Here & There (42 page)

Purgatory was very feng shui’d. A queen-sized bed hovered in the center of the room. A red Roho Barcelona chair and stool sat by the floor-to-ceiling window, which framed the aforementioned constellations and hell fires. An arco floor lamp stood guard over the chair. Against the wall, opposite the bed, a red and white orchid dangled off of a dark oak table. Purgatory, apparently, was très art deco.

Clean lines. Clean flow. Clean mind.

I threw back the white, twelve-hundred-thread-count, Egyptian cotton sheets, and gingerly hopped down onto the floor (the side opposite the window—I wanted to avoid that precipice at all costs). It was then that I noticed my feet were bare. The rest of me was wearing white silk pajamas. They were not mine. The only clue as to who they belonged to were the initials EL embroidered in red thread over the breast pocket. Although there weren’t any periods after the letters. Maybe they weren’t intitals. EL,
Ēl
,
Elohim
, the ancient god, father of all gods?

I scanned the room. My clothes weren’t there.

My briefcase! My briefcase wasn’t there.

I was halfway across the room when I stopped myself. The door loomed big. What if it was locked? What if I were locked in here? A prisoner of Purgatory. Sartre’s cackles echoed around my skull.

What if it wasn’t locked? Did I really want to find out what was on the other side? Was I in any state to handle that? What if it were the exact
same room, with the same view, and the same bizarre levitating bed? No way could I handle that. Or what if it were some high-end, übermodern Department oubliette relic left over from the ‘50s?

Wherever I was, my briefcase had to have come with me. And whoever was in charge had obviously and purposefully made the decision to separate us.

CLINK
,
CLINK
.

Silence.

OMP
.

Silence.

A
CLACK
followed by what sounded like a marble rolling across concrete and punctuated with a quiet
Goddamnit
.

Silence.

Someone was on the other side of that door.

My hand hovered over the doorknob, frozen with apprehension. Then I heard a familiar and all too comforting sound: ice singing its way around the circumference of a rocks glass.

Whoever was out there, s/he/it was having a drink.

I opened the door.

Across the modern-styled living room, staring out another floor-to-ceiling window, stood an Asian man, maybe midfifties . . .
qui faisait la cinquantaine
, dark silky hair streaked with gray, a goatee, dressed in black slippers and the photonegative version of my PJs: red material with a white EL insignia over the breast pocket. In his hand a rocks glass, half-filled with amber liquid and two cubes of ice.

Was this my Michelin Man or Mephistopheles? No way to tell who was who without a puffy coat or a pitchfork for clues, neither of which were in plain sight. Then it hit me, what if Mich and Meph were one and the same?

“Dang, my apologies. I went and woke you with my goddamn cussin’, didn’t I?” A Texas twang was the last accent I expected to come out of that Asiatic goatee. The devil was from Texas?

I froze in the doorway. My mind flipped through pages of memory, trying to remember how Ivan Fyodorovich coped in this situation. I drew a blank and opted for nonchalant politeness. “I was already up.”

“Glad to hear it. You been dead to the world going on three days now. How’d you like the bed?”

“It floats . . .”

“Ain’t it sumptin’? Held up by a strong magnetic field. Prototype from a friend of mine. Real wow factor.”

“Definitely a conversation piece.”

He shook his drink and cast a glance over to a bar cart that looked like it had rolled right out of the ‘20s. “I’m fightin’ a fierce case of jetlag
myself. And we gave you the last of my pills. Welcome to join me in some of my sleep juice if you like.”

I nodded, while contemplating how many time zones were in hell. I imagined no matter which direction you traveled in, you were always losing an hour.

“What’s your poison?” He moved to the cart.

“I feel like I should order a pomegranate martini.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Bad joke. Just being wry.” Apparently bad jokes were my way of coping with the supernatural. “Got any absinthe?”

The goatee laughed, said he hadn’t gotten around to stocking up on wormwood yet. I deferred to whatever he was having, which turned out to be Laphroaig 21.

Maybe it was the gravity of alcohol or a subtle slope to the floor, but I found myself drawn across the room, closer and closer to that vertiginous wall of windows.

In an effort to avoid the dizzying panorama, my gaze kept drifting down to his slippers. They looked like normal feet. A little calloused maybe, but normal. No cloven hoof. No discernible limp either.

As he handed me my drink, he apologized for not having introduced himself. “Eli Longhorn,” he said, handing me my scotch with his left, while ensnaring my right in a handshake.

With that introduction, my gaze snapped up to his gray-streaked hair. I was looking for hidden bumps, horns cloaked beneath the thick hair.

“I’m Danny.”

“Yeah, I know. The guy who’s been rode hard and put up wet.” He laughed, clinked my glass, and took a drink.

The Laphroaig tasted like burnt peat soup that had been boiled in a worn leather saddle. All the ice in the Arctic couldn’t have watered that firewater down enough. Still, its burn was at least warming my toes. I traced the EL on my chest. “So you’re EL. Pardon my saying, but you don’t look like much of an Eli.”

A lone horsefly buzzed past, bumping against the window several times, in search of an escape.

“My father was Jewish.”

Elohim?

Le diable n’existe point.

I scampered frantically for solid footing. “Longhorn wasn’t the name of your ancestors.”

Le diable n’existe point.

“My granddaddy Anglicized it in a blatant and futile attempt at assimilation. The surname had to go, but his yarmulke stayed on his head
all day, every day. Assimilation in name only,” Eli laughed to himself. “A rose by any other name . . .”

“Where am I?” I hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that. If I were a betting man, I definitely would’ve placed a C-note on me tiptoeing around that terrifying subject.

“This is my place.”

“I thought Purgatory was more of a neutral zone.”

The goatee laughed bigger this time. “I don’t know about Purgatory, but as far as I’m concerned, the Mandarin Oriental is as close as you can get to heaven on earth. Right below my ranch in the Bitterroot Mountains.”

It took my lacuna-addled mind a few moments to parse all this new information. For some reason, mundane reality was much harder to accept than flights of deistic fancy. “The Mandarin Oriental . . .”

“Columbus Circle.”

“Like where Per Se is?”

Eli laughed, “Well, it’s a few dozen stories down, but yep. That’s here all right. Not my kind of fare. Seems like the more you pay, the less you get.”

His words buzzed around my ears, background noise. The world outside shifted as I defenestrated my focus out the window and down several hundred feet, back to the massive, grave-shaped portal into hell that I first saw when I woke, the one that seemed to have swallowed up the center of the city, the bottomless rectangle of darkness dotted with brimstone bonfires. Suddenly I was looking at a life-sized optical-illusion puzzle, like one of those where you focus past the picture, and a shape jumps out at you. The grave-shaped blackness of hell dotted with bonfires of brimstone morphed into Central Park with street lamps winking through the trees. The territory devoured by the map.

Eli caught me as my hand squeaked across the window, having lost my balance. I made some joke about his sleep juice as he helped me to the white leather couch. He sat on the other leg of the
L
shape and watched me with concern. I downed another slug of Laphroaig. Lucidity seeped through as I watched the bloody-fingered night wane back into the harmless red glow of the Hotel Empire neon sign.

Eli had to reassure me several times that he wasn’t the devil, didn’t work for the Department, and had never even owned one of those puffy, Michelin Man coats. As the stupor of sanity sank in, he filled me in on his backstory: his mom was a Taiwanese emigrant who, while plying her trade as a chemical engineer in Dallas, met and married an exec (his father, Ruben Longhorn) who worked for the same energy company. Eli himself never took an interest in the energy sector. Instead he built himself
his own little empire exporting steel to China. In fact, most of the towers that scraped the Shanghai skyline were his steel.

It was all very impressive and interesting, but none of it explained how I had ended up in his guest room. Eli apologized, after I explained how my short-term memory had been folded over and over and then cut up like a paper snowflake.

Lorelei, long familiar with his jetlag issues, had called him in the middle of the night seventy-two hours prior, asking if he could help out a friend of hers.

“You didn’t wonder why she didn’t just bring me back to her place?”

“She didn’t offer,” he said. “And I didn’t ask. This ain’t my first rodeo. Her place is pretty small, and from what your friend . . .”

“Toby?”

“Right, Toby. From what I could glean from him, we needed to hide you like a crazy aunt in the basement.”

I took in the large living room again. Not too bad a place to hide out. And it’s certainly the last place anyone would think to find me.

“So, you and Lorelei, are . . .”

It took Eli a second to fill in the ellipsis in his head. When the dots finally connected, something halfway between a guffaw and a whistle erupted out of him. “Just because a chicken has wings doesn’t mean it can fly.” When he saw that cleared up nothing for me, he explained, “No. Little Li-Li and I are not. I have much more of an avuncular attachment to her. Her daddy and I were at business school together. I introduced him to her mother. I was at the hospital when she was born. Taught her to fly cast when she was four, to shoot when she was eight, to kick ass when she was thirteen. Over the years, Little Li-Li has developed a lifelong habit of hiding out in my various sanctuaries whenever she’s needed to step out of the normal ebb and flow of life.”

Eli swirled his ice around in his glass and took me in. “Funny thing, I was eventually going to get around to asking you the same thing.”

I did my best to emulate his guffaw whistle but just ended up coughing. Eventually I managed to squeak out a no, we’re just friends and coworkers.

“But you’d like it to be more than that,” he said, not so much as an accusation, more like a tracker reading the signs a wounded deer has left behind.

Put on the spot, I did what I always do, I prevaricated. “Who wouldn’t? She’s a great girl. Woman. Specimen.” Fuck.

Eli let it go with an easy shrug. “Makes sense. She rarely introduces me to the men she dates.”

I opted not to share my knowledge on the subject.

Eli finished his drink, gestured his glass at me, asking if I’d like another. I surprised myself, shaking my head no. He dropped two cubes in his glass.

CLINK
,
CLINK
.

Took the cork top off the Laphroaig.

OMP
.

As he poured, he mused out loud, “Well, you might have some hope just yet. Way she’s been dotin’ on you these last few days. Regular Florence Nightingale.”

You think I would’ve smiled at that little revelation, but all I felt was sadness. My dreams had finally come true. My head on Lorelei’s lap, her fingers pulling through my hair, and I couldn’t remember a damned thing. Not the texture of her Lululemon leggings stretched across her taut thighs, nor the slightly musty smell of her favorite old, stretched-out cotton J. Crew sweater that somehow still showed off her slight frame and the rolling topography of her perfect tits. I wonder if the soft weight of her breast had flattened against my cheek, a thrilling caress of incidental contact when she’d lift my head to shift her arm beneath me. Still, she had cradled me. She had cared for me. Her long curls had turned umber, backlit by the recessed lights, filtering the incandescents that glowed against their silken strokes, warming my neck. Her soothing susurrations fluttered against my earlobes. Instead of comfort, I felt loss. All the more accentuated by my keen and constant awareness of the absence of my briefcase—like a black-market organ-harvesting victim waking up in a bath of ice with scars where his kidneys used to be.

It’s been three days.

She confiscated my mother’s briefcase from me as I mumbled through muddled plot points. Confiscate might be the wrong word. Excised? Amputated? Cleaved? That’s it—cleaved. Then locked it away, down in Eli’s storage unit, when she left to go home. Appearances had to be maintained after all: sleep at home, work at Anomaly. All the while, keeping it trussed up, safe in the basement, while I writhed in agony on a hovering bed in the sky, jonesing for my heroine.