“I hate that music,” he said. “These people spook me. I feel faint all the time, like when I was back in my father’s mortuary and the smell of formaldehyde made me sick.” He began to retch at the memory.

“Derek,” I said firmly, “everybody lives in some kind of sweatbox or another. You’ve got to pull yourself together.”

“Sure, that’s what my father’ud say. He knew I was scared of the stiffs, and it was a weakness he couldn’t accept. So he’d lock me in the embalming room with a corpse. That supposed to pull me together?”

“Your father was a scary bastard,” Val said, “and you’re too sensitive.”

“My mother scared me even more,” Derek said, taking, I thought, a peculiar pride in her frightfulness. “Like one Saturday when my father was away on business. Soon as he left the shop I bolted for home. In the house the radio was playing loud and there she was, pissed as usual, dancing naked before a wad of neighborhood kids.”

He blew his nose on his colored neckerchief. “I got to get back to New York,” he rambled, “where I won’t die, and get ate by vultures. Maybe I won’t go to New York. Maybe I can find another place to glow—go.”

“Don’t worry,” Val said, “you’re going to be all right.”

“Sure,” I lied. “You’ll be sadder but wiser for the experience.”

“Screw that,” Derek said. “I’d rather be happier and dumber.” He straightened up, standing tall, although his eyes still had a hopeless look in them. “You’ll talk to Abdul?” he asked.

“Of course.”

He left. For a moment Val and I said nothing.

THIRTY-FIVE
THE GOOD AMBASSADRESS

Less than an hour ago the morning rain stopped with the suddenness of a plugged spigot. My cell is already charged with accelerating heat.

The lean old woman comes in, a pouch of rat skin draped over her wrinkled shoulder. Her eyes have trouble tracking, and above them on her brow, an inch below the peak of her beautiful white hair, is an embroidered band of green beetles. She sinks to the floor with the effortless grace of a dancer, sitting with crossed legs and a spine as straight as a sapling. From the pouch she takes little packets of powder wrapped neatly in palm leaves. She aligns them before her like a druggist dispensing restoratives.

“I have been told,” she says in a parched whisper, “that you are interested in my magic. What is your wish? Birds’ claws for courage? Rats’ teeth for happy thoughts? Bones of a lizard to fight off demons? Wings of a scarab for toothache? Sorghum and swordgrass to lengthen the penis?”