Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (6 page)

The rubber guards breathed, or at least made a regular asthmatic hissing through their filter snouts. The bodies also made a faint liquid sloshing sound when they moved, suggesting the presence of internal bodily fluids. Since they were able to stand and move and exert considerable physical strength when so instructed, they obviously had a supporting skeletal structure. They obeyed orders, and thus were possessed of at least a rudimentary brain. All Semple knew was that, in formulating the blueprint of the rubber guards, she had taken the concept of man and debased it to nothing more than a bladder of contained and controlled aggression. It seemed an adequate degree of payback for what she had suffered on Earth at the hands of men.

The thought of debasement again turned Semple’s attention back to the unfortunate angel. “I suppose, if I wanted to take on your education, I could put you in with some of my women. My retainers may look girlish, but they can be wickedly ingenious and
might be able to do something with you. You could probably keep them amused for a while.”

“I’m sure I’d learn extremely fast.”

“Unless, as you say, I destroy you first.”

“I beg you not to do that.”

“You enjoy your existence?”

“It’s the only one I have.”

Semple looked curiously at the angel. This one seemed to be exhibiting an exceptionally well-developed sense of individual identity. Had Aimee somehow altered the way she made them? Had she modified the cosmic cookie cutter to give the things more sense of self? It hardly seemed like Aimee. “My sister created you?”

“That’s what I was told.”

“Then it’s perfectly simple for her to create a replacement for you.”

The angel hesitated. “Yes, but . . . ”

“But what?”

“It wouldn’t be me, would it? If you destroy me, I will no longer exist.”

Semple looked at the angel with some renewed interest. The creature may have had no balls on the physical level, but it was demonstrating a certain psychological masculinity. “Are you trying to tell me that you consider yourself a unique and irreplaceable being?”

“I am . . . from my point of view.”

Semple thought about this, but before she could come to any conclusion, something happened that radically diverted her attention from anything so mundane as the perceptions of an angel. A rotary Princess phone, apparently made out of solid gold, materialized out of nowhere, right on the marble floor, slightly less than three feet from her left foot. No sooner had it appeared than it began to ring with a bright, melodious soprano trill. Semple looked down at the thing with distaste. “That can’t be anybody but my sibling.”

Jim Morrison awoke, if indeed “awoke” was the correct word, with a headache of such catastrophic proportions that his head felt about to shatter and fragment into a hundred pieces. Despite the pain, though, a part of him was aware that the headache was of his own creating. In that part of his mind where all things are certain, and
pretense or self-deception is not tolerated, he knew it was nothing more than a reflex retreat. The hangover was a defense mechanism rooted in his mortal debaucheries, which in the latter days had inevitably ended in similar monumental suffering. He was defending himself against the experience from which he had just made his exit. By re-creating the symptoms of an epic mother and father of mornings after, he was seeking to relegate the way he had been forcibly thrust all the way back to the Great Double Helix to a more manageable level. He was attempting to pretend it was no more than a psychotic nightmare, a psychedelic hallucination, or an alcohol-induced delirium, rather than face the truth. The truth was that such self-deception was all but impossible. In the Afterlife, one saw too clearly. His plunge back to the central majesty of the Great Double Helix was too strong in his immediate memory to be disguised or held at bay until some later time.

After the first shock of Moses hurling the stone tablets and the resulting chaos and plasma storm, Jim had found himself subjectively falling, discorporate and almost mindless, hurtling down a spiral energy stream, surrounded by violent, vibrant color and a screaming roar of horror that hardwired itself directly to what remained of his nerve endings. In every way, it was all but identical to the first fearful onslaught of the death trauma itself. It had resembled the phase of confusion before the light took over and protective tranquillity kicked in, except that, in the death trauma, one always rose, and Jim had been descending, fast and furious, all the way until he bottomed out in the cloud envelope.

In the cloud envelope, out on the far margins of the Great Double Helix, he discovered to his relief that he had partially stabilized. He was not going back to the vacantly dreaming pod form. Instead, he floated with a ghost gauze remnant of the Jim Morrison body still draped in tenuous wisps across his consciousness. Before him, but at a merciful distance, seemingly too far away for it to draw him in, the Great Double Helix revolved in its awesome vastness, cloaked in attendant vortices of impossible, unbearable brightness, and with the parallels of forcibly curved space arching around it like concentric parabola. If he turned his perception through some ninety degrees, he could also see the Canal of Reincarnation tangentially dropping away to the Edge and the mortal Earth beyond. For a while, he was sorely tempted to maneuver himself so he would be pulled in by its quasi-gravity and take its path to a second mortal go-around. A
deep-seated belief in karma, however, dissuaded him. He had hardly excelled in his last life, and the idea of returning as an insect, a virus, or maybe even yeast, in no way appealed to him. On the other hand, he had absolutely no desire to spend an undefined eternity in indistinct Limbo, the null zone that was the worst fear of all in the Afterlife.

It took him a seemingly long, although obviously immeasurable time to realize how the way out was in fact ridiculously simple and completely in his own hands. If he concentrated all of his energy on perceiving and reconstituting the details of the slowly fading Morrison body, he would ultimately recorporate. Essentially he was replicating the pod process, except that, unlike a pod, he had conscious control and didn’t have to wait out the randomness of a pod’s haphazard dreaming. He didn’t even need to make the effort to move. The more the body gathered substance, the more it was repelled by the ectoplasmic wind of the Great Double Helix. If he simply hung in and didn’t struggle, its celestial backwash would ultimately toss him back into the fantasy of the Afterlife like some fisherman’s rejected catch. He’d “wake,” with the exact blinding headache from which he was now suffering.

Jim groaned. “Oh fuck, I think I’m going to throw up.”

In truth, Jim was actually feeling somewhat better. As he confronted the fullness of what had recently happened to him, the pain noticeably mitigated, although it was still a matter of better as opposed to worse, rather than better moving through to good. He still didn’t feel absolutely ready to open his eyes and face the light, but then the voice cut in on his thoughts. “At least you’re back. For a while, we thought Moses had tossed you to the end of nowhere.”

The voice took Jim completely by surprise. It was, however, young and female, and it sounded friendly, with a faint trace of a Latina accent. Jim took a deep breath and very gingerly opened his eyes. At first he thought that the light would blind him, but after a few seconds he grew accustomed to it and was able to make out a woman’s face looking down at him with obvious amusement. The amusement increased as Jim struggled to sit up, and he altogether failed to share the joke. “I wish you’d tell me what you find so goddamned funny.”

“I guess this is what you have to expect if you go out honky-tonking with Doc Holliday.”

“I didn’t go out honky-tonking.”

The woman plainly didn’t believe him. “I heard the two of you were attending an orgy.”

Jim avoided her eyes. “Yeah, well, there was an orgy and we were there, but it wasn’t from choice, I can assure you.”

“That’s what they all say.”

Jim wearily started to protest. “It’s the truth.”

“I suppose the devil made you do it?”

“I think Moses made me do it.”

“That’s a new one.”

The woman was slim and pretty in a tough, no-nonsense way, with olive skin and straight glossy black hair that hung almost to her waist. She was dressed in a low-cut white cotton peasant dress trimmed with lace, but in total contrast she also wore a bandolier of cartridges, slung bandit-style across her shoulder. Her blue and white Cuban-heeled cowboy boots gave her a sexy, confident stance, and Jim started to pay more careful attention. Even in the Afterlife, an ex-human’s erotic radar still continued to function. “So what’s your name?”

“Donna Anna Maria Isabella Conchita Theresa Garcia, but you can call me Lola.”

“Lola?”

“That’s what Doc calls me. He has a very bad memory for names. I think it’s a side effect of the opium.”

Jim propped himself up on one elbow. “I’m Jim.”

“I know all about you, Jim Morrison.”

“You do?”

“You were famous long ago.”

“For playing the electric violin, Donna Anna Maria?”

She looked at him impassively. “Lola.”

Lola was carrying an engraved silver tray. Jim gestured to it. “What’s that?”

“Your breakfast.”

“It’s been a long time since I was offered a breakfast.”

Lola set the tray on the bed and Jim noticed that she wore a silver identity bracelet on her left wrist, but the name tag was blank. He leaned forward and inspected the tray’s contents. What part did food play in the Afterlife? Nostalgia for mortality? Part of a ritual? A hedonistic indulgence? A simple prop for an invented lifestyle? Eating was a piece of comfortable holdover behavior that had absolutely nothing to do with nourishment or survival, and Jim rarely
bothered with it. His first look revealed, however, that this breakfast was a highly individual one. The bone china coffee set, the glass of orange juice, and the two slices of wheat toast were reasonably conventional. The collection of multicolored pills and capsules, the ornate flask of laudanum, the loaded opium pipe, the thin black cigar, and the four fingers of whiskey in a crystal shot glass that were also carefully arranged on the tray came, on the other hand, squarely out of left field. Jim looked at Lola questioningly and Lola shrugged. “We didn’t know what you wanted, so we gave you the same as Doc.”

Jim blinked at the spread that was now set before him. “Doc has all this for
breakfast?”

Lola nodded as though it were really no big thing. “Every day when he’s in town.”

Jim picked up the glass and sniffed the whiskey. It was bourbon and, if his nose didn’t deceive him, at least twelve years old. “What are the pills?”

Again Lola shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I think Doc invents them. As long as he gets a jolt, he don’t care to sweat the pharmacological details.”

“Is Doc here?”

“He’s around.”

“And did Doc create you?”

Lola’s eyes flashed angrily. “What you say?”

“I asked if you were one of Doc’s creations.”

“You think that somebody made me? You think that I’m some irrelevant piece of set dressing?”

Jim knew that he had said the wrong thing. “I just asked. I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful.”

Lola leaned toward him and her expression was dangerous. “You listen to me, Mr. Jim Morrison, and you listen good. I ain’t nobody’s creation. I’m here because I want to be. You know what I’m saying, ese?”

Jim eased back in the bed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Just don’t do it again, okay?”

Jim nodded, looking as contrite as possible even with a headache, without compromising his devil-may-care charm and allure. “I surely won’t.”

Lola turned and walked out of the room, and Jim watched the sway of her retreating hips with singular appreciation. It would have
been an understatement to say that she interested him. It might have been a side effect of his recent brush with what had been painfully close to a second death, but right at that moment she seemed about the best-looking woman he’d seen in a long time. Once she was gone, he pushed back the sheets and swung his legs over the side of the bed and tried sitting up. For a moment, he felt dizzy and disoriented, as though mind hadn’t quite locked into body and the two were operating out of phase. With an effort of concentration, he eased the two halves of himself together until he felt as though they were properly meshed, then he waited a moment and the dizziness passed. Deciding that he was now about as fully integrated as he was going to get, Jim slowly looked around the room.