Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

—Don’t know about you, but I’m getting high. I showed her the pills.

—What is it?

—Dilaudid.

—Is it something good?

—It’s evil. You gonna fucking adore it.

I powdered a handful of pills in the bottom of a teacup and let Leeli feed her nose from the tip of a knife blade.

—Oooh, she said, sliding down in the bed, closing her eyes.

—What I tell ya?

I did more than Leeli, enough so the world fitted around me like a warm liquid glove and there were little sparkles at the corners of my sight and when I moved my hand I felt the exact curve of my shoulder and the muscles playing sweetly in my arm. I lay back next to Leeli. The ceiling was bare gray boards and beams with black grainy patterns and sparkles pricking the gaps that were probably stars. It looked distant and enormous, part of some ancient building that was proud of itself, a church where saints and great soldiers were buried, and terrible instruction was regularly given to the faithful, lots of Gothous and Verily-thee-must-hastens that resulted in dungeons filled with bones and chained apes with blood on their teeth and crestfallen martyrs, but it didn’t have no message for me. My eyelids were trying to droop and my mind drooped too, blissfully trivial, noticing stuff about the high, the tremor in my leg, a pincushion sensation in my left foot, a nerve jigging in my chest. Something landed softly on my stomach, its warmth spreading like a melting pat of butter. Leeli’s palm. Feel up to having some fun? she asked. Her hand slipped lower and she flicked my zipper.

—I ain’t never gonna say no, but I’m pretty damn wasted.

—Me, too. I don’t really need to or nothing. I just want to see what it’s like…when I’m like this, y’know. Okay?

We fucked like space babies in no gravity, coming together at goofy angles, forgetting for long moments what we were doing, our minds scatting on some loopy riff, reawakened by the touch of lips, a breast, something that got us all juicy and eager for a time, speeding it up and lapsing again into slow motion, into stillness. It took Leeli damn near an hour to come and once she started it took her almost the same to stop. She curled up into me after like a dazed, sleek bug that had eaten too much of a leaf and said, Sweet Jesus. That was amazing! I was too gassed to respond. If we’d been a pair of spiders, she could have gnawed off my legs and laid eggs in my belly and I wouldn’t have argued the matter.

Leeli had some trouble sleeping due to the itching that goes with the Dilaudid wearing off, but finally her breathing grew even and deep. I did a few more hits, pulled on my pants and went onto the porch. A wind had sprung up, driving away the skeeters and quieting the frogs. Clouds edged with milky light were racing the moon, parting around it, and the grasses gave forth with an approving chorus, like the sound Leeli made when the Dilaudid rushed upon her, only louder by a million throats, seeming to appreciate the architecture of dust and reflected fire in the sky, the hosanna clouds, the lacquered moon-colored water, the grasses tipped in silver, the black cutouts of the palm islands like left-over pieces of Africa. I had that feeling of small nobility and pure solitude the world wants you to feel when it reveals this side of itself, so you’ll believe nature was this awesome beautiful peaceful rock concert deal before man come along and doggy-fucked it full of disease, and not the bloody, biting, eat-your-meat-while-it’s-alive horror show it truly is. That night I was okay about feeling this way and I walked along the shore, sucking in the odors of fish and frogs and the millions of unrecorded deaths that had accompanied the Hojo manager’s as if they were the latest Paris perfumes.

I thought I was out there on my lonesome, just me and a scrap of wilderness and Dilaudid, but when I climbed a hummock to avoid wading through the marsh, I spied Ava, Carl, and Squire standing at the tip of a grassy point about sixty feet farther along. Ava was gesturing at the sky like she was naming stars or teaching about the weather or something. Squire and Carl, whose jaw was bandaged, were gazing upward. I was too fogged to jam their nature walk in with all the other nothing junk I knew concerning them and make any sense of it, but when they strolled off still farther from the lodge, I realized this was my opportunity to take a peek at Ava’s personals and maybe scoop up some cash. I hustled back as fast I could, which was not real fast, and located the room where she was bunking. Her tote bag was stuffed under a pillow. I found no money, but among the keys and Kleenex and cosmetics and all was a badge holder holding a photo ID. Official evidence that Ava was affiliated with the FBI. A fake, I thought, but then remembered where I’d met up with her and wasn’t so sure. At the bottom of the bag was a leatherette photo album. The first picture was an overexposed black and white shot of Ava and Carl leaning against a vintage Chevy Impala. The ‘sixty-two convertible. She appeared to be around seventeen, eighteen, and wore white socks and buckle shoes and a print dress with a belling skirt that covered her legs to the mid-calves. Carl had on jeans and a sport shirt with its tail hanging out. He looked no younger than he did now. Another guy sat behind the wheel of the Impala. His face was a blur of sunlight, but going by his round head, I guessed this to be Squire. Both Ava and Carl were grinning and pointing at a shield-shaped sign on the shoulder of the road. The sign was also blurred, but readable: State Road 44.

Several of the remaining pictures were shots of Carl, some of Ava and Carl. A few recent ones showed them with Squire. None of these said much to me, not like the first. Seeing that Ava had aged, though not so much as she should have, and Carl hadn’t aged a day, this gave rise to Star Trek movies in my head. Space aliens, UFOs, abductions, secret government projects, intelligent robots, all kinds of happy horse-shit. A couple of times I thought I’d figured out who they must be, but if they were aliens or whatever on the run from the government, what the hell were they doing on government property? If they were working with the government, why were they hanging out with the likes of Leeli and me? And what was that house doing in the dunes near the Cape? A trap for lowlifes such as myself, I decided. That was it. Damn straight. Alien creatures from beyond the stars were studying the pork rind set. Government super-clones were learning how to mimic the scum of the earth so they would be in place to assassinate the redneck Jesus, who’d be coming to a womb in Kissimmee any day now. Or could be robot killers who did the evil bidding of the Bush administration were given vacations during which they hung out with real folks and fucked them up every whichaway. Or Squire and Carl were aliens who’d suffered brain damage in the Roswell crash and Ava was their rehab nurse, training them in the ways of society, and their vibrations were keeping her young. I got somewhat insane behind all this, creating tabloid headlines, picturing me and Leeli on the talk shows, discussing her alien lesbian lover with Jerry and Jay and David and the rest, going out to Hollywood to attend the premiere of the movie about our life story. Gradually I calmed down. There was bound to be a logical explanation for the photo and Carl’s recuperative powers and everything else. I told myself I’d get to the bottom of it eventually.

I woke the following morning with a pistol barrel poking my nose and Rickey’s hand on my throat and his burnt-out eyes giving me a close-up of the dark sour-smelling rathole they opened into. It was like the little room he lived in was inside him, too. Straggles of hair curtained off his face, but did nothing to filter his rotten breath.