“It had better be authentic.”

“Huh,” Monroe said, leading her out through the maze of spaces. “I think they grow their own worms.”

*   *   *

Flix was lost. He felt himself tossed in a bloated bag of water, blood, and bone. He was everywhere and nowhere. He was falling, flailing, failing even to remember who he was or had been.

Dimly, he was aware of Whitman crouched beside him, Charlie flitting in and out, there, not there, back again, like the shadow of death he had often dreamed about when he was a boy. That shadow was now more real to him than the human figures around him, his memory of it more real than the fog of the present. Time seemed as elusive as water, moving forward, then flowing backward, repeating patterns that should have had meaning for him, but were as inscrutable as starshine.

Only the shadow, eyes in a hidden face staring at him as if they could see straight through to the core of him, as if the shadow wanted to feed off his brain, as if it wanted nothing but him. And as if the shadow was some terrible harbinger, his chaotic mind was suddenly filled with the child Lucy, the nights when his sister must have tucked her into bed, when she had looked up at Marilena with those huge coffee-colored eyes, asking for something Marilena could not give her. His shame took the form of the shadow, silently laughing, as if it wanted to tell the world his secret longing. And then his shame was crowded out by the monsters of The Odyssey: Medusa, the Cyclops, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the Chimera, and, finally, the Lotus Eaters, where, he imaged, Lucy had run off to find—what exactly? Lost. She had been lost to him, and who knew what horrors she had been witness to during her long exile?

A wallop like a bolt of lightning rent the skies of his memory-clogged mind. He felt something palpating the back of his skull, the nape of his neck. Then everything lit up as if he were on the Vegas strip when, at day’s death, all the neon signs pop on at once, obliterating night by creating a blinding, unnatural day.

*   *   *

“I hadn’t meant to go there,” Lucy said. “In fact, it was almost the last place on earth I’d intended to end up in.”

“The bayous of Louisiana can be a dangerous place.”

Monroe sat back as their mezcal was served, along with the fiery Mexican food Lucy had ordered. They were sitting at a wooden table painted with scenes from typical Mexican peasant life, at Cantina No Sé, heavy on the dark wood and the primitive painting, but 100 percent authentic.

“How did you wind up there?” Monroe asked.