"There doesn't seem to be much here," I said doubtfully. "I expected more."
"Flashing lights! Chrome-plated knife-switches sticking out of science fiction control panels! Star Trek telescreens! Possibly a teleportation chamber, or a hologram of Noah's Ark in a cloud chamber!" He laughed cheerily.
"Nothing like that," I said, although he had pretty much hit the nail on the head. "It just seems kind of . . . sparse."
"It is. I've gone about as far as I can for the time being. I've sold some of my equipment. Other stuff--more controversial stuff--I've dismantled and put in storage. I've done good work in Tulsa, especially considering how little spare time I have. Keeping body and soul together is an annoying business, as I suppose you know."
I certainly did.
"But yes, I made some progress toward my ultimate goal. Now I need to think, and I don't believe I can do that when I'm turning half a dozen tips a night."
"Your ultimate goal being what?"
He ignored the question this time, too. "Step over here, Jamie. Would you like a small pick-me-up before we begin?"
I wasn't sure I wanted to begin, but I wanted a pick-me-up, all right. Not for the first time, I considered just snatching the little brown bottle and running. Only he'd probably catch me and wrest it away. I was younger, and almost over the flu, but he was still in better shape. He hadn't suffered a shattered hip and leg in a motorcycle accident, for one thing.
He grabbed a paint-spattered wooden chair and set it in front of one of the black boxes that looked like a Marshall amp. "Sit here."
But I didn't, not right away. There was a picture on one of the tables, the kind with a little wedge on the back to prop it up. He saw me reach for it and made a move as if to stop me. Then he just stood there.
A song on the radio can bring back the past with fierce (if mercifully transitory) immediacy: a first kiss, a good time with your buddies, or an unhappy life-passage. I can never hear Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" without thinking of my mother's last painful weeks; that spring it seemed to be on the radio every time I turned it on. A picture can have the same effect. I looked at this one and all at once I was eight again. My sister was helping Morrie set up dominos in Toy Corner while Patsy Jacobs played "Bringing in the Sheaves," swaying on the piano bench, her smooth blond hair shifting from side to side.
It was a studio portrait. Patsy was wearing the sort of billowy, shin-length dress that went out of fashion years ago, but it looked good on her. The kid was on her lap, wearing short pants and a sweater vest. A cowlick I remembered well stuck up at the back of his head.
"We used to call him Tag-Along-Morrie," I said, running my fingers lightly over the glass.
"Did you?"
I didn't look up. His unsteady voice made me afraid of what I might see in his eyes. "Yeah. And all of us boys were in love with your wife. Claire was, too. I think Mrs. Jacobs was what she wanted to be."
At the thought of my sister, my own eyes began to fill up. I could tell you it was just because I was physically low and full of craving, and it would be the truth, but not the whole truth.
I swiped an arm across my face and set the picture down. When I looked up, he was fiddling with a voltage regulator that didn't look like it needed fiddling with. "You never remarried?"
"No," he said. "Never even close. Patsy and Morrie were all I wanted. Needed. There's not a day when I don't think of them, not a month when I don't have a dream that they're okay. It was the accident that was the dream, I think. Then I wake up. Tell me something, Jamie. Your mother and your sister. Do you ever wonder where they are? If they are?"
"No." Any scraps of belief that survived the Terrible Sermon had withered away in high school and college.
"Ah. I see." He dropped the regulator and turned on the thing that looked like a Marshall amp--the kind of amp the bands I played with could rarely afford. It hummed, but not like a Marshall. This sound was lower, and almost musical. "Well, let's get on with it, shall we?"
I looked at the chair, but didn't sit on it. "You were going to give me a little hit first."
"So I was." He produced the brown bottle, considered it, then handed it to me. "Since we can hope this will be your last, why don't you do the honors?"
He didn't have to ask twice. I took two heaping snorts, and would have doubled down if he hadn't snatched the small bottle away. Nevertheless, a window on a tropic beach opened in my head. A mellow breeze wafted in, and I suddenly no longer cared about what might become of my brainwaves. I sat down in the chair.
He opened one of several wall cabinets and brought out a pair of battered, taped-up headphones with crisscrosses of metal mesh over the earpads. He plugged them into the amp-like device and held them out to me.
"If I hear 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,' I'm taillights," I said.
He smiled and said nothing.
I put the headphones on. The mesh was cool against my ears. "Have you tried this on anyone?" I asked. "Will it hurt?"
"It won't hurt," he said, not answering the first question at all. As if to contradict this, he gave me a mouthguard of the type basketball players sometimes wear, then smiled at my expression.
"Just a precaution. Pop it on in."
I popped it on in.
From his pocket he took a white plastic box no bigger than a doorbell. "I think you'll--" But then he pressed a button on the little box, and I lost the rest.
*
There was no blackout, no sense of time passing, no discontinuity at all. Just a click, very loud, as if Jacobs had snapped his fingers beside my ears, although he was standing at least five feet away. Yet all at once he was bending over me instead of standing beside the thing that wasn't a Marshall amp. The little white control box was nowhere to be seen, and my brain had gone wrong. It was stuck.
"Something," I said. "Something, something, something. Happened. Happened. Something happened. Something happened, happened, something happened. Happened. Something."
"Stop that. You're all right." But he didn't sound sure. He sounded scared.
The headphones were gone. I tried to get up and shot one hand into the air instead, like a second-grader who knows the right answer and is dying to give it.
"Something. Something. Something. Happened. Happened, happened. Something happened."
He slapped me, and hard. I jerked backward and would have fallen over if the chair hadn't been placed almost directly against the metal side of his workshop.
I lowered my hand, stopped repeating, and just looked at him.
"What's your name?"
I'll say it's something happened, I thought. First name Something, last name Happened.
But I didn't. "Jamie Morton."
"Middle name?"
"Edward."
"My name?"
"Charles Jacobs. Charles Daniel Jacobs."
He produced the little bottle of heroin and gave it to me. I looked at it, then handed it back. "I'm good for now. You just gave me some."
"Did I?" He showed me his wristwatch. We had arrived at midmorning. It was now quarter past two in the afternoon.
"That's impossible."
He looked interested. "Why's that?"
"Because no time passed. Except . . . I guess it did. Didn't it?"
"Yes. We spoke at great length."
"What did we talk about?"
"Your father. Your brothers. Your mother's passing. And Claire's."
"What did I say about Claire?"
"That she married an abusive man and kept quiet about it for three years because she was ashamed. She finally opened up to your brother Andy, and--"
"His name was Paul Overton," I said. "He taught English at a fancy prep school in New Hampshire. Andy drove down there and waited in the parking lot and when Overton showed up, Andy beat the living shit out of him. We all loved Claire--everybody did, I suppose even Paul Overton did in his way--but she and Andy were the oldest, and they were especially close. Is that what I told you?"
"Almost word for wor
d. Andy said, 'If you touch her again, I'll kill you.'"
"Tell me what else I said."
"That Claire moved out, got a protection order, and sued for divorce. She moved to North Conway and got another teaching job. Six months after the divorce became final, Overton drove up there and shot her dead in her classroom while she was correcting papers after school. Then he killed himself."
Yes. Claire dead. Her funeral had been the last time what remained of my big, brawling, usually happy family was together. A sunny day in October. When it was over, I drove to Florida just because I had never been there. A month later I was playing with Patsy Cline's Lipstick in Jacksonville. Gas prices were high, the climate was usually warm, and I traded my car for a Kawasaki. Not a good decision, as it turned out.
In one corner of the room was a small fridge. He opened it and brought me a bottle of apple juice. I drank it down in five long gulps.
"See if you can stand up."
I rose from the chair and staggered. Jacobs caught me by the elbow and steadied me.
"Good so far. Now walk across the room."
I did, at first weaving like a drunk, but when I came back, I was okay. Steady Eddie.
"Good," he said. "Not a sign of a limp. Let's go back to the fairgrounds. You need to rest."
"Something did happen," I said. "What?"
"A minor restructuring of your brainwaves, I believe."
"You believe."
"Yes."
"But you don't know?"
He considered this for what seemed like a long time, although it might only have been seconds; it was a week before anything like a real sense of time returned to me. At last he said, "I've found certain important books very difficult to obtain, and I have a long way to go in my studies as a result. Sometimes that means taking small risks. Acceptable ones only. You're fine, aren't you?"
I thought it was too early to tell, but didn't say so. After all, the thing was done.
"Come on, Jamie. I've got a long night's work ahead of me, and I need rest myself."
When we got to his Bounder, I tried to reach for the door and once more stuck my hand straight up in the air instead. The elbow locked; it was as if the joint had turned to iron. For one terrifying moment I thought it would never come down, that I was just going to spend the rest of my life with one hand raised in that Teacher, teacher, call on me gesture. Then it let go. I lowered my arm, opened the door, and got in.
"That will pass," he said.
"How can you know, if you don't know exactly what you did?"
"Because I've seen it before."
*
When he was parked in his usual spot at the fairgrounds, he showed me the little bottle of heroin again. "You can have this if you want it."
But I didn't. I felt like a man looking at a banana split minutes after polishing off a nine-course Thanksgiving dinner. You know that sugar-loaded treat is good, and you know that under certain circumstances you would gobble it greedily, but not after a heavy meal. After a heavy meal, a banana split is not an object of desire but just an object.
"Later, maybe," I said, but later hasn't come yet. Now, as a going-on-elderly man with a touch of arthritis writes of those old days, I know it never will. He cured me, but it was a dangerous cure, and he knew it--when one speaks of acceptable risks, the question is always acceptable to whom? Charlie Jacobs was a Good Samaritan. He was also a half-mad scientist, and that day in the abandoned auto body shop I was his latest guinea pig. He could have killed me, and sometimes--many times, actually--I wish he had.
*
I slept the remainder of the afternoon. When I woke up, I felt like an earlier version of Jamie Morton, clearheaded and full of pep. I swung my legs over the side of his bed and watched him put on his show clothes. "Tell me something," I said.
"If it's about our little adventure in West Tulsa, I'd rather not discuss it. Why don't we just wait and see if you remain as you are now, or if you relapse into craving . . . damn this tie, I can never get it right and Briscoe is utterly useless."
Briscoe was his assistant, the fellow who mugged and distracted the audience when it needed distracting.
"Hold still," I said. "You're making a mess of that. Let me."
I stood behind him, reached over his shoulders, and tied the tie. With the shakes gone from my hands, it was easy. Like my walk once the brain shot had worn off, they were Steady Eddie.
"Where did you learn to do that?"
"After my accident, when I could stand up and play for a couple of hours without falling down, I worked with a group called the Undertakers." It hadn't been much of a group. Any band where I was the best player wasn't. "We wore frock coats, stovepipe hats, and string ties. The drummer and the bass player got into a fight over a girl and the group broke up, but I came out of it with a new skill."
"Well . . . thank you. What did you want to ask me?"
"About the Portraits in Lightning gig. You only take pictures of women. It seems to me that you're losing fifty percent of your business that way."
He grinned his boyish grin, the one he'd worn when he was leading the games in the parsonage basement. "When I invented the portrait camera--which is actually a combined generator and projector, as I'm sure you know--I did attempt to do both men and women. This was at a little seaside amusement park in North Carolina called Joyland. Out of business now, but it was a lovely place, Jamie. I enjoyed it greatly. During my time on the midway--which was called Joyland Avenue--there was a Rogues' Gallery next to Mysterio's Mirror Mansion. It featured life-size cardboard figures with cutouts where the faces belonged. There was a pirate, a gangster with an automatic, a tough Jane with a tommygun, the Joker and Catwoman from the Batman comics. People would put their faces in and the park's traveling photographers--Hollywood Girls, they were called--would snap their pictures."
"That gave you the idea?"
"Yes. At the time I was styling myself Mr. Electrico--an homage to Ray Bradbury, but I doubt if any of the rubes knew it--and although I had invented a crude version of my current projector, it had never crossed my mind to feature it in the show. Mostly I used the Tesla coil and a spark generator called Jacob's Ladder. I demonstrated a small Jacob's Ladder to you kids when I was your minister, Jamie. I used chemicals to make the rising sparks change color. Do you remember?"
I did.
"The Rogues' Gallery made me aware of the possibilities inherent in my projector, and I created Portraits in Lightning. Just another gaff, you'd say . . . but it also helped me to advance my studies, and still does. During my stint at Joyland, I used a backdrop featuring a man in expensive black tie as well as the beautiful girl in the ball gown. Some men took me up on it, but surprisingly few. I believe their shitkicker friends laughed at them when they saw them dressed to the nines like that. Women never laugh, because women love dressing to the nines. To the tens, if possible. And when they see the demonstration, they line up."
"How long have you been gigging?"
He calculated, one eye squinted shut. Then he opened them both wide in an expression of surprise. "It's almost fifteen years now."
I shook my head, smiling. "You went from preaching to huckstering."
As soon as it was out of my mouth I realized it was a mean thing to say, but the idea of my old minister turning tips still boggled my mind. He wasn't offended, though. He just gave his perfectly knotted tie a final admiring look in the mirror, and tipped me a wink.
"No difference," he said. "They're both just a matter of convincing the rubes. Now please excuse me while I go and sell some lightning."
He left the heroin on the little table in the middle of the Bounder. I glanced at it from time to time, even picked it up once, but I had no urge to use any. To tell you the truth, I couldn't understand why I'd trashed so much of my life over it in the first place. All that crazy need seemed like a dream to me. I wondered if everyone felt that way when their compulsions passed. I didn't know.
I still don't.
*
> Briscoe lit out for the territories, as gazoonies so often do, and when I asked Jacobs if I could have the job, he agreed at once. There really wasn't much to it, but it spared him the task of finding some local yokel to tote the camera on and offstage, hand him his tophat, and pretend to get electrocuted. He even suggested that I play some chords on my Gibson during the demonstrations. "Something suspenseful," he instructed. "Something that will put it in the rubes' heads that the girl might actually get fried."
This was easy enough. Switching between A minor and E (the foundation chords of "House of the Rising Sun" and "The Springhill Mining Disaster," if you're interested) always suggests impending doom. I enjoyed it, although I thought that a big slow drumbeat would have added something.
"Don't get too wedded to the job," Charlie Jacobs advised me. "I intend to move on. When the fair closes down, attendance at Bell's goes into the toilet."
"Move on where?"
"I'm not sure, but I've gotten used to traveling alone." He clapped me on the shoulder. "Just so you know."
I already did. After the deaths of his wife and child, Charlie Jacobs was strictly a solo act.
The visits he made to his workshop grew shorter and shorter. He began bringing some equipment back and stowing it in the small trailer he'd tow behind the Bounder when he resumed his rambling. The amplifiers that weren't amplifiers didn't come; neither did two of the four long metal boxes. I got the idea he meant to start fresh, wherever he ended up. As if he'd gone as far down one road as he could, and meant to try another.
I had no idea what I wanted to do with my own life, now drug-free (and limp-free; that, too), but traveling on with the King of High Voltage wasn't it. I was grateful to him, but since I could no longer really recall the horrors of heroin addiction (any more, I suppose, than a woman who's had a baby can recall the pain of childbirth), not as grateful as you might think. Also, he scared me. So did his secret electricity. He talked about it in extravagant terms--secret of the universe, path to ultimate knowledge--but he had no more idea of what it really was than a toddler has of a gun he finds in Daddy's closet.
And, speaking of closets . . . I snooped, okay? And what I found was a photograph album filled with pictures of Patsy, Morrie, and the three of them together. The pages were well thumbed, and the binding was loose. It didn't take Sam Spade to know he looked at those pictures a lot, but I never saw him do it. The album was a secret.