Horse Latitudes | Page 6

when they had first lived that particular moment.
It was near Stockton Street that I heard the looters. Then I saw them, moving quickly and surely through the narrow alleys, loaded down with merchandise from the sleepwalkers' open stores. The looters took great pains not to touch any of the sleepers. Perhaps they were afraid of being infected with the sleepwalking sickness.
Watching them, cop paranoia got a hold of me, and I started back out of Chinatown. I was almost to the gate, dodging blank-eyed Asian children and ragged teenagers with armloads of bok choy and video tapes when I saw something else: Coming put of a darkened dim sum place--a jewelled bird skull on a black jacket. The jacket must have spotted me too, because it darted back inside. I followed it in.
A dozen or so people, mostly elderly Chinese couples sat miming silent meals inside the unlit restaurant. Cats, like the homeless, had apparently figured out the pattern the sleepwalking sickness took through the city. Dozens of the mewing animals moved around the tables, rubbing against sleepers' legs, and licking grease off the stacked the dim sum trays. I went back to the kitchen, moving through the middle of the restaurant, trying to keep the sleepers around me as a demilitarized zone between me and the jacket. I wasn't as certain of myself inside the restaurant as I had been on the street. Too many sudden shadows. Too many edges hiding between the bodies of the dreaming patrons.
There were a couple of aproned men in the kitchen, kneading the air into dim sum. Cats perched on the cutting tables and freezer like they owned the place. Whenever one of the sleepwalking cooks opened the refrigerator doors, the cats went berserk, crowding around his legs, clawing at leftover dumplings and chunks of raw chicken. There was, however, no jacket back there. Or in the restroom. The rear exit was locked. I went back out through the restaurant, figuring I'd blown it. I hadn't had any medication in a couple of weeks, and decided I'd either been hallucinating again, or had somehow missed the jacket while checking out the back. Then from the dark she said my name, the name she knew me by. I turned in the direction of the voice, and the jewelled skull winked at me from the corner.
I had walked within three feet of her. She was slumped at a table with an old woman, only revealing herself when she shifted her gaze from the tablecloth to me, doing a good imitation of the narcotised pose of a sleeper. She motioned for me to come over and I sat down. Then she pushed a greasy bag of cold dim sum at me. "Have one," she said, like we were old friends.
"Frida?" I said.
She smiled. "Welcome to the land of the dead."
"Why were you following me?"
"I was raiding the fridge." She reached into the bag and pulled out a spring roll, which she wrapped in a paper napkin and handed to me. As she moved, I caught a faint glimmer off the gold rings above her eyebrow. "You, I believe, were the one who only seconds ago was pinballing through here like Blind Pew."
"I'll have my radar checked. Do you always steal your dinner?"
"Whenever I can. I'm only at the cafe a couple of nights a week. And tips aren't what they used to be. Even the dead are peckish around here."
The old woman with whom we shared the table leaned from side to side in her chair, laughing the fake, wheezing laugh of sleepers, her hands describing arcs in the air. "So maybe you weren't following me tonight," I said. "Why did follow me the other night from Cafe Juju."
"You remind me of somebody."
"Who?"
"I don't know. Your face doesn't belong here. But I don't know where it should be, either. I know I've seen you before. Maybe you're a cop and you busted me. Maybe that's why you look familiar. Maybe you're a bad guy I saw getting booked. Maybe we went steady in the third grade. Maybe we had the same piano teacher. Ever since I saw you at the cafe, I've got all these maybes running through my head."
"Maybe you've got me mixed up with someone."
"Not a chance," said Frida. She smiled and in the half-light of the restaurant I couldn't tell if she knew who I was or not. She didn't look crazy, but she still scared me. I'd gone to the funeral of more than one friend who, walking home, had turned a corner and walked into his or her own Mark David Chapman. Frida's smile made her look strangely vapid, which surprised me because her eyes were anything but that. Her face had too many lines for someone her age, but there