Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (2 page)

Separation also didn’t keep Semple from deliberately devising ways to irritate her from afar. At all-too-regular intervals, her sister would play some minor prank, causing a black and sinister helicopter to clatter across Aimee’s azure sky, disturbing the fleecy clouds with its violent prop wash, or sending a flock of malicious and predatory birds to settle in the cypress trees and stare at her with bleak, beady, Alfred Hitchcock eyes until they abruptly left and flapped away to the other side of the sunset. Semple also had a habit of removing the odd cherub or angel for her own nasty amusement. Although Aimee could hardly approve, these abductions were of little importance. Angels could always be replaced.

At that moment, however, Aimee had more pressing matters on her mind than Semple and her games. The master plan was hardly coming to fast fruition, and Aimee had to admit that she lacked the imagination required to conjure a suitably infinite Celestial Vault. What she needed was a helper. A Michelangelo who would labor in her Sistine Chapel. What she needed was a visionary whom she could bend to her will and inculcate with her vision, and who would help her make Heaven the place that it really ought to be. For a while she had considered making overtures to the phony Moses; the size and elaboration of some of his spectacles certainly bespoke a measure of power and directorial talent. They also indicated, if by nothing other than their bizarre repetition, that the Moses guy was barking crazy. Despite, in theory, having all eternity in which to work on it, Aimee knew she would never bend him to her will. His insanity was too inflexible. What she really needed was an artist, a painter or a poet, one who was fresh from death or otherwise clean-slated, without preconceptions and totally vulnerable to suggestion and manipulation.

As with so many of her recent trains of thought, the railroad eventually led back to Semple. Aimee knew she would need Semple in on this capture of a creative hireling. The artist would have to be located. He would have to be kept ignorant and off balance, and then be brought to her quickly before he could develop any inclinations or preferences of his own. Aimee knew she wasn’t the half with the capacity to accomplish this. It was Semple who had the
necessary cunning and seductive charm. It was Semple who would have to find and snare the poet or painter for her, and persuading her sister to accept the assignment would not be easy, unless Aimee could somehow appeal to her innate perversity.

As Aimee turned away from her less-than-satisfactory landscape and walked back along the terrace, an uninvited vision wandered aimlessly into her mind. A young man, wild dark curls, a sensual pout, and thumbs in the conchoed belt of a pair of narcissistically tight leather pants strolled idly down a dusty road, roughing the dirt with the heels of his worn engineer boots, dragging on a cigarette. He clearly had no place in Aimee’s design and she consigned a thunderbolt to the vision, garbaging it before it could grow or develop. The young man staggered, stunned, and left her mind. The obvious first reaction was to blame Semple, and Aimee would certainly quiz her on the intrusion, but she knew instinctively that the apparition of the strange young man was something other than one of Semple’s annoyances. She also hoped he wasn’t a portent of future problems.

Jim Morrison shook his head, trying to clear it. Had he been mauled? Mindfucked? Struck by lightning? Large parts of his consciousness were wastelands of fractured shards, data retrieval had become history. Sometime, someplace, someone had royally flamed his memory, though he couldn’t recall where or when. He had a flash of sun, dust, and a back road, idly dreaming of an ice-cold beer, but it was such a brief sparkling fragment it could provide not even a pointer to the thread of a real story. So it went with most of his mind. All he knew about himself was that he had once been a poet and that, at least for the time being, he would be forced to live absolutely in a highly specialized moment where even the mundane appeared strange and unexplored, and reality checks could only come via the benevolence of the passing crowd.

One of the few things about which Jim Morrison was certain was that his true death had not occurred on that dusty back road. All thoughts of his true death conjured fragmented but repeated impressions of lukewarm water, a womblike tub, and the city of Paris. Beyond that, all he could retrieve was a useless combination of details, motor skills, and unrelated images. One major problem was that, for
the time being, his own name was one of the things that determinedly eluded him. He could read and write, he could remember the names of songs and the titles of books. He knew enough to put his pants on one leg at a time and zip the fly when he was done. The rest was a destructed jigsaw of fear, rage, and unhappiness, both his own and others’. A woman ran with her hair on fire, smoke drifting across a bleak concrete freeway lined with withered palms and choked with frightened cars, while a threatening red sun on the hazy horizon struggled to shine through that same smoke. Blind horses drowned in slate-gray ocean and Indians died on the sands of a sterile desert.

He sincerely hoped the apparent garbaging of his memory was purely temporary. Painful as it might prove, it was his and he wanted it back. He was fairly optimistic that it would one day return. Something, possibly a perceived familiarity with advanced and multiple intoxication, told him that his life on Earth had been replete with blackouts and memory lapses, and suggested that this could well be a cosmic version of the same condition. If it was, he had only himself to blame. One of his most profound desires, when he had found himself discorporated at such an unexpectedly early age, was that he could somehow avoid the thereafter being merely a rerun of the same drugged, drunk, chaotic shambles. As far as he could tell, and to his eternal shame, his resolve wasn’t holding up too well.

The immediate concrete fact before Jim was that he had suddenly found himself at a party, and he knew enough to realize that it was no ordinary party. Jim had no clear idea of how or why he had arrived there, but it was plain that this Cecil B. DeMille production of howling, dancing, undulating vice was full of others who had rendered themselves as mindless as he was. He could see the unmistakable vacancy in the eyes of a high percentage of the revelers. They, too, had sacrificed mind and memory to the specific moment; for them, it was a moment of vibrance and abandon, a gratifying instant of tongues and hair, sweat and flesh, lips and liquidity. All set against the backdrop of a towering, slowly erupting volcano that spewed majestic flows of bright, sulfurous, hellfire lava and sent them slithering and easing their way sinuously down the upper slopes in ponderous slow motion. All around him, faces gleamed with flame reflections of red-orange heat, and demon-black shadows crouched among the crush of groaning, howling participants.

The thousand or more human beings who made up this plunging
mass, plus the hundred or so other entities who couldn’t quite be classified, were crowded into a natural amphitheater at the base of the mountain. The set for this epic surrender to hedonism and sexual abandon was a flat-bottomed basin surrounded on three sides by high black basalt walls that looked to have been carved out of prehistory by some vast, violent geological scoop. Within its confines, men and women, intoxicated to the borderline of psychosis, clawed and pawed at each other’s greased, painted, and perfumed bodies. Some lay sprawled in spread-eagled abandon on the now damp and stained cushions that had been strewn across the floor of polished stone, while others groped, staggered, and stumbled, bent on staying on their feet come what might. Such clothing as had been worn back when the festivities had started was, for the most part, long since shredded or ripped away, and, along with it, any sense of individual identity, even on the most minimal level. The crowd had all but merged into a single, moving, but apparently unthinking, entity. This lust-driven composite was a constant flux of wave motions that, at regular intervals, would erupt into screaming pockets of mass hysteria or moaning cluster orgasm.

On a rock ledge above the seething crowd, Ethiopian drummers, their shining, oiled forms festooned with gold jewelry inlaid with turquoise and ivory, and their faces hidden by the fall of their dripping dreadlocks, pounded furiously on the hard hide heads of leopardskin-draped kettledrums, rhythmically urging the already furious crowd to even greater frenzy. The drummers seemed all but oblivious to the women and men who crouched at their feet, seemingly worshiping what they saw as the driving force of the orgiastic confusion. Intrusive, urgent hands stroked the players’ legs and shamelessly cupped their genitals and buttocks, but the ritual drummers missed not so much as an inflection or accent. Even when bold, eager tongues licked the very sweat from them, the beat went on, relentlessly maintained, unwavering and unchallengeable.

On a second ledge, immediately below the drummers, relays of young men and women, all but naked in sheer drapes of near-transparent Hunan silk, poured dark, aromatic, psychedelic wine from a seeming endless supply of stone jars into the upheld goblets and even directly into the open mouths of the
Mad
magazine mass that milled below them. The hair of these serving youths was garlanded with twines of white flowers and some wore luxurious orchids behind their ears. Every one of these exquisite servants swayed in time
to the throb of the drums as they slaked the mob’s obvious thirst, and they broke frequently from their appointed tasks to allow themselves to be kissed and fondled by absolute strangers and even carried down, unresisting, into the squirming carnality. When these dalliances interrupted the wineflow, celebrants would climb up and help themselves. Entire jars would be passed down and borne away, their contents slopping and staining what remained of the surrounding crowd’s disarrayed clothing, and adding to the profusion of fluids that drenched and lubricated the desperate celebration.

The Golden Calf itself squatted balefully at the center of the entire sensual maelstrom, presiding over the sinuous chaos. Over fifteen feet high from its cloven hooves to the tips of its branching Texas horns, and constructed entirely from beaten gold and crusted with precious gems, it provided the ultimate focus and singular provocation of all that happened around it. Ultimately pagan in its sculptured ferocity, the tall idol’s nostrils flared, and the huge rubies that formed its eyes glared down with implacable bovine contempt at those who prostrated or disported themselves before it. The Golden Calf had been festooned with more white flowers, splashed with wine, and columns of smoke rose on either side of its massive head from braziers of burning incense, all but creating the impression that the beast was breathing fire. Two women, bodies bare from the waist down, straddled the wet ridge of its metallic spine, rocking their hips backward and forward, riding the towering effigy with eyes closed, faces ecstatic, locking in lewd oblivion. The idol even came with its own sacrificial maiden, who hung in chains suspended from its mighty horns and, in the tatters of her blue silk ball gown, bore an uncanny resemblance to Debra Paget in the Vista Vision, wide-screen version of
The Ten Commandments
, although in the movie Debra Paget had not been used with such repeated depravity by such a representative cross section of the massed celebrants. In historical and mortal fact, that kind of thing had been the prerogative of Howard Hughes.

That Jim had no idea of how exactly he had come to be under this particular volcano at the time in question had, after repeated draughts of the purple wine, pretty much ceased to bother him, in part because, as the crowd swayed around him, he was hallucinating to the point of near-blindness. At one point the effects of the wine had prompted the vaguest of recollections of being in the middle of a pitched battle in a high mountain pass between the Dionysians
and the Apollonians. The Apollonians had come in with automatic weapons and air support, while the Dionysians had only coup sticks and ghost shirts. Needless to say, he had been on the side of the Dionysians in this unequal conflict, and his memory may have been the price that he paid for his ill-advised participation.

About the only thing of which he was sure was that he hadn’t created the orgy himself. His recall might be down, but he still knew his own personality, and he was confident that his tastes, although certainly of a Bacchanalian bent, didn’t run to such old-Hollywood, pornographic grandiosity. When he found himself at the base of the Golden Calf, caressing the exceptionally full and well-formed breasts of a naked and nameless young woman who resembled a very young Mamie Van Doren, he knew it was the work of some mysterious other. If he had been in control, he would never have allowed himself to be dragged from off her so early in the encounter.

Initially the young woman had been energetically eager, and in the mere space of their first minute together she had entirely ripped away his white linen shirt. Jim hadn’t been too concerned about the shirt, and when the woman had started unbuckling the belt of his ancient leather jeans, he had been quite prepared to swim with the prevailing sensual tide. The only thing that bothered him was that, when she spoke, he found himself unable to understand a word she was saying. At first he was alarmed that he had been deprived of language as well as memory. This theory hardly seemed to fly, though; he not only thought in English, but when he attempted to say anything, he formed English words and sentences despite the drunkenness of his condition.