Shadows Out of Time

“I’m still a little drunk, if that counts. And I just had to tell my sister it was okay to fuck over my dad, well, fuck over the body my dad used to inhabit. Because there wasn’t any other choice. And my Dean wants to read me the riot act since I decided to take liberties with our upcoming production of…”

“Do you really think we give a shit about Denmark?” Eddie picked up a bong made out of a plaster skull. A long tube depended from the back of the head like something out of an H.R. Giger nightmare. A metal tray gleamed in its rictal mouth, waiting for burnt offerings.

“No,” I said. “No, but what the hell? You’ve got my father’s memories bagged and tagged and filed in long boxes and…” I looked slowly around the store. I thought about the implications. I looked back at the three women. “Aw, fuck.”

“Yes,” Mimi said, her face grown solemn.

“This is my father. Isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And his memories are actually for sale.”

“Yes.” She thought for a minute. “Sort of. More like a wager.”

“And though he can’t have them back, someone else might. I could walk away with a really sweet deal.”

“Or a really bad one.”

“Because there’s a catch.”

Eddie smiled. “A lovely, lovely catch.”

“Which would be…”

“Your memories for his,” Mimi said.

“Win, and take away what he’s lost,” Melody said.

“Lose, and let go of your own,” Eddie said.

“All of them?” I thought about chasing girls on the playground with my “love inducer” made from a Cracker Jack box and an old TV antenna. I thought about the first sex I ever had, back seat of a Ford Futura. That time in fifth grade, sneezing while giving an oral report, unspooling snot, snorting it back up. Sixth grade, wrestling, shitting my shorts. The look on my father’s face that one Christmas.

“All? No, of course not. The game has limits. But I’m sure there are memories you don’t want anyway.” Eddie’s smile became carnivorous.

She was right. There were some memories I wouldn’t miss, but others? Others I’d sell my soul to keep. “Ah,” I said. “What are the odds?”

They led me to the back of the store, Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew playing in the background. Once we passed behind the curtain, there was almost no light. Just a glowing, cluttered table around which had been arranged four chairs. The three workers, owners, sisters, whatever, gestured to the extra seat and found their way to their own. I could see them in the near dark, reflecting the light of the strange table that looked like a giant, glowing toadstool, but — like seeing the light of the store itself through snow, like seeing modern drama through the lens of comics — not really. I couldn’t see them at all. As I took the offered seat, suddenly I felt like a student again. First day of class. What would I learn?

I’d been teaching for a long time. I knew a lot of shit. Once upon a time, that knowledge was useful. I could riff off the Greeks and the Akkadians and the Medieval Mystery Plays for hours. But nowadays where I taught…not so much. Rose State used to be a community college, a kind of votech for not-ready-for-prime-time scholars. No, probably not fair, but after they renamed it — same way so many small colleges did in the ’90s, suddenly deciding they were universities — most of my students still came there to make up for deficiencies, to tread water while waiting for a raise at work. Yes, I had some good students, even some stellar ones, but most saw the school as a clearing house to buy Associates Degree insurance. That, or a way to tiptoe around core requirements that might be harder at a “real” university.

Still, regardless of what I was able to impart to others anymore, I recognized those figures who were supposed to be the source of all I’d ever imparted. Like the witches in the Scottish play, the grey hags Perseus consulted, the Norns, the knitting women Marlowe encounters in Heart of Darkness, these figures…Jesus, I thought, am I really saying this to myself? After all the comics, after all the memories held captive in not-so-funny books, after all that had happened since this morning…Somehow, somehow I knew. These three had to be them. I knew it in my hind-brain. I felt it in the movement of my mitochondria. They characterized, represented, actually were the power of chance and choice and knowing. The original muses, the Titanides. Song, Practice, Memory. I could feel them in my lungs, in my DNA, in the dark, confused, clattering places of whatever I had left of a soul.

“Have a seat,” Melody said.

Eddie sat directly to my right. She handed me a small leather pouch. “Choose your die.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, she likes to do that. Dice. Choose one of the dice,” Mimi said.