“Well, Baron Turbot has some winning qualities,” said Sheila weakly.
“Which?” asked Esther, hoping for some validation in Ohnstad’s short-lived pursuit of her. She turned her head to the backseat and sped up still more, pushing the Duesenberg to new limits. I clenched.
“Well, he’s much improved. He isn’t so set in his ways as lots of liberals and yuppies. Tarbox, uh, Turbot doesn’t have guile. For white trash, he’s rather good.”
“Do you suggest he’s too simple-minded to have guile?” asked Deronda. “That raises some ethical issues.”
“Forget Turbot. What about Arlene?” I asked, knowing full well we couldn’t just scrape aside Tarbox, and I was worried that we ourselves might soon need to be scraped off the highway as roadkill. We were approaching a four-leaf clover near Bear Mountain. “Do you think he’s reformed or really changed in any way? That new institute, for example, the, uh, IPCSRECPP”—somehow I didn’t feel the acronym would catch on—“he’s still bent on exposing people who believe in horoscopes, dowsing, Plant Spirits, Druids, crop circles, UFOs, and the like. Some practical jokester—first he convinces people of the paranormal, then he exposes them for their gullibility.”
“Again, this raises some ethical issues,” said dour Deronda.
“Yes, but he renounced that tactic—he was really sorry about turning me into a heron. And he donated his Cardiff Giant costume to the Smithsonian.”
“Tax write-off, not contrition,” opined Deronda.
To be sure, Ohnstad’s costume was ironically given a higher appraisal by Sotheby’s than the Cardiff Giant himself. They appraised him at one penny per pound—$29.95 plus shipping and handling. The Farmers’ Museum then decided against selling the fake.
“Don’t you think it takes some courage to go through a sex change?” I asked. “I wouldn’t have known Ohnstad had that in him.”
Esther turned her head to the backseat again, goosing the accelerator and dipping into what she still coveted by way of Freudian explanation. “Jack, don’t conflate psychic needs with moral vir—”
The Duesenberg had just reached the top of the four-leaf clover when she lost control. We sailed off the petal loop into space, the weight of the automobile brushing aside the retaining wall as if it were the balsa wood of Sheila’s stage sets. Despite our takeoff speed, it seemed like slow motion as we sailed out in terror, wondering what death would feel like. Sheila must have had a sense of déja tombé. But in her earlier free fall, she was rescued by Tarbox. What we needed now was a choir of angels with fast reflexes.
“Jesus, Es!” I cried.
“Just hold on, guys!”
The Duesenberg continued to arc through the air, rising gracefully then slowly gliding down, as we braced and muttered prayers. I saw the hackneyed radiant golden light at the end of a dark tunnel.
The limousine softly alighted without a sound. We were relieved that death had been painless. Now what?
Lots of white stuff, the clouds of heaven, was swirling about. But I noticed my companions hadn’t sprouted wings, and no cherubim and seraphim. Then I ascertained we were moving along the highway, elevated by something or other, making our way down the four-leaf clover in the opposite direction.
“Have we landed on a giant turtle?” asked Sheila.
The entity we landed on came to a halt. It was no turtle. We peered down through the swirl and saw two angry men approach the back of their flat truck. We opened windows.
“Sorry about that,” said Esther, choking on the white swirling stuff. “I hope we’ve not discommoded you. I have some leftover Klonopins.”
“Lady, do you know where you’ve landed? Smack dab on our cargo. There’s gonna to be hell to pay.”
“What’s your cargo?” she asked.
“Organic goose-down featherbeds, bitch. Two hundred and eighty-four of them. Fuckin’ expensive.”
“Two hundred and eighty-four—that number’s pronounced rapad in Hebrew—the root means ‘to prepare the mattress of love.’ And we went off a four-leaf clover! That’s for good luck.”
“And they’re organic!” exclaimed Sheila.
“You two are backsliding,” I cautioned. “There’s a rational explanation for our soft landing. Yes it’s a piece of good luck but, sorry, no suspension of the natural order. With better luck we wouldn’t have gone off the road in the first place.” Though I had to admit, it was a major miracle to be alive.
“What are you meatheads talking about?” asked one of the truckers. “You’ve got some explaining to do—to the fuzz!”
Meatheads? Fuzz? These truckers were heirs to an antediluvian vocabulary.
“Now see here,” said Deronda, “we are quite sorry about what happened. The fault is entirely our own. And it falls to me to take care of any damage to your cargo. I shall simply make out a check. No need to call the . . . fuzz.”
“While we’re at it, why don’t we buy some of these organic featherbeds?” suggested Sheila diplomatically.
Tempers abated, and the truckers agreed that this wasn’t the time and place to unload a Duesenberg from a flat truck. We settled back in our seats while they drove us on to their destination. This turned out to be the Mohonk Mountain House, an imposing 1890s American Gothic structure that had been recently purchased from the Quaker owners and converted into a federal prison for Enron executives, television evangelicals, celebrity athletes, fracking enthusiasts, and talk show hosts. In purchasing feather beds, the feds were trying to create an environment that would earn the esteem of their inmates. A chain gang of Republicans, which included the recalled state governor, was invited to unload the Duesenberg and damaged featherbeds, to which we owed our very lives. Deronda made out a large check to the truckers and we took our leave.
Maybe it was a normal hesitation about getting back into the Duesenberg with Esther at the wheel, but I suggested we walk down to the quaint gazebo overlooking Lake Mohonk and unwind a bit before driving further. We now had more to ponder, given our near-death experience.
A full moon lit up the lake and surrounding woods to such an extent that we could see the riot of October foliage even at midnight. It was an unusually warm evening. I saw a rowboat cross the diagonal of moonlight on the lake—and in it were two lovers who had snuck the boat out against the rules. Reclining on bamboo chairs, we conversed. I was feeling autumnal.
“Seems like a long time since I first arrived in Cooperstown to check out that giant. So much has happened. I wonder what the moral is,” I said, setting the topic and knowing Deronda would have a ready answer.
“The moral is listen to your mother.”
Not bad, I thought. Mothers had played quite a role in the lives of Sheila and Esther too. But my own mother, that harridan, I’ve barely mentioned in this history. And let’s face it, there are many not-good-enough mothers in the world.
“What do you think, Es, apart from—how shall I say it?—keeping your eyes on the road.”
“Jack, you know I’ve traded in Kabbalah for mainstream cultural Judaism—and Danny’s sense of duty has rubbed off on me.” Deronda nodded. “I spend most of my time helping poor old Jews in the Bronx get enough brisket and then helping them get into caskets. No thanks to Freud, I don’t fret about my father anymore. And have you noticed? Sheila and I don’t fight about who had the harder time of it growing up. We’ve both got husbands and kids now—that’s progress.”
I knew from Sheila that Esther had some reservations about Deronda’s pajamas and other matters pertaining to the bedroom. It seems that whenever Esther prepared the mattress of love, Deronda broke out his fiddle.
“But what’s it all mean?” she continued. “Let me think. Well . . . giving up numerology was hard. It meant the universe was no longer jerry-rigged just for me. I’ve found different ways of throwing myself into the thick of things.”
“Throwing, yes. Sis, let’s face it, you’ve always been reckless.”
“But look,” said Esther, laughing, “the Doors had it righ
t. We’ve all broken through to the other side—Ohnstad, Tarbox, you, me, Danny, Jack. We’ve broken through and are just now finding out what’s here. It took hard knocks and flexibility and pluck . . .”
“And luck,” I added. “We’ve all had soft landings instead of our bums getting smushed. No thanks to guardian angels or alignment of the planets. But luck seems like special destiny after one has bounced up like rubber putty. You know, I’ve decided this is the greatest delusion of all. Every numbskull who becomes president imagines it was his special destiny. This is megalomania. The horoscope is megalomania. Look at Hazel Bouche. Our soft landings and happy endings weren’t sure bets—we’ve been lucky. I think the philosophers call this contingency. We could just have easily been characters in a tragic drama.”
Sheila weighed in. “But Esther’s right. We’ve added something. We weren’t just being bounced about like billiards. My big goof was letting everybody else have the power. It was in my psychic or my Plant Spirit guru, or it was in all the things that were out to get me, toxins, my father—those things had the power—not me.”
“Pardon some more backsliding on my part, but it sounds like paranoia,” said Esther. “No power. Others out to get you. Remember, sis, you had power over your sets, your costumes, your career. That’s what you wanted to be early on—before all the New Age stuff. That Plant Spirit Healer certificate you were working on when you jumped off the balcony—it’s an old saying but that certificate plus a subway token could take you to the Bronx. I liked it when we put on costumes at school theatricals—we decided which masks to wear, we played pretend, but it was still us, our faces, beneath the masks. We would come back to ourselves. That’s what we’ve done—come back to ourselves, maybe for the first time because we didn’t know how much we already had.”
This conversation was getting too solemn and I wasn’t sure anybody was making much sense. We all got drowsy as the moon descended, and before we knew it we were asleep.
I was the first to awaken, around six in the morning, and took survey of my slumbering pals. Deronda was humming in his sleep, Sheila was snoring, and Esther was speaking nonsense syllables. I looked out on the tranquil deep-watered lake, cast over by long shadows from trees that ringed it. Ripples appeared near the center. Trout or pike, I thought, having their bug breakfast. The ripples increased, then a large bulge appeared near the lake’s center. The water slowly parted as a thing slowly arose. I could make out a dark proboscis, then eyes emerged, then a full head the size of a rhino but shaped like a serpent. The creature turned in my direction and its eyes focused on me. I was paralyzed as in a dream where I wished to cry out and run but couldn’t overcome the immense drag of gravity. The long serpentine neck and coiling body set off in our direction, the undulations creating large waves. At about fifty yards it seemed to hesitate, then reared out of the water to a height of about sixty feet. It stood for a moment like a colossus, staring down at me quizzically. Its forked tongue, at least five feet long, darted out as if in search of giant frogs or maybe people—a serpent licking its chops.
But then it grinned and winked, deciding against eating us, I guess, settling for having given me a good scare. It set off in slow and ponderous undulations to the east.
“Sheila! Esther! Deronda! Wake up! Look there!”
Before I could rouse them, the creature had ducked back under, its long tail waving with a flourish. The ripples that gently cascaded forward and vanished on the rocky beach were the only evidence of a giant beast.
As recent converts to more skeptical ways of thinking, Sheila and Esther said I must be crazy. “Go back to sleep, Jack, you jerk,” said Esther. “Please, we’re sleepy,” said Sheila. Right, tables turned. I readily agreed I was sleepy and crazy and maybe it was a bad dream. I tried to go back to sleep, despite the distant clanging of a Green Party chain gang whipping up their goat cheese omelets and chicory lattes.
There’s no evidence I didn’t see the Lake Mohonk Monster. Can anybody say I didn’t? But I’ve decided to keep the matter to myself and not dwell on this monster, whom I’ve named Sally, as I bring this history to a close.
A sneak peek at Larry Lockridge's upcoming novel
The Great Cyprus Think Thank
The island of Cyprus is a world in miniature of what ails the human race. Bart Beasley, a midlist writer of cultural memoirs, forms a think tank of renowned but personally flawed experts. They will address problems still besetting Cyprus in 2024. A fast-paced string of heady and hilarious adventures follows, while romantic liaisons spring up within the ranks. Unknown to all except alert readers is a counterplot to undermine the think tank's best designs.
Prologue
Whenever my dreamworld turns bleak, I glare at my writing desk and cry out to solitary walls, “I’ll go abroad!” In early 2022 I was no longer dreaming of sphinxes, pyramids, and caravansaries. My night fantasies had given way to dark frustrations. I couldn’t find my classroom and, when I did, was without a syllabus or anything to say, while nameless students peered into iPhones and sullenly drifted off. When I took the elegant stairwell to my gala book launch at the Century Club, I beheld old friends no longer recognizable, for this was our fortieth high school reunion, and I was the emcee. A porter on the Trans Canada told me the Rockies had been leveled because—didn’t I know?—Saskatchewan was the new look for Canada. My worst dream was to survey my image in the bathroom mirror and see that I was sixty-two—worst because upon awakening I sighed at its unnerving truth.
The mind beneath mind that is the wellspring of dreams needed fresh water, and I knew where to find it—in the fabled and parched isle of Cyprus.
My doctorate in sociolinguistics has taught me a nonacademic kind of writer’s life. I pack my bags and set up in an exotic locale, quickly learn the language and native customs, and within a year or two, produce a novelistic memoir. You may already have read some of them. Thanks for downloading another—Bart Beasley’s The Great Cyprus Think Tank.
I was born in 1960 in Ottawa but spent four years in Cyprus while my father, a minor Canadian diplomat stationed in Nicosia in 1970, did what he could to make amends for the earlier British occupation of that unfortunate island. He advised the UN Peace Keeping Force in its deployment of Canadian military fodder. Upon the Turkish invasion of 1974 he took credit for deceiving the Turks and protecting the airport in Nicosia by telling the Canadians to move their pitiable handful of tanks around all night as noisily as possible, with bright lights. Good thinking. The Turks concluded the airport was too heavily fortified to bother with, at least at the time. But the invasion was so stressful that my father suffered a mild coronary and was sent home to Ottawa along with his wife and me, their only child. He died not long after.
Having clocked the years from ten to fourteen there, I found that Cyprus had lodged deep in my memory cells and re-emerged from time to time as a yearning. In 2022 it beckoned again.
As you know, to the amazement of everybody the world over, the island was reunified earlier that year. In a new pan-Cypriot bi-communal federation, restrictions on travel across the border imposed by the Turks in 1974 were lifted. Resettlement of displaced Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots was soon underway, with somewhat less gory jousting over old homesteads than might have been expected. But ethnic animosities persisted, as did other worries—desertification, a diet dominated by British chips, a rising sea level that threatened hatcheries of the famed sea turtles, the slaughter of migratory songbirds, and looting of antiquities for sale on the black market.
I’m not by nature a social engineer or utopianist. One motive was frankly self-interest in whipping up fresh material for this memoir. But I’d also felt at times an urge to do my species some good beyond fictionalized memoirs that leave little trace beyond an evening’s frolic in the minds of a handful of pale, unsatisfied readers seeking ports of call they can never visit because too poor, infirm, or lazy. Then too, there were deficits in my life that prompted my conscience to acts of compensation.
&
nbsp; I applied to the Soros foundation to fund a think tank. Let me enlist specialists to rescue the island, I told them. It took only a few hours on the internet to seek out the world’s finest, some of them already familiar with the island, and add their names to the application form. They included a zoologist, a nutritionist, a meteorologist, a neurologist, and an archeologist. My project may smack of presumptuous American world-beating, but keep in mind that I’m Canadian.
The Soros foundation knew a good idea when it saw one and, within weeks, was depositing large sums in my checking account at Chase on lower Broadway. This wasn’t my money, but it felt good to see my account plump up beyond a midlist author’s best imagining. I was teaching creative nonfiction at NYU as an adjunct and barely paying rent for a modest one-bedroom at 68 Carmine Street.
I’ll spare you two years of logistics. The Cyprus Think Tank took up residence in Káthikas, a small village in the west overlooking ancient Páphos. We numbered five geniuses plus me.
You may already know us from the singular episodes we occasioned during our brief tenure on the island, having gained influence within the new pan-Cypriot government. The Minister of the Interior was amused by my scheme, viewing it as crackbrained but harmless enough. And she was happy to receive a handsome subsidy from Soros, which could have purchased the entire island with cash on hand.
My special interest in Cyprus, beyond saving it and writing this memoir, was the literary connections—not native writers but the outsiders Arthur Rimbaud and Lawrence Durrell, who lived for brief spells on the island. The French poet was the negative lure, Durrell the positive. Rimbaud gave up verse at the age of twenty as the most precocious writer in the history of literature. He turned his back on the whole enterprise. What boots it? Whenever I suffer writer’s block, I say to myself, Rimbaud knew he need not write more, so why should I? Durrell kept writing beyond The Alexandria Quartet, but never again so well.
The Cardiff Giant Page 14