It was a vision of such simplicity, yet such power, that. One rum and
Coke,” the waitress said, putting a glass and paper cocktail napkin on
the table in front of Vassago. “You want to run a tab?”
He looked up at her, blinking in confusion. She was a stout middle-aged
woman with auburn hair. He could see her quite clearly through his
sunglasses, but in his fever of creative excitement, he had difficulty
placing her.
Finally he said, “Tab? Uh, no. Cash, thank you, ma’am.”
When he took out his wallet, it didn’t feel like a wallet at all but
like one of Bambi’s ears might feel. When he slid his thumb back and
forth across the smooth leather, he felt not what was there but what
might soon be available for his caress: delicately shaped ridges of
cartilage forming the auricula and pinna, the graceful curves of the
channels that focused sound waves inward toward the tympanic membrane.
…
He realized the waitress had spoken to him again, stating the price of
his drink, and then he realized that it was the second time she had done
so- He had been fingering his wallet for long, delicious seconds,
daydreaming of death and disfigurement.
He fished out a crisp bill without looking at it, and handed it to her.
“This is a hundred,” she said. “Don’t you have anything smaller?”
“No, ma’am, sorry,” he said, impatient now to be rid of her, “that’s
it.”
“I’ll have to go back to the bar to get this much change.”
“Okay, yeah, whatever. Thank you, ma’am.”
As she started away from his table, he returned his attention to the
four young women-only to discover that they were leaving. They were
nearing the door, pulling on their coats as they went.
He started to rise, intending to follow them, but he froze when he heard
himself say, “Lindsey.”
He didn’t call out the name. No one in the bar heard him say it. He
was the only one who reacted, and his reaction was one of total
surprise.
For a moment he hesitated with one hand on the table, one on the arm of
his chair, halfway to his feet. While he was paralyzed in that posture
of indecisiveness, the four young women left the lounge. Bambi became
of less interest to him than the mysterious name- ‘Lindsey”-so he sat
down.
He did not know anyone named Lindsey.
He had never known anyone named Lindsey.
It made no sense that he would suddenly speak the name aloud.
He looked out the window at the harbor. Hundreds of millions of dollars
of ego-gratification rose and fell and wallowed side to side on the
rolling water. The sunless sky was another sea above, as cold and
merciless as the one below. The air was full of rain like millions of
gray and silver threads, as if nature was trying to sew the ocean to the
heavens and thereby obliterate the narrow space between, where life was
possible.
Having been one of the living, one of the dead, and now one of the
living dead, he had seen himself as the ultimate sophisticate, as
experienced as any man born of woman could ever hope to be. He had
assumed that the world held nothing new for him, had nothing to teach
him. Now this. First the seizure in the car: Something’s out there!
And now Lindsey. The two experiences were different, because he heard
no voice in his head the second time, and when he spoke it was with his
own famIliar voice and not that of a stranger. But both events were so
peculiar that he knew they were linked. As he gazed at the moored
boats, the harbor, and the dark world beyond, it began to seem more
mysterious to him than it had in ages.
He picked up his rum and Coke. He took a long swallow of it.
As he was putting the drink down, he said, “Lindsey.”
The glass rattled against the table, and he almost knocked it over,
because the name surprised him again. He hadn’t spoken it aloud to
ponder the meaning of it. Rather, it had burst from him as before, a