very edge of existence! Whoosh—and you were standing against a cliff and the view opened onto everything ever else, light and dark both, and you told yourself, Now or never, baby. Jump!