Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

“You need a disguise,” he said. “And you got the perfect disguise right at your fingertips.” He proceeded to explain.

“You crazy, Buddha!” said Taboo. “No way I can do that.”

“You ain’t got no choice.”

“You crazy!” Taboo repeated, backing away. “Crazy!”

“C’mon back here!”

“Naw, man! I gotta get away, I gotta…” Taboo backed into the door, felt for the knob, and—eyes wide, panic-stricken—wrenched it open. His mouth opened as if he were going to say something else, but instead he turned and bolted down the hall.

The pain in Buddha’s back was throbbing, spreading a sick weakness all through his flesh, and he passed out for a few seconds.

When he regained consciousness, he saw Taboo standing in the doorway, looking insubstantial due to the heavy wash of magic around him; in fact, the whole room had an underwater lucidity, everything wavering, like a dream fading in from the immaterial. “See?” said Buddha. “Where you gon’ go, man? You barely able to make it here!”

“I don’t know, I’ll…maybe I’ll…” Taboo’s voice, too, had the qualities of something out of a dream; distant and having a faint echo.

“Sheeit!” Buddha reached out to Taboo. “Gimme a hand up.”

Taboo helped him to his feet and into the bedroom and lowered him onto the bed. Buddha felt as if he might sink forever into the black satin coverlet.

“Show me that new dress you bought,” he said. Taboo went to the closet, pulled out a hanger, and held the dress against his body to display its effect. It was white silk, low-cut, with a scattering of sequins all over.

“Aw, man,” said Buddha. “Yeah, that’s your dress. You be knockin’ the boys’ eyes out wearin’ that…if they could ever see it. If you’d just do what’s right. You’d be too beautiful for Detroit. You’d need to get someplace south, place where the moon shines bright as the sun. ‘Cause that’s what kinda beautiful you gon’ be. Moon beautiful. Miami, maybe. That’d suit ya. Get you a big white car, drive down by them fancy hotels, and let all them fancy people have a look at ya. And they gon’ lay down and beg to get next to you, man…”

As Buddha talked, conjuring the feminine future with greater seductiveness and invention than ever before, the heat haze of Taboo’s magic grew still more visible, taking on the eerie miragelike aspect of the mists beyond the lake in Buddha’s Africa; and after Buddha had finished, Taboo sat on the edge of the bed, holding the dress across his lap. “I’m scared,” he said. “What if it don’t work?”

“You always been scared,” said Buddha. “You bein’ scared’s what got them two men dead out there. Time for that to stop. You know you got the power. So go on!”

“I can’t!”

“You ain’t got no choice.” Buddha pulled Taboo’s head down gently and kissed him openmouthed, breathing into him a calming breath. “Do it,” he said. “Do it now.”

Hesitantly Taboo came to his feet. “Don’t you go nowhere now. You wait for me.”

“You know I will.”

“Awright.” Taboo took a few steps toward the bathroom, then stopped. “Buddha, I don’t…”

“Go on!”

Taboo lowered his head, walked slowly into the bathroom, and closed the door.

Buddha heard the tub filling, heard the splashing as Taboo climbed into it. Then heard him begin to mutter his charms. He needed to sleep, to fix, but he kept awake as long as he could, trying to help Taboo with the effort of his will. He could feel the vibrations of the magic working through the bathroom door. Finally he gave in to the pressures of exhaustion and the throbbing in his back and drifted off to sleep; the pain followed him into the blackness of sleep, glowing like the core of his being. He woke sometime later to hear Taboo calling his name and spotted him in the darkest corner of the room—a shadow outlined by painted stars.

“Taboo?”

“It don’t feel right, Buddha.” Taboo’s voice had acquired a husky timbre.

“C’mere, man.”

Taboo came a step closer, and though Buddha was still unable to see him, he could smell the heat and bitterness of the herbs.

“It worked, didn’t it?” Buddha asked. “It musta worked.”

“I think… But I feel so peculiar.”

“You just ain’t used to it is all… Now c’mere!”

Taboo moved still closer, and Buddha made out a naked young woman standing a few feet away. Slim and sexy, with shoulderlength black hair and high, small breasts and a pubic triangle that showed no sign of ever having been male.

The air around Taboo was still and dark. No ripples, no heat haze. The magic had all been used.

“I told ya,” said Buddha. “You beautiful.”

“I ain’t…I just ordinary.” But Taboo sounded pleased.

“Ordinary as angels,” Buddha said. “That’s how ordinary you are.”

Taboo smiled. It was faltering at first, that smile, but it grew wider when Buddha repeated the compliment: the smile of a woman gradually becoming confident of her feminine powers. She lay down beside Buddha and fingered his belt buckle. “I love you, Buddha,” she said. “Make me feel right.”

Love was a steady flow from her, as tangible as a perfume, and Buddha felt it seeping into him, coloring his calm emptiness. On instinct he started to reject the emotion, but then he realized he had one more duty to fulfill, the most taxing and compromising duty of all. He reached down and touched the place between Taboo’s legs. Taboo stiffened and pushed her hips against his finger.

“Make me feel right,” she said again.

Buddha tried to turn onto his side, but the pain in his back flared. He winced and lay motionless. “Don’t know if I can. I’m hurtin’ pretty bad.”

“I’ll help you,” she said, her fingers working at his buckle, his zipper. “You won’t have to do nothin’, Buddha. You just let it happen now.”

But Buddha knew he couldn’t just let it happen, knew he had to return Taboo’s love in order to persuade her of her rightness, her desirability. As she mounted him, a shadow woman lifting and writhing against the false night of the ceiling stars, strangely weightless, he pinned his dead wife’s features to her darkened face, remembered her ways, her secrets. All the love and lust he had fought so long to deny came boiling up from nowhere, annihilating his calm. He dug his fingers into the plump flesh of her hips, wedging himself deep; he plunged and grunted, ignoring the pain in his back, immersed again in the suety richness of desire, in the animal turbulence of this most alluring of human involvements. And when she cried out, a mournful note that planed away to a whisper, like the sound a spirit makes falling through eternity, he felt the profound satisfaction of a musician who by his dominance and skill has brought forth a perfect tone from chaos. But afterward as she snuggled close to him, telling him of her pleasure, her excitement, he felt only despair, fearing that the empty product of his years of ascetic employment had been wasted in a single night.

“Come with me, Buddha,” she said. “Come with me to Miami. We can get us a house on the beach and…”

“Lemme be,” he said, his despair increasing because he wanted to go with her, to live high in Miami and share her self-discovery, her elation. Only the pain in his back—intensifying with every passing minute—dissuaded him, and it took all his willpower to convince her of his resolve, to insist that she leave without him, for Taboo and his dead wife had fused into a single entity in his mind, and the thought of losing her again was a pain equal to the one inflicted by Johnny Wardell.

At last, suitcase in hand, she stood in the doorway, the temptation of the world in a white silk dress, and said, “Buddha, please won’tcha…”