(3)
 Like all of us who died violently and suddenly, Lolo has her days of craziness—Daze of Craze, she likes to call it during more lucid moments with that crooked gamine grin—when she obsessively haunts the place where the drunk ended her life. Usually, this happens on anniversary days, but often just when the memory of lives and loves happens to lie thickly on the broken base of the soul's shattered glass; when the thick, precious beer—of having been, of having existed in the flesh and blood world and now not being—flows and splashes across the dirty and unforgiving bar top of circumstance. For Lolo, it is the memory of not only her parents in Montreal, but a boy named Henri who was studying medicine there and missed her very much, and of course they had been high school sweethearts and planned to get married.
I have my days of craze at least three or four times a year, when I stagger black of mind and dark of soul on the leafy paths of Balboa Park when the moon drifts full among the Mexican fan palms, and a hard silver light etches the Moorish fantasies of 1915 Panama Exposition domes and minarets. There, amid the blue and yellow tiles of the Alcazar Gardens, I was supposed to meet Tamsin for an evening out after teaching a class at a local art gallery. Tamsin and I were very much in love, or so I thought.
We had been living together more than a year, and seemed pretty inseparable. Tamsin, my delicate blonde, who loves cats and children and parrots, with whom I went to movies and walked on the beach. We made love and dreamed about owning our own home after getting married. It was all so perfect. We lived in a rambling apartment high up in the hills of Loma Portal, overlooking the sea a mile west and far below. I had never been happier in my life, and she was too, until something happened. I have some idea, but it's hard to believe. It's almost like she traded personalities with another version of herself, in another dimension, not long after Marcus started work at our agency. I'd known Marcus in college, and thought of him as a friend, though we had not been close.
Tamsin became preoccupied and distant, and started to hint at postponing our wedding a bit, because things 'are crazy' at work. Yes, well they were, as I was to find out. And Marcus, whose office was near mine, started avoiding me—I blamed myself, wondering if I had done or said something to anger him.
Instead of my fiancée, there came a hooded, anonymous young man who shoved me and then stuck a dagger into my chest, up and down, up and down, not just a nut like Wallace Meat, but after the wallet in my pocket. Why did he have to kill me? I had sixty bucks in the wallet, and would have gladly given it to him to save myself.
Lolo has her own little café along Shaman Row, which is one of those crazy little San Diego alleys of vapor and brandied mirrors. Walking to her coffee shop is like drifting in isinglass, like peering through ginger ale, like squinting through a rainstorm. People-shades, ghosts, walking on those streets appear bent, stick-like, almost like insects. Time flows differently in the side and back alleys, too. Spells cast there take a long time to drift away in the wind. Smoke rising from chimneys immediately pours downward like thick ink in rainwater.
Lolo holds court in her own little postmortem coffee bar. It has no name. Call it simply Lolo's. Sometimes deceased customers who remember her stop in for a mocha or an espresso. She's like so just yesterday. Did I mention she died in the 1970s? Yes, time has little meaning here; sometimes a lot; usually none whatsoever. Twenty years, thirty years, it passes like a car in the night. She would be a middle-aged woman now, maybe with grown-up children. She would most likely be living in Longueuil or Laval or someplace else close to Montreal, with Henri. They would make love a lot and have three or maybe four children. As it turns out, Henri mourned her, but later married a Hong Kong Chinese woman with a pleasing face and beautiful eyes in citron skin, with whom he had two sons who are now grown, and Henri is white-haired. From time to time, he thinks of Lolo. He can hardly remember what she looked like. He only remembers her smile, her happy eyes, the rueful twist in a pleasant face, and when he tries to concentrate on it, the memory fades even more. What few photographs he has are faded and shadowy and capture wrong angles.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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