The Talisman

his skin after they kissed him. Some of the women were no younger than his mother; others seemed only a few years older than himself. Jack’s eyes grazed over this needful flesh – all of it, young and unyoung, pink or chocolate-brown or honey-yellow, seemed to press toward his touch, and he was too conscious of Speedy Parker standing beside him, watching. Then he saw the landscape in the midst of the nude photographs, and for a second he probably forgot to breathe.
    It too was a photograph; and it too seemed to reach out for him, as if it were three-dimensional. A long grassy plain of a particular, aching green unfurled toward a low, ground-down range of mountains. Above the plain and the mountains ranged a deeply transparent sky. Jack could very nearly smell the freshness of this landscape. He knew that place. He had never been there, not really, but he knew it. That was one of the places of the Daydreams.
    ‘Kind of catch the eye, don’t it?’ Speedy said, and Jack remembered where he was. A Eurasian woman with her back to the camera tilted a heart-shaped rear and smiled at him over her shoulder. Yes, Jack thought. ‘Real pretty face,’ Speedy said. ‘I put that one up myself. All these here girls met me when I moved in. Didn’t have the heart to rip em off the wall. They sort of do remind me of way back when, times I was on the road.
    Jack looked up at Speedy, startled, and the old man winked at him.
    ‘Do you know that place, Speedy?’ Jack asked. ‘I mean, do you know where it is?’
    ‘Maybe so, maybe not. It might be Africa – someplace in Kenya. Or that might be just my memory. Sit down, Travellin Jack. Take the com’fable chair.’
    Jack twisted the chair so that he could still see the picture of the Daydream place. ‘That’s Africa ?’
    ‘Might be somewhere a lot closer. Might be somewhere a fellow could get to – get to anytime he liked, that is, if he wanted to see it bad enough.’
    Jack suddenly realized that he was trembling, and had been for some time. He balled his hands into fists, and felt the trembling displace itself into his stomach.
    He was not sure that he wanted ever to see the Daydream place, but he looked questioningly over at Speedy, who had perched himself on the school chair. ‘It isn’t anyplace in Africa, is it?’
    ‘Well, I don’t know. Could be. I got my own name for it, son. I just call it the Territories.’
    Jack looked back up at the photograph – the long, dimpled plain, the low brown mountains. The Territories. That was right; that was its name.
    They have magic like we have physics, right? An agrarian monarchy . . . modern weapons to the right guys over there . . . Uncle Morgan plotting. His father answering, putting on the brakes: We have to be careful about the way we go in there, partner . . . remember, we owe them, by which I mean we really owe them . . .
    ‘The Territories,’ he said to Speedy, tasting the name in his mouth as much as asking a question.
    ‘Air like the best wine in a rich man’s cellar. Soft rain. That’s the place, son.’
    ‘You’ve been there, Speedy?’ Jack asked, fervently hoping for a straightforward answer.
    But Speedy frustrated him, as Jack had almost known he would. The custodian smiled at him, and this time it was a real smile, not just a subliminal flare of warmth.
    After a moment Speedy said, ‘Hell, I never been outside these United States, Travellin Jack. Not even in the war. Never got any farther than Texas and Alabama.’
    ‘How do you know about the . . . the Territories?’ The name was just beginning to fit his mouth.
    ‘Man like me, he hear all kinds of stories. Stories about two-headed parrots, men that fly with their own wings, men who turn into wolves, stories about queens. Sick queens.’
    . . . magic like we have physics, right?
    Angels and werewolves. ‘I’ve heard stories about werewolves,’ Jack said. ‘They’re even in cartoons. That doesn’t mean anything, Speedy.’
    ‘Probably it don’t. But I heard that if a man pulls a radish out of the ground, another man half a mile away will be able to smell that radish – the air so sweet and clear.’
    ‘But angels . . .’
    ‘Men with wings.’
    ‘And sick queens,’ Jack said, meaning it as a joke – man, this is some dumb place you made up, broom jockey . But the instant he spoke the words, he felt sick himself. He had remembered the black eye of a gull fixing him with his own mortality as it yanked a clam from its shell: and he