me by the elbow and steadied me.
“Good so far. Now walk across the room.”
I did, at first weaving like a drunk, but when I came back, I was okay. Steady Eddie.
“Good,” he said. “Not a sign of a limp. Let’s go back to the fairgrounds. You need to rest.”
“Something did happen,” I said. “What?”
“A minor restructuring of your brainwaves, I believe.”
“You believe.”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t know?”
He considered this for what seemed like a long time, although it might only have been seconds; it was a week before anything like a real sense of time returned to me. At last he said, “I’ve found certain important books very difficult to obtain, and I have a long way to go in my studies as a result. Sometimes that means taking small risks. Acceptable ones only. You’re fine, aren’t you?”
I thought it was too early to tell, but didn’t say so. After all, the thing was done.
“Come on, Jamie. I’ve got a long night’s work ahead of me, and I need rest myself.”
When we got to his Bounder, I tried to reach for the door and once more stuck my hand straight up in the air instead. The elbow locked; it was as if the joint had turned to iron. For one terrifying moment I thought it would never come down, that I was just going to spend the rest of my life with one hand raised in that Teacher, teacher, call on me gesture. Then it let go. I lowered my arm, opened the door, and got in.
“That will pass,” he said.
“How can you know, if you don’t know exactly what you did?”
“Because I’ve seen it before.”
• • •
When he was parked in his usual spot at the fairgrounds, he showed me the little bottle of heroin again. “You can have this if you want it.”
But I didn’t. I felt like a man looking at a banana split minutes after polishing off a nine-course Thanksgiving dinner. You know that sugar-loaded treat is good, and you know that under certain circumstances you would gobble it greedily, but not after a heavy meal. After a heavy meal, a banana split is not an object of desire but just an object.
“Later, maybe,” I said, but later hasn’t come yet. Now, as a going-on-elderly man with a touch of arthritis writes of those old days, I know it never will. He cured me, but it was a dangerous cure, and he knew it—when one speaks of acceptable risks, the question is always acceptable to whom? Charlie Jacobs was a Good Samaritan. He was also a half-mad scientist, and that day in the abandoned auto body shop I was his latest guinea pig. He could have killed me, and sometimes—many times, actually—I wish he had.
• • •
I slept the remainder of the afternoon. When I woke up, I felt like an earlier version of Jamie Morton, clearheaded and full of pep. I swung my legs over the side of his bed and watched him put on his show clothes. “Tell me something,” I said.
“If it’s about our little adventure in West Tulsa, I’d rather not discuss it. Why don’t we just wait and see if you remain as you are now, or if you relapse into craving . . . damn this tie, I can never get it right and Briscoe is utterly useless.”
Briscoe was his assistant, the fellow who mugged and distracted the audience when it needed distracting.
“Hold still,” I said. “You’re making a mess of that. Let me.”
I stood behind him, reached over his shoulders, and tied the tie. With the shakes gone from my hands, it was easy. Like my walk once the brain shot had worn off, they were Steady Eddie.
“Where did you learn to do that?”
“After my accident, when I could stand up and play for a couple of hours without falling down, I worked with a group called the Undertakers.” It hadn’t been much of a group. Any band where I was the best player wasn’t. “We wore frock coats, stovepipe hats, and string ties. The drummer and the bass player got into a fight over a girl and the group broke up, but I came out of it with a new skill.”
“Well . . . thank you. What did you want to ask me?”
“About the Portraits in Lightning gig. You only take pictures of women. It seems to me that you’re losing fifty percent of your business that way.”
He grinned his boyish grin, the one he’d worn when he was leading