“I’m sorry, Doctor, what were you saying?”

He raised a knowing eyebrow. “The why…behind the why.”

“I…I don’t understand. I…I don’t feel good.”

“Oh, you’ll be all right. Anyway, feeling good is overrated.”

He sipped and I went flush in lurches, tingly, hazed, half-dazed, and then I knew—“Did you drug me?!”

“I wouldn’t call it that,” he said with a Jewish shrug. “After all, I had some too. We just had a spot of The Empathy Mixture.”

“The what? I don’t feel good,” I repeated dumbly. Woozy and more than a little pissed, I tried to stand up off the red velvet to move up the stairs and get the hell out of there, but the room tilted like a seesaw and I fell back into the velvet, panicky and full of rage. Bahari scurried toward me as if to comfort.

“Please, Adam,” he said, “don’t be frightened. Peace and love spoken here. Sharing, confiding. Nobody will hurt you.” His weird cadence sent me from high to crazy high then way too high in three rock skips across a pond.

“You mean you dru—I didn’t come here for this, I—”

“I know, I know—but I promise, this will help you. And your mission.”

“I am fucking spinning, Doc,” I said.

“You’ll be fine. I vow it.” Bahari had moved closer somehow; he was seated on the couch in front of me, but twisted, facing me. “I am here to help you—plain and simple. And for me to do that,” he said softly, “we’re going to have to start as close to the heart of the matter as we can. Forget about the long ago of people you barely knew for the time being. I’m going to ask you some personal questions now—get to know the real Adam Zantz.”

35

A wave of woozy—Bahari stared me down, my psychic tour guide on a gnarly inside-out bad trip. “All I’m asking,” he said, “is what keeps you up nights, Adam? What hurts you?”

“How the hell is that gonna help me solve this case?”

“It’s pretty basic,” he said, almost affronted. “I’m looking to discover what drives you forward.” Then, after a pause, he said, “So come on, let me in. Close your eyes if it helps, lay down, stand on your head. I don’t care. But let me in. You’ve come this far—all the way up the mountain just to have a gun stuck in your face, you already risked. So take me down your path—and maybe we’ll discover the way forward.”

“You are a nut,” I blurted.

He said, “Takes one to know one,” without missing a beat. And he watched me so patiently. Across the checkerboard walls, peacock feathers glistened electric—or maybe I was seeing that.

I said, “I heard you didn’t believe in, uh, psychedelic whatever.”

“Ha—where’d you read that? Wikipedia?”

“What’s in my body right now anyway?” I said.

“One hundred percent organic and natural ingredients. You will not get sick, you won’t lose your mind. The very worst thing that might happen to you tonight is you might feel emotions you have locked up for a long time. Believe me—it’s a good thing.” He grinned again and the room seemed to swirl with his mood—his company was more psychedelic than the strongest LSD on earth.

I looked to the exit—I wanted to get the hell out of there, but even if I could make it up the stairs, and I knew damn well I couldn’t, my car was a million miles away.

As if reading my mind, he said, “If you don’t like this, if it’s too much, I’ll call for Giuliana to take you home.”

But I didn’t answer.

“Try closing your eyes, Adam.”

Reluctant, stuck, I closed them again and surged instantly with a strange, labyrinthine insecurity, self-disappearing into self-disappearing into self, like red-and-gold MC Escher staircases going up and down at the same time.

“Don’t forget to breathe.”

My heart rate normalized—the inner staircases broke open like a thousand floating streamers and then—

Faces: Emil and Cinnamon just before a kiss—

Faces: old men—Elkaim, Uncle Herschel—turning their sorrowful Jewish countenances upon me, then fading into dark—

Faces: the teenage boys in the canyon, posing for their shoot—solemn, sage—they saw it coming—

“Tell me what you see.”

I groaned “faces” and hurt burst inside me like a super-bubble, spreading its ache through my limbs. “I knew him,” I confessed, “as a child.”

“You knew Emil.”

“Yes…I…looked up to him.”

“I see. So presented with this case—”

“…to make my uncle happy. My late uncle.”

“Your…dead uncle?”

“My dead uncle,” I said, eyes still closed, clutching at a velvet throw pillow now, its softness throbbing in my grip like a beating heart. “He adopted me. I don’t feel good.”

“Stay with me, Adam. What you are feeling is nothing more than extreme openness. And even that passes—you’ll miss it when it’s gone.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

“Why…would your uncle adopt you?”

“My mother was arrested for vagrancy. Parent services intervened.”

“I see. Did your uncle love you? Or was he just engaging in filial obligation?”

“He loved me.”

“He did.”

“Yes. Too much.”

I felt speedy shivering from within, but Bahari’s presence contained the dream-swirl, framed it like the movie-house walls.

“We…had a falling out,” I said. “Uncle Herschel wanted me to be a winner.”