There was an uneasy silence in the room for several seconds before Bringham began again. “I see now that my fanatical need to achieve was handed down to me from my father. Maybe it was a competitive thing, sort of a deranged Oedipus complex. I’m not yet fully sure about that part. But Bill, you and I are from similar backgrounds, and I’ve always been impressed that you avoided all the crap I subjected myself to.”
“For the most part.”
“But I am learning. Like this morning, I spent the better part of an hour extracting all these unsightly ear hairs, which I had never really noticed before. A superb job don’t you think?” He tilted his head side to side and up and down for inspection. “I got a great deal of satisfaction from that, then even a greater sense of exhilaration from the fact that I could gain such a sense of pleasure from such a simple task.”
More moments of strained silence.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Bringham continued. “Here I am rattling on, dominating the conversation. I suppose one tends to do that when one lives in isolation and suddenly comes in contact with other humans.” Just then the sharp sound of two bells came from the opposite end of the trailer. “Oh my, time flies. It’s already time for my medication.”
“Did we come at a bad time?” Bill asked.
“Oh, no, no. No problem. I won’t let you throw me off my schedule. Sit tight. I’ll be right back.” He rose and walked into the darkness of a room on the far end of the trailer.
Mary Jean looked around the room. There was a small kitchen connected to the tiny living room and sparse furnishings in both rooms. A large color aero photo of the three great pyramids of Egypt was centered on the wall above the TV, but there wasn’t the grand wall-to-wall psycho statement she had expected from someone called the ‘Pyramid Man’, nor was her clock anywhere to be seen.
“I wonder how he got this couch in here?” Bill wondered out loud.
“I think they built around it, but who cares? When are you going to ask him about my clock?”
“Shhh…”
Bringham returned carrying a large middle-eastern hookah pipe, which he set directly in front of his chair. He picked up the stem of the pipe, sucked at the mouthpiece as he lit the bowel with a disposable lighter, and then blew a thick cloud of smoke away from Bill and Mary Jean. He smiled, noticing Bill’s expression. “Yes, it’s what you are thinking it is, but it’s perfectly legal my friend. Prop 215. I’ve got two different prescriptions from two different doctors. One for stress the other for alcoholism. One bowl three times a day, I came up with that part myself.” He took another hit and released more potent-smelling smoke. “I understand this is very good quality marijuana, what the kids call ‘D’kind’. I’d offer you some but that would be illegal.” He smiled and took another hit.
Mary Jean remembered weed she had smoked in Jamaica so potent it could make you forget you name. She never thought that a good feeling.
“That’s a wonderful photo of the Great Pyramid and its friends.” Bill pointed to the wall.
Bringham let out another small cloud of smoke. “I used to have a huge, rather obsessive collection of photos, models and sculptures of the Pyramids of Giza. I suppose the Pyramid Theater was actually part if not the pinnacle of the collection.”
“Was is probably right,” Mary Jean righteously jumped into the conversation. “Your ex-wife is trying to tear it down.”
“I’ve heard about that.” Bringham looked down at the floor. “Have you met my last wife?” He looked up smiling. “A stunning girl, and very bright.” He stopped smiling. “I suppose change is inevitable. In essence losing the theater is, for me, part of the psychic purge of possessions and obsessions. It’s probably healthy.” He moved the hookah pipe out of his way to the side of his chair. “Of course I haven’t quit my explorations or obsession cold turkey. I’ve got that photo, and that.” He pointed to a kitchen table filled with open books, a laptop computer, yellow legal pads and small scattered stacks of white paper. “Have you heard about the Pyramid Texts? That’s what that mess is all about.”
“The Pyramid Texts?” Bill rubbed his chin with his left hand. “If I’m not mistaken, they were hieroglyphics in the important tombs which weren’t translated until sometime in the late nineteenth century.”
“Correct. All kinds of information about them is accessible now online, and the more I look into them, the more trouble I have with the traditional interpretations of them. They might be about much more than just burial rituals and directions to the afterlife for the Pharaohs. They might in fact be the direct key to uncovering the mystery of Atlantis. They might someday prove the Great Pyramids are actually tens of thousands of years older than the best and brightest scientists say they are now, which would throw historians the biggest curveball they’ve ever seen.” Bringham smiled. “I mean almost all writing is subjective, right?”
“Especially if it’s spiritual or an article in the newspaper.”
“The Sleeping Prophet said the secret of life was hidden in the Pyramids,” Mary Jean, wanting not to be left out of the conversation, parroted something she had heard recently.
“Oh, you know Cayce? A great seeker and mystic. I think he proved more than anyone that dreams are magical. I don’t mean dreams like plans for fame and fortune, but the dreams one has while asleep. Don’t ever ignore or underestimate them. But his thoughts on the secret to life to be found in a hidden room in the great tomb, well, I’m ambivalent on that one. What if he meant the mystery itself was the solution? I mean when the mystery is solved, the story is over, right? When the mystery is solved what reason would there be to go on?”
“With all due respect, Hoyt, how long do you plan to go on? With a heart condition, is that stuff good for you?” Bill pointed to the freestanding pipe. “And is it wise to be living up here by yourself, miles from town?”
Bringham smiled. “My heart attack wasn’t or isn’t a condition. It was an occurrence. Now I can’t say whether it’s meditation, or change in diet and lifestyle, or help from my hookah, but I’m in the best health I’ve been in years. I haven’t drank in over a year and my blood pressure is way down. As far as living alone, those mutts outside are great company, and this splendid isolation.” His smile grew and he looked up at the ceiling as if he were looking at open sky. “I think anyone would be better off if they would or could give it a try. I have music and time to read for pleasure. Who do you know who reads anymore? That television.” He pointed to the tiny TV in the corner of the room, “I try not to let it become too big of a distraction or burden, but it gets all the local channels, which keeps me from feeling like a total hermit though I do find myself sitting and staring at your new channel whenever I go off course and overdo my Prop. 215 medication.”
“How did you know Channel 63 was mine?”
“I’m not totally out of the loop.” Bringham grinned. “Interesting test pattern I must say.”
“That’s what I tell the FCC it is, and my lawyers tell me that no matter how much the Feds don’t like it there’s nothing they can do about it.” Now Bill smiled. “Interesting thing though is people call me all the time wanting to buy ad time. Go figure?”
Bringham laughed, and then stretched his arms and legs. “Well, I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed the company, but I know you are just being polite. I assume you came up here for more than just chit-chat.”
Bill nodded, pulled a large photo from a brown envelope and handed it to Bringham. “It’s just a shot in the dark but we were hoping you might have seen this thing.”
Bringham stared at the picture from several different angles and distances for about twenty seconds before he smiled and lightly nodded his entire thin body in rhythm as if a holy connection had just been made. “I have.”
Mary Jean lurched forward so quickly she nearly slipped off the couch. “Really? Where?”
“A strange little woman tracked me down at the organic produce market on L Street. I go there every other Monday religiously. She thought I still collec
ted pieces and I might be interested in that piece of crap.” He shook his head at the photo. “Man that thing is ugly.”
“Never mind that. Was that it? What else did she say?”
“Well, she was a bit rude, especially when I told her it wasn’t actually a pyramid but more like an obelisk, and I wouldn’t have been interested in it even when I was interested in collecting pyramid related things.”
“And that was it? She left you alone?”
“Not right away, but she left when I suggested she it take by my twins’ place. They have a little store which specializes almost exclusively in worthless crap.”
“Your twins?”
“Identical twins from my second marriage, KC and Edgar. They have the House of the Unusual on Kern Street. Not much of a business, but it keeps them out of trouble.”
“Well, that’s our next stop then, thanks, Hoyt.” Bill stood and offered his hand.
Outside Bringham lead MJ through his pack of dogs and opened the car door for her. MJ started to sit but stopped. “I got to ask you, I’ve seen people change, and like become reformed drunks or over-the-edge Jesus freaks, but you are sooo different than I remember. So what exactly happened to you?”
Bringham locked his eyes deeply into Mary Jean’s.
“Sorry I didn’t mean it to come out like that, I just meant,” Mary Jean started to stammer.
“No, no, dear, no offense taken, but let me ask you a question. Have you ever heard the expressions OBE, or NDE, or second self?”
“Huh?”
“Well there’s no reason to get into it then, things can’t be forced. Let’s just say I saw the light. A very bright light, and now I’m much happier than I was before.” Bringham gently took her hand, helped her into the car, shut the door, and said goodbye to her and Bill. Waving and smiling, Bringham became a tiny figure in Bill’s mirror as he turned off the property beginning the journey back to Ashland.
Five miles later, as they passed below the dam, dusk was calmly settling in with the final demise of orange light stretched across the broad horizon to the right. Bill’s pace was still deliberate. Mozart was still on the stereo.
“Well? What do you think?” Mary Jean had tried to mute her enthusiasm but couldn’t hold out any longer.
“I think Hoyt Bringham is real close to being booked into a padded room in a place where all the happy people go.”
“No, about my clock. Even if he were totally nuts how could he have made up that stuff about meeting Patty?”
“It’s a lead, nothing more, Queenie.” Bill turned on his headlights.
Mary Jean brushed her hair back from her face as she thought. “That was different though. What a change, I mean the guy used to be the Citizen Kane of Ashland.”
“Yeah, except now instead of looking for Rosebud, he’s just looking for some good bud.” Bill looked at Mary Jean. “It’s like he didn’t discover the 60’s until the 90’s when he was in his 70’s.”
“But he seemed so…so serene.”
“Yeah, so did Frances Farmer after her lobotomy.”
“Geez, why are you so down on the guy? Like you’re not strange, like I’m not strange, like everybody’s not a little weird…but what about that OTB stuff?”
“OBE, NDE, out of body experiences, near death experiences.” Bill turned the music down a notch. “I don’t begrudge anybody any weird beliefs, one’s as good as another as far as I’m concerned. Hell, he could become a Hare Krishna and dance around in the airport for all I care, it’s just.” He quickly paused.”Ah, forget it.”
“You know I won’t.” MJ smiled. “So you might as well finish your thought.”
Bill changed hands on the steering wheel, and nodded his head. “You can be a real persistent pain in the ass, can’t you?”
“Among other things, and I’m proud of each and every one of my personality disorders. They set me apart…so?”
“So…so he reminds me of my old man because he’s so sure. My old man was totally convinced about all that Mormon Church bullshit, and Bringham’s stuck on and convinced about this Pyramid Power, New Age bullshit.” He briefly looked at Mary Jean with a cold stare.
“Well, he really seemed deeply into a lot of complex stuff.”
“Sometimes people are so simple they seem complicated.” He turned briefly to MJ. “I’m sorry, but people who are so certain about matters of faith really piss me off.”
“Don’t look at me. I’m an atheist. When you die you die and that’s it.”
“I’ll go you one better,” Bill seemed to lighten his tone. “What if there is no time, no past or future and everything is really happening at once and we just divide it up into time to keep things interesting? Of course there is always the possibility that none of this is really happening at all, that there are no people, that this is all just a dream.”
“Yeah, right, and I’m dreaming that I’m a broke over-educated, fifty-year-old waitress with a worthless degree in Anthropology. I don’t think so. I think I’d be dreaming I won the Lotto and was still twenty-five with a perfect body.”
“Then it wouldn’t be your dream. It would be somebody else’s. That’s the problem in figuring all this out. Like right now are we in your dream or mine?”
Mary Jean furrowed her brow and folded her arms across her chest. “I just want my clock.”
“We’ll be in the Pyramid District in five minutes,” Bill said as he started onto the freeway entrance, which would take them in a big loop around town to their destination, “and then we will see what we will see.”
KC & Edgar’s House of the Unusual was on Kern Street, one of four little shops in an old brown-brick building on the west side of the two-lane, one-way street. Bill parked against the curb directly under a street light, which had blossomed brightly in reaction to the night’s swift arrival.
Mary Jean was out of the car first and quickly on the sidewalk in front of the store, rattling the handle of the locked door while she starred directly into a small square sign pointing out the store’s hours of business.
“Open Tuesday through Saturday two to five PM? What kind of hours are those?” She jerked the door handle several more times.
“The kind for lazy rich kids who don’t need to make any money.” Bill was now just a few feet behind her.
“What are we going to do?”
“Wait until two o’clock tomorrow I suppose.”
Mary Jean shaded her face as she pressed it against one of the large windows. “Look at all that crap. It’s like a giant yard sale gone bad.” She moved a few steps to her left to another window. “OH MY GOD! THERE’S MY CLOCK!” She was bouncing up and down as she pointed, turned to Bill, then back to the window.
Bill looked inside, squinting to focus. “Eureka. Well, we’ll come back tomorrow—”
“TOMMORROW! But my clock’s right there. I can see it. It’s right there! There has to be something we can do.”
“I suppose there is, but a B&E rap doesn’t figure into my plans for tonight. Look, nobody’s bought that ugly thing so far. I don’t think we’ll be fighting a line to buy it tomorrow.”
MJ’s frustration began to manifest. She was struggling to vent when she saw, three doors down, a big, burly biker with a full beard and dirty hair hanging past his shoulders. Kneeling, he was using a flashlight to inspect something on his dressed-out Harley. Mary Jean recognized him as the owner of the head shop just behind him. She nearly ran down the sidewalk until she was standing over him.
“Hi,” she said, wasting a big smile as he merely grunted and barely looked up from his work. “I was wondering if you knew anything about the two kids who have the store at the end of the building.”
“I know that them and their whole family are a bunch of rich fuck-heads, and their step-mom is getting ready to tear down the Pyramid.” He looked up at Mary Jean for the first time. “That little slut. Can you imagine what bad Karma that’s going to bring? I’d leave the neighborhood right now if the rent wasn’t so cheap.”
He clicked off his flashlight and came up from his knees until his head was a full foot higher than Mary Jean’s. “Hey, I know you, Moon Glow incense.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, about a year ago I ordered six boxes of Moon Glow incense because you were in here ranting and raving about how much you loved the stuff.”
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