floor.
“Hunh?”
“Lucky t’ing you ain’ smuddered.” Johnny handed him the brassiere that had been lying next to the bed. It was an enormous black underwire job-44, double E cup. Lewis moaned again as it all came back to him, unspooling in fast reverse. The more recent memories were the most sporadic-retinal flashes of Emily Epp squatting atop him, nude, eyes closed, pale watermelon breasts swaying. But he remembered the lime grove all too starkly. Those earlier images were seared in, sights, sounds, smells, even the touch of the Montserrat girl’s lips was-
Montserrat. The volcano. His dream. Could he somehow…? No! Ten t’ousand times no. He’d felt nothing, he told himself firmly. The idea that you could take in another human being’s soul or spirit with their dying breath was absurd. Beyond absurd-it was insane. He’d dreamed of Montserrat because he knew that was the whore’s island.
Lewis took a sip of the Bloody Mary Ann, belched tomato juice. “Take Dr. Vogler out to the patio, bring him some coffee, tell him I’ll be right-”
“Mistah Lewis.”
“-out. What?”
Johnny nodded toward the bedroom window. The sky was nearly as dark as it had been in Lewis’s dream.
“Little late in the season for a storm, isn’t it?” said Lewis. There was a rhyme every St. Luke kid learned as a toddler: June, too soon; July, stan’ by; Au-gus’, it’s a mus’; Septembah, remembah; but Octobah, it’s ahl ovah.
“It’s still early in the mont’, sah. Dey ahlso say the Octobah storm, she ain’ blow so fierce, but she piss lak hell.”
“Put Vogler in the drawing room,” said Lewis. “I’ll be right down.”
Blue seersucker two-button sport coat, blue-and-white butterfly-patterned bow tie. “I’m afraid we’re going to be having another truncated session,” said Vogler, glancing pointedly at his watch.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Lewis. “I don’t really want to do this anymore anyway. I should have called you to cancel, but it slipped my mind, what with the funeral arrangements and all.”
The psychiatrist blinked a few times behind the thick lenses of his reddish-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses. “I have to tell you, Lewis, I think that’s a bad idea. You-”
Lewis cut him off. “If so, it’s not my first, and it certainly won’t be my last. End of discussion.”
Vogler shrugged. “Your decision.” He glanced at his watch again-he was taking this better than Lewis had expected. “You still have a few minutes on the clock-anything you’d like to talk about? As long as you’re paying for it.”
“Come to think of it, there is something I wanted to ask you. I was thinking things over last night. You know, thinking about Hokey, how easily it can all be taken from us, realizing how precious every day is. And the upshot was, I decided to quit dicking around and get started on that novel I’ve been telling myself I was going to write since…since prep school anyway.”
“That’s encouraging,” murmured Vogler.
“The thing is, I have this character, he-I mean she-She’s totally nuts, but I’m not sure what to call it specifically.”
“What are her symptoms?” Vogler was still reserving opinion as to whether the query was genuine, or a more elaborate version of Doctor, I have this friend…
“That’s the thing-she doesn’t really have any. Except she believes something totally crazy…oh, I don’t know, say she thinks she’s a vampire or she believes in ghosts or something like that-don’t worry, I’ll think of something more original. But say she really believes something that couldn’t be true, and it makes her do bad things, but other than that she acts perfectly normal.”
“Does she have hallucinations?”
“I don’t think so.”
Vogler decided the query was genuine. “Sounds like what you’re describing is Delusional Disorder. We don’t see it in a clinical setting very often. It’s a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia, but unlike schizophrenia, hallucinations are rarely present, psychosocial functioning is generally unimpaired, and the behavior is generally well within normal parameters, except where the specific delusion is directly concerned. And whereas with schizophrenia, the delusions tend to be what we refer to as bizarre-i.e., clearly implausible and not derived from ordinary life experiences-for a diagnosis of Delusional Disorder, they have to be nonbizarre.
“That’s where the diagnosis gets tricky, though. All sorts of cross-cultural factors come into play, especially where the delusion is of a religious or spiritual nature.”
“How about something like…I read somewhere there are societies where they believe the soul leaves the body with the last breath?”
“The Ibo,” said Vogler promptly. “I did an undergraduate paper on them. It’s a perfect example of the problem I was just telling you about. The Ibo belief, for instance, that every human has two souls, the Maw and the Nkpuruk-Obi, both of which leave the body with the last exhalation-that would be considered nonbizarre if held by an Ibo in Nigeria, but bizarre if held by a Catholic in Cleveland.
“Whereas the doctrine of literal transubstantiation, i.e., the wafer
Like I could care what you think of me, thought Lewis. “Can I get another prescription for Valium when I run out? They really saved my bacon the other-”
“I don’t prescribe for patients I’m not treating,” said Vogler, with evident satisfaction-apparently he wasn’t taking his dismissal as well as Lewis had first thought. “Oh, and I just remembered one more interesting fact about Delusional Disorder: out of the three hundred and ninety-five psychiatric disorders recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, Delusional Disorder is the only one that’s contagious.”
“What the hell does that mean?” asked Lewis in alarm.
“Sorry, time’s up,” said Vogler-by then he was practically oozing satisfaction. “Call my office for an appointment if you decide you need more Valium.”
3
If Pender had died in his sleep Sunday night, they’d have had to bury him with a grin and a hard-on. What had begun in the cramped Quonset and been interrupted by Pender’s turn at guard duty, ended in the spacious sleeping loft of the A-frame. At their age, they needed the leg and elbow room.
Dawson was gone when he awoke a little after ten-he’d neglected to set his alarm-but he could smell her scent everywhere. Madagascar jasmine, not from a perfume bottle but from the white blossoms she’d picked down by the lane and strewn across his bed and herself as she waited for him to return from guard duty the previous night. Blossoms they’d crushed under and between their bodies as they made love. He’d laughed, called her his flower child. You can take the girl out of the sixties, but you can’t take the sixties out of the girl, she told him.
The sky was overcast as Pender climbed the hill to the Crapaud. He assumed it was going to be another of those hit-and-run showers. On his way out of the Crapaud he encountered Dawson on her way in. Morning after the night before. Pender knew better than to let it get awkward. “Well helloooo, gorgeous,” he boomed.
“Sheesh, tell the world, why don’tcha,” said Dawson, Raggedy Ann blush circles blooming on her round cheeks. But she went up on tiptoe and kissed him as they brushed past each other in the doorway, and he knew he’d been right not to underplay it.
The rain held off for Pender’s commute, but the sky continued to darken. He parked the cruiser in the police lot behind Government Yard, entered the quadrangle through a stone archway overgrown with bougainvillea, and crossed the cobblestones to police headquarters.
Inside, there was a commotion in the lobby. People were scrambling around the lobby floor chasing little rolling limes the size of golf balls. The desk sergeant rushed by with a chair, set it down in the middle of the lobby,
