Meanwhile in the World where Kennedy Survived

by Lacey Ann Carrigan

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Dorina went to bed early that night.

  Samantha had curled up in a ball at her feet. Through the night she slept soundly but in the small hours of the morning, she dreamed.

  She was in a small, very antiquated looking motel room. The beds had been dressed with floral brocade and the lamps and furniture were in geometric, fifties modern. Green carpet beneath her feet was textured in swirling whorls and a light fixture with prism glass dangling from it hung delicately from the ceiling beneath a still fan. She was aware of wearing a stiff, itchy sleeveless dress and a severe, cantilever bra that constricted her. When she looked down she saw dainty ballet flats with bows. The television along the wall held a rabbit ear antenna atop it and rotary dials on the front. When she looked in the mirror, she saw that her dark auburn hair had been swept up, delicate curling wisps of it trickling down alongside her ears. She wore pale lipstick and severe liner.

  There was a knock at the door. She padded along the carpet slowly and reached out to twist the knob. When she opened the door she saw a younger, stunning Jacy in a cape and hat, her hair dangling down in soft curls. “Are you ready?” Jacy asked. “Get your coat.

  We don’t have much time.”

  Dorina stood for a moment, shocked. Her mysterious new friend could not have been more than twenty-eight or twenty-nine, still in the bloom of flawless youth. Still, she opened a closet door and pulled a dress coat out of it, slipping it over her shoulders. Locking the door behind her, they ventured out onto the walkway of the hotel. The weather outside was bright and sunny but refreshingly cool. They had to cross along the walkway to the staircase at the end, where they could descend to street level. Dorina glanced into the parking lot and saw the rounded and gaudy, big-finned cars of the fifties. An older gentleman in a lariat and a cowboy hat passed them. He tipped the hat as he walked by.

  “Jacy where are we?” Dorina asked.

  “Dallas,” she said, quickening her pace. “Now come quickly. We don’t have much

  time.” Once on street level, Jacy extracted a set of car keys from her purse and poised them in her hand, walking toward a cream colored Ford Thunderbird with opera windows.

  She keyed her door open, and slid behind the wheel with one sustained, graceful movement. Once comfortably behind the wheel, she reached across and lifted the lock so that Dorina could get inside.

  The moment Dorina settled inside, Jacy twisted the ignition, depressed the choke and pumped the gas pedal as the Thunderbird roared to life. The tires chirped on the pavement as she backed out of the lot while turning, stopped, and then eased the car out onto the street. While they drove past tall brick buildings and a library with marble columns Jacy noticed that street crowds thickened with each passing block, men in suits and women in tasteful coatdresses and cat sunglasses. “Where is everyone going?” Jacy asked, gazing at the crowd building along the sidewalks.

  “Market Street,” Jacy said. “Listen, we’re going to have to park and walk the rest of the way. Hope you don’t mind. I don’t think we’re going to be able to get any closer.”

  “Okay.”

  They found a small lot besides a building. When Dorina got out of the car, she noticed tall letters of a tobacco company ad painted on the outside of the building. As soon as the car had stopped, Jacy twisted the ignition, yanked the key out of it and used the steering wheel to help push herself out of the car. “Come on!” she said. “Up this alleyway. At the end.” The women ran down the shadows of a cobblestoned alley. Dorina could see a crowd gathered and multi-colored confetti raining down.

  Dorina followed Jacy as she turned sideways weaving past the people in the crowd. Ladies with their hair tied up in kerchiefs and men carrying their children atop their shoulders to get a better view. “What’s going on, anyway?”

  “The president’s motorcade is coming from around the bend,” she said. “Come on, over here!” She found a space beside a lamp post beside a group of teenagers wearing jackets, brownie cameras hanging from their necks. Dorina stood on tiptoe. She saw a parade of slow moving black vehicles approaching, all of them convertibles. Gentlemen in military uniforms occupied the first two and other dignitaries rode in the one after that, all of them smiling glamorously, beaming for the crowd, waving their gloved hands.

  Dorina recognized John F. Kennedy in the next car, which had been basking in bright sunlight between two buildings. Suddenly Jacy held her gloved hands over her ears and turned away. Puzzled, Dorina kept looking at JFK, enthralled by the startling clarity of detail in her dream. Then two loud booms sounded, like a cannon, and people shrieked, scurrying away from the curb.

  Dorina had been watching the President at the precise moment to see first his shoulder explode with a splash of blood. He turned, a look of terror in his eyes and a second shot caught him on the crown of his head, blowing it open in a mass of red as he tumbled forward over the seatback. She screamed, and Jacy caught her by the arm and led her back through the crowd and into the shadows of the alley, grabbing her by the shoulders, gazing deeply into her eyes.

  The walls and the shrieking people around them dissolved, swarming into a blurred mass as Dorina kept saying “Why! Why! Why!”

  “I know it’s horrible, dear,” Jacy said, embracing her, holding her tightly. “I know. I know.” When they eased apart from each other Dorina realized that they were in a completely different scene. The weather was much warmer now, and still sunny. They both wore light sundresses. Jacy wore barrettes in her long, brunette hair to lift it up and away from her face. Her beauty had matured; Dorina looked at her quizzically as she now guessed her age at around forty. They stood on a brick walkway looking out over a manicured growth of shrubbery surrounding what looked to be a giant clock built into ground with the numbers formed by trimmed hedges. A giant silhouette of Mickey Mouse appeared at the center of the clock. Families and crowds of people passed by them, men in Hawaiian shirts and women in bell bottoms and frilly blouses.

  Dorina turned around to look behind her and saw a large castle springing up out of a lagoon. “Where are we now?” she asked. “It looks like...Disneyland, but different.”

  “It’s Walt Disney World,” she said. “In Orlando, Florida.”

  Dorina spun around. “But that’s impossible. Florida has been blown off the map! The only thing left was a marshy area and part of Miami and Key West. And Jacksonville. The whole middle part of the state was destroyed. What’s going on?” She turned in another direction and saw Dumbo elephants suspended on wires flying around in a circle. Disoriented, she would wander a few steps one way, then turn and see a carousel in yet another direction. Costumed characters such as Goofy, Pluto, Snow White, Mickey and Minnie Mouse walked slowly, children clamoring after them as they waved back animatedly.

  Jacy approached her solemnly, the hurt showing in her sensitive eyes. “I know this might all be coming to you as a great shock but there are many other worlds.”

  Dorina looked closely at the theme park patrons passing them by in all directions. They all looked like people she saw every day at the supermarket, or the mall, or at restaurants. The mood in the air seemed different in a way she could not quite define, however. In the old pictures of her mother and father, especially from their honeymoon, people had dressed in these gaudy colors and patterns. “This is absolutely crazy,” she said.

  “Like an island sprang up in the middle of the ocean.”

  “It’s a peninsula,” Jacy said, regarding the people passing by. “In another world closely related to ours, the Soviet Union was not able to drop the nuclear bomb on Cape Canaveral in 1965. The United States space program flourished and in July, 1969 we launched a spaceship called Apollo Eleven and it landed on the moon.”

  Dorina was starting to put two and two together. “And in this other world, John Kennedy was assassinated? Is that why you showed me that horrible scene?”

  Jacy nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it was harrowing.”

 
Dorina paused to think. “If Kennedy was assassinated, who became president?”

  “Lyndon Johnson. He was sworn into office right after that and won re-election in 1964. In 1968 Richard Nixon won against Hubert Humphrey from Minnesota.” She paused for a moment, concern etching across her face, her lower lip quivering. “Bobby Kennedy was assassinated that spring.”

  “Did Nixon have him killed?”

  Jacy laughed. “That’s an interesting theory. Actually no one knows. A Middle Eastern man was convicted. It happened in a hotel kitchen.” She reached over and guided Dorina out of the way of a college-age boy with red white and blue suspenders running past them, holding a fist full of strings restraining balloons.

  “This is just too strange,” Dorina continued. She followed Jacy’s lead as they walked leisurely along the concrete path past tropical shrubbery with bright pink flowers. Ahead of them lie a eutopic playground for children with small cars they could drive and a roller coaster constructed to look like a barnstorming plane Goofy flew. She’d learned about Nixon during history classes in high school and had always thought of him as a tragic figure. “So Nixon got to be president for eight years?” She assumed that he wouldn’t have tried all that cloak and dagger stuff with the tapes if he was already president.

  “No, just six,” Jacy replied, smiling down at little children who bumped into her knees.

  “Six? Why only six?”

  Jacy smiled. “He had to resign in 1974. Watergate.”

  “You’re kidding me!” Her own father had told her that he’d been glad when Nixon finally beat a Kennedy in 1972 and then became disgusted over the Watergate scandal broke. After Nixon’s public disgrace, Ford took over for the final two years, but in 1976 Bobby ran for president again and won. She was born late in that year.

  It occurred to her that while they were able to walk through this amusement park, dozens of people passed them and looked directly at Jacy, yet no one seemed to recognize her. She wondered if, in this parallel world Jacy Rayner remained Jacy Rayner and stayed out of the Hollywood limelight. The easiest way to find out was simply to ask her but she could not think of a tactful way to broach the subject. Instead, she asked something else that had played on her mind: “Jacy, why are you showing me all of this?”

  Sadness clouded her expressive features. She sighed, gazing out in the distance, toward a monorail car gliding along a track. “I told Jack, I mean, President Kennedy to watch himself during 1963 because I sensed that so many people were out to get him. October and November of that year he faced a congressional investigation because of me. That kept him from going to Dallas, where he would have been assassinated, as you saw. In 1964, the CIA successfully made away with Castro. Tensions grew and grew and in April, 1965, just before the Gemini mission, well, you know what happened.”

  April 5. Cape Canaveral Day. The Soviets successfully launched a nuclear strike targeting the east Florida coast. Fallout spread as far away as Atlanta and New Orleans. The force of the blast crumbled the state’s limestone base at the center and turned the area from just beneath Jacksonville to the northernmost reaches of Miami into an inhospitable swamp. While many had been spared through evacuations and bomb shelters, hundreds of thousands of people died. And the fish, the wildlife, the natural beauty, all destroyed.

  “Jacy,” Dorina said. “You’re not responsible for April fifth.”

  She looked away. “The horror is in the knowing,” she said, softly. They stopped in the shade of a palm tree. Suddenly Jacy’s mood brightened and she reached out and touched her. “I want to show you something. Let’s go! This way!” Jacy started walking briskly in the other direction, backtracking over their path, headed toward the castle rising from above the lagoon.

  Dorina had difficulty keeping up with her. Scents of floral bouquet from the lush tropical shrubbery filled the air along with the sweetness of cotton Jacy and the aromas of chocolate and taffy from the Jacy factory. Before long they arrived at the cobblestones paving the way for the steps leading to the castle. Inside an archway artisans had painstakingly created a beautiful mural of the handsome prince fitting the glass slipper onto Cinderella’s foot. They used individual squares of enameled tile. Dorina stopped for a moment to marvel at this but noticed that Jacy had already found a door and had opened it, disappearing behind it. Dorina followed.

  The doorway opened to a staircase that she supposed led all the way up the tower of the castle in a spiral. “Jacy?” she called out, “are you up there?”

  “Yes!” Jacy said, her voice reverberating against the stone walls. “Come quickly.”

  Dorina climbed the stairs after her, certain that they would lead to an observation platform on top. She expected that as she neared the upper reaches of the tower, that light flooding in through the windows and parapets up there would brighten the staircase. Yet, mysteriously, the light in the narrow stairway became increasingly dim until Dorina found herself in near-total darkness as she climbed. “Jacy, where are you? Now I’m really getting scared! This is pretty intense!”

  “There’s a door up here at the top,” she called down to her. “Follow me inside. It’s just a little bit further up.”

  Dorina paused, took a deep breath and then pressed onward. Jacy’s voice had sounded reassuring. Up ahead, there was barely enough light for her to see a door, just as she’d been told. She reached up and found a swivel latch and swung it open. Bright light immediately burst through the opening and at first she had to squint, shielding her eyes from the intensity.

  Beyond the doorway, she found what at first glance appeared to be a huge atrium.

  Jacy awaited her on the other side of the door but her clothes had completely changed. She wore a magisterial robe with silver stars on the shoulders over a shimmering, navy blue iridescent bodysuit that conformed to her figure’s lithe contours. Her hair had transformed into deep brunette again and had been swept up and away from her face, poofing out at her neckline, helmet like. She carried a short staff that appeared to be a scepter, containing at one end an emerald beacon that crystallized and radiated light. Dorina was fixated on Jacy’s suit. When she looked closer at it, she noticed that the shimmering patterns swirled and congealed slowly, like the stars and galaxies metamorphosing through the evolution of the universe. The glistening material continued all the way down to her feet, which had been encased in delicate boots

  Dorina was in awe at first, aware that they had somehow stepped off the parapet of Walt Disney World in another Florida dimension and into yet another world. “Jacy, I don’t know what to say,” she said. “But you look fantastic.”

  Jacy smiled faintly. “Come with me,” she said. They walked along a corridor that ran in a circle around the atrium. Through glass, or what was probably a glass-like substance and probably a thousand times stronger, Dorina looked inside the atrium. A network of round tubes ran through the atrium which people walked briskly along, to get from one side to the other. There were men, women and children all scurrying about or floating through them and each possessed a glowing, inner beauty and they seemed to all wear variations of tunics or capes with the same type of glisteningly alive material as Jacy.

  A man about Jacy’s age approached them, wearing what appeared to be a tan and brown leather military outfit. Blond, curled hair spread back away from his regally high forehead and his brisk, confident air. When he approached them he smiled, looking at Jacy, nodding acknowledgment of her as he passed. Jacy regarded him by saying “Warberg.” as she and Dorina brushed past.

  Around the long, arcing hallway Dorina finally noticed that they were approaching a tall, black door. “There’s someone just beyond the door I know you’ll want to meet,” she said. She reached for the latch and opened it, the great door slowly swinging outward. They slowly stepped inside, and Dorina was at first dismayed that they again found themselves in near-total darkness. When her eyes adjusted, however, she quickly realized that they had entered a huge, cavernous auditorium, but without seats. In the distance,
hundreds of feet below them she could see a solitary figure tapping buttons on what appeared to be an instrument console. “Hey Ronald,” she said, “How about throwing a little light on the subject. There’s someone here to meet you.”

  “Okay,” the man at the instrument console said. Dorina noticed that he spoke in a normal tone of voice yet she could hear him as well as if he’d been standing beside her.

  “Over here,” Jacy said, guiding Dorina toward a series of bright blue ovals that had been inlaid into the floor, shining in the dimness. “Stand inside the oval, and be completely still.” She then lifted her palm upward, her fingers pointed toward the bright blue of the oval floor. Sparks emanated from her palm, causing Dorina to double-take. When she looked closer, she noticed that they were actually tiny characters, or symbols. The floor gently gave way beneath them and an invisible force field kept them inside a walled cocoon as they descended to the level where Ronald worked.

  They reached the main floor of the auditorium and Dorina suddenly realized who the man at the console was: “My god,” she said, “Ronald Lewandowski?” By the time they reached him, he had flipped on a switch or pushed a button or some way brought light to the cavernous auditorium with the high, arcing, royal blue walls. They approached him and she immediately recognized Ron from the photos of him on the websites: the boyish sandy hair, the brown, friendly-yet-intense eyes and the beard. He was tall, nearly six and a half feet, slender, but with a powerful build, the jumpsuit he wore accentuating an inverted “v.”

  “Ronald, I’d like you to meet Dorina Pettit,” Jacy said.

  He reached forward and shook her hand firmly but tenderly. “Hi,” he said. “It’s a pleasure. Jacy’s told me a lot about you.”

  The remark struck Dorina as odd, but she dismissed it. “So what is all of this?” she asked, indicating the console and the huge auditorium.

  Ronald smiled. “I guess you could think of it as a control room,” he said.

  “A control room?” Dorina asked. “What do you control from here?”

  Ronald appeared as if he was ready to explain but had difficulty coming up with the appropriate words. Jacy said “Go ahead and show her.”

  He said “She’s right. It is probably the best way to explain.” He lowered down into the recessed area of the console, touching a large dial.

  If Dorina ever remembered this extremely vivid dream and tried to explain the next part of it to someone, she would do it this way: when Ronald turned the dial on the console, the huge arcing walls of the auditorium parted in sections like a huge camera aperture.

  When he further twisted the dial, spectacular daylight vistas appeared flooding the auditorium shell with light. It was as if he flicked the lever on a giant view master and a real, three dimensional world appeared below them. At first it was a mountainous vista, like the craggy peaks Dorina had once seen in Colorado. Then it was an alien civilization that could only be described as a collection of spectral pyramids teeming with people. New York City appeared, the twin towers glistening in the sunlight, dominating the skyline. After that a desert where Dorina could see strange bison-like creatures with great curling tusks at their nostrils and a strange half-man half horse apparition gliding past. Finally, a scene materialized that she was very familiar with: the street from her home town in Indiana.

  “Oh, my god,” Dorina said. “It looks like we can just step out and walk there.”

  “We can,” Ronald said.

  Jacy gestured to the spring afternoon of Dorina’s hometown. She said “Why don’t you take her for a walk?”

  He said, “Sure.” Looking at Dorina, he added “I thought we could have a little chat, get to know each other. That you might feel more comfortable in more familiar surroundings. Don’t you want to come also, Jacy?”

  “No, I’ll leave you two to yourselves. I’ve got business at the atrium.”

  Ronald nodded and then took Dorina by the hand and helped her from the auditorium shell to her street in her hometown during a spring day. After they had stepped out and onto the sidewalk of her street, Dorina expected to be able to look back and see the giant auditorium shell and possibly even the atrium. They had left it behind them somehow, someway and were totally immersed in what now appeared to be the present day world of her girlhood home in Indiana. Spring was her favorite time of the year, with the blossoms giving the air the clean, floral, fresh smell. The lawns also regained their color, and the tulips and daffodils bloomed. Her family’s house lies down at the end of the street and she and Ronald walked casually toward it.

  When she looked at him he smiled warmly for her. It was a quiet day in the street and though elderly Mrs. Hecuber pulled dandelions on her small front lawn, all the other yards were empty, cars gone from the driveways. She decided that it must be a weekday.

  “Ask me anything,” Ronald said. “I won’t mind.”

  “Okay,” Dorina said, sorting through the myriad possibilities. “For one thing, how are you going to get back? To your console.”

  “Aw, don’t worry about that,” he said, waving a hand dismissively. “Portals.”

  “I guess that’s why you call it Portals Beyond?”

  “Yes.”

  “So then I guess Jacy really did help you out of the coma?”

  “She did.”

  “That’s amazing,” Dorina said, shaking her head. “Yet, when I asked her about it, she didn’t seem to know. She told me I had to come to you.”

  “Well Jacy’s very special, and she was given a very special gift. After she found out about how April 13th happened, she wanted to become a healer. She helped me and countless other children in ways similar to how she helped me. And it didn’t stop there. Through Jacy I’m very lucky to be able to help people myself. By giving them hope.”

  “I’ve heard that,” Dorina said. “The Portals Movies give people hope.”

  “That, they do,” he said proudly.

  Dorina turned to face him as they walked on. “I have to ask you something. On this past Sunday, my boyfriend took me out to the desert. He said he was going to find Merlin’s Lair, your soundstage. He had a map for it and everything. We did find something; it looked like a bunker, or a shelter or the entrance to an underground garage. Was that the entrance to the soundstage?”

  “No, it was not. It was a portal.”

  “A portal?” Dorina said, “Then you don’t have a soundstage?”

  “No. I’m afraid that the sprawling Merlin’s Lair complex is just a media creation.”

  “Then how do you make those movies?”

  “Oh, we sometimes rent out studio space and go on location. To the desert, to Scotland. But that’s just for transitional shots. We usually just go to the different places using the portal and capture the images.” He raised his hands to indicate his present surroundings. “Like here!”

  Dorina glanced ahead and noticed that they were nearing the end of her street and the house where she had lived all through grade school and high school. She called it the “gingerbread house” because of the textured masonry finish, the huge roof that looked like something out of a fairy tale, and the dark brown trim. From the meticulously groomed evergreen shrubbery to the delicate arcing bricks that lined the front walk, it gave her a warm feeling inside to return home. She turned to Ronald and said “This is where my mother, father, and younger sister live. I’m going to see if anyone’s home.”

  Ronald nodded.

  “Do you want to come in?” she asked, stopping to face him.

  He replied “It’s a nice offer, but I really should get back.” They looked at each other for a few moments that bordered on awkwardness. Finally, he took both of her hands and looked at her with sincerity. He said “I’d like you to become part of our family. To come work with us, and help us provide hope.”

  Dorina, suddenly feeling a great rush of affection for the man, said “I would like that.”

  Ronald reached into a chest pocket of his jumpsuit and extracted a business card. He g
ave it to her.

  She looked down at it. Centered at the top of the card were the words “Merlin’s Lair,” printed in Old English script, with “H.R. Lewandowski, President” below it. There was a telephone number, a website address and a fax number, but the physical address had been omitted. “Tomorrow, sometime, after you wake up, call us, and we’ll get you started on your new career.” Dorina, in her lucidity was aware that she would forget the phone numbers on the card to be able to check out whether there was a link to the real world. But she still felt touched.

  He extended a hand for her and she shook it, but she also embraced him lightly, saying “Thank you.”

  They parted. “See you soon,” he said, waving to her as he backed away.

  She turned and found herself skipping up the front walk, as she had in high school. Before reaching for the door handle she watched Ronald walk back down the street toward the portal. For a moment she considered discretely following him, to try and discover how he would re-enter that magnificent auditorium. Instead, she turned, plunged her thumb down onto the latch and the door opened. She poked her head inside and said “Mom?”

  Before she could hear her mother answer, there was a sudden buzzing, like a chainsaw cutting wood. A bright light filled the house, washing out all the details of it and Dorina seemed to float away. Something touched her face lightly, like a feather, tickling it, and she was aware of a softer, humming sound beneath the buzzing. She opened her eyes.

  It was morning in her bedroom back in Los Angeles. The alarm clocked blared atop her dresser and Samantha had crawled onto the pillow beside her, nuzzling her with her delicate little mouth and her whiskers.

  “Kitty, that was one strange, intense dream,” she said, stroking the soft fur atop her cat’s head. She pushed the sheets and comforter, swiveled her hips and swung her knees toward the side of the bed, bringing her feet over the edge, setting them down on the floor.

  Groggily, she stepped barefoot across the carpet and reached up to the dresser to switch off the alarm on her clock radio.

  There was a small card atop the dresser, laid down beside the musical carousel she kept up there. It was a business card. Centered at the top were the words “Merlin’s Lair,” written in old English lettering. Below that: “H.R. Lewandowski, President,” and a phone number, website address, and fax number.

  Dorina said “Oh, my god.”

  The End