Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (32 page)

“Here, what?” Ian asked sharply.

“Mercado del León lies on the other side of this barrier,” she said. “A bus or a train will take you in. Remember what the oracle said. ‘We, the people…’” Then she faded away.

“Uh-oh,” Lauren murmured, her voice tight, hoarse. “She wasn’t real.”

Or she was vividly real, Ian thought. “A bus or a train? What’s that mean?”

“I don’t have any idea.”

Ian glanced around for landmarks so that he and Lauren would be able to find this spot when the hallucinogenic magic had worn off. Directly across the street, at 137 Valle Boulevard, stood a bookstore where he and Tess browsed whenever they were in the neighborhood. A fire hydrant stood on the curb in front of it.

“We need to remember those landmarks,” Ian said, pointing them out.

Lauren nodded, activated the recorder on her phone, and made note of the landmarks. “I’d like to text Leo and let him know where we are.”

“Better not do it yet. The police probably took his phone. Wait until he texts you.”

Moments later, her phone sang “Me and Bobby McGee.” “Text message.” She glanced at it. “Bastards.”

Lauren passed the phone to him. The text message from Leo was brief:
Being removed from area, mandatory evac under way, they r looking 4 u and Ian. Stay safe. Meet u @home. Luv u, Leo.

He handed the phone back to Lauren. “So we can’t return to the hotel.”

“We can’t be seen out here, Ian. I’m not going to be hauled into the city in the back of some cop car while I’m this high. Fuck that.” She turned rapidly into an alley, Ian at her heels, and for a few minutes, they stood there, peering out at the traffic and the pedestrians who swept past.

The visual effects of Segunda Vista came at him more strongly now, powerful undulations that made him feel as if he were on the deck of a small boat in wind-tossed seas. He felt like puking. He dug a bottle of water out of his pack and sipped at it.

Maddie and her friends took Segunda Vista fairly frequently and, according to Sanchez’s father, she had joined a shamanic circle with some Quechuas in old town. Ian had never thought to ask what sorts of experiences she had on this stuff, but he knew that she’d learned to cultivate the weed from one of the locals, and grew it right alongside tomatoes and lettuce and broccoli, in a small greenhouse behind the home where she and Sanchez lived. He also knew, through Tess, that Sanchez didn’t partake and that it annoyed the shit out of him that Maddie did.

And because he had thought of her just then, Ian texted Maddie.

She replied within fifteen seconds.
Just heard from Leo. He’s asking Diego to bring them here to Wayra and Illary’s. Segunda can be a trickster. Ask Lauren why Leo calls her Prankster. B careful. Question everything.

“I’m supposed to ask you why Leo calls you Prankster,” he said.

Lauren rolled her eyes. “I never shoulda told Maddie that story.”

“So tell it to me.”

She looked over at Ian, her pale blue eyes still ringed by navy, Lauren’s trippy eyes. “You know how weird it is that you and I are out here, Ian, high on Esperanza’s sacred psychotropic, trying to break through some sort of supernatural barrier?”

Weird? He had better adjectives than that.

“In the sixties, I was a hippie in the truest sense of the word. Tess has always been more traditional than me.”

“Straighter,” he said.

Lauren gave a small, clipped laugh. “Exactly. I sometimes forget you’re actually from the sixties.”

“I never did more than smoke a joint now and then. I was a married professor with a kid,” he said. “I demonstrated against Vietnam, marched with King and Jesse Jackson, voted for Kennedy, but drugs just weren’t my thing.”

“Well, you won’t find this kind of stuff anywhere else in the world. Even McKenna would tell you that.”

“McKenna,” he repeated. “As in Terence?”

“Yeah.”

Tess had told him about her mother’s adventures in the sixties with the Merry Pranksters, the Acid Summer of the late sixties, when Leonard Cohen had sung about San Francisco and Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia had taken off across the country in their psychedelic bus,
Further.
But from what he knew of that time, neither Garcia nor McKenna had been regular passengers.

“I read McKenna,” he said. “Pretty wild stuff.”

“While doing psychotropics, McKenna recognized that the sixty-four hexagrams of the
I Ching
are archetypes, patterns of energy, and that they explain certain universal forces. While tripping his brains out, Ken Kesey met his future self, the famous cult hero. While doing mescaline, Jerry Garcia composed some of his best music ever. I tripped with all these guys, loved them, and am diminished in some essential way because all of them are gone. I
outlived
them, for Chrissake, that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Ian, momentarily rendered speechless, finally blurted, “Well, ask for their help.”

Lauren looked surprised, then delighted, and threw up her arms and yelled, “Ken, hey Ken, I could really use some help here. Get Jerry and Terry to come with you, okay?”

Her voice echoed through the alley, drawing the attention of a man and a boy who hurried by on the sidewalk.
“Locos,”
the man said to the kid, and touched the boy’s back, urging him to pick up his pace.

Crazies.
Ian exploded with laughter, slapped his hands over his mouth to stifle it, and stood there snorting and snickering. Crazies, yeah. He’d definitely gone round the bend. What sane man would attempt to find the woman he loved by taking hallucinogenic weeds to get into an area that had been supernaturally displaced?

“¿Epa, qué está pasando aquí?”

Ian spun around, Lauren stopped laughing, and the two of them stared at a pair of cops who stood at the mouth of the alley with rifles slung over their shoulders. Behind them was a third cop, on horseback and, in Spanish, he said, “Gringos. This area is under mandatory evacuation. If you do not have transportation, there are vans and buses just up the street that will take you into Esperanza.”

Rarely did a cop in Esperanza refer to an American as a
gringo.
Before Ian could say anything, Lauren whispered, “Ian, look at their eyes.”

Slick and oily dark. “Do you have the time?” Ian asked in English, tapping the face of his watch. “My watch has stopped.”

Brujos
tended to be somewhat unimaginative and, as he hoped, the unexpected question threw them. As the cops glanced at each other in confusion, Ian grabbed Lauren’s hand and they tore up the alley, knocking over garbage cans that clattered across the cobblestones, bags of trash spilling from them. The
brujo
on horseback galloped after them, the horse’s hooves clobbering across the cobblestones. When Ian glanced back, the horse was deftly dodging the bags of trash and the rolling cans. The other two cops raced on foot, slightly behind the horse, shouting and threatening to open fire.

Faster, dodge, faster, zigzag, faster …

The end of the alley loomed in front of them, an erratic rectangle of light through which Ian saw pedestrians rushing to evacuate, some with packs and suitcases, others clutching small children. He saw people on bicycles and scooters, and a line of cars stuck in traffic. Ian assumed more
brujos
were out there somewhere, perhaps hosted by other cops or even by some of the fleeing residents.

“Let’s split up, Ian.”

“No way.”

Then the cops started shooting and Ian and Lauren dived behind a huge Dumpster on wheels. Bullets pinged off the front of it, tore through bags of trash. The gunfire echoed loudly, was heard out in the street, and people rushing past on the sidewalks suddenly started running, shouting about gunshots.

Ian and Lauren leaped up and leaned into the Dumpster, struggling to push it out away from the wall and into the middle of the alley. Protection for the people on the street, and for them. It creaked and moaned and finally started to move. The Dumpster swung into place, taking up most of the alley, and Ian and Lauren dashed out into the street and joined the burgeoning mob of people trying to get out, away.

A cop’s horse whinnied and snorted, then tore past them, riderless, its hooves thundering over the cobblestones. Men and women and kids abandoned their cars now and took off up the road in droves, hauling their
stuff
—packs, bags, pet carriers—and pulling dogs on leashes. Cops on horseback swarmed into the road—
brujos,
more goddamn
brujos,
a trap. Ian sensed hundreds of
brujos
in their natural forms traveling with the cops, seeking hosts. People started twitching, jerking, stumbling as they were seized.

Someone screamed,
“¡Brujos, los brujos están aquí!”
and the crowd broke apart, people stampeding in every direction, up and down sidewalks, into the side roads, over the abandoned cars. Ian and Lauren dashed through the crowd, around and over cars to the other side of the street, where tables and chairs and potted plants in front of restaurants and cafés had been overturned. They ducked into one of the empty cafés, dozens of people crowding in behind them. Someone slammed the door.

“Tables,” Ian yelled. “Push tables up against the door.”

He and several other men pushed three tables against the door, piled chairs on top of them, and Lauren herded everyone else toward the exit at the rear of the café. When the door was barricaded, Ian joined Lauren.

She threw her weight against a fire exit door and it swung open. He recalled that when he was attempting to return to Esperanza, he had fled a
brujo
fog in San Francisco in the same way, through the rear exit of a restaurant. But that time, he was able to make it back to his hotel. This time, if he returned to the hotel, he would be arrested.

Sure enough, a thick
brujo
fog rolled into the alley entrance to the right, and the air filled with that familiar chant,
Find the body …
He and Lauren abruptly turned and raced left, to the south. Screams tore through the air as people were seized, as others stumbled and fell and were either trampled or killed. The fog moved swiftly, swelling like a giant tick, and closed in on Ian and Lauren.

A cloud of dust suddenly rose at the end of the alley, something you might see in an old John Wayne movie, a swirling maelstrom sweeping across the empty plains. Except they weren’t on the plains and this dust glowed from within. Maybe it was what a UFO would look like to the true believers, Ian thought.

Then something exploded out of the dust storm, an old bus painted in psychedelic colors. A large, metallic peace symbol hung from the front grille and the roof rack was loaded with stuff—suitcases, bundles, bags of clothing and fruit. It barreled toward them, horn blaring, two long-haired men hanging out the side windows, waving their arms and shouting, “Lore, we heard you!”

“Holy shit,”
Ian whispered.

He
recognized the Merry Prankster bus,
Further,
with Ken Kesey behind the wheel and Jerry Garcia and Terence McKenna hanging out the windows. Ian and Lauren and the others leaped to the sides of the alley, the old bus kept trundling toward them, that cloud of dust gathering speed and momentum, swallowing
Further,
coughing it out again. When it screeched to a stop in the middle of the alley, the dust cloud covered it completely.

“My God,” Lauren squealed. “It’s them, Ian, it’s the Pranksters!” And she raced toward the psychedelic bus, her bag banging against her hip.

Kesey himself swung off the bus and threw his arms open. “Lore!” he shouted.

Lauren flew into his arms and he hugged her so tightly that Ian was sure she would disappear into him. McKenna and Garcia got out and greeted her like long-lost lovers. Maybe she was. Maybe she had been a lover to all three of them.

She had traveled on this bus with them when she was twenty years old, had dropped acid with these guys, seen the sixties in a way that he had not because he was too old then to have been a hippie. He just stood there, staring, aware that the dust cloud provided partial cover for a reunion that was clearly impossible. After all, Kesey, Garcia, and McKenna were dead. People around him murmured, whispered, pointed, hung back. Lauren turned toward them and motioned for them to get on the bus.

“C’mon, we’ll take you out of here,” she said. “Anyone who wants to head into the whiteness to find loved ones is welcome. If you just want out of here, we’ll drop you off in a safe area.”

For a moment, no one moved. Kesey said, “Hey, did any of you people see the movie
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
? Jack Nicholson was the main dude. I wrote that book.”

This elicited a few nods.

“You people done magic mushrooms?” McKenna called out. “I’m the guy who talked to them. McKenna’s the name, Terence McKenna.”

A few more nods.

Garcia ducked back into the bus and emerged a moment later with a guitar. And then he started to play “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” a Bob Dylan song that was performed by Dylan and the Grateful Dead on a joint tour in 1987. Mesmerized, Ian knew he had fallen down the rabbit hole and that from this point onward, he couldn’t go back. There was nothing to go back
to.
He moved forward—and so did everyone else around him.

While Garcia continued to play, Kesey and McKenna shook hands with everyone who came aboard. As Ian climbed into the bus, Kesey gripped his hand tightly. “Dude, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

“Likewise. I used to cite your books when I taught journalism.
Tell a story just like Kesey did.
And I’d get these looks and some student would invariably inform me that Kesey wrote fiction. That student usually didn’t pass my class.”

Kesey’s bellowing laugh was as large as he was, like a force of nature. “No shit, man. Doesn’t matter what it is, truth or not, if you tell it like a story with heroes and villains and all the soap opera stuff in between, it speaks to the heart every time. Our lives are soap operas—and so are our deaths.” He threw out his arms. “We’re proof of that.”