The Norma Gene

by M. E. Roufa

  Norma looked at Abe, and he looked back at her. Now what? He couldn’t imagine asking her to ride the rides, and there was nothing he could think of needing in any of the shops. But they had to go somewhere. “Where should we…” he began.

  Norma had clearly been thinking this through. “France,” she answered.

  Tucked away in a corner of the Park, a miniature version of the great capitals of the world was open for tourists. Abe and Norma settled in to a small café nestled at the base of a fake Eiffel Tower, and ordered more coffees (much fresher this time around) and a basket of croissants. If you had to run for your life, this was definitely the way to do it.

  “How long do you think we can stay here?” Norma asked, brushing crumbs from her mouth delicately.

  “Here here, or here Paris?” Abe asked back.

  “Both, I guess. I can’t figure out whether so far you’ve just been really lucky, or the people after you have been really clueless.”

  “I wish I knew,” Abe said. “You seem to be taking this whole thing in stride.”

  “Not much choice,” Norma responded. “Besides—yesterday I was facing another day in a soulless store, spritzing people with perfume they didn’t want, and instead, here I am having café au lait in Paris with Abraham Lincoln.” She giggled.

  “Can’t argue with that,” Abe said. He raised his cup. “To la Proclamation Emancipatión,” he said in his best French accent, which was pretty terrible.

  Norma raised her cup to his with a clink. “Viva la President,” she answered back, in her own idea of a French accent, which was worse.

  “Is it my imagination,” Norma asked quietly, “or are there suddenly a lot of people here who are overdressed for the occasion?”

  “Well, we are in Paris, home of la mode,” Abe answered jauntily, then noticed what she meant. Heading toward them, though still far enough away that it could be a coincidence, were quite a number of nondescript men in sunglasses and suits. “Au revoir?” he whispered.

  “Toot sweet,” she whispered back. And they made another run.

  Their next destination was an inspired one on Norma’s part, Abe had to admit. Standing in the Hall of Presidents, looking up at the full-sized replica of himself, surrounded by all the other American Presidents in an ersatz representation of Independence Hall, Abe felt all the old feelings of awe and resentment. But Norma had miscalculated—there didn’t seem to be any backstage area in which to hide. Or rather, there was a backstage area, and they were in it. “Don’t just stand there,” Norma said. “Put your coat back on!”

  “I don’t have the coat anymore,” Abe shot back. “I think I left it in your car somewhere.”

  “Then take his!” Norma responded, stripping the coat off the animatronic figure a lot more violently than Abe liked to see. He immediately made a mental note that if he were ever lucky enough to find himself in a similar situation with Norma, he would do all his own undressing. It seemed a minor miracle that she managed to remove the coat without snapping off either of the 16th President’s arms. “Here,” she said, thrusting the coat at Abe. “Put this on. The hat, too,” she added as an afterthought.

  “No hats,” Abe replied weakly, still trying to hold firm on that one last principle, but the look she shot at him allowed no further protests. He put on the hat. Norma, meanwhile, was bodily removing the dummy of the former President and throwing it unmercifully into the wings.

  Abe winced. “What are you doing?” he asked, bewildered.

  “Just stand where he was—no, like this” She demonstrated, striking a Presidential pose. “We’re running out of time!”

  Sure enough, through the proscenium curtain Abe could hear the sounds of a crowd gathering in the outside seats. She wasn’t really suggesting that he… that he… “What am I supposed to do?” he asked her.

  Norma shot him another flabbergasted look, as if the answer should be obvious, to him of all people. “Who cares? Wave your arms a lot. Move your mouth when he speaks.”

  “But I haven’t been here in years—I don’t know what he’s going to say—my mouth won’t match!”

  “Abe, you’re a robot,” Norma hissed. “It’s not supposed to match.”

  “But what are you going to do? There’s no place here to hide!” There truly wasn’t—even in the semi-darkness, Abe could make out the animatronic Abe Lincoln’s feet sticking out from where Norma had stashed him.

  “Trust me,” Norma said. “I know what I’m doing. Just shut your eyes a sec, okay?”

  Abe had been given far weirder commands in the past few days, so it was no difficulty to simply obey. But it suddenly became much more difficult when he heard the unmistakable sounds of a woman undressing. What was she doing? Going into drag as Teddy Roosevelt?

  “Okay, you can look,” she called out. There was an odd catch in her voice, as if she were simultaneously proud and ashamed. Abe opened his eyes and took her in, from the platinum blonde waves to the flesh-colored sequined dress to the haunted echo of a distant past reflected in her large brown eyes—a look that he knew he shared, and he suddenly understood everything.

  “Norma Jeane,” he said, awestruck.

  “Happy birthday, Mr. President,” she replied. And just as the curtain started to rise, revealing them to the next round of theme park visitors, she hurled herself into John F. Kennedy’s lap.

  52

  The first show seemed to go okay. Luckily there was a spotlight that shone on every presidential figure just before he spoke, giving Abe a much needed cue to get ready to flail his arms around and move his lips. He was even familiar with most of the lines he had to mouth—the bulk of them were all taken from well-known speeches. Norma’s role was trickier. She basically just froze solid and looked up at the robotic JFK with equally robotic-looking adoring eyes. When the spotlight first hit them, Abe was sure the gig was up. Instead, the crowd roared with approval. Sex appeal had been inserted into inappropriate places to sell tickets for so long, people simply took it for granted to find it here.

  Abe wanted to run again as soon as the curtain fell. How long did she think they could keep this up? But together they decided that it was probably the safest place to hide for the time being—they could see everything, there were emergency exits behind them, and it did seem like the least likely place for anyone to look. And it didn’t hurt that there was supposed to be an Abraham Lincoln standing right where he was, making it the least likely place in the Park for him to stand out. As for Marilyn—Norma, he corrected himself—she seemed to be making it work for her.

  If he was attracted to her before, she dazzled him now. It all made sense. No wonder she looked familiar to him, like coming home. Her—no, Marilyn’s—movies had been a regular staple on his mother’s television while he was growing up. Abe flushed with guilt at making the exact same mistake he always condemned others for doing, mistaking the living person for the dead famous person. But this was somehow different. He felt certain that he knew her. For the first time in his life he understood why it was so important to everyone to know what was going on inside Abe Finkelstein. This went beyond the simple curiosity about celebrities that pushed tabloid sales into the billions. Looking at Norma, seeing Marilyn Monroe, Abe wanted to get inside her, to see how she ticked, how she felt, what it was like to be her. He also wanted to get inside her in other ways, but this was a family park.

  In between shows, Abe did everything he could not to stare at Norma in her new incarnation. She politely kept her own gaze away from his, as if afraid to catch him in the act of false adoration. They didn’t talk.

  Norma was waiting for the inevitable questions. The evening and morning had gone so well—it might not have been a date, but she had begun to really, really like Abe and loved the Norma she was with him, a Norma whose back story didn’t matter in the slightest because it was the same as his own. But once she saw him looking at her in full Marilyn mufti, everything seemed to change. He had the same hungry look that all men got when they found out her
secret, and it was disheartening. She wished she hadn’t changed into the Illusions gown. She could have left, gone a separate way, hidden elsewhere in the Park. But putting on the costume had seemed like the right thing to do—an easy disguise, and something more as well—a way to confess to Abe, to make up for knowing so much about him while revealing so little of herself. But it had clearly backfired. And now it seemed like he couldn’t stop giving her that look, couldn’t stop staring—not even when she met him with a challenging look back.

  “What?” she finally demanded, daring him to say something about Sugar Kane, or Joe DiMaggio, or sleeping in the nude. What he said instead completely threw her for a loop.

  “You might want to turn off your necklace.”

  “My… what?”

  “Your necklace—it’s blinking. I think you had better turn it off. It might give us away.”

  Norma reflexively reached toward her neck. What was he talking about? She removed the pendant and looked at it. Sure enough, the red stone, which she had assumed was garnet or cornelian, was actually some sort of bulb, and it was emitting a steady pulsing light. In a flash (literally), Norma realized what it was she held in her hand. Stuart hadn’t been lying—she really must have dropped it when she got into her car.

  It wasn’t an earring, like Stuart thought.

  And it wasn’t a pendant, either.

  It wasn’t a piece of jewelry at all.

  “It’s an EMT,” she said aloud.

  “You’re a paramedic?” Abe asked, confused.

  “No—an EMT…an electronic merchandise tracer. With GPS. It must have fallen off the dress. That red gown you hit with your car. The drycleaners must have removed it when they fixed the tear. Lord’s puts them on everything worth over a thousand dollars—it’s to prevent shoplifting. They must have activated the tracer.”

  “Wait a second.” Abe started out slowly. “Are you telling me… we’re currently being chased for shoplifting?”

  Norma looked away in apology. “It was a really great dress. And I took it back.”

  “Shoplifting?!?”

  “I know, I know.” Norma reached around the curtain and tossed the tracer into the empty seats. “We have to get out of here. If those people are from Lord and Taylor’s, we’ll have a lot more work losing them than if they were just the FBI. You should see what they do over knitwear.”

  Abe raised an eyebrow but didn’t respond. There wasn’t time. As he and Norma bolted toward the edge of the stage, they were met by several men in suits, pouring in from what seemed like every direction. There wasn’t time to think or to react. There was only time to flail. Grabbing the first weapon to come to hand (and which turned out in retrospect to be the arm of Richard Nixon), Abe flailed away, knocking down two men at once and giving a third one a nasty uppercut with the edge of Nixon’s fist. Norma, meanwhile, had incapacitated two of her pursuers by shoving over William Howard Taft, crushing them beneath his vast form. As Abe continued to fend off the two remaining agents (FBI? CIA? Mall security?), Norma headed for the back exit, only to be stopped in her tracks by a giant of a man in a suit, standing in wait with his arms outstretched, as if ready to scoop her up. There was no way around him. She was trapped.

  Norma reached down into her purse and pulled out the only weapon she could wield with any sort of accuracy. She aimed straight for his eyes and pushed the trigger. “Would you like to try Illusions?” she cooed, pushing him out of the way as the perfume shot into his eyes and nasal passages, making him wince with pain. She’d wanted to do that for years. It felt even better than she had imagined. Yelling for Abe to follow, Norma took off around the corner as fast as Marilyn’s stilettos would carry her.

  53

  Abe and Norma ran down the back alley that separated the hall of Presidents from the rest of the simulated old-American Towne Square, not daring to look behind them to have their worst fears confirmed. Wrapping his fingers around Norma’s tiny hand (he was holding her hand!), Abe gave a tug that was a bit stronger than he had intended (he was breaking her arm!) and almost on instinct headed around the corner to a fence marked “Cast Members Only.”

  They ducked around the fence to find a selection of doors, one clearly heading out to the parking lot, one into a cinder-block building with an anomalous Alpine gabled roof, and the third one just leading… down. Not having a car handy, and not being Swiss, Abe took a mental leap of faith and headed toward the third door. They ran down a flight of steps, and then another, which finally spilled them out into a long corridor, lined by visible concrete blocks and lit by vaguely bluish fluorescent lighting that hummed faintly. The bottom half of the walls were painted a bright blue color, the ceilings were lined with heavy industrial pipes and ductwork. Just before Abe and Norma shut the door behind them with a slow thud, they could hear the sounds of at least two sets of feet echoing off the stair treads overhead at a rapid pace. The corridor stretched out in both directions for longer than they could see, with occasional hallways branching out on either side. The effect was somewhat like being in an undersized, unfinished airport, or possibly a vast anthill whose occupants had almost but not quite mastered the art of masonry. There were no people in sight, but every few hundred feet there were abandoned battery-powered vehicles, golf-carts, bright yellow utility trucks, and herds of two-wheeled Segway scooters.

  “Which way?” Norma asked, out of breath. Without a coin to flip or enough time to get past “meenie,” Abe took a wild guess at what seemed to be the longer tunnel with the most branches and pointed—making the gesture with Richard Millhouse Nixon’s disembodied arm, which Abe still clutched tightly in his hand, gesturing elegantly in its striped grey flannel sleeve. Norma grimaced and headed in the indicated direction. They had run what seemed like the length of a city block, when a distinct echoing sound reached their ears—the noise footsteps make when they travel in groups greater than two. But because of the echo, it was impossible for them to tell from which direction the feet were coming.

  “Which way now?” Norma asked again, as Abe tried to figure out which way the steps were headed based on the reverberations.

  He looked at her, admitting defeat. “No idea. You pick.”

  Norma shrugged. Then she reached over and plucked the robotic arm out of Abe’s grasp. She looked in both directions, then ahead. There were two more intersecting paths in the near distance, not quite plumb enough to be an intersection. Running to where the four tunnels met the closest, she closed her eyes, pointed the arm out, and spun. Abe wanted to tell her they didn’t have time to play games, but the way Norma’s dress clung to her with her every movement, all Abe could think was don’t stare… don’t stare… don’t stare… as he stared without hesitation. Fortunately this was one of the rare times when he actually kept his mouth shut.

  Norma stopped spinning as abruptly as she started, the arm pointing imprecisely toward one of the paths. “This way,” she said assertively. Her reasoning being as good as anything he could have come up with, Abe followed without a second thought. When had Richard Nixon ever steered anyone wrong? Okay, maybe that wasn’t the right question. But then again, if her choice worked out, maybe she would do that breathtaking spin again.

  The corridor was almost identical to the one they had left, with the same abandoned industrial vibe reminiscent of a Soviet orphanage—visible concrete block walls barely covered with off-white paint in a shade that looked like it was probably dingy even in the can. But the cheerful blue strip lining the walls had at some point switched to a garish dark green. The fluorescent lighting did its best to erase any lingering cheer. The only reminder of where they were came from brightly-tinted images of smiling animals in bizarre combinations of period clothing which occasionally decorated a seemingly randomly placed door or staircase, each character holding a sign labeled with chains of initials which meant nothing to either Abe or Norma. The sounds of footsteps kept coming, still with no indication from which direction, but almost certainly closer than before.

&
nbsp; “They’re right behind us!” Norma cried, grabbing at Abe’s arm.

  “Are you sure? I think they might be in front of us.”

  They were both right. Four men appeared in the distance, running down the hallway from both directions, headed straight for them. They were also in excellent running condition.

  There were no golf carts in this section of the tunnels. But there were plenty of Segways. Norma jumped on one.

  “What are you doing?” Abe croaked.

  Norma rolled her eyes. “What does it look like? Either get your own or grab on!” She pushed a button and the scooter hummed to life. Abe looked at the scooters, then looked at Norma. He grabbed on. Nothing.

  “You have to lean forward.”

  He leaned forward, slightly, trying not to push his body too much against hers. They moved a little.

  “Lean forward—harder!” Norma commanded, her own body draped forward across the handlebars as far as she could to counterbalance his upright frame. He rested his weight against her. They shot forward. She smelled incredible.

  “Oof! Not so hard!” she gasped, and they chugged forwards at a much slower speed than either had anticipated. The two agents behind them were still behind them, but not by much. The two other agents were straight ahead of them, still running at top speed. There was another hallway branching off a few feet away, but no way to guess who would get there first.

  They reached the corridor almost simultaneously, the men reaching arms out to grab at Norma. Abe swung the Nixon arm in response, aiming high. The arm connected with a soft thunk. The man staggered, then grabbed the arm and pulled it towards him, knocking Abe off the scooter. Abe fell and rolled, his horizontal body doing much more damage than his vertical one ever did. Both men lay sprawling on the floor, all three struggling to get upright first. Norma sped back, reaching an arm down and grabbing Abe by the collar.