I picked up my salad and fought with the supposed easy-open corner. "I don"t see how anyone could look past you. Not with that hair."
She fingered a long copper curl as if she"d forgotten she was wearing a halo of fire around her head.
"It"s beautiful," I offered, "especially with the sun shining on it."
She looked at me as if she was as startled at being paid a compliment as I was at giving one. She blushed, a pale pink that touched only her high cheekbones and just above her eyebrows. "Thank you. No one"s said something like that to me in a long time."
I was smitten. In addition to a funky retro jacket and hair like new pennies, she had the smile of a siren, bright as sunflowers.
"I"m Charles." I held out my hand.
She touched her small hand to mine. Her skin felt strange, cool and there, yet... so not there. Like the brush of dandelion fluff. " Arizona."
I could help but laugh. " Arizona? That"s your name?"
The smile faltered. Her hand slipped away, leaving a ghostly impression of coolness where her fingertips brushed.
I rushed to patch my faux pas. "With hair like that, I thought you"d be Caitlin or Maureen or... " I searched my mind for another obviously Irish name and couldn"t think of a single one.
She relaxed, her smile returning. "It"s from a song."
And immediately, the lyrics popped into my head. " Arizona, rainbow shades and hobo shoes. Paul Revere and the Raiders."
She smiled even wider, surprised and delighted that I got the reference. "My mom and dad were sort of hippies."
"I wanted to be a hippie. More than I ever wanted anything in my life. I even bought a map of San Francisco and a moth-eaten old duffel bag and kept it packed and hidden in the back of my closet." I couldn"t believe I"d just told her that. I"d never told anyone about the stuff I"d dreamed when I was a teenager. It all just seemed so silly and flighty. The exact opposite of the rock-solid person my parents expected me to become. And I guess there was a bit of disappointment in there, too, that I"d never shinnied down the pear tree that grew right outside my window and lit out for California.
I"d missed the summer of love and Woodstock and Monterey Pops. The closest we"d come to anything hippie in East Texas was Jimmy Johnston, who wore his kinky blonde hair in a "fro and went around saying "Groovy, dude," to everyone, until he slipped and said it to our English teacher in cla.s.s one day and got sent to the Princ.i.p.al"s office. The Haight-Ashbury district that had seemed so exotic and exciting was now just The Haight, home to Gap and Starbucks. I hadn"t moved to San Francisco until I was forty-something, and only then because I was promoted into it.
Arizona and her shining hair and the strangely familiar, flowery, faded embroidery on her sleeves brought back the bittersweet smells and sounds of those summer nights. Lying in my bed, listening to Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Joe c.o.c.ker and Jefferson Airplane, with the radio turned low so my parents wouldn"t hear. Smelling the warm, growing earth and the green pears. Dreaming of hopping a freighter headed west.
"What was in your duffel bag?"
I still remembered that, too. "A pair of bell-bottomed jeans that I bought off a guy named Jimmy Johnston. And a poster for a Janis Joplin concert. And clean socks."
She laughed, a rougher sound than I"d have expected from such a delicate woman.
I looked down at my sensible leather dress shoes and smiled. I would have been the only flower child in Haight-Ashbury wearing clean, white cotton socks. I guess solid and rebellious are strange bedfellows.
"Why did you want to be a hippie?"
I opened my mouth to be glib but, again, wound up telling the truth. "I didn"t want to be sensible and steady. I thought being a hippie sounded like a magical way to live. Free and alive, the way Janis Joplin was. Unfettered, spontaneous. Music, drugs, free love."
She frowned, as if I"d said something goofy again.
"I know it probably wasn"t like that. I mean, living moment to moment may sound glamorous, but not knowing where your next meal is coming from isn"t all that... groovy."
We both grinned at my use of the word.
"I guess the fact that I thought I"d need clean socks tells you I wasn"t cut out for it."
"I think you can be glamorous and free and still have clean socks," she said, and for a moment, I saw that sparkling light again and caught a glimpse of a Monterey Pine, needles shifting gently in the breeze through her forehead, as if her brain was clear.
I rubbed my eyes. Seeing things like that sounded like all the stories I"d read about LSD trips. When I looked up, her forehead was just a forehead again, solid and wrinkled by fine concentration lines.
"Why didn"t you do it?" she asked. "Why didn"t you run away and become a hippie?"
"I don"t-I"m not sure exactly." I didn"t like the sound of the words coming out. "I guess... I guess the right time just never came. And then it was too late."
"I was there once," she said. "For a while. It was cool, just like the books say."
"There where?" A bean sprout fell off my fork onto my thigh. I brushed it away. Why did I feel like our conversation lulled her into saying something she didn"t mean to? Why did I, for just second, think she meant she"d been to Haight-Ashbury, in the Summer of Love?
Then she looked at me, straight into me. As though she could see through me. " San Francisco, back then. I was there for a while."
"Huh?"
"I don"t know about taking you there, but... I think I can take you somewhere you"ve never been before. If you want to go with me on my next trip."
Because I was still in that whole Woodstock, summer of love frame of mind, I immediately thought she meant a trip. A drug trip. But... would I do it? I sat there, staring at her. Kind of stupidly, I imagine. Like a big, dumb rock with a heart beating triple time. Would I do it? Wasn"t that the kind of recklessness I"d always wanted? Hadn"t I always intended to try tripping, just once? But I wasn"t that fourteen-year-old dreamer anymore.
What if she was a cop? What if this was a set-up? My appet.i.te shriveled, and I put the salad down on the ground. "Is this a joke?" I looked around, trying to do it casually. I couldn"t see anybody who appeared to be watching us, but that was the point of surveillance, wasn"t it?
"No, it"s not a joke." She held out her hand.
I glanced over my shoulder, then at a guy who was sitting nearby on the ground, leaning back against a tree.
I looked back at her. She hadn"t moved. She was just sitting there, her small hand extended, palm up. But she was doing that shimmering thing. One minute so transparent that she almost wasn"t visible, the next as solid as... well, not as solid as me. Few people were as solid as me.
It must be something about the area, about the way the bench was positioned against the sun and the water. There was something about her. Something about the way she was barely there, but so much more there than anyone else I"d ever met, that drew me like a magnet. I took her hand. And the world shifted.
It felt like-it felt like sparkling. Like sparkling should feel, if you could feel it. It felt as though I"d become one of those sparklers that all the kids played with on holidays. As if I were giving off sparks, showers of them, but they didn"t burn. I didn"t burn. I gave off sparks of multicolored light, but I didn"t diminish. I was still solid and stable.
Then slowly the fiery p.r.i.c.ks of light began to die down, and I could see. The world around me was hazy and thin, but I could see. The world was becoming more and more solid, more and more color leaching into the walls and the floor beneath my feet.
Floor? I was sitting in Golden Gate Park, watching the noon sun sparkle on the bay, holding hands with a girl named Arizona. There shouldn"t be floor beneath my feet. Especially not floor with s.h.a.g carpet. Or walls with flocked gold and green wallpaper becoming more solid around me. There shouldn"t be-I looked around in a panic. Where was Arizona? But there she was, right beside me, her thin fingers still gripping my thick ones.
" Arizona? What"s going on?"
"I don"t know yet," she said, her voice calm and even. There was none of the panic in her tone that I"d heard in my own. "It"ll come clear. It always does."
"What does?" I turned slowly, not going so far that I had to let go of her hand. At the moment, she was my only connection to solidity.
We were in a hotel room. It looked and smelled as though there"d been a raucous party there. The air was thick, almost unbreathable with the sour scent of aged cigarette smoke and the sweet scent of whiskey. There was an unopened bottle of booze on the nightstand and one overturned on the floor just under the foot of the bed. Cigarette b.u.t.ts and potato chips overflowed from several ashtrays and from what looked like a large, sh.e.l.l shaped soapdish on one bedside table. On the floor, beside the almost empty bottle of whiskey, was a newspaper. I leaned over and picked it up. A Los Angeles newspaper, dated October 4, 1970.
"I don"t understand. Where are we? Is this some kind of joke? Did you have this made up at that shop over on Page?" But of course, a fake newspaper wouldn"t account for how I"d gotten here.
Arizona "s lack of confusion and fear only made me more frantic. Up until that point, she"d seemed fluttery and ethereal, like a b.u.t.terfly or a wispy cloud or some fey creature. Here, in this place that I couldn"t account for, she seemed solid as stone and as dangerous as rattlesnake backed into a corner.
"How did we get here?"
"I don"t know exactly. It just happens." Arizona said. "It has something to do with this." She caught the edges of her jacket and held it out from her hips.
The red jacket with its gold embroidery had seemed strangely familiar and strange from the moment I saw it. But that was some jacket if it could take me on a LSD trip without the LSD. "I don"t understand."
"It"ll come clear."
"Stop saying that! This doesn"t make sense. Did you drug me? Have I pa.s.sed out? Is this a dream?" Would I wake up in a few minutes, annoyed that the alarm clock had gone off and that yet another boring, plodding day was beginning?
"We"ve traveled in time."
"What?" That made even less sense, and now I was starting to get angry. I kept trying to remember if she"d touched my food. Or if I"d put my water down on the bench between us.
"I don"t know how it works. I just know it happens. And we"ll know what needs to be done. Once it comes clear."
For some reason, I wanted the panic of my first few minutes back. It seemed like a solid, logical response. At the same time, it didn"t seem right, that a guy as big and broad as me should turn into a gibbering mess while a tiny woman stood by so coolly.
Arizona seemed to understand. She took my hands in hers, and it was only because her hands seemed so hot that I realized how cold my own were. "It"ll be all right," she said. "I promise. It scared me, too, the first few times, but I got used to it."
"How many times has this happened to you?"
"I don"t know. I quit counting after a while."
"How long is "a while"?"
"I don"t know. Ever since I bought this jacket at a junk auction. A long time, I think."
I circled the room. I stopped in front of the door and put my hand on the k.n.o.b. The dull, tarnished gold of it was cold and solid in my palm. It gave me an idea.
I rushed over to the window and shoved the heavy curtains aside. The sliding gla.s.s door opened onto a d.i.n.ky balcony that overlooked the street below. In the hotel parking lot right below was a mint Volkswagon van that I would have killed for in my youth. It had the finest psychedelic paint job I"d ever seen, even down to the giant peace sign on the front. And down the street, a yellow Corvair and a red Ford Mustang mixed in with a dozen huge, heavy period cars. So much for the theory that it was all just an elaborate joke. A newspaper could be faked, but an entire street of 1960s vehicles?
As I stepped back into the room, there was rattling and coughing behind a door that I a.s.sumed was a bathroom. A woman cursed softly under her breath. There was the sound of water running. More cursing, then the bathroom door opened.
I gasped, so loudly that the woman who strolled into the room should have heard me.
She looked exactly like Janis Joplin. The Janis Joplin I"d listened to long after my parents thought I was asleep. The Janis Joplin who epitomized everything I"d wanted in the depths of my unsolid soul when I was thirteen.
The woman walked past as though I weren"t even there. I put out my hand to touch her, and it was like touching a cloud. It was like on the television when someone touched a ghost. My hand went right through her shoulder.
The Janis lookalike didn"t even flinch. She just walked past and threw herself down on her stomach on the bed. The springs squeaked under her weight, then settled.
"What the h.e.l.l!" There"s only so much even a rock-steady guy like me can take. I crossed the room in what seemed like only two giant strides and grabbed Arizona. Her shoulder was thin, but solid. "What the h.e.l.l"s going on here? What kind of game is this?"
"No game."
But my mind wouldn"t stop gibbering. It carried my tongue right along with it. "What"s going on? I want to know right now. What is this, some kind of set-up? And where did you find that woman? She looks just like Janis Joplin." I knew about look-alikes, those people who do impersonations of celebrities. I"d seen a couple that could make you stop in your tracks, but this one... This one could have been Janis Joplin"s twin.
"She is Janis Joplin," Arizona said, as matter of fact as if she"d been discussing next week"s menu. "I told you. We"ve moved through time. You"re connected to her somehow. That"s why we came here, to this time. This place."
"I"m not connected to her. She died thirty years ago! Today." I picked up the paper from the floor and shook it at Arizona. "She died on this day. When I was just a kid."
Arizona nodded, but she wasn"t paying me any attention. She was watching the woman on the bed.
She had rolled over on her back and pulled a large cloth purse up off the floor. Propping the bag on her stomach, she dug into it, scratching around as if whatever she was looking for was eluding her. Things began to fall out of the bag, an ink pen, a wad of papers, keys.
The next thing she found was a cigarette pack. She ran her finger down in it, then shook it, as if there had to be just one more cigarette in it. When it stayed empty, she gave a sound of disgust and threw it into the overflowing ashtray on the nightstand. Then she sat up and pulled open the nightstand drawer and stuck her hand in. She found another empty cigarette pack. She cursed, eloquently and musically.
That"s when I knew, really knew, that this really was Janis Joplin. Because a lookalike might fake her pockmarked face, or her eyes, or the frizzy hair. But no one, no one, could sound like Janis. No one could sound like that, rough and sweet, gravel on satin.
Then she pulled something else out of the nightstand. A paper bag, brown and so new it sounded crisp. She slowly opened the bag and upended it. What toppled out made my breath freeze in my throat.
Janis stared at what had spilled out of the bag... a syringe, a small folded packet that looked like wax paper, a spoon, a short piece of rubber hose. Even a stolid and plodding guy like me recognized a drug kit when he saw one.
Janis picked up each item one by one and turned them over in her hands. She picked up the wax paper packet last, opened it slowly. It had fine white powder in it. I knew what it was. So did she.
She looked like she might cry. Or laugh. Or scream.
I looked back at Arizona. She was watching us, her gaze flitting back and forth between my back and the packet in Janis" hands.
"Has it "come clear" yet?" she asked. "Why we came here?"
In a flash, I remembered why I"d never taken my duffel bag with its carefully folded clean socks and my guitar and hopped a train for Haight-Ashbury. It was because of Janis Joplin.
Janis Joplin was a Texas girl whose hometown was just like mine, uptight and boring and predictable. But unlike me, she"d escaped. She"d lived her dream. I"d dreamed of hopping a freighter for California and standing right in front of the stage for one of her concerts. I"d dreamed of being carefree and unpredictable, of living for the moment.
Then Janis Joplin had died.
First Hendrix, then Janis just a couple of weeks later, of a heroin overdose.
And suddenly, I"d seen the dark underside of the carefree, hippie lifestyle. Several months later, Jim Morrison also died. But Janis" death had been the end of my dreams of Haight-Ashbury and life as a barefoot, dancing flower child.
I wheeled to Arizona. "I just remembered. This is why I didn"t run away from home. Janis died, and all the light seemed to leak out of my dreams." I wasn"t sure the light had ever come back.
Arizona nodded and smiled.
"Does that mean...?" I stopped and squeezed my temples between my palms. It was all so weird, so very far out, that I couldn"t quite wrap my mind around it. But I"d read science fiction, like every other kid with dreams of something different, something better. Some of the stories about time travel had stayed with me. "Does that mean that if I save her... my life will change? Does that mean that I"ll be the person I always wanted to be?"
Arizona sort of shrugged and smiled and nodded, all at the same time.
I started to question that weird, ambiguous response, but I was too taken with the idea that I might not have to be stolid and plodding. That the woman behind me on the bed didn"t have to die. But how would that work if I couldn"t even touch her?
As I thought it, Janis jumped backward, sending the drug paraphernalia scattering across the bed. "G.o.d d.a.m.n, man! Where"d you come from? How the h.e.l.l did you get in here?"
She could see me! She was talking to me! For a minute, I just stood there, a big, dumb rock. Janis Joplin could see me. Janis Joplin was talking to me!
"I asked you what you"re doing in here?" She was regaining her equilibrium, coming up on her knees on the bed, reaching for her purse.
My voice came back in a rush. My muscles decided they wanted to work. "I"m sorry, Miss Joplin, for scaring you. I just came for... I just came for this." I leaned over the bed and gathered up the drug stuff, dropping the syringe, dropping the hose, but making sure I tucked the little wax packet of white powder into my pocket. Then I gathered up the rest of it a second time and stuffed it back into the sack.