“Mandy Eloise Whitacre,” she recited, “January 15, 1951, 12790 North Lakeland Road, Hayden, Idaho, 83835. Arthur and Eloise Whitacre—Eloise passed away March 12, 1965. I graduated from Coeur d’Alene High School in 1969. Sophomore at North Idaho Junior College working toward a major in theater …”
There was a gentle knock on the door and it opened. Two nurses came in—at least she figured they must be nurses. One of them, a nice-looking lady in her forties, was dressed in dark pants and a comfortable blouse with pockets and had a stethoscope around her neck. She could have been somebody’s mom. The young, pretty one was wearing blue pants and a flowered top and had long hair done up in braids. Neither wore a cap. The younger one was pushing a little wheeled stand with a … Mandy didn’t know what it was. A TV? A typewriter? Both? How could it be so small and flat and be either one?
The mom-looking nurse said, “Hi, Mandy. I’m Dr. Fried, but you can call me Angela, and this is June.”
Mandy shook Angela’s hand, actually looking at it. It was warm and real. “Mandy Whitacre.”
“Go ahead, sit down,” Angela said, indicating the gurney. “Make yourself comfortable.”
Mandy settled back down, again trying not to crinkle the sheets.
Angela left the door half open—Johnny the cop was standing just outside like a wall, watching everything—then came close to Mandy, looking her in the eyes and with a gentle hand to her chin to turn her head, either side of her face. “So, what brings you here today?”
“The sheriffs.”
“June’s going to take your blood pressure, okay?”
Mandy was staring at the really flat TV hinged to a really flat typewriter as June wrapped the cuff around her arm. “Okay.”
“Do you know where you are right now?”
“Spokane County Medical Center.”
“That’s right.”
June pressed a button on a small white box; the cuff squeezed around Mandy’s arm all by itself and red numbers began blinking on a little machine. Now Mandy stared at that.
“And why do you think they brought you here?”
Mandy’s mind went dead in the water. The question wasn’t hard; it was the answer that was tough.
“One-forty over eighty,” said June, removing the cuff. “Pulse is one-ten.”
Angela nodded with a smile and touched Mandy’s hand. It was trembling a little. “It’s okay, Mandy. You’re safe.”
Mandy drew a deep breath, let it out, and tried to relax.
“That’s the stuff. Now hold still, just look at me.” Angela took an eye doctor’s instrument from her shirt pocket and shined it into Mandy’s eyes. “Try to keep them open just a little longer …” Then she took another instrument and looked in Mandy’s ears. With a gentle hand and soft words, she turned Mandy’s head, lifted her hair aside, and checked behind both ears. “I’m just looking for any bruising, any damage to your head.”
June was typing on the little flat typewriter.
“What is that?” Mandy asked.
June skipped a beat trying to understand the question. “What is what?”
Mandy pointed. “That thing you’re typing on.”
Angela rotated the stand so Mandy could see it better. “This thing right here?”
Mandy nodded, amazed at the words and lines and little blinking spaces on the screen—and there was her name in tight little letters as clear as a bell. It was like television, only much better.
June put a little white thimble over Mandy’s thumb and another gadget on a wheeled rack showed the results in more red numbers: 95, 97, 96 …
Angela saw the numbers and typed those in. “This is a computer. You’ve never seen a computer?”
June stroked a little gadget over Mandy’s forehead and said, “Ninety-eight point six.”
Now Mandy had to check that thing out. “Did you just take my temperature?”
June smiled. “Sure did.”
“No thermometer?”
“That’s what this is.”
Mandy reached out and touched, then tapped the edge of the computer screen. It was real under her fingers.
Angela was watching her. “Mandy, have you had any drugs or alcohol in the past twenty-four hours?”
This was worse than Planet of the Apes. This was Planet of the Weird Hospital of the Future … or The Time Machine Gone Crazy, or …
“Mandy?”
“I need to call my father.”
“Can I ask a few questions first?”
Mandy slowed her words down. “I need to call my father. He’s going to be worried about me. He doesn’t know where I am.”
“We’ll call him, but we need to be sure you’re all right first.”
Nobody ever listened! “I need to call him now!”
Johnny, still stationed just outside the door, gave her a corrective parent look, his weight shifted in her direction.
“All right, Mandy.” Angela reached into her pocket. “Here you go.” She handed Mandy a little plastic square thing, folded like a clam.
Mandy held the thing in her hand, turning it over, exploring, trying to understand it. She was getting that sinking feeling she got in school when she didn’t know the answer to a test question—and she could easily sense that Angela was playing the prof.
Angela reached over and opened the little clam. Inside were tiny buttons like an adding machine and … was that a television in there? What was this, another computer a whole lot smaller? Mandy felt totally stupid.
Angela asked, “Have you ever seen one of these?”
“Maybe on Star Trek. You know, ‘Kirk to Enterprise!’”
Angela reached over and took it from her. “What’s the number?”
“Parkway three-seven-one-two-zero.”
Angela and June looked at each other.
“Parkway?” asked June.
Angela asked, “You wouldn’t have another number we could try, would you?”
“That’s the only number we have.”
Angela shrugged with her eyebrows, tapped on the little buttons, and handed the thing back.
Mandy didn’t know what to do with it—was her dad going to pop up on that little TV like Captain Kirk?
Angela mimed holding a phone to her ear. Mandy put the thing up to her ear.
Oh. Wow. This was too much.
Right away she got a rude squeal and a voice: “We’re sorry, the number you have called is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again.”
“The number was wrong,” she said, staring at the little buttons.
“Press Off.”
Mandy obeyed.
“Now press Talk and try again.”
Mandy pressed Talk and listened. Dial tone. She entered the numbers again, watching them appear on the little screen. Wow.
“We’re sorry, the number you have called is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again.”
Mandy thrust the little plastic clam/Star Trek communicator back at Angela. “I need a real phone, one I can dial with!”
Angela took it from her hand. “Sweetie, this is a real telephone. It’s a cell phone, right?”
You expect me to know that? Mandy couldn’t sit. She was on her feet before she noticed, shuffling about the free floor space like a nervous fish in a very small bowl. “A cell phone.” Yeah. Riiight! Like everybody and his mother and his uncle and brothers had a cell phone! She wanted to bite somebody. “Where’d you get it?”
Angela gave a little shrug. “I bought it. You’ve never seen one?”
“No. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve never seen before, everywhere I look. It’s like I’ve gone into the future or something.”
Angela paused just a moment and her tone changed ever so slightly. “Mandy? What year is it?”
Mandy looked at her, looking for a sparkle in the eye, an upturned corner of her mouth. “You serious?”
Angela just tilted her head with an apologetic air and waited for an answer.
�
��It’s 1970,” said Mandy. “It’s September twelfth, 1970.”
“Who’s the president?”
Oh, come on! “Nixon’s president!”
“Okay.”
Now June was typing on the computer.
She is messing with me! “Nixon’s the president. Spiro Agnew’s vice president. You want to know the Speaker of the House? John McCormack!”
“Mandy …”
“And Nixon ran against Hubert Humphrey and Humphrey’s running mate was Ed Muskie and I don’t do drugs and I don’t drink and I never have!” Now Mandy was crying; she couldn’t help it.
“All right, Mandy, all right.”
“I’m not crazy!”
Johnny leaned in. “Everything okay in here?”
Who invited you? “I’m fine, thank you!”
He just kept that same old steel expression: Mr. Wall. Don’t try to get past me.
Angela whispered something to Johnny and then closed the door to only a crack. Then she sat with Mandy and put an arm around her shoulder. It felt good, warm and human. It gave her permission to cry, so she just let go. She needed to.
Angela spoke close to her ear, almost in a whisper, “Sweetheart, we’re your friends. We want to make sure you’re all right and we want to fix whatever’s wrong, but we need your help. We need you to help us help you. Do you understand?”
Mandy’s nose was running, but June had a tissue right there, just in time, and then another one for her tears. Mandy used both, received a third, and then nodded.
“Now, we’re going to do all we can to contact your father; we’ll get some people working on that right away and they can be doing that while we’re working with you, but right now we have to ask questions and do some tests and do all we can to isolate the problem. Will you help us do that?”
She wanted to trust them. She nodded again.
June remained seated at the computer, typing away while Angela asked Mandy a whole string of questions:
Full Name: Mandy Eloise Whitacre.
Age: Nineteen.
Address: Mandy could recite it without a hitch.
Next of kin: Her father, Arthur, and there was also her aunt Josie, her dad’s sister who lived in Seattle. June typed in all the phone numbers and addresses.
Height: Five-four.
Weight: 108.
On any medications? No.
Any allergies? None that she knew of.
Any past surgeries? No.
Medical problems? She fell off a horse once and sprained her ankle.
When was her last menstrual period? Just finished it last week.
So not much chance she was pregnant? No chance at all, since she’d never had sex.
Was she in school, working? She was attending North Idaho Junior College, pursuing theater, and working in the research library to offset her tuition.
“And when did everything become different? Do you remember what time, how long ago?”
That was easy. Mandy recounted the whole story, throwing in lots of details just to show her mind was sharp.
Angela listened, nodded, then asked, “Do you remember being in any accidents where you hurt yourself, where you may have hit your head?”
“My girlfriends and I went on some rides at the fair.”
Angela perked up a little at that. “What kind of rides?”
“Uh … the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Chair-O-Plane … and that thing that looks like a hammer on both ends and the cars tumble around while the big hammer spins—you know what I mean?”
Angela stepped back and looked her up and down. “Have you ever heard of a CAT scan?”
“I don’t think we went on that one.”
“Well, I’m talking about—”
“I’m kidding. But can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“What year do you people think it is?”
Angela looked around the room until she spotted something. “Let me show you, and you tell me what you think.” She stepped over and moved an IV pole that had been half covering a wall calendar, one of those charming calendars with a Norman Rockwell painting for each month. She pointed at the precise date. “Today is right here, September seventeenth, 2010.”
Mandy studied the calendar. The year 2010 was printed plainly over the month. No doubt she could touch that calendar and it would really be there. She was a little surprised at her own reaction, a strange, incredulous chuckle. Why shouldn’t it be 2010? By now they could have told her she was on Mars in an experimental futuristic city under a huge plastic dome with artificial weather and that would have fit in just fine with everything else. “What’s a cat skin?”
chapter
* * *
4
FIERY WRECK KILLS MAGICIAN
Mandy Eloise Collins, best known as the witty and offbeat wife and partner of Dane Collins in the magical duo Dane and Mandy, was killed yesterday and her husband, Dane, injured when the Collins’s car was sidestruck by another motorist, also killed in the crash. Dane Collins, riding in the passenger seat, escaped and was subsequently injured trying to rescue his wife from the burning vehicle… .
The news story went on recapping their career, identifying the drunk driver, quoting a police spokesman, covering the lesser details, blah blah blah. Dane could read only so far before the real world with its real pain returned, overrunning the stupor of the painkillers and the drug-induced oblivion of the previous night.
The photo was difficult enough. Arnie sent the Las Vegas Sun some promo pictures and an eight-by-ten for them to crop, resize, whatever they wanted, but of course it was the wrecked BMW that made the newsy photo, caved in on the driver’s side, gutted and charred throughout. The seats were reduced to misshapen steel and wire frames, and the floor was burned down to the metal. Half the roof was gone—that was how the rescue team got Mandy out.
Dane let the paper fall to his lap as he sat on the edge of the bed. Yeah, there was that sick, crushing feeling again, the head-bashed-against-concrete, immovable, immutable cruelty of the real world. Good morning, Dane. Glad to have you with us.
Earlier, by now another world away, he woke up by gradual degrees and found himself in a place that could not have been real, only a dream he didn’t have to believe. No, this didn’t have to be a hospital room. He wasn’t really hurt. The pain was only sunburn and maybe a charley horse here and there.
And any moment, Mandy would walk into the room, look down at him, and say, “Wow, that was a close one!” And he would say, “Yeah, sure was,” and then they’d take each other’s hands and thank God together that they made it through another one. God was taking care of them just as He always did. Remember that spinout we had on Donner Pass the winter of ’73? Got away without a scratch. Hey, what about that fall you took from the stage in Pittsburgh? If that nice gentleman had not been in the front row for you to land on …
But the sorrow was, he continued coming around. His eyes roamed in small circles, then greater, and everything he saw he discovered for the first time and then remembered: the bed in which he lay, the remote that raised and lowered the bed, the call button for the nurse, the television on the wall, the food tray waiting for breakfast or his next dose of pills, the graduated drinking mug with the hospital’s name on it, the happy face to miserable face pain chart, stripes of sunlight coming through the slatted blinds, and the flowers. Everywhere, the flowers. The room smelled like a florist shop—or a funeral, either one.
Oh, right. He’d had visitors bringing bouquets, loving words, comforting touches—on his left side only. Bouquets stood on the shelf, the sill next to the bed, the windowsill, even the floor below the window.
The daisies. Ernie and Katelynn Borgiere brought those because Mandy always liked them. Ernie was a stage magician in the classic style. Some of Mandy’s favorite dove tricks she got from him, and he was honored.
The red roses, pink lilies, and purple asters in the tall basket came from Pauline Vitori, musical director for Dane and Mandy’s six-wee
k run at the Las Vegas Hilton. That engagement was five years ago, Dane and Mandy hadn’t seen her in all that time, but she was here yesterday, teary-eyed and bringing a bouquet so big it had to sit on the floor.
Chuck and Cherry Lowell, Dane and Mandy’s pastor and his wife, were there for a great part of the day and brought the dozen roses and baby’s breath. The card read, “For a grand lady at the close of a great performance.”
Preston and Audrey Gabriel sent roses and a heartfelt letter. Preston, a veteran magician and innovator of magic, was the wise old man in Dane’s life. Now hosting a television show on A&E, he was making quite a name for himself debunking phony psychics and faith healers. He was always good for a deep discussion.
Carnations. Orchids. Lilies and birds-of-paradise. Greens shooting out of the vases and baskets like splashes. Ribbons. Cards.
So yesterday really happened.
Didn’t it?
Then Arnie arrived with a fresh change of clothes to replace Dane’s bloodied and burned ones, and handed Dane the morning paper.
Guess it did.
Dane went back to the photo and studied the car’s blackened frame, broken windows, collapsed steering wheel. It was time to face it. What happened, happened. No option, no escape, no denial. It happened, and the sooner he came to grips with that, the sooner he could learn to live with it. He studied the photograph until his stomach turned and his hands shook.
Arnie took the paper away from him. “That’ll be enough for today.”
He sank forward, elbows on knees, hands over his face, sitting on the edge of the bed, recovering, breathing. He didn’t cry this time, he didn’t know why. Maybe his whole body was tired of crying. He just ached, felt sick, felt as if he could never eat again. He wanted to stay in the dark behind his hands.
“You need help tying that shoe?” Arnie asked.
Dane let his hands drop from his face and the light of today’s world flood his eyes. He reached down, but stopped and grimaced halfway.
08 Illusion Page 3