Nine Kinds of Naked (36 page)

Elizabeth paused. At least he was speaking straight with her now. “Maybe that's true,” she said, “but that doesn't change the fact that you're Billy Pronto.”

Diablo sighed impatiently. This whole interaction was careening uncomfortably close to a sense of sanity he wasn't even sure he possessed. Over the years, he had come to feel certain that Billy Pronto was some bizarre aberration in the space-time continuum, yes, but not a split personality of his. The last thing he needed was someone trying to tell him otherwise. “You don't know what you're talking about,” he muttered uneasily.

“If it's not you then it's your crusader friend.”

Diablo groaned. “I told you, I don't have any crusader friends.”

“Fine, whatever, your jail guard buddy, then. Whatever you think your friend was dressed as, the two of you are obviously in cahoots.”

“Cahoots?”

“A nefarious collaboration,” Elizabeth defined.

“A nefarious collaboration,” Diablo repeated, finding a grin. “That sounds very romantic, Ms. Wildhack. I must be quite the rascal in your estimation.”

Elizabeth gazed at him, her eyes sparkling like the diamond tips of a drill that could bore through any BS. “I just want to know what's going on.”

Diablo deflected her piercing gaze by avoiding eye contact. “Don't we all,” he agreed. “But the trick is to discover the truth within ourselves, don't you think? Besides,” he reminded her, “you said a few minutes ago that you already know what's going on. What do you need me for?”

Exasperated, Elizabeth decided to gush the whole truth on him. “Listen,” she said, suddenly vulnerable. “Last night I dreamed that a little girl gave me one of
your
seashell pipes filled with something she called m2, and later she turned into
your
crusader friend that
you
claim does not exist, and now I'm starting to feel like I might be going crazy. Please.” She paused, biting a tremble out of her lower lip and looking away. “Pretty please.” She looked back at him, overriding desperation with jest. “Pretty please with a maraschino cherry on top. Can you tell me what's going on or not?”

This dream disclosure startled Diablo, and he had an urge
to flee her presence despite her cute little maraschino cherry in-joke. He knew too well, however, what the gnashing desperation of losing one's sanity felt like. It was not an apprehension he would foist upon anyone, let alone this delicate hurricane of a woman with whom he had grown so fond of bantering. “Did you smoke the m2, then?” he asked hesitantly, resigning himself at last to a reckoning with his sense of reality.

Elizabeth nodded, feeling suddenly guilty, as if she were admitting to eating a forbidden fruit. “But it wasn't a decision; it just sort of happened.”

Diablo nodded, opening the door and gesturing her to step inside. “I know,” he said grimly. “I've had that dream, too.”

 

95
S
EVERAL BLOCKS AWAY
at an outdoor café, a ceramic mug of mocha latte with chocolate sprinkles levitated off its saucer and drifted silently away, the saucer tagging along after a moment's hesitation. Neither a drop was spilled nor a noise was made, and this departure went unnoticed by anyone, including the owner of the beverage, who was otherwise occupied reading the Aquaholics Anonymous exposé on counterfeit berg ice. When he did eventually notice his mocha latte's unaccountable absence, he angrily demanded an explanation from the waiter, who, having no answer, settled for picking up the abandoned teaspoon and tapping him twice on the head with it. Then he touched the side of his nose and said, “Walk away,” just before walking away himself.

Several blocks later, the ceramic mug of mocha latte with chocolate sprinkles gracelessly splotched its contents onto the
front of Special Agent J. J. Speed's white shirt. It was not scalding, but it was hot enough to elicit a yelping “Motherfucker!” from Special Agent J. J. Speed, who was so immediately preoccupied with pulling the hot and wet shirt away from his tenderized skin that he failed to witness the wonder of the ceramic mug settling silently upon its saucer a few feet away on the pavement, suffering neither crack nor chip.

The mocha latte with chocolate sprinkles had also sopped the notebook upon which he had scribbled
m2, Diablo, Billy Pronto
, and
Know thee Satan.
“Motherfucker,” Special Agent J. J. Speed again whined when he saw this damage, snapping the loose foam from his notebook and noticing only then the bestilled ceramic mug, smug in its emptiness. Glancing apprehensively at the sky, he realized simultaneously that his earbud receiver was no longer purring. He frantically tapped at it a few times, and was relieved when he heard their dialogue resume at last, and without the distraction of Wilhelmina's purring no less. It was Diablo who spoke first:

“Welcome to the eye of the storm.”

 

96
W
IND IS SILENT
and invisible until it touches something. As a consequence, untold numbers of chaostrophic vortices—gustnadoes—were spinning their way through the. atmosphere enveloping New Orleans, unobserved as they went about rearranging sundry objects according to the dictations of unknowable whimsy.

Because air is a fluid, it operates according to the principles of fluid dynamics. Tornado researchers often gesture vaguely in the direction of this esoteric field of inquiry when pressed
to explain how a tornado once stole a duffel bag from a resident's attic and planted it in their neighbor's attic, where it lay undiscovered for many months and was eventually found to be brimming with several kilos of cocaine. Or how a farmer's wife once entered the locked door to her bedroom after a tornado and, upon hearing some commotion from within her chest of drawers, opened the top drawer only to discover two squawking chickens burst out grotesquely naked, tumbling and thumping about in their imbalanced featherlessness. In such circumstances, the researchers explain, the air itself achieves tentacular tendencies, that is, acts like a tentacle, maintaining its cohesive force, and with obviously astounding consequences.

Thus it was that exponential curiosity began appearing throughout New Orleans. In one instance, a couple stepped into their kitchen to fetch a second bottle of wine, pausing for an amorous kitchen-counter encounter, and returned breathless to their dining room only to find the front door wide open and their table gone missing, though every random thing on the table was still arranged just as it had been on the tablecloth, resting undisheveled upon the floor. Drunk on sex and Chianti (“This wine doesn't breathe,” the boy was heard to say as he dramatically popped the second cork, “it pants . . . ”), they pursued their lovely evening regardless, and several minutes later a crowd gathered around a nearby utility pole, pointing in puzzled enthusiasm at the dining room table dangling from the top of the pole, hanging precariously from one leg.

Some kind of foolish prank, it was generally agreed.

 

97
F
ORTUNATELY FOR
Special Agent J. J. Speed, Wilhelmina had followed Diablo and Elizabeth into the studio that Diablo had referred to as “the eye of the storm,” and he was consequently able to sustain his stakeout. The eye of the storm was an immediately pleasing space for Elizabeth to enter, entirely sunlit with several chandelier crystals hanging by fishing line in front of every window, refracting hundreds of prismatic rainbows into a gently entrancing dance around the otherwise barren surfaces of the room. The floor was alone in being covered, flaunting an astonishingly ornate Oriental rug. Diablo called it his magic carpet, and his only prized possession.

Off to the side of Diablo's magic carpet were two desks set at a right angle to one another, crammed with top-end computer equipment. “What's all this?” Elizabeth asked cheerfully, very much relaxed now that she was in this ostensible holy of holies and getting some answers.

“This is my studio,” Diablo drolly stated, idly clicking a few keys and checking a couple of monitors. “Central command, you might call it. Headquarters. This is where m2 takes over the world.”

“I knew it!” Elizabeth gushed, and Special Agent J. J. Speed echoed her.

“You knew what?” Diablo asked, as a couple of strokes from his hand kick-started Wilhelmina's engine, and outside and around the corner, Special Agent J. J. Speed cursed.

“I knew you were Billy Pronto.”

“I am no such person. In fact, I don't believe there is such a
person, although the past few minutes have certainly inspired my uncertainty.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that Billy Pronto is the gentleman jail guard who gave me that Bible you're still hugging.”

Elizabeth looked at the Bible she was still hugging. “Billy Pronto is a crusader,” she replied with calm certainty, “and I expect he wants his Bible back.”

“Nope.” Diablo shook his head. “Like I said, I'm pretty sure Billy Pronto doesn't actually exist, but don't even try to ask me how he gave me the Bible. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“All right.” Elizabeth lounged down upon the luxurious rug, unintentionally sensuous as she laid the Bible aside and began stroking her hands across the woolen fibers of the rug. “Suppose you tell me what you're talking about.”

Surprising her with his agility, Diablo hopped into a sitting position on the rug in front of Elizabeth. “All right,” he agreed, licking his lips in spry enthusiasm. “I've never told anyone this before, and I'm only telling you because this is a very compelling synchronicity that we have happening here.”

“There is nothing but synchronicity,” Elizabeth said again. “It is only our attention that tunes in and out of it.” Her rug stroking had attracted Zippy's hand-fetishist attention, and Elizabeth was now petting her with both hands, ravishing her into a purring paroxysm of feline ecstasy. Elsewhere, an uncontainably pissed-off Special Agent J. J. Speed relieved his mounting frustration at this aggravation of his stakeout by growling “goddamnit to hell” every few seconds. He could barely make
out what they were saying over Wilhelmina's reverberations, and kept losing whole sentences.

“That's exactly right.” Diablo pointed at Elizabeth with genuine severity. “There is nothing but synchronicity, and that's the only reason why I'm telling you anything at all. So listen up, buttercup, because you're going to have to take me at my word if either of us is to have any hope of discovering what is going on. As far as I thought I knew, Billy Pronto—the guy who gave me that Bible—is a runaway jail guard, and I've never seen him costumed in any creative anachronism, crusader or otherwise. I first met him the day you were born, as a matter of fact, shortly before the tornado hit, and I thought he died that day, but then five years later I almost ran him down when he was hitchhiking.” Diablo sighed, having no idea how to explain the preposterousness of the predicament, or even how much of it was necessary to include. He attempted to wave the nonsense away as if it were a cloud of peppermint-farting mosquitoes, largely to no avail. “Anyway, ever since then, every time I drive my truck he's along the road trying to hitch a ride, never changing out of his uniform, never aging a second, invisible to everybody else, always talking in the present tense, and always grinning like a goddamn maniac.
That's
who gave me that Bible, not some crusader with a jackass. So,” Diablo concluded immensely, as if he had just presented an irrefutable argument. “Suppose you tell me what
you're
talking about.”

Elizabeth blinked. “You're asking me to take you at your word? That might be the most unlikely explanation ever offered about anything.”

Diablo shrugged. “Having a dream about a drug-dealing child who smokes you down with some kind of blood-boiling hash and then turns into a crusader who you imagine you see the following afternoon walking his pet donkey around town is hardly a more plausible scenario.” Diablo paused, then as an afterthought asked, “Was the donkey in the dream?”

“Drug-dealing child?” Special Agent J. J. Speed repeated aghast, desperate to decipher their conversation. “Pet donkey?”

“No,” Elizabeth replied, smirking in spite of her sulk. “But didn't you say you had the same dream?”

“I had a dream in which I smoked m2, but it was a jail guard who gave it to me, not some delinquent child.”

“What happened when you smoked it?”

Diablo confounded his expression. “The same thing that happened when you smoked it, of course. Every tooth in my mouth was kicked in, every bone in my body was broken, and every cell in my body was raped. I was utterly destroyed, supremely perished, and then I witnessed the blinding peace of divine consciousness. Basically, I fathomed hell and soared angelic, and then I woke up like I've never woken up before. I mean, there's kicking awake, and there's flying out of bed and landing nine feet across the room feeling like your skin just spun twice around your skeleton.” He leaned forward. “You do realize that thousands of people have had this dream, don't you?”

Elizabeth shook her head innocently, terrified by what she was hearing. “So what's happening?”

“The human imagination is stirring awake,” Diablo grinned reassuringly. “What else could a dream like that be? The
imagination is nonlocal, accessible to all and possessed by none. This thing is manifesting across the collective unconscious. And there have always been shared dreamscapes, naturally, shared expressions of archetypal themes ranging from the foolish to the frightful. The showing-up-to-school-naked dream, the being-chased-by-men-in-black dream, right? But the m2 dream, this thing is obviously something else entirely. It's not just an expression of the archetypes of human consciousness; it's an
activation
of the archetypes of human consciousness. We're dreaming ourselves awake and waking up to the dream of life. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. This is gnosis. That's why synchronicity storms are getting more and more frequent. You've noticed this?”