by Pete Hautman
She wondered, not sure which way she wanted it to go, whether Bigg would keep his promise not to touch her. If he tried, by god, she’d show him why she was lifting all that daily iron. The elevator doors opened. She stepped out into the lobby and saw, through the glass entryway, Bigg’s long white Lincoln limousine parked at the curb, the back door standing open. From that sector of her mind where the ancient memories reside, she heard a little girl shrieking, “Cinderella! Cinderella!”
Drawn by the open door, Flo floated across the foyer and out to the circular driveway. The inside of the limo fluttered with kaleidoscopic colors. The smell hit her. Flowers. The back of the limo contained a huge bouquet of flowers. Flowers for Flowrean. White and pink roses, a huge spray of chrysanthemums, even a bird-of-paradise.
She climbed inside, pulled the door closed, and settled into the L-shaped white leather seat. The limousine immediately began to roll. Flo looked around the plush carriage, noticing the television set, the bottle of champagne cooling in an ice bucket, the privacy panel separating her from the driver’s compartment. They were on the freeway heading south before she noticed the pair of lime green pumps perched neatly on top of the wet bar.
41
The Seven Steps of the Amaranth present a formidable flight. Only a few of us have the key to the elevator.
—“Amaranthine Reflections” by Dr. Rupert Chandra
“WOULD YOU TRY TO drive smoother, love?” Rupe said, keeping his teeth clamped together. “I’m in agony here.”
He had been warned against opening his mouth. “Avoid talking for a few days,” the doctor had told him, “and try not to eat anything that requires a lot of chewing.” That wasn’t so bad, but they hadn’t told him that every time the Range Rover hit a little bump an intense bolt of pain would arc from his right ear over the top of his head to his left temple. Rupe had never experienced electroshock therapy, but he imagined that this is how it would feel.
Polly said, “I’m not feeling all that good myself, you know.”
“At least you can see what’s coming.” That was the worst part. With the bandages over his eyes, the jerks and bumps and curves in the road all took him by surprise. He never knew when the next painful explosion would occur.
“I told you we should’ve stayed overnight in Rochester.”
“No.” Rupe swallowed. His throat hurt, too. “I wish to be at Stonecrop. I feel horrid.”
“Dr. Bell said you’d be uncomfortable. We should’ve filled that prescription.”
“I don’t need drugs.”
“Then quit complaining.”
Rupe tried to relax his shoulders. The discomfort encompassed his entire body. His thighs were throbbing unpleasantly, and his chest hurt. He felt as though his torso was being squeezed by steel bands. Maybe some pain management techniques would help. He began by regulating his breathing, slow and deep. He emptied his mind, visualizing a featureless gray plain. He imagined himself traveling its surface, seeking out inflamed knots of synapses, surrounding each pulsing node, expunging it with a soft mental squeeze. A simple variation on his cell regeneration techniques, and highly effective. He began to feel whole as the nodes of pain disappeared, one by one. He saw the fibers of his mind relaxing and detangling. His spine seemed to loosen, translating the vibration of the tires on the road into a shimmering caress.
The pain management program was working. Maybe they could offer a seminar on it. People with chronic pain might benefit from this new branch of Amaranthine technology. Maybe if they didn’t hurt so bad they’d want to live longer. He expanded his visualization exercise, imagining his face as it would appear after the surgery healed. His eyelids tightened and youthful-looking from the blepharoplasty procedure, his chin ever-so-subtly larger and firmer from the implant. Rupe had always hated his weak chin. He could hardly wait to see the results.
Of course, he already knew what he’d look like. He’d seen his face magically transformed on Dr. Bell’s computer screen—as amazing to behold as the actual Amaranthine cell regeneration techniques, only much, much faster.
Just then the truck hit a crack in the pavement. A shock wave snaked up his spine; the base of his skull bloomed with agony. Rupe gasped and slumped forward, holding his head in his hands. “I’m going to be ill,” he groaned.
He heard Polly’s exasperated sputter. “You puke in my Range Rover, I’ll hit every pothole from here to Stonecrop.”
Rupe swallowed and attempted to reboot his pain suppression program, but all he could think about was the next bump in the road. “Just get me there,” he said.
The guardrail posts pounded by faster than her heartbeats, the limo going much too fast to jump, but Flo almost went for it. She still remembered paying seventy-nine dollars for those green pumps, and she remembered where she’d lost them. Flo went into trapped animal mode, everything packed tense, ready to explode at the slightest hint of an escape opportunity. She looked out the window, down at the blurred concrete surface of the freeway. If she threw open the door and jumped with all her pent-up strength she might make it over the guardrail onto the grassy median.
The more evolved portion of her brain managed to rein in the flight impulse. She saw herself skidding across the road surface, the techno-Amazon instantly becoming a tattered bloody mess. She whispered, “Just be here for a minute, girl. Just think.”
A mechanical ringing sound, like a cross between a doorbell and a pager, startled her. On the second ring, she saw that it was coming from a telephone handset above the wet bar. After six rings, she picked it up and put it to her ear.
“Don’t be mad.” The voice was deep and masculine. It did not belong to Arling Biggie.
Flo said nothing.
“You okay?” the voice inquired.
Flo said, “Are you the driver?”
“Yeah. I’m the driver.”
“Pull over the car, please.”
She heard a cavernous chuckle. “You okay, I guess. You like the flowers?”
Flo replaced the receiver, opened the door, and kicked the vase of flowers out onto the freeway. The vase shattered. She looked back, saw cars swerving to avoid the sudden floral hazard. The phone began to ring again. This time she let it ring for five minutes before answering.
“I guess you don’t like flowers.”
“You better let me out, whoever you are, or I’m coming right through the back of your seat. Rip your fucking spine out.”
“I let you out, Mizz Peeche, I might never get to know you.”
“You better hope you don’t get to know me. Who the hell are you?”
“Folks call me Chuckles, on account of I like to laugh sometime. We met at the Amaranthine Church, remember? I brought you your shoes back. You see ’em?”
“I see them.”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“Pull over and let me out, then you can talk all you want.” She heard the deep chuckle again. Amazing that it could come through so thin a wire. “Why should I talk to you?”
“Mizz Peeche, we are movin’ south on I-35 at sixty miles per hour. No stop signs. I just keep the needle steady, no reason to slow down ’cep to fuel up, and there’s enough gas in this stretch to roll us clear to Kansas City. What else you gonna do with yourself? You got nobody else to talk to.”
Flo hung up the phone. A few seconds later it rang again. Flo picked up the champagne bottle, wrapped the bar towel around its neck and swung it as hard as she could against the privacy panel, right where she figured his head would be. The bottle exploded with a satisfying liquid boom. The limo swerved slightly, but the panel held and the phone continued to ring. Flo ripped the television set from the entertainment console and hurled it at the panel. The picture tube shattered, filling the compartment with some nasty dust. Flo rolled down two windows and let the wind clear the air. The ringing persisted.
After a few face-saving minutes, she picked up the phone again.
“Why are we going to Kansas City?”
“We’re
not. We just riding. Just makin’ conversation. How you doin’?”
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Just to talk. Like I said.”
“So talk.”
Hyatt and Carmen were arguing again. Chip could hear them right through the privacy panel. The bride was mad, and Hyatt was trying to calm her down. It reminded him of Polly and Rupe, the way they’d go at each other sometimes, only this was worse because they just kept saying the same things over and over.
At least the drive was nice, with plenty of rolling hills and trees and green fields. Chip liked being out in the country. He thought how much nicer it would be on his motorcycle, with the sound of wind in his ears instead of the whining and cajoling going on behind him.
The bride, Carmen, wanted to know why she wasn’t married. Chip could’ve told her that. He would’ve told her it was because she was a complaining, drunken, cigarette-smoking bitch. Even with the air on and the privacy panel closed, the entire limo reeked from her cigarettes. She was back there drinking champagne and smoking and bitching. He couldn’t understand how Hyatt, a founding father of the Amaranthine Church, had wound up with this one-note whiner.
“You told me it was gonna be after the wedding, Hy! We get married, then we get snatched. That’s what we talked about. I didn’t even get to go to my own reception!”
Here they’re making history, in the middle of reforming the Amaranthine Church of the One, and she’s worrying about missing her party. Chip, he’d’ve just popped her one.
Hyatt was more patient. He kept trying to explain strategies to her. About how it was better to get kidnapped before instead of after. This was some real, first-class strategizing, the kind of complex thinking that Hyatt Hilton was so good at. Chip appreciated a strategic mind. Polly, she was strategic, too, but not as strategic as Hyatt.
“This is all about public perception,” Hyatt was explaining. “It has to do with the concept of the bride. We were kidnapped on the way to the altar. If it happened after, it wouldn’t have the impact. It’s all about what order things happen in. That’s what it’s about, Carm, is impact. Why do you think O.J. Simpson got so much press? It was the order that things happened in.”
“Sophie’s gonna kill us both,” Carmen said.
“Look at it this way,” Hyatt said. “Once we get on TV, then we can do whatever we want. We can get married on the Tonight Show, like Tiny Tim. Would you like that?”
“I want to go to the reception.”
Hyatt seemed to run out of patience. “Well,” he said, “you can’t. Deal with it.” Chip smiled. That was much better. That was strategy.
When had she lost control? A few months ago, Carmen had been in charge of her life. She’d been the one who called the shots. She had decided when they would go out, when they would have sex, and what movies they would see. He would come to her with his ideas, and she would pick and choose. But lately—for a long time now, come to think of it—she had been more like a passenger, watching life coming at her, unable to get a grip on the wheel. It reminded her of her experience with her last boyfriend, the skinhead psycho James Dean who had ended up dead and almost got her killed, too. Only Hyatt wasn’t scary dangerous like Dean had been. She couldn’t imagine Hy actually hurting her. So how and when had she lost control?
She poured herself another glass of champagne, spilling a little when the limo swerved. Or maybe the limo hadn’t swerved. They were on their second bottle, so it was hard to tell exactly what had caused the glass to move just as the champagne emerged from the bottle neck. Oddly enough, although she felt a pleasant alcoholic buzz from her toes to her fingertips, her mind remained clear. Memories played one after another as she searched her recent past for clues to her present situation.
The day she had moved into Hyatt’s apartment. Was that when she had lost it?
No. By that time, the out-of-control feeling had already arrived.
Hyatt was up front talking to the driver, Chip. Carmen did not like Chip. She didn’t like his reptilian eyes and the way she couldn’t help but look into his nostrils when he faced her.
She looked further into the past, searching for that moment when she’d blinked and her life had gone off in this strange direction. Was it when she had told Sophie that she was getting married? Or before that? She looked into her champagne flute and saw, through the bubbles, the ring around her finger. She switched the glass from her left hand to her right and looked at her ring. Sunset slanted in through the tinted windows, hit the diamond, and threw sparks into her eyes.
That was it, she thought, blinking. She had lost it the moment he gave her the goddamn ring.
“So what you’re saying is that these telomeres get a little shorter every time I do something bad to my body?”
“That’s right. You go out in the bright sun, your cells got to fight the light, your skin telomeres shorten up faster. You smoke a cigarette, your lung telomeres get shorter. You eat a Twinkie, you messing with all kinds of ’em.”
Flo said, “Huh.” It made sense to her. “What about when I work out, breaking down those muscle fibers.”
“That different. That not damaging cells, it challenging them.” Chuckles held up a clenched fist, saluting the concept. Flo could see his grin in the rearview mirror. They were still cruising down I-35, coming up on the Iowa border. Chuckles had lowered the privacy panel a few miles back. He was not bad looking. He knew how to wear gold. A lot of men didn’t. A lot of men, especially black men, had these big yellow watches and rings and such but it was the gold wore them. This Chuckles, he wore the gold.
She couldn’t remember exactly what he had said that had got her to listening. Somewhere back around Owatonna, he’d started to make sense. Chuckles—or Charles Thickening, which was his real name—was a very smart man. He knew all kinds of stuff about cells and telomeres and the mind-body interface. He knew things she’d never heard before.
Flo said, “But that lady that got younger, that was fake.”
“Rupe, him and Polly have a philosophy. They figure it’s cool to fool folks if that’s what you got to do to teach ’em the real thing. See, one secret to longer telomeres is you got to believe. Rupe, he says it don’t matter if you fooled or not, long’s you believe.”
“You are what you think you are,” said Flo, quoting one of her favorite articles from Muscular Development.
“You got that right, what Rupe called the first step: believe. And there’s more. The second step is … you know, you not suppose to know this one yet, but I gone tell you anyway. Live longer.”
“Sounds sort of obvious.”
“A lot of the steps do, until you really think on ’em. See, the longer you live, the more science you got to help you live longer. For instance, a fifty-year-old man in 1950, he could expect to live maybe to fifty-eight. But if he manage to live to seventy, his life expectancy went up to seventy-nine. And if he make it to ninety, he might could expect to live to 100. Every year he live he get another year! According to Rupe, anybody who can make it to the year 2078 is going to live forever.”
“I’d be pretty old.”
“Yeah, but you’d look and feel young. Those are just two steps I told you. There’s five more. Once you do all seven, you there.”
“Tell me one more.”
Chuckles chuckled. “I don’t know you ready, Mizz Peeche.”
“Tell me.”
“Okay, I tell you. You ready?”
Flo nodded.
“Be there.”
“That’s mine!”
“That number three.”
“It’s mine. Tell me the rest.”
42
Kathie: What are you rebelling against?
Johnny: What have you got?
—Mary Murphy and Marlon Brando, The Wild One
“LET ME ASK YOU something, Crow. How many times have you been hit on the head so hard it knocked you out?”
Crow lifted a hand and felt the back of his head. It was bandaged, and numb. His
mouth tasted awful. He had awakened in hospital rooms before, and his mouth always tasted the same.
Debrowski sat back in the beige plastic chair, playing with the zippers on her jacket. “Do you even remember?” She had something on her head. An old 1950s-style motorcycle cap.
“I think four or five … or six. What’s that on your head?”
“You know, most people go their whole lives without getting knocked out.” Zippers opened and closed, making soft metal buzzing sounds. “How many times has it been this month?”
Crow frowned. “Two?”
“That’s what I told the doctor. He said you’re lucky to be alive.”
“Doctors say that all the time.”
“Maybe it’s true.”
“Of course it’s true. You’re alive, too. Do you feel lucky?”
“Yeah. I’m lucky I’m not you.”
Crow turned his head away, taking a break from Debrowski’s eyes, which became unbearably rectangular when she was angry. On the other side of the bed, Sam sat slumped in a chair, snoring gently. The zipper noises merged with Sam’s snoring, sounding like a slowed-down recording of buzzing insects. Behind Sam, Crow could see a street lamp through the dark window.
“What time is it?” he asked.
Debrowski said, “A little after eleven. Maybe you should get yourself a motorcycle helmet. What would you think about that? Since people keep hitting you upside the head. You know, I’m kinda P.O.ed at you, Crow.”
Crow thought, I could get hit by lightning, and she’d get mad at me. She’d say, why didn’t you duck? All he’d been doing, he’d been trying to do a favor for Axel. Then something had happened. Something not his fault.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” he asked, watching a bead of drool form at the corner of his father’s mouth.
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
Crow explored the scrambled regions of his brain. “I remember going into a place to buy a pack of cigarettes for Carmen.” He turned back toward Debrowski.