The paratrooper boots were a bit of a departure.
She smiled, waved a hand and said, “Hi.”
My quick glance went to the open door, then back to her.
I hadn’t heard her come in.
I said, “Hi, there, young lady. What’s up?”
The Bellevue nurse’s aides were ordinarily quite young. This one wasn’t. Late thirties, I would guess, maybe forties. Red hair. Somewhat pretty. Couldn’t make out the color of her eyes. Meantime, I wondered, what was she doing with an old Alf Landon button pinned to one side of her hat and a Wendell Willkie button pinned to the other?
“Are you Mister—?”
She paused to lift a card to her view.
“Mr. Joseph El Boono?” she finished.
“Bueno.”
“Sorry, Bueno. Are you he?”
Almost done with the book, I was antsy to get back to it.
“I am,” I said curtly. “Now what is it, please? What do you want?”
She lifted upturned hands to the side and smiled.
“Oh, well, everything,” she said,
I thought, What?
I was squinting at her now. My eyesight had grown a bit blurry. “Look, I’m trying to write,” I breathed out with weary patience.
“Oh, my God!” She then gasped. “Oh, my God!”
She lifted a hand to her cheek as her mouth fell open and her eyes flared into Betty Boop territory. “You mean you’re Joseph El Bueno the famous movie writer?” she squealed.
Then she slapped at her forehead. “Duuuhhhhh!”
My bleary eyes narrowed with suspicion. Never kid a kidder. The wildly overdone bimbo squeal of ecstasy was mockery. But why?
I glowered. “Come on, what is this? Huh? What’s up?”
“Joey, don’t you ever know me?”
“What do you mean, ‘ever know’ you?” I tried studying her face but the blurriness had gotten even worse. “I don’t know you at all,” I said. “Who are you?”
“It’s me.”
“‘It’s me?’ Who’s ‘me’?”
She quickly covered up a giggle with her hand.
“What’s so funny?” I said.
She dropped her hand from her mouth and said, “You.”
I squinted harder. There were dimples in her cheeks.
“You okay in there, sailor?”
I turned my head and saw Bloor. She was standing in the doorway with only one hand on her hip, a deliberate sign she had come in peace. For a moment she eyeballed the turned-off TV, and then shifted a frowning look back to me.
“So what’s up?”
“What do you mean?”
“Lots of talking going on in here, Joey.”
She was slowly and suspiciously glancing around.
I turned a wild look to the nurse’s aide. She was chortling again, this time covering her mouth with both hands.
Bloor didn’t see her!
“What’s going on in here?” Bloor sniffed. “What’s harpooning?” Then her gaze settled back onto me. “You got a little pocket radio or something? Maybe talking to yourself? I’d need to know about that, Joey. Okay?”
“Just reading sentences aloud to check their rhythm.”
“You do the characters’ voices as well?”
“My forte. I thought I told you I do voices.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” she said, nodding. “When you were a kid.”
“Do you see this chair?”
I was pointing at the nurse’s aide, who was on the verge of losing it, with full-blown guffaws now threatening to erupt.
Bloor looked at the chair, then back at me.
“Nice chair. Is this an eye test or the start of a joke?”
“Is there anybody sitting in the chair?”
Bloor stared at me inscrutably for a time, her little eyes glaring up from a lowered head like a baby rhino you’d just cursed with a “Brux.”
“This could be scary and discouraging,” Bloor said evenly. “If this isn’t a joke I’m going to have to have certain professional parties take a look at you again, which might of course mean au revoir to my budding movie career. But if it is a joke—and knowing you it probably is—then it isn’t in the spirit of our newfound and possibly incredibly fragile relationship. Save the funny jokes for our script.”
Nodding solemnly, I said, “I will.”
As she left, Nurse Bloor closed the door behind her.
I turned to look at whatever it was in the chair. She was wiping at a laughter tear in the corner of her eye with a knuckle. “Funny woman,” she said with half a chortle and half with a touch of fondness.
“Yes, everything’s funny to you, it seems,” I said grumpily.
“Well, everything is.”
I shaded my eyes with a hand, looking down. “Yes, that’s right,” I said with quiet resignation. “And that’s because you’re a ka, a made-up doppelgänger, a female projection of me. I am talking to no one but myself. I’m really crazy.”
“Joey, look at me,” I heard the aide say to me tenderly.
I looked up and saw a fond, warm look in her eyes.
I could see now they were green. Jade green.
Of course.
“So you’re Jane,” I said. “The Jane I made up.”
Smiling faintly, she nodded her head and said softly, “Yes, I’m Jane. Your Jane. But you didn’t make me up, Joey. I did.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean my real name isn’t Jane.”
At this I frowned a bit, puzzled, and I tilted my head to the side. “Then what is it?” I asked.
“It’s Eileen. Joey, I’m your mom.”
I just gaped. I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t speak.
My unconscious must have known that she was telling me the truth because otherwise why had my heart started thumping and why were there tears streaming down my cheeks?
She said, “I’ve come for you. I’ve come to take you home.”
“W-w-w what?”
“Merry Christmas, my Joey.”
I held out my arms to her.
“Oh, Mom!”
21
She filled my head with a ton of information in just seconds, but I’ll have to set it down here very roughly because I haven’t much time, only minutes, and my brain and my heart are exploding suns. The time that I’d died and come back, she explained, at the end of my “life review” it was clear my next stop would be limbo, or maybe the word that she used was “purgatory.” Not sure of it, okay? The Other Side. But it wouldn’t be in one of the better rooms, so Mom pleaded with God that I should get another chance because she’d died when I was born and wasn’t there to give me spiritual formation when I was young, which could have set me up to walk in the right direction. She’d blamed herself for her pneumonia just before I was born! Can you believe it? She said it all happened because of her vanity, insisting against Pop’s objections that she had to go out in a freezing storm to buy a couple of barrettes and a “really pretty robe” for her hospital stay. “Oh, please send Joey back to his childhood,” she’d pleaded. “I mean, only if just in his mind, so I can give him the formation he should have had and that I owe him! A few times when he’s little and can be molded, that’s all, and then you can see what choices he makes or that he would have made! Alright? You’re God, the God of Abraham and Jacob! You mean you can’t be the God of virtual reality?”
“Oh, Mom, you’re so beautiful!” I marveled.
She smiled and primped her hair for a second, then got up and came over to the side of my bed and I could swear the room was filled with the scent of mimosa.
“I guard!”
“Almost time, Joey. Time to go home. Pop’s waiting for you.”
“Really, Mom? Pop?”
“Oh, well, of course. He’s jumping up and down with wanting to see you. He’d be here now except he had this appointment.”
“What appointment? Inner Sanctum?”
Still smiling, she nodded, a
nd said, “Something like that.”
“What’s it like there, Mom? Tell me!”
And now suddenly her smile became that rising of the moon I’d once seen in Jane, her face aglow with a joy she had no words to express but that she knew would never fade, not even long after the sun had grown cold and, beyond, when time no longer existed. She put her head back and her laughter flowed out in warm waves.
“Oh, my Joey, you have no idea! No idea!”
After that she looked down at me and placed her hand on top of mine, which I could see but couldn’t feel. “Are you ready?” she asked.
“Oh, no, please! A few minutes! Can’t I have a few more minutes? I need to finish what I’m writing, Mom! Please! Five minutes! Okay, four! Give me four!”
“Go ahead,” she said softly. “Do what you can and we’ll see.”
Well, my fingers fairly flew at the laptop keyboard, completing these final four or five pages, and in parting let me say I’d like to thank my director and my wonderful cast and crew, my niece Emilia, and all the barbers who flew to location that elate a love a life a laugh along the
New York City
December 25, 2010
A Special Tribute
Oh, well, hi! My name is Rose Ellen Bloor and I’m a Registered Nurse at Bellevue Hospital in New York City where it was my privilege to care for the coauthor of this work, Joseph Michael El Bueno, the noted screenwriter and humanitarian who was a two-time winner of the PETA Compassionate Colleague Award, once for “never writing scenes in which a character is shown using a flyswatter,” and the other time for “never setting the action of the story in either fall or winter or in Russia at any time of year, thus avoiding the use of wardrobe made of fur.” After my collaborator’s passing it was both my sad yet supremely satisfying privilege to bring this current work into the light of day, even though it was my choice to leave my part in it uncredited, more or less as a tribute to El Bueno, who in fact performed most of the manual labor on the work—the typing, the writing and so on. My most significant creative contribution, perhaps, consisted of the posthumous editing of the manner in which my character was depicted, which, while originally wholly accurate, I thought to be so cloyingly sweet—in fact virtually heroine worship—that the work might lose its credibility, and so I rewrote those scenes, virtually fictionalizing them by making my character at times seem eccentric, even psychopathically hostile and threatening, thus adding both “color” and the necessary tension that had been curiously absent from the work. I know that Joey—that’s what he begged me to call him—would approve. He was always so kind. He once told me he would probably die in some movie theater lobby reading audience preview-card comments at a sneak of one of his films, whereas in fact he passed away while composing the present work, thus explaining the incomplete sentence at the end and which only the inexplicable resistance of the publisher prevented me from completing my thought being to add the words “Navajo Trail.”
Well, at least now you know.
Rose Bloor
Other Books by
William Peter Blatty
Which Way to Mecca, Jack?
John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!
Twinkle, Twinkle “Killer” Kane
I, Billy Shakespeare!
The Exorcist
I’ll Tell Them I Remember You
The Ninth Configuration
Legion
Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing
Elsewhere
Dimiter
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
CRAZY
Copyright © 2010 by William Peter Blatty
All rights reserved.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2649-2
Crazy Page 13