stepped into his life (the better to sail through customs, my dear, and what a great big
joke that had turned out to be), and was a still a respectable length. He shaved every
morning, using the keen edge of Roland’s knife, gingerly at first, but with increasing
confidence. He’d been too young for shaving to be part of his life when Henry left for ‘Nam,
and it hadn’t been any big deal to Henry back then, either; he never grew a beard, but
sometimes went three or four days before Mom nagged him into “mowing the stubble.”
When he came back, however, Henry was a maniac on the subject (as he was on a few
others—foot-powder after shower- ing; teeth to be brushed three or four times a day and
followed by a chaser of mouthwash; clothes always hung up) and he turned Eddie into a
fanatic as well. The stubble was mowed every morning and every evening. Now this habit
was deep in his grain, like the others Henry had taught him. Including, of course, the one
you took care of with a needle.
“Too clean-cut?” he asked her, grinning.
“Too white,” she said shortly, and then was quiet for a moment, looking sternly out at the sea. Eddie was quiet, too. If there was a comeback to something like that, he didn’t know
what it was.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was very unkind, very unfair, and very unlike me.”
“It’s all right.”
“It’s not. It’s like a white person saying something like ‘Jeez, I never would have guessed you were a nigger’ to some- one with a very light skin.”
“You like to think of yourself as more fair-minded,” Eddie said.
“What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common, I
should think, but yes—I like to think of myself as more fair-minded. So please accept my
apology, Eddie.”
“On one condition.”
“What’s that?” she was smiling a little again. That was good. He liked it when he was able to make her smile.
“Give this a fair chance. That’s the condition.”
“Give what a fair chance?” She sounded slightly amused. Eddie might have bristled at that tone in someone else’s voice, might have felt he was getting boned, but with her it was
different. With her it was all right. He supposed with her just about anything would have
been.
“That there’s a third alternative. That this really is hap- pening. I mean …” Eddie cleared his throat. “I’m not very good at this philosophical shit, or, you know, metamorphosis or
whatever the hell you call it—”
“Do you mean metaphysics?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I think so. But I know you can’t go around disbelieving what your
senses tell you. Why, if your idea about this all being a dream is right—”
“I didn’t say a dream—”
“Whatever you said, that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? A false reality?”
If there had been something faintly condescending in her voice a moment ago, it was gone
now. “Philosophy and metaphysics may not he your bag, Eddie, but you must have been a
hell of a debater in school.”
“I was never in debate. That was for gays and hags and wimps. Like chess club. What do
you mean, my bag? What’s a bag?”
“Just something you like. What do you mean, gays? What are gays?”
He looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. “Homos. Fags. Never mind. We could
swap slang all day. It’s not getting us anyplace. What I’m trying to say is that if it’s all a
dream, it could be mine, not yours. You could be a figment of my imagination.”
Her smile faltered. “You . . . nobody bopped you.”
“Nobody bopped you, either.”
Now her smile was entirely gone. “No one that I remember,” she corrected with some sharpness.
“Me either!” he said. “You told me they’re rough in Oxford. Well, those Customs guys weren’t exactly cheery joy when they couldn’t find the dope they were after. One of them
could have head-bopped me with the butt of his gun. I could be lying in a Bellevue ward
right now, dreaming you and Roland while they write their reports, explaining how, while
they were interrogating me, I became violent and had to be subdued.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Why? Because you’re this intelligent socially active black lady with no legs and I’m just a hype from Co-Op City?” He said it with a grin, meaning it as an amiable jape, but she
flared at him.
“I wish you would stop calling me black!”
He sighed. “Okay, but it’s gonna take getting used to.”
“You should have been on the debate club anyway.”
“Fuck,” he said, and the turn of her eyes made him realize again that the difference
between them was much wider than color; they were speaking to each other from separate
islands. The water between was time. Never mind. The word had gotten her attention. “I
don’t want to debate you. I want to wake you up to the fact that you are awake, that’s all.”
“I might be able to at least operate provisionally according to the dictates of your third
alternative as long as this . . . this situation . . . continued to go on, except for one thing:
There’s a fundamental difference between what happened to you and what happened to me.
So fundamental, so large, that you haven’t seen it.”
“Then show it to me.”
“There is no discontinuity in your consciousness. There is a very large one in mine.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I mean you can account for all of your time,” Odetta said. “Your story follows from point to point: the airplane, the incursion by that. . . that… by him—
She nodded toward the foothills with clear distaste.
“The stashing of the drugs, the officers who took you into custody, all the rest. It’s a
fantastic story, it has no missing links.
“As for myself, I arrived back from Oxford, was met by Andrew, my driver, and brought
back to my building. I bathed and I wanted sleep—I was getting a very bad headache, and
sleep is the only medicine that’s any good for the really bad ones. But it was close on
midnight, and I thought I would watch the news first. Some of us had been released, but a
good many more were still in the jug when we left. I wanted to find out if their cases had
been resolved.
“I dried off and put on my robe and went into the living room. I turned on the TV news.
The newscaster started talking about a speech Krushchev had just made about the
American advisors in Viet Nam. He said, ‘We have a film report from—’ and then he was
gone and I was rolling down this beach. You say you saw me in some sort of magic
doorway which is now gone, and that I was in Macy’s, and that I was stealing. All of this is
preposterous enough, but even if it was so, I could find something better to steal than
costume jewelry. I don’t wear jewelry.”
“You better look at your hands again, Odetta,” Eddie said quietly.
For a very long time she looked from the “diamond” on her left pinky, too large and vulgar to be anything but paste, to the large opal on the third finger of her right hand, which was
too large and vulgar to be anything but real.
“None of this is happening,” she repeated firmly.
“You sound like a broken record!” He was genuinely angry for the first time. “Every time someone pokes a hole in your neat little story, you just retreat to that ‘none of this is
happening’ shit. You have to wise up, ‘Delta.”
“Don’t call me that! I hate that!”she burst out so shrilly that Eddie recoiled.
“Sorry. Jesus! I didn’t know.”
“I went from night to day, from undressed to dressed, from my living room to this deserted
beach. And what really happened was that some big-bellied redneck deputy hit me upside
the head with a club and that is all!”
“But your memories don’t stop in Oxford,” he said softly.
“W-What?” Uncertain again. Or maybe seeing and not wanting to. Like with the rings.
“If you got whacked in Oxford, how come your memories don’t stop there?”
“There isn’t always a lot of logic to things like this.” She was rubbing her temples again.
“And now, if it’s all the same to you, Eddie, I’d just as soon end the conversation. My
head- ache is back. It’s quite bad.”
“I guess whether or not logic figures in all depends on what you want to believe. I saw you in Macy’s, Odetta. I saw you stealing. You say you don’t do things like that, but you also told me you don’t wear jewelry. You told me that even though you’d looked down at your