about getting pregnant. Astrid who sometimes used to blow smoke from her Virginia Slims into my mouth, giving me a hard-on for the ages.
Then she was just a pretty little Sooner gal again, in from the farm and ready for a night of fun.
Jacobs’s assistant, a kid with zits and a bad haircut, trotted out with an ordinary wooden chair. He put it in front of the camera, then made a comic business of dusting off Jacobs’s old-fashioned frock coat. “Sit down, honey,” Jacobs said, ushering the girl to the chair. “I promise you a shockingly good time.”
He waggled his eyebrows and his young assistant did a little electric jitter. The audience yukked it up. Jacobs’s eyes found me, now in the first row, passed on, then came back. After a second’s consideration, they moved on again.
“Will it hurt?” the girl asked, and now I saw she didn’t look much like Astrid, after all. Of course not. She was much younger than my first girlfriend would be now . . . and wherever Astrid might be, her last name was almost surely no longer Soderberg.
“Not a bit,” Jacobs assured her. “And unlike any other lady who dares to step forward, your portrait will be . . .”
He looked away from her, back at the crowd, this time directly at me.
“. . . absolutely free.”
He seated her in the chair, continuing with the patter, but he seemed a little hesitant now, as if he had lost the thread. He kept glancing at me as his assistant fastened a white silk blindfold over the girl’s eyes. If he was distracted, the crowd didn’t notice; a petite pretty girl was about to be photographed at the feet of a giant beautiful girl—while blindfolded, no less—and all that was very interesting. So was the fact that the live girl was showing a lot of leg and the one on the backdrop was showing a lot of cleavage.
“Who wants”—the pretty girl began, and Jacobs promptly put his microphone in front of her mouth so she could share her question with the whole crowd—“a picture of me wearin a blindfold?”
“The rest of you sure ain’t blindfolded, hon!” someone yelled, and the crowd cheered good-naturedly. The girl in the chair pressed her knees tightly together, but she was smiling a little, too. The old I’m-being-a-good-sport smile.
“My dear, I think you’ll be surprised,” Jacobs said. Then he turned to address the crowd. “Electricity! Although we take it for granted, it’s the greatest natural wonder of our world! The Great Pyramid of Giza is only an anthill in comparison! It’s the foundation of our modern civilization! Some claim to understand it, ladies and gentlemen, but none understand the secret electricity, that power which binds the very universe into one harmonic whole. Do I understand it? No, I do not. Not fully. Yet I know its power to destroy, to heal, and to create magical beauty! What’s your name, miss?”
“Cathy Morse.”
“Cathy, there’s an old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You and I and everyone here is going to witness the truth of that saying tonight, and when you walk away, you’ll have a portrait you can show your grandchildren. A portrait they’ll show to their grandchildren! And if those as-yet-unborn ancestors don’t marvel over it, my name’s not Dan Jacobs.”
But it isn’t, I thought.
I was swaying back and forth now, as if to the music of the calliope and the music I was hearing in my ears. I tried to stop and found I couldn’t. My legs had a strangely meaty feel, as if the bones were being extracted, inch by inch.
You’re Charles, not Dan—do you think I don’t know the man who gave my brother back his voice?
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, you may want to shield your eyes!”
The assistant theatrically covered his own. Jacobs whirled, puffed up the black cloth on the back of the camera, and disappeared beneath it. “Close your eyes, Cathy!” he called. “Even beneath the blindfold, an electrical pulse this powerful can be dazzling! I’ll count to three! One . . . and . . . two . . . and . . . three!”
Once again I felt that strange thickening of the air, and I wasn’t alone; the crowd shuffled back a step or two. Next came a hard click, as if someone had snapped his fingers beside my right ear. The world lit up in a blue burst of light.
Aaaahhh, went the crowd. And when they could see