Aloha from Hell

“Otherwise, ten years from now, you’ll be stopping me and asking a foolish question and I’ll end up sending you to a gas station to buy a map.”

“Ow. When you put it that way, Hell sounds just about right.”

Sally touches my cheek. Her hand is warm, like the furnace burning behind her shades.

“Be a rock, James. Otherwise, you’ll lose everything.”

“How did you know my name was James?”

She swallows another jelly bean.

“It’s just a trick I can do.”

I shake my head.

“You sound like the Veritas sometimes.”

“One of those little Hellion luck coins that insults you when you ask a question? I hope I’m not that mean.”

“No. But what the hell does ‘Be a rock’ mean? It sounds like the kind of hoodoo warning that never actually means what it says.”

Mustang Sally puts the jelly beans back in the bag.

“I always say what I mean.”

She takes the white driving gloves out of her purse and puts them on. “Just like I always signal when I change lanes. I can’t help if you don’t see me coming and end up in a ditch.”

Like a Howard Hawks freeway femme fatale, Mustang Sally slings the little purse over one shoulder and gets back in her car, revs the engine, and peels out. She blows me a kiss as she speeds by.

Aloha from Hell

I DRIVE ACROSS town and beach the Bonneville in a no-parking zone in front of the Bradbury Building, that old art deco ziggurat and one of the few truly beautiful constructions in L.A. A group of schoolkids is on a field trip and I let them pass by before stepping into a shadow. I’m pretty sure a couple of the kids saw me. Good. Kids need their minds blown every now and then. It’ll keep them from thinking that managing a McDonald’s is the most they can hope for.

I don’t come straight out into Mr. Muninn’s cavern. I lean against the wall in the Room of Thirteen Doors. This is the still, quiet center of the universe. Even God can’t text me here. In here I’m alone and bulletproof.

I’ve had one ace up my sleeve since this whole circus with Mason, Aelita, and Marshal Wells began. The kill switch. The Mithras. The first fire in the universe and the last. The flame that will burn this universe down to make way for the next. I told Aelita about it but she never believed me. She couldn’t. I’m an Abomination and I could never get anything over on a pure-blood angel like her. So what good does that make the Mithras? A threat only works if people believe in it, which leaves me alone in this eternal echo chamber, not sure what to do. I can get behind Mustang Sally’s beauty-in-darkness idea. That’s half the reason Candy and I have been circling each other all these months. We’re each other’s chance to find some black peace in the deep dark.

Burning the universe was a lot more fun to think about when Alice was somewhere safe. Some puny hopeful part of me imagined that Heaven would still stand even if the rest of the universe turned to ash. But Alice is Downtown now and I know she was right and I have to let go of her, but I can’t let her die down in Mason’s crazy-house hellhole, and that’s what will happen if I throw the kill switch.

I grab a heavy glass decanter from the floor and step out into Muninn’s underground storeroom.

I yell, “Mr. Muninn. It’s Stark.”

He sticks his head out from around a row of shelves overflowing with Tibetan skull bowls and ritual trumpets made of human femurs decorated with silver. He wipes his brow on a black silk handkerchief as he walks over.

“Just doing a bit of inventory. Sometimes I think I should hire a boy like you to put this all on a computer, but then I think that by the time he’s finished, computers will be obsolete and we’ll have to do it all over again with brains in jars or genius goldfish or whatever other wonders scientists come up with next.”

He sighs.

“I suppose in a place like this, the old ways work best. Besides, I know that while it looks like a jumble to other people, I know where each and every item is. I only do inventory as an excuse to revisit doodads and baubles I haven’t handled in a century or two.”

He sees the glass container in my hand.

“Oh my. You’ve brought it back. Let’s sit down and have a drink.”

Muninn’s desk is a worktable covered in the kind of junk that would give the staff at the Smithsonian nuclear hard-ons. An early draft of the Magna Carta that included the emancipation of ghosts. Little floating and whizzing matchbox-size gewgaws from Roswell. Cleopatra’s lucky panties. For all I know, he has Adam and Eve’s fig leaves pressed in their high school ag high s yearbook.

I set the decanter on the table between us. If you look hard enough into the glass, you can see a flickering match head of fire. It doesn’t look like much, but neither do the few micrograms of plutonium it takes to kill you as dead as eight-track tapes and with a lot more open sores.

“You’ve changed your mind, have you? You’re not going to set us all ablaze like the Roman candles on the Fourth of July?”

“When you put it like that, it sounds fun. Giving this back might be a mistake, but I don’t think it’s mine anymore.”