"It'll be too dark."
"No. They'll come up and light candles when the sungoes. Come and talk with me for a while. Tell me how my father died."
It took Tommy-Ray longer to reach the Mision de Santa Catrina than the woman he was racing against because of an incident along the route which, though minor, showed him a place in himself he would later come to know very well. In a small town south of Ensenada, stopping in the early evening to get something for his parched throat, he found himself in a bar that offered—for a mere ten bucks—access to an entertainment undreamed of in Palomo Grove. It was too tasty an offer to refuse. He put his money down, bought a beer, and was allowed entrance to a smoke-filled space which could only have been twice the size of his bedroom. There was an audience of maybe ten men, sprawled on creaking chairs. They were watching a woman having sex with a large black dog. He found nothing about the scene arousing. Neither, apparently, did the rest of the audience; at least not in the sexual sense. They leaned forward to watch the display with an excitement he didn't understand until the beer began to work on his wearied system, tunnelling his vision until the woman's face mesmerized him. She might once have been pretty, but her face, like her body, was wasted now, her arms showing plain proof of the addiction that had brought her so low. She teased the hound with the expertise of one who'd done this countless times before, then went on all fours before it. It sniffed, then lazily put itself to the task. Only once it had mounted her did Tommy-Ray realize what claim her expression had upon him, and, presumably, upon the others. She looked like somebody already dead. The thought was a door in his head opening on to a stinking yellow place; a wallowing place. He'd seen this look before, not just on the faces of girls in the skin mags, but on celebrities trapped by cameras. Sex-zombies, star-zombies; dead folks passing for living. When he plugged back into the scene in front of him the dog had found its rhythm, and was making at the girl with doggy lust, foam dripping from its mouth on her back; and this time—thinking of the girl as dead—it was sexy. The more excited the animal became the more excited he became and the more dead the woman looked to him, feeling the dog's dick in her and his eyes on her, until it became a race between him and the dog as to which was going to finish first.
The dog won, working itself up into a stabbing frenzy then stopping suddenly. On cue one of the men sitting in the front row stepped up and separated the pair, the animal instantly uninterested. Her partner led away, the woman was left center stage to gather up a scattering of clothes she'd presumably shed before Tommy-Ray had entered. She then exited through the same side door where the dog and its pimp had gone, her face the same slack mask it had been from the outset. There was apparently another part of the show to follow, because nobody vacated their seats. But Tommy-Ray had seen all he needed to see. He made his way back towards the door, pushing through a soft-bodied knot of newcomers, and out into the dusky bar.
It was only much later, when he was almost at the Mission, that he realized his pockets had been picked. There was no time to go back, he knew; nor indeed any purpose. The thief could have been any of the men who'd crowded his path as he'd left. Besides, it had been worth the lost dollars. He had found a new definition of death. Not even new. Simply his first and only.
The sun had long set by the time he drove up the hill towards the Mission, but as he began the ascent a distinct sense of deja vu crept over him. Was he seeing the place with the Jaff's eyes? Whether or not, the recognition proved useful. Knowing that Fletcher's agent had undoubtedly arrived ahead of him he decided to leave the car a little way down the hill and climb the rest of the way on foot so as not to alert her to his coming. Dark though it was, he didn't travel blind. His feet knew the way even though his memory didn't.
He'd come prepared for violence, should the occasion demand. The Jaff had provided him with a gun—courtesy of one of the many victims the Jaff had relieved of their terata— and the idea of using it was undoubtedly appealing. Now, after a climb which had made his chest ache, he was within sight of the Mission. The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.
His head tender with such thoughts, he trod through the withering blossoms to the Mission.
Raul's hut was fifty yards beyond the main building, a primitive structure in which two occupants were a crowd. He depended, he explained to Tesla, entirely on the generosity of the local people, who supplied him with food and clothing in return for his being caretaker of the Mission. Despite the poverty of his means he had been at pains to elevate the hut from a hovel. There were signs everywhere of a delicate sensibility at work. The squat candles on the table were seated in a ring of stones chosen for their smoothness; the blanket on the simple cot had been decorated with the feathers of sea-birds.
"I have one vice only," Raul said, once he'd set Tesla down in the single chair. "I have it from my father."
"What's that?"
"I smoke cigarettes. One a day. You'll share with me."
"I used to smoke," Tesla began, "but I don't any longer."
"Tonight you will," Raul said, leaving no room for dissension. "We'll smoke to toast my father."
He brought a hand-rolled cigarette from a small tin, along with matches. She watched his face as he went about the business of lighting it up. All that she'd found unnerving about him at first sight remained unnerving. His features were neither simian nor human, but the unhappiest of marriages between the two. And yet in every other respect—his speech, his manners, the way he was even now holding the cigarette between his long, dark fingers—he was so very civilized. The kind of man, indeed, mother might have wished her to marry, had he not been an ape.
"Fletcher hasn't gone, you know," he said to her, handing the cigarette across. She took it reluctantly, not particularly eager to put to her lips what had been between his. But he watched her, candle light flickering in his eyes, until she obliged, smiling with pleasure at her sharing with him. "He became something else, I'm sure," he went on. "Something other."
"I'll toast that," she said, taking another drag. Only now did it occur to her that perhaps the tobacco they smoked down here was a little more potent than in L.A.
"What's in this?" she said.
"Good stuff," he replied. "You like it?"
"They bring you dope as well?"
"They grow it themselves," Raul said in a matter-of-fact way.
"Good for them," she said, and claimed a third hit before handing it back to him. It was indeed strong stuff. Her mouth was already half way through a sentence her mind had no idea of how to finish before she knew she was even speaking.
"...this is the night I tell my kids about...except that I won't have any kids...well, my grandchildren then...I'll tell them when I sat with a man who used to be a monkey...you don't mind me telling you that do you? Only it's my first time...and we sat and we talked about his friend...and my friend...who used to be a man..."
"And when you tell them," Raul said, "what will you say about yourself?"
"About myself?"
"Where will you fit into the pattern? What are you going to become?"
She mused on this. "Do I have to become anything?" she asked eventually.
Raul passed the remnants of the cigarette back to her. "Everything is becoming. Sitting here, we're becoming."