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You've been a godsend."
She shook my hand, barely squeezing in response to my firm grip. Then her focus shifted,
and I knew I was screwed. I tried to pull my hand back before she could connect with
spirits I wasn't ready to face. But her vision had nothing to do with worlds beyond death.
"David is in danger," she said tightly. "You must tell him to stay away from the house with
the pink door. It is rigged to blow."
She dropped my hand and sat back in her chair, looking like somebody who's just
debarked from an intense roller coaster ride. She murmured something that sounded like,
"Who are you?" But I could barely hear her beyond the roaring in my ears. It was as if the
explosion had already happened inside my head. The blackness stormed over me like a
level five twister, a miles-wide black-on-black runaway train I could never hope to resist.
But I tried. For David's sake I fought to stand, to simply stay upright and functional while
my own wild-eyed psyche tried to bowl me over. This time it worked. The force that had,
for so long, squashed my awareness and pushed it down into unconsciousness, now
tugged at me, pulled me forward so fast I felt dizzy with the rush. I felt supercharged, as if
I could see everywhere all at once, be anywhere I wanted to go, do whatever I wished.
The way I figured it, this was no time to kick Tinkerbelle in the teeth. I wished to be with
David, wished hard, like when we were kids and Tammy Shobeson had me down in the
dirt, demanding that I call myself and my snake eating, son-of-a-bitching dad a dirty,
rotten coward.
There was a moment when the blackness seemed to offer up a navigational beacon, my
own personal yellow brick road on which to set a new land-speed record. Later I would
gain the knowledge I needed to slow that trip down, put it into some kind of perspective.
But now it seemed instant, a Jell-O Pudding trek that put me where I needed to be, in the
middle of Desert Nowhere in the dark, in the heat, slamming into my brother, through
him, screaming, "David! David! David!," in a voice so loud and shrill I expected some
unseen enemy to lob a grenade my way just to shut me up.
David stood still, a sheen of sweat covering his artificially darkened face. Night vision
goggles covered his eyes, but I knew what they looked like. I faced their twins every day
in the mirror. He carried an M-16 in one hand and a radio in the other. He looked so fit, so
healthy, I just stood there for a second and watched him breathe.
"Jaz?" he whispered.
"You can see me?"
Immediately he shook his head. I could almost read his thoughts. Nope, can't see a thing
because this was not covered in Special Forces Booklet 14 A. But he reached out his
hand, poked it through my stomach and out my back. The same hand went immediately to
his forehead and banged on it hard. "What a helluva time to start hallucinating."
He turned his back on me, and over his shoulder I saw the house, a squat little square with
dark, dark windows and a pale pink door. His team surrounded it, crouched in the
shadows like latter-day ninjas, awaiting his orders.
"David!" I jumped in front of him, holding up my hands, failing to stop his slow advance.
"The door! The pink door! It's booby-trapped!"
"Quit freaking out, D." That's what he called himself during his damn-I'm-stressed pep
talks. "It's all been scouted. It's all good." The hand with the radio moved toward his lips.
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"Goddammit, I didn't come all this way to blow smoke up your ass, Daz. Don't go through
that door!"
He looked straight at me. "You haven't called me Daz since West Virginia. Not even in my
dreams." It was my pet name for him, the one I'd used to remind him he was a part of me
despite his hip friends, his athletic prowess, his ability to make even little old librarians
laugh.
"You haven't called me at all," I whispered.
He murmured orders into the radio and waited, Neither of us spoke. I didn't want to
spook him further. He didn't want to understand how I was, and wasn't, there. I heard
frantic whispering.
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