The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 (47 page)

Bad? No, not at all. I felt special that of all the people she lived with, had fucked, had fought with, this one grungy hack writer living in a cheap-ass bungalow in Long Beach was the one she wanted to spend eternity with.

But there were other times, too. I would walk from the kitchen into the living room, coffee cup in hand, straight for my Mac with visions of
Truck Stop Bimbos
running through my head like a pneumatic chorus line, and I would see her, standing by the window looking at something only the ghostly Jasmine could see. What bothered me more than anything was that Jasmine, alive, never really had an interest in the traffic on Oleander Street. Jasmine wasn’t just an echo drilled into me and my cheap-ass stucco walls. Something of the real Jasmine was here with the spectral one. Something that was missing something.

It became pretty obvious when she started to get . . . distracted by things. Right in the middle of one hot and nasty morning blowjob, her ghost would stop right in the middle (
coitus spectoralus
) and I would get the definite impression that she was either looking out that window again or maybe trying to remember something that she had forgotten.

Rosie, my only expert on dead relations coming back to cop a feel, got real quiet as she poured me Darjeeling tea, then said: “When Bolo left this world—” Rosie’s ex who tried to jump her Harley from the Queen Mary to Catalina “– she came back to visit me a couple of times. It was like she just wanted to say good-bye in a way she couldn’t when she was living. When she had done that, she just faded away.”

“Yeah, but I don’t get the vibe that Jas is here for a reason. It’s like she just sort of moved back in.”

Rosie stirred her tea with a chiming that reminded me way too much of Jasmine’s tiny silver bells. “I got the impression from Bolo that she knew where she was going and that she was just stopping by. Remember, we are dealing with Jasmine, here. She could have gotten lost.”

Great, a girl who could get lost in a Safeway had taken the wrong turn between death and the afterlife and was now trapped in my house.

It got worse soon after. The sex was still there, but now it was . . . sad. The one thing the flesh and blood Jasmine wasn’t was sad. The best way to get rid of her, in fact, was to get depressed: she’d vanish like pot smoke to find someone more cheerful. I have always had a hard time putting on a happy face, the one reason why Jasmine and I never stayed together for too long a time. Now, though, it looked like she was stuck in my dark little bungalow.

And it was making her sad. It wasn’t something she was used to, getting sad, and it was hitting her hard.

I heard her cry one day. I was hard at work on something for a porno mag specializing in dirty buttholes “– and the guys who love to lick them” when I heard this weird sound. A sort of choking, wet sound. I hadn’t ever heard it before.

I found her next to the bed, curled into a partially invisible fetal position. Jasmine was crying. It was that heaving, nauseous kind of crying, the kind you do when your cat gets run over, when you know you’ve taken way too much of the wrong kind of shit, when you’re lost and know you can never find your way back.

I’m not a very altruistic kinda guy. I don’t really know where it comes from, or doesn’t: I just really don’t give a flying fuck for a lot of folks. Yeah, I’ll take Steve to the hospital when his T cells are low, or hold Rosie when she thinks too much of Bolo, but I don’t really see those things as being good. Good is, like, helping fucking orphans or something, or giving change to the smelly crackhead who hangs out, or passes out, at the Laundromat. I don’t have that kind of temperament.

I really didn’t care that much about Jasmine. Yeah I’d bail her out when she got busted for forgetting her purse and eating up a storm at some diner. Yeah, I’d give her whatever I had in my checking account when she really needed it. Yeah, I’d always let her in, no matter what was going on in my life. But she was just a pal, and a really good lay. I honestly didn’t think of her in any other terms.

But then she was dead, and crying in my bedroom.

I could guess the cause. Bolo was a dyke who always knew where she was going and how exactly to get there. She was an iron-plated mean mother who knew what the score was – despite her profound depressions and mood swings. Jasmine was flowers and pot and the Beatles. She could get lost walking from the bathroom into the bedroom.

It wasn’t all that hard, once I made the decision to do it. One phone call, to Rosie. Then into the bathroom.

I hadn’t done my Death Trance since she had manifested herself those two weeks ago. It was just too much of a temptation for her and the shock of her walking in had been way too much when she was flesh and blood. Since she was a ghost – well, I don’t really want to see if I’m cardiac prone.

Had trouble sleeping a few years back. I was lucky enough to have health insurance at the time, and so was able to see a doc who could actually give me pills. I had only taken one – the fuckers were so strong that I stopped taking them and simply started staying up late.

I took five and lay down in the warm water.

We are nothing but matter. We are nothing but the flesh than hangs on your bones, the blood that gushes through our meat. Bach took shits, Aristotle got piss hard-ons, Mother Teresa the runs, Ghandi really liked enemas, Lincoln got wind. We are animals that have learned to walk upright, that have trained themselves to use the next best thing to fishing with termites with a stick: the nuclear bomb.

I didn’t have to think long. About the time I was drawling analogies between Sartre and seals that know how to play
Lady of Spain
on car horns, I was interrupted by a tiny sound, the sound of cheap Mexican toe rings chiming their tinny, cheap tones: the tinkling of tiny silver bells. Then the sound of Jasmine pissing into the toilet.

But this time it didn’t sound mischievous: It sounded sad.

The pills had started to take effect, I braced my feet against the tub so I wouldn’t drown and whispered, as loud as I could (which was just loud enough for the dead to hear), “Follow me.”

I don’t know what she saw, but I started to hallucinate pretty badly. Either the pills, or I had really started to fade, myself – I don’t know. I was in the kitchen, full and real and solid, looking out my window. The sun was bright, so bright that I had to close my eyes against the brightness – but for some reason it reached right through my eyelids and right into my brain. I realized then that it couldn’t be the sun – for at least the obvious reason that sun never came in that window, anyway.

No tunnel, no saints (or sinners, either), just that bright light. I felt myself start to come apart, like the flesh I had always talked about, thought about in my trances, was starting to unravel and decompose around me, leaving just the lightweight fragment of Roger Corn left. It wasn’t a pull or an enticement, it was just a direction that I was walking myself to.

Jasmine. Somewhere I thought that, and reached back into my apartment for her, but I couldn’t seem to find her. I looked in the bedroom, the bathroom (I looked so silly lying there in the tub, mouth hanging open), the living room, all the closets, the kitchen . . . everywhere. No Jasmine. Not even her ghost.

Then that sound. Her sound. Cheap bells on her toes and a smile on her face. I found her masturbating in the bedroom, chubby legs wide and open, finger dancing on her clit. Typical. I smiled and took her hand and pulled her towards me, into me –

– and then pushed her away, into the brightness.

The cops and firemen busted down my bathroom door about that time. I don’t remember much after save the sound of their tools smashing my interior door to cheap splinters. I probably don’t want to remember being naked in front of all those macho public servants, having a tube run down my throat and having all that guck and pills poured out. Rosie had come through, with perfect timing.

No repercussions, no real ones at any rate: what’s another botched suicide, after all. At least I had accomplished something with this one: a spectral repercussion.

She’s gone. You’d expect that. Gone wherever magical little Deadheads go when they OD. She’s with Janis now, with Morrison and Lennon – in a place where the seventies never happened and where everyone gets along.

And, yeah, I hear those damned happy bells now and again.

The first time I saw Esmee she was reading Tarot in the square in front of a soaring brick and stone church. What I would come to know as French, African, and Spanish blood was blended in her dark luminous eyes, high cheekbones, and queenly posture. Dressed like a younger, hipper incarnation of Marie Laveau in a long ruffled skirt and tignon, she laughed and chatted with the tourists.

She shuffled and dealt like a pro, slim golden fingers bridging the oversize pasteboards with ease. I watched from the shade of a flowering tree as she told the future for a few bucks a pop, her patter in Creole-spiced tones as sweet and slow as honey. She noticed me, too. Her inquisitive glance felt real as a touch on my skin, even as she assured a stout, perspiring woman of opportunities on the horizon. When the woman hauled herself to her feet, Esmee beckoned to me, smiling.

I hesitated. Not because of the cards, though some of Papa’s congregation would consider them a risk to my immortal soul. Papa would disapprove mightily as well, though from distaste for the mystical rather than belief in its dangers. I hesitated , because of the danger to my heart, the danger of making a fool of myself. What could it hurt? I asked myself as I stepped out into the sun.

“What’choo name, cher?” she asked.

“Kristina.” I sat on the rim of the fountain.

“From up north? Me, I’m Esmee.” She’d set what looked like a large TV tray covered with a black velvet cloth next to the curb of the fountain. Only room for a three card spread – past, present, future – because, she explained shrugging, “les flics” sometimes looked the other way, and sometimes not.

“Gypsy laws,” she said darkly.

And sure enough, as soon as she laid out my cards a cop strolled into the square. Her eyebrows rose, but I’d barely gotten a glimpse at the bright colors and archaic forms before he headed towards us. Esmee bundled the cards into the cloth and folded the table. We scurried into a nearby café; half in real urgency, half in smothered giggles.

From the shelter of the area defined by awnings, ropes, and potted plants, she gave an impudent smile to the cop. He cocked thumb and finger at her like a gun, smiled sourly and walked on.

“Private property,” she explained with satisfaction.

We sat at a small wrought-iron table, her paraphernalia stowed beside us. The waiter brought café filtres without being asked. We sipped and smiled a little self-consciously, my sundress and sandals making a strange contrast to her voluminous garments.

“Would he really have arrested you?” I asked.

“Maybe. Maybe not.” She flashed a gamine grin at me, square white teeth gleaming. “For sure, he’d hassle me, run me off. Me, I don’t feel like running today.”

“I thought that was all part of the local charm. Jazz, ghosts, voodoo?”

“In theory” – she pronounced it “tee-o-ry” – “but not in practice. If you don’t have a license or work for a shop, they treat you like a panhandler. If you do, you don’t make any money.”

“What about my fortune?” I wondered if she remembered the cards, if she’d read it here.

“Pfft, that’s easy,” she said, winking. “Same as mine, when I read my cards first thing this morning: ‘you have been lonely, but you will meet a beautiful stranger. Your life will change.’”

I caught my breath, unsure whether she meant what I thought or not. Unsure what I wanted her to mean. I was afraid it was wishful thinking on my part, though her slow smile and dark gaze seemed to indicate otherwise. For years, I’d been taking my holidays in exotic cities, hoping for excitement. Perhaps, just perhaps, that excitement had finally arrived.

“So, how much do I owe you?” I asked, reaching for my handbag to cover my confusion.

“For you, nothing.” She shrugged; a delicious gesture that caused her off-the-shoulder blouse to shift distractingly. “We’ll share it, yes?”

“Are you sure? Don’t I have to cross your palm with silver to make it come true?”

“Not much silver in American money these days. Cross Etienne’s palm instead. Get the tip? Come, walk with me, cher.” Esmee dropped a couple of tattered dollars on the table and I hastily scattered a handful of change. The maitre d’, a very dark man with dreadlocks, kissed his fingers to her and smiled.

Outside, she slipped her hand through my arm as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Our strides matched nicely, shoulders brushing as we strolled out of the sun-struck square and down a tree-lined avenue. At home, I would have felt self-conscious. At home, I would have had good reason – Pastor Nilsen’s librarian daughter. Here I enjoyed the glances we garnered: a lovely darker woman in the garb of the last century and a tall, blonde woman in aggressively modern tourist attire.

We talked. She was actually a student at the local college, slowly putting herself through evening classes. Not an actual refugee from another time, she told fortunes, did other things. Like gumbo, she said, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.

“Can you make a living?” I asked, though truthfully her gypsy existence sounded like heaven. I’d had enough stability to last a lifetime.

“Not bad during the season,” she said cheerfully. “More fun than waiting tables, washing dishes, yes?”

More fun than shelving books and collecting quarters, too. I asked, “Do you believe in the Tarot?”

“But, of course! We make our own futures, you know, but we make them of the past and the present. It’s all there.”

“What if you see a bad future for someone?”

“Mmm, bad fortunes are bad for business. Like a sundial, I only count bright hours. I might warn, you know? Don’t travel next week? Like that, but the other, no. People come here for pleasure, to leave sorrow at home.”

I suppose I thought Esmee was looking for a new place to set up. I didn’t realize I was walking her home until we arrived at the door.