Cities of the Red Night

lawyer enter from a door at the rear of the booth. One of the cops points to a packet of cocaine on a shelf. 'She have it in her pussee, senores.' Ata gesture from the General the cops exit, grinning like monkeys.

'We feel so sorry for your pussee—frozen in the snow,' says the General taking off his pants. 'I am the beeg thaw.'

A giggling macho pulls aside a curtain in front of the booth. 'Good pussee, cabrones?'

Two Chapultepec blondes nudge each other and chant in unison: 'Isn't he marvelous? Never repeats himself.'

The macho pulls aside the curtain of the next booth. 'He fuck her in the dry hole.'

'Never repeats himself.'

In the end booth Ah Pook, the Mayan God of Death, is fucking the young Corn God. As the curtains are jerked aside they reach orgasm and the young Corn God is spattered with black spots of decay. A nitrous haze like vaporized fish steams off their bodies. The macho gasps, coughs, and drops dead of a heart attack.

'Never repeats himself.'

Lupita gestures. Indian servants load the body onto a stretcher and carry it out. The party resumes at an even more hectic pace. The gas released by the copulations of life and death acts on the younger guests like catnip. They strip off their clothes, rolling around on mattresses which are spread out on the floor by wooden-faced servants. They exchange masks and do stripteases with scarves while others roll on their backs, legs in the air, applauding with their feet.

The Iguana touched my arm. 'Will you and your two helpers please come with me? We have matters to discuss in private.'

She led us through a side door and down a long corridor to an elevator. The elevator opened onto a short hall at the end of which was another door. She motioned us into a large loft apartment furnished in Moroccan and Mexican style with rugs, low table, a few chairs, and couches. I declined a drink but accepted a joint.

'The postcard vendor tells me you can help us locate John Everson,' I began

She nodded. I remembered that I had not heard her brother say anything. He had nodded and smiled when we were introduced. He sat beside her now on a low couch looking serene rather than bored. Jim, Kiki, and I sat opposite in three cedar chairs from Santa Fe.

'We have many places here....' A wave of her hand brought the benzoin smell of New Mexico into the room. 'It was a lovely place but they had to spoil it with their idiotic bombs. Oh yes, John Everson ... such a nice boy, modern and convenient. You found him so, of course?' She turned to her brother, who smiled and licked his lips. 'Well, he is in Durango with relatives ... in excellent condition, considering the transfer of identities. Such operations may leave the patient a hospital case for months. This generally means that the operations has not been skillfully performed, or that discordant entities have been lodged in the same body....

'In Everson's case, there have been no complications. We had to give the Mexican identity sufficient time for a transfer to take place. Now it only remains to blend the two and he will recover his own identity, with fluent Spanish and a knowledge of rural Mexico which will be useful in his profession.

'In this case, the two identities are so similar that there will be no disharmony. And the spirit of El Gringo now has a home. He could not enter the cycle of rebirth because his karma required a duplicate death. This was done by electric brain stimulation which seems completely real to the patient. As you know, a difficulty in organ transplants is that they are rejected as a foreign body. Drugs must be administered to suspend the rejection. In this case, the shared experience of being hanged will dissolve the rejection that would otherwise occur, giving rise to the phenomenon of multiple personalities, where only one personality can occupy the body at one time. The hanging experience acts as a solvent. The two personalities will blend into one. John Everson will contact his parents, and tell them that he suffered a lapse of memory owing to a light concussion but is now completely recovered.'