Apart
an excerpt

After the fire, I spent a lot of my time drunk. It made my vision hazy and my head pound, but it also took most of the sting out of my cracked ribs. It seemed to relax my labored breathing, too, and even made me go whole minutes without remembering the bullet hole in my hip or how it had gotten there. The labels on my prescription bottles all said something about “do not consume with alcohol,” and that was all the encouragement I needed to swallow the pills – my favorites were the ones that were the fat, false blue of clouds in a Crayola sky – with Jack Daniel’s straight from the bottle. It was like a half-remembered line from a movie, something about seeing a sign, “Keep off the grass,” and being unable to resist the lure of the forbidden, no matter how insignificant the offense. Petty criminal to the very end, me.

If I’d stopped to think about it, or been in any condition to do so, I would have had to admit I was more scared than hurt, and it was that cold knot of fear lodged at the center of my belly I was hiding from, really, rather than the lump of metal lodged in my hipbone. But I made damn sure I was in no shape to think.

I missed the better part of the winter, stoned and drunk, coming quite unwillingly to my senses when the cash and prescriptions ran dry. Nothing like the wake-up call of shuddering so hard you can’t stand up, uncertain if it’s withdrawal or just the cold. How “Trainspotting” of me, eh? I was a damn walking cliché.

The Groundhog and I staggered out of our holes at about the same time. Like “Puxatony Phil,” I had some “encouragement” from big men in thick coats. One morning – not sure what time it really was, just there was more light outside the building than my throbbing, bloodshot eye was prepared to interpret – I was hauled bodily out of the nicotine-stained shit-hole of a room I’d been renting, courtesy of a retired construction worker named “Lou.” He smelled like smoke and McDonald’s fries, a combination of odors that made me puke on his steel-toed boots. He deposited me, blinking, shuddering, and swearing, on a slush-covered curb. Without a word, Lou went back inside and locked the door. Guess he had gotten sick of waiting for my back rent. He pointedly did not throw my few things out with me. Guess he kept them, not that it was likely any of it added up to enough cash to buy him a drink – if it’d been worth a drink, I would’ve hocked the stuff myself.

I don’t remember if I saw my shadow. I do remember that the winter air hit my face like a slap. Things got blurry again, after that. I ended up in a state-run rehab. Not the happiest place. But there was food and it was warm and I didn’t know a soul. It was kinda nice, really. Yeah, I was that messed up.

By summer I was out and working in one of the crappier bars Downtown, washing dishes in the back. It wasn’t much but it paid for food plus a little something towards the tiny room I was staying in – formerly a storage closet – above Black Mambo.

Papa Juma, the owner of Black Mambo and local witchdoctor (among other things), had offered me the guest room at his place, but I didn’t feel fit for that much civilization, certainly not to be someone’s “guest.” The little spare room above the head shop was much more my speed. There was a cot, almost buried under layers of blankets and threadbare quilts; a rickety three-drawer dresser; a sliver of window, cut in half by a wall that had been put up at some point after the exterior of the building had been built; and a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling. It was only good for sleeping or sitting and staring at the dingy white walls with their myriad of spider-web-like cracks and subtle shadings from one tone of dirty white to another. It felt like a prison cell, and that’s what I wanted. That’s what I deserved, even if The Man hadn’t gotten around to putting me in the real thing.

Unlike a prison cell, there was a rickety brown door covered in cracking varnish and splatters of old paint, and I could open or close it whenever I felt the need. Mostly, I left it closed, not because I gave a damn about privacy, but because otherwise I felt how large the building was and it scared me. Everything seemed to echo and creek in that big empty space outside my door. So I kept the door closed, blocking out what I could of the world with that hunk of timber and varnish.

The whole building smelled of old incense, so that my room smelled like dust mixed with sandalwood and smoke. It was always chilly, no matter what. Soon after moving in, Papa Juma must have ducked in to check on my digs, because when I came back from my shift at the bar one evening, there was a Thermos of tea and a little altar set up on top of the dresser. I drank the tea and ignored the rest, just as I had ignored the Gideons’ Bible on top of the nightstand when I was in rehab, just like I’d ignored the plastic crucifix nailed to Lou’s wall. God, or gods, or whoever…we didn’t seem to be on friendly terms, or even speaking terms, at least not enough that I wanted to chew the fat.

It was early autumn before my brain really came back from that numb place where it had been hiding out, somewhere far out past the drugs and the booze and the fear, somewhere out of reach from the twelve-steps and the soapy water and the monthly check-ins with my pinch-faced case worker, “Gwen” of the polyester suit jackets and the Mary Kay catalogs. It’s like I’d spent that year as a zombie, breathing and eating and working and sleeping – sometimes, at least – but not actually alive or aware.

It started, suddenly, when I was putting something away in the battered dresser. Out of nowhere, I became painfully aware that all I had, all I owned was a couple of tee shirts, three pairs of white cotton panties, a pair of jeans, a pair of battered Converse shoes that had started life green but were now a sort of olive-orange mix where bleach water had spattered across them, a pair of dark glasses that pinched the bridge of my nose, and a wool pea coat that scratched at my skin like it was made of angry porcupines.

Up until that second, I hadn’t tallied my possessions or thought that I needed or wanted anything more since, well, it had been at least a year. I hadn’t even thought about a time when I did want or need things. Hell, I hadn’t read a book, had a piece of chocolate… I hadn’t so much as picked up a pen that whole time, ‘cept to sign my name when someone shoved a clipboard full of papers at me. Even then, I hadn’t signed my real name. Except for Papa Juma, not many people knew “Eurydice Nolan” was anything but a charcoal briquette the State had planted in some potter’s field. Certainly, no one had lost any sleep over finding out otherwise.

Around my neck, a fraying and discolored piece of waxed cord held my wedjat eye pendant, Poker’s license, and a key. I hadn’t noticed the necklace in so long, looking down and seeing it surprised me, even though it was right there, bumping against my sternum for a whole damn year. I hadn’t even let them take it off me in rehab. I had hazy, watercolor memories of biting someone when they tried. Good God, I’d bitten someone. Hard enough to draw blood, because the fragment of memory came with the sharp tang of coppery blood on my tongue. Tasted awful. Guess even strung out, I wasn’t a vampire.

I sat down heavily on the cot, took off my necklace and just stared at the three pendants. I stared like I’d never seen them before, like I’d never seen anything before. I ran my thumb over the surfaces, touching the smooth silver, the etched aluminum, the nicked brass, one by one, like I was blind. Suddenly, the textures of my clothes and my bedding, the smell of the incense and musty air, the sounds of the city, everything, it all just hit me and I sat there blinking like when Lou had thrown me out on the curb in the snow. Except this time, my head was clear. The slap in the face was inescapable this time.

First thing I did was cry until my face was hot and my limbs were cold and my belly was sore from the shuddering sobs and my eyeball felt like it had turned into a burning hot raisin in my head, all shriveled and used up. My newly cleared head throbbed in time to my heartbeat as I staggered down to the little bathroom in a corner of the back room on the first floor. I washed my face in the chilly water, and then I washed my whole head, finishing just as the water turned from pleasant to scalding. I looked at myself in the blurry mirror (or maybe the old mirror was fine and my eye was still blurry). I looked at the pasty, stringy, grey-tinged wreck with one blood-shot blue-grey eye on the right, a not-there eye on the left, the twice-broken nose, and a dripping mass of brownish hair that was halfway to turning into unintentional dreadlocks from neglect.

“Shit,” I told the thing in the mirror after I’d used my tee shirt to dry my face and hair. I looked like… “Shit.”

I tried to duck back into my numbness, but the jig was up. I was back, fully, inescapably back.

*****

I woke up, confused as hell and with a pounding headache, in a bed and a bedroom I didn’t recognize. Before I could kick up much of a fuss, though, there was a cool hand on my forehead and a vaguely familiar voice somewhere close on my blind side. It took two tries but I eventually managed to turn my head enough to bring a bleary eyeball to bear on what turned out to be a blonde figure somewhat resembling Mandi, Papa Juma’s lady friend.

“Hey there, Eury,” Mandi said as her hand petted my forehead, pushing my bangs back from my eye. If I’d been feeling ineloquent before…whenever that was… I wasn’t certain I could manage more than a grunt for Mandi. When I tried, it came out a bit like one of the whimpery whines my dog, Poker, used to make when he had a belly ache from eating too much stuffing out of one of his chew toys. Damn dog was always eating things like polyfill and plastic rather than, you know, kibble. I swear that dog was retarded. Recent events had led me to suspect the same of his owner.

Mandi said something or maybe asked me a question, which I missed in favor of working out which direction was up and how my limbs and I were supposed to interact with that funky “gravity” thing we’d been hearing so much about. She slipped a hand under my shoulders and gently heaved me upright with a practiced move. The world tilted crazily and the pounding in my head switched to double time. I think I managed an incoherent groan. Then, Mandi held a plastic cup to my lips, which brought at least a bit of the bedroom back into focus. I was dying of thirst, and would’ve jumped up and kissed Mandi for her clever kindness if I could have managed it. Instead, I drank the water she slowly poured into my mouth, having to focus more than usual to get my throat working and coax the water to go down the right pipe. She was really good at the whole thing. I vaguely remembered Papa Juma, no, “George,” as she called him, saying that she was a nurse.

Wait. Mandi was a nurse. Nurse, with a capital N. Nurse. Crap. Mandi, if she was worth even one of her little white shoes (all nurses have to wear ugly white shoes, right?), would probably know just by looking at me where I’d been spending my time and cash for the last year; and that was only assuming Papa Juma hadn’t already given her some sort of rundown of my less than illustrious recent past. Crap. She would then, no doubt, immediately determine that, considering how I’d spent the last year, I’d obviously brought whatever this latest illness was on myself…and probably deserved it. Richly deserved it, more like. And then she would tell George, no, Papa Juma. George. Whatever. Him. She’d tell him to be rid of me and I’d be back out on the curb, blinking and shivering, only this time I didn’t think I’d be able to do it. I didn’t think I’d get lucky enough to get scooped up by cops and then by a rehab facility with a bed to fill and even if I was, hadn’t I already used up my “second chance” allotment and… crap. What was going to happen to me and didn’t I deserve it, no matter what it was, anyway? In my head, I was already back on that million times damned curb, shivering in the snow and too damn strung out to even lay down and die properly. Just…crap.

I admit it. I started crying. I just couldn’t face all that, not again, not while my head was throbbing and I was so messed up that someone’s girlfriend was holding me up to drink tap water. Big fat hot tears slid down one side of my face and my whole body started shaking hard enough that some of the water splashed out from around the edges of the cup and down onto my chest and lap.

“Whoa… Oh, sweety. Shhhh, honey. Shhhh. It’s okay,” Mandi’s voice interrupted my downward spiraling inner monolog. I felt her take the cup away but her hand stayed at my back, holding me up. Her other hand dabbed at me with a towel, first my lap and chest, then finally my right cheek. I felt the bed shift as she sat down, her hip settling against my thigh. She pulled me forward and against her chest, guiding my head down to her shoulder as she hugged me.

It was all overwhelming, really. Completely overwhelming. There hadn’t been a lot of hugs recently, and here was Mandi, who I didn’t know terribly well and certainly hadn’t know at all back when things were actually going right or at least smoothly in my life, hugging me and rocking us back and forth gently. Were nurses even supposed to give hugs? I mean, when they were getting paid and everything, rather than just doing charity work? And, god, she was hugging me.

Her kindness made me cry harder. Sue me, I’m an idiot. Mandi seemed to take it in stride, though, stroking my back and speaking softly to me about everything being okay as I made a big wet spot where my eye was pressed against her shoulder. Everything was far from “okay,” but the reassurances helped, all the same. Even the thought that things might eventually be okay was rather a new concept and somewhat shiny and foreign to me, like a snow globe brought back from a foreign land, the little landscape inside both surreal and idealized but pleasant all the same. The land of “Everything is Okay” was somewhere you might want to some day go, even though you knew it wouldn’t ever live up to the image captured in plastic and floating glitter under that perfect little half-dome.

After a while, Mandi eased me back onto the pillow and wiped my soggy, hot face with a damp cloth. She smiled at me, too, though I must have looked like the Crypt Keeper.

“Try and get a little more sleep, honey. George and I are looking after you.” I tried to think of something to say or at least a question to ask that would make sense to either one of us. I drew a complete blank. There were things you were supposed to say to people who gave you water and let you sob all over their tastefully tailored shirts. But, it was like I didn’t even speak English any more, but no other language had stepped up to take its place, either. I surely hadn’t the energy to give her any lip about how she’d called me “honey.” I did the only thing I could do. I gave Mandi a miserable, watery smile and closed my eye. I did as she said and slept.

******

I dreamed of Papa Juma and Papa Legba and Raymond – in my dream, Ray was a tall, broad shouldered man rather than a gawky, growing punk, and on his shoulders was a pug dog’s face, but I knew it was Raymond all the same in the way that you just know things for no good reason in dreams – all dancing together like satyrs in the woods, holding hands and dancing wildly around a bonfire. Their heads were thrown back and their feet were never still. They looked like painted figures on Greek pottery, thrown up in stark shadow against the glowing light. And, it is true that they were nothing more than shadows against the firelight, but I knew who they were: Papa Juma in his whites and beads; Papa Legba with his cane – no, my cane – his cigar and his black dog; Raymond with his gleaming golden teeth, his dog-face, and baggy pants. As they danced, the three of them grew tall and distorted as the shadows of the silhouettes stretched across the grass towards me. Somewhere, someone was drumming and the three figures danced to the beat, lifting their legs and kicking at the darkness as they circled.

Another figure, tall and inky black despite being closer than the dancing trio, stood near me, laughing and clapping in counter-point to the drumming. I couldn’t see his face, but in silhouette, I could tell he was wearing a stately top hat and I caught the impression of tails on his coat. A tall, emaciated shadow man in formal dress, then. In the way of dreams, I just accepted this as fact. By the fire, Papa Juma, Raymond and Papa Legba danced and danced, circling the flames, but they always appeared to be in front of the light so that they remained in shadow. I tried to ask them how they could keep dancing like that, but they didn’t hear me. Instead, the fourth figure, the one in fancy dress was the only one who would speak to me.

Turning towards him so that the fire and the dancers were on my left – in the dream, I still had both eyes, so that my left was not my blind side, but rather a side – I addressed the question to him. The tall figure had a deep, rolling laugh that reminded me of that guy in the old 7-up commercials. His was a laugh too impossibly rich to be real. He said something then, the top hat wearing man, and it mollified my dream-self’s question, though I couldn’t say what he said or even if he had spoken aloud or just inside my head. Dream logic and dream rules. The drumming continued but it seemed flattened once the tall figure stopped clapping in counterpoint. To my left, the dancers took up the rhythmic slack by stomping their feet on the hard packed ground. They whooped and cried out to the darkness, while at the same time, they and their noise seemed to retreat, leaving me standing in silence with the shadow man in the top hat and tails.

I noticed then that his face was white like paper, like paint, like bone. By some trick of the retreating fire light, or just by the nature of dreams, as I looked up at him again, I could see his white face, though the rest of him remained in shadow. The shadow man nodded to me, almost a bow, and grinned a dead man’s smile of too many teeth, his eyes black as the shadows around us. He was so tall, like a tree, like a mountain. So tall and cold, but in the dream this was just a fact, not something I should fear. He laughed his loam rich laugh again.

“You are a funny little one, aren’t you?” His voice, like his laughter, was warm and deep and resonant the way a voice in the waking world could never emulate. “All this time with me, and yet you do not know me. All this time. So much time.” He put on a pair of dark glasses, identical to the kind I sometimes wore, but with the left lens purposefully broken out leaving nothing but the bare frame. The shadow man in broken sunglasses gestured then towards the fire and the three dancers. When I turned to my left to look, it seemed to me that they were far away then, on the other side of …something, separated from where the top hat man and I stood by more than simple distance. They had been so close before and though none of us had moved, the space had stretched or grown somehow, so that they seemed to be a lifetime away. Before I could ask why this was, the shadow man gestured with his other hand and I looked into the darkness on my right.

When I looked to my right, I saw that the darkness there was not complete. Rather, it was closer to an indistinct twilight. Through the gloaming, I could see, or perhaps rather I sensed, a mass of shadows, all distinct from one another, no matter how closely they pressed together. They stood in silence and in cold, waiting and waiting and waiting. They waited as the mountains wore away to valleys before them and the stars burned out to cold black deaths above their heads. Somehow I knew they could not see the man in the top hat and me, nor could they see the bon fire and the dancers, but they craved the sight all the same, as if they could taste the possibility of warmth and drumming in the very air.

“Who are they,” I asked the shadow man when I turned back to face him. I could feel the press of the dancers’ shadows on my left and the silent, yearning multitudes on my right. I could feel them both, on each side of me, like dark, wet velvet rubbing against my skin, warm with sweat and heat on the left, clammy with cold on the right. The shadow in the top hat laughed a third time.

“I am Saturday and they are mine,” the shadow man said in answer, tipping his top hat to me in a formal bow. He straightened and spread his arms to encompass the few, flickering dancers and the silent, standing crowd in his gesture, catching them up in the sweep of his arms, “They are mine.”

I felt my brain move from what the shadow man said to what he meant in slow, careful steps. Like following those plastic foot print shapes on a dance floor, I carefully jumped just enough to reach the next position and no further. I thought: Saturday. Saturday in French is Samedi. Samedi. “Sam’ di,” in Creole, which means “as I say,” by which it is meant, “do as I say,” or simply, “obey me.” Who was he to say obey me? He was a Baron, the title obvious to me in that place. “Baron” was his title and his name, too. He was Baron Saturday. Baron Saturday, Baron Samedi, “Baron Zombi,” loa of the dead. Lewd and rude and loud and proud, the all-knowing lord of the dead but also the lord of sex and resurrection, my brain supplied as if reading aloud from an invisible encyclopedia. I knew the broken glasses were a symbol of the Baron, too, said to allow him to see into the lands of the living and the lands of the dead, depending on through which eye he chose to look.

As I thought these things, the smell of rum augmented with fierce chili peppers and smell of tobacco smoke came from the shadow man as if suddenly he were steeped in the two indulgences or as if wind I could not feel against my skin had changed to bring the scents to me. Just as sharply, I smelled the overly sweet scent of rotting fruit, the sourness of putrid meat, and the dark scent of heated bodies. But Baron Saturday was more than indulgence and decay. His was the powerful trinity of sex and death and rebirth, all tangled up together under his top hat, or maybe resting just a little lower, say, between his legs. He was the past, present and future, making him one with the Greek Fates who spun, measured, and cut the cords of life. He was the three in one aspect, making him kin to the Morrigan, the triple goddess of the Celts, who was Mother, Maiden and Crone at once. He was the Christian Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost turned on its ear and given a lascivious, skeletal smile.

As if to prove his claim, Baron Saturday gestured down to the ground beneath our feet. When my eyes followed his gesture, I saw that we were standing not on grass, as I had previously thought, but on a little garden, where the tiny, fragile plants were laid out in the veve, the complex and beautiful Vodun pattern used to signify a loa’s claim to something or some place and also used to summon that loa’s influence to a particular place or thing, of Baron Samedi. His veve was under our feet as a living, dying, flowering, decaying, reviving pattern.

The crowded specters on my right – for they were the ghosts of the uncountable millions, the legions of the dead – represented the lands of death, while the shadowed, dancing trio on my left – or perhaps it was their drumming and their fire that was the true symbol – they represented the lands of the living. In between the two, Baron Saturday and I stood, somewhere else, somewhere apart from both these places, somewhere to one side, neither counted amongst the living nor the dead. If life and death were a play, we were standing in the wings, able to see the actors and the audience, but apart from each. We were apart. Apart. The word echoed oddly in my mind.

Looking back on the dream later, I saw that my subconscious must be dyslexic and had reversed the more traditional aspects of left and right, sinister and dexter respectively in heraldic terminology. Traditionally, in art and in a multitude of theologies, the right-hand side is for light and life and good, while the left-hand side (“sinister” archaically meant “left,” whereas now the word has come to mean “menacing or evil,” and not by accident, either) is reserved for the Fallen and the damned, for darkness and bitter endings, for Death himself. In a fairytale, always take the right-hand path towards your true love’s castle. In a Renaissance painting, look for the risen Christ presiding over the sorting out of all the souls on the Judgment Day, and see how the damned fall away to eternal torment on His left, the blessed and just, rising towards His throne on the right.

But in the dream, I was only aware of the feelings of cold and heat, of wet earth and damp bodies, somehow pressed against my left and right sides without either group ever drawing close enough to touch, while in front of me, the grinning skull of Baron Saturday, his presence dry and cool but his voice rich and warm. He was waiting for me to say or do something. I knew this in the way you simply know things while you dream. Dream logic, dream senses.

He had said, “I am Saturday and they are mine,” but I could not think what answer I was supposed to make to that. “They are mine.” Then, because in dreams, you simply know things, I knew what he was waiting for me to say.

“But I am not yours,” I said, feeling the truth of it as I said the words. The Baron nodded to me, then, some ritual requirement satisfied by the exchange. “Whose am I,” I asked, violating the formula, somehow. He smiled his dead man’s smile as he spread his hands wide, offering up the lands of the living and the lands of the dead.

“Which would you have? Whose you are depends on what you take, little spark, little tune, little crumb,” Baron Saturday answered, as cryptic as his Trickster brother ever was. I saw that in his hands he held two things. Towards the living, he held a small brown bird, a sparrow, and towards the dead, he held a miniature bleached human skull decorated with swirling patterns of ochre. The bird made no sound and the tiny skull, a child’s skull, I thought, was smooth as a pebble in his hand. “Which would you have,” the lord of death and sex and resurrection asked, now holding his hands and his symbols, out to me, his breath sweet with smoke, decay and decadence.

Awake, offered a live bird and a dead skull, there wouldn’t be much of a choice. In the dream, though, I hesitated. The drumming and firelight called to me, reverberating against my ribcage like the amped beat of a rock concert. At the same time, I wanted to touch the smooth dome of that little white skull, to cradle it in my hands. I wanted to protect the fragile little thing. Figures I’d suddenly develop a maternal instinct only to waste it on a skull. I didn’t like the choice the Baron offered. Something wasn’t right about him asking; as if the choice carried with it a sort of discordant note.

“If I am not yours, you cannot make me choose,” I answered the loa of death, and his grinning skull face clouded with his displeasure. The symbolic offerings disappeared from his palms as he extended on hand to wag a warning finger – withered down to nothing more than shreds of dried skin and rods of hardened tendons – in my face.

“Tread carefully, little gnat, little turd. If you will not choose, when given a choice to do so freely, you belong to Him,” he turned his death’s head towards the fire and somehow pointed to Papa Legba without removing his hand from my face. In the shadows of the dead, something hissed and slithered as he spoke. Something was approaching. In the shadows of the fire, Papa Legba transformed until his body was that of a wolf or dog, but his head was that of a bird, a crow, and behind him he trailed the cobwebs of a spider. He was the Trickster god in many facets and in one. “In places in between, in crossroads and doorways, in endless journeys that have no resolution, in riddles without an answer, he will torment you and he will laugh,” Baron Saturday said in his cavernous voice. “Do not be so foolish, little flicker, little breath.” He plucked a fragment of dust from his midnight colored coat, flicking it off into the darkness without a glance. “Choose.” He reached out with his hand of bone and shrunken flesh. The instant before it touched my face, I woke up screaming.

My subconscious should work for Stephen freaking King.

*****

“Better?”

I nodded, finally finding at least a few words for my personal, self-appointed guardian, “I think so?” Even though I was uncertain, vaguely allowing that I might be better was a surprise. I blinked and put my face into the curling steam rising from my mug as soon as I’d put my rump in the chair, as if my own voice had caught me off guard. The tea was black this time, with a sort of citrus tang to it.

“Good good. You need to spend some time in the here and now,” he said, tapping the wood of the table to emphasis “here.” I raised my eyebrows at that, but took a deep slow sip of tea rather than questioning him. The hot liquid burned all the way down, just a touch too hot to drink. “That reminds me, you need to wear this.” He took something from his pocket and slid it across the wooden tabletop towards me. It was a small leather gris gris bundle tied with a blue cord. Gris girs bags are little pouches of herbs and charms and magical doodads commonly used in Vodun. The few times I’d been close to them, I’d discovered that I had a hard time telling the cloth-wrapped ones from some of the more exotic combinations of herbs Papa Juma assembled for his muslin tea bags. Food or magic? Magic or food? Unless someone identified the little bundles specifically, I couldn’t tell without thoroughly dissecting the contents and checking for chicken feet, fur, silver dimes or other giveaway ingredients that meant magic rather than food. It was an important distinction. Steeping a gris gris bag in hot water and drinking the results probably wouldn’t prove fatal, but I’d bet my eye it’d taste awful.

Papa Juma nodded as I obediently slipped the cord over my head. The dark bundle hung lower on me than my other necklace. It didn’t smell too bad and it wasn’t very large. I could wear it for a while without being too annoyed.

“What’s it for?” Apparently, I had graduated from one-word sentences to three-word sentences. At this rate, I’d be spouting the Gettysburg Address by, oh, next Fourth of July. Papa Juma didn’t answer immediately. Instead he refilled my mug and slid a plate of some sort of sweet, nut-filled bread towards me. Banana? Zucchini? I couldn’t picture Papa Juma baking either one, so whatever it was, it was the work of Mandi the Wonder Nurse. I took a slice of the moist, mystery bread and ate half the piece as it broke apart and tried to escape between my fingers before I’d figured out it was apple-nut or something close to that.

“That,” he said, indicating the gris gris bag around my neck, “is because you are too eager to go wandering off. Caught the attention of Ol’ St. Gerard already with your wandering and got a good lump on your head to show for making him angry.” Papa Juma pointed at my forehead as he spoke. My hand reflexively reached up to brush the Band-Aid at my hairline and the mini-goose egg it was covering. St. Gerard Majella was the Catholic saint used to represent the Baron Gede, the family of loa of death and the cemetery, of whom Baron Saturday was prominent. Papa Juma knew about my dream. Damn good thing I didn’t give a lick of credence to the “spooky stuff” or that would have been creepy as hell.

All the same, I had to ask, “How’d ya know?”

“’Bout Ol’ St. Gerard? Little girl, who do you think I am?” He put his hands on his hips in a show of indignance, but his smile was another of his extra warm ones. I smiled back at him over the rim of my cup.

“Okay, Papa Mambo,” I said, using the Vodun title for shaman, hoping to mollify him though it still felt like each word had to be carefully carded from the air before I could spin it even into simple sentences and questions. Gods, where had my brain gone? And had it run off with my sometimes silver tongue or had that gone off in a different direction, the pair never to be seen again? Across the table from me, Papa Juma nodded hard enough that the cowry shells in his hair clicked and rattled.

“I am.” He held up a thin finger, for a moment reminding me vividly of Baron Saturday making the same gesture in my dream. “But, more than that, you’ve been wandering for a while now, girl. At first, I thought that’s what you wanted, and I’m not here to keep people from what they want. That’s not a Mambo’s job. But later, I started to see it wasn’t your doin’. So, I asked you to come stay with me, and I helped keep you from wandering too far. I knew you’d come back, too. But then you go and get yourself in deeper, going off dancing with Samedi, first time my back is turned.” He shook his head with what looked like fondness mingled with exasperation, a parental look, a look I’m not used to seeing very often or under anything but the worst of circumstances. “Girl, you just keep gettin’ your fool self into trouble like it’s your calling.” Papa Juma shook his head and picked up his cup and drained it. He licked his lips and then looked back at me, specifically catching my eye. “Now, that gris gris bag stays on ‘til I say, yes?”

“Yes, Papa Juma,” I said. He nodded.

“Yes,” he agreed. He put his empty cup on the table, looking at the stray tea leaves along the bottom, or perhaps looking at something in his mind’s eye, instead. “Now. When we were at Two Flea’s you were thinkin’ about Fete Gede, yes?” I nodded. “Yes. And then you were thinkin’ about Raymond Tufu.” I nodded again. Don’t ask me how Papa Juma did it. I never figured out the trick, but, wow did he have it nailed when the mood struck him. “So, I’m thinkin’ that you need to do what that no-good Raymond boy was asking you. Because him, Samedi n’ where you been are all tangled up together, but good.” I blinked in surprise.

“Huh?” Papa Juma nodded.

“They are, or they will be. Same thing.” He flashed me one of his unfathomable Papa smiles, the kind that usually makes me roll my eye. “So. Raymond said he would come to call later today, and you will help him,” he said as if by telling me so was as good as seeing it done. Being a witchdoctor gives one a sense of superiority, I’ve noticed. “But, first, you need to tell me what St. Gerard wanted.” Papa Juma folded his hands and looked at me expectantly.

“He wanted me,” I said, the dream running through the back of my head like the disjointed scenes from a movie, “to choose something.”

“What?”

“He had a bird.” I closed my eye, trying to picture what the shadow man had held out to me. “A bird and a skull.”

“What colors? Colors are important,” Papa Juma said. He reached out across the table and rested his hand over mine where it had settled once I’d finished with my tea and all but forgotten I possessed limbs.

“The bird was… brown. The skull was… white but decorated with…ochre, too. It was small. Like a baby’s, maybe?” The memory jumped out starkly at me, there in the honey colored kitchen: withered hands emerging from bejeweled cuffs to offer me a mangy little sparrow and skull. The bird had been sickly and almost threadbare; and the skull hadn’t been a baby’s skull at all. Between the swirls of red brown pigment, I saw that the top of the cranium was smooth and fused. A baby’s would have had gaps at the top where the plates had yet to fuse together. The eye sockets were proportional to the rest of the face, not the almost alien-looking huge sockets of an infant. The skull Baron Saturday had held out to me was fully formed but miniature. There had been something else. The memory broke apart like soap bubbles when I tried to sift meaning from it.

“Tell me the rest,” he said. And I described the entire dream as best I could. When I explained about the living on the left and the dead on the right, Papa Juma laughed at me. “Girl, think about it! It was your right and your left, but Ol’ St. Gerard was facin’ you, yes? So…what was on His right and His left, then?” I felt my face flush at my mistake. Of course! I’d been caught indulging in human hubris at its best…or was that more appropriately “at its worst?” The dancers and the damned had been on the correct sides, sinister and dexter were not reversed. Instead, I’d simply been facing the wrong way…because I wasn’t the important figure in the tableau; Baron Saturday was. Of course he was! Any fool would know that without a moment’s thought. Except that in my beautiful human arrogance, I had assumed… Have I mentioned I’m an idiot?

“Oh,” was all I said out loud. I’m the queen of understatement…or something.

“Oh,” Papa Juma echoed and then nodded. Behind him, there was a buzz. “That is your clothing in the drier,” he said, pointing towards the utility room. “Go fetch your things and get dressed, or Mandi will accuse me of being a terrible host or of keeping you half-dressed on purpose.” He gave me a very un-Papa-like, lascivious grin then rolled his eyes, his face remolding itself into more familiar features.