I shake my head, wipe my mouth, my eyes.
“Okay. I think maybe I should take you to meet my girl, Toshi. She works in this area, so she might know this double happiness place.”
I follow him a few blocks. I’m still trying to find the double happiness sign, but it’s even harder now because I got some sick on my address book and the ink’s smeared. Also, there are black spots dancing before my eyes making it hard to see where the pavement really is.
When we finally stop, I almost cry in relief. Because we’ve found it, the double happiness place. Everything is familiar. The steel door, the red scaffolding, the distorted portraits, even the faded name on the facade, Ganterie, after the glove factory it must have once been. This is the place.
Toshi comes to the door, a tiny black girl with tight dreadlocks, and I want to hug her for delivering me to the white room. I want to march straight to the white room and lie down next to Lulu, to have everything feel right again.
I try to say this, but I can’t. I can’t even really get my legs to move because the ground beneath me has turned liquid and wavy. Toshi and my samaritan, whose name is Pierre, are arguing in French. She wants to call the police and Pierre says they have to help me find double happiness.
It’s okay, I want to tell him. I’ve found it. This is the place. But I can’t quite make the words come out straight. “Lulu,” I manage to say. “Is she here?”
A few more people crowd around the door. “Lulu,” I say again. “I left Lulu here.”
“Here?” Pierre asks. He turns to Toshi and points to his head and then to my head.
I keep repeating her name: Lulu, Lulu. And then I stop but her name continues, like in an echo chamber, like my pleas are traveling deep into the building and will bring her back from wherever it is she’s gone.
When the crowd parts, I think it really has worked. That my words dredged her up, returned her to me. That the one time I wanted one to wait, one did.
A girl steps out from the crowd. “Oui, Lulu, c’est moi,” she says delicately.
But that’s not Lulu. Lulu was willowy with black hair and eyes as dark. This girl is a petite china doll, and blonde. She is not Lulu. Only then do I remember that Lulu is not Lulu either. Lulu was the name I gave her. I don’t know her real name.
The crowd stares at me. I hear myself babbling about needing to find Lulu. The other Lulu. I left her in the white room.
They look at me with odd expressions on their faces and then Toshi pulls out her mobile phone. I hear her talking; she is requesting an ambulance. It takes me a minute to realize it’s for me.
“No,” I tell her. “I already have been to the hospital.”
“I would hate to see you before,” Wrong Lulu says. “Were you in an accident?”
“He got beaten up by skinheads,” Pierre tells her.
But Wrong Lulu is right. Accident—how I found her. Accident—how I lost her. You have to give the universe credit, the way it evens things out like that.
Three
I take a taxi to Céline’s club. The fare eats into the last of my money but it doesn’t matter. I just need enough to get back to Amsterdam, and I already have a train ticket. On the short ride over, I nod off in the backseat and it’s only when we pull up outside La Ruelle that I remember we left Lulu’s suitcase here.
The bar is dark and empty, but the door is unlocked. I hobble down to Céline’s office. It’s dark inside there, too, only the grayish glow of her computer monitor lighting her face. At first, when she looks up and sees me, she smiles that smile of hers, like a lion waking from a nap, refreshed but hungry. Then I click on the light.
“Mon dieu!” she exclaims. “What did she do to you?”
“Was she here? Lulu?”
Céline rolls her eyes. “Yes. Yesterday. With you.”
“Since then?”
“What happened to your face?”
“Where is the suitcase?”
“In the storage room, where we left it. What happened to you?”