Ding! said my brain, as I recalled that whenever anyone ordered a Bahamalama-Dingdong, they rang a special bell. Hence the "dingdong" part of the name.
Well, partly. I watched the bartender take a banana from the freezer. He put it in a tall highball glass and poured rum over it, then mystery juice from a plastic container marked BID, and finally a careful layer of red liqueur across the top. I detected a scent like cough medicine rising up.
"Nassau Royale?" I asked.
The bartender nodded. "Yeah. Do I remember you?"
"You mean, from before the Health Department shut you down?" I asked.
"Yeah," he said. "You don't look so familiar, though."
I nodded. "I've only been here once, actually. But I had a friend who used to come all the time. Named Morgan?"
"Morgan?"
"Yeah. Tall, dark hair, pale skin. Black dresses. Kind of gothy?"
Pause. "A woman?"
"Yeah."
He shook his head. "Not ringing a bell. You sure you got the right place?"
I looked down at the Bahamalama-Dingdong, the Nassau Royale-stained banana looking back at me like a bloodshot eye, and took a sip. Tropical fruit sweetness poured over my tongue, textured by strips of rind shedding from the frozen banana. That night of more than a year before began to flood back into my mind, carried on pineapples and the burnt taste of dark rum.
"I'm positive," I said.
There wasn't much to do but get drunk.
The bartender asked around, but no one remembered Morgan or even vaguely recalled a gothlike woman who had hung out here in the old days. Maybe, like me, she'd randomly wandered in off the street that night.
On the other hand, if her inner parasite had been pulling her strings, making her desperately horny, then why had she chosen a gay bar, the place she was least likely to get lucky? (Had she been as clueless as my younger self? Hmm.)
I let the drinks take hold, ringing more bells, bringing back stray fragments of memory from that night. There definitely had been a river involved; I recalled reflected lights rippling in boat wakes. All the Bahamalama-Dingdongs that Morgan and I had drunk had put a little stumble into our step. I'd been worried she'd go over the rail and I'd have to leap into the cold water to save her, even though I wasn't fit to walk a dog.
We had strolled out to the end of a long pier and stood looking at the river. The Hudson or the East River, though?
Then I remembered: At some point I'd checked my compass and announced that we were facing northwest, which made her laugh. Definitely the Hudson, then. We'd been looking at New Jersey.
What had happened next?
I tried to press the hazy memories forward in time, but my mind was stuck on that image of New Jersey reflected in the river - Hoboken already teasing me from across the water. No matter how hard I concentrated, I couldn't recall a single step of the route we'd taken back to Morgan's apartment.
A guy came up next to me, back here in the present.
It took a few moments to pull myself out of my Bahamalama-Dingdong reverie, but I could tell from his scent that he'd just come back into the bar from catching a smoke outside. His leather vest was cow-smell new, and he wore an intrigued expression. Maybe he'd heard I'd been asking about Morgan.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey. What's your name?"
"Cal." I reached to shake his hand.
"I'm Dave. So ... what are you into, Cal?" he asked.
I paused for a second before answering.
I couldn't tell him what I was really into: finding the woman who had turned me into a superhuman freak, taking the next step in destroying my bloodline - dealing with my progenitor, then hunting down any more peeps she had created, and then delving further into the endless, knotted tree of the parasite's spread. So I cast my mind back to the homework I'd been reading in the diner that morning as I'd waited for the clouds to clear.
"Hookworms," I said.
"Hookworms?" He took the seat next to me. "Never heard of that."
I sipped from my third Bahamalama-Dingdong.
"Well, they burrow in through your feet, using this enzyme that breaks down skin tissue, then travel along the bloodstream till they get into your lungs. They mess up your breathing, so you cough them up. But you know how you always swallow a little bit of phlegm?"
One of his eyebrows raised, but he admitted he did.
"Well, a few hookworm eggs get swallowed along with the phlegm and travel down into your intestines, where they grow to be about half an inch long." I held up my fingers a hookworm's length apart. "And they develop this circle of teeth in their mouths, like a coil of barbed wire. They start chomping into your intestinal wall and sucking your blood." I realized I was going into drunken detail here and paused to check if he was still interested.
"Really?" His voice sounded a bit dry.
I nodded. "Wouldn't lie to you, Dave. But here's the cool thing. They produce this special anticlotting factor, kind of like blood antifreeze, so the wound doesn't scab over. You become a sort of temporary hemophiliac, just in that one spot. Your intestines won't stop bleeding until the hookworm gets its fill!"
"Hookworms, huh?" he asked.
"That's what they're called."
Dave nodded gravely, standing back up. He grasped my shoulder firmly, a serious expression on his face. His thoughtful features seemed to reflect for a moment the hard road I had in front of me.
"Good luck with that," he said.
I figured seven Bahamalama-Dingdongs would do the job.
That was probably more than I'd drunk my first time at Dick's, but these days I was older and more superhuman. I did a professional job of getting off my stool, and my feet got into a pretty good rhythm after shuffling a bit at first. My metabolism may be peeped up, but there's only so much rum even my body can process before it starts to sputter. All in all, I'd managed a pretty fair reconstruction of my first really wicked buzz in New York City.
I headed off to retrace my stumbling path from a year before.
The bartender watched me go with an impressed-looking nod, and Dave waved from behind the pool table. As the evening had progressed, he'd sent some of his friends over to ask about hookworms, and they'd all listened attentively. I'd thrown in some stuff about blood flukes, too. So it hadn't been like drinking alone.