by Mick Farren
Jim groaned. “Oh fuck, I think I’m going to throw up.”
In truth, Jim was actually feeling somewhat better. As he confronted the fullness of what had recently happened to him, the pain noticeably mitigated, although it was still a matter of better as opposed to worse, rather than better moving through to good. He still didn’t feel absolutely ready to open his eyes and face the light, but then the voice cut in on his thoughts. “At least you’re back. For a while, we thought Moses had tossed you to the end of nowhere.”
The voice took Jim completely by surprise. It was, however, young and female, and it sounded friendly, with a faint trace of a Latina accent. Jim took a deep breath and very gingerly opened his eyes. At first he thought that the light would blind him, but after a few seconds he grew accustomed to it and was able to make out a woman’s face looking down at him with obvious amusement. The amusement increased as Jim struggled to sit up, and he altogether failed to share the joke. “I wish you’d tell me what you find so goddamned funny.”
“I guess this is what you have to expect if you go out honky-tonking with Doc Holliday.”
“I didn’t go out honky-tonking.”
The woman plainly didn’t believe him. “I heard the two of you were attending an orgy.”
Jim avoided her eyes. “Yeah, well, there was an orgy and we were there, but it wasn’t from choice, I can assure you.”
“That’s what they all say.”
Jim wearily started to protest. “It’s the truth.”
“I suppose the devil made you do it?”
“I think Moses made me do it.”
“That’s a new one.”
The woman was slim and pretty in a tough, no-nonsense way, with olive skin and straight glossy black hair that hung almost to her waist. She was dressed in a low-cut white cotton peasant dress trimmed with lace, but in total contrast she also wore a bandolier of cartridges, slung bandit-style across her shoulder. Her blue and white Cuban-heeled cowboy boots gave her a sexy, confident stance, and Jim started to pay more careful attention. Even in the Afterlife, an ex-human’s erotic radar still continued to function. “So what’s your name?”
“Donna Anna Maria Isabella Conchita Theresa Garcia, but you can call me Lola.”
“Lola?”
“That’s what Doc calls me. He has a very bad memory for names. I think it’s a side effect of the opium.”
Jim propped himself up on one elbow. “I’m Jim.”
“I know all about you, Jim Morrison.”
“You do?”
“You were famous long ago.”
“For playing the electric violin, Donna Anna Maria?”
She looked at him impassively. “Lola.”
Lola was carrying an engraved silver tray. Jim gestured to it. “What’s that?”
“Your breakfast.”
“It’s been a long time since I was offered a breakfast.”
Lola set the tray on the bed and Jim noticed that she wore a silver identity bracelet on her left wrist, but the name tag was blank. He leaned forward and inspected the tray’s contents. What part did food play in the Afterlife? Nostalgia for mortality? Part of a ritual? A hedonistic indulgence? A simple prop for an invented lifestyle? Eating was a piece of comfortable holdover behavior that had absolutely nothing to do with nourishment or survival, and Jim rarely bothered with it. His first look revealed, however, that this breakfast was a highly individual one. The bone china coffee set, the glass of orange juice, and the two slices of wheat toast were reasonably conventional. The collection of multicolored pills and capsules, the ornate flask of laudanum, the loaded opium pipe, the thin black cigar, and the four fingers of whiskey in a crystal shot glass that were also carefully arranged on the tray came, on the other hand, squarely out of left field. Jim looked at Lola questioningly and Lola shrugged. “We didn’t know what you wanted, so we gave you the same as Doc.”
Jim blinked at the spread that was now set before him. “Doc has all this for breakfast?”
Lola nodded as though it were really no big thing. “Every day when he’s in town.”
Jim picked up the glass and sniffed the whiskey. It was bourbon and, if his nose didn’t deceive him, at least twelve years old. “What are the pills?”
Again Lola shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I think Doc invents them. As long as he gets a jolt, he don’t care to sweat the pharmacological details.”
“Is Doc here?”
“He’s around.”
“And did Doc create you?”
Lola’s eyes flashed angrily. “What you say?”
“I asked if you were one of Doc’s creations.”
“You think that somebody made me? You think that I’m some irrelevant piece of set dressing?”
Jim knew that he had said the wrong thing. “I just asked. I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful.”
Lola leaned toward him and her expression was dangerous. “You listen to me, Mr. Jim Morrison, and you listen good. I ain’t nobody’s creation. I’m here because I want to be. You know what I’m saying, ese?”
Jim eased back in the bed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Just don’t do it again, okay?”
Jim nodded, looking as contrite as possible even with a headache, without compromising his devil-may-care charm and allure. “I surely won’t.”
Lola turned and walked out of the room, and Jim watched the sway of her retreating hips with singular appreciation. It would have been an understatement to say that she interested him. It might have been a side effect of his recent brush with what had been painfully close to a second death, but right at that moment she seemed about the best-looking woman he’d seen in a long time. Once she was gone, he pushed back the sheets and swung his legs over the side of the bed and tried sitting up. For a moment, he felt dizzy and disoriented, as though mind hadn’t quite locked into body and the two were operating out of phase. With an effort of concentration, he eased the two halves of himself together until he felt as though they were properly meshed, then he waited a moment and the dizziness passed. Deciding that he was now about as fully integrated as he was going to get, Jim slowly looked around the room.
The best word to describe the place was “incomplete.” It was obviously a bedroom, since it was dominated by the huge canopied bed on which Jim had been lately lying, and the stairs down which Lola had made her exit suggested that it was on an upper floor of some larger structure. What was less clear was why the place had no roof and only two and a half of what should have been four walls. In many respects, it resembled a film or stage set. It also hinted Dali, although no soft clocks flowed. Since he’d risen to a sitting position, Jim could see a blue and cloudless Technicolor sky beyond the canopy of the bed. One wall had been completely finished, right down to red velvet wallpaper, and even an ornate gilt mirror hung at approximately eye level. Another wall was missing entirely, and beyond the wooden framework that should have held the wall in place, Jim was treated to a view of flat, rust-colored desert, with mesas and hazy mountains in the distance. Instead of a third wall, a bannerlike bolt of what looked to be saffron-dyed silk had been hung in its place, and it undulated gently in a slight breeze. The silk extended beyond the level of the floor, and, for all Jim knew, might have reached all the way to the ground, wherever that was. Aside from the bed, the room contained little in the way of furniture. A pile of clothing rested on a plain, straight-backed chair, and an ornate Victorian washstand stood in front of the wall that wasn’t there.
Since Jim was quite accustomed to anomalies in the Afterlife, he didn’t spend too much time puzzling over either the nature or origins of the place in which he found himself. Instead, concentrating on the practical possibilities of the moment, he turned his attention to the contents of the tray. He poured himself a cup of coffee, wondered about smoking the cigar, but decided he wasn’t ready. Even in the Afterlife he had never mastered the knack of not inhaling, and cigars inevitably made him cough. What really interested him was
the drugs. The array of medication was formidable. A total of seven pills and capsules were arranged on a blue and white Wedgwood plate, two large white pills, two smaller yellow pills, two red and black capsules, and one more in turquoise and orange. “Sweet Jesus, Doc, who do you think you are? Jerry Lee Lewis?”
Jim pushed the pills around on the plate with his index finger, arranging them into different patterns of colors. Finally he selected one yellow pill, a red and black capsule, and both white pills. He had no idea what they might be, but how much harm could they do? He was already dead, after all. He put all four in his mouth at once, and, before he could think about it any further and reconsider, he washed them with a gulp of coffee, followed by a fast shot of bourbon and a chaser of orange juice. The old reckless Jim was back in the saddle again, going with the impulse and damn the torpedoes. Maybe, if he kept it up, his coherent creativity might actually return. Having escaped the Great Double Helix, he felt he was taking the first steps in a new phase of being. And these steps would not be cautious or faltering: better a lurch than a whimper. The best of times had always come when he’d pushed self-destruction to the fate-to-the-wind limit, and that was where he was headed now. There’s danger at the edge of town. By the way of compromise, though, he ate a single slice of toast, if only to indicate to the world, and maybe Lola, if she was the one who cleared away the tray, that his repast hadn’t been purely chemical. Then he sat back to wait and see where the pills might be taking him.
Jim didn’t have long to wait. A loud bang, and a vibrant flash like an exploding TV screen, heralded the onset of at least one of the drugs. The entire room, and the world and sky beyond it, began to spin violently. Jim’s vision shattered into fractal chaos. From the intensity of the rush he estimated that, had he still been mortal, his heart would probably have exploded. The effect lasted for only a few seconds, though, and then he returned to normal. A second later, a small army of six-inch-tall, anthropomorphic cartoon rodents in tiny military uniforms appeared, quite literally out of the woodwork, and proceeded to march across the floor in formation. They halted in front of Jim, saluted, and then vanished. Even Jim found himself a little stunned, and had to remind himself that, like so many other things, drug abuse in the Afterlife was exempt from the restrictions of cause and effect.
Before anything else could happen, Jim reached quickly for the opium pipe. He didn’t bother to search for a match with which to light it; he wished it alight and it was lit. He inhaled deeply, happy that spontaneous combustion was one of the perks of being dead. Opium, along with alcohol, was a drug that could, for the most part, be relied on to have a similar effect to that which it had on Earth. A couple of long pulls on the pipe were enough to mellow the environment to the point where further explosions or rodent animations would hardly daunt him. The smoke didn’t exactly take him all the way to the Palace of Mirrors, but he found himself in a far more amiable state of mind than he’d enjoyed in a long time. Maybe Doc Holliday had the right idea. Jim’s headache had completely gone; when he inadvertently dropped a red-hot coal from the pipe on his bare thigh, he was only marginally aware of the pain.
Putting the pipe down, he attempted to stand. To his mild surprise, he neither reeled nor staggered. He simply floated with an easy naked euphoria in the direction of the mirror on the red velvet wall. He smiled at his own reflection. In death, he had miraculously shed the weight gain that had dogged him through the final years of life. He could see the bone structure in his face, his stomach was flat as a board, and he was once again the sullen prince who had taken rock and roll by rebel storm. He laughed out loud. “You’re one handsome devil, Jimbo. Don’t you ever die again, you hear?”
He realized the absurdity of what he had just said, but he was too opiated for it to bother him. He turned away from the mirror, suddenly gripped by an urge to get out of the room and do something. He realized he was probably expected to dress. From his brief encounter with the man, Jim couldn’t imagine the immaculate Doc Holliday setting up his home someplace where everyone went buck naked. A thought stopped Jim momentarily in his tracks. Hadn’t Doc said that they’d met before? Jim still had no recollection of such an encounter, so plainly not all of his memory had been returned to him. Unless, of course, more than one Jim Morrison was running around the Afterlife. It was the first time he’d considered such a possibility; maybe the pills and the opium were giving heightened powers of perception. Did any mechanism exist within the Great Double Helix to prevent two people from taking on the same persona? Somehow Jim doubted it. The Great Double Helix manifested little respect for individualism. He would have liked to ponder the problem, but the drugs were doing nothing for his attention span. Dressed. That was what he had to be. Concentrate on the practical now, leave the applied metaphysics for later, when he was no longer quite so airborne.
He looked at the clothes on the chair and wondered if they were intended for him. Then he saw his old scuffed engineer boots standing side by side at the foot of the bed, as if awaiting instructions. If his boots were there, the clothes also had to be for him.
Jim picked up the top garment. It was a loose Mexican shirt made from rough cotton. Beneath it were his familiar scarred and battered leather jeans. He quickly dressed, took one final look in the mirror, and started for the stairs.
“I need your help.”
Semple McPherson raised an eyebrow and half-smiled. Aimee needed something, thus the sudden materialization of the golden Princess phone. Semple saw no reason to be helpful. “I’m kind of busy right now.”
“What are you doing?”
Semple was tempted to tell her sister that it was none of her fucking business. It was so typical of Aimee to want to know what she was doing. As though she had the right to evaluate whose priorities should be the ones to take precedence. Instead, Semple made her voice sweetly innocent. “Actually, sibling, dear, I was busy torturing one of your angels.”
Aimee sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t keep doing that.”
Semple glanced at the angel, who steadfastly refused to look at her. “Why? There are plenty more where he came from.”
“Isn’t it all a little childish?”
Semple could just imagine her sister, standing on her goddamned marble terrace looking out over her ludicrous Heaven, a sad patient smile on her miserable face and bluebirds fluttering all around her. It would make a welcome change if one of the wretched bluebirds took a shit on her. Except, of course, Aimee’s bluebirds didn’t shit. “The word you’re grasping for is ‘childlike.’ ”
Aimee’s voice took on an edge that foreshadowed full-blown exasperation. “The word I’m grasping for is ‘pointless.’ ”
“This particular angel had failed to accomplish a very rudimentary sex act.”
“They’re not designed for sex.”
“You don’t have to remind me. Besides, I was bored.”
The moment she admitted to being bored, Semple realized that she had made a bad tactical error. Aimee immediately pounced on it. “If you’re so bored, you clearly have the time to help me with what I’m doing.”
“Extending your damned Heaven?”
“What else?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not that bored.”
“We would be doing the work of God.”
Although she’d been through this routine countless times before, Semple started to lose her temper. “The fuck we’d be doing the work of God.”
Semple was predictably scandalized. “How can you say that?”
“Because there is no God. There is no God, Aimee. When the fuck are you going to grasp that? Since you died, God hasn’t sent you so much as a fucking postcard, let alone clasped you to his bosom like a little lost lamb. Accept the obvious, woman. God is a no-show. God has stood you up.”
Her outburst was greeted by a long silence. Semple knew she’d wounded her sister, but she wasn’t about to feel any guilt. Aimee would not only get over it, she’d
exact payback sometime in the future. “You could do it for me.”
“Like, you’re God?” Semple adopted a Valley girl intonation. She had discovered it during one of the irregular browsings through mortal culture she had made since her death. It was custom-tailored to irritate Aimee.
Aimee, however, came right back at her. “I suppose you could look at it like that.”
“But you’re not God.”
“I’m doing my best.”
Aimee was actually sounding a little frayed; for a moment Semple took pity on her. “What exactly do you want me to do?”
“I want you to find someone for me.”
“Find someone?” This actually had more promise than Semple had expected. She momentarily savored a vision of herself as Semple McPherson, girl detective. She saw herself in a trenchcoat and an exceedingly cool hat, prowling dark and dangerous streets.
Aimee continued, “I need you to find someone to help me with what I’m doing.”
“Who in their right mind would want to help you enlarge that ridiculous Heaven of yours?”
“They don’t have to be in their right mind. In fact, I’d like them to have as little mind as possible. All I need is someone with enough creative panache.”
“A clean slate?”
“Exactly.”
“A man or a woman?”
“A man would depend entirely on my mood at the time.”
“Either way, you’d get to use your not-inconsiderable powers of seduction.”
“Are you saying you want me to set you up with a man? You want me to procure for you?”
Aimee sounded shocked to the bone. “It would be nothing like that. How could you ever think it?” Semple didn’t find the shock in Aimee’s voice altogether authentic. To her ear, Aimee was protesting too much.
Grinning nastily, Semple continued as though Aimee hadn’t spoken. “It’d be just like old times, wouldn’t it? I reel them into bed, I fuck them, you enjoy the experience from afar, but by never actually emerging until there was a hard-won orgasm to be had, you always left room to pretend it never happened, that you were still God’s own sainted, deep-frozen virgin.”
