Stone Junction

When they swung through Las Vegas two months later, Daniel was burning to play. He told Bad Bobby he was ready.

‘Told ya, Daniel, you play your own money any time you think you’re ready. You can play my money when I think you’re ready.’

Daniel said, more challenge than question, ‘You don’t think I’m ready.’

‘Nope. I think you’d get sucked down like a little muskrat swimming in a pool of ’gators. Fact is, you’re still making too many mistakes on the problems I’ve been giving ya.’

With passion, Daniel said, ‘That’s because I’m sick of theory. From watching you play it’s pretty clear that every hand is a unique situation, because you’re involved with people, real individual players, and one of them is on a hot streak, and one just had a fight with his wife, and one has just finished his sixth whiskey in two hours. I would play my own money if I had any left, and I can always get what I need if I have to––’

‘No you can’t,’ Bobby cut him off cold. ‘No thieving, not even an ashtray – that’s an iron rule with me. Offends the poker gods.’

‘I think I’m ready,’ Daniel said firmly.

Bad Bobby scratched his nose. ‘All right,’ he said without conviction, ‘I’ll front you five grand. But the deal is, if you lose so much as a nickel, you don’t play again for a month and you don’t badger me about being ready.’

‘You’re on,’ Daniel grinned.

‘We’ll get us some dinner and head downtown to the Antlers. They’ve got a hundred-dollar-limit Five-Stud game that’s about your speed.’ Bad Bobby gave him a laconic smile. ‘It’s a real character builder.’

Daniel bought in for a thousand dollars and built some character immediately, his three sevens crunched by three jacks – set over set, one of the toughest beats in the game. He called for another thousand.

It took him an hour to lose the second grand. In a pot with six players, Daniel raised himself all-in on the fourth card, which had given him a second pair to go with his aces, only to get beat on the last card by both a low flush and a straight.

Bad Bobby chuckled behind him. ‘Now Daniel, remember what Ol’ Jake Santee used to say: “Don’t hurt to get it all in. What hurts is getting it broke off.”’

Daniel took out the rest of his bankroll and called for three thousand dollars in black chips. Five hours later, having discovered a tell on a player named Frog Jorgenson and having caught some good cards, Daniel had twelve thousand dollars in front of him. When the player to his right busted out, Daniel was surprised to see Bad Bobby slide into the vacant seat and call for twenty thousand dollars in chips.

Daniel played cautiously whenever Bad Bobby was in the pot. Bobby played his usual game, steady with erratic eruptions, though he juiced the action by betting the limit from first round to last. An hour before dawn, Daniel had about seventeen thousand dollars and Bad Bobby had doubled his stack. As word spread that Bobby was in town, players dropped by the Antlers to check out the action. When the sun came up, there were four times as many railbirds as there were players.

Bad Bobby stretched lazily as the deck was shuffled. ‘Gentlemen, I’m only good for a few more hours. Any objection to putting some guts in this game and raising the limit to a thousand?’

Everyone except Daniel immediately agreed.

‘Thousand it is, then,’ a player named Mad Moses announced.

‘Just a minute,’ Bad Bobby said mildly. He turned to Daniel. ‘How about you, Daniel?’

‘Hell,’ Mad Moses said, ‘he’s winners. If he don’t want to jack it up he can cash ’em out – there’s a whole herd of high rollers drooling to git in the game.’

‘No,’ Bobby said flatly, ‘that ain’t how it’s done. He’s been in the game over twelve hours, and if he says no, that’s all it takes as far as I’m concerned.’

‘A thousand limit is fine with me,’ Daniel murmured. Twenty minutes later he wished Mott Stocker had been there to cut out his tongue.

Daniel started with the seven of hearts in the hole and the eight of hearts up. Bad Bobby was high with the king of hearts showing and when the low man brought it in for the minimum hundred, Bobby raised a thousand. Daniel and three other players called. Daniel caught the eight of diamonds for a pair on the board, Mad Moses caught an ace to go with his offsuit jack, the two others didn’t visibly improve, and Bad Bobby caught the ten of hearts. When the bet reached him, Daniel raised a grand. Moses and Bobby were the only callers. Daniel caught the seven of clubs to pair his hole card, Moses was dealt the six of hearts, and Bad Bobby the trey of hearts, giving him, at best, a pair of kings or a flush draw. Bad Bobby, now low, surprised Daniel by betting the limit. Daniel raised the same. Mad Moses, after long deliberation, folded. Bad Bobby reraised a thousand dollars. Daniel hit it again. So did Bad Bobby. ‘I’m not stopping,’ Daniel said, pushing his call and another grand raise into the pot. ‘You’ve got to catch me and I love the odds on that.’

‘Well,’ Bobby said, ‘count your stack down and we’ll get it all in right now,’ cause I intend to keep raising you back.’ When he’d counted down what remained of his seventeen thousand and shoved it in the pot, Bad Bobby matched it. Counting Mad Moses’ money and the initial bets, there was over forty thousand dollars in the pot.

‘It’s up to the cards now,’ Bobby said. ‘Let’s take a look and see if I can snap your two pair.’

The dealer turned up the jack of hearts for Daniel. Bad Bobby caught the queen of hearts. He had the ace of hearts in the hole. Heart flush.

‘Take the pot,’ Daniel said, trying to control the shocked disappointment in his voice. He smiled ruefully at Bad Bobby, who was stacking the chips. ‘You deserve it, Bobby, catching that queen with so many hearts out, raising all the way – that’s luck.’

‘No, Daniel, that’s knowing when.’

‘You want more chips, Daniel?’ the floor man said at his shoulder.

Daniel started to rise from his chair. ‘I guess not.’

‘If no one objects,’ Bad Bobby said, ‘you can play ten grand off my roll.’

There were no objections.

Bad Bobby cashed out at noon, thirty-thousand dollars winners. Four hours later, his eyes stinging from smoke and exhaustion, Daniel cashed out twenty-one thousand five hundred, fifteen thousand of which he returned to Bad Bobby, who was still awake when Daniel got back to the hotel.

‘You come out, huh?’

‘I won sixty-five hundred.’

‘Good, but don’t forget you can lose.’

‘I would have if you hadn’t staked me that extra ten grand. Thanks for the confidence.’

‘Well shit, I wouldn’t have much of an opinion of myself as a teacher if I didn’t think you could hold your own in a little pissant game like that. Besides, you caught Froggy’s tell about ten minutes after I did. You might be relying a shade heavy on odds, but I suppose that’s my fault. Just remember that if you’re playing Russian Roulette, one chamber loaded out of six, about seventeen percent of the time you’re going to be dead. Technically, you know, you lost our side bet when I broke you, because if I hadn’t extended more credit, you’d be washing windows with your tongue. Now you have enough money of your own to do as you please. If you run short, you can play my money any time.’

But Daniel, with his sixty-five hundred dollars profit, played his own, and he played it well. At the end of a year he had almost two hundred twenty thousand dollars, eighty thousand from a single pot in a Seven-Stud game in Albuquerque, beating Dumpling Smith’s four nines with a low straight flush in diamonds. Between games, as they traveled the circuit (what Bad Bobby called hard-assing the highway), Bad Bobby critiqued Daniel’s play. Aside from the lack of polish and occasional lapse in judgement, he saw only one major flaw. It wasn’t so much a repeated mistake as it was a general disposition – Daniel liked to gamble. He was seduced by the needle-thrill of action, the excitement and hope and abandon.

Bad Bobby told Daniel that a friend, a famous stock-car driver, had told him what he considered the greatest danger of racing: ‘“When you’re driving hard out on the edge, and the love of speed comes over you so true and deep and real, you don’t want to slow down. You know you ought to. But you’re locked into something so awesome and consuming you can’t back off. It’s always the same – the faster you go the less you care about being able to stop. Ever.”

‘And that’s bad shit, Daniel. Don’t step in it.’

But to sustain the high, thin edge of concentration gambling required was costly in itself. Along with the constant travel, there were days without sleep, an almost constant isolation from the natural world, adrenalin solos dancing on the blade. Against the discontinuities of the gambling life, Daniel developed portable routines. He read the paper with breakfast to remind himself daily there was a world beyond the cardtable. He took a long bath before every game. He wore, interchangeably, ten identical white shirts. The routines gave him a sense of stability, of a quotidian infrastructure that could survive the winds of chance. Occasionally he wanted a woman, and most often she was a five-hundred-dollar call girl. Daniel liked call girls. They were adventurous, usually independent, often beautiful, took pride in their erotic charms and understanding, and there were no complications.

Daniel agreed with Bobby’s claim that the simple life was essential if you hoped to sustain the ferocious concentration cardplaying demanded. Bad Bobby practiced extreme simplicity. Besides the restored ’49 Caddy, his worldly possessions were his father’s straight razor and an old Ruger .38 that ‘Jack-’Em-Up’ Jackson had given him to discourage cheaters and highwaymen. Bad Bobby slept and bathed in hotels, ate in restaurants, and bought new clothes when he was tired of the ones he was wearing. He also bought books – he was studying history – but when he finished one he either passed it along to Daniel, if he was interested, or left it for the room’s next occupant and the vagaries of chance.

After fifteen months of steady playing, Daniel became restless and vaguely depressed. They were halfway into their Lo-Ball swing through northern California, and the familiar land forms reminded him of the clear balance of ranch life. Gambling also had its balance, but it was forever shifting, erratically brilliant. He was bored with the game. He’d learned what he could, and it left him strangely dissatisfied. He told Bobby he wanted to move on.

Bad Bobby wouldn’t let him. ‘I’ve spent over eighteen months working with you, and I’m not done because you’re not ready.’

‘I appreciate that,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ve learned a lot. But I’m beginning to burn out.’

‘Daniel, that’s just when you learn things you’d never know otherwise. It’s that long, precise discipline that holds it together when it wants to fly apart. That’s when you develop some bottom to yourself, but you’ve got to be tough. You’ve got to patiently practice what you don’t enjoy if you want to make yourself a whole player. Like a wide receiver who’s the best there is going long, but who stays after practice every day and works on those three-yard outs that he has trouble with. That’s why they invented dues, Daniel – to pay ’em.’

Daniel sighed. ‘I appreciate what you’re saying, but I can quit any time I want. Don’t make me do it.’

‘Actually,’ Bad Bobby grinned, ‘you can’t quit whenever you want, ’cause I got it on your honor that you have to beat me in a gambling game to call your own shots.’

‘Fine,’ Daniel shrugged. ‘Tomorrow. Five-Card Stud.’

‘You chose your strongest game, even if your timing is off. I just got a call from Stan Wurlitzer down in Gardena. Seems both Guido Caramba and Rupert the Limey are in town, and there’s heavy sentiment developing for a hundred-thousand-dollar freeze-out game if Stan can put it together. I’m supposed to let him know by tonight.’

‘How’s it set up?’

‘Everybody buys a hundred thousand, and you play till somebody has it all. You lose your buy-in, you’re eliminated; no second buys.’

‘The game?’

‘Lo-Ball Draw, exactly like we’ve been playing the last coupla weeks. I personally think Lo-Ball will eventually be your best game, because a big edge in that game is hitting it on the come and playing power position.’ Course, this will be no limit, and you don’t want to be raising too much to draw cards.’

‘Are you suggesting I could play in a game like that?’

‘That’s up to you. I’m sure going to, so I don’t really want to waste my energy whipping on you tomorrow. But here’s a proposition: If you win the freeze-out, you’re free to go. If you don’t, you’ll still have enough money left to take a shot at me later.’

‘Knowing your propositions, I assume the other players will be good.’

‘You got that right.’

‘So, if I’m the winner, I not only get to leave, but I take eight hundred thousand dollars with me.’

‘It’d be nice to tip Stan ten grand or so for holding the stakes and letting us use his facilities – unless, of course, you don’t mind being known as a no-class tight-ass.’ Daniel started to defend his tipping – generous by most standards, though hardly equal to Bobby’s extravagance – but Bobby rolled right over him. ‘’Course, you’re long odds to win. You’ve got to beat seven other players, and they include Guido, Rupert, and me. My advice is to start early and bring extra grub.’

Daniel had known Bad Bobby long enough to sense a proposition. ‘What are you laying now?’

‘Even money you don’t make the final four. Your eight to my one that you’re exactly the third player eliminated. And twenty to one you don’t win it.’

‘You’re hurting my confidence.’

‘Can’t help it. Real is real, and I call ’em like I see ’em. And what I see is that you’re a damn good player, but not good enough yet.’

They were sitting in Daniel’s room at the Eureka Inn. Daniel pointed at the phone on the desk. ‘Call this Stan guy and reserve two seats. And I’ll take a grand on the first two propositions, and five on the twenty to one that I win it all. So then you’d be out two hundred thousand plus change, and I’d be on my own.’

Bad Bobby gave a number to the operator. He grinned at Daniel. ‘You’ll love Guido. He’s a character-builder all by himself.’

The next morning, they left for San Francisco. As Daniel drove, Bad Bobby analyzed the players and discussed the strategy of no-limit Lo-Ball freeze-out. It would be a full game, eight players. There were only two Bobby hadn’t gambled with before.

‘Clay Hormel is a movie producer, lots of bucks, and Hollywood all the way. You’ve seen the type in Vegas – silk shirt unbuttoned to his navel, six pounds of gold chain, sunlamp tan. He may know how to cut a movie deal, but he don’t cut shit as a card player. His ego’s as big as his bank account, and I figure they’ll both get flattened some in this game.

‘Charley Li is an old Chinese guy, over seventy now I’d guess. Knows Lo-Ball as well as anyone and can be double-tough if he catches a heater. I think he may be a little too conservative for this action, a tad too predictable. But he’s solid, and he’s a real gentleman.

‘There’s two guys I don’t know, but Stan gave me a line on their play. First guy’s named Paul Schubert, known as “Rainbow.” Gather he’s something of a hippie, one of these new-age types with the ponytail and turquoise. Stan says he’s about thirty years old, and he’s either pretty high up in some drug dealing or there’s bread in the family,’ cause he doesn’t play well enough for the roll he packs. He’s probably an action freak, a good example of what I warned you about. Can’t pass up a big pot and makes terrible calls. Which means he’s hard to bluff.

‘The other guy is Johnny “The Rake” Russo. I’ve never met him, but I’ve heard a lot about him. East Coast guy. Got his first stake together lagging quarters in the Bronx when he was twelve – that’s the line anyway. He’s not much older than you – twenty-one, around there – and seemingly deserves his rep for being double tough. He’s not afraid to put chips in the pot. Stan says he plays a lot like me when I was his age. That means he’ll be too aggressive on marginal hands, bluff in the wrong situations, and not pay enough attention to position.

‘Rupert Mildow is a middle-aged English gent down to his tweeds and walking stick. Everybody calls him ‘Limey,’ which he thinks is vulgar, which is why everybody calls him that. If he has a weakness, it might be he doesn’t trust his instincts, especially the killer one. But if you beat him, you’ve beat somebody. He’s good.

‘Guido, though, is probably the best. He’s tougher than a junkyard dog, and since he came up from the bottom, he loves the top. He’s part Mexican and part Italian. He comes on like he’s got stones the size of boulders – and he does – but he’s also got fire and finesse. He likes to give you this exaggerated Mexican bandito accent to annoy you and twang any latent racism. Likes to make you want to beat him. An uncanny ability to find your weakness and show it to you for lots of money. Probably the best psychological player I’ve ever seen. Pay attention to his play and don’t listen to his mouth.’

‘So, how does he play?’ Daniel said.

‘Real good.’

‘You’re overwhelming me with helpfulness.’

‘It’d be foolish to say more. Guido plays the players, the chemistry, the mood, the rush, and the moment as well as he plays his cards. I’ve beat him a few times, but if this ol’ Caddy was full of the money I’ve lost to him playing Lo-Ball, the axles would snap with the load.’

‘Does he play Stud or Hold-’Em? I mean, you’re supposedly the best around at those.’

‘Well,’ Bad Bobby said, ‘I got enough of it back that I still have the car.’ He gave the horn a long echoing blast as they passed through a grove of redwoods, then smiled contentedly as he watched the road unwind.

The players met Friday night in the lounge of Stan Wurlitzer’s cardroom to discuss rules and format. Except for Guido, everyone was there promptly at nine. He arrived twenty minutes late, accompanied by an entourage of four lovely young Chicanas, each in a white silk dress of alarming décolletage, and a thin choker of opals and pearls. The jewels were a proper complement to their skin, which had the sheen of melting caramel.

Daniel stared, remembered he was going to play Guido, not them, and shifted his attention with difficulty.

Guido was greeting the other players with gusto. He was a large man, well-bellied to the point of corpulence. His face was broad and swarthy, the cheeks slipping into jowls. It would have appeared frankly corrupt if not for Guido’s eyes, eyes the color and same hard gleam of obsidian. He was wearing a tuxedo and silk top hat. His cuff links were twenty-dollar gold pieces. Large diamonds sparkled from his wristwatch and rings.

When Stan Wurlitzer introduced him to Daniel, Guido frowned. ‘Mr Wurlitzer,’ he said playfully, ‘there ess a leetle boy in the lounge who has loss hees momma. You find her queek to lead thees young one to safety.’

Daniel, assuming that somehow Guido had heard about his mother’s death, said calmly, ‘Fuck you.’

‘So bold!’ Guido shouted, stumbling backward as if overwhelmed.

‘Really Guido,’ Rupert said dryly, ‘save it for the game.’

‘Ahhhh, but I can’t help it,’ Guido apologized. ‘I feel so wonderful thees evening. I jus feenish loving all my girlfriends and it makes me so happy to be there with them I am late being here weeth you. And you, young Daniel, I was only keeding, for I hear all over you are an hombre at the table, that even so young you already have the hairs on your ass and gallons of conjones. But’ – Guido’s booming voice dropped to a sad murmur – ‘I weel run over you like water runs over the lowlands.’

‘That’s why we’re playing,’ Daniel nodded, ‘to find out.’

‘Stanley,’ Rupert rolled his eyes, ‘may we proceed?’

The rules were standard: open or out in turn; checks could call on the second round but not raise; you had to bet a 7–6–5–4–3 or any hand lower. The format Stan suggested was likewise agreeable to all: rotating deal; a five-hundred-dollar ante to begin with, increasing as players went bust; a half-hour break every three hours and an hour every six, with twelve hours a day limit on playing time. Stan collected the stakes, each player except Guido counting a hundred grand off their rolls or presenting, in Rupert’s case, a cashier’s check.

Guido said disdainfully, ‘I do not soil my hands weeth cash or waste my time at the banks.’ He snapped his fingers: each of his beautiful young friends hiked her dress and removed a wad of bills from her garter. Guido, gnashing his teeth at the sight of their supple thighs, announced, ‘I tell you people, Guido Caramba weel not gamble money that has not known the warmth of a woman’s skeen. Now, eef our meeting ess done, I must take my friends here and return to my training. I weel see you mañana.’

‘You weeel indeed,’ Daniel murmured.

The players gathered in Stan’s cardroom just before noon. They cut cards for seats, going around the table in order of low cards. Daniel cut the Joker, a propitious sign, he felt. He couldn’t have been happier with the final positions if he’d deployed them himself. From Daniel’s left, taking their seats around the clean felt table behind one hundred thousand dollars stacked in black and gold chips, were Charley Li, Rupert, Johnny Russo, Clay Hormel, Paul Schubert, Guido, and Bad Bobby – which meant that Guido and Bobby, the two strongest players, would usually be acting before him.

There were already close to a hundred spectators seated well away from the table. Clay Hormel, perhaps to rattle Guido, had arrived with his own bevy of young starlets. Guido’s caramel-skinned beauties, still in bridal-white silk, sat behind him. Guido had added a black cape to his tuxedo.

Daniel whispered to Bad Bobby on his right, ‘Guido looks like a fat Dracula.’

Bad Bobby barely nodded, drawling, ‘Yeah, and he plays like a werewolf.’

They cut for the deal, Guido winning the honor with the ace of diamonds. Each player anted a black five-hundred-dollar chip, Guido shuffled, and ‘Rainbow’ Schubert cut the deck. Guido shut his eyes and lifted his face heavenward, solemnly intoning, ‘God, I ask You for mercy on their doomed asses,’ and dealt the first hand.

Daniel held a 9–8–6–5–3. When Bad Bobby passed, Daniel opened for four thousand. Charley Li, Rupert, and Johnny Russo passed.

‘Hell, I always play the first pot,’ Clay Hormel said, calling. ‘If you don’t win the first one you can’t win them all.’

‘I like your philosophy, man,’ Rainbow Schubert said, also calling.

Guido looked at his cards belligerently. ‘What ees thees? A full house? I play the wrong game. But I call anyway because maybe the poker gods weel get eet straightened out.’ He set four thousand-dollar gold chips into the pot. ‘Teekets?’ he inquired sweetly, burning the top card face down in the pot.

Daniel rapped the table softly, indicating he was pat.

‘Nooo!’ Guido wailed. ‘Please reconsider.’

Daniel said sharply, ‘No cards.’

Guido shrugged with hopeless fatality. ‘Are you also pat, Meester Hormel?’

‘Not now. Send three.’ He discarded and Guido dealt him three cards.

Rainbow Schubert drew one.

Guido set the deck down, capped it with a chip, and looked at his cards for nearly thirty seconds. Finally he said, ‘I can’t play thees mess. I have two aces, two deuces, and that funny leetle man riding the bumblebee with hees finger up hees ass.’ He smiled at Daniel, appealing, ‘Help me play my hand.’ Guido turned it over: two aces, two deuces, and the joker.

Obviously he would draw two cards to ace, deuce, joker. Daniel suggested mildly, ‘Throw away your two pair and draw to the joker.’

Guido looked at Daniel with implacable fury. ‘I tell you sometheeng right now, my young one. You can fuck weeth Guido’s money because Guido, being a happy man, does not care about money. You can play weeth Guido’s wimmens because Guido, being a generous man, would never deny you their immense pleasures. But!’ he thundered, dramatically isolating the contradiction, ‘you cannot fuck weeth Guido’s mind!’ His voice softened to a reflective murmur. ‘You cannot fuck weeth Guido’s mind because Guido has no mind. He feed it to hees guts thirty years ago starving in Tijuana.’

‘I was just trying to be helpful,’ Daniel said, acting vaguely hurt that his intentions could possibly be misunderstood.

‘I will take two cards,’ Guido decided, discarding and drawing.

Daniel was slightly worried, not by Guido’s mouth, but his hand. Though a pat nine was the favorite against any two-card draw, ace-deuce-joker was the best two-card draw in the game. Daniel bet another four thousand, not a strong bet, but better than checking, since they would know he didn’t have a seven or lower.

Clay Hormel and Rainbow folded. Guido was squeezing out a peek at his draw. ‘Ah,’ he beamed, ‘a stranger. Look, I don’t lie.’ He laid down ace–deuce–joker–four, keeping the last card hidden.

Six cards will beat me, Daniel calculated, seven won’t. Damn near down to even money. He watched Guido’s eyes as he tipped the fifth card for a look. They glittered with excitement.

‘Yaaaaasss,’ Guido shrilled, ‘hello leetle seex!’ He glared at Daniel. ‘I call your puny bet and raise whole handfuls.’ Guido pushed in the ninety-six thousand dollars he had remaining.

Daniel looked at his hand again. It hadn’t changed. The odds slightly favored him, but it was far too early to risk it all on what he held. ‘Take the pot,’ he told Guido, folding his cards face down.

Guido glowed. ‘I don’t bullsheet you. I make a hand.’ He turned over his last card, the ace of hearts. He’d paired aces. ‘See? Two ace, three counting the joker.’ Suddenly he looked worried. ‘Three ace? No, I forget again!’ He slapped himself lightly on the side of the head. ‘Guido, you dumb one, wake up! Eet ees Lo-Ball! But,’ he quickly forgave himself, ‘take the cheeps anyhow.’

Next to Daniel, Bobby asked softly, ‘Rough eight or nine?’

‘Yup.’

‘You played it right. No need to risk it all early on a slim edge.’

‘That’s why I laid it down,’ Daniel said curtly.

‘Don’t let him get in you, now,’ Bobby warned, gathering the cards to deal.

Clay Hormel was the first to go broke, calling a raise from Rupert before the draw and then, when Rupert rapped pat, drawing two cards. When Rupert checked to him, he’d foolishly tried to bluff a pair of fives with his remaining twenty thousand. Rupert called immediately with his 8–4–3–2–1, and Clay sheepishly joined his flock of starlets on the sidelines.

The next few hours moved slowly. Daniel played conservatively, paying careful attention to position. He was down to sixty thousand when he realized the thousand-dollar antes were beginning to dent his stack. He began to open pots for ten thousand, trying to win the antes. At the end of five hours he was nearly back to even, as were most of the remaining players except Guido and Rupert, who each had about a hundred seventy-five thousand, and Charley Li, down to fifty thousand, his cautious play eating up his antes. Charley realized it too late, began playing catch-up hands, and steadily went broke. Daniel took Charley’s last eight thousand, making an eight against Charley’s pat nine.

Rainbow Schubert went broke ten minutes later. He’d reraised Bobby with a pat 10–9–8–2–1 before the draw. Bobby had only called, then rapped pat. That put the pressure on Rainbow, who after toying with his turquoise bracelet and tugging on his ponytail, finally threw away the 10–9–8 and drew three, catching a 9–4–3. When Bad Bobby uncharacteristically checked, showing weakness by not betting into a three-card draw, Rainbow bet the twenty-five thousand he had left. Bad Bobby called with his 8–5, springing the trap.

As the next hand was dealt, Bobby told Daniel, ‘I owe you a grand.’

Daniel gave him a quizzical look.

Bobby explained, ‘You weren’t the third player eliminated.’

‘That’s right,’ Daniel said. He’d forgotten the side bets.

The action picked up as each of the five remaining players looked for an edge. Though there were a few good pots, the hands broke close to even. As they approached midnight and the end of the first day, Daniel, Bobby, Guido, and Johnny Russo all had about a hundred eighty thousand with Rupert down to eighty grand.

Just before midnight, Daniel took fifty thousand of Rupert’s. Daniel was dealing. Rupert opened for ten thousand and everybody passed to Daniel. Daniel raised forty thousand. Rupert called and drew one card. Daniel played pat. When Rupert checked, Daniel bet thirty thousand, all that Rupert had left. Rupert considered for a moment then shook his head. ‘Take the pot, sir,’ he said with his usual crisp formality. ‘I was drawing to a six-four with the joker, and I caught a notch outside.’ He turned over his hand – 10–6–4–2–joker – then threw it in the discards.

Daniel said, ‘When you checked, I knew you didn’t have a seven or better, and I had all the eights.’ He turned over his hand, four eights and an ace.

Rupert nodded glumly. ‘Good hand.’

Guido squealed, ‘Someone call the weather station and please see for me if thees ess true. I don’t believe my eyes but I think I jus’ see some snowing.’

The last hand before midnight, Rupert tapped out.

Daniel and Bobby ate a late-night dinner in the lounge. Bobby reviewed the pro football games coming up the next day, idly asking Daniel what he thought of the spreads. Daniel wanted to talk about the card game. ‘Forget football. How am I doing?’

‘Who’s got the most chips on the table?’

‘I do,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ve got about two hundred fifty thousand, Guido two hundred forty, you’re around two ten, and Russo’s about even.’

‘Well, whoever’s got the most chips is doing good.’

Daniel ignored Bobby’s sarcastic grasp of the obvious. ‘I think I’m going to win it all. That snow hand broke me loose.’

‘It was a good play,’ Bobby said, ‘but it sure would have been interesting to see what you woulda done if Rupert had rapped pat in front of you. Beside crap your pants, I mean. But like I told you a thousand times, a good play is the one that wins the pot. That’s the measure of it.’

Daniel was about to reply when Clay Hormel approached their table. ‘Bobby, Daniel – good to see you both still in there.’ He squeezed Daniel’s shoulder. ‘Kid, that was a helluva snow you put on ol’ Limey. He’s still talking to himself. Tell you what, though – I sure as hell would have called you.’

Practicing his social graces, Daniel said, ‘I wouldn’t have tried it on you. You’re too tough.’

‘If I could have caught a few cards, I’d still be in it.’

Bobby agreed, ‘Yeah, you gotta catch the tickets.’

Clay said, ‘Like the ol’ saying goes: “When you’re hot, you’re hot; and when you’re not, you’re colder than a motherfucker.” And speaking of hot,’ Clay winked, ‘you guys are invited down to my place in Malibu for some serious party-time when the game’s over. Lots of gorgeous women and other fun things. Can’t tell, maybe even play a few hands of cards.’

‘We’ll be there with bells on,’ Bad Bobby grinned.

Daniel said more loudly than necessary, ‘It depends on how I feel.’

‘No matter how you feel,’ Clay patted him on the back, ‘my parties make you feel better. See you there, and good luck to you both.’

When Clay was out of hearing, Daniel leaned forward and said so evenly that the control in his voice was obvious, ‘Don’t fuck with my head when we’re not playing.’

‘You ain’t beat me yet,’ Bad Bobby replied without a trace of defensiveness. ‘Till you do, I call the shots. Clay’s Hollywood games are world renowned for a shitpot of lawyers and producers with big money, bigger egos, and just a tiny little talent for poker. And personally speaking, if I don’t win this freeze-out game, my bankroll will need some pumping up. So that’s the shot I’m calling for us. And till you beat me, you come along.’

‘Till then,’ Daniel said.

‘And besides all that, Daniel, I’m your teacher. I’m supposed to fuck with your head.’

Guido came on strong when play resumed the next afternoon. He’d changed from his tuxedo into a chambray work shirt and jeans, explaining, though nobody asked, ‘Now eet ess time to go to work.’

He went to work on Johnny Russo’s chips the fifth hand, taking half of them when he beat Johnny’s one-card 8–5 with his pat 8–4. He took a raised pot from Bad Bobby, making an 8–6 to Bobby’s pat 9–8. Daniel recognized Guido was hot and stayed away from him, the four-thousand-dollar antes slowly eroding his stack. But he couldn’t avoid Guido forever.

Bad Bobby dealt it. Daniel opened for twenty thousand with a one-card draw to ace-deuce-trey-four. Johnny Russo passed. Guido raised fifty thousand. Bad Bobby passed. Daniel had an impulse to raise all he had left, around a hundred fifty thousand, and either force Guido to fold or, if he called, let it all ride on the single card. He decided just to call, sliding two stacks of gold chips into the pot. He drew one card. Guido, after some thought, rapped pat. Daniel noticed the hesitation; Guido usually declared himself immediately. Daniel looked at his new card: he’d caught an eight, making an 8–4–3–2–1. But he didn’t know what to do. If he bet a lot and Guido raised, he’d have too much in the pot not to call. If he checked and Guido bet a bunch, he’d have to call. He decided to bet a little, hoping Guido might think he was trying to sucker him into raising. ‘I bet ten thousand,’ Daniel announced.

Guido looked at him curiously. ‘You don’t bet very much. You don’t like your hand?’

‘You can raise if that’s not enough,’ Daniel told him.

Guido thought a second. ‘No, I jus’ call.’

‘I have an eight–four,’ Daniel said, spreading his cards face up on the table.

Guido shook his head dolefully as he turned over his, a 7–5–4–3–2. ‘Put eet een a Glad Bag, keed, and set eet out on da curb.’

‘A seven–five?’ Daniel said with disbelief. ‘And you don’t raise? Guido, what’s the matter? You don’t like money? Or did you think it was a suction bet?’

‘No, no, no,’ Guido passionately denied it. ‘Eet ess jus’ that you play so bad I feel peety on you. But peety ess not a good thing for you or me, so soon it must be like God and the dwarf.’

‘God and the dwarf?’ Daniel repeated, immediately knowing better.

Guido slapped himself on the forehead, bellowing, ‘What! You have not been told of God and the dwarf?’

‘No,’ Daniel said, ‘but I have a feeling I will be.’

‘Yes, I weel gladly tell you how eet ess weeth God and the dwarf. Thees dwarf ess sitting one day in the cantina with many, many other people when God walks een the door, looks ’roun’, and says, “I’m going to shit on all the peoples een thees cantina – except for you, leetle dwarf.” The dwarf he ees very happy and he jumps down from hees chair and cries, “O thank you merciful Lord for sparing me, for already I have suffered very much being a dwarf.” And God tells heem, “Hey, I don’t spare nobody. I’m gonna use you to wipe my ass.”’

Guido laughed wildly while Daniel, without a word, tossed his hand in the discard. Guido’s laugh bothered him more than the story. Guido was crazy; he might do anything. Daniel decided to play cautiously until he regained his sense of balance.

Perhaps too cautiously. With Bad Bobby again dealing, Daniel opened for ten thousand dollars with a pat 8–7–6–5–3. Johnny Russo, who’d dropped to about seventy thousand, called, as did Guido and Bobby. When Daniel rapped pat, they each drew a card. Daniel wasn’t in love with his chances: A rough eight was good odds against one player drawing a card, but not against three. Daniel checked, prepared to call any bet. Johnny Russo pushed all his chips in, close to sixty thousand. Guido cursed the king he’d caught and pitched his hand in the discards with disgust. Bad Bobby announced, ‘I raise,’ adding another sixty thousand to the call.

‘I got nothing left,’ Johnny said, tipping up his empty rack.

Bobby reminded him, ‘There’s still another player in the pot.’

‘No there’s not,’ Daniel said. ‘I might have called sixty thousand, but not a hundred and twenty.’ He threw away his hand.

‘You got me,’ Johnny told Bad Bobby. ‘I paired fours.’

‘I caught a queen,’ Bad Bobby said, spreading his hand.

Johnny said, ‘Good call. I didn’t think anyone would expect a bluff.’ He pushed himself back from the table and stood up.

‘Don’t feel bad,’ Daniel told him, ‘I threw away the winner.’ He counted his chips. He had a hundred sixty thousand dollars, Bad Bobby three hundred thousand, and Guido around three-forty. He would have to play careful to catch up, look for a good clean shot and gamble on it.

Down to a hundred twenty thousand after Bobby snowed him with three nines, Daniel took his shot. He was dealing. Guido opened for a modest ten grand, Bad Bobby passed, and Daniel, with 9 –5–joker–2–1, raised fifty thousand.

‘Well dwarf,’ Guido smiled, ‘I wipe my ass early. Please put in all your cheeps eef you weesh to play.’ He called Daniel’s raise and added another sixty thousand.

Daniel looked at his hand again. It wasn’t likely he’d get a better one to play. ‘I call,’ he said, and put his remaining chips in the pot. ‘Cards?’ he asked Guido, picking up the deck.

‘Cards?’ Guido repeated, as if he’d never heard the word. ‘Guido Caramba does not put a hundred and twenty thousand dollars een the pot and then draw a card. Only a fool would do such a thing.’ He rapped the table violently. ‘No cards! ’

‘Shit,’ Daniel muttered. He’d been hoping Guido would draw; if so, he’d play pat. Guido’s big production over drawing cards made Daniel think Guido wanted him pat, which meant he likely had a rough eight or seven. Bad Bobby had taught him it wasn’t a sound practice to break a pat hand if you couldn’t win any more money if you improved it, and since he was all in, there was no more to win. But any eight would beat him. It was a gut judgment. He threw the nine face up on the the table and said to Guido, ‘I’m going to get off this smooth nine.’ He dealt himself one card.

Guido feigned astonishment. ‘You are craaazzy. Now you must ween the pot twice.’ He spread his hand on the table: 10–9–8–7–4.

Daniel slowly turned over the card he’d drawn. It was the jack of hearts. ‘You win,’ he told Guido, ‘take the money.’ He rose numbly from his seat.

‘You are good player, dwarf,’ Guido smiled hugely as he stacked the chips. ‘You will grow.’

Still numb, Daniel watched the game continue from one of the front-row seats reserved for the eliminated players. An hour later, Bad Bobby, who’d started making hands, had pulled even with Guido, each close to four hundred thousand dollars. Next to him, Johnny Russo said, ‘Looks like it might go awhile now.’

‘I was just thinking the same thing,’ Daniel agreed.

It ended on the next hand. Guido opened for forty thousand. Bad Bobby, dealing, raised a hundred sixty thousand.

‘That ees mucho dinero,’ Guido murmured. ‘Before I call, there ees one card left I must look at een my hand.’ Squinting, Guido peeked. ‘Oh my God you weel not believe, but eet ees the yoker. I don’ even believe thees myself. I must call your raise and then raise all my cheeps I have left. Let us do eet now and go home.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Bad Bobby said cheerfully, stacking off the rest of his chips. He picked up the deck and burned the top card. ‘You drawing any cards, Guido?’

‘Of course I draw cards,’ Guido said with umbrage, as if he would never think of putting four hundred thousand dollars in a pot with a pat hand. ‘Thees nine ess not good.’ He flicked it into the pot. ‘Geeve me uno.’

Bobby slid him a card and picked up his own hand. Since they were all in and he was last to act, he turned it over to look at it: 9–6–5–3–2. ‘I’ll draw with you,’ he said, and threw away the nine.

Daniel, suddenly wired to the action, couldn’t believe they’d both broken pat hands.

Bobby dealt his card face down, set down the deck, then flipped his new card over – the ace of hearts. ‘I caught inside on the bottom,’ he told Guido. ‘I have a six–five.’

Guido spread his own hand on the table. ‘I too have a seex, but I like my seex very very much because eet ees seex–four–trey–yoker–ace.’

‘Take it down, then, Guido – you win it all. Congratulations.’

Guido grinned benevolently as the crowd burst into applause. ‘Thank you, Bad Bobby. You are an hombre of spirit and grace, and I admire very much your gamble. You got down weeth me on that last hand. We catch alike, but I draw a leetle smoother. We will play again, amigo.’

Getting to Malibu the next day was easy. They flew in Clay Hormel’s Lear jet to the airport, where a limo was waiting to whisk them to Xanadu, the producer’s ‘little beach house,’ which had a Jacuzzi and round, revolving bed in each of the thirty guest suites, and a kitchen staffed and provisioned to serve the crew of an aircraft carrier. Johnny Russo and Rainbow Schubert accompanied them on the flight. Guido had regretfully declined, citing a prior engagement with his bevy of lovelies for a religious holiday, the observance of which seemed to involve rolling naked on large-denomination bills. Daniel, in a funk, hadn’t been interested in the lurid details.

Noticing Daniel’s mood on the flight, Bad Bobby told him, ‘Just ’cause they beat on you don’t mean you have to get bent. Yesterday is history. Today’s brand new.’

Daniel muttered, ‘I don’t know why I broke that pat nine against Guido.’

Bad Bobby said softly, ‘I ain’t gonna sit here and listen to you snivel.’ He moved to the rear of the plane and sat down with Johnny Russo.

Getting to the party was easy. Getting away proved difficult. First there was his ‘personal hostess,’ Linda O’Rahl, whom Clay had introduced as ‘maybe the next Meryl Streep.’ Linda showed him to his room and informed him that there was a full bar right behind the movie screen if you lifted it (she demonstrated), that weed, coke, and ’ludes were available upon request, and that ‘Sexually, I’m into whatever you’re into.’

Daniel felt a powerful, implacable despair gathering in the center of his brain. It was difficult to keep his tone civil. ‘Thanks, Linda, but what I’m really into at the moment is a long walk along the beach, all alone except for a bottle of whiskey. I need to sulk and sort and think and scheme. You go play with someone who can do you some good. If Clay says anything, tell him I’m gay.’

Linda said helpfully, ‘I have a gay girlfriend. We could put you in a pussy sandwich?’

‘In another mood, I’m sure it would be delightful. Right now I need walking, water, and whiskey.’

‘You want water with your whiskey?’

‘No. I meant the ocean.’

‘Sounds romantic.’

‘It’s not,’ he assured her.

Even though Daniel left by his private exit and went around the back, he still couldn’t get away. He had to cross a long, terraced patio thronged with people. Just below them, on the beach itself, a nude coed volleyball game was in progress. That stopped him. In the intense, late-October light, every naked body seemed young, tanned, perfect, and doomed to perish.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ Bad Bobby suddenly groaned beside him, ‘stark-naked volleyball. Seems California just gets stranger and weirder every time I pass through.’

‘I’m going for a walk,’ Daniel said. ‘If it’s all right with you, of course.’

Bad Bobby looked out toward the horizon. ‘I made me a deal with the ocean when I was a scrawny little twelve-year-old cracker-ass kid – no folks, no kin, nowhere. I’d scraped my way down to the Gulf because I’d heard about the ocean, but I’d never seen it; and I wanted to see it real bad. And I stood there gawking at it, water as far as I could see, and I said real fast, “Ocean, let’s work out a deal. If you don’t fuck with me, I won’t fuck with you.”’

‘Sounds fair,’ Daniel said. He took a step to leave.

‘Goddamn, Daniel!’ Bobby boomed, stopping him. ‘Don’t matter how big a snit you’re in, it’s piss-poor manners to be holding a bottle of whiskey in your hand and not offer a thirsty man a drink.’

Momentarily disconcerted, Daniel remembered he had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his hand. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, offering the bottle.

Bad Bobby unscrewed the cap and lifted the bottle: ‘May you get ’em when you need ’em, and sometimes when you don’t.’ He took a long swig.

Daniel nodded to acknowledge the toast. He realized he was tired of looking at Bad Bobby, tired of his voice, his strong and constant presence.

Bad Bobby handed the bottle back. ‘There’s a hell of a card game shaping up inside. If you need to find me, start looking there.’ He turned and walked away.

Daniel fumed as he walked down the beach. ‘He’s always the one who walks away. Always gets the last word. Always has the hammer and the high ground.’

Heading up the beach, he was forced to admit that Bad Bobby was simply sharper – more experienced, more aware, more determined – and Daniel arrived at the understanding that if he played cards heads-up with him, Bad Bobby would hand him his ass. The understanding didn’t cheer him up.

When he was out of sight and sound of the party, Daniel sat against a wave-smoothed drift log and drank slowly and steadily. He watched the ocean, each wave driving him deeper into depression. Even the fiery sunset seemed bleak. He felt like he was trapped inside himself, a ragged rat in a maze.

He stood up shakily and took off his clothes, the night air balmy against his skin. He waded out in the creaming surf and dove into an oncoming wave. As he felt himself tumbled in its force, his depression vanished. He swam out till nearly exhausted and then floated on his back, watching the stars, giving himself to their vast indifference. It was exactly what he’d been missing – stars, rock, water, wind. For over a year he’d been living sealed in smoky rooms, perfumed suites, and moving cars; rootless, wired to the action, tightened down to the turn of a card. Too small, too narrow. It wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to expand, to roar. He wanted to be a furnace of light.

Every clear night at Nameless Lake Wild Bill had spent at least half an hour staring at the night sky. When Daniel had asked him if it was some sort of meditation he was doing, Wild Bill had claimed that the stars were actually alchemists’ forges and he just found it reassuring to see so many souls at work.

Floating, Daniel tried to see the stars through Wild Bill’s eyes, but couldn’t. He tried to imagine he was the first primitive man who’d ever looked up and beheld them. With an oblique leap, he thought of a warm autumn afternoon when Johnny Seven Moons had showed him how to play Indian stick gambling. Stick gambling was clean and simple. Which hand held the stick. Left or right; right or wrong. Pure intuition, the grace of guessing. Daniel smiled at the starry heavens. He had his game. It eliminated Bad Bobby’s major edge in cards, his years of experience. Daniel doubted if Bad Bobby, despite that experience, had even heard of stick gambling.

Daniel swam back in slowly, riding the waves, then sat on his log drying off. He felt fresh, happy, confident – an actual sea change. He could see the lights from the party far down the beach. He decided not to go back. Scooping a hollow against the log and rolling his clothes into a pillow, he curled up and in moments fell asleep.

He dreamed for the first time since the explosion.

A card was dealt to him face down across the green felt table. He flipped it over. The jack of hearts, the knave, the hook, the sweet bastard himself. He focused on the image. It was Guido’s face. He turned the card upside down. Now it was Bobby’s face. He ripped the card in half.

Another was dealt immediately, skimming face down across the felt. Slowly, he turned it over. The jack of hearts. He ripped it in half.

Another was dealt. Jack of hearts. He tore it in two.

And another, and another, and another, the invisible dealer sending them as fast as Daniel ripped them up.

The next card he turned over was blank. Stunned, he stared at the glossy white surface. A bird cried. He touched the card. It turned into a window. He strained to see through it but he was looking into an empty sky.

He touched the glass, and when he lifted his finger he saw a black stone hurtling toward him. But as he watched, entranced, he saw it wasn’t a stone at all, it was a bird, a raven, and it had a small, brilliant object clasped in its beak, a spherical bauble of some kind, a glass bead, but no, it was too brilliant, too clear. A diamond, a slender spiral flame burning in its center, and then the bird hit the window and it froze into a mirror and he heard his mother scream, ‘Run, Daniel, run,’ but there was nothing he could do, he was falling toward the mirror. He curled into a ball to protect himself, then changed his mind, opened himself, arms spread wide; the instant before he hit the mirror he saw it was empty.

The mirror shattered into a million diamond splinters and Daniel floated on his back in the moonlit water, watching the darkness and the stars.

He woke in the late morning. Except for a raging thirst, he felt wonderful. He was dreaming again. His luck had changed. He picked up the whiskey bottle to celebrate. Under it, side by side in the depression, were two stones, virtually identical, each a flat, smooth, elongated oval, one black, one white. He hefted them, one in each palm, then closed his hands into fists. He stood with his eyes closed, the stones warm against his palms. Bad Bobby was in trouble.

Transcription:

Denis Joyner, AMO Mobile Radio

Hang on, honey, we’re going up high! Yasss, sweetness, wrap your ears around me and I’ll get you there. Yup, and you didn’t even have to guess it, you got the DJ, the Devil Jubilee, coming at you hot and heavy on mow-beel, multiple-frequency, pirate, jack-your-ass-up, ray-dee-oooo – and oh my goodness, talk about diversity, you got me if you want me on KPER, KINK, KUZZ, KLUE, and KYJL (the only gay station in Malibu). And now that you got me, just try turning me loose.

You figure on that while I cue up tonight’s musical treat. Hold still now, cuz for the next three hours you’re gonna hear something so old, so moldy gold, you’re gonna remember back through seven lifetimes at least. Three solid hours – count ’em, Jack – of uninterrupted Voodoo Trance Jam that I recorded live, scared to death, on my recent trip to Haiti. And while you’re digging the movies on your skull walls, the DJ here is gonna be getting comfortable with a little sweet thing who just dropped by the van to discuss the price of opium in Shanghai. So I’ll catch you ’round ’bout midnight with DJ’s bedtime story and quasiphilosophy lesson, yet another installment in this metaphysical potboiler he’s beginning to suspect is his life. So spoon June’s moon and stay attuned. Be here now or there later. This has been the DJ babblin’ in your ear. Till then, all over and far out.

After he’d showered off the sand and changed clothes, Daniel found Bad Bobby where he’d said he’d be, playing Hold-’Em in Clay’s game room. Bobby had towers of neatly stacked chips in front of him, so he was either doing well or had bought a bunch. Before Daniel could say a word, Bad Bobby stood up, said to the table of players, ‘Deal me out a few hands,’ and motioned Daniel outside on the patio.

‘Daniel, we’ve blundered into Poker Heaven. There’s lawyers, producers, actors, directors, drug dealers – and they are all loaded with cash money and hot to prove they have the huevos to play no-limit Hold-’Em.’ Bad Bobby glanced around and leaned closer, lowering his voice. ‘And about half of them, it’s maybe the third time they’ve played Hold-’Em in their entire life, and they didn’t learn shit from the first two. They think a pair of treys in the pocket is a mortal lock and that a kicker is some Hungarian who boots field goals for the Rams. The only reason not to be in that game is if you absolutely hate money. How much you have left in your roll?’

‘I’m down to about twenty grand.’

‘Get it in there.’

‘I’m saving it to play you.’

Bad Bobby blinked slowly, about the only sign of agitation he ever displayed. ‘Jesus, Daniel, not now.’

Daniel reminded him, trying to keep any hint of mockery from his tone, ‘“Any man, from any land; any game he can name; any amount he can count; any place, face to face; any time he can find.”’

‘You got it close to right,’ Bad Bobby acknowledged, his drawl considerably tightened. ‘Now you go find the time and come back and tell me when it is, and I’ll see if I’m available. In the meantime, I’m gonna keep on repairing the dent Guido put in my bankroll. And since I can flat fucking guarantee I won’t be available till this game breaks up, you might as well sit down and get rich. You lose your twenty grand, your credit’s good with me.’

‘Give me fifty thousand.’ Daniel was half bluffing. His credit line had always stopped at twenty-five, which Bad Bobby claimed was a safeguard against Daniel going so tilt he couldn’t recover.

But without a word Bad Bobby dug out his roll and started counting. When he ran out of bills he shook his head. He handed the wad to Daniel. ‘Only forty-seven. Little short myself.’

‘Thanks,’ Daniel said, moved that Bobby had given him his last penny. ‘I’d use mine first, but if I lost it, I’d have to borrow from you to play you heads-up, and I’d feel bad about making you gamble against your own money.’

Bad Bobby cocked his head. ‘That don’t make a drop of sense to me. It’s all money, and when it isn’t, it’s all chips. Like I told you, it’s just a way of keeping track.’

Daniel looked at him and said, ‘How do you always manage to get in the last word?’

‘Same way I usually manage to get in the last raise. Why? You want to say something?’

‘No, not really.’

‘All right, then – let’s go shear sheep.’

Good Shepherd Bobby destroyed the personal finances of a famous young actor, nearly drove a prominent Hollywood law firm into Chapter Eleven proceedings, and cost Clay Hormel a point off his next teenage horror flick. Definitely one of Bad Bobby’s better days at the office.

Daniel won eight hundred fifty dollars, or, according to a chuckling Bobby, a little less than he’d tipped his personal hostess. Daniel had been ahead almost ninety thousand. With a pair of tens in the hole, the flop had brought another ten and a pair of sevens. He slow-played it, not raising till the end, but when Bad Bobby had reraised a whopping hundred thousand, Daniel had put him on four sevens and threw his hand away. He’d been right – Bad Bobby showed the hand down when Clay Hormel, with ten-jack, called what he thought was a bluff, thus losing one percent of his profit in Torn Teenage Flesh VIII. When Bad Bobby saw that Daniel had laid down tens full, he’d nodded with respect. ‘Besides being smart, that took some real balls. The more I see of you, Daniel, the more I see a player.’

Daniel said, ‘Wait till we play the game I’m going to name. And I promise you it won’t be cards, because you’re the best.’

‘I’m looking forward to it, Daniel. I really am.’

So when the game broke up Daniel was right behind Bad Bobby as they cashed out. Daniel handed him the fifty grand he’d borrowed and said, ‘You ready?’

Bad Bobby shrugged. ‘Sure. But you don’t want me now – sweet Jesus, son, can’t you see I’m on a supreme heater? There should be flames shooting out my ass, I’m that hot.’

‘Every heater burns out,’ Daniel said, repeating one of Bobby’s axioms.

‘All right. What’s the game?’

Daniel thought fast. ‘Nomlaki Stone Gambling.’

‘And I suppose you wrote the official rule book.’ Bad Bobby was clearly dubious.

‘As a matter of fact, it’s the oldest gambling game on the North American continent.’

‘I thought Indian Stick Gambling was.’

‘Well, yes,’ Daniel gulped, ‘that’s right, too. See, stone gambling is just like stick gambling, except you use stones instead of sticks.’

‘Makes sense,’ Bobby noted.

Daniel continued, ‘You use a white stone and a black stone. You mix them hand to hand behind your back and then hold your fists out to the other person, who can choose the hand that has either the black or white stone.’

‘Little more complex than stick gambling, but the same idea. I gotta think you chose it because you think it’ll neutralize my vast card-playing experience. Which was smart of you.’ He draped his arm fraternally around Daniel’s shoulders. ‘But you’re gonna be in a world of hurt, Daniel. I beat Tony Big Elk so bad stick gambling that he retired, and he was supposed to be the best.’

Daniel hadn’t heard that story before, so wasn’t sure if it was fact or intimidation. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t waste our time playing. I’ll just give you the ten grand and listen to you call the shots for another year.’

‘Probably be efficient,’ Bobby chuckled, ‘but it wouldn’t be as much fun. I haven’t played sticks in about fifteen years now and I’m kinda looking forward to it. You want to do it here, or in one of our rooms?’

Daniel feigned dismay. ‘Inside? Bobby, this is Indian gambling. We do it outside. Naked. Right on the beach. First one to a hundred wins.’

Bad Bobby plainly didn’t like this. He blinked slowly, took his arm from Daniel’s shoulder, and crossed his arms on his chest. ‘I assume you have the stones?’

‘In my pocket.’

Bad Bobby glanced at his watch, then at his personal hostess hovering nearby. ‘It’s nine-thirty. I’ll meet you here at midnight. I’ve got to stash my roll, wash off the smoke, get something to eat.’

‘Midnight’s perfect,’ Daniel told him. ‘I was going to suggest it myself.’

Naked, Daniel and Bad Bobby faced each other at the surf’s edge, the waxing half-moon spilling phosphorescence on the wet sand.

‘Okay,’ Daniel said, ‘let’s get our wager straight. If I win, I’m free to go, to do as I please; if I lose, I stay, and it costs me ten grand for the fun of getting beat.’

‘That nails it.’

‘I have a little proposition,’ Daniel said, ‘a side bet.’

Bobby said, ‘I won’t know what it is if you don’t tell me.’

‘First, I want you to know why I’m offering it. You see, all I can win is leaving you, and as a matter of fact you’re good company, a fine teacher, and the best cardplayer I’ve seen in my brief career – including Guido. So I want to bet you another ten grand on the side, straight up, no odds. That way I at least stand to win something besides leaving, and if I lose I want you to take my whole roll.’

‘You want to give it away, I’ll take it.’ A wave crashed a hundred yards out. Bobby glanced at it.

‘Good thing you’ve got a deal with the ocean,’ Daniel said.

‘You gonna talk this game or play it?’

‘Play it.’ Daniel put his hands behind his back and began rapidly shifting the stones back and forth. ‘You’re the champion,’ he told Bobby, ‘so you get to go first.’ He kept trading the stones till he didn’t know himself which hand held what. He thrust his fists out to Bad Bobby.

Instead of choosing, Bobby lifted his grizzled face heavenward and began a high, rhythmic chant: ‘Hiya-Ya-Yee-Ah-Yah––’

‘Hey,’ Daniel said sharply, ‘what the fuck are you doing.’

Bobby stopped chanting and looked at Daniel with plain surprise. ‘Why, I’m singing my gambling song. That’s the most important part of the stick game, your song. You need it to open your circuits and mess up the other guy’s. See, you probably think you don’t know which hand holds which stone, but you do.’ He touched Daniel’s left hand. ‘Black.’

Daniel opened his hand. It held the black stone.

‘One for the old guy,’ Bobby said, beaming as he accepted the stones from Daniel.

It was a slaughter. Daniel beat him one hundred to forty-seven, and that after trailing twenty-eight to twelve. When it had reached eighty to forty-four Bad Bobby had groaned, which was about as close as he ever came to sniveling. ‘You’re hotter than a cheap pistol and I’ve turned colder than penguin shit.’

It didn’t help Bobby’s concentration that – as Daniel had foreseen – the literal tide turned at five minutes past midnight, or that at about the time the surf began surging around their ankles, Daniel got an erection he was unaware of until Bad Bobby said, ‘Why don’t you put that thing away?’

‘Boy,’ Daniel said, ‘Nature sure makes you jumpy. Why don’t you see if you can make it a deal?’

But what really hastened the rout was Daniel’s discovery that if he emptied his mind, concentrated through instead of on, he could feel the black stone in one of Bobby’s hands. Always the black, though often he’d point to the other hand and guess white so Bobby wouldn’t suspect he’d somehow keyed in.

Daniel didn’t know how he knew, but it didn’t surprise him that he did. Wild Bill had hammered into his head that life was full of critical information that refused to pass through the rational circuits of knowledge. Or as Bad Bobby put it later, as he peeled off a hundred hundred-dollar bills and handed them to Daniel, ‘Simple arithmetic will tell you how much you lost, but only your ass knows how bad it’s been kicked.’

Transcription: Telephone Conversation Between

Volta and Bad Bobby

BOBBY: It’s Robert. Called to tell you Daniel’s ready to move on. Beat me the first try in some version of stick gambling. Whipped me bad.

VOLTA: That didn’t take long. You must be getting old, losing your edge.

BOBBY: You were right – he’s good. He’ll stand in and take his best shot. No seasoning, of course, and he’s got a weakness for the long odds and big moves, but there’s somebody home, know what I mean, even if he’s not sure who it is.

VOLTA: Any suggestions where to send him next?

BOBBY: I don’t know. I’m not good at figuring what’s next. Have enough trouble figuring out what’s now. And Daniel’s hard to read. He’s got gamble in his blood but no heart for the road – he was burning out on the life, not the game, but you really can’t separate them. Thing I can’t figure is how he can be such a restless soul and not have a taste for the road.

VOLTA: Maybe he doesn’t have a taste for the game and can’t admit that to himself.

BOBBY: (after a pause) I don’t know. He’s either a helluva quick learner or he’s got some card sense on the natch, because in eighteen months he was holding up against some of the best, and that was starting from scratch. He don’t have to admit that to himself; that’s just a stone fact. And the bigger the money, the better he plays.

VOLTA: Any indication where his interests lie?

BOBBY: He mentioned the focus was too tight in gambling. He said he wanted to expand. Maybe send him back to the mountains for a while – he says he misses them. Maybe turn him over to Slocum Wright for a couple of years to learn boats.

VOLTA: Not enough challenge.

BOBBY: Well, you got me. By the way, before my senile ol’ mind forgets it, he said to be sure and tell you he had a dream and wants to talk to you about it.

VOLTA: Tell him I’ll talk to him later, unless it’s something urgent regarding his mother.

BOBBY: Sure, but where does he go? He seems real anxious to know.

VOLTA: Probably because he’s thinking of quitting.

BOBBY: (chuckling) Haven’t we all.

VOLTA: True enough. But okay, give him these instructions. He should fly to New York two weeks from tomorrow, on the twenty-seventh. Wait in the Silver Wings bar for a man named Jean Bluer. If Bluer isn’t there by 6 p. m., he should take a taxi to the Wildwood Hotel and register as David Hull. If he hasn’t heard from Jean Bluer in three days, he should call me at the Six Rivers number.

BOBBY: Who’s this Jean Bluer? Sounds like a Frenchy.

VOLTA: A recent addition. I just decided a few seconds ago he might be the one to open a different dimension. Could take me a few days to find him, though – that’s why the convoluted and contingent instructions.

BOBBY: You have anyone lined up for me?

VOLTA: No.

BOBBY: There’s a kid named Johnny Russo that looks good. Care if I take him on for a few months?

VOLTA: Not at all. But I’m a little surprised. I thought you preferred traveling that mean ol’ hard-ass gambling highway by your lonesome.

BOBBY: Guess it turns too lonely when a man starts losing his edge. Hell, I only won about half a million this week.

VOLTA: That’s nothing. I heard some guy named Guido Caramba won seven hundred thousand in two days.

BOBBY: Probably a good thing you have me to rag, otherwise you’d go around putting the boots to puppies. You know, Volta, any time you think you know something about playing cards, I’m sure you can find me and show me how it’s done.

VOLTA: You know I don’t gamble, Robert.

BOBBY: Right. And Pancho Villa couldn’t hide a pony.

Daniel sat in the Silver Wings Bar at Kennedy International drinking whiskey and waiting for Jean Bluer. He’d parted company with Bad Bobby in San Francisco twelve days earlier and hiked and fished in the Sierras till his departure for New York. He’d made his flight in Oakland with barely enough time to cadge a shower in the employees’ lounge and change his smoke-tanged clothes. Now, seven hours later, he was on the other side of the continent, his head still in the Sierra high country, New York at his feet, his heart dislocated and confused.

In the mountains he’d considered giving up his training. He didn’t feel it was going anywhere. Every teacher had demanded strict attention and ferocious concentration, but to no real point, or none he wanted. That, he decided as he ordered another whiskey, was the problem: He didn’t know what he wanted. He had no family, no lovers, no close friends. His vocational skills, essentially solitary occupations, were illegal in most states. Growing dope, cracking safes, and playing poker were potentially lucrative, and, if nothing else, he was comfortable with risk. The ten days in the Sierras hadn’t refreshed him as he’d hoped they would. As he waited, he decided if he didn’t like Jean Bluer, or if it was more of the same work in a different form, he would ask Volta for a two-year vacation. If Volta refused or resisted, he’d quit AMO. No. He would tell Volta he was taking a few years off for independent study, not ask. He was still hurt Volta had shown no interest in his dream.

At six, Jean Bluer hadn’t arrived. Irked, Daniel downed his drink and made his way through the crammed terminal as the PA boomed static-fractured announcements of arrivals and departures.

‘I’m departing,’ Daniel, at least one sheet to the wind, muttered as he followed the arrows for ground transportation. But when he stepped outside into a raw dusk, he didn’t see any buses or taxis around. A porter whisked by with a rack of luggage.

‘Taxi?’ Daniel called.

‘Do I look like a fucking taxi?’ the porter snarled without breaking stride.

Daniel, scrambling to make the leap between high country solitude and the teeming arrogance of New York, fell short. An infinitely sweeter voice behind him purred, ‘Are you going into the city?’

Daniel turned. The speaker was a striking young woman with long, glossy black hair. She was barely an inch shorter than Daniel’s six feet, wearing a skirt the color of terra cotta and a loose red-silk blouse. The colors went well with her dark complexion and the lines complemented her body, more sleek than thin.

‘I’m looking for a taxi or a bus or something,’ Daniel told her. The whiskey and a rush of lust thickened his tongue.

‘So I gathered. These porters are becoming absolutely loutish, their insolence matched only by their capacity for obscenity.’

‘Yeah,’ Daniel said. He looked at her closely, trying to fix her nationality. She was wearing lots of makeup.

‘You didn’t say if you were going into the city, but if you are, you’re welcome to ride with me.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Daniel said, trying to muster a formality equal to her own. ‘I accept with gratitude.’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘The Wildwood.’

Her large brown eyes looked pained. ‘There are better hotels in New York.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ve never been here. I’m meeting an old friend.’

‘Business?’

‘Indirectly. We’ve done a lot of gambling together.’ Inspired, he added, ‘That’s why we’re meeting at the Wildwood – there’s supposed to be a rather promising poker game there. Poker, you see, is my business.’

‘A gambler! How fascinating. You must tell me more.’

Daniel started to oblige when a black limousine hushed to a stop beside them. A chauffeur ushered her inside, inquiring, ‘And how was your trip, Miss Haruh?’

‘Work, as usual.’ Then, indicating Daniel, ‘This gentleman will be riding into the city with us, Phillips. Please drop him at the Wildwood Hotel.’

‘Of course, Miss Haruh.’

The limo was opulently appointed. ‘You travel very well,’ Daniel said as they pulled away.

‘When you travel as much as I do, luxury becomes a necessity.’

‘I can appreciate that, though in my business forsaking luxury is more often the necessity, especially if you play badly. My name, by the way, is Daniel Pearse.’

‘Mine is Imera Haruh,’ she said, bowing her head slightly.

There was something about her that Daniel suddenly didn’t trust. Her speech and gestures seemed too self-consciously graceful or formal – as if rehearsed. ‘Haruh?’ he said. ‘Is that Pakistani?’

‘Close. Indian.’

‘Your English is exceptional.’

She smiled. ‘It should be. I was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. My parents were Brahmins who did not like Gandhi any better than the British.’

‘So, what takes you on these travels where luxury is a necessity?’

‘I’m a model with the Sebring Agency. I just shot a spread for Elle with Raoul Villela – it seems only an hour ago I was in Madrid – and next month I’ll be on the cover of Vogue. Look for it. I’ll be wearing Oriental make-up, a bamboo hat, and halter-top pajamas. It’s their Vietnam Remembrance Look or something equally tacky.’ She arched her lip in distaste. ‘The editors, the advertisers, even the photographers – none of them have souls.’

Daniel said, ‘You don’t have to do it.’

‘Mr Pearse,’ Imera said tartly, ‘the world gives women very little of financial value other than their beauty, which it then wastes. I intend to – how do you gamblers say it? – cash in while I can.’

Daniel thought, That explains the brittle, practiced grace. A model, a Brahmin, and a pound of righteous feminine bitterness. ‘Miss Haruh,’ he said gently, ‘please don’t mistake my intentions, but after I’ve finished making arrangements with my friend at the Wildwood, would you be my guest for dinner? And not merely to reciprocate the generosity of this ride, but to sustain the pleasure of your company.’ That was good, Daniel thought, impressed.

Imera’s smile seemed more relaxed. ‘As long as it’s no place where I’d usually be recognized by the fawning flesh-dealers of this city.’

‘Anywhere you choose.’

She cocked her head slightly, a gesture that would have seemed coy if not for the strength in her voice, ‘And please, Mr Pearse, don’t mistake me.’

‘I won’t,’ Daniel assured her, thinking, I dreamed; now maybe I can make love to the same woman twice.

They ate at a small Greek restaurant, then, having dismissed Phillips earlier, took a taxi to her Upper East Side apartment. He didn’t wait for her to turn on the lights. Taken with the sudden dizziness of desire, he put his arms around her.

‘Daniel,’ she warned, breaking away. ‘Don’t. You’ll be disappointed, I’m afraid.’

‘More likely, that would be your complaint, not mine.’

‘I doubt that sincerely,’ she said, flipping on the lights.

Daniel, whose attention had been riveted on her, was startled to see her apartment was more like a small warehouse, most of it devoted to makeup tables and racks of clothes. He looked at her, the intimation of betrayal like a weight in his lungs. But before he could even imagine what it was he hoped she could explain, Imera swept off her wig and hung it on a nearby rack. She was bald.

And when she spoke, it seemed her voice had dropped thirty-nine octaves. ‘Daniel, allow me to introduce myself properly. I’m Jean Bluer, Master of Disguise.’ Jean Bluer smiled hugely at his little joke.

‘I’m going to kick your ass,’ Daniel promised, taking off his coat.

‘I seriously doubt that will occur. Besides being a master of disguise, I am also a master of Tao Do Chaung, the almost extinct art of Ninja foot fighting, and I will defend myself.’

‘I think you’re the master of bad jokes and bullshit.’ Daniel lunged.

Jean Bluer spun sideways, whipping his right foot around into Daniel’s thigh with an excruciatingly precise force. Daniel went down screaming.

Jean Bluer looked at him as he writhed in pain. ‘Daniel,’ he said, vaguely disappointed, ‘you must develop a larger appreciation for the essential humor of identity.’

Since Jean Bluer was never entirely himself, any description was provisional. His eyes most often were blue, but through the adroit use of contact lenses and the application of special drops he prepared himself, they might be twenty shades of hazel, brown, or grey. His hair color, length, and style were a function of whatever wig he chose for the day, just as his nose and ears depended on putty and makeup for their shape. He altered his body with girdles, lifts, padding, postural changes, and the warehouse of costumes, many of which he’d sewn or otherwise assembled himself. When Smiling Jack had called Volta’s attention to Jean Bluer, Jack had claimed that given enough preparation time, Jean could pass for any adult from twenty-nine different cultures – and Jack was notoriously frugal with exaggeration.

Daniel received his daily lessons in the warehouse where Jean dwelt among his manifold identities. Jean was a passionate and exacting teacher. Study began at seven in the morning and lasted till nine in the evening. At Daniel’s insistence, instruction in Tao Do Chaung was added, beginning at 5 a.m. After the smoky rancidity of the gambling life, Daniel embraced the physical exertion of Tao Do Chaung’s dervishlike exercises.

Daniel had revered – even loved – Wild Bill. Mott Stoker he’d admired for the exuberance of his excesses. He’d hated and adored Aunt Charmaine’s glacial grace and piercing mind. He’d respected Bad Bobby’s skill, style, and raptor’s eye. He was enthralled by Jean Bluer. The warehouse, like Jean’s psyche, was a hall of mirrors, and while Jean, like his student, examined each image for its elemental accuracy, teacher and student were both compelled to look into themselves for who they might possibly become.

Jean Bluer distinguished four stages of disguise: the photograph; the dance; the poem; and the person. The photograph, as the label implied, centered on visual accuracy. Under Jean’s severe tutelage, Daniel learned how to use skin tints, crepe beards, putty, sponges, false eyelashes, contact lenses, paint-on tooth enamels; a variety of wens, warts, and beauty marks; and molded latex masks which, worn overnight, pulled his features to their designs.

Initially they worked from a file of photographs. When Daniel finished his makeup, Jean Bluer inspected the face, offering a barrage of criticisms and suggestions.

‘The seal between the nose putty and lip line is faulty – use a bit more glue, and mix a touch of Max Factor Number Nine in with it.

‘The beard is inept, much too sparse below the jaw. The powder on the cheekbones is excessively dark, thus exaggerating the hollow; in sunlight you’d look like a zombie. And smear the lip gloss; it’s blinding. Small amounts, smoothly applied – that’s the proper application. Small and smooth. Suggestion, not statement. The harmonious integration of details.’

After a month working from photos, they moved to the street for an hour every morning. Jean Bluer would pick out a model for Daniel to reconstruct back at the warehouse. Jean commented as Daniel, squinting into the semicircular mirror on the makeup table, reproduced the face from memory. As Daniel soon discovered, each face Jean chose as a model presented different problems.

‘No! Never! The eyes are too far apart. You couldn’t fool a blind man,’ Jean Bluer would admonish, picking up the eyeliner. ‘Like this, you see – a bolder line, and a little more arch to the brows. The eyelashes, now, curl them away from each other. Notice how it widens the placement of the eyes, thus broadening the forehead, harmonizing the illusion.’

Or another day: ‘Acchhh! The scar is terrible. Atrocious. Like scars little kids paint on their faces playing pirate. Utterly one-dimensional.’ (One-dimensionality was, for Jean Bluer, the only unforgivable fault.) ‘Wipe it off before its stupidity paralyzes us both. Now try this: a whitish-grey liner, a hint of silver, a faint streak of blue for the highlights. Then, the little bottle next to the Max Factor Flexible Collodion that you’ve used to hold wigs and seal putty – no, next to it, yes, the little bottle that says Non-flexible Collodion. Now, paint over the scar. See? It shrinks the skin and draws it inward. Notice how the lower lid of your eye is just slightly pulled down? Yes, yes – excellent. You did especially well on the coloration. That is a scar. Merely looking at it one can feel the pain of the original wound, the pain of healing.’

When Daniel was proficient with makeup, Jean introduced him to costume. From Amish hats to zebra-striped panties, Daniel learned materials, cuts, padding, and the conventions governing them. Women’s clothing in particular confounded him.

‘Heavens,’ Jean Bluer howled at his first attempt, ‘you’d be arrested in a moment as a transvestite, and any self-respecting drag queen would assist the police. The nylons are baggy. If your upper lip were any thinner you could slice salami. The purse was out of style seven years ago, and you are holding it like a dead baby. Your breasts have ridden up around your collarbones because you have not imagined their weight, thus are holding your shoulders too far back. Also, your feet are too far apart and your center of balance seems to be around your knees rather than between your hips. This is bad, Daniel. This makes me ill.’

After school, Daniel, who lived in a rooming house down the block, was free to do as he pleased, as long as he observed how people looked, walked, talked, and thought. Daniel kept notes, and while he practiced the morning’s lesson in Tao Do Chaung, Jean critiqued them aloud.

‘“Waved.” Which hand? Was this coat buttoned, open, or partially buttoned. You note a blue-striped dress shirt. What sort of collar and cuffs? “European laugh?” “Southern accent?” Meaningless descriptions. The laughter of the French and Italians is completely different. There are well over a hundred southern accents. Precision, Daniel. Detail. Nuance. One perfect gesture or inflection will carry even a hasty physical disguise.’

When Jean Bluer was satisfied with Daniel’s progress, he introduced the second stage, the dance. He started Daniel at the center: muscle, bone, integument – what was connected to what and how it worked. From that center, Jean explained, posture, movement, and gesture naturally expanded.

‘Physique is the deposited history of our forebearers, and thus a component of character. Any voluntary movement is, naturally, a gesture of consciousness – certainly our main interest – but always pay initial attention to the arrangement of muscle, bone, and skin, for they determine the actual form of the movement.’

Daniel learned ten basic walks, each emphasizing a different center of gravity, and therefore a different balance. He worked barefoot to sense the precise distribution of weight and strain. They spent the lunch hour on the street, observing the way people moved their bodies, endless variations on a few skeletal themes. Jean emphasized hands – the position of the fingers, angle of the palms, the speed and force of movement, continually reminding Daniel to look for each person’s pattern of motion, not just isolated moves. And at the end of eighty strenuous days, Jean, pleased with Daniel’s abilities, announced they would move to the third stage of disguise, the poem.

Daniel started with breathing exercises, first establishing a ‘regular’ breath as a median from which to explore different rhythms. ‘Accent, pitch, inflection’ – Jean dismissed them with a wave – ‘they can only be added after you have the basic cadence. Listen to how people breathe when they talk, and the rest falls into place.’ As usual, his advice was amazingly helpful.

From breath cadence, Daniel moved into sound, the vibrating air of vowels and consonants, the bare phonetic minimums and the corresponding placement of teeth and tongue, the subtle variations in pitch and duration. Daniel practiced from Jean’s vast catalogue of tapes as Jean listened for flaws in Daniel’s imitations.

‘Not “you-all”; it’s “yawl.” Roll the jaw – it’s a broad elision… More drag on the gutturals and more hum in the nasals – you’re in New Mexico territory, pahdnah. Pay attention to that tongue! Northern, more forward; southern, let it loll back a little. And diction, Daniel, diction! You’re supposed to be an Irish hod-carrier, not a British barrister.’

Daniel’s favorite of these admonitions was ‘More mumble, please, more mumble.’

When they entered the last stage of disguise, Jean gave a short speech about what he was after. ‘So far we have been involved in the duplication of appearance, movement, and speech. Duplication requires craft. Now we enter art, for the fourth stage requires not merely a physical extension of identity, but its assumption. Real imagination, where you become what you create. And this needs to be stressed: Those identities are already within you. We think of identity as being singular, unique. But it is only the expression of one possibility. Think of identity as a braid of many identities through which the force of life flows – like an electrical wire composed of many smaller, intertwined wires coated with a rubber insulation that keeps them intact, coherent. You are both the Ancient Mariner and the wedding guest, the bride and the groom, minister and derelict. Every person dead, alive, or to be born is within you. Tap that storehouse of selves, draw upon your own body of metaphor.’

The exercises for the fourth stage of disguise, the person, were challenging to the point of absorption. At seven each morning Jean gave him a problem to solve. Daniel had till noon to find a solution, which he performed for Jean. If Jean approved, he sent Daniel out on the streets to present it under real circumstances. The problems were people.

The first was easy. ‘Daniel, become a thirty-seven-year-old union electrician, born in Chicago, with a wife and two children. You fell from some scaffolding two years ago and shattered your left shoulder, living on disability insurance ever since. You’re on your way back from seeing the doctor and have stopped for a drink in an unfamiliar bar. I’ll be taking the part of the bartender.’

The problems soon became more difficult. ‘You are a twenty-year-old female journalism student at Columbia University. You were born in Lubbock, Texas, lived there till you were fourteen, then moved to Newark. Your father is a mid-level executive with Standard Oil, and your mother is a closet alcoholic. You have been increasingly depressed the past few months and have sought help from the university counseling center. I will be a psychologist.

‘You are a thirty-year-old male Puerto Rican cocaine dealer. You’ve been in prison once for three years for assault on a peace officer. You have a scar on your right cheek. I will be a new buyer, whom you suspect may be a narc. You want to be careful, but you could also use a new customer.’

Although Jean always sent Daniel to the street with each solution, it was nearly four months before the sharp, continual criticism gradually gave way to praise. The day Daniel passed through a welfare interview as a fifty-year-old female Colombian immigrant with four children and little English, Jean told him, ‘As you know, you are my first student under my agreement with Volta, and I’m either a much better teacher than I ever hoped, or you are a natural talent. I can find very few flaws lately, and they are flaws only experience, not instruction, can correct. You are good enough to leave any time you choose. I will notify Volta.’

‘Thank you,’ Daniel acknowledged the praise, ‘but I won’t leave until I can fool you as you initially fooled me.’

‘Ah, but Daniel, that was much easier on my part, since you’d never seen me before or suspected I would be in disguise. Do remember that I can spot a disguise very quickly, especially when I’m looking for one. Your chances of getting past me are extremely poor.’

‘With all respect, I believe I can do it.’

‘Very well, if you insist. At the end of Tao Do Chaung each morning, I will tell you where I plan to eat lunch and the route I’ll take to get there. Assume the disguise of your choice and engage me along the way. If you can fool me for thirty seconds, consider yourself successful.’

The first day Daniel disguised himself as a window washer, renting a van and equipment. As he began washing the windows of the restaurant, Jean emerged, laughing, and told him that most professionals used some sort of detergent in the water since it seemed to get the windows cleaner.

The second day he joined a group of winos huddled in a doorway. As he passed by, Jean put a quarter in his hand and whispered, ‘It would have been a twenty if you’d fooled me.’

That night, Daniel had a brainstorm. He would disguise himself as the one person Jean might not expect, might not even recognize: He would disguise himself as Jean Bluer.

Daniel left early for the studio next morning, still excited by his plan. There were very few people on the street. An old black man, so drunk he’d entered another dimension, lurched past with his eyes rolled back in his head. A sturdy Ukrainian woman stood at the bus-stop. A sawed-off, pot-bellied army sergeant carrying a duffel bag fumed by, muttering to himself, ‘Fuckin’ reveille motherfucker and no fuckin’ sleep – fuck the fuckin’ army!’ Daniel hurried on.

Daniel crossed the kitchen toward the large dressing room where he usually changed into a jock and sweatpants for Tao Do Chaung. Volta was standing at one of the mirrored makeup tables, idly examining a color chart. The moment Daniel saw him he realized he’d just passed Jean Bluer on the street, and that he would most likely never see him again. It was an appropriate farewell.

Volta glanced up. ‘Daniel, how have you been?’

Daniel said, ‘Was that fat sergeant I just passed on the street Jean Bluer?’

‘It was indeed. Jean’s talents are required elsewhere. Not an emergency exactly, but a pressing concern, you understand. Your work here is through.’

‘Not quite,’ Daniel said, shifting his center of gravity into the Tao Do Chaung stance known as the Wounded Crane and simultaneously unleashing a flawless Do Rah Ran, a powerful side kick that swept Volta’s feet out from under him.

Volta, however, controlled his fall, tucking himself midair and rolling on his shoulder as he hit. He was on his feet instantly and assumed the .38 Colt Python stance, the front bead locked on Daniel’s navel. ‘Don’t make me defend myself,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m no match for your youth. I’d have to shoot you.’

Daniel said with certainty, ‘You wouldn’t kill me.’

‘I didn’t say I’d kill you; I said I’d shoot you. In fact, since the gun is full of snake-loads – birdshot instead of a bullet – I doubt if I could kill you, but I could probably perforate about a half mile of small intestine, which would slow you down enough to make it a fair fight.’

‘No,’ Daniel said in the same implacably certain tone, ‘you wouldn’t do that either.’

Volta shrugged. ‘You’re right.’ He released the hammer and tossed the pistol to Daniel.

Startled, Daniel grabbed awkwardly.

While he was still fumbling, Volta started talking. ‘What are you so ferociously peeved about anyway? That I’ve been neglecting you? Daniel, I’m not your father. I have responsibilities to many others as well as you. And I have my own life, too. Or is this because I didn’t have either the time or inclination to hear your dream? I told Robert to convey my congratulations, which I trust he did.’ Daniel began to say something but Volta rolled on. ‘Or was that spiteful kick the result of my high-handed presumption in ending your work with Jean and sending him to attend other business? Daniel, your work with Jean, by his report, was finished a week ago. Since then, again by his report, you’ve been trying to convince yourself that you’re adept enough to fool him – that is to say, his equal. You’re not. Though having said so, I hasten to add that I think you have the talent and passion to surpass him eventually. The opportunity is there. And have you noticed how opportunity seems to expand as it narrows?’

‘I sure have,’ Daniel said. ‘That’s why I’m quitting AMO.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Volta snapped. ‘Bye.’

Daniel flipped open the .38’s cylinder and ejected the shells into his palm. They were snake-loads. He looked at Volta. ‘Maybe you would have shot me.’ He tossed Volta the gun.

Volta caught it by the butt and in virtually the same motion flipped open the cylinder, magically producing a speed-loader in his other hand, and had the pistol ready to cock again before Daniel could blink twice. ‘I’m a man who draws lines, Daniel. That way I know where my edges are. One of those lines is a refusal to be brutalized for petty reasons, especially youthful petulance. If you were a Zen master, I would be bowing to you. But you’re not. As you’ve no doubt noticed.’

Daniel took a deep breath, and for a moment seemed to be gathering himself for a heated reply. ‘Okay,’ Daniel said. ‘I’m sorry. I apologize.’

‘Accepted and forgotten,’ Volta said. The gun disappeared into his jacket.

Daniel said, ‘It was a bit of all the reasons you mentioned, but the work with Jean especially. You think my work here is done, Jean thinks it’s done, but I don’t. Today I was going to try something that may well have worked – I was going to disguise myself as Jean.’

Volta sat down at the makeup table, turning the chair away from the bank of mirrors to face Daniel. ‘That might have proven difficult, since there is no Jean Bluer.’

‘I thought I sensed one.’

‘Possibly you did.’

They were silent a moment and then Daniel said, ‘I need a vacation, a serious rest. A year at least; maybe two.’

‘You quit, remember? I assumed you quit in order to do exactly as you please. Do so.’

‘“Accepted and forgotten?”’ Daniel reminded him. ‘Don’t beat me with my apology.’

‘Your apology was for the kick, not your resignation – for that, no apology is necessary. We couldn’t very well call AMO a voluntary alliance if one wasn’t free to withdraw.’

‘I want to stay. It was an addled act. Jean gone, you here telling me what to do … it was too much at once.’

‘I’m truly glad to hear that, Daniel, because right now we need your help.’

‘My help?’

‘I don’t understand why you seem startled,’ Volta said with more than his usual dryness. ‘We haven’t been providing your training without some expectation of return. We consider you what we call a free agent. We assume you will listen to various requests for assistance, though of course you retain the right to refuse, or to suggest alternatives. No more teachers, unless you wish to arrange further study on your own. And remember one of Wild Bill’s better lines: “When the teaching ends, learning begins.”’

‘So what am I needed for? To grow dope? Gamble? Crack safes? To disguise myself as an Italian waiter and find out what the Secretary of State discusses with his mistress over the scallopini?’ Daniel’s sarcasm belied his excitement.

‘Nothing so mundane. This is much more in tune with your romantic nature: a jewel theft. An extraordinarily difficult theft, I warn you, but it is an extraordinary jewel. To steal it, you will have to surpass Jean Bluer.’

‘You just finished saying––’ Daniel began, but Volta cut him short.

‘What’s the ultimate disguise, Daniel?’

Daniel considered a moment. ‘Invisibility, I guess.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I’m not quite able to do that yet.’

‘I am,’ Volta said. ‘Or I was at one time.’

‘Actually become invisible, right? Dematerialize? Poof?’

‘Vanish is the term I use. And no poof. It’s more like slipping underwater.’

‘You’re telling me you could vanish into thin air?’

‘Or thick.’

‘No offense,’ Daniel said, ‘but I’d have to see it. And then I’d still probably have to believe it.’

‘You’ll have to take it on faith. I gave up the practice years ago. It was too dangerous for me. And it might be even more perilous for you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I think you’d like it.’

‘First I’d have to do it.’

‘Let me assure you, Daniel, if I didn’t think you were capable, I wouldn’t mention it. Do you think I’m unaware what an outlandish claim it is, especially when I’m not prepared to demonstrate? And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I’ve never met another human being who had the power to vanish. I’ve tried to instruct six people before you, without success.’

‘Not even an arm? A finger?’

Volta ignored him. ‘I discovered it by accident. I was near death, adrift on the ocean. A woman on the boat that rescued me claimed her mother, a Jamaican shamaness, had vanished once in her practice and found it such a dangerous and treacherous state of mind that she never tried it again. When a woman accomplished in the spirit arts says a practice is dangerous and treacherous, that should command your attention. This is for real, Daniel, this is for keeps. School’s out.’

Daniel held up a hand. ‘Wait a minute, now. I thought you said you were going to teach me.’

‘I couldn’t call it teaching. That would be an insult to people like Wild Bill. All I’m going to do is share my experience, which might be wholly inapplicable. The best I can do is point at the mountain and hope you find a trail.’

‘How long would it take me to learn?’

Volta shook his head. ‘No idea. None. The other people I’ve tried to teach all gave up within a week.’

‘I suppose it’s arduous and requires great concentration.’

‘Naturally. Immense concentration; pinpoint focus; enormous clarity. It takes everything you have.’

‘Is this jewel worth it?’

Volta said, ‘Properly, that’s for you to decide.’

‘Have you seen it?’

Volta hesitated. ‘Well, I’ve dreamed it.’

Daniel shook his head. ‘I’m getting lost. You want me to vanish into your dreams?’

‘Good Lord, no,’ Volta blanched. ‘That’s exactly what I don’t want you to do.’

‘So, what is it exactly you do want me to do?’

‘Steal the diamond.’

‘So, it’s a diamond?’

‘Yes, though it’s a bit like saying the ocean is water. The diamond is perfectly spherical, perfectly clear – though it seems to glow – and it’s about two-thirds the size of a bowling ball. I think of it as the Diamond. Capital D.’

‘Who owns it?’

‘No one. The United States government has it at the moment. We want it. And to be honest with you, Daniel, I particularly want it, want it dearly. I want to look at it, into it, hold it in my hands. I had a vision involving a spherical diamond, a vision that changed my life, and I want to confirm that it was a vision of something real, the spirit embodied, the circuit complete.’

Daniel was smiling. ‘You’re going to love this. That dream I wanted to talk to you about, my first since the explosion? It just happened to feature a raven with a spherical diamond in its beak. Obviously, it wasn’t as big as a bowling ball, and there was a thin spiral flame running edge to edge through its center, which made it seem more coldly brilliant than warmly glowing, but it sounds like the same basic diamond to me.’

‘And what do you think it is?’

‘I think it’s beautiful.’

Volta gave him a thin smile. ‘If I were more perverse than I already lamentably am, I would say it is the Eye of the Beholder. In fact, I don’t know what it is.’

‘It might be a dream,’ Daniel said.

‘Very possibly,’ Volta agreed, ‘but I don’t think so. I think – feel, to be exact – that the Diamond is an interior force given exterior density, the transfigured metaphor of the prima materia, the primordial mass, the Spiritus Mundi. I’m assuming you’re familiar with the widely held supposition that the entire universe was created from a tiny ball of dense matter which exploded, sending pieces hurtling into space, expanding from the center. The spherical diamond is the memory, the echo, the ghost of that generative cataclysm; the emblematic point of origin. Or if, as some astrophysicists believe, the universe will reach some entropic point in its expansion and begin to collapse back into itself, in that case the Diamond may be a homing point, the seed crystal, to which it will all come hurtling back together – and perhaps through itself, into another dimension entirely. Or it might be the literal Philosopher’s Stone we alchemists speak of so fondly. Or I might be completely wrong. That’s why I want to see it. If I could actually stand in its presence, I’m convinced I’d know what it is. I would even venture to say, at the risk of rabid projection, that it wants to be seen and known.’

‘But you’re not even sure it exists,’ Daniel said. ‘Right? And hey, it’s tough to steal something that doesn’t exist, even if you can be invisible. The more I think about this the less sense it makes.’

‘Then think about this: Two days ago, Navy divers searching for the wreck of the Moray – you might recall it was a nuclear submarine that vanished without a trace in 1972 – found a mysterious object on the ocean floor exactly on the Greenwich Meridian. According to our information, the object appears to be a spherical diamond that “glows” – whatever that means. It has been taken to a government lab for tests and observation. We’re not sure where it is at the moment; there are rumors it’s being moved. That’s what Jean was called away to work on, as well as Smiling Jack and some of our other best people. Including you, I hope.’

‘And you really think I might be able to do it? Actually vanish?’

‘I think you’re the most likely candidate I’ve ever known.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘A number of reasons, but essentially because you want to vanish.’

‘I do?’

‘I think so, yes. But what concerns me is that I’m not certain you will want to come back.’

‘Suppose I don’t. Or can’t. What happens to me then?’

‘I don’t know, but I suspect you might truly discover what lost means. Not confused, or disoriented, or displaced. Lost.’

‘Is that a challenge?’

‘It challenged me.’

‘Is that why you quit?’

‘Yes, one could say that.’

‘What did you steal when you were invisible?’

‘Nothing. I used the ability to perform escapes in my magic act.’

‘Sounds like magic to me, all right.’

Volta said emphatically, ‘It’s not. Vanishing is a tool, a technique, another manipulation of appearance. Magic is the expropriation of the real.’

‘Well, hell, let’s get started. I can’t wait to see if I can vanish into nonexistence and magically expropriate a reality you dreamed.’

‘You’ve forgotten your dream; you might have to battle that raven for the Diamond.’

‘I suppose I’ll find out. Are we going to start soon?’

‘Early tomorrow morning. Meet me at the Oakland airport at midnight, Pacific time. You can pick up your tickets and itinerary at the Gilded Lily Pawn Shop at the top of President Street. You’ll be leaving this afternoon. I have some business, so I’ll be taking a later flight. We’ll meet at Gate Seven and then catch a private flight north to the Eel River, and from there to my place. We’ll get started after breakfast.’

‘That’s not much sleep,’ Daniel noted.

‘Daniel, I can only tell you what I know. And one thing I know is that exhaustion encourages vanishing.’

Daniel and Volta took the interfacility shuttle to the private hangars. On the way, Volta told him, ‘Our pilot will be a young man named Frederic Malatest. Red Freddie, we call him. Don’t bait him on politics. He takes them seriously.’

‘Red Freddie and Low-Riding Eddie – that’s quite a crew.’

‘That,’ Volta sighed, ‘is our entire western air force. No wonder we’re forced into imagination.’

Red Freddie was in his mid-twenties. His lanky frame and laconic movements were in contrast to his piercing brown eyes and the message emblazoned in black letters across his motorcycle helmet: Smash the State. While Volta sat with his eyes closed, Daniel started Red Freddie on politics before they’d even taken off.

Over Ukiah Daniel expressed serious reservations about Red Freddie’s claim that the highest revolutionary act available to a middle-class people in the 1980s would be piling their television sets in the middle of the street and setting them ablaze with their front doors. They argued for a few minutes, until Red Freddie warned, ‘Reconsider your position,’ and put the twin-engine Beechcraft into a steep power dive.

Pressed back in his seat, Daniel watched the town lights below rush toward him. He was too stunned to speak until Volta, with a trace of reproach, said in his ear, ‘I told you he takes his politics seriously.’

Daniel immediately leaned over and screamed in Red Freddie’s helmet, ‘You’re right! Build a bonfire with those front doors. And while you’re at it, throw on all the word processors, too!’

‘Right on!’ Red Freddie bellowed, lifting the nose back up and leveling it before beginning a series of exuberant snap-rolls, each punctuated with a scream of ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’

‘Another thing,’ Daniel yelled. ‘After the televisions and typewriters, every speck of paper in the country.’

‘You got it, bro! You think something is important enough to write down to be remembered, important enough for others to know, well you can write it on a goddamn wall. Imagine it, man: motel room walls would be like poetry magazines.’

Volta sleepily opened his eyes and said, ‘Did you two realize that Ukiah is haiku spelled backwards?’

Before Daniel could admit he’d missed that one, Red Freddie threw out his arms and dramatically declaimed,

When the last capitalist is strangled

With the guts of the last bureaucrat,

Cherry trees will blossom in our minds.

Daniel said, ‘And when all the paper’s burning, people should throw their clothes on the blaze and snake-dance around the neighborhood naked, then sit in a big circle and toast marshmallows and drink whiskey and smoke dope and trade stories, lies, and rumors.’

Red Freddie nodded rapidly. ‘And the next morning form labor syndicates and call a general strike.’

As Daniel and Freddie raved back and forth, Volta eased back in his seat. He admired youth and ambition, the seizures of endless possibilities and unqualified enthusiasm, but lately they were making him tired. He tried to relax and let everything go, but he couldn’t shake an image of Daniel looking at himself in a mirror. The boy was bright, maybe even brilliant, but he was not wise.

For the thousandth time Volta wondered whether he would have offered Daniel the chance to vanish if there was no Diamond to steal. He remembered how Madge Hornbrook had touched his sleeve just before the ceremony when he’d replaced her as a member of the Star, whispering ‘Just remember that the crucial decisions are always too close to call.’ He was encouraged by Daniel’s claim that he, too, had dreamed of the Diamond – a good sign. Yet he found little solace in it. He was getting old, he realized. Old.

Twenty minutes later, Red Freddie set them down on a fog-shrouded strip along the Eel River. He kept the motor running as Daniel and Volta quickly unloaded. In minutes he had the plane turned around, gunning it down the strip.

When Red Freddie lifted off, Daniel picked up his duffel. ‘All right, what do we do from here? Walk?’

‘Right,’ Volta said absently.

‘Which way and how far?’

Volta looked at him, then bent to pick up his own suitcase. ‘Northeast. About a hundred yards. To my truck.’ Volta started walking, Daniel falling in beside him.

Daniel said lightly, ‘Your truck? Given your position as a senior member of the Star, I thought a limo would be waiting.’

‘The truck was indulgence enough.’

‘What is it? Something along the lines of Smiling Jack’s Kenworth?’

‘You’ll see,’ Volta said.

To Daniel it looked like any other old battered pickup, though it had new rubber all the way around. He told Volta, ‘Bad Bobby would book it eight to five that the tires outlast the truck.’

Volta took Daniel’s duffel bag and swung it into the bed on top of his suitcase. ‘No he wouldn’t. Robert has a discerning eye for the deceptions of appearance.’

‘Well,’ Daniel allowed, ‘maybe even money.’

‘I intended to let you drive, but since you persist in insulting a work of art, you merely ride.’

Not until Volta turned the engine over and Daniel felt the whole truck shimmying with an almost erotic anticipation did he understand the work of art under the hood.

Volta smiled, a boyish gleam in his eye. ‘The music you hear is a 427 Chrysler. This is an authentic moonshiner truck – not much to look at, granted, but since it’s rocket on the road, all you see’s a blur.’ Volta tapped the gas.

‘You like power, don’t you?’ Daniel said.

‘Properly applied.’ Volta slipped the truck into first and applied some.

It was just as well Daniel couldn’t think of a reply, for it would have been lost in the engine’s chattering howl.

The narrow road soon left the river plain and began twisting up a long ridge. An hour later they dropped down and crossed the north fork of the Eel, its water shivering with starlight. A few miles farther on they turned onto a dirt road blocked by a sturdy metal gate. Volta pushed a button under the dash and the gate swung open. Daniel assumed they’d arrived, but it was another chucked and rutted seven miles and three gates before the road sloped down off the broad point of the ridge, curving slowly north as the land leveled, ending abruptly at a small frame house with an adjacent barn and scattered outbuildings. Volta touched another button under the dash and the house and yard lit up.

Daniel drawled – a fraction too slowly, Jean Bluer would have noted – ‘I got it figured ’twernt any ol’ moonshiner done did your ’lectronics.’

‘No, it was a young electromagnetic genius, a German anarchist in love with waves.’

‘I heard Wild Bill claim more than once that “German anarchist” was a contradiction in terms. That the best you could hope for was a Hegelian Baptist.’

Volta laughed. ‘Bill’s prejudices are notorious. But let me welcome you to my retreat, which is known locally as Laurel Creek Hollow. I wouldn’t forbid you to reveal its location, but I ask you, as I do all visitors, to exercise the utmost discretion.’

‘You may depend upon it,’ Daniel promised, vaguely mimicking Volta’s formality.

‘Tell me,’ Volta said, ‘do you find me a bit grandiose and dramatic?’

‘A little,’ Daniel answered.

Volta leaned toward him, his gaze so intense that Daniel was surprised when he whispered, with a mixture of apology and exasperation, ‘That’s show biz, Daniel. Pure show biz.’ Before Daniel could respond, Volta pointed out the window, adding, ‘And that’s the house. It’s four fifteen. I suggest you unload our bags while I start a fire and cook us some breakfast. It’ll be your last meal for a while, and I’d like to make it special.’

It was. Air-light buckwheat pancakes with fresh butter and Vermont maple syrup. Ham from the Blue Ridge Mountains, cooked with a peach glaze and sliced thin. A fruit dish of apples, grapes, and slivered pecans, barely sauced with curried sour-cream. For beverages: Gravenstein apple juice and a choice of Vienna Roast espresso or Volta’s own blend of tea, the latter with a squeeze of lemon and a dollop of fireweed honey.

As Volta cooked, he told Daniel about the origins of the ingredients. The buckwheat was grown and milled by a Montana woman named Jane Durham. She sent him a fifty-pound sack every year because Volta had personally tracked down her grandfather’s grave – he’d been a Wobbly organizer – and purchased a headstone for it. Tick Hathaway cured the ham, the last of twenty Volta had received in exchange for the 1925 Honus Wagner baseball card Tick needed to complete a collection. The apples were from a feminist commune in coastal Sonoma County, juiced on an old screw press. Smiling Jack had brought him ten gallons of maple syrup from the Hewlitt Jefferies’ farm near Burlington. The honey was from the five-percent dues of another commune, whose members rejected the use of money – Dead President Trading Cards, as they called it.

Although Daniel felt both the urge and obligation to savor each morsel, it was all he could do not to wolf the food. It had been almost twelve hours since the airline dinner of gooey Yankee pot roast and boiled vegetables. Daniel was eyeing the last slice of ham, half listening to Volta recount the geological history of the Eel River watershed, when suddenly Volta stopped and delicately pushed the ham platter toward him.

‘I’m sorry,’ Daniel said. ‘I’m so hungry I’m afraid I can’t really appreciate how good it is. But I do appreciate you cooking it for me; I really do.’

‘I’m sure the food appreciates your hunger as much as my preparation. Hunger, you know, has always fascinated me. I have seen people on the verge of starvation standing in line to give food away. This was in Tibet, in a small mountain village. There was a holy man who lived in a cave higher up the mountain. Every full moon, for as long as it was visible in the sky, he would receive petitioners at the mouth of his cave. Each petitioner brought him a gift of food. In exchange, he would answer one question. When the holy man had enough food to last the month, he would start giving each gift to the next person in line. It was a rough climb to the cave, remember, and food was scarce, but the line of petitioners would begin forming well before sunset. There were often over a thousand people in line, and all of them knew that the holy man would withdraw when the moon set.

‘The first time I visited I asked him, “What is reality?” Without hesitation he replied, “A handful of rice.” Sort of your standard holy-man answer. The second time, I asked, “What is the greatest obstacle to wisdom?” He shut his eyes a moment, and when he opened them they had this wonderful delighted twinkle. “Wisdom is easy,” he said. “The mind is difficult.”’

Daniel wiped his lips. ‘I don’t know about how easy wisdom is, but the mind being difficult, he got that right.’

‘Indeed. But I mention it because I’m experiencing some of that difficulty. I have reservations about your attempting to vanish. Gut reservations, nothing I can explain – except to assure you that they reflect uncertainties regarding my judgment, not yours.’

Daniel, surprised by the turn of the discussion, said, ‘I want to try it. That’s my judgment, my call. You’re relieved of the responsibility of the decision.’

Volta said, ‘I don’t accept responsibilities that can be absolved. Clearly, since your approval is necessary to the attempt, and my instruction may be critical to your success and safety, it is a mutual decision. I’ll be responsible for my part; you take care of yours.’

‘That’s all I was trying to indicate – that I intend to.’

Volta leaned back in his chair and looked at Daniel closely. ‘All right. From this moment onward, Daniel, don’t speak to me. Don’t speak at all. If you do, or if you violate any subsequent instructions, our work will end there, and along with it, my responsibility. Now please, finish your tea.’

When they’d cleared the dishes, Volta took a six-volt flashlight from a shelf and told Daniel to follow. He led him out the back door and along a wide trail toward the cedar-shingled barn. Stars still glittered overhead, but the sky had begun to pale in the east. Volta followed the trail around the barn, then down a gradual slope to a small shack. Volta opened the door and entered, shining the light back for Daniel. When Daniel was standing beside him, Volta shined the light around the room. Along the far wall was a narrow bed. Three thick quilts were folded and stacked on the foot of the bed, a small white pillow on top. The only other furnishing was a straight-backed wooden chair.

Volta held the light on the chair and told Daniel, ‘Sit down.’

When Daniel was seated, Volta held the light on a door in the wall Daniel was facing. ‘The door opens on a small compost toilet. If you’ll remember to sprinkle a small can of wood ashes when you use it and replace the seat cover, there shouldn’t be any odor.’

The light flicked back to the bed. ‘Against the wall at the foot of the bed are three one-gallon jugs of local spring water. I advise you to use it sparingly.’

Volta snapped off the light. ‘I want you to shut your eyes, Daniel, and I want you to listen well, listen as if your life depended on it. This is where I make my speech.’

Volta began pacing around Daniel in the chair. Daniel shut his eyes and sat up straighter, concentrating. He felt fatigue evaporate as his attention sharpened. But as Volta continued his silent circling, an image of a jackal formed in Daniel’s mind, then a vulture. Circling, waiting for his flesh. His heart started pounding so hard he couldn’t breathe, so hard he thought it would explode, and he felt himself lifted to another plane, a plane of glassy power, smooth, translucent, solid. It wasn’t a mystical experience. From his days with Mott Stocker, he recognized the feeling as the first rush of excellent amphetamine. He shook his head – not to clear it, but in mild disbelief. Volta had dosed him with crank! It made sense – Volta wanted him exhausted but alert. But Volta could have asked, or suggested.

Daniel was approaching righteous anger when Volta stopped in front of him and said, with an irony not lost on Daniel, ‘I know you trust me, but I can feel you don’t trust me deeply. That’s fair enough. You don’t know me well, and you may think I’ve withheld information on your mother’s death, or that I may have brainwashed you while you were in your coma, or that I have otherwise controlled your behavior and limited your expression. You’re wrong, but I understand your caution. However, do trust me in this: What you’re about to attempt is extremely dangerous – more so if you succeed than if you fail. Banish frivolity, boredom, self-pity. They can only compound the peril. The states of mind you may enter are almost impossible to imagine. They make drugs look silly.’

Volta paused, started pacing around the chair again, but this time speaking as he moved. ‘Daniel, I want you to know I’m not speaking symbolically when I claim you can dematerialize your body and literally vanish, move unimpeded through concrete walls and steel doors. I don’t have any idea how or why it is possible to spontaneously convert – perhaps invert – mass to electromagnetic waves, not so much jumping a frequency as leaping a dimension. I liken it to a phase change, the same essential configuration in a different form. Solid to liquid to gas; ice to water to air. Perhaps invisibility is one of our possible states. I don’t truly know. I’ve ridden every metaphysical twist, and to me it remains an incomprehensible fact.

‘As I mentioned before, I vanished many times in the past, usually in connection with magical performances. I’m the only person I know who’s done it, though I have heard of another – the Jamaican shamaness – so please, Daniel, please understand that all I know is limited to my experiences. In short, what I tell you might be inapplicable to your own circumstances. You must absolutely trust your own instincts and intuitions as you approach the threshold. However, my intuition tells me that the experience is archetypal, and so I’ll tell you how it felt, hoping it will be close.

‘First, though, let’s set some ground rules. You must, as noted, remain silent. You can talk to yourself – or scream or sing – when you’re alone, but not when anyone else is present. You must fast – nothing but water. You are not allowed to leave this room. If you do, for any reason, that ends it. Finally, you must follow my instructions to the best of your ability, though actually that may be a measure of mine. Each day I will slip a set of instructions under the door.

‘As to my pedagogical method, Wild Bill claims I’m a practitioner of the Kamikaze Socratic school, with a strong influence from the Marquis de Sade, but you know how fiercely judgmental William can be. I assume what he means is that I fly at the heart of the lesson and am not afraid to make you suffer. I build the raft. You run the river. I draw the map. You make the journey. If you don’t trust me, clearly you should say so now and not waste our time and spirit.’

Volta fell silent, still slowly pacing around Daniel on the chair. After three circuits, he continued. ‘Here’s how I experienced the transformation from matter to electromagnetic energy. It begins with an empty moment. Blank. Null. To me it was exactly as if time had stopped. And I think that’s just what happens, because you escape its force, not by transcending it or obliterating it, but by finding a still point within it, like a trout finding the point of hydraulic equilibrium behind a boulder in the flow.

‘The next sensations come quickly. First, there’s a very brief feeling of wetness, then a sense of light and warmth on your skin, and then a sudden and horrible confusion of all sensory information – a synesthetic snarl, an electrical storm in the brain. It’s at that point, I think, you actually begin to vanish, or begin the neural transition. It coheres as suddenly as it started, and you’re immediately sorry, for you find yourself falling, and you experience – or at least I did – terror that is unimaginably intense. It’s a paradoxical fall – you know it is endless and you know you’re going to hit. I’m sure you’re familiar with the folklore about falling in dreams, that you always wake up before you hit because if you do hit, you’ll die. As usual, folklore is correct.

‘To vanish, you must consciously resist the terror and stop the fall. You resist the terror by recognizing it without reacting, accepting without judgment, becoming light moving through space. Again paradoxically, you cleanse the terror of falling by falling. You stop the fall by conscious imagination. What I did was form an image of myself falling, and then I concentrated on that image with every scrap of power I could summon, concentrated so deeply the image dissolved.

‘When the fall stops, you are invisible, and everything returns to “normal,” or at least one’s familiar sense of space/time coherence and one’s usual perceptual and emotional sets. Except the body is not visible. You can lift that electrical field you call a hand and scratch that whirling constellation of energy you call your head, but you are not flesh and bone, ashes or dust. You are released from the constraints of matter, and as that recognition deepens, a powerful serenity wells up and surges through you, and at the quick of that serenity is a magnificent clarity – you understand everything and know exactly what to do.

‘That is when it becomes dangerous. And not because the clarity is delusional. On the contrary, it couldn’t be more real, more true. And one thing you see most lucidly is that everything is necessarily subject to flux, and you’re about to undergo a wrenching reversal. That the powerful serenity you felt surging through you was actually you surging through it; that the clarity isn’t yours, but belongs to a center you are passing through. You can’t keep it. And because you try to sustain it, try to hang on, it’s worse. It’s ecstatic, and it’s all you want to feel forever. You are free of purpose, pain, obligation, consequence; dialectic and dynamic; life; death.

‘The ecstasy is consuming. There’s nothing you desire more than the annihilation of that last speck of concentration holding consciousness together. And though I obviously can’t know for sure, it’s my strongest intuition that if you succumb to ecstasy and fail to reclaim your concentration, your center, you’ll vanish forever. Just as the terror is experienced as falling, the ecstasy is experienced as rising, soaring – but unchecked, it’s the same as falling. So watch for that moment when clarity swerves toward the ecstatic. Catch yourself and return as soon as possible. I mean immediately. The further you soar, the further you fall.’

Volta quit speaking but continued to pace. Daniel, who had been wired to every word, opened his eyes when Volta passed behind him. The room seemed much brighter. He wondered if there was a skylight. He glanced up. There was a skylight, but it wasn’t much – a small panel of corrugated plastic, clotted with detritus from the surrounding trees. The amphetamine made his jaws ache and his mind race; he wanted to babble hundreds of questions. It took an effort to maintain his silence.

Volta stopped directly in front of him, put his hands behind his back, and continued. ‘It is impossible to overestimate the power and glory of that ecstatic leap, but if you surrender to it, I believe you’ll be consumed. I repeat: Return immediately.’

Volta smiled thinly. ‘The reason I’m repeating myself is not simply to stress its importance, but to forestall having to explain how you escape ecstasy and return to the visible. I’ll tell you how I did it, but I also must tell you that while I feel crossing into energy is roughly the same for everyone, each person’s return is unique. I don’t know why I feel that’s the case, and I trust that you don’t expect me to offer reasons for intuitions.

‘Now before I tell you how I returned, let me refresh the principle, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. The principle is contained in an ancient alchemical forge-chant, which Wild Bill refers to as “that ol’ cornball Babylonian mantra.”

To be yourself,

see yourself.

To see yourself,

free yourself.

To free yourself,

Simply be.’

Daniel agreed with Wild Bill’s aesthetic assessment. He almost shook his head in dismay.

‘I feared you’d share William’s antipathy for civilized wisdom, but surely you understand that clichés endure because they’re repeated, and they’re repeated because they’ve proven accurate. But I won’t pursue it.

‘Here’s what I did to escape the ecstasy and return. I imagined a mirror. I held the image of the mirror ferociously in mind until I could see my face within it. And then I smashed the mirror. The return was immediate and wrenching, and the further I’d sailed, the worse it was – almost in direct proportion.

‘When you return, you feel distant from your body, weak, witless, disoriented. It passes quickly, but you’re exceptionally vulnerable to poor judgment, physical miscues, and general fuckups while you’re reintegrating. Be careful.

‘Basically, then, vanishing first of all involves a feeling of terror as you fall, then a brief and serene lucidity, which in turn opens into a soaring ecstasy. All three states of the transformation have their dangers, and your only defense is consciousness and concentration. Nothing really changes except form into formlessness, flesh into air. If you’re thirsty when you’re visible, you’ll be thirsty when you vanish. Again: consciousness and concentration. You must work from the center of yourself. Use it to stop the fall. Sustain the clarity. Salvage yourself from ecstasy. Dilute the melancholy that invariably accompanies returning.

‘The longest I was able to sustain invisibility was sixteen minutes, and I almost didn’t make it back. Ecstasy doesn’t encourage concentration. I have no idea if it’s possible to sustain it longer, but I wouldn’t try it for over ten minutes if I were you.

‘I’ve told you what I can, but there are things I haven’t told you. Some I haven’t told you because you must discover them for yourself. There are things I haven’t told you whose omission may seem cruel as the work unfolds, but it would be wise to withhold judgment until we’re done; appearances and disappearances are equally deceptive. There are also things I haven’t told you because I don’t know them.

‘That’s not all I haven’t told you, but I will tell you this, with my honor behind it: Nothing you’ll be instructed to do is dangerous, up to the point of vanishing. Difficult, exacting, perhaps painful – yes. But not dangerous. Vanishing is dangerous.’

Volta looked in Daniel’s eyes to be sure the point was clear. ‘So, we begin. Your instructions today are simple, derived from an ancient exercise that I’m sure you’re familiar with. I want you to acknowledge, without response, every piece of sensory data, every thought, every image, every feeling. Accept and let pass; see and release. Don’t get caught up; don’t follow; don’t cling.

‘I met a Chinese magician in Tangiers years ago. His name was Fang Chu, and he was the best fire eater I’ve ever seen. He claimed the “acknowledge without response” meditation is the only one you really needed to understand magic. Fang Chu had this wonderful smile and not much English, though more than my Chinese. Whenever we talked about the meditation he would grin hugely and say, “O yes! And so easy!” Then he would turn the grin up a notch and open his hands like this’ – Volta grinned and opened his hands and then, imitating Fang Chu’s sharp nasality, said, ‘“Not’ing to it, as your cowboy say.”’

Volta held the pose a moment, still grinning. In his own voice he said, ‘So cowboy, nothing to it. Ride straight on through. There will be further instructions in the morning. Oh yes, and I almost forgot: No one knows what we’re attempting here, and I believe it should remain that way. Until I say differently, this is solely between you and me. If you succeed in vanishing and wish to teach others, you must get my permission. When I die, the judgment of transmission shifts to you. I must have your honor on this, Daniel. Agree by remaining silent; if you don’t agree, say so. We can still stop – no blame, no shame.’

Volta waited. When Daniel had remained silent for almost a minute, Volta squeezed his shoulder. ‘I wish you the three things you will definitely need: strength, grace, and luck.’ He crossed to the door, closing it softly behind him.

Daniel leapt to his feet. The room was cold enough that he could see wisps of his breath. There was no sign of a heater or fireplace, nor could he find any lamps. The murky skylight was the only source of illumination. Its bright rectangle of light was beginning to lengthen on the bare western wall. The light did little to take off the chill. Daniel paced, flapping his arms for warmth as well as to burn off the manic energy of amphetamine meeting exhaustion. He tried not to think, to let all sensation simply loop through, fly away home. He tried to imagine his mind as a hole in a net, but thousands of speed-amped fishermen repaired it faster than he could rip.

‘That motherfucker dosed me!’ It felt so good to hear his own voice aloud, to move his speed-jammed jaws, that he began babbling to drain off the flitty, jangled, ganglia-scorching rush of amphetamine.

‘I’ll hire Mott, goddammit. Mott said a guy dosed him once, STP, B-1 brain-bomber of psychedelics, twenty-seven hours of spiders crawling out his nose and his great-granddaddy – shrunk down to miniature, inch tall at most – standing out on Mott’s dick, digging his caulks in as he revved up his chainsaw. So Mott would take care of Volta for dosing me, I know he’d do it, I’m sure he would, Volta, that arrogant prick deserves it, fucking power freak, dumps crank in my tea and then tells me to empty my poor fucked mind, sure, right, so wired I can feel my pores open and shut, right, you bet, make it more amusing, mix in some mumbo-jumbo soul-and-spirit shit for the mystery/romance crowd, then tie their brains to the track.’

Daniel listened to himself with the faceless intimacy between confessor and priest, feeling both the mechanical emptiness of sin and the weary forgiveness. He listened, heard, let it go, a lake barely ruffled by the breeze until suddenly he doubled over with a pain so complete and consuming he couldn’t tell at first where it was coming from. It left him trembling in a cold sweat. He’d just started to straighten up when a grenade went off in his small intestine. He jackknifed to the floor, flopping like a clubbed fish.

When the GIFLUV X-27 1-20 PSB virus took full effect an hour later, flopping became a luxury. Gastro-Intestinal Flu Virus (GIFLUV), Experimental Lot Number 27 (X-27), had, as its code explained, an hour lapse between ingestion and full release, a twenty-hour duration (1-20), and with the general effect of making the victim puke and shit bad (PSB). Daniel’s stomach and bowels emptied their various loads in the compost toilet as he whirled helplessly. When he pulled himself up on the bed at last, shook off his pants from around his ankles and piled the quilts over his quivering body, Daniel looked up at the grimy plastic skylight and moaned to the heavens, ‘Only a monster would double-dose another human being with food poisoning and amphetamine. Making sure you’re awake for the misery. Only a monster. A fucking fiend.’

Sometime after sunset the savage bouts of vomiting and diarrhea gave way to a deep, steady, skeletal ache accompanied by flashes of fever and chills. Daniel was forced into a state of nonresponse. He felt himself shivering under the quilts, saw and released the image of himself shivering in an instant, let it pass into the parade of sensation. He began to feel calmer, almost floating. He desperately wanted to sleep, but the pain and the falling edge of speed prevented him.

Daniel tried harder to focus. He saw himself sitting in the straight-backed chair in the center of the shed, fishing through a hole cut in the floor. He didn’t remember a river under the shed, but he could hear the water and feel the current carry his line. The drift paused and his rod-tip twitched. He set the hook instinctively and moments later lifted a golden fish from the water. He had to show Volta. Holding the fish in his left hand, he headed for the door. But when he opened it, expecting to step outside, he found himself in another room, a duplicate of the one he’d just left. He crossed the room and opened the door into another empty room. And another, room after room. He held the fish tightly. When he opened the next door, a faceless man holding a small automatic pistol shot him in the head. Even though he knew he couldn’t possibly survive the wound, Daniel put his hand to his temple to see how bad it was. Pieces of his skull moved under his hand like continental plates. His shock-bloated tongue couldn’t form words. His ears roared as his sinuses filled with blood. He sagged to his knees and, in almost the same motion, toppled forward. Still clutching the golden fish, he tried once to push himself up but his body was too heavy. The last thing he felt before he died was the fish thrashing in his hand.

The fever finally broke an hour before dawn the next day. Daniel slept into the early afternoon. He woke with a raging thirst. He gathered himself and threw back the sweat-damp quilts, but when swinging his legs to the floor proved too complicated, he crabbed himself around and reached over the foot of the bed, uttering a small moan of pleasure as his hand circled the neck of one of the gallon water jugs. He had to use both hands to lift it. He leaned back against the abutting wall, legs splayed for balance, and drank greedily.

A dull headache was getting sharper, and his eyes felt like they were on stalks. Better than yesterday but worse than shit, he decided. A few moments later he burst into laughter, spraying a mouthful of water through the rectangular shaft of light from the skylight. The droplets of water hung suspended for an instant, round and molten in the swath of light, then disappeared.

Daniel tried to imagine himself as a droplet of water hurled into light, but he couldn’t come close.

He wiped a dribble from his chin and lifted the jug for more. He was light-headed, he realized, almost giddy – but not disoriented. He knew exactly where he was, why, what had happened yesterday, who was responsible, and how he might take his revenge. He considered whether he should give Volta a Mott Stocker chili enema before he skinned him alive with a dull linoleum knife, or apply the enema as the coup de grace once Volta was flayed. He’d about settled on the former when he realized that if Volta had put the double-whammy dose on his breakfast, drinking the water was probably on the dumb side of chancy. However, he was still thirsty. He drained the jug. As he set it down, he noticed the envelope shoved under the door.

It was a journey across the Sahara to get out of bed and go pick it up. He brought it back to the bed before opening it. The message was in a neat hand.

I hope you’re feeling better today, Daniel. I also trust you appreciate the force of necessity. Extraordinary undertakings require extraordinary means. Be assured, on my honor, that the water is untainted.

Your instructions today are again simple. By sevens, count to 63,000 as smoothly as possible, and then, without pause, count backwards by sevens to zero. When you finish or fail the exercise, relax or sleep as you will. Let your mind glide.

As he wondered how long it would take to count to sixty-three thousand by sevens, Daniel opened the second jug of water and enjoyed a dread-free pint. He set it back on the floor, sat up on the bed, closed his eyes, and began aloud, ‘Seven, fourteen, twenty-one …’ He started swiftly to establish momentum, and in a few furious minutes had passed a thousand, but the addition of one thousand before each number soon slowed the pace. Without missing a beat he began saying the numbers silently. That sped him up briefly, but it was still slow. At 2,401, he quit saying the numbers silently and tried to see them in his mind, a digital display progressing smoothly and quickly in increments of seven. It was like gliding on ice as the numbers flew by, and he almost skated past sixty-three thousand in no time at all.

He paused a moment, looping a circle around the figure, then headed back. But the shift to subtraction lurched him from the groove. He had to retard the rhythm to the point of slow motion before he could pick it up again, quickening it to a pulse, then speeding till it nearly blurred. He felt like he was sailing through a tunnel without walls. As he passed 490, he slowed down to savor his return, and then celebrated with a long drink of water.

Daniel was pleased. As far as he was concerned, he had completed the exercise efficiently and close to flawlessly. He acknowledged there’d been some shaky moments the day before when the poison hit – very shaky, actually – and his recent attempt to imagine himself as water in light had been a bit feeble. But such a reaction to systemic poisoning was certainly understandable, and the attempt to vanish like a water droplet was at least an attentive seizure of possibility, an error in the right direction. Alert and boldly decisive, disciplined enough to move on a flicker of instinct – that was the spirit Volta had indicated was necessary. Daniel was just about there. Very close. He could feel it.

He laid back down on the bed and watched the skylight darken. When he saw the first star’s murky glimmer in the night sky, he folded his hands across his chest and shut his eyes.

He looked down into a circular pond. A golden fish swam languidly in the shallows, the water so clear, so still, he could see the fish’s scales. Daniel plunged his arm into the pond and grabbed the fish behind the gills. He lifted it thrashing from the water and started running. He wanted Volta to see it before it died. He threw open the shed door expecting to find Volta meditating in the straight-backed chair. Instead his mother was laying in bed exactly as he was, and he sensed her nakedness under the quilt as his own. She ignored the fish in his hand and asked him, smiling, ‘How many sides does a circle have?’ It was a riddle she’d asked him one April Fools’ Day at the Four Deuces. He knew the answer but said, ‘You got me.’

‘Two,’ Annalee said, her eyes glittering. ‘An inside and an outside.’

Daniel fought an impulse to weep. He said, ‘That’s a great riddle from a great mom.’

But he couldn’t wait for her smile. He had to get the fish to Volta. He didn’t have to explain his haste; she understood. He waved and bolted out the door into a duplicate room, only his mother was in bed with a man he didn’t recognize, straddling him, her hands touching her own breasts, her back arched with pleasure. Daniel turned and ran into another room, this one empty, and then into empty room after empty room until he opened the door and a faceless man raised a pistol and shot him in the head. The last sensation Daniel felt was the fish slipping from his hand.

He read the day’s instructions back in bed, the quilts mounded over him. The instructions were brief: ‘Count your bones till they glow.’

He assumed it was the same practice he’d learned from Wild Bill. But this had a different focus: ‘till they glow.’ He had no idea what that meant. It was still early. He could sleep on it.

When the rectangle of light touched his outflung hand, Daniel woke. Except for a nagging thirst and a growing hunger, he felt exceptionally clear-headed. In his work with Wild Bill, Daniel had developed a variety of ways to do the bone-counting exercise. He started with the simplest, moving upward from his feet. He didn’t really count the bones – just touched and moved. When he ended at his skull he felt sweetly refreshed, but far short of glowing. Taking a clue from the counting exercise, he reversed direction, skull to feet, but the rhythm was sprung. He decided it was his arms; he had to move down them and then back up. He concentrated on his arms, thinking he could perhaps blur the awkwardness with speed. It was better, but needed more power behind it. He tried to bring his mind to a single point of concentration, a dense mass, holding it till he trembled with the effort, then unleashed its pent force down through his neck and shoulders into each arm, converting it to energy. And rather than turning around at his fingertips to course back up his arms, something happened Daniel didn’t expect – the energy shot through the ends of his fingers, arced through space, and returned through the soles of his feet, rushing up through his legs and pelvis more powerfully than it had started. He was afraid his brain would be obliterated, so he slowed it slightly, gathered the force, shot it back around the circuit, and then again. With each passage through his bones the power increased. When his skull could no longer contain the force, he let the surge shoot through the top of his head; it looped back through his fingers. He split it into two circuits, then four, and each new circuit clarified the power. He effortlessly added more until he felt as if he was enmeshed in a silken light. He felt his bones begin to glow. The light squeezed him out of his body. He floated above it, watching in amazement as it coalesced into a spherical diamond, the light now a spiral flame in its center. But it coalesced until it collapsed back into itself, through itself, roaring into emptiness. He felt a terrible suction pulling him down. He turned and ran. He had to warn Volta. But what had been light was now black water, a whirlpool spiraling him irresistibly downward to its vacant center.

In the dark suction, a golden fish flashed before him. He lunged. The instant his hand closed around the fish, Daniel was running uphill toward Volta’s house. Volta had to see it. When Daniel opened the door he saw himself standing across the threshold. He didn’t realize he was looking into a mirror until a faceless man stepped from behind it, raised a pistol, and shot him in the head. Daniel collapsed to his knees. He felt the fish flop out of his hand. Even though he knew he was dead, he could still see. The pool of blood spreading from his wound was almost like the surface of a lake at water-level. The golden fish flopped into view. When it reached the edge of his blood, it righted itself and started swimming toward him. Suddenly, it disappeared into the depths. Daniel kept watching, waiting for it to come back up. The cooling blood began to congeal.

Daniel dressed quickly in the cold room. The water was running low. What he really wanted was some food. He hadn’t eaten in four days. He thought of buckwheat cakes with maple syrup and Virginia ham, and almost swooned.

Daniel walked softly across the room and knelt in front of the door. In a minute he heard Volta moving down the trail, humming cheerfully under his breath. He quit humming as he approached the shed. Daniel waited, poised. When the edge of the envelope appeared under the door, Daniel snatched it. He growled softly at first, letting it build in his gut, rise, hold, suddenly erupt into a roar, and as suddenly cut off. He listened. He could hear Volta humming as he walked back up the trail. Well, Daniel thought, at least he has something to think about. And added aloud, dolefully, ‘Yeah, like what a fool I am.’

Under the bed, bolted to the frame between two sheets of plywood, is a mirror. Prop it up securely and position yourself comfortably in front of it. Count your bones until they glow, then relax for about ten minutes, until you’re breathing calmly and evenly. Shut your eyes and try to empty your mind. When you open your eyes again, look at yourself in the mirror. Look deeply into your own eyes. See yourself through yourself. The point of integration is the surface of the mirror. When you join yourself there, you will vanish.

These are your final instructions. Try as often and as long as you want. I maintain my faith in your success.

As Daniel slid under the bed, he would have given twenty to one that the mirror would be round. He would have lost. As he discovered when he spun off the wingnuts and pulled the plywood sheets, the mirror was rectangular, roughly two feet by four, in a slender maple frame. He propped it against the western wall and, after folding one of the quilts under him, sat down about three feet away.

He closed his eyes and imagined his skeleton. He started counting his bones, quickening the rhythm until the circuit blurred and energy looped through his hands, feet, loins, spine, and skull. His bones began to glow as if the marrow was aflame.

The glow faded into an empty tranquillity. Daniel opened his eyes and looked into his own eyes looking back. He saw his skeleton stretched out on the bottom of a lake, his bones the glossy black of ebony. He wanted to lie there forever, but a resonant drumming from the surface seemed to summon him. He felt his skeleton float upward. But it didn’t break into light. The lake surface was frozen; Daniel’s bones rattled against the ice. The drumming was almost deafening now. People were banging the ice with shovels in the hopes that the vibrations would raise his body. He could hear them calling to each other but the ice muffled their words. He tried to call out, to tell them it was all right, he liked the bottom, but the thick ice made it hopeless.

He’d started sinking when Volta, calmly and distinctly, said ‘Life.’ Daniel stopped his descent and floated, gathering what strength remained. He kicked back toward the surface, feeling the cold water rushing through his eye sockets, ribs, pelvis. As he neared the frozen surface, he balled his right hand into a bony fist and slammed it upward through the ice, shattering it into a geyser of diamonds. His bones were fleshed when they touched the air. He pulled himself out of the lake through the hole he’d opened. Severely disoriented, he turned in circles, looking for the shortest way to shore, but fog obscured his view. His flesh felt wet, but he wasn’t cold. In fact, it seemed balmy. He turned and faced what he hoped was west and started walking. He hadn’t taken three strides when he stepped over the edge of a cliff.

Volta had just finished decoding a long message from Jean Bluer when he heard Daniel scream. He stood on the backporch in the early morning light listening intently. When there were no further sounds from Daniel, Volta glanced at his watch. It was seven-thirty. At seven-fifty, another scream shredded the silence. Volta turned and went back inside, leaving Daniel’s bewildered cry echoing away across Laurel Creek Hollow.

Daniel’s terror was reflexive, powerful, total – ‘cellular,’ as Volta had called it. Daniel was irked at himself for being surprised. Volta had noted that the feelings of wetness and warmth were precursors to the drop.

On his second attempt, Daniel had no previews of coming attractions, no sense of wetness or warmth. He met himself on the surface of the mirror and immediately fell. Though startled, Daniel managed to form an image of himself falling. He could control the fall with the image, but his grip was shaky. The sound of the wind planing over the shed roof cracked his concentration.

He was focusing too slowly, caught in movement rather than anticipating it. He needed to leap to the moment of transformation, catch the fall as it started. But first he needed rest. He felt so confident he drank the rest of the water, then took an hour nap.

The third time was the charm. The instant he merged with his image on the mirror’s surface, Daniel imagined himself falling with a concentration so powerful and precise that the terror never really began. He opened his eyes.

The mirror was empty. The quilt cushion was bare. Amazed, Daniel stood up and walked through the mirror, the wall, the laurel tree outside. He walked up the trail thinking, How can I walk without a body? Without feet? Why don’t I just sink into the ground or float off? He wasn’t troubled by the questions, just curious.

Volta was sitting on the porch, trying to read a bundle of letters fluttering in the strong easterly breeze. He seemed less interested in the messages than the shed.

Watch this, Daniel thought, even though he wasn’t sure what he would do. Not that it mattered. He felt serene, powerful, invincibly wise. He began to dissolve in pure pleasure. He understood this was the danger Volta had warned him about, but he wanted to feel it forever, wanted to stay there, pouring into joy. He almost flirted too long. With immense concentration he imagined a mirror, then his image in the mirror, and, when their eyes met, himself.

Daniel’s return was wrenching. As he staggered sideways on the lawn, right in front of Volta, he felt a searing pain, followed immediately by a rush of melancholic exhaustion. Confused, he looked up at Volta.

Volta’s eyes glittered with delight. ‘Daniel,’ he called, rising from his chair, ‘you did it. Excellent. Excellent! Finally, someone to compare notes with. Come in, come in – you must be hungry.’