by Paul Neuhaus
Did I even care about or want Elijah anymore?
Absolutely not. I looked at him and felt nothing. No physical attraction; no desire for intimacy. Nothing. He’d become even more of a man-child than he’d been when I loved him. I no longer viewed him as an equal, and I sure as hell didn’t want a mate, I’d have to both love and raise as an offspring. Was I being unfair? Maybe his retreat into childish things was the same as my retreat into my trailer. That certainly made sense, but the idea didn’t sway me. My feelings toward El were a funny cocktail of resentment and indifference. Not a good basis to reignite an old spark. Plus, the whole thing had been his fault. A drunken indiscretion had led to years and years of disappointment and detachment. If El had been able to keep his drunken dick in his pants, the span from roughly 2003 to the present would’ve been very different. Try as I might, I couldn’t forgive him for that.
Okay, so forget about Elijah. Why not try and find someone new?
Because no-one was trustworthy. Everyone was either a heat-seeking missile of selfishness, or they were a pinball bouncing around randomly off the bumpers. Humans were bad; Mythniks were worse. As petty and stupid as Men could be, Mythniks were both supernatural and Greek. Being immortal led to entitlement. You felt you were better than all the other living creatures, and the world should treat you accordingly. Throw in the Greek element with its overwrought, histrionic behaviors and you had a recipe for insufferableness. The older I get, the less tolerant I am of affectation, and Mythniks seem to always walk beneath clouds of tiresome affectation. So, that was it, I guess. On the subject of romantic possibility, no-one was worth my consideration. In a world of eight billion people, that was a depressing notion.
What am I? What am I really?
I’m a robot. I have one purpose and that is gathering up bad things and putting them into a box. When I thought about what I was at that moment versus what I’d been when I was a little girl, I couldn’t see a connection at all. It was like two different people living two different lives. What had I wanted when I was a child? What had I wanted to be? I dug down under all the layers of soil and rock to find that little girl and ask her.
What’d you wanna be when you grew up? Times were simpler back then, and there weren’t as many options—for little girls or little boys. I think that might’ve been a good thing. I want to be a wife and mother, the little girl said to me, echoing through time and experience. Quaint. Retrograde. Subversive by modern standards. But there it is.
What do I want to be now?
If the wiring is in and I can’t find someone to share my life with, I guess what I want to be is unmoored. Once upon a time, I told myself I wanted to die, but that wasn’t it. Not really. The truth is, I have a healthy ego, and I can’t imagine a world without me in it. More to the point, and given my years of duty and wandering, I couldn’t imagine a world where I wasn’t doing exactly what I wanted to do every second of the day. I’d earned that, I thought. After my adventure with Orpheus and Medea, I thought I’d found a different, possibly better outlook. An outlook where I was open and not only willing but eager to engage with and help others. After my adventure with Adrestia and the Kraken, I felt everything I’d wanted had been thrown back in my face. It felt punitive. It felt gratuitous. A new me began to emerge. A new me that said, It’s time to look out for number one. It’s time to become “Power Dora”; to embrace a great love I’d been neglecting. And that love’s name was, of course, “Dora”.
That’s what I came there to think. I thought it, and it was time to go.
I walked back to the sand, sat for a moment to replace my footwear, and headed back toward the trees. As I approached where I’d entered, I had a funny thought: There will be no pining Sicilian women in my life. I won’t allow it.
I fell out of the pinecone. It was in motion when I passed from the world inside to the world outside, and so I fell. I landed on my ass in front of my desk and was dazed for a moment, unclear what was happening. I looked up and there was Keri Wiener, standing over me. She’d just picked up the pinecone and was carrying the pithos and my bass guitar. She had a Dutch boy haircut with a Flock of Seagulls point in the front. She was surprised to see me. In fact, she gasped and spun on her heel. She ran toward the open door of the trailer. Beyond her, I could see a waiting car. The car was full of kids in their late teens and early twenties, all of them sporting Dutch boy haircuts with Flock of Seagulls points in the front. “Come on! Come on!” the girl in the passenger seat yelled.
I snapped out of teleportation lag and went after Keri. I snagged her by the cuff of her right pant leg and jerked just as she was leaping into the backseat of the getaway car. I cut into her momentum only slightly and she still landed across the laps of the kids in the vehicle. Though I didn’t stop her, she did drop the pithos. The jug hit the pavement (and I winced as it did), but it didn’t break. It rolled to the left of the car and I lost sight of it. The car burned rubber, threw off smoke and jetted toward the sea. As I watched, it took a hard U-turn, passed in front of the Tonga Lei Lounge and disappeared down Pacific Coast Highway. Someone finally had the idea of shutting the right rear door.
I’d landed flat on my stomach in front of the trailer. I rolled over, so I could sit on my bottom and look over toward Hope. She’d come to rest against the left front tire of my Pontiac Firebird Esprit. “Maybe you should’ve locked the door,” Hope said.
“Ya think?”
I took Hope back into the house and shut the door. I put her down on the desk and took stock. I had no idea how long Keri had been inside the trailer before I came out of the pinecone, but the place looked its usual slovenly self. She took my cone and my Gene Simmons bass, and she’d tried to take Hope too. I drew an immediate and, I think, correct conclusion: Keri had no interest in my things. If she’d taken them, she’d taken them for the Church of Reciprocity—and that meant some bad mojo was in play.
I’ve already told you most of the details I know about the C.O.R. Most experts considered them a cult. They’d badgered their way into tax-free status (mostly through litigation), but they were by no means a real religious entity. They used their converts for slave labor, they kept their people on a special diet, and this being Hollywood, they counted several celebrities as members. But what could they possibly want with a magic pinecone, a battle-axe-shaped guitar, and a jug meant for capturing Evil? I discounted the bass as unimportant right away. Keri had probably been sent for the pinecone and the pithos, seen the bass as something shiny and neat and grabbed that too. The pinecone and the jug were the only things I owned that were worth a damn. Both were significant magic items from the Greek tradition. The pithos had once been called “Death Star of Greek antiquities”. That the jug had been the thing Keri dropped was good. It was real good. I’d had Hope stolen once before and it was an angsty time. Thankfully, that was off the table. But what could be done with a magic pinecone? Not much as far as I could tell. It was great for anyone who wanted a) a taste of ancient Greece or b) a good blowjob, but it wasn’t good for much else.
“Stop pacing,” Hope said at last.
I’d been pacing and hadn’t realized it. I stopped. “What do you think that was all about?” I asked her.
“Why would Keri Wiener wanna rob us? I dunno. I don’t know much about this church she’s attached herself to. Are they on drugs? Keri looked like she was on drugs.”
“Keri was on drugs before the cult. I doubt she’s on drugs now. The Church of Reciprocity has a fairly Christian-y code of ethics. They don’t like homosexuals, or drinkers or druggers. Although there have been rumors about their food.”
“Their food?” the disembodied voice from inside the pithos said. “What do you mean their food?”
“They only eat food they generate themselves. Like Herbalife or Jenny Craig. Some people say it’s full of chemicals. Mind-altering chemicals to encourage conformity. It could be an urban legend, but, a while back, these dudes analyzed some in a lab and they were gonna come forward with their
findings. The C.O.R.’s lawyers dropped like Thor’s hammer. That’s how they operate. Through legal proceedings, threats, intimidation. Outside their own circles, they’re not well-liked.”
“People call them ‘space hippies’…”
“That’s right. You pay to rise up through their ranks. Supposedly, when you get to the top level, they crack a vault and you get to see the sacred scriptures. A bullshit tale about how we’re all descended from aliens or something.”
“Are you sure we’re not descended from aliens or something?”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t wanna get into theology right now, but, even if we are descended from aliens, I doubt it’s the set the Church of Reciprocity claims it is. I never bothered reading the story. It’s on the Internet somewhere. Supposed to be bat-shit crazy.”
“Okay, so what’re we gonna do?”
“You’re assuming we’re gonna do anything.”
Hope sighed a disappointed sigh. “Come on, Dora. You’re snapping right back into the place you were before—only worse. This isn’t you. And even if it was you, you’d be duty-bound to get up off your keister and pitch in.”
“Duty-bound? I really don’t like the sound of that.” I was doing my level best not to alienate Hope too. I did have to live with her, after all.
“Yes. Duty-bound. As a living person you’re obligated to stand up and find a fuck to give. Forget Keri is Elijah’s daughter. I think—and I’m convinced I’m right—it’s completely irrelevant. Keri is a person. A woman. A woman with whom you’ve shared experiences and a strong bond. Fuck Elijah. Elijah’s a goofball, but that doesn’t mean you should leave Keri to twist in the wind. It’s… It’s immoral is what it is.”
I gotta hand it to Hope. She’s good at righteous indignation. She also rarely swears, so when she throws in a ‘fuck’ you better listen. But I was still torn. The talk I’d had with myself inside the pinecone still hung over me. I wasn’t sure I could muster a fuck. To give that is. It wasn’t in keeping with the “Power Dora” mandate. “I don’t know…”
“You don’t know? You don’t know what? Whether you want to help Keri. If that’s true, I’m ashamed of you. But forget that for a minute. What about the pinecone? We already know the kind of things that could happen if I fell into someone else’s hands. I have no idea what happens if someone gets the pinecone. Maybe nothing happens, but do you really wanna wait around and find out?”
I sat down on the edge of my couch, my hands clasped in front of me. I was overloading. Too much input from wildly different sources. I closed my eyes. “Okay, but we don’t know where Keri went. She could’ve gone to any of the church facilities in L.A.” The C.O.R. was big into real estate. They’d bought a lot of property in L.A. County back when it was cheap.
“How many facilities have they got?”
“Saying they’re like Starbucks would be an exaggeration, but not a massive exaggeration. They’ve got a huge recruitment center right on Hollywood Boulevard.”
“Of course, they do. Hollywood Boulevard leads the world in cultist per capita.”
I brought my fists up and rubbed my eyes. I opened them again and my vision was noisy. “I’m clueless. I have literally no idea where to start looking,” I said at last.
Hope hesitated before saying what she had to say next. “Then you know what you need to do…”
“I do?”
“Yeah. There’s only one thing you can do. You have to go to Westwood and talk to Elijah. He’ll have more details.”
“Huh? You were here when he was here. He wasn’t exactly a fount of information. And, despite what people seem to be thinking lately, I’m not Sam Spade.”
The girl inside the jug made a pffting noise. “Except that, both times people thought you were Sam Spade, you actually solved the case. You don’t give yourself enough credit. When you’re on your game, you’re the strongest most self-possessed person I’ve ever met. And I’m older than you are.”
I’m glad she shut up when she’d did. If she’d continued in “Up with Dora” mode, I might’ve screamed. I put my head between my knees and exhaled sharply. “Fuck. I really don’t wanna talk to Elijah again.”
“Then don’t talk to Elijah again.”
“But you just said—”
“Don’t talk to Elijah again. Talk to the goofball that Elijah’s become. Nowhere is it written you have to treat him like the guy who was your boyfriend. He’s not that person anymore, so if you wanna hold contempt for him, hold contempt for him. Just do it while you’re pumping him for info.”
That made a weird kinda sense. I raised my head. “That’s pretty cold,” I said.
“So, it’s cold. Sometimes, to get through, you just gotta do what you gotta do.”
She had no way of knowing it, but what she’d said was in line with my new “Power Dora” philosophy. I stood up about as reluctantly as I could and grabbed a jacket off the hook by the front door. I started to grab Hope, but I noticed something behind my desk. It was the canary yellow flier I’d stuck to the bulletin board about a month before. It advertised the Church of Reciprocity’s Conclave of Universal Consciousness. An outdoor festival to be held at the Parthenon Restaurant between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Obviously, it was the “convention” Keri teased her father about. It was one day away.
I snatched the flier, picked up Hope and made for the Firebird.
Here’s a detail about that flier I might not have mentioned. Bloop featured prominently along the entire right side. If you’re not aware, Bloop is the mascot of the Church of Reciprocity. He’s a cute purple alien, and he was designed—sometime in the early 1960s—by a former Disney animator. He is, in point of fact, adorable. The Church has made as much money from Bloop merchandise as they have from bilking their flock.
Anyway, I felt ambivalent as I realized the Conclave of Universal Consciousness was probably gonna be a bad scene. The feeling didn’t jibe with the friendly spaceman who was inviting me to attend.
3
Road Trip
My stomach was burning all the way from Malibu to Westwood. The whole idea of what I was about to do didn’t sit well. I’d turned into a superhero in my last two forays away from the trailer. Although there was some satisfaction in doing the things I’d done and not dying, I didn’t want to press my luck. Also, being a superhero is, I suppose, like being the frontman in a band. It comes with visibility and visibility was the last thing I wanted right then. I had butterflies. The same kind of butterflies you get when you’re in the doctor’s office waiting to get your test results. It was an awful way to feel.
I probably should’ve stopped for lunch, but my belly scoffed at the idea. My anxiety gave me tunnel vision. I stared at the road and was barely there until I pulled up in front of the Wiener house. After I parked the Firebird on the street, I went around and got the backpack I used to carry Hope around with me. Like it or not, I was motivated now to keep a closer eye on her. As I got into the harness, I slapped myself lightly on my right cheek. I realized I’d probably be going into yet another dangerous situation soon, and I couldn’t afford to have such a divided mind. Although, I hoped I wasn’t about to get into another dangerous situation.
As I slammed the trunk and turned toward the house, a voice startled me. “You came!” it said. I pivoted, ready for action, but it was only Jack, Elijah’s identical twin brother. The one with the foul ball divot in his head. I say “only Jack” but seeing him right then wasn’t a good thing. My nervousness red-lined. “I’ve been waiting, and you’re finally here!” he said. He wasn’t angry; he was overjoyed. That didn’t help.
The last time I’d talked to Jack, he told me he’d always been in love with me—even when I was dating El. My body went rigid. “Hi, Jack,” I said, barely audible.
“How’ve you been? I heard about what you did for Keri and El. Say, did you hear Keri’s missing and she’s in some kind of cult? That’s bad. It’s really, really bad. Is that why you’re here? Are you gonna help reprogram Keri? T
hat’s what they call it, right? Reprogramming? Sometimes I get my words confused. For a whole week, I said ‘eggs’ when what I really meant was ‘television’. I’d be all like, ‘Hey, did you guys see that thing on the eggs last night?’ and nobody called me on it—which is really funny, but also kind of annoying. If I’m saying ‘eggs’ and I mean ‘television’, someone should point it out, am I right? I guess they just figured that’s divot-head being divot-head. I would’ve much rather they told me. I mean it’s better for me and them. You probably would’ve told me, wouldn’t you?”
“I probably would’ve told you,” I mumbled.
“Yeah, I thought so. You’re a straight shooter. No bullshit. It’s one of the things I always liked about you. Or should I say loved about you?” He put on an affected grin. He was proud of his less-than-elegant transition.
I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another. “About that…”
He leaned in, wide-eyed and expectant. “Yes? Are we having the talk now? The one you promised we’d have? I’ve been waiting. Very patiently. I didn’t wanna crowd you. I said to myself after I saw you last, ‘Don’t crowd her, Jackie. She needs her space. It’s a lot to take in’.”
“It is a lot to take in. I was just— “
“I mean I wouldn’t know how to handle it If some chick I knew was suddenly all like, ‘Jackie! I love you! I’ve always loved you. Run away with me!’ I might be severely freaked. Although, who knows? Maybe I’d call her by the wrong noun and she’d leave, and she’d be all confused. Old divot-head’s maybe not the best at the interpersonal stuff. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I was worth a damn pre-divot, but you take the hand you’re dealt. It doesn’t matter if your cards are lousy if they’re the only cards you’ve got.”