Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (3 page)

The woman’s speech also seemed to lack the form and natural repetition of language; it was little more than a sequence of unstructured grunts and glottal cries. Jim’s next assumption was that she had consumed so much of the psychedelic wine that she was actually talking in tongues, but then he noticed that a similar glossolalia was being mouthed and uttered by most of those around him. Could it be that whoever had fashioned this lavish and ultimately impressive event, and possibly even brought Jim there from wherever he’d been, had problems with giving speech to his creations? Either that or he wanted to keep his celebrants in mindless noncommunication in his lush pit of Babel. It was while Jim pondered this question that he discovered that he who ponders can also lose. Two men, a bull-dyke lesbian, and a creature who could easily have been a Sasquatch
had picked up the Van Doren replicant by her arms and legs and physically removed her, while the surrounding crowd brayed with laughter. Jim considered the action neither friendly nor sexually ethical, but he was too loaded to make an issue of it.

After that, he had wandered aimlessly through the chaos of the orgy, shirtless in his jeans and scuffed engineer boots, finding himself repeatedly splashed with wine and fondled by total strangers of both sexes and none. This licentious buffeting soon grew tiresome, and he looked around for some detached vantage point where he could observe the epic debauch without any compulsion to become part of the action. He noticed a hollow niche some twelve feet up on the rock wall, opposite the ledges occupied by the Ethiopian drummers and the youths serving the wine. A usable if rudimentary path led up to the niche and it seemed to be exactly the kind of spot to which he could happily withdraw. The only snag was another individual already had the same idea. A fully clothed man was sitting there, knees drawn up, shoulders against the rock face, and a wide-brimmed black hat pulled down so it concealed his face. He was the only fully clothed, not to say elaborately dressed, character in sight, which, in context, made him appear singularly perverse.

As Morrison observed the man who had beat him to the sanctuary, his rival pulled a silver one-pint flask from his coat and took a long drink. He then returned the flask to his pocket and almost immediately fell into a spasm of uncontrolled coughing. He struggled to extract a white lace handkerchief from another pocket and bring it to his mouth. When he finally withdrew the uncharacteristically dainty piece of linen, Jim could see, even from a distance, that it was stained with fresh red blood.

The man looked strangely familiar to Jim, although he was of course unable to put a name to him or locate him in any context. That someone in the Afterlife should be suffering from what appeared to be not only a terminal earthly disease but one that was classically Victorian was remarkable enough, and the man’s style was certainly in profound contrast to any of the other guests at the orgy. Where the rest were primitive or Old Testament, he was clearly a son of the nineteenth century. The cut of his black velvet frock coat and ornamental brocade vest could only be described as rakish, and the same applied to the long, old-fashioned cavalry
boots that extended well above his knees. His soft floppy hat was turned down at one side in a decidedly dandified manner, and in Morrison’s estimation he had struck an almost-balance between western gunfighter and dissolute pre-Raphaelite aesthete. Jim wasn’t quite sure how he recognized these origins, but he was relieved to find that at least his cultural reference bank hadn’t completely gone off line.

While he was entertaining these thoughts, Jim also found himself being pawed at by a naked and grossly obese hermaphrodite who not only talked in tongues but did so with a repulsively sibilant lisp and a spray of drool. Jim quickly decided that enough was enough. He ducked away from the creature’s damply eager clutches and unappetizing, fish-belly flesh and began to negotiate the series of hand- and footholds that led up to the niche now occupied by the familiar stranger in the frock coat and soft hat. The hollow in the rock was large enough to accommodate three or four grown men; the worst the stranger could do, Jim reasoned, was scream at him to go away. As he approached the man, Jim called out, extending what he saw as a minimal social courtesy even if it wouldn’t be understood.

“Do you mind if I join you up there?”

The frock-coated stranger pushed back his hat, revealing a sickly pallid face with a dark drooping mustache, hard blue eyes, and the expression of one who is easily irritated. To Jim’s surprise, he answered not only in English but in a deceptively indolent drawl that might have had its origins in the old, and largely fictional, antebellum south. “May I assume that you’re looking for some peace and quiet and not some kind of homosexual liaison?”

Jim halted halfway between orgy and niche. Despite the lazy speech, the stranger’s overall demeanor was quite enough to warn him that this was not a character with whom to trifle. “I’m definitely looking for some peace and quiet.”

The stranger shrugged. “Then come ahead, young man. Come right ahead.”

As Jim reached the hollow in the rock, the stranger looked at him questioningly. “You seem, sir, not to be remembering me?”

Jim instantly adopted an improvised approximation of the stranger’s fanciful speech patterns. “I fear, sir, I have no memory at all.”

The man’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Considering the nature
of our last encounter, I’m surprised that you would have forgotten it in such a hurry.”

Jim was quick to explain. “I mean I have no memory of anything. I appear to have materialized here with no recall beyond a sorry and confused blur.”

The man seemed content with the explanation, at least for the present. “That’s unfortunate.”

Jim sat down, allowing a civilized distance of almost two paces between them. The man seemed to accept this as a mark of well-mannered respect. “At least you and I are not the wanton creations of whoever started this thing.”

“What makes you say that?”

“If you and I were mere fantasy figments, we would not be up here, playing the part of nonparticipant watchers. We’d be down there, wallowing with the rest of the recently invented swine. To mangle Descartes a little, we observe, therefore we are.”

This statement was so far from anything that Jim might have expected that he was temporarily at a loss for a response. The stranger, for his part, seemed to have nothing to add, and the two of them sat quiet for a time while the bacchanal continued to howl and throb below them. Finally, Jim could contain his curiosity no longer regarding the familiar stranger’s identity. “I fear, sir, you have the advantage of me.”

This time the stranger didn’t bother to raise the brim of his hat. “You think so?”

“I do indeed. You would appear to know who I am, while I have no recollection of either your name or where we might have met. In fact, I’d be more than happy if you could tell me who I am. My own identity also appears to have escaped me somewhere in the mysterious transit that brought me here.”

The man chuckled and then coughed as a result of the unguarded laugh. “Are you saying that you want me to introduce you to yourself?”

“I suppose I am.”

“That’s some singular request, my friend.”

“But one that I need to make.”

The familiar stranger paused for a very long time, toying with Jim, perhaps, or pondering the ethics of reuniting an individual with his mislaid identity. Below them the orgy showed no signs of abating. The Debra Paget look-alike chained to the golden calf was now
being forced to pull a train for a gang of burly Cro-Magnons with thick red hair all over their bodies. Finally the stranger made up his mind. “In that case, my friend, your name is Morrison . . . James Morrison.”

“James Morrison?”

“James Douglas Morrison, commonly known as Jim.”

“You’re telling me that I’m Jim Morrison?”

“That’s what you were calling yourself last time I saw you.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“Indeed I am not.”

“The Jim Morrison?”

“So you said. You claimed you were the Lizard King, whatever that might mean. You went on to boast that you could do anything.”

“I suppose I was drunk.”

“As a skunk. Indeed, a good deal drunker than you would appear to be right now.”

Jim nodded slowly and thoughtfully. This took some digesting. “No shit.”

“As I recall, you were inordinately proud that you had made something of a nuisance of yourself for a short while in the twentieth century.”

Jim was beginning to get the distinct impression that the stranger was making fun of both him and his disability. “I’m beginning to remember.”

In fact, a whole block of memory had abruptly tumbled back into place, memories of crowds and lights, fame and fortune and a myriad of women, of hashish and heroin and massive quantities of alcohol. Of flash and flamboyance offset by monstrous hungover depression and a constant dicing with the death that had ultimately become inevitable.

The familiar stranger took another pull on his flask. He also coughed again, but only a couple of times and without the previous painful violence. “Of course, you may not really be Morrison.”

Jim frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You know how it is.”

“No, I don’t.”

The stranger pushed back his hat. “That’s right. I was forgetting. You don’t have a memory.”

“I’m getting some memory back and it’s all Morrison.”

“Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?”

“It would?”

“We all indulge our fantasies, my friend. We strive for seamlessness.”

Jim was now totally confused. “We do?”

“It rather goes with the territory. In fact, it quickly becomes all the territory we’ve got.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. You lost your memory on the way to the orgy. You don’t remember the death trauma. You may have left it in the cab.”

“Left it in the cab?”

“A figure of speech.”

“Oh.”

“You really don’t remember, do you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“And you certainly don’t remember the next stage, hanging cursed and discorporate, one of the million tiny, anonymous pods in the Great Double Helix.”

Jim shook his head. “Are you kidding me?”

The stranger scowled. “Why should I do that?”

Jim shrugged. “I don’t know.”

The stranger turned his head and looked directly at Jim for the first time. His eyes had changed from merely hard to downright dangerous. “You wouldn’t be about to suggest that I’m a damned liar, would you, sir? You wouldn’t think of suggesting some slanderous thing like that?”

Jim half-smiled. “Oh no. I’ve done some dumb shit, but nothing that dumb.”

The stranger nodded. “I’m glad to see that at least your animal cunning and instincts for self-preservation haven’t deserted you.”

For a while neither man spoke. The stranger tapped his right foot gently in time to the relentless drumming. Finally Jim decided that he should prompt the stranger to go on with his story. “You were saying . . .

The tapping foot stopped. “I was saying what?”

“I was a discorporate pod hanging in the Great Double Helix.”

The stranger nodded. “Indeed you were. We all are directly after death. And some of us like it so much we pay repeated visits, just to start again.”

“So then what happened?”

“You began to find that you had the capacity to make this stage of the Afterlife practically anything you wanted it to be.”

“I did?”

“Damn right you did. The pods dream.”

“The pods dream?” The drumming or the wine sloshing in his stomach, or maybe the ongoing confusion, was starting to give Jim a headache.

“The pods dream and find that their dreams might become their reality. The pods think and thoughts become things. A few, the really unadaptable, go the disembodied route, hanging around waiting for a séance to happen or spooking out and haunting some of their lifeside mortal hangouts. Those of a more Hindu mind-set take the Canal and get busy reincarnating themselves as kings or cockroaches, entirely according to their level of earthly self-esteem.”

“And the rest of us?”

The stranger unscrewed the cap on his flask. “The rest of us? Indeed, Jim Morrison, what of the rest of us? The rest of us create an environment out of our previous realities and fantasies.”

“You mean that, after death, there are people who take on the identities of the famous and notorious?”

“Why the hell not? Maybe on Earth you were some sorry, no-class, turd-shoveling creature of insignificance, but you don’t want to go damned from here to eternity like that. Oh dear me, no. What happens is, after a couple of incalculable timeless aeons hanging in the Helix, you realize that you can be Alexander the Great or Catherine de Médicis or the Old Whore of Babylon if you so wish. And so you wish and, presto, that’s exactly what you become. That’s what you are until maybe you think better of it and transcend.”

Jim frowned. “But surely you must retain some turd-shoveling memories?”

“Believe me, friend, they fade like a dream with morning in this wonderful new postmortem reality.” The stranger suddenly grinned. “Hell, I’m not even sure that I’m really who I claim to be.”