“Are you the lawyer?” I said to her.
“Do I look like a fucking lawyer to you?”
She stepped close to me. To me, being carried as I was with my head thrown back, she was upside down. With swift, precise movements, she took out a hypodermic needle and a small vial. I struggled, but there was nothing to be done—the men held me tight while she filled the needle and jabbed it into a vein in the side of my neck. My vision swayed. They dropped me into the trunk of the car.
“Welcome to the Hard Four,” said one of the voices, gruff and full of laughter, while the world slipped away from me. “It don’t get a lot better.”
3.
When the world and I found each other again I was swimming through some kind of pink-hued southern sea. I was a gone goose. I was flying, but I was underground, too. I was under the city of Indianapolis, back in Jackdaw’s miserable tunnel, surrounded by dripping clay walls, by darkness and illness and cold. I was in Bell’s Farm; I was in the shed buried underneath the earth, a Franklin’s black government boots just visible through the slit, and I had done something, but what had I done? And I was also at the Capital City Crossroads Hotel, in the basement, where the pool and the gym were, and I was on that planet that Castle used to murmur in my ear, the planet called the future.
I got up, and I fell down. First onto my knees, and then, after a moment’s consideration, the rest of the way, down onto my back. I felt something alien on my thigh and looked down and it was my dick, flopped over like a scrap of rope. I was bare-ass naked, which was hilarious, and some people were laughing, so I went ahead and laughed, too. My voice was a creepy giggle, unfamiliar to me, so I stopped.
“Get back up on the chair now,” said a woman’s voice, stern but not unkind. A little tremor of humor in the voice. “Go on. Come on.”
I obeyed instructions as best I could. First I put my forearms onto the seat of the chair, then I heaved myself up and twisted myself around. I had to stop halfway through and get a couple breaths in me, paused with my ass in the air, gulping the smell of basement—what the hell basement was I in?—and hearing more laughter swimming all around the corners of my brain.
The jab and the sting. That vial, that stubby little pot full of poison. Someone caught me with a shot of something. Whatever it was had me all cooked up for sure. I was out on the ice—I was out on the dance floor no question.
“Siddown, honey,” said the voice, then the face that belonged to it came into focus—it was the woman from the square there, the one who had poked me. The orange head wrap was gone: her hair was short dreadlocks, a bristle of corks. She was crouching now in front of me. She had cagey eyes and ruby lips and her skin was smooth. She lifted a red bath towel that had fallen off my lap and pooled at my feet. It must have been covering my nakedness while I dozed in the chair—I lifted it up and covered myself up again.
“Now, listen,” I began.
“Shush, man. You’re in no state.”
“Ah, he all right,” called someone else, a man, from the far side of the room, and someone else said, “He’s just fine,” and then a third voice, a woman’s voice: “Fine and dandy,” and then all the voices were laughing. Not me, not this time. “Now, look,” I said, and the woman told me to shush again, firmly, and I shushed again. The kitchen was crowded with people. A kitchen! I was in a kitchen, in a basement, unfinished and unfancy. One of the men was sitting on a counter, swinging his legs. Another was leaning against a refrigerator, with a girl wrapped up in his arms like they were old-time sweethearts.
Everybody was in black. Everybody was wearing overalls, with a logo at the breast. Everybody was either barefoot or in sandals.
There was music playing. It had taken a while to reach me, but now I could hear it, and it was like sugar. Horns. Trumpets. Saxophones? And drums: snares and cymbals. It was fast and sweet, and it rolled around the room. I tasted that music. It was like hard candy.
“Sorry about the violence out in the square,” said the woman with the dreads. “Two black folks slipping in a car together is a conspiracy. Couple black boys beating the shit out of another one, that ain’t nothing. That nobody cares about. Black folks scrapping, cops ain’t looking. Patrol, neither. They turning away.”
“Turning away?” said the man on the counter. “C’mon, Ada. Placing bets, more like.”
“Yeah,” said Ada. She reached forward, touched the side of my head, and I winced. My head hurt. “But anyway. It’s gotta look real. So. Sorry ’bout that.”
“So okay,” I said. Blinking my eyes and trying to get this lady to come into focus. “Are you the lawyer?”
“Damn. You all business, huh?”
“Are you?”