Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (82 page)

“That’s about it.”

“So it’s more of a permanent arrangement than just helping her get back on her feet.”

Jim nodded unhappily. “That is how it looks. I want Semple, but no way can I stay in this place for the duration.”

“If you shack up with Semple, with her sister as a third wheel, I give the romance three weeks, tops.”

“Aren’t you always telling me time’s relative?”

“It isn’t relative where relatives are concerned.”

“So what the fuck do I do, Doc?”

Doc slowly sighed. “I never found there was any percentage in giving advice to the lovelorn, but you do at least know one of the possible futures for the two of you.”

“The old house in the swamp?”

“What else?”

“I should tell Semple about that. Maybe it would stop her from making me feel like a bastard for not wanting to stay.”

Doc gave him a warning look. “That kind of vision shouldn’t be talked about, sport. It tempts destiny too directly.”

Jim and Doc both looked in the direction of Semple and Aimee. They were now in close discussion; Semple’s shoulders sagged as though she were close to resignation or defeat. “I’m going to tell her about the old house.”

Doc put a firm hand on Jim’s arm. “I really wouldn’t do that, Jim. It could set up all manner of destructive resonances.”

Jim’s expression was one of disbelieving suspicion. “What are you saying? That it’s like telling your birthday wish?”

“No, but if it helps you understand the concept, you can think of it that way. Anyway, she seems to be coming to you.”

Semple was walking quickly away from Aimee to where Jim and Doc were waiting. As she came close, it was clear that she was close to tears. Aimee was following more slowly, some distance behind her sister. Doc moved quickly to head her off and give Jim and Semple some privacy.

Semple faced Jim with a look of total desolation. “I have to stay with her. She’s just had all the supports kicked out from under her. God was her whole life, don’t forget. She could fade away to nothing.”

Jim shook his head impatiently. “Can’t you see she’s conning you?”

“I know that, but I’m frightened. I . . . ”

“What?”

“This time, I could be the one who fades.”

“You won’t, believe me.”

Semple looked more conflicted than Jim had ever seen her. He gestured around at the wrecked environment. “You don’t belong in this fucked-up place. You should be in Hatheg-Kla, with me. And all the other wild places.”

“No, Jim, it’s you that belongs in Hatheg-Kla. I have to be with Aimee.”

“Are you saying you won’t even come and join me?”

Semple suddenly clung to Jim. She held him for a moment and then stepped back. “Just go, Jim. Go with Doc right now. It’s hopeless. I know you’d stay with me if I begged you, but in the long run you couldn’t hack it. Aimee would drive you crazy. You’d get to hate me.”

“For fuck’s sake, woman. Forget about Aimee and come with me.”

“Just go, Jim. I made a promise.”

Jim hesitated for an Afterlife minute, then he turned, as though his brain had given up on the anguish of the choice and only the need to escape was driving him. That and a strange glimpse of the future. “So I’ll be seeing you.”

“I don’t think so . . . ”

Jim’s suddenly smiled. In that instant he trusted the vision of the old house as much as he trusted anything. “Oh yes, you will.”

“What makes you say that?”

“For once, I know something you don’t know.”

Before Semple could respond, Jim turned and walked to the portal. “Okay, Doc.”

Semple called after Jim as Doc dropped into the portal and dematerialized. “What do you mean, you know something I don’t know?”

Jim stepped into the portal himself. “You’ll see.”

J
im leaned on the porch rail with a twenty-four-ounce bottle of Ivory Coast Mamba Beer in one hand and a skinny Jamaican cheroot in the other, watching the sun sink behind the volcanoes and the sky turn bruised-fruit purple. Semple didn’t mind Jim smoking cigarettes in the house; that was a given. But she claimed the cheroots stunk up the place and that Dr. Hypodermic only brought them to piss her off. Both the cheroots and the West African beer came courtesy of Dr. Hypodermic. He always brought a couple boxes of one and a case of the other on his regular visits, along with the rather large parcel of extremely assorted chemicals. Dr. Hypodermic might have tortured Jim once, but now, as a retired agent of the gods, Morrison found himself incredibly well treated. Hypodermic seemed to know when Jim was running low on supplies and would appear well before the situation threatened to become desperate. The only fly in this otherwise impeccable ointment was that Hypodermic and Semple just didn’t get along. Whenever the great and ancient jet-black Rolls-Royce hearse would appear away across the swamp, driving on the surface of the water, swaying slightly on its shimmering private force field, Semple would retreat to the attic of the spooky old house to work on her dark abstract oil paintings and refuse to come out until after the Mystère had departed, which was usually after a couple of relative days of intense narcotic excess.

Jim wasn’t exactly sure what lay at the root of the enmity between the two of them, but knew it had something to do with the fading and ultimate negation of Aimee. Although it had been Danbhala La Flambeau who had brought the freaked- and stressedout
Semple to Jim at the house in the Jurassic swamp, it was Hypodermic who had been there when Aimee had finally passed to nothing. He had been around during the demise of the “good” sister and must have seen things that made Semple uncomfortable around him. Semple had never really explained to Jim what exactly went down between her and Aimee that had left her as the lone survivor. He knew in broad terms that, once they were left alone in the wreckage of Heaven, a strange process of transfer had been set in motion: Semple became stronger while Aimee weakened, becoming progressively more ineffectual and transparent. Neither sibling was able to reverse or arrest what was happening to them, and Aimee had apparently gone into almost monstrous bouts of furious recriminations that only served to speed things along. What Jim didn’t know, and was one of Semple’s most veiled and shadowy secrets, was how Aimee had actually departed. All he knew was that it had been highly traumatic, if the state of shock in which La Flambeau had brought Semple to him was any indication.

Semple’s powers of recovery were such that she had recuperated in surprisingly short order; to all outward appearances, she had returned to her old perverse, hedonistic, and curious self. The only detectable scar that remained surrounded Aimee’s passing. No matter how Jim might coax her, when the night grew blue-black late and the brontosauruses sang their low winding trills off among the conifers and giant celery, the subject was strictly taboo. The closest she had ever come to discussing the matter was one night when, after consuming a number of orange and yellow pills washed down by half a bottle of fine cognac, she had smiled enigmatically. “Aimee is no more, my love. She didn’t flex, and thus she broke. And when she broke, it all came to me. Ezekiel 25:17 included.”

Prior to Semple’s unexpected arrival, Jim had spent a long time, unshaven and rootless, on the run with a gun on his hip, wilding with Doc Holliday in all the environments that countenanced that kind of behavior. Eventually, though, he decided it was time to settle someplace and attempt to pull his poetry back together. Doc reminded him constantly that the dead had all the time in the world, but ultimately Jim felt he was compelled to go back to his avowed vocation, if he was to reclaim even a few shreds of his self-respect and not lose himself in the easy out of the drunken spaghetti-western yahoo.

Once Jim settled to it, the writing had been exciting, but after a few hundred pages, mainly concerned with the pantheon he had
encountered on the Island of the Gods, it grew too weird to be workable. When he tried a course correction, he went to the other extreme and found that all he could produce was rhyming couplets so mawkish they would have sickened a greeting card hack. He’d attempted to bail himself out with William S. Burroughs cutups, Scrabble tiles, a planchette, all the way to automatic writing, hoping he’d make a little headway even if it had to be by means of chaos, random chance, and spirit intervention.

The wrestling match with his muse had been so thoroughly interrupted by Semple’s arrival that his writing was again put aside as first he helped her, as best he could, regain her strength and equilibrium, and then, with that accomplished, they enjoyed a prolonged and at times quite spectacular honeymoon of depravity that found the two of them raving and rampaging through the echoing rooms of the house in the Jurassic swamp. After this frantic period of red-in-tooth-and-claw renewal, they had settled into a comfortably routine relationship that was both sheltered and secure, if perhaps a little isolated. Not that Jim and Semple lacked for diversion; over and above what they could provide for themselves when motivated by lust, devilment, or ingenuity, Doc Holliday visited on a fairly regular basis, usually crossing the swamp from the Great River in a borrowed launch or speedboat. When Doc didn’t come in person, he wrote long, rambling, and very Victorian letters in a scratchy and curliqued dope-fiend hand. These missives always arrived by bizarre means that Jim assumed was a part of Doc’s correspondence shtick. Often it would be an Aztec runner, with beaded apron, feathers in his braided hair, and oiled body, who would hand the familiar pale parchment envelope to either Jim or Semple without a word and then immediately turn and start jogging back along one of the less soggy trails across the swamp. On other occasions, the improvised mailman was a humanoid amphibian, a gill man who looked like a close cousin of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and who, unlike the taciturn Aztec, expected to be invited in for a while and tipped with cans of sardines, anchovies, or tongol tuna before he swam off. The oddest and most memorable of these deliveries from Doc was brought by a trained eagle with a small leather pouch chained to its left leg. While Jim had removed the letter from the pouch, the eagle had eyed the Mammal with No Name as though the reincarnated western outlaw might make an acceptable snack to speed him on his way.

The Mammal with No Name had moved into the mansion and made himself at home in a compact little nook adjacent to the wine cellar, even before Semple had arrived. He obviously considered Jim’s dark residence an ideal protection against pterodactyls and other Jurassic predators, and Jim, from his side of the arrangement, was actually glad of the company. The accumulation of what Jim later referred to as his and Semple’s own private Addams Family had not stopped with the Mammal with No Name. In the wake of Jim and Semple’s exhaustive and exhausting honeymoon, Mr. Thomas had arrived, looking much the worse for alcoholic wear and obviously hoping to be adopted for at least long enough to recover from his latest epic debauch. He had even offered to assist Jim with his poetry in an attempt to sweeten the bargain. In fact, no bargaining had really been necessary. Although Semple wasn’t terribly fond of the Mammal with No Name, being less than keen on his interminable tall violent tales of the Old West and finding it hard to forgive him for his nun-raping past, she was overjoyed to see the goat, whom she considered a trusted comrade in arms from the fall of Necropolis. Jim, while not being as intimate with the goat as Semple, had no objection to someone who had perhaps once been an illustrious poet becoming a permanent fixture under his roof.

For a while, after they had left Aimee’s derelict Heaven, Mr. Thomas had tagged along with Jim and Doc, but his physical limitations, and his habit of drinking the worst bathtub gin by the bucketful, had made it hard for him to keep up with the fast and furious, pistoleer ways of the other two. He had dropped off the wildman bandwagon and elected to become the town drunk in a strange little settlement where almost all the inhabitants had reincarnated themselves, either by accident or design, as deliberately eccentric animals.

The final arrival had been Igor. Semple’s longtime butler had appeared a couple of relative months after Mr. Thomas had shown up at the house. He had apparently made it all the way from Aimee’s failed Heaven under his own steam, with little help and no sense of the shortest route between two points. The trek through the Jurassic swamp had all but finished him, and he had fallen onto the porch and collapsed, one early dragonfly morning, filthy with slime and waxy and insubstantial from exhaustion and fever. As with the goat, Semple had greeted Igor as an old and trusted companion and retainer. He, too, was nursed back to servile health, and joined what was now becoming Jim and Semple’s little colony in the swamp.
Once again, Jim had no objections. A butler was a largely beneficial addition. Now Jim had someone who seemed more than pleased to bring him drinks when he was too idle to get up and make them for himself; plus he was freed from doing almost any chores around the place. About the only peripheral drawback was that Jim, now living the life of the idly pampered, had started to put on weight, much as he had done on the lifeside, and a nascent beer gut was already starting to protrude over the concho belt of his leather pants.

As the sun made its last curtain call, shooting majestic rays through the valleys between the volcanic peaks, Jim continued to lean on the front porch rail. He took a swig of beer and dragged on the cheroot. The cheroots were rum-soaked and mildly opiated and produced a very slight hallucinogenic buzz. As often when stoned, Jim’s mind wandered to the odd paradox that, sooner or later, a younger version of himself would come slopping through the mud and water, attracted by the light of the house, to creep and peer in the windows, just in time to watch Semple carve her initials on his back with the rapier. So far, his and Semple’s lovemaking had only infrequently drawn blood, and certainly no sharp steel objects had yet been employed on the endless quest for higher and more esoteric planes of fun. So maybe it would be some time before the young Jim came tiptoeing by.