From the moment I set out from my uncle’s cabin, I hoped to find a place like this. It’d missed it so much—wrapped in the cozy cocoon of cigarette smoke and whiskey fumes. It had been years.

The La Condesa Cantina and Sports Bar was in a predominantly Latino neighborhood on the edge of downtown San Antonio. I tried to get the attention of the man working behind the bar for a second beer, but all he did was shoot me a stern glare. The bartender, like everyone else in this place, stared intently at the TV. Some sort of game show. I shrugged and helped myself to a bowl of salted peanuts.

I’d had my fill of television some years back, and my eyes didn’t linger long upon the set mounted up near the ceiling. Just some guy with a preacher’s wig—some famous person I’d seen before but who I couldn’t place—and he was energetically encouraging some people to play a game of chutes and ladders. Well, that’s what it looked like. When the show broke for commercials, the bartender finally came over.

He poured another beer and set the mug in front of me.

“Yeah, we don’t do that, cabrón.”

“Pardon?” I asked.

“We don’t interrupt Serpientes y Escaleras. That’s what we don’t do.” The bartender nodded in a manner that I understood to mean I’d used up my one free pass.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not familiar with the show.”

A moon-faced man with a bad haircut who sat on the stool beside me pivoted around. Other than myself, he was the only Anglo customer in the bar.

“Not familiar with Serpientes y Escaleras?” he said loud enough for everyone to hear.

The bar fell silent.

“I’m not,” I said, wondering how large a blunder I had made choosing this place. “I just came into town.”

The bartender looked at me with suspicion.

“I’ve been in the mountains these last few years,” I added.

The bartender softened, now curious. “From the mountains? We hardly ever get travelers.”

The moon-faced man grinned.

“Dang, Stranger,” he said, “but you’re in for a treat. Maiden voyage on the good ship Serpientes y Escaleras.”

The patrons, as one, hissed for silence as the logo for the show came back up.

My eyes went to the television. On the screen was a striking woman with high cheekbones, severe eye makeup, and lipstick of the darkest red imaginable. She stared intently into the camera. I knew her. I was sure of it.

“Yes, sir,” Fran whispered to me. “Look upon the miraculous Saligia Jones at her finest!”

Saligia! Of course. And the man in the crazy wig…could it really be Silverio Moreno? Then the camera cut to him standing behind a candy orange Fender Rhodes electric piano. Yes. It was really him. My old friend, Sy.

But that was impossible.

Or was it?

I’ve never cared for game shows, so I can’t provide any critical insight. It seemed to me more convoluted than it needed to be, and I was confused by pretty much all of it. It appeared to involve mind-reading. I think.

The show ended when the big lighted game board indicated that one of the two contestants had landed on a special square. The flashing light that represented his game piece slid down the snake or chute or whatever and won with a great deal of noise and excitement.

But because this was a game of moral arbitration (I guess), the winner was awarded life everlasting in paradise, and the loser was to be sent to hell or purgatory. Again, I think I have it right, but I’m not positive.

I hadn’t been giving much scrutiny to the rules. Mostly I was watching Sy and Saligia. I had previously seen them perform, but never on a game show.

The one thing about the show that got my attention was the very ending. The winner was taken to a door. Door Number One. The loser, to Door Number Two.

The doors were both opened so that the contestants could be escorted inside. Then the doors were closed. Dramatically, I’ll admit. Though it’s hard to make the closing of doors dramatic.

And that was it. Music played, audience, cheered, lights flashed.

Credits rolled.

The end.

What a wasted opportunity. I mean, I knew a bit about visual story-telling in general, and television in particular. If the point of your show is that the winners are magically spirited away to heaven, and the losers, hell, then you really should have a moment when those doors are opened back up to reveal them to be empty.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

But that never happened.

It would be like a magician peering down into his upturned hat and saying, “yep, the rabbit’s in there—just take my word for it.”

The crowd at La Condesa had no problems with how the show ended, however. They were cheering and banging on the bar top like they’d just seen the most amazing thing ever.

Their excitement allowed me to make my exit unnoticed.

###

It had been a few years since I’d been drunk. Even a bit. I stepped out of the bar, marveling at how still the night was. I knew this neighborhood from years ago, when my grandparents lived in San Antonio. I’d come here during the summers when I was a teenager, darting down the alleys with the local kids, eating pan dulce on the porch of the abandoned house across from the tire repair shop, drinking beer at night along the creek, reading in the downtown library, second floor, at the table near the air conditioner vent.

My grandparents were long gone. But the neighborhood appeared much the same. Even the La Condesa Cantina and Sports Bar—though back then I was too young to have ever caught a glimpse of the interior. These quiet streets seemed untouched by the years. Or by the Changes.

I stood there, on the sidewalk beneath the lighted sign for La Condesa. I realized I was savoring this warm wave of nostalgia. I knew that once I started walking through the city I would soon begin to encounter those disconcerting remainders and reminders of the Changes. However, in this moment, this peaceful moment, I could pretend that they had never happened.

Pretend that the world of my boyhood was still here.

I heard the door to the bar open behind me. Once the game show had ended, the television was shut off. So now the place had become move lively with drunken laughter and music from the jukebox.

“Disappearing back into the night, Stranger?” asked the man who had been sitting next to me. “Maybe returning to the wilderness?”

I’m no fan of nicknames, and Stranger made me feel like some vaguely sinister character out of a Howard Hawks western. But I saw no point in introducing myself to a man I’d likely never see again.

“I appreciate a man who can step away from the bar after just a couple of drinks,” he said. His tongue fumbled with some of the words, and he seemed to have enough presence of mind to find that amusing. “As you can see,” he added with a smile, “I don’t always manage to do so myself.”

“I don’t know anyone in town,” I said. “I need to start looking for a hotel before it gets too late.”

Earlier when Nora and I had arrived in town, we crawled unnoticed out of our secret compartment. She had dramatically hugged me, insisted that we meet Saturday “at high-noon in front of the Alamo,” and she vanished into the crowd of well-dressed people getting off the train. Without much difficulty, I found a tiny shop near the courthouse which advertised cash for “gold jewelry, gold coins, and gold teeth.” I was relieved to sell off a couple of my coins for a substantial wad of folding money. More than enough for a good meal, some new clothes, a couple beers, and now, hopefully, a place to sleep.

“Not much of a call for hotels,” the man said. He looked at the sky, lost for a moment in his boozy sway, like a dandelion in the breeze. “Folks don’t go traveling these days,” he said softly.

“I saw a few people get off a train today,” I said. “They looked like tourists to me.”

“Oh, that magnetic train.” He shifted his head as if trying to focus on something out beyond the horizon. He gave up and lowered his gaze. “It caters mostly to rich weirdos who’d want nothing to do with likes of us. Besides, they usually stay at La Vida Tower.”

“That’s a hotel?”

“Sort of. They do have rooms to rent on the lower floors, but they don’t come cheap. So, unless you have a fortune and a hankering for deep tissue massage and chocolate fountains at the breakfast buffet, I’d not bother.”

“Massage at a buffet?”

“What? My goodness but you’re all hayseed and fireflies. The big city’s going to eat you up! There are some good and cheap hotels around. Not for travelers so much. Mostly to accommodate temporary bachelors, tossed out on their tails by womenfolk. Poor naifs such as myself. So, Morris my man, follow me to where there’s always a vacant room or two.”

I allowed him to lead the way. As we walked down Dolorosa Street, he rattled on about how he wished he, too, had run off to the mountains as the Changes swung into high gear.

“Everyone—well, most everyone—seemed to become less and less disturbed and confused as the world became more disturbing and confusing. They fell into a fog. Not me, though. I believed—well, at first—that I was going crazy and those others, they were the sane ones. I started drinking then. Kind of my own special brand of fog. But then I began to encounter the occasional person whose mind seemed to reach up and above the fog. Not a one of them knew what was going on, but they sure weren’t pretending nothing was going on. Well, I take that back. There were a few who claim to know what’s going on.”

“I’ve meet a few,” I said. “Prophets and gurus.”

“Yep. There’s a group led by a fellow used to be a cellist with the symphony. They’re holed up in the Bexar County courthouse, and worship this levitating futon. Since the Changes began, it hasn’t once touched the earth. It floats in the basement foyer, untroubled by errant breezes or those who clamber upon it.”

“I once had a stegosaurus eat a sugar cube from my palm,” I said.

“We’ve all seen an eyeful, we have. Some of us…well, we have our theories and speculations and we gather together. We’re certainly not so public as those Futonians at the courthouse. Or those free love fanatics down in Poteet.”

“Poteet, you say? That a town?”

“Those of us with a more inquisitive bent, we meet in the shadows—so to speak—where we can exchange ideas, all in attempts to understand this fog of the mind which blew in with the Changes.”

He stopped and tilted back his head to look up at the tall building across the street from us.

“Is this where you live?”

“Far from it.” He chuckled. “A whole world of difference between my humble home and La Vida Tower.” His turned to look at me, and he lowered his voice. “During the Changes it vanished. The whole building. One day it reappeared. The same, but not quite the same.”

“Chocolate fountains, right?”

“What? Oh, yeah.” He pointed up. “At the top, that’s where they make Serpientes y Escaleras.”

“But we’re not going there,” I said. “Right?”

“Shh!” he hissed. He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into the deep shadows of an alleyway.

Through the glass panels of La Vida Tower’s revolving door, we saw a woman pushing her way through and then walked out onto the sidewalk. We watched her until she disappeared around the corner of the building.

“It’s her,” Fran whispered. “The newest star of Serpientes y Escaleras.”

“The girl who was wearing the red dress? You sure?”

“There are amazing things which go on at the top of that building. Things much more important than some dingy floating futon. I don’t know much, Stranger, but that much I do know.”

“Please,” I said, “call me Morris.”

“And you can call me Fran,” he said. “Short for Francis. Come on. Let me introduce you to the sad bachelors of the Omega Hotel.”

I was tempted to ask Fran to wait. Maybe the grand man himself, toupee and all, would come down as well. I was curious. From what I had seen on the television screen, Silverio Moreno was looking quite healthy. And I thought I killed him years ago.