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.Out in the clearer air, my body – my preferred body – was waiting for me by the car.“How’d it go?” he asked.“I hate this town,” I replied.“Every mouth aches from smiling too much.”He shrugged.“Works out well enough.Hey, you in tonight?”“I was thinking about it, why?”“The Dodgers are playing.I thought, you wanna go?”I thought about it.“Why not? I’ll change into someone less sensible.”So saying, I took his unresisting hand, and jumped.The Dodgers don’t interest me.Baseball doesn’t interest me.Sports trivia.If you suspect that the body you’re sitting opposite is a ghost, I recommend sports trivia as a method of detection.A body wearing a Dodgers shirt should, if it paid for the threads, know the score – but what self-respecting ghost wastes time on detail like that?That’s the kind of thing you pay estate agents to do.Straight white streets through the straight grey grid of LA.My body is young, stronger now for a decent meal, with a mole under my left armpit that I find perpetually fascinating and have to force myself not to fiddle with in public.He is also that most vital of employees for a jobbing estate agent – a clean, cooperative gofer.I had met my body beneath freeway 101.It was the place where dreams went to die.The failed actors, the porn stars who’d been too late to get the treatment.The handyman turned out when the studio went under, the scriptwriter who’d never quite hit the money.The drug dealer who’d lost his haul in the last bust, the kid whose father was in lock-up and whose mum couldn’t cope.It was the dead night-time stain of the city, the hollow-eyed place that peeked out between the brightness of the street lights.It was a dangerous place to walk alone at night.It was the perfect place to find unwanted flesh.He wore stinking grey fabrics falling off him like the wrappings from a rotten mummy.His beard was down to his collarbone.His hair appeared grey, but when I squatted down opposite him and put a twenty-dollar note into his foul black hat, he told me his name was Will and he was twenty-two years old.“Are you on drugs?” I asked.“Jesus,” he groaned as the cars rumbled by overhead.“What kinda question is that?”“A question that could change your life,” I replied.“There’s more than just money on the line.”His head turned one way, then the other, twisting down like a swan examining its feathers.“No.You think I got the cash to pay for that shit?”“What brings you here?”“I fell for a guy.”“So?”“They don’t take kindly to sodomy in Texas.If it’d had been a white guy, maybe my folks would’ve been OK.Maybe they wouldn’t.With all the shit that went down, didn’t really stop to ask.”“You got family, friends here?”“I got folk who look out for me,” he replied, bristling.“That’s… not what I meant.”His eyes narrowed.“Spill.Don’t dance – talk.”I sat back on my haunches, hands spilling over the tops of my knees.“In five seconds’ time you’ll be standing up, but you won’t know how you got there.”“What the —”I grabbed his wrist and switched.Five seconds later he was standing up and didn’t know how he’d got there.“What the fuck did you do to me?” he breathed.I swayed, my body a little dizzy from the two rapid jumps, in and out.“I want you to listen to me carefully.There sometimes comes a moment – so fast, a flash in the pan – which can change your life.It’s the two seconds in which the driver of the truck failed to hit the brakes.It’s the single breath where you said something stupid, and you should have said something kind.It’s the moment the cops bust in through the door.Everyone feels it, that moment where their lives hang on a knife’s edge.This is one of those moments.”“Who are you?” he stammered.“What the fuck are you?”“I am a ghost.I live through other people’s skins, wear the flesh of strangers.Quickly, painlessly, and without memory of the event.I’m not going to ask for a decision now.I’ll keep my distance and let you think it over.I’m in town for a few weeks running some errands [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]