Madeleine's Ghost by Robert Girardi Page A

would flay the skin and wear it like a coat, until it rotted. Shit, imagine having your heart cut out while you were still alive. You’d be able to see them lift it over your head—this bloody hunk of meat—in the last split second before your eyes went black,” She turned to me, expecting a reasonable response.
    â€œGruesome,” I said, making a face.
    â€œNo. Not really. Hell, I would have gone voluntarily. I think it would be a good thing to have your heart cut out. Who needs a heart?”
    â€œEveryone needs a heart,” I said as if talking to a child.
    She shook her head and opened her mouth to speak but instead leaned forward and put her hands and her forehead flat against the glass and gave a small moan.
    â€œOh, man,” she said. “This is bad. I’m coming down. Fast.” Then she began shivering in quick little spasms. I touched her bare shoulder and felt the spasms go through her like electric shocks, and I became alarmed. Her teeth began to chatter. I put my books on the floor and took off my coat and put it around her shoulders and stood there for a moment in the dim light of the museum, unsure of what to do next. From a case nearby the black monkey faces of the mummies leered at me through the glass and from across the distance of three thousand years.
    â€œWe’ve got to take you to a doctor or something,” I said at last.
    She clamped her jaw shut in an effort to stop the chattering noise. “No,” she said. “This has happened before. It’s just a bad trip. Listen, you’ve got to help me get home. Will you help me get home?” Then she pushed off the glass and stood woozily on her feet for a second before she slumped back into my arms.

4
    A NTOINETTE LIVED in the Faubourg Marigny at North Villere, one block from Elysian Fields. The St. Roche shrine was visible through the round window of the stairwell. I lugged her with some effort up the two narrow flights and into the apartment, where she crawled onto a worn yellow satin Victorian fainting couch in the living room and covered herself over with a quilt that lay crumpled in a heap on the floor.
    The place was a wreck. A bit worse, if that was possible, than my own pink house on Mystery Street. Clothes lay in piles in every corner and the expensive-looking oriental carpet was filthy, strewn with glossy French fashion magazines, open lipsticks, apple cores, half-eaten Healthy Choice dinners, empty cups of low-fat yogurt, and other junk. A waterless fish tank, gravel at the bottom, sat on the floor, filled with shoes. A large framed photograph of the portrait of the antebellum lady I had seen in the Cabildo hung at a crooked angle between the French doors that opened onto the balcony fronting Marigny.
    Antoinette’s lips had a white, parched look, and she watched me through glassy eyes, quilt tucked up to her chin, as I rummaged around in the kitchen cabinets, looking for anything that would help: aspirin, a bromide, tea. Reaching onto a top shelf, I knocked a jar of dried red beans onto the tile floor. It shattered, beans and glass shards everywhere.
    â€œPlease,” she said from the couch, her lips barely moving. “Come here.”
    I left the mess and went to kneel beside her. She shivered visibly beneath the quilt.
    â€œA doctor might not be a bad idea,” I said. “You look terrible.” But it wasn’t true. Even sick and shivering, she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.
    â€œNo,” she said in a harsh whisper. “A doctor might go to the police or, worse, to my parents. I took one hit too many. It’s Dothan’s stuff. Homemade, by this half-crazy chemist up in Dessaintes Parish. You can never tell how you’ll react. This time it’s like a block of ice. It’s like I’m sitting naked on a block of ice.” Then she put an arm out from beneath the quilt, took hold of my wrist, and pulled me close. Her breath