My brother’s room was bare and empty, just as he had left it, the bed and dresser ready “in case I need to crash.” No lady with a ukulele hid in my office either. The plans usually strewn about the place were stacked neatly on the drafting table against the wall. Out of habit, I woke the computer from its sleep and the anthem rang and blue light filled the space around my desk. The hardware chugged and the software spun, and eventually all the file and program icons filled the screen. I opened the e-mail browser and was stunned to find the memory full. Impossible, I thought, but thousands of unopened messages crammed the inbox. I checked to see if Sita had written recently, but her address was missing from the list. It will take me weeks just to organize the mail into junk, delete, and read piles. The dates on the most recent messages are wrong, too, as if they had been sent from the future, but just thinking about how to fix all this gives me a headache.
Beneath the desk, the octopus of plugs and wires lurked in darkness. In the linen closet, towels and sheets kept order. The last possibility was the attic, but the door was shut as I had left it. She had disappeared completely, if she had existed at all in the first place. The faint strains of a jazz tune slipped under the bathroom door, and above that background noise, conversation rolled and pitched, someone told a joke and the rest laughed, the sound of people having fun. I could hear ice clinking in glasses, as though a cocktail party was going on, some scene out of the late ’50s or early ’60s, the old man in a tux or evening jacket, the women dolled up with bright red lips and lacquered hairdos. The very thought of a party cheered me, and I was pie-faced happy as I opened the door. Pointing straight back at me was the business end of a revolver. Holding the gun in my face was the seventh sister, deadly in a menacing little black dress. Behind the pistol, she wore a devilish grin, and behind her, the rest of the gang had turned their smiling faces to me. “C’mon in,” she said. “You’re the guest of honor.”
I found her oddly seductive, the woman with the revolver, though perhaps it was in equal part the danger of the little black dress. She waggled the barrel at me, and I obeyed her direction to squeeze into the room. We now numbered ten—the seven women, the old man, myself, and the boy. Boy, because in the time I had been away, the child seemed to have aged another few months. His baby fat was melting away to reveal a more angular facial structure, and when he smiled he had a full set of tiny sharp choppers.
While I was searching downstairs, the lady gunslinger must have snuck in from some hiding place, and the others had taken her in and included her in their usual high jinks. They were mugging for one another, winking their third eyes. Changes in hairstyles and clothes, and of course the moving tattoos. Another bit in the performance piece, or maybe it was all some elaborate game. Had I not been preoccupied with the thought of bullets, I would have inquired as to the meaning behind the cryptic symbols. Maybe they meant nothing. Maybe sometimes a slithering tattoo snake is just a snake; a cigar, Dr. Freud, is just a cigar; and a gun is just a gun. In any case, she held the power in her hand.
Through a variety of signals—a raised eyebrow, a curled upper lip, and quick glances back and forth between me and the gun—the old man sought to assure me that he had a plan to disarm the shooter, but I had no idea what role I was to play in the drama. My hands were up in the air and my reflexes are very slow. The very idea was entirely too dangerous, someone would most likely be shot, but I had no way of communicating my anxieties.
“Don’t try anything funny,” she said.
“I have no intention of trying anything,” I said, “funny or otherwise. Do you really need to do this?”
“As a matter of fact, very much so.”
“In front of the little kid? You’ll scar him for life.”
“Somebody pick up that kid,” she said. “And avert his eyes. No, on second thought, let him watch. It’ll be good for the boy to know what happens when you wrong a woman.”
I lowered my arms to half-mast. “Listen, sister, I never met you before tonight. What cause you got for saying I done you wrong?”
“You got time for a story?” She laughed at herself, and the irony spread through the group till all the women were giggling.
Caught in the spirit, even I chuckled. “I’ve got nothing but time, though I’d feel a little bit better if you would point that piece in another direction.”
She lowered the gat slowly, all the while keeping her gaze trained on me. “No monkey business, see.”
I was sorely tempted to make like an ape, but under the circumstances controlled the impulse. Without the gun in my face, I took a closer look at her. No doubt, the ukulele woman, now done up in her killer black dress, stockings, pumps, and a choker of pearls. Her bleached-blonde hair was arranged in a bouffant with a saucy little flip curl, and her reddened lips set off two rows of wicked white teeth. If the bullet didn’t work, she could bite. I wanted her to bite me. Like a pasha on a throne, the old man leaned back on the toilet seat. During my absence, he had acquired a red fez, now perched atop his silvery hair, which gave him an air of exotic intrigue while simultaneously making him slightly ridiculous. “Before you begin your story, Miss, may we have the pleasure and courtesy of an introduction?”
“Button your lip,” she told him. “One thing you should know straight off: she that’s got the gun calls the shots.”
“Oh, well played,” the old man said.