by Mick Farren
The dog bared its teeth at Jim in what amounted to a snarl. “Fuck you. I’ll go someplace where the drunks are a bit more hospitable.”
For a moment, Jim thought the dog was about to bite him and he wondered how the hell he should deal with that. Could you actually punch out a dog? Then the dog started to walk away. Jim realized he’d probably made an error in good manners. He called after the dog. “Hey, wait up. You can have the last of the booze.”
The dog turned and looked at him with an expression of utter canine contempt. “Keep your fucking booze. I got friends, if you know what I mean.” And with that ambiguous parting shot, it trotted off in the direction of the cantina.
Jim watched as the dog vanished inside the cantina. He half expected it to reemerge a few moments later, followed by an entire pack of talking dogs intent on ripping him to shreds in canine retribution for the disrespect that he had afforded one of their number. Although Jim had never actually witnessed or even heard a firsthand account of such an occurrence, a rumor did exist in the Afterlife that, should you be torn apart by dogs, blown up, or otherwise have your quasi-corporate body fragmented into multiple pieces, you were in a lot of trouble. The essential core of one’s being, the part that some called the soul, would almost certainly return to the pod; that wasn’t the problem. The real problem was that the other bits might actually attempt to reconstitute themselves with often grotesque and monstrous results, and even come looking for you.
He struggled to his feet and stood waiting, but when, after a reasonable passage of time, no vengeful dog crew snarled from the cantina, Jim sat back down again and resumed his previous indolence. Long Time Robert Moore had started in on another tune, and Jim simply relaxed, closed his eyes, and let the sound wash over him.
If I wake tomorrow
I ain’t guessing where I’ll be
Maybe in some other time
Maybe in misery
Jim’s eyes remained closed, until a second voice roused him. Someone else seemed bent on breaking in on his precious internal privacy. He looked up and discovered a bulky man wearing a dashiki, a riot of red gold and green, with his hair puffballed out in a vast Afro. The man was standing over him, grinning down with a mouthful of jewel-encrusted teeth that put Long Time Robert Moore’s lone diamond to diminutive shame. “I’m Saladeen.”
Jim nodded. “Saladeen?”
“Right?”
Jim found it hard to drag his eyes away from the gem-filled bridgework, but he extended a tentative hand. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Saladeen grasped the offered hand, fortunately with no fancy ritual handshake. “You Jim Morrison, ain’t you?”
Jim tensed and slowly drew his legs up protectively, in readiness to flee or fight as circumstances might dictate. “I was last time I looked.”
“I saw you one time.”
Jim relaxed slightly. Apparently he didn’t owe Saladeen money and he hadn’t done anything terrible to his sister. He raised a neutral eyebrow. “You did?”
“I did. It was in Oakland in 1968. Of course, you didn’t see me. You was up on the bandstand posing in the spotlight, I was down in the crowd selling loose joints and nickel bags.”
“I hope you enjoyed the show.”
“I thought you were a crazy motherfucker.”
Jim decided to accept that as a compliment. He eased himself out of fight-or-flight mode and raised his bottle. “Well, thanks. I’d offer you a drink, but this bottle’s all but dead.”
Saladeen shook his head. “I’m okay for the moment. Besides, I’ve got my own euthanasia.” So saying, he pulled a fat, double-corona, three-paper reefer from the folds of his dashiki, and gestured to the sidewalk next to Jim. “You mind if I take the weight off? I ain’t invading your space or nothing, am I?”
Jim raised an invitational arm. “Help yourself, man. I got all the space I need.”
Saladeen lowered his bulk to the wooden sidewalk. “I see that crazy fucking Euclid was hustling you for drinks.”
Jim was puzzled. Had he missed something? “Euclid?”
“The dog you were talking to.”
“That’s Euclid?”
“That’s what he calls himself.”
“Euclid the mathematician?”
Saladeen lit the imposing joint by simply igniting his index finger. For a moment his Afro was so wreathed in smoke that the two were almost a single cloud. “Fuck no, Euclid the dog, man. Euclid the mathematician has to be out somewhere with Einstein and Stephen Hawking by now, helping run the universe.”
“He seemed kind of put out when the bottle started to run dry.”
“Euclid’s kinda short on good manners. Mostly folks let him slide, though, on account of he was executed and all.”
The conversation seemed to be making odd jumps and Jim attempted to slow things down enough for them to make at least minimal sense. “The dog was executed?”
“You think he was a dog in his mortal life?”
“No, but . . . ”
Saladeen passed Jim the joint. “He told you the electric chair in Parchman was banana-colored, am I right?”
Jim inhaled deeply and immediately felt a little solarized at the edges. “Yeah, that’s right. It was his opening line.”
“So how do you think he knew that?”
“I don’t question it. I was talking to a drunken, crazy-looking dog.”
Saladeen’s smile faded. “You got some kinda prejudice against dogs? You maybe think you’re better than a dog?”
Jim wasn’t going to go along with this one. He did his best to avoid conflicts, but the guy was going too far. He passed back the joint. “You may not believe this, but there are times when I really do think I’m better than a dog. I mean, you won’t ever see me catching Frisbees in my teeth.”
Again Jim tensed slightly in anticipation of a possible negative reaction. To his surprise, Saladeen merely laughed. “So you ain’t buying my line of bullshit, huh?”
Jim shook his head. “Not tonight.”
The gems in Saladeen’s teeth flashed in the lights from the cantina. “Just checking, if you know what I mean.”
Inside, Long Time Robert Moore was still rocking the joint.
If I wake tomorrow
I ain’t guessing where I’ll be
Saladeen glanced at Jim. “Cat sings like a motherfucker, don’t he?”
Jim nodded. “He surely does.”
“I don’t figure that his real name’s no Robert Moore.”
“No?”
“You just think about who he sounds like.”
Jim thought about this, but he didn’t feel that any answer was required right there and then. Particularly as Saladeen had already turned the discussion back to the subject of the black dog. “If you’d met Euclid back in the world, back when he was a human, it’s likely you’d still have thought you were better than him.”
“Yeah?”
Saladeen nodded solemnly. “Oh yeah.”
“Low?”
“Real low.”
“How low?”
“Low motherfucker. A piece of sorry-assed white trash that went by the name of Wayne Stanley Caxton. Shot three folks dead in a fucked-up, thirty-five-dollar armed robbery at a corner grocery in Tunica, Mississippi. I figure it was no loss to the world when they fried him. Some of the shit must’ve gotten through to him, though. If he come out of the pod as a dog, motherfucker must have developed some sense of shame.”
“You think so?”
“Lot of folks here got themselves executed. Doc’s real good about letting them settle in his area. Figure it’s because he came close enough to getting hung himself a couple of times. When you get yourself executed, man, you hit the pod feeling about as lowdown and abject as it’s possible to get. A lot of the worst of them just wraith out and become haunts and night creepers. Particularly the serial killers and sex butchers. By the time you make it to the priest and governor and the thirteen steps to the Great Divide, you’re thinking that you don’t go
t any other option. The man got the system set up so you be feeling like an all-time fucking wretch when they strap you in the chair or the gas chamber or onto the gurney for the lethal jolt. Think about it. You spend years on death row. Eight, nine, ten years, man. Twisting and turning, appealing and petitioning, with everyone telling you that you’ve sunk so low you no longer deserve to live. So, when you land in the Great Double Helix and all them dreams come to you in the pod, they ain’t about you going into the Afterlife as King of the fucking World, I can tell you.”
“You’d know about that, bro?”
“Is that a discreet way of asking me if I was fried myself?”
Jim kept a perfectly straight face. “About as discreet as I could put it.”
“Well, the answer is no. I didn’t go to the chair or the gas chamber or the lethal injection, or even a Utah firing squad or a French guillotine. Me, I was shot by a fucking cop. A small-town, red-necked, Coors-beer, pig son of a bitch who thought he’d pulled over Eldridge Cleaver or some shit. November tenth, 1972, Barstow, California at nine-seventeen in the evening. Just trying to get myself the fuck away from L.A.”
“I guess that didn’t make you feel so good, either.”
“I’m telling you, man. I came out of that pod as mean as hell. After a while, though, when I saw how things were, I started figuring that I was probably lucky.”
“How did you figure that?”
“I never had to trip on no death row contemplation, bro. Or no terminal cancer ward, for that matter. And for those mercies I was profoundly grateful, you know what I’m saying? If you gotta go at the hands of the man, you best make it fast and furious.”
The joint was now down to a roach; Saladeen nipped off the hot coal with a callused thumbnail and ate what remained. “That’s maybe why Doc lets them hole up here. He didn’t go no fast and furious. He did his own share of twisting and turning on them TB blues before he passed over. Fast and furious be the only route.”
Jim nodded. “I can see that.”
“Lee Oswald, man. That’s the only way to go. You’re walking through the door into that parking garage, man. Nothing on your mind except how the fuck are you going to get out of this deep shit and then BAM! Jack Ruby with his hat on and you gone before you even know it, homes. No ten years of lawyers and thinking about it.”
After that, Jim found himself at a stoned loss for words. There was really nothing to say, and for long minutes the two men sat in silence until Saladeen spoke again. “He was here for a while, you know?”
“Who was?”
“Lee Oswald.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“I swear. A wandering soul wandering through. He was calling himself Harvey Hydell, and he’d taken on the physical form of Leon Trotsky, but most everyone knew. And those that didn’t figured it out in time.”
“Leon Trotsky? Are you jerking me around?”
Saladeen looked angry. “Leon fucking Trotsky. Leader of the motherfucker Red Army, purged by Stalin, assassinated 1940, Mexico City. What’s the matter, jerkoff? You think I don’t know what Leon Trotsky look like? You think I’m stupid or something?”
Jim held up a hand. “Just slow down here, okay? Don’t get so fucking hair-trigger on me. I was just thinking what a weird choice it was to look like Leon Trotsky. I mean, those fucking glasses and the beard and the sticking-up hair. Jesus Christ.”
Saladeen shrugged. “I guess the motherfucker wasn’t aiming for handsome. You know what I mean? Being a paradox wrapped in an enigma got to be some burden to bear. Can’t leave you too much time to be doing handsome, yo?”
After Saladeen’s sudden flash of temper, Jim thoroughly expected him to get up and take his leave after this statement, but the big man surprised Jim by remaining exactly where he was. He didn’t speak for a while and then he grinned sheepishly. “Listen, I—”
Jim shook his head. “No big thing.”
Saladeen turned away, staring off down the street and across the desert. “I guess I still ain’t gotten over being mad at—” He abruptly stopped and his back stiffened. “Uh-oh.”
Jim quickly turned. “What?”
“Uh-oh.”
This second uh-oh was one of the least encouraging uh-ohs that Jim ever remembered hearing. Saladeen continued to peer out into the desert. “I think we may have a problem yonder.”
Jim looked where he was looking. A bright blue-white light was zigzagging across the desert, laid low to the ground but, as far as Jim could tell, making for the town. Jim glanced at Saladeen. “What is that?”
Saladeen ignored him as he watched the light. It seemed to be coming nearer. He cursed slowly under his breath. “Shee-it.”
Jim was starting to become a little alarmed. “So what is it?”
Saladeen scowled. “It could be anything. There’s always lights buzzing about in the desert. Could just be random leak-through. Or it could be a harbinger.”
“A harbinger of what?”
Saladeen’s scowled deepened. “That’s always the tricky part with harbingers.”
The hard, rocky, and already uneven ground of Golgotha was now so littered with human skulls and bones that it was all but impossible to walk without crunching them underfoot. Semple’s high heels constantly threatened to twist out from under her, and she was beginning to profoundly regret that she had insisted that the meeting be held in this accursed place. To deliberately irritate Aimee, Semple had chosen a suit in guardsman red, an eighties-style Dynasty-retro number with a short and very tight skirt and a flounced jacket with enormous shoulders. The ensemble was completed by matching pillbox hat and veil, and the already-mentioned shoes with their impractical heels. Aimee, on the other hand, had dressed in blue for their meeting, pumping her image of innocence and purity on this occasion with shades of the Virgin Mary. She even had a faint rainbow halo hovering above her head. Aimee definitely seemed to be in the process of making the transition from the loyally devout to the independently divine; plus the simple fact of having been organized enough to arrive first allowed her to establish her high ground and spare herself the need to stumble over the strewn bones in front of an audience. In this respect, Semple had definitely been aced out in the current round of the struggle.
Prior to the complete separation of herself and Aimee, the fiction had always been that the horror landscape of Golgotha was a creation of Semple’s. She was the dark half. Who else could bring into being such a vivid tableau of desolation, suffering, and mortal misery? Semple, however, had repeatedly denied this. She had no memory of doing any such thing. Certainly, the necessary evil lurked in her heart, but the grisly brutality of Golgotha, with its multiple crucifixions and its stark, wind-scorched terrain, just wasn’t Semple’s style. Golgotha was primitive, stinking, and foul, and her signature wasn’t on any part of it.
After a long time, Aimee had all but managed to convince her that she must have brought the ghastly location into being quite unconsciously, in a dream or when she was occupied with something else. Aimee had reasoned that it must be the product of a deeply buried nastiness from the lower murk of Semple’s tainted psyche. It was only after the separation had become absolute, and Golgotha had not only remained but also extended itself, that the truth had finally to be faced. Golgotha had nothing to do with Semple. It had grown and continued to grow from some flaw of corruption in Aimee’s soul. Semple might be the dark half, but Aimee wasn’t without her own secret reservoirs of shadow. From Semple’s perspective, the only disturbing factor in the revelation was that, if Aimee wasn’t as pristine and perfect as she pretended, it might also indicate that Semple herself wasn’t all bad. At some point in the future, an unanticipated inner virtue might rise up and betray her at the worst possible moment.
Once the truth was out, Semple had taken every opportunity to remind Aimee of the embarrassing fact that Golgotha was entirely hers. That was why Semple had insisted that they meet there, but now it looked as if instead of Semple rubbing Aimee’s nose in the wart
on her psyche, she was about to twist, distastrously, one or both of her own ankles. Semple’s scarlet alligator spike crunched down on a partial human rib cage and she stumbled badly. She had to take three quick steps sideways to avoid falling, while, to her total chagrin, Aimee watched with an amused smile and the crew of nuns that flanked her hid their faces in the wimples of their white habits and tittered behind their hands.
“Are you drunk, sibling dear?”
Semple regained her balance and glared at her sister. “No, I’m not drunk. It’s becoming impossible to walk in this place. Couldn’t you have someone clean it up? Or at least clear some paths through the bones?”
“Perhaps it’s the extreme impracticality of your footwear?”
This remark drew a fresh burst of smothered sniggering from the nuns, and Semple wished that she had the time to create a dozen or so Mongol tribesmen or Russian soldiers from World War II. They would make short work of those bitches. “If you have to have this accursed place, you could at least make some effort to maintain it. If they aren’t cleared out soon, the damned bones will start piling up in drifts. Where do you think you are? Pol Pot’s Cambodia?”
Aimee glanced at one of the nuns. “Make a note, my dear. The Place of Skulls needs to be tidied up.”
The nun nodded and produced a small notebook and silver pencil to take down the memo. Semple had heard that both the retinue of nuns and also the gaggle of women dressed in torn and filthy sackcloth, the ones with the wild hair and mad staring eyes, who clustered at the foot of the crosses watching the agonies of the gasping, groaning victims with ugly relish, had previously worked as prostitutes in the notorious ectosector of the degenerate ex-dentist and hired killer called John Holliday. They were, however, a recent addition to Aimee’s human menagerie, arriving well after Semple had gone her own way, so she could not be completely sure of the story’s veracity.
Aimee turned her attention back to Semple. “Why don’t you come closer, my dear?”
Semple shook her head. “I think I’ll stay right here.” Another attempt to stumble across the field of dry bones would only risk further humiliation and even injury.