LITMIR.BIZ

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      “You have to stay with me Alex. Concentrate. Look at me. Stay with me.” There was a note of desperate pleading in Brenda’s voice. She was begging him to stay alive, a task he was not sure he could manage.

      “Come on Mckenzie, don’t give up on us now” Peter’s voice was also pleading but at a greater distance. With each word he seemed to fade away - moving back into a gray oblivion that was enveloping all that lay around him. In seconds that void would take him into its grasp.

      He had a vague sensation at being lifted and placed on something soft. A mask filled covered his nose and mouth as oxygen filled his lungs. Stretcher? Ambulance? The concepts were difficult to grasp. Probably too late for this, he thought.

      “I’m going to the hospital with him.” Once again Brenda’s voice, resonated with professional competence and raw determination. She was still bending over him, but the gray void was gathering around her as well. Mckenzie could feel his hold on consciousness weakening and slowing fading away.

      Then to his surprise, the world abruptly became brighter. A sharp glow pushed back against the void and he could see Brenda Stewart’s features with perfect clarity. As he watched, her face began to change, taking on a new form, a new shape, a new appearance. It began in the eyes. Her shining dark eyes lightened into the color of a cloudless sky on a summer morning. Brenda’s olive complexion was replaced by a pristine porcelain white, as unmarked or unblemished as newly fallen mountain snow. Her hair, moments before, a glistening black, cut into a pixie-like shortness now hung long and luxurious beside her face. The color was a deep auburn, the warm tone of burnished copper. When she smiled at him, now it was with an expression, not of anguish or regret, but of comfort, of compassion, of affection. It was Mireille.

      Mckenzie had never thought of himself as a person of faith. Churches, religion, prayer had never been part of his life. Perhaps he had been wrong. Looking now at this exquisite beauty, the adored image he had carried hidden in his heart for so many years, he wondered if this was what God did. Did God send an angel to get you when it was your time to leave this world?

      “No mon coeur, I’m not an angel.” She spoke to him and he could hear her soft breathy voice with absolute clarity. “It is not time for you to die. I need you Alexander. I need you to come for me.” Her smile was still there, but there was an expression of quiet entreaty in her blue eyes. “Only you can save me, mon amour.”

      His lips moved as he tried to speak her name. His right arm trembled as he strained in a futile effort to raise his hand to touch her check. Then the mist returned, it darkened and a smothering blanket of black oblivion swallowed him.

      It was the music that penetrated the blackness and forced open a door. The beat was a type of light jazz punctuated by sharp digressions on a guitar. He heard the music first, followed by a buzz of voices and then a growl of car engines passing behind him. He could sense people moving around him even before someone lightly brushed against his side.

      “Pardon moi, monsieur.”

      He opened his eyes and a physical world sprang back into existence. He was standing on a sidewalk, an urban walkway filled with pedestrians, some briskly passing by, others stopping to listen to the music. In front of him, the large glass window of a restaurant provided passers-by with an unobstructed view of a small jazz combo - trumpeter, bass player, and guitarist whose music was enticing all to enter.

      It had been twenty-five years since he had been here. Mckenzie had not the slightest doubt, however, where he was. The glass window belonged to a gathering place for the hip young professionals who resided in the area. It was the Chez Grenier on the Rue Oberkampf. He was in Paris.

      CHAPTER 8

      San Francisco 1982

      “A pilgrimage!” Marcus sarcastically and derisively dismissed the entire idea. His characterization was expressed in the same bitter tone of disappointment that dominated his increasingly strained relationship with his son. “You aren’t going to experience culture, see the sights, or revel in the arts. Hell, you aren’t even going to chase women.” Marcus snorted as if the last alternative would have at least sounded reasonable to him. “No, you want to go walk the holy road, touch the relics, and genuflect at the shrine. You want to go feed that sick fantasy of yours.”

      “Father, this really isn’t any of your business. I am not asking for your help. I have my own money saved and I can pay for the trip myself.” There was an obvious similarity in the tenor of Alex’s response to his father’s sneering observations. His reluctant conversations with Marcus routinely stretched the outer limits of civility. A search of his tone for any semblance of filial affection would have been fruitless.

      “I think you two need to dial it back a bit. You are supposed to be talking not fighting with each other.”

      Both Alex and Marcus turned with some surprise to look at Christie. Usually she just left the room when the latest round in the ongoing Mckenzie civil war broke out. It was something of a departure for her to intervene so openly.

      Alex actually welcomed the interruption more than Marcus did. Christine “Christy” Mckenzie, nee Hager, otherwise known as Stepmother Number Two, had developed an oddly friendly relationship with her husband’s difficult off-spring. It helped that she was closer in age to him than she was to her husband. From the beginning, Alex had understood her in a way Marcus had not. Marcus saw only the flashy, spectacular endowed blonde who looked so perfect on his arm—a young woman who could stir the delicious jealousy of his colleagues while simultaneously feeding the ego and libido of an aging male.

      Alex, on the other had, had seen through the well constructed veneer to the cunningly intelligent and more than a little mercenary woman who hid behind it. Christy understood both her role on the stage as well as the likelihood that the curtain would someday go down. Men like Marcus tended to replace trophy wives periodically by trading in for a newer model. Marcus had also crafted a fairly extensive prenuptial agreement that limited the financial rewards of divorce. So as the poet said “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” or as Christy interpreted the sentiment, spend as much as you can as fast as you can.

      A different son might have tried to warn his father about the financial depredations going on under his own roof. Alex choose instead to become an implicit coconspirator. He winked and grinned at Christie’s extravagances. He believed that there should be a price to be paid for being a wealthy amoral lecher and he was fully prepared to let Christie collect that bill from Marcus.

      In return, Christie tried when possible to run interference for him, to shield him from Marcus’s latest angry fixations. It was Christie who dissuaded the elder Mckenzie from cutting off his son’s university tuition when Alex insisted on taking degrees in literature and philosophy.

      Marcus had stormed about the house complaining loudly that Alex’s educational choices had no financial promise. “What the hell is he going to do with that kind of background - run a McDonalds?” Marcus had taken Alex’s most recent renunciation of any interest in the legal profession as a personal rejection - as an ongoing affront to his pride in being one of San Francisco’s leading trial lawyers. In that regard, Alex had squarely hit the target he aimed for.

      Christie had artfully deflected Marcus’s anger by reminding him that Alex was only in his early 20's and that there was plenty of time for him to make career choices. She completed her exercise in psychological manipulation by including a physical component that created a rare mellowness in Marcus’s disposition. Later she provided Alex with an edited account of this incident ending with the pungent observation that “You owe me your senior year, sonny boy.”

      “This is Alex’s graduation gift, dear.” Christie’s honey soaked words still had the power to bank the flames of her husband’s anger. She would retain that ability for almost four more years until Marcus’s wandering eye alighted on Melody, a/k/a Stepmother Number Three. At that time, Christie would gather her possessions, including her extensive jewelry collection and the pass book to her private checking account, kiss Alex on the check, and even smile knowingly at Marcus before making her uncomplaining departure. Christie knew how to

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