Finnegan is nice enough, for a lawyer. He tells me he’s a partner in Bailey, Lassiter amp; Phelps, the family’s firm in New York, and he just happened to be taking a meeting in Atlanta when Josey yanked the handle. Being nearest partner to big client, he got tagged and came. I lie back in the leather of his rented Town Car and breathe in air-conditioning; I’m back in the bubble wrap of Doe existence, and I find I am a little sorry, as I never quite fit into it. I’m also nervous, because it means I’ll have to talk to my father again.
Finnegan is giving me lawyerly advice, which I interrupt to tell him about Luz. I give him the whole story straight-up. He purses his lips. He is thin lipped, and it distorts the whole bottom shelf of his face to generate a purse equal to my little problem.
“You say this officer, this detective …”
“Detective Paz.”
“Paz. He knows the whole story?”
“Not the part about the mother’s death, no. But he knows something is fishy about Luz. And if he looks hard, he’ll find out who she is.”
“Yes, but there’s no evidence you had anything to do with the woman’s um … accident. She fell and struck her head. You found the girl, patently abused, and took her home, gave her shelter, cared for her. Irregular, of course; you should have notified the authorities, but … we can play it as a Good Samaritan excess. She calls you ‘Mommy,’ does she?”
“Muffa.”
“Hm. Let me get to work on it. I’ll call the governor’s office, see what can be done. Clearly, you’re the best possible adoptive mother with respect to resources for a child; you’re married, which is to the good. Is there any chance …?”
He sees my look.
“Sorry, no, of course not. Still, I think we can get you named guardian while we iron out the details.”
Iron on, Finnegan! It’s so easy to love lawyers when one is rich. We drive to the transmission place and I get my clunker, occasioning another massive lip-purse. I shake hands with Finnegan, thank him. He unloads a last smidgen of advice, to keep my mouth shut and avoid associating with my husband. Poor man, he was all set for a task like bailing a rich bitch out of some DUI-like situation and he ends up with me, voodoo, mass murder, Armageddon, and the Last Days. He hands me a bulky manila envelope and bids me good night.
After the chilled car the night is like a warm washrag against my face. Driving home, I’m aware of the sound of sirens, more sirens than usual, even down here in the poor end of the Grove. I hear a flat explosion, too, somewhere to the north, and closer, the firecracker poppings of small-arms fire. I park and hurry across to Dawn’s.
She’s pale and nervous and she chatters a mile a minute: Jeopardy has been interrupted by the news. The Last Days indeed! Some huge and disparate disaster is occurring. An oil truck has crashed on I-95, gunfights have broken out near the Miami River, a riot is brewing in Overtown, a whole family has leaped from the top of a Brickell apartment house, a squadron of cops has run amok with automatic weapons and shot one another and several civilians. What’s happening, is everyone going crazy? What should she do? Her husband is away again. What should she do?
I suggest a soothing cup of herbal tea, which I make, in her messy kitchen. This served, I greet my child with more fervor than I usually show. She feigns indifference, and continues her play with little Eleanor. Dawn and I sit in wicker chairs and watch the TV for a while. The pundits have decided that it is sabotage and a cult riot, although no one is sure about which cult is involved. Then the screen fizzles and goes dark. We wait, and watch the signature static of the Big Bang for a while, before I thumb the thing off. Dawn gets weepy and I comfort her as best I can.
Around eight, I take Luz home. I have a lot of stuff to do tonight. She’s clinging and fretful, however, and I must stay with her, up in her little garret room, until she’s asleep. Downstairs again, I take another amphetamine, no, two, just to make sure I stay up on the plateau, where there is a good view. I can’t fall into the crevasse now, uh-uh.
I haul out the box and remove my divining bag, and some bags and bottles and soiled envelopes containing various organic flakes and fragments? komo?and the jar of kadoul I mixed up the other day, and my Mauser. I arrange these all on the kitchen table. Before starting, I look into the manila envelope that lawyer Finnegan gave me. Inside is my passport, my checkbook, my VISA and Amex cards, my New York driver’s licence, and a minute cellular phone, with a note taped to it, in Josey’s felt-tipped scrawl: Janey?call Dad! auto #1 love J. Oh Josey! How long would you have kept the dead girl’s things had I really done it?
So the crying starts again, and through tears I seek and push the right buttons. The tiny thing reaches out into the wireless nexus and gets my father. By then, of course, I am honking like a walrus in heat, and I say how sorry I am, and he tells me not to think about it, that he never believed that I was dead. I asked him why not, as I thought I had done a pretty good job. He said he knew that if I really wanted to kill myself I would have used a gun. He said he knew I didn’t have anything to do with Mary’s death, and that he knew I really loved her, even though she didn’t love me. I was amazed: we’re always so surprised when our parents can figure us out, we all think we’re so secret and clever. He asked when I was coming home. I said I had some things to take care of here, but not long at all. Then we talked about my mom for a while.
He asked me if he could help. I knew what he meant, and I said, no, he couldn’t. I was going to a place where even the red handle wouldn’t help, and Josey couldn’t track me down for another rescue. He told me to take care and trust in God.
After we hung up, I finished my hysterics, weeping for my family, for Mary, and my poor gorgeous crazy mom, and Dad of course, but I’d always been able to cry for him. Then I washed my face in the tepid water of the kitchen sink and got down to work.
It is strangely the case that a particular arrangement and combination of organic materials, which have been handled in a ritual way, will perform acts definable as magic, or prevent them within a particular area. You can make, for example, a ch’akadoulen and plant it in front of a guy’s house, and he will gradually fade away and die. Or suddenly decide to kill his family and have to be shot. Whether or not he’s a believer. So I carefully compound my scant store of komo into tetechinte, countermagic. I only have enough komo for five of them. They don’t look like much: little bundles of bark and leaves, smeared with oily substances, strong-smelling, each wrapped in an intricate web of red, black, white, and yellow threads.
I go outside and bury one at each corner of my house. There is a smell of distant burning, nastily hydrocarbonish, and a red glow to the north, and low heavy clouds, no breath of wind, although the clouds seem to be writhing along, lit from below. They must have tried to take him, and now he’s showing them what he can do if he likes. He doesn’t understand that they will all die before admitting that what he is is real, that they will squat, if it should come to that, in the glowing ruins of their cities and say, coincidence, random, bad luck, natural disaster, unknown terrorists, mass hallucinations, like a mantra. And he will still be invisible, the poor man.
The last little bundle I take up to the loft and hang from the ceiling above Luz’s head. Over my own neck I draw the amulet Ulune gave me when I left Danolo, a little red-dyed leather pouch, into which I have never peered.
Now I clean my Mauser 96, a restful chore. It has no screws in its mechanism at all. Each part pops free with a precisely directed pressure and snaps in with a satisfying click, just where it belongs; the smell of the oil rag reminds me of home, of Dad. After that, I take the rounds out of the box magazine and rub the bullets with a substance designed by Olo technicians to make them penetrate magical objects or beings. Then I reload.
I need a bath, now, to clean the jail stink off my skin, a long hot one in a huge bathtub like they have at Sionnet, but what I have instead is my little chipped one. I stay in it a long time, and wash the last of poor Dolores’s shit-brown out of my hair. After I emerge, I rub the haze from the mirror and contemplate Jane recidivus, trying not to recall the undying ghosts of this same assessing gaze, from my youth, when I cried, and cursed my plain face, and hated my sister, whom the mirror loved. I see the perfect teeth of the rich, quite startling eyes, if I do say so, nose too big, jaw too strong, teeny tiny little skinny lips like worms … At any rate, a lot better looking than Dolores. I get out my barber scissors, spread newspaper, and snip away, snip away, until I have made a rough dark-yellow helmet, jaw length on the sides and back, with a center parting, the somewhat jockish look I had in sophomore year, when I played a lot of field hockey. My husband always liked me to wear it long, and I did, down to the waist in back, braided and pinned up, a pain in the ass in Africa, but the Africans loved it. They used to touch it on the street, like touching a snake, for luck. I carefully gather up all the cut hair, down to the tiniest fragment I can find, and flush it away in the toilet. A little habit in the sorcery biz, practically the first thing Ulune taught me.
I don my ratty blue chenille Goodwill bathrobe and sit in the kitchen in the dark with my gun. The air is stifling, loaded heavy with the usual Miami perfume: jasmine, rot, car exhaust, a rumor of salt water, plus tonight the stink of burned things and … just now, the dulfana, and a dead rat odor. At the screen door I look down in the yard. There are three of them, standing motionless in a group. Paarolawatset. I can’t see their features, but one of them has the sagging shape of the man Paz called Swett.
He doesn’t want me wandering away again, it appears, and has dispatched watch-things to trail me, or maybe he fears for my safety in the chaos he’s causing, and these are guards. That would be like Witt, to think of that.
I sit down and drink water. The thought of food is nearly as nauseating to me as the thought of sleep. I hear thumps and scratching sounds outside, calls of animals and birds whose natural habitat is not South Florida. I get my journals from the box and review my notes, as for a big test. I should be more or less safe from ordinary jinja, his sendings, because Ulune was a major power and he gave me some good stuff. I wish he were here now, Ulune. He wouldn’t actually protect me. He sure didn’t when I was witched out of my hut by Witt and Durakne Den. But I always got the feeling that Ulune was playing a much larger game than the usual sorcerers’ spats, that if he thought it was required, he could have crushed both Witt and his witch teacher like cockroaches. Let Ifa unfold, Jeanne, he would say. Don’t grab at the folds like a greedy child tearing the peel from a fruit. The do-nothing phase of life, as sensei used to put it, so hard for us Americans.
So I wait, and after a while … an hour? A couple of hours? … there is another unfolding. I hear steps on the shell gravel of the drive, and steps on my stairs. I work the action on the Mauser, chambering a magic bullet, and point at the screen door. There is a shadow there, a face. It’s him, Witt. I take aim, not at all confident in my ability to shoot, not even now. Or that the bullet will have any effect.
“Jane? Ms. Doe? Are you there?”
I let out the breath I am holding, and a wave of relief passes through my body, tingling down to my fingers. I lower the gun, and I say, “Come in, Detective Paz. The door’s open.”
He comes in. I turn on the kitchen light. A little double take when he sees the new me. When he notices the pistol he frowns.
“That’s quite a piece.”
“It is. It’s a Mauser 96, old and very rare. It works, though. You look like you’ve had a rough night.”
He has a smudge on his forehead, grease or smoke, and the knees of his tan slacks are grimy.
“You could say that. Can I sit down?” I motion to the other chair and he falls into it heavily. He gestures to my pistol. “Expecting somebody? Or considering another suicide?”
“Troubling times,” I say. “You never can tell who might come by on a night like this. Or what.” This sounds so portentously like the dialogue in a bad horror film that I feel hysteria rising in my throat, and I have to stifle a giggle.
“How do you know I’m not a what?”
“If you were a sending, you couldn’t have gotten in. I have bars up against magical forces. The pistol is for physical beings, like those zombies out in the yard.” He stares at me, his mouth slightly open, like a child’s. A good deal of the slick gloss and confidence he exhibited earlier today seems to have been scraped off Detective Paz by this night’s doings. I feel for him. I recall being scraped myself.
He says, “Shit! This is really happening, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so,” I say.
He hisses something in Spanish that I don’t quite catch, and strikes the heel of his hand hard against his temple. “Fuck! Sorry, I’ve had a bad day.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Lately? Well, we started the evening by arresting your husband. That didn’t work out too good. He didn’t stay arrested. He was in the back of my car, cuffed, and then he was smoke. Then all hell broke loose, which I thought was a figure of speech until a while ago. You wouldn’t have any idea about how he does all this shit?”
“Actually, I have a very good idea, but I already told you and you didn’t pay any attention. I don’t really feel like going through it again.” I tapped the cover of the journal. “It’s all in here, more or less. You could read it.”
“I might do that.” He looks around my bare kitchen. “You wouldn’t have a drink handy, would you?”
“A drink drink? No, I don’t. But I could run across to Polly’s and borrow a couple of beers.” I rise, pistol in hand. I should have offered, of course; we Does are trained in the elementary courtesies, but there has been a long time between guests chez Jane.
“What about …?” With a movement of his head he indicates the waiting things in the yard.
“Oh, they won’t bother me. If they do, I’ll shoot them.”
“The zombies? I thought they were dead already.”
“A popular misconception. In any case, I have magical bullets. Stay where you are. Don’t move. I mean really don’t move. You’ll be fine.”
I go down the stairs and cross the yard. The paarolawatset begin to move toward me, but slowly, shuffling like old bums.
I knock on Polly’s side door. The yellow porch light comes on, a curtain pulls aside, showing the terrified face of my landlady. At first she doesn’t recognize me; then, with a look of vast relief, she does. Several locks click and she pulls me inside.
“Dolores! Thank God! What’s going on? I was watching TV and then the cable went down. There’s supposed to be a riot going on. Christ! Is that a gun? Who are those guys in the yard? I called the cops, but 911 is jammed up …”
I put a calming hand on her shoulder. “There’s not going to be a riot around here. Just stay in the house and you’ll be okay. Are the kids in?”
“In L.A. with their father, thank God. They’re due back tomorrow. Dolores, what’s going on?”
I try to radiate confidence. Polly is actually pretty tough, and New Agey enough not to be knocked entirely out of whack by weird doings. “It’s a real long story, but first of all, I’m not Dolores anymore, I’m Jane. My husband isn’t dead, like I told you; he’s alive, and after me, and he’s a … sort of a terrorist, and those are his people out there, watching me.”
“You’re kidding, right? God, you cut and colored your hair! You look great. But seriously, you were hiding from him and he found you? Did you call the cops?”
“Yes. One of them is up in my place and I offered him a beer that I don’t have. I came over to borrow a couple.”
She bursts out laughing, and I join her, and arm in arm we go up to the kitchen and she passes me a six-pack of Miller tallboys from the fridge. She says, “I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna go up to bed and turn up the A/C all the way, and put Hildegard von Bingen on the headphones and pull the covers up over my head until this is over.”
I tell her this sounds like a good plan. I am halfway home when I feel a finger scratching at my neck, and then my neck hairs are pulled and twisted in that annoying way she used to do when we were kids, and my sister’s voice comes clearly over my left shoulder. Oh, Janey, you really messed up again, big-time. This is all your fault. Plain Jane. Plain Jane couldn’t stand I was pregnant, you were so jealous you could hardly look at me, you always hated me, Mom said so. That’s why you got him to kill me. You knew he was going to kill me, didn’t you? And my baby. Look at me, Jane! Look what you did to me!
I don’t turn around but keep walking. Slow going; I never realized that it’s about a quarter of a mile from Polly’s house to the garage. The path is closing in: rattan palms rattle and brush my arms, acacias, and locust bean, and all the dry spiky shrubs of the Sahel. My feet sink into the warm sand. A figure looms ahead, blocking my way. It’s my brother. He is naked. He has an erection, which he strokes. Janey, honey, let’s do it in the weeds. Janey, come on like we used to do in the boathouse, come on, Janey, his voice is sweet, low, insistent, come on, Janey, you know Mary and I used to do it all the time. Take off your clothes, Janey, let’s see if you got any tits yet. I raise my pistol and shoot him in the chest. Screaming and crashing in the brush, and laughter, not human, like a hyena. I stagger.
There’s hot breath in my ear, stinking breath, booze and decay. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, says Mom, why do you have to be such a pain in the ass? Look at your sister, just look at her! And there she is, right in front of me now, white and lovely in her little scoop-neck blue linen maternity top and white shorts. She smiles her cover girl smile. She opens the top and her insides fall out of her ripped belly as she smiles on. There is shrill howling, like a dog hit by a car.
Something grabs my left arm, hard. I raise the gun, but it is batted away and I am hauled up off my feet, an arm around my waist. I feel stair treads under my zoris. Detective Paz is heaving me up the stairs and into my apartment.
I collapse inside the door, my head against the cool porcelain of the stove.
“I heard the shot,” he says. “I think you popped one of those … those guys. You were turning in a circle and screaming, about ten feet from the stairs.”
“Yeah. It’s not so good out there right now.” I crawl on hands and knees to the bathroom. I lay my cheek on the rim of the toilet and retch up a little yellow slime. I hear the snap of a pop-top and the gurgling sound of a man knocking down most of a twelve-ounce in one slug.
“Feeling better?” he asks when I totter back and collapse into a chair next to him.
“Much. If I were a bell, I’d be ringing. Thank you for coming out there after me.”
“You had the beer. What was going on?”
“Just paging through the family album. Look, I think we’re stuck here for a while. We’ll be okay here unless he decides to come in person.”
“In which case, you’ll waste him with that funny gun. Or I will.”
“No,” I snap, “if he comes here, I’ll probably shoot you, and maybe my daughter, too, or you us. Surely it has finally sunk in that he can control what we see? If I think he’s approaching in person, we unload the firearms and put them out of reach. We can’t fight him in m’fa; I have to stop him in m’doli. If I can.”
He drains his beer and pops another. “Want one?” he asks, offering. I drink a sip. I can feel it trickle all the way down into what feels like an empty fifty-five-gallon drum. Paz is fingering my journal. He says, “Would there be a part here that explains how a bunch of highly trained cops got into a gunfight with people who weren’t there and then started shooting one another?” He shudders. “And how somebody else, some fucking Ku Klux Klan bastard, is living in my partner’s body? In small words.”
“Small words? You’ve seen a grel. That makes it easier. Sorry, grel? greletis the plural. Mind demons. The Chenka call them ogga. Okay, the short version: One, the psyche is real, like metal and electricity. It’s its own thing. Psyches live in complex brains like ours, but they’re not strictly speaking products of our brains. And they can live outside of brains too.” I tell him in plain language what the Olo make of the mental phenomena that still baffle Western science?manic-depression, schizophrenia, mass hysteria, intuition, sexual attraction …
“I thought that was all chemicals?the mental disease business,” he says.
“Yes, right. But that view of the mind ignores tens of thousands of personal accounts of psychic experiences?falling in love with unsuitable people, premonitions, significant dreams, spirit possession, ghostly apparitions, religious ecstasies. Inexplicable behavior, we like to call it. The regular joe who every so often just has to rape and strangle a little girl. Afterward, he feels better. Of course he feels better; his grel is well fed, like a leopard after a nice haunch of antelope. Or the well-brought-up kid with no obvious symptoms who one day murders his parents and starts shooting everyone in school, or on a slightly grander scale, the fact that the most civilized and technically advanced nation in Europe once decided to put itself totally in the hands of an uneducated wacko with a funny mustache and a hypnotic stare. Yeah, it’s all so-called chemistry, but since we don’t know squat about how it works, calling it chemistry is just another kind of incantation. It’s not science.”
And more of this. I haven’t talked with anyone for longer than necessary for a couple of years and so it comes out in a rush, all of Marcel’s theorizing, the stuff even he was nervous about placing before the scientific community, my own compulsive thoughts about the stuff I’d experienced, plus a good deal of speculative ontology, what I used to keep myself sane among the Olo, assuming for the moment that I succeeded in that. He listens, hardly interrupting, for which I am grateful. Detective Paz is a good listener; perhaps it is a professional requirement. Perhaps, also, he is exhausted into passivity, psychically spent, and, as his fourth tallboy goes down the hatch, a little drunk.
“So let’s for the moment accept the reality of psychic entities,” I say, “and that they are natural beings whose existence lies outside the scope of modern physics, not necessarily and forever outside the scope, because we can conceive, if only with difficulty, of a psychophysics that includes the phenomenology of consciousness and disembodied psyches. Like I said, physics has expanded to cover stuff like action at a distance, radio waves, radioactivity, quantum weirdness. The point is, there’s no supernatural. It is all part of the universe, although the universe is queerer than we suppose. Now, the grelet, the ogga, are destructive psychic particles. They’re everywhere, like bacteria. Why are they destructive? Because they feed on the psychic breakdown products of a collapsing human psyche. They eat anguish and pain and heartbreak, and so they attempt to control their hosts so as to cause these states. Naturally, like any parasitic entity, they camouflage themselves as natives of the psychic ecology. You say your partner was never foulmouthed or racist before this?”
“Never. And he comes from a long line of nasty racists. He’s a hard-rock born-again Christian.”
“But inside him was all the shit he heard when he was a kid, suppressed, under control. I take it he’s a tightly wrapped guy?”
“Very.”
“Right, so Witt releases an aerosol that stuns what’s his name’s …”
“Barlow. Cletis Barlow.”
“Yes, it stuns Barlow’s consciousness. That consciousness is asleep, or helpless. Into the driver’s seat comes something wearing the sensory experience of his childhood, the material put there by his father. We all carry powerful bits of our parents’ psyches in us, what the Jungians call introjects. That’s how our psyches are formed in the first place, but even when we’re adults, there’s a little Mom and a little Dad still sitting in there, and God knows, even in so-called normal people, what we see in daily behavior is largely those introjects in action.”
That was interesting, that flicker of pain at the line about parental psyches. Could this be the ally? I am dying to know about this guy’s daddy. But I have to be careful, or he’ll bolt. “What happened to your partner happens all the time in other cultures. It’s a regular thing in Southeast Asia, like headache or the flu. They call it amok or matagalp. And dreams?these other psyches really boogie out in dreamland. The Olo believe that’s why we sleep in the first place?so we can listen to and deal with the other folks who’re living in our heads. That’s one reason why extreme sleep deprivation leads invariably to psychosis.”
Yes, Jane, and look who’s talking. He gets up, paces in silence to the end of the room, and comes back again. “Say I buy all this. What’s the fix? What do we do?”
A wail comes from upstairs. I am up the ladder in a flash. She’s sitting up in bed, crying. I hold her, I rock her; she calms after a while, and I ask her what’s wrong. Monsters. My heart freezes. But I don’t smell anything, and the charm is still in place over her bed. Just a regular nightmare, then, thank God, just wonderful ordinary hideous childhood terrors. We talk about monsters a little. Your regular mom can tell her child that monsters are imaginary and can’t hurt you. This is, however, not an option for me. I indicate the tetechinte over her bed, I explain what it is for and that it will keep the monsters from getting in.
Something heavy lands on the roof and makes a scratching sound, like long claws drawing over shingles. Luz shrieks again, and buries her face in my bathrobe. I say it’s trying to get in and it can’t, and in fact, it can’t. She does not, however, want to sleep alone, she wants to sleep in the big hammock, with me. I think that’s a reasonable request. I say, “Listen, honey, you remember that policeman who was here today, this morning?” She nods. “Well, he’s downstairs. Mommy is helping him catch the bad people.”
“Can I help, too?”
“Of course,” I say. She doesn’t want to be left out of anything, even death. “We’ll all help together.”
I grasp her hot, damp little hand and we go to the ladder together. Suddenly, she gives a little shriek. “I forgot. I have a note.”
She runs back to her book bag and trots back with a square of paper. It says Dear Ms. Tuoey: Luz needs her decorations attached to her costume. Everything is in the bag. Use your imagination!! It’s signed Sheila Lomax. “What is it?” Luz asks.
“I’m supposed to fix your costume for the Noah’s ark play.”
“My Mary Mary all contrary costume. It has fluffy things, and little shiny things like little tiny mirrors.”
“Sequins.”
“Uh-huh. I have a lot and a lot of them.”
Oh, good! Thank you, Miss Lomax!
We descend. Detective Paz is crouching in firing position between the refrigerator and the bathroom door. He has the grace to blush, and shoves his pistol hurriedly back into its holster, like a man caught pissing, zipping it away.
Something has changed in the atmosphere, a lightening of pressure, in the last few seconds, like a fresh breeze through your window on a sultry night. My wall clock says midnight. I go to the window. The shapes in the garden are gone. Detective Paz stands next to me.
“They’re gone,” he says.
“Not for nothing are you a detective,” I say, and he laughs.
“Maybe they’re on shift work. Who do you think’s going to cover the graveyard shift? So to speak.”
He seems to be returning to his cheeky ways. Good. Resilience is good. Luz sees us looking at each other and does not like it.
“I’m hungry,” she declares, pouting. “I’m starving to death!”
“Luz, honey, it’s twelve midnight,” I say. “Have a banana and you can go into the hammock.”
“I don’t want a banana. I want dinner.”
“You had dinner, dear. At Eleanor’s. Remember?”
“No I didn’t. Eleanor had a yucky dinner, and I didn’t eat it.”
Oh, Christ. And of course, Dawn was too frazzled to inform me. Luz is getting ready to wail, when, remarkably, Detective Paz kneels down next to her. “You know, I’m starving to death, too. What do you say we go out to a restaurant? I bet you have a pretty dress you can put on. And your mom can put on a pretty dress, and we’ll go out to a fancy restaurant. It has tropical fish tanks and a cage full of parrots.”
“A restaurant?” says The Mom doubtfully. “It’s past midnight.”
“I mean a Cuban restaurant,” he says. “Cuban restaurants are just getting in gear at midnight.”
I look at him and at Luz. They’re both grinning at me, white teeth against brown. This is interesting. The world as we know it may end fairly soon, and here we are getting ready for a date. But what else should we do? Call in air strikes? Run around like chickens with their heads off? This seems right, and as I think this, suddenly my appetite comes back in a rush. I am starving. I find I am ridiculously pleased that, whatever happens afterward, at least I’ll get one decent meal.
I say, “Okay, but I have to get dolled up. You could skim through that while I’m doing it.”
He stops smiling and sits down at the table. He opens the journal.