Aloha from Hell

“Wrap it around my ankle a few times to hold the gun. Don’t be shy. Make it tight.”

She squats down in front of me and runs the tape around my leg a few times. Tests to see if the gun is secure and tears off the end with her teeth.

She slaps me on the ankle.

“You’re ready to go, Wild Bill.”

She leans up, puts her hands on my face, and kisses me. It feels good and it’s a relief. I was half expecting a gone-baby gone-death kiss, like the kiss you give a corpse before it rolls into a crematorium. But it’s a normal kiss. A have-a-nice-trip, see-you-soon kiss. For once, even the angel in my head is happy.

“Can you hold on to the stuff in that pile?” I ask her. “The phone and keys and cash and whatever.”

“Sure.”

In the closet there’s a box of Alice’s things that I took from Vidocq’s apartment. I pop the top and start taking things out. What’s the appropriate trinket from a murdered girlfriend to wear to a suicide?

From the bed Candy asks, “What are you looking for?”

“I’m supposed to bring something from a murdered person with me. Alice qualifies there, and I figure if I bring the right thing, it might help convince her it’s really me. I have a feeling they’ll have been messing with her brain by the time I get to her.”

A 000000"01C;I wasn’t murdered, but I’m a girl. Maybe I can help.”

“Okay.”

She sits down beside me as I pile Alice’s things onto the floor. There’s a pair of her favorite shoes. Some dime-store bracelets and necklaces from when she was a kid. An Altoids tin with fortune-cookie fortunes and buds of eleven-year-old pot. I set everything on the floor and Candy examines each object. I don’t know if she’s helping me or trying to figure out who Alice is.

I hear Kasabian putting a DVD into the player by his computer.

“What are you putting on?”

“The Wizard of Oz,” he says. “It’s about a dumb broad who flies off to somewhere weird and dangerous so she can wander like an asshole down a road she doesn’t know and get attacked by monsters and fucked over by a magic man. It sounds strangely familiar.”

I pull out more of Alice’s things. A brush. A Weirdos T-shirt. Photos of a ruined motel by the water, part of Salton City, an abandoned town in the desert. We were going to take a trip there.

From behind me I hear Traven say, “I wanted to thank you for saving me today and taking me to Allegra’s extraordinary clinic.”

“How’s Hunter doing?”

“Much better. He can go home tomorrow.”

“Good for him.”

“Is there anything I can do to help besides tape things?”

I get a pen and paper off Kasabian’s desk and scrawl lines and shapes. My memory isn’t a hundred percent on how the seven symbols Alice was writing looked, but I draw them as well as I can. I hand Traven the paper.

“Do you know what these are?”

He carries the paper over to a lamp and stares at it for a minute.

“This is a very rare script. It’s a kind of cipher combining pictograms and letters. Each letter has a numeric value, but their meaning changes in relation to their position in relation to the other characters. Where did you see this?”

“A friend showed it to me. What is it?”

“It’s the secret language the fallen angels used to plan their rebellion in Heaven.”

“Do you know what it says?”

“May I borrow your pen? I’ll need to do scenneed toome calculations.”

I toss it to him and he starts scribbling on the paper.

I’m on my knees next to Candy with Alice’s life spread around me on the floor. It’s like I’ve fallen into a Hank Williams song. I push the T-shirt, underwear, jewels, and address books around like I’m looking for the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. Candy upends a pair of green dress shoes with one broken heel and something falls out. It’s a small toy, a plastic rabbit with beard stubble and a cigarette jammed between its lips. Candy holds it up.

“What’s this?”

“Alice said it was me in a former life.”

Candy smiles.

“I think we have a winner.”

“Eleusis,” says Traven.

I look at him.

“What’s Eleusis?”

He raises his eyebrows.

“I thought you’d be the one to know. It’s a region of Hell.”

“Never heard of it.”

He comes over and hands me the sheet of paper. It’s just chicken scratches and his calculations.

Traven says, “Dante wrote about Eleusis in the Inferno, though he didn’t call it by that name. Some translations described it as the woods given to the virtuous pagans. Dante described it as a green and pleasant place for pre-Christian men and women who weren’t sinners but couldn’t get into Heaven because they weren’t redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice.”

“Wait, Heaven is punishing those for being born too early?”

“It’s not punishment. It’s like Limbo. A work-around invented by the Church centuries ago. If humanity can only be redeemed by Christ’s death, what happens to the virtuous prophets of the Old Testament? Eleusis in Greece was the site of ancient mystery rites and therefore a vaguely mystical region as good as any to dispose of the pagans.”

I hand the paper back to him.

“Then Eleusis is where Mason has Alice.”

“From what I recall, it’s a long way from Pandemonium. Halfway across Hell in fact.”