“Animae?” the Russian asked, just as the scholar glanced over his shoulder at his partner and said, “some,” out of the corner of his mouth.
“Geniuses,” the athlete said, his eyes very dark. He held out a hand and I took it; his had ridged callus, like somebody who spends a lot of time holding a golf club or a tennis racket.
The scholar shook his head and shrugged apology at me. “
Genii
is the word the tennis bum is scratching his head over.”
“Hey, man—”
It was a game, I realized—and the other pair knew it too, from the sly communicating smile they shared. The Russian stayed a little behind the American, covering his back, as the athlete stepped away. “All right,” the American said, scratchy tenor voice and an arched eyebrow. “I’ll play the idiot child. What are animae?”
The scholar coughed, and licked his lips. “This was the thing we were just going to explain before we came over here”—he shrugged, and looked helplessly at his partner, and tugged the American’s sleeve a little to turn him away—“y’see, you and me, man . . . all of us, really. We’re not exactly real.”
The American and the End of an Era.
Somewhere in Las Vegas. Summer 1964/2002.
The American looked at the Russian, who crossed his arms and tilted his head before nodding slightly—a gesture that encompassed a fifteen-minute conversation, brought them into concord, and formalized a plan.
We’re not exactly real
.
“You have five minutes,” the American said. “Go.”
The kid knotted both hands in his strangely cut hair. “It’ll take more than five minutes, sir. Look—can we maybe sit down? Join me at my table—”
“We have to settle the bill,” the athlete said, with a glance back at the spies’ own table.
“I run a tab. I’ll pay for it. Please. Just sit.” He stepped aside and tugged a chair away from the table, turning it to display its seat. “You see, I think it’s half my fault you’re all here in the desert, and I’ve got problems of my own. And I’d like to buy you a drink and sort things out.”
“My man doesn’t drink.” The athlete glanced over his shoulder.
The scholar wasn’t smiling, and his brow had furrowed a little deeper. He leaned forward and crossed his arms. “I’ll take a coffee,” he said, and placed himself very definitely in the chair Jackie had drawn out.
“I’ll take a coffee too.” The Russian sat down across from the scholar.
The American watched, unsettled.
We’re not exactly real
. He pulled out the chair beside his partner, while the athlete retrieved one from an empty nearby table, tilted it, and spun it around. The American leaned forward on his elbows once everyone was settled; the chill in his gut wouldn’t slack. “All right,” he said. “So, Las Vegas. You’re the whole box top. Let’s, ah, hear it. Explain to me why we’re not—”
“—exactly real?” The young man smiled, showing even teeth above a pronounced jaw. “When it comes right down to it, I’m not exactly real either. We’re conjured beings, embodiments of the collective unconscious, if you will.”
“
Die Zeitgeist
.” The Russian, sounding unwilling, but fascinated. The American shot his partner a look; he shrugged. It wasn’t an apology. “Funky.”
“Prove it,” the American said.
“Well, for one thing,” the scholar said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his legs, “there was no Brown Derby in Vegas in the sixties—”
“You say ‘in the sixties’ as if it’s something else now.”
“It’s two thousand and two,” the athlete said. “Don’t look at me like that, man. I only know ’cause they woke
us
up again. We were walking through all the old ghosts and dreams same as you, caught up in our story.”
“Who’s they?” the American asked.
The athlete gestured broadly, taking in the restaurant patrons, the casino beyond it, the city and the world. “The ones who tell the stories,” he said. “And your next question is going to be, ‘What do you mean, ghosts and dreams?’ Isn’t it?”
“Yes—”
“Take an example.” The athlete glanced up at the ceiling. “The MGM Grand wasn’t here in the sixties. There wasn’t anything here in the sixties. And the Desert Inn, where you’re staying—it’s a ghost as well. They imploded it. You guys are sort of a memory, something that got left over, created by the world’s collective memory of the stories that were told about you.”
“Jetways.” The Russian, and the American knew that focused tone in his voice very well. It was the tone that meant a clue had just snapped into place, revealing a much larger section of the puzzle. It was a tone he trusted, although he couldn’t always follow the twists that brought it on. “Jetways, jetways.”
The kid—
Jackie
—was looking at the Russian, a thin smile playing with the corners of his mouth until the American couldn’t take it any more and snapped,
“What?”
“There are no jetways at McCarran Field—”
“There were no jetways at McCarran Field,” Jackie said calmly. “It’s McCarran International Airport now, and the seventh busiest in America.”
“The lights I saw when we were flying in.” The American’s gut gave one more squeeze of denial, and then it settled down and let him think.
When you’ve eliminated the impossible
—
Hell, it wasn’t as if his career hadn’t spanned UFO.s, killer robots, and radio controlled vampire bats. His own nonexistence wasn’t such a big stretch, after that. “You’re telling me I’m a fairy tale? Make-believe?”
He ignored the Russian’s sharp, offended stare. Whatever his partner had been about to say was cut off when the waitress arrived, was roundly charmed by the assembled, and departed with their orders. The American looked at Jackie again as Jackie shrugged, one-shouldered, and lit a cigarette. “I’m telling you what I know.”
“Fine. All right. I believe you—” He could almost be amused by the surprise his friends evinced at his willingness to believe what they were telling him. Mind control rays, earthquake machines, being told one’s life was a mass hallucination: all in a day’s work. The coffee came, and he picked up his cup to hide the way his hands wanted to shake. “—now on to the interesting question, Mr., ah—”
“Just call me Jackie.”
“—Jackie.” Smoke curled around the young man’s fingertips and outlined the patch over his eye as he raised the cigarette again, but didn’t puff.
“The interesting question. You said you summoned us.”
“Yes.”
“How? And to what purpose?”
“Ah,” Jackie said, and dropped the cigarette in his ashtray before he reached for the creamer. “That’s what makes the question so interesting, you see. I’m not exactly sure. But I have a couple of propositions to make, if you like.” He locked gazes with the American. Neither looked down.
The mug was burning the American’s fingers. He lifted them to his lips and blew on them, and laughed at the back of his throat. “I don’t suppose you play chess.”
Jackie smiled hard. He was missing a tooth far back in his mouth. “Only for money, my friend.”
Tribute Faces the Music.
Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
Half an hour before dawn, I found my way back to the room I’d rented at the Motel 6 just off the strip. It had enormous windows, but the blackout drapes reached floor to ceiling, and I made sure to overlap them and pin them in place with the chair. One of the consequences of what I am is that I could make out the patterns on the hotel bedspread and carpeting, even in the dark, and so I spent more time than I would have wanted counting the awful repetitions.
The bed was that spongy texture only hotel mattresses have. I squared my shoes underneath, lay down on it and pulled the pillow over my face. It was a little bigger than King-sized, no matter what they called it; I could have laid three of me down side by side.
I couldn’t sleep.
By sunrise, I was ravenous.
Sycorax and the poisoning had taken it out of me in more ways than the metaphorical, and I would need something that night if I was going to keep passing for a mortal. And feeding—
Isn’t quite what the romantic fancies of novelists and poets and moviemakers would make it. The stable of willing paramours, the idyllic pleasures of the feast—
No.
It’s not like that at all.
It didn’t matter when I was with Sycorax. I took what she told me when she told me and tried to put it off as long as I could, and I mostly pretended I couldn’t hear Jesse. Especially when he asked me to have him exorcised, to let him go.
But things were different now that I was on my own. I found I had qualms.
In addition to my qualms, I had questions. Like Angel and Stewart, and why Angel was out of her city. And why they were with each other, and not with their own partners. And what was
wrong
with Stewart.
I rolled over in the dark behind drawn curtains, keeping a healthy distance from the scalding brightness that glowed around the edges of the blackout curtains and contemplating whether coming to Vegas had been such a good idea.
It didn’t have to be here. I knew that.
I wanted it to be here. Vegas had changed even more than I had; I barely recognized the place. But me and Sycorax had been traveling for the better part of three decades and it wasn’t like I could just go home to Tupelo. I haven’t got much good to say about Sycorax, bless her black little heart, but twenty-five years with her filled in the gaps in a public school education pretty well. And besides. Las Vegas was a place where I could perform, and nobody would find it strange that they never saw me out in the sunshine.
I could
pass
.
There’s nothing more pathetic than an insomniac vampire.
I sat up in bed, reached for the remote, and turned the television on.
Maybe forty minutes later, the corridor door opened. I’d heard the footsteps pause in front of it, but I didn’t get off the bed, even though it didn’t sound like a chambermaid. They usually don’t wear military boots.
Once he opened the door, I caught the scent of leather and sweat and nicotine and the blood under his skin, and then I didn’t need to turn. The black-haired kid in the suit and Doc Martens slipped inside and shut the door behind himself.
“King,” he said, smart enough to stay in the narrow corridor with the bathroom on one side and the closet on the other and to keep his back to the door, “we’ve got to talk.”
“How did you find me?” Not bothering to disguise my voice for once. Even though he had to be expecting it, he startled: fresh salt sharp in the cool musty air. His flickering heart kicked up a notch.
“I got lucky,” he said, layers of irony lacing his voice. Something there I’d have to tease out someday. I didn’t turn to look directly, but I saw him move out of the corner of my eye. He jerked his chin at the television. “You gonna shoot that?”
“Nah,” I answered, thumb on the mute button. “It’s too much of a pain in the ass when you haven’t got a road manager to fill out the paperwork. Besides, I haven’t got a gun. My next question is supposed to be how you got through the locked door, but that’s easy. So—how’d you recognize me?”
The hurt in his voice was thick and evidently artificial. “You don’t remember me, King?”
“I go by Tribute, these days.” I left the remote on the bed when I stood up and tightened the covers. The rug caught at my socks as I turned to have a look at him. Just a mortal boy, but it would be cocky to let him get in between me and the window in daylight. “The King—that’s somebody else. Where should I remember you from?”
“Vegas,” he said, stepping forward so the bathroom light would fall across his face. One eye was covered by the eyepatch. The other one sparkled in a way I’d seen too much of lately. I squinted at the face, though—the eyepatch stood out, and there was no telling what color his hair was under a couple of gallons of Gothic black. He looked a bit like Dean Martin, maybe—a much skinnier Dean, with higher cheekbones and a thinner nose—and when I pictured him with shaggy dark brown hair or a slicked DA, I nodded.
There are always people around the entertainment business whose role is never made particularly clear. They’re attached to somebody, or they know somebody, or somebody owes them a lot of favors or a lot of money. They’re glad handers and compromisers and the sort of people who throw parties that nobody dares miss. I’d seen this kid before, all right, and I’d thought at the time he was one of those people. A good-looking little pansy, nice enough, better conversationalist than me.
But he hadn’t aged a day in thirty years, and gold-and-white streetlights shimmered behind his unpatched eye. Yeah. I knew his name. “Jackie.”
“You
do
remember.” He folded his arms and stepped back, leaning, the crease in his trousers pulling tight as he kicked one foot up and braced the sole against the door.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think I gave you a Cadillac.”
A quick look down, and he scratched his ear. “It wound up welded to a stand at the 15 and Jones a few years back, being used as a billboard. They painted it pink. Perfect symbol of Las Vegas, if you ask me.”
“Yeah. Perfect. I didn’t know you were Vegas, Jackie.”
“Would you have treated me any different if you did?”
“At the time, I’d never heard that cities had genii and I didn’t believe in vampires or werewolves, so probably not.”
He didn’t look down and his heart didn’t skip when I smiled, and I smiled wide enough that even human eyes would catch the way my front upper teeth hooked over the bottom row. “You’re here to run me out of town.”
His breathing quickened, just a touch. The lines beside his eyes deepened. I almost heard the incidental music shift tempo, a little bit faster, a little bit louder. “I came to ask what you thought you were doing here.”
“Just moving from Memphis to the Luxor,” I said. He gave me the blankest look ever, and I sighed. No use wasting any jokes about the underworld on him either; he wouldn’t get any more use out of them than I would have back in 1962. “Just looking for a place to stay out of the sun for a while.”
“It seems unfair somehow that you didn’t need my permission to be here.”
“Walking into a city isn’t like walking into somebody’s house—”