Chris Abani - The Secret History of Las Vegas

These two delinquents here are Peggy and Petrol, Salazar said.

Sunil nodded. Salazar thinks you might know someone we’re looking for, he said. He reached into his back pocket and took out a photo of Fire and Water. The kids studied the photo for a while before passing it around. Sunil watched their eyes, noticing shifts in expression, but it was only Annie who said: a real freak! She sounded envious.

We haven’t seen them, Petrol said, passing the photo back almost reluctantly.

Who else might have seen them? Where would they go, Salazar asked.

You should ask Fred, Annie said. Fred knows everything.

The others glared at her and Sunil caught the look.

I’m not a policeman, he said. I’m a doctor. I don’t want to harm Fred. I just want to talk to her. In fact, Sunil said, pointing to Water in the photo, this one says he is in love with Fred.

The kids laughed.

Everyone is in love with Fred, they said, almost in unison.

Where can we find this fucking Fred person, Salazar asked.

The kids looked away.

Please, Sunil said.

She lives out in Troubadour, Horny Nick said.

The ghost town, Sunil asked.

Fred doesn’t like uninvited guests, Petrol said.

Here, Sunil said, digging into his pocket and passing a twenty-dollar bill over to Peggy.

As she took it she leaned into him. Be careful, she whispered. Someone is following you.

Why would anyone follow me, he asked.

How the fuck should I know, she said. But I’m never wrong.

As they walked away, Salazar turned to Sunil. What was all that about, he asked.

She thinks I’m being followed, Sunil said.

Do you think you’re being followed?

No. Why would anyone follow me?

Salazar looked Sunil over for a minute, then said: Listen, is the ghost town far from here?

Yes, a couple of hours.

When do we leave?

Why don’t we go tomorrow morning? Come by my place about nine a.m. You’re driving, by the way.

What’s your address?

Like you don’t know, Detective.

As Sunil drove home, he kept glancing in his rearview mirror. Two cars behind him, Eskia smiled.

In this dream, Selah is an angel oak and all her leaves are yellow, a bright yellow like the soft down on a chick and irradiated by sunlight so the very air, the sky, is all yellow.

The tree is in a field of yellow shrubs: a yellow sky, a yellow field, and a yellow tree. The only things that are not yellow are the black limbs of the tree.

Water stands in the soft down of the shrubs and looks up at the tree. Selah, he says, crying, Selah.

The yellow tree shakes in a sudden wind until it is stripped of leaves, of everything. Now Water is standing in a brown field next to a small cabin leaning drunkenly.

Selah, he calls again, Selah.

Where is your brother, the tree asks.

Water looks down to his side and Fire is gone. He runs his hands down his sides and he is healed, his skin unmarked.

I don’t know, he says, his voice heavy with awe. What does this mean, Mother?

The tree turns white. A rude tree in a field of green and white and in the distance the white shrubs. Water looks around, confused.

Where am I, he asks no one, because there is no one to ask.

And the sky grows dark and brooding like a storm was coming, but there is a purity to the tree, to it all.

Selah, he calls one last time to the tree.

There is nothing but the searing whiteness everywhere.

Wake up, Water.

When he opened his eyes, a nurse was standing over him in the glare of the fluorescent overhead lights.

Time for your medication, the nurse said.

Water took the pill and swallowed it, then lay back, his breath shallow and ragged. Beside him, wrapped in the smoothness of his caul, Fire snored.

The sign outside painted in uneven lettering on a piece of plywood read: GOGO’S CURIO AND BOOKSHOP. Run by Gogo, a shriveled old woman who could have been colored or Indian or even a sunburned Boer, it was a place where people from different races overlapped without worrying about the authorities. Perhaps it was Gogo’s racial ambiguity, or her reputation as a fierce witch with so much muthi that even the police were unwilling to come up against her; whatever the reason, Gogo’s curio shop was probably the most liminal place in all of Jozi, sitting as it did in a dead zone between the Wits University campus and the Fort. The wall facing the street was covered in a colorful mural, and a ditch and a fence hid the entrance, which was down an alley.

Her customers included university students, interracial lovers hiding from anti-miscegenation laws, sangomas, curio hunters, rare-book collectors, and more. It seemed sometimes to Sunil that all the misfits in Jozi met up there.

He had been coming to Gogo’s since he stumbled on the store as a sixteen-year-old and Gogo had given him a torn paperback copy of Tropic of Cance r. He came because he imagined his parents must have met in a place like this. Gogo’s always smelled of frankincense, which she kept burning on coals in a small black cauldron behind the counter.

Keeps the customers honest, she said to Sunil once with a wink. Besides, it smells like church, holy and mysterious.

He had to agree. Seen through the thin haze of smoke, everything looked mysterious. The mummified animals; the mummified human hand and head; the strangely formed rocks; animal pelts and skins; freshly killed owls; bones; dried herbs; the books — stacked everywhere; and strange jewelry from Tibet (malas and turquoise rings) — amber with insect fossils, and rings and necklaces with butterfly wing fragments encased in resin.

It was the last place Sunil expected to meet Jan. He’d never seen her at the bookstore. She looked up at him when they both reached for the same book. They each knew the risk of it, in those days, but that only made it more exciting; and during a conversation on the amazing hummingbird moth, held over the book neither would let go of, she touched his hand and asked if he would like to go back to her place. Her forwardness both attracted and frightened him.

Her small flat was made smaller by the glass cases and frames that covered every surface: walls, tabletops, couch, the dining chairs, and the floor.

Come in, she said, walking in and dropping her handbag in the middle of the rubble. He followed somewhat timidly, fighting a strong urge to tidy up. Jan grabbed mugs from the draining board in the kitchen, poured wine from a half-empty bottle, and handed him a mug.

Cheers, she said, clinking. Well, it’s not much, but it’s all mine.

Quite, yes, Sunil said, thinking the untidy mess of her apartment didn’t match the somewhat severe Jan of the classroom. But then, that wasn’t uncommon among white South Africans. It was common knowledge that most led a double life. What was shown in public was a repressed, conformist, and exaggerated morality. But the home life was completely different, revealing everything from messiness to deviant sexual behavior. A double life, however, was a privilege no blacks had because while whites were safe from scrutiny behind their front doors, blacks were always under scrutiny.

Come see this, Jan said, and sat at her kitchen table, bent over a butterfly she placed carefully under a microscope. Come see, she said. He shook his head and sipped the cheap wine. Watching her, he’d loved that she could get lost so easily in her study. He thought it a wonderful thing to sort and label whole species, to mount them behind glass as proof of certainty. She smiled up at him and he smiled back, wondering in that moment if what Lacan said was true: that loving someone else is impossible. That all we love is the space between our own desires — to be seen and to be wanted. It wasn’t unusual, he supposed, that as a psychiatrist-in-training he would think of Lacan when he thought of love, but he did find it irksome the way his mind seemed to get between him and his body, between him and the world. He imagined it was different for Jan. She seemed to have a more visceral engagement with things when she was in her own world.