Blood on Black Tie’s shirt, an artful splatter that looks just like one of Julie’s paintings, she’s embarrassed by all her work but she singles that one out for scorn, a silly attempt to be Jackson Pollack, she calls it, I don’t care that it’s derivative, I appreciate the form, the bright colors, the passion in the wild swings of her brush—
I break the front legs off my chair and lunge into Black Tie and knock him to the floor and head-butt him over and over; his nose breaks, his eye socket breaks, I’m going to do this until everything breaks, until both our heads merge into one mass of bone fragments and pulp—
He stabs the power cord into the base of my skull and this time I feel it. True pain, up close and intimate, bursting out from the core of my brain and crackling through my eyes and teeth. I have tumbled off my balcony and into the muddy streets, and the locals are swarming over me with clubs and knives and fists, hissing, Welcome, foreigner. Is it everything you hoped?
I see Julie high above me as I writhe on the floor. Warm drops of her blood fall on my face like tropical rain, and behind her agony, I see sadness. I see grief. I see our tender little dream receding into blackness.
FACES DRIFT PAST ME as I float through my delirium. I see the pitchmen, their grins gone, their expressions slack, communicating with each other through small gestures and occasional grunted vocalizations. I see Julie being carried away by a man in a beige jacket. I call out from somewhere in the darkness and grasp around frantically, trying to find my body in all these suffocating shadows. I succeed in jerking my limbs and emitting a faint groan, and the man in the beige jacket turns around. At the end of my blurry tunnel of vision, I see the face of an old friend.
Perry’s eyes are troubled and he shakes his head as if to say, Don’t panic. It’ll be okay. And for some reason, I believe him. I stop thrashing. I watch the ghost of the man I killed carry away the body of the woman we both love, and I sink back into the shadows.
? ? ?
“Can you hear me . . . look up . . .”
A soft, smoky voice, imperfect in pitch but rich in timbre.
“The clouds are lifting . . . the window’s open . . . time to grow a pair of wings . . .”
The tune is familiar. The words, doubly so. Lines from a film merged with melody from a memory. A girl in a field. A man reaching out to her from miles away.
“Look up . . . look up . . .”
I open my eyes and look up. Julie smiles down at me. My head is resting on her lap and she is stroking my hair with her right hand. Her left hand lies limp on her knee, wrapped in bloody gauze.
“Lazy boy,” she murmurs. “You’ve been getting a lot of sleep lately. Feel refreshed?”
I drag myself upright and then collapse against her shoulder as my head pops like a water balloon, gushing agony into every corner of my body. My brain. That lump of boiled hamburger that I’ve protected for so long, the only part I ever considered worth the effort. How can it possibly be functioning through pain like this?
“I guess that’s a ‘no,’?” Julie says. She runs her fingers through my hair again, gently massaging my scalp. It helps.
We are sitting on a tile floor against a tile wall in a dark, sour-smelling room. The only light comes from a flickering bulb in the hall outside, leaking into our cell through the door’s barred window. We’re in jail. A couple of young deviants caught tearing up the town. Drinking. Smoking. Heavy petting at the drive-in.
“Are you . . . okay?” I manage to croak as I crawl back into my body.
She chuckles. “What’s left of me is. Our hosts were kind enough to stitch up the stump, which I guess means they’re not planning to kill me yet. Hooray.” Her fingers trace around the burn on the back of my skull. “What about you?”
I pull myself upright and stare at nothing, waiting for the damage report. My body feels raw, dried out, like all my joints and muscles have been lightly seared. Waves of nausea wash over me, followed by an undertow of feverish heat. And of course, my head. The steady throb of blood pounding against constricted vessels, squeezing against my sinuses, crushing my eyes in their sockets.
“Just a little hungover,” I mumble.
She smiles bitterly. “Wild night.”
We are silent for a moment. Will there ever be a funeral? Will there be a day to stop and acknowledge the cutting of Lawrence Rosso’s thread? Or will he be swept up with the rest of the day’s tragedies and dumped into the wastebasket of the new world, where death is not a headline but a weather report?
Julie stands up and paces slowly around the room. In the flickers of light through the door I see a row of sinks, a row of toilet stalls. Our jail is a restroom. Julie stops in front of the shattered mirror and moves from side to side, examining herself in its facets. A puffy eye here. A split lip there. Blue-brown burns everywhere. “Looking good, Julie,” she mutters. “A very good year for Cabernet.”
I notice she has a slight limp. “Your leg?” I say.