Magnificent Vibration (18 page)

After a comparatively uneventful drive, Alice, Lexington Vargas, and I hole up in my BP (Bachelor Pad) and agree unanimously that it has been a fairly unusual night, to say the least. We’ve changed out of our wet clothes and showered. Alice is wearing my robe and I suspect not much else. L.V. has somehow managed to squeeze himself into one of my T-shirts and a pair of board shorts. I am in my jammies, once again.

“Alice, you can sleep in the master bedroom,” I offer magnanimously. “Lexington and I will take the single bed in the second room and the couch here. Is that cool with everyone?” I say, pointing to the couch as if they’ve never seen a couch before and need immediate illumination.

“I’ve got dibs on the couch,” says Lexington Vargas graciously. I admit I have a vague and unrealistic hope that somehow Alice and I will end up in the same bed tonight. Sheesh, what morons Woody and I are sometimes. We are a dangerously impractical pair, I think.

Alice and L.V. nod their agreement—on the sleeping arrangements, that is; not my private, mental note about my quixotic relationship with the Woodman. “I have spare toothbrushes,” I offer to both but leaning heavily and hopefully toward L.V.

“We should turn on the news,” says Alice, so I do.

The plane crash is on every station. There is also shaky videophone footage that some quick-thinking citizen has captured and probably sold to the networks for billions. The amateur video plainly shows the moment the evac slide is activated. Then the horrific explosion that follows. Of course the channels play this footage over and over and over but for the life of us all sitting watching in my living room, we don’t see a single soul come down that slide.

The newscasters announce it again and again: No survivors. They show the video. Then say there were no survivors. Then replay the video . . . and say again, in case we missed it the first fifteen times, that there were no survivors. It’s an endless loop and what news channels do when actual fact-gathering is slow.

We are too tired, too bewildered, and too numb to make any sense of the last few hours and what it all might mean. But we are united in the belief that it means
something
and that we are now involved in
an anomalous event, possibly preternatural. Either that or someone spiked our coffee at Jafar’s Java Joint.

“When we wake up tomorrow, I’m dialing that number in Lexington’s book,” I announce adamantly. The truth is I’m nervous about calling in case he/she harasses me again. Anyway, it’s really late and I figure even God has to close up shop at
some
point and go home to the wife and kids. I still haven’t looked at my copy of the book yet beyond checking out the 800 number. There’s only so much information I can cram into my tiny brain in one cataclysmically eventful and astonishing night. I already feel like my head is about to detonate like the guy in that awesome scene in
Scanners.
BOOM!

Lexington Vargas nods his agreement at my suggestion of getting God on the horn in the a.m. I think he’s too bone-weary to chat now, anyway. Alice continues to stare at the TV. She’s hard to read. I don’t understand her reaction, or rather her non-reaction, to the fact that we have some new, possible holy digits. If you were a sophomoric stockbroker and someone handed you Warren Buffet’s home number, you’d want to give him a buzz, right?

Why doesn’t she want to place the call? It’s her BOSS!!! I let it go for now. Instead I suggest we all get some sleep. Lexington Vargas finally switches off the TV and its frightening replay of images we witnessed just hours ago and will never forget. I can only hope I’m too tired to dream.

U
nder cover in the darkened street below, a figure watches as the last light goes out in the apartment.

The rain has stopped but the wind still blows, whipping his long
jet-black hair across his beautiful face. He brushes the errant locks aside with elegant fingers and continues to observe.

J
osie’s health heads south rapidly. She no longer babbles her sweet, childlike phrases to me in any language I can decipher. What little speech she has is taken from her completely in a matter of months as the tumor grows and presses on new and crucial areas of her brain. Our mother does her best, but she is struggling with the emotional and financial impact of the divorce as Dad, three weeks into post-marriage freedom, reneges on the monetary aid he’d promised her. The church is her only salvation, and I’ve even sullied
that
with my wanton sexual meanderings. She is waiting for the new pastor with bated breath. Me, too.

My “darn job” has failed to materialize, but I have now progressed to the slightly easier D-chord on the guitar and am hoping all my hard work will soon pay off and the much-anticipated rock stardom is just around the corner. That said, I’m pretty sure I could be kidding myself, so on weekends, when mother is home all day, I go door to door to see if anyone wants to employ a depressed, directionless, deviant high school dropout. So far no one has jumped at the offer.

The doctors (yes, “doctors” plural, because once you get cancer, everyone wants to climb aboard the gravy train) have been giving my sister high doses of steroids in the hope that this might shrink the tumor and relieve some of the pressure on her brain. Although it’s a stopgap measure at best, the dexamethasone/prednisone concoctions have caused her once narrow frame to swell dramatically, as though someone has attached an air hose to her. Everything about her appearance is bloated and distended, and she no longer looks anything like Josie. Her skin has
thinned drastically thanks to the self-same steroidal abuse, causing the weakened epidermis to tear randomly and painfully all over her body under the added pressure of the weight gain. I can tell she’s suffering, though she makes no sound or movement, and I am unable to do anything to help her.

I read to her in the beginning, hoping Melville will get through. If
Moby-Dick
can’t reach her, nothing can. I even clamp headphones over her ears and crank up Nirvana. She doesn’t react to either. So I just sit with my sister and watch her die. I really wish we still had a dog.

I’ve even given up my fruitless hunt for the perfect girl, which at this point actually means “any girl who finds me even remotely attractive and has half a mind to climb into the sack with me and Woody.” I begin to believe that maybe the Reverend’s freak of a wife was the high point of my sexual career. Heaven forbid.

My girlfriend prospects are limited anyway, now that I’m caring for Josie most of the time, unless I start opening up the qualifications a tad to include 55-year-old, morbidly obese nurses and the occasional snobby, balding doctor. It’s a thought.

I come home one evening from another fruitless day of who-wants-to-hire-an-incompetent-loser and hear my mother talking to my sister as though she were aware and coherent and might actually respond. It’s silly and heartbreaking at the same time.

Mom says, “We have a new pastor coming into the church soon, Josephine. It’s very exciting. We’re all
very
excited.”

Crickets!

More from Mom: “I might paint the bathroom. It looks so drab, that awful green color. I think it’s time for a change, don’t you?”

Again, crickets.

“Doris—you know Doris, Mark Brewer’s new wife?—well,
apparently she’s got a bit of a history and may actually have a criminal record. At least that’s the talk.”

As before, crickets. I walk into Josie’s room to free her from this inane jabber, but she actually seems to be taking an interest in it. She’s looking at Mom with big, wide eyes and appears to comprehend it all, ready to gossip herself, chat, shoot the shit, throw the bull. I sense that a change has occurred in our girl. This could be good. Is this the rewiring of the brain the doctor had mentioned? The miracle of miracles?

So if this was real life—and it most certainly is—what would be the guess? And you are correct, Sir or Madam!! Go to the head of the class. Pass “GO” and collect 200 dollars. Pick any stuffed animal from the third shelf. It is NOT the miracle we have all been praying for.

I sit on Josie’s bed. My mother gives me a look that says she is making some serious progress and not to interfere. I have a sneaking suspicion it is not progress. At least not the kind she is imagining. I touch my girl’s face. She is ice cold. I black out for a second. I put my hand on her ribs. There is no rise and fall or breathing of any kind. Josie is dead. She has silently passed, and our mother, with all her disconnected craziness, has missed this beautiful/awful moment. Our girl is gone forever. I fall into her lifeless arms and hug her for the last time. Mother is reduced to silence.

“I love you, my girl,” I whisper into Josie’s cold shell of an ear. I know she knows this but I must tell her once again. I am an inarticulate nineteen-year-old and I have no words to express either my pain or the staggering profundity of this moment. All I’ve got at my command is this simple, timeworn phrase. It is the purest and most simply meaningful final sentiment I can offer my avenging angel/harpy who was my rock, even with all her afflictions. And I offer it to her as she leaves me, on a journey to I-know-not-where.

So I say, one final time to her: “I love you.” And mean it as much as I ever will in my life.

The hospice nurse comes in to confirm that Josie is actually dead, and a couple of men from the mortuary arrive to collect her body. We are in a daze and assume they know what they’re doing, though who has the wherewithal at a time like this to judge that? A day later they deliver to our home a small wooden box of ashes that is all that remains of my sister. I set them on the dining room table, where we used to fight over who got the most Jell-O for dessert when we were kids. Her beautiful hair, the tortured eyes that could still show love, the pale skin she used to scrub until it was red and raw, the good heart that beat, the brain that turned on her, the musical voice that could soothe my young soul, the face and form of my sweet sister—all reduced to a pale gray, granulated powder. Her ashes. The container sits there for weeks. I don’t want to move it because it’s Josie. My mother won’t go near it. Mother wanted her buried, whole and in the ground with all the attendant church rituals and hallowed recitations but Josie had (maybe presciently) expressed to me her desire to be turned into ash and given back to the earth should she go before me. And so I have made certain that this wish, at least, has been fulfilled. It is the least I can do for all she was to me. Sorry, all she
is
to me.

I walk into my monster-shrine of a bedroom a few days after she has passed and see my sad, pointless guitar sitting against a wall. The last time I wrestled it to the ground in search of the perfect “D” chord, Josie was still living and breathing in the next room. It seems to be mocking me. Now that she’s gone, the guitar looks like an alien artifact. From a place I can’t get to anymore. And music is basically math, isn’t it? I sucked at math. Super-sucked! And the
electric
guitar is probably the algebra of the guitar world.

I think about selling the damn thing as it sits there and scornfully
plays back my ineptitude to me. But trading the torturous thing for cold cash seems crass. That very afternoon I walk my guitar outside and lean it against a tree in front of the house by the street. I write up a cardboard sign, place it between the strings, and then head back inside. The sign has the magic word written on it:
FREE.
Underneath, for my own benefit, I have added:
TO A GOOD HOME.

I look out an hour later. The guitar is gone. And so are my rock-star dreams and my big sister.

“O
h my god, what’s that horrible sound?” is the first thought that comes to me as I surface from my deep and stuporous sleep, like a diver with narcosis. Did I doze off next to the rhinoceros pen at the zoo as they bellow and shriek their way through hot rhino-love? No, I’m in a bedroom, but it isn’t mine. Maybe I got drunk and passed out somewhere? And then in a giant, mind-melting rush and crash, the whole previous night comes flooding back into my still severely overtaxed brain. I’m in my own guest bedroom because the provocative proselyte, Alice, is in
my
bed and that hideous, guttural pig-squealing noise must be Lexington Vargas snoring away on the couch in the living room! It’s light outside so I rise, knowing I haven’t slept nearly enough, but I’m determined to get back on the case, maybe even dialing up the Big Dude, although in the cold light of day I’m feeling a lot less confident about actually making the call. And I think I had some weird dream about a plane I was on crash-landing in Loch Ness as the passengers were trying to photograph the amazing monster of the Loch that turned out, instead, to be the spire of a sunken church. (??) I read somewhere that in dreams, flying and water
are both symbolic of sexual desire. Guess who the sunken church is? Yep. And she’s wearing my robe, right now.

I shake it off, grab my slippers, and walk out into the living room and confirm that the farm-critter noises are indeed being cranked out via L.V.’s ample nasal passages. Wow, he’s
loud!
Any minute I expect to hear neighbors banging on the ceiling, floor, and walls. Maybe these walls are thicker than I thought, although I
always
hear the guy next door’s bed bumping rhythmically against my living room wall and the
Oh my gawd
s every time he scores, and he scores a lot, the lucky bastard.

I stop in the doorway at the vision before me. Alice is already awake and on my computer, the blue-white glow of the screen lighting her fetchingly as she sits there, legs tucked under her. And, yes, she is still in
my robe.

It’s the very same computer I sometimes watch free Internet porn on as I spank Woody Woodsman into mild ecstasy to ease the pain of my loneliness and also get a good night’s sleep, such is the pathetic cliché I have become, post-divorce. Until now. There is nothing clichéd about this
Three’s Company
-with-a-twist I find myself in.