Head Games, page 21
IT WAS JIM’S LAST DAY in town. He woke up, riding the tail end of a cloudy dream, of dead men lying in open caskets, of funerals, magic watches, and Lisa in a tight black dress. The man in the casket was Don, no, Santos, his shirt oozing blood.
Jim opened his eyes and saw his two suitcases sitting on the floor, packed, ready to go. He closed his eyes again, pushed his face down into the pillow, shut out the dead men, and brought Lisa back on his mental screen for a solo performance. Yes, there she was, eyes rimmed with black eyeliner, wearing a mini dress and strappy heels, sitting on a barstool, impatiently crossing and uncrossing her legs, taking Jim’s hand, sending a charge through his body, telegraphing memories of a tumbled bed, the musky smell of mingled bodies.
She reaches up and touches Jim’s cheek. It’s nice of you to come, she says, but you shouldn’t talk like that in front of Don. Her lips are dangerously close to his. I said nothing. I didn’t even open my mouth, he says. You did. You said that you are still in love with me. He shakes his head. I didn’t say a word! You didn’t say it out loud, but I heard you anyway, she says. The mental screen goes fuzzy. Jim comes out of the dream, his brain still working on a comeback. Why can I never think of good lines for myself ? I need to take lessons from Lisa on how to write dialogue, on how to play head games, he thought, as his dream balloon popped, and he opened his eyes.
He shouldn’t have opened his eyes. It was a mistake to let in the light. There was a definite link between night and imagination. Conjuring up Lisa worked better in the dark. Jim was afraid that the daylight would wipe out the last traces of her, that she would disappear from his waking thoughts, that he would never be able to resurrect her. My God, he could barely remember what she looked like. A year was a long time between phone calls, between embraces. No, it was longer than a year. Sixteen months. His night visions of Lisa were caught in a time warp. The Lisa of his dreams looked the way she did when they said goodbye at the airport in Catamarca. Jim couldn’t imagine her with a baby girl unless he made her a miniature version of Lisa, and not even then. He couldn’t coax Lisa back into a dream. He was inconveniently awake. It was an inconveniently bright day.
Jim got up, showered and dressed, his mind back on track in the real world.
After breakfast he dropped his car off at the leasing company, and then he was at loose ends, impatient to get through the leftover hours, until it was time to go to the airport. He walked back to the hotel. In the lobby, the receptionist waved to him: Señor! She had a pink message slip for Jim and a small package. The message read: “Lisa called from Toronto. Would like you to return her call.”
Instantly the image of Lisa appeared in the discreet half-light of the lobby – a telepathically fixed outline, hotwired to Jim’s brain, sparking Lisa, Lisa. He wanted to call back immediately, but he needed to get a grip on himself first and practise the words he would say, come up with decent lines for once.
In the elevator, on the way up to his room, he was thinking: she’s didn’t give the receptionist her last name. Is she Lisa Baker now? Or is she still/again Lisa Martinez? He preferred to think of her as Martinez. He didn’t want even a shred of Don adhering to Lisa when he called her back.
In his room, he remembered the package the receptionist had given him. He sat down and unwrapped it to keep his fingers busy, to gain time and make up a Jim-Lisa dialogue. A small wooden box emerged from the wrapping paper. Inside the box was Jim’s watch, with a note:
“Here is your watch back. Santos is dead. Simon killed him. It was murder, but Jaime Anqua paid the chief of police a coima to call it an accidental killing. I feel like someone has been burning my guts. Everything tastes of ashes. Time to get out of Catamarca. – Asu.
“PS: Did the magic work? Are you back with Lisa?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erika Rummel is the author of more than a dozen non-fiction books (social history, biography, translation) and a novel, Playing Naomi, published by Guernica (2009). She divides her time between Toronto and Los Angeles, and has lived in small villages in Argentina, Romania, and Bulgaria. She was awarded the Random House Creative Writing Award in 2011. Playing Naomi has been praised as a wry comedy “reminiscent of the corrosive but jovial cynicism of media satires like The Larry Saunders Show and The Newsroom” (Cynthia Sugars in University of Toronto Quarterly).
ABOUT THE BOOK
Argentina, 1979. Life has gone stale for Jim, an expat working in Catamarca. Everything is predictable until he meets Lisa. She has the starry eyes, the sensuous lips, and the tango steps that make all rational assumptions go away. Jim gives her top marks for animation but there is a warning at the end of his tip sheet: Danger. Lisa is a little too intense, a little too crazy, a woman with too many scenes playing in her head. Her antics don’t faze Santos, a curandero who is looking for a medium to channel the dead and attract his lost sister. He lures Lisa to his compound in northern Argentina, where she becomes a pawn in a deadly family feud. Jim goes in search of Lisa. Tracking her down turns into a double mission – freeing Lisa from her captors and himself from the monotony of his life. It takes a fantastic journey through rugged country for Jim to realize that he loves Lisa just the way she is: unpredictable. The story unfolds against the background of a country under military rule. It is a place where kidnapping, violence, and death no longer make headlines, a place where you learn survival skills.
Erika Rummel, Head Games
