Down Solo by Earl Javorsky Page A

wares laid out on colorful blankets; jewelry and carved wood, stone pipes with screens in them, pottery, and herbal health potions. I navigate around a knot of people crowded around two jugglers throwing flaming kerosene-dipped torches, a volunteer onlooker now standing in the line of fire as the burning sticks sail behind and in front of him, only inches away. Wild-eyed panhandlers pick on the tourists at the edge of the throng.
    North of Thornton, the crowd thins out. I’m about to turn back when I notice a familiar figure in the sand. He looks up and grins.
    “Hey, my mon, Charlie, I been waiting on you.” It’s Daniel, sitting at a card table full of small prisms and colored-glass pyramids. At the center of the table is a deck of odd-looking cards and a placard that says, “Past, present, future, right here, right now, only ten dollars.”
    “Sit down, sit down. Good to see you, mon.” Daniel gestures for me to sit in the empty chair at his table. A bearded dwarf wearing only speedos and wraparound sunglasses is bearing down on me, pulling a cart with a legless man playing a Cajun waltz on an accordion. Daniel whistles and says, “Some mighty strange people we got here. And I seen plenty strange.”
    “I’ll bet you have,” I say, taking a seat. “I don’t have time for chit-chat. I’m in a jam, big time.”
    Daniel grins again and says, “Charlie Miner, battling de forces of evil, all by himself.” Why he thinks this is funny, I don’t know, but it’s pissing me off.
    I gesture toward the prisms and cards on the table. “So what’s up with this bullshit?”
    “Props, mon, all for show.”
    “Props?” I turn over the top card of the deck. It shows a man hanging upside down. Or is the card upside down?
    “De white mon don’t believe in direct knowledge of de hidden world. So he need to see juju, voodoo, mumbo jumbo. Props . . .” He makes a gesture of dismissal at the items on the table. “They are not necessary for seeing.”
    “And what do you see for me? Somebody’s got to see something, because I’m flying blind.”
    “For you?” Daniel locks eyes with mine, seeming to stare right into me. “In you I see a sickness of de mind and spirit.” He pauses and seems to consult some inner voice. “Give me your hand.”
    I hesitate. I don’t need some charlatan’s crap about my planets being out of alignment. On the other hand, this guy has definitely got an angle I’ve never seen before. I let him take my hand.
    A current passes between us, powerful but gentle. Daniel grips my hand and closes his eyes, then opens them and says, “Commune with your spirit to begin healing.”
    “Commune with my spirit?”
    “You’ve been given a chance to heal. Death hasn’t been allowed to touch you. Do not leave your body for too long, or He will have his way and collect you.” Totally uninflected English, without a hint of an accent.
    “What’s too long?” And how does Daniel know about roaming?
    “You will know. You can feel it when it’s close.” I remember the panic that almost took me at Tanya’s hotel room. Daniel’s hand relaxes and lets go of mine.
    “That’s it?”
    “For now, yes.”
    “They have my daughter.”
    “Yes, the man who took your life.”
    “How do you know that?”
    Daniel laughs, then shrugs. “I see it.”
    “I know who you are now.”
    “That’s good. We’ve been worried about you.”
    “What happened to me?”
    “You were part of the twenty percent.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “We have an eighty percent recovery rate. Four out of five of our patients are clean after a year.”
    “And the twenty percent . . . ?”
    “Well . . .” Daniel picks up the hanging-man card and shows it to me. “Some have psychotic breaks and are never the same, and some completely repress the whole experience. Like you. We brought you home and I watched you go back to using as if nothing had ever happened.”
    “How does all this explain my