Boarding Instructions, page 11
“Don’t be silly ICBM boy,” she says, “It’s time to go back to the hacienda for a quick bite. Your ears look cold, where are your merry Christmas earmuffs?”
It’s like from her point of view nothing has changed.
“Get back,” I tell her, “get back or I’ll go kaboom.”
She doesn’t get back.
I go kaboom.
Glinky
1
Not a Bird
Glinky is on TV.
The man with the abdominal gunshot wound isn’t watching Glinky.
What the heck is Glinky anyway?
Is he a mouse?
No!
Is she a cat?
No!
It’s Glinky, Glinky, Glinky!
The wounded man wants to somehow get to the telephone on the table near the couch and call for help. It’s a long way to crawl. Glinky sings him a little song of encouragement, but it’s clear the cartoon is mocking him.
When the man gets to the table, he looks back and sees a long smear of blood across the carpet and beyond that Glinky glaring at him from the TV.
Who in the world is Glinky?
Some monkey?
No.
A flying fish with horse lips and dog ears?
No, he’s just Glinky!
The man stretches up an arm and bats around on the top of the table for the phone. It isn’t there. No, wait, there it is. He pulls it off the table and tries to catch it as it falls, and fails, and it hits him in the face, but the pain is nothing like the pain in his gut. The pain from the phone hitting him in the face is trivial. It might as well not be pain at all. He drags the phone into his lap and picks up the receiver and puts it to his ear.
There is no dial tone.
He pulls at the phone wire that leads to the wall. Soon, he’s holding the end. The shooter or someone (maybe Glinky?) has unplugged the phone.
He crawls under the table to look for the outlet. He finally spots it behind the couch. Should he try to get back there and plug the phone back in? No. He won’t be able to move the couch. He will have to crawl to the front door and yell into the street for help. The door is so far away it looks like he will have to Alice down to a very small size to fit through it. But he must get there first. A journey of a thousand scootches begins with the first scootch.
Will he make it, Glinky?
“No!”
So, he’ll never get out of here?
“Not unless he buys something.”
What must he buy, Glinky?
“The farm!”
2
To Your Left
Oddly, I’d been on my way to the Medical Mall that day anyway. It was company policy that all my employees undergo annual medical checkups, and the fact that I was my only employee did not tempt me to relax the requirement. Karl Sowa Investigations had procedures, and we followed them. I didn’t expect to be a one-man operation forever.
I could have driven the few blocks from my office on Eleventh Avenue to the Medical Mall, but instead I made the healthy choice and walked. It was a glorious Oregon day. The sun was shining for a change. The birds were chirping. The squirrels were gathering nuts or whatever urban squirrels gathered. The traffic was a steady hum with not so many horn honks.
Spring at last.
I was thinking I should maybe whistle a happy tune when right behind me, someone shouted, “To your left!”
Meaning, I thought, I should jump to my left.
Wrong.
The bicyclist behind me yelped and swerved to the right at the last moment and clipped me, and I stumbled off the sidewalk where a great wall of metal rushed by, and for a moment I thought I’d stepped onto railroad tracks that had not been there a moment before, but then the thing passed, and I could see it was a city bus. There was some kind of big rodent with huge red eyes painted on the back of the bus. It studied me with smug amusement.
I looked back to see the bicyclist peddling full speed toward a place where the sidewalk made a sharp turn at a building. Probably a kid, I thought, judging by the fact that there were things sticking out of her helmet like horns or ears and long red hair shooting out in all directions — some kind of costume?
Surely she would slow down for the turn. I had a sudden feeling of total satisfaction at the thought of her hitting the building with a cartoon splat, but then I felt guilty for thinking that and then felt okay, realizing it wasn’t like it was actually going to happen, but then it did.
The wheels were a blur and for a moment I thought they were not wheels at all but the galloping feet and legs of some kind of furry beast, but before I could get that thought fully formed, the rider ran headlong into the building. Instead of crashing or bouncing back out into traffic, she passed right through the wall as if it were made of smoke.
Before I had time even to doubt what I’d seen, someone shouted, “Don’t move!”
Then there were hands all over me. A young woman told me everything would be okay, you’ll be fine, just relax, you’re hurt, but we’re here to help. There were three of them — two big blond guys with very short hair and the young woman with the soothing voice, all of them wearing white medical coats. One of the guys grabbed me under the arms from behind and the other snatched up my feet, and they lowered me onto a gurney.
“Hey!” I yelled and tried to get off. The woman put both hands on my chest and pushed down. She was pretty strong, but she didn’t have to hold me long, because one of the guys pulled a leather strap over my arms and chest and fastened it. Likewise another strap across my lower legs.
“Okay, let’s go,” the woman said.
One of the guys pushed me onto the sidewalk. The woman walked along beside me patting my shoulder and looking concerned. I lifted my head as much as I could and looked down the length of my body and between my feet and saw the other young man take off running while waving his arms and making siren noises. The guy pushing my gurney picked up the pace, and the woman jogged to keep up. Soon we were zooming along dangerously fast.
The guy making the siren noises didn’t slow down for the big automatic glass doors of the Medical Mall. The doors opened just in time, and we zipped into the mall.
The waiting areas were set up like sidewalk cafés so consumers of medical services could watch other consumers strolling up and down the mall. There were small white metal tables and chairs and roving venders offering cola or cappuccino. The doctors were arranged by body parts or maybe alphabetically (podiatry followed by proctology) or maybe metaphorically — is that a kick in the ass or what? Bings and pings now and then interrupted the Muzak which was a song about buying this or buying that, come on, do it for the Glinkster, don’t be a tightwad.
We were still moving pretty fast as we passed through one of the café waiting rooms and banged through a set of double doors into a huge bright room. The guy pushing the gurney let it go, and I flew forward spinning like the jack of diamonds tossed at a big silk top hat.
I tightened up for the forthcoming crash and pain, but someone caught my gurney before it hit a wall.
A new team descended on me. My eyelid was peeled back and a bright light shined into my eye, first on the left and then on the right. Someone else stuck a needle in my arm behind the elbow.
“Hey, I’m not hurt,” I yelled. “Let me up.”
“Relax, Karl,” a woman said. “Everything is going to be fine.”
How did she know my name?
I felt the familiar coldness of a stethoscope on my chest and looked down to see that I was now wearing only my underwear and that my arms and legs were no longer strapped down.
The guy listening to my chest put away his stethoscope and said, “Get up now, please.”
I got up. There were two women and one man dressed in white like the ones who’d snatched me off the street. I looked around the big room and it did not seem so big now and the gurney I’d ridden in on was now an examination table and instead of three people, there was only the one nurse, neat, maybe mid-forties, very efficient, no nonsense, and she directed me to a scale and weighed and measured me.
“Boy oh boy,” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing, just your weight and height.”
“Is it unusual?”
“We’re all individuals, aren’t we? Jump back up on here.” I sat on the edge of the examination table, and she checked my reflexes.
“Whoa!” she said when my knee jerked.
“What?”
She turned my head to one side and put something in my ear and said, “Well, this is interesting.” She turned my head the other way to look into my other ear. “Here, too,” she said.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Everything is shipshape.”
“But what about my ears?”
“What about your ears?”
“Never mind.”
“Well, just relax,” she said. “The doctor will be with you shortly.”
Which meant sometime in the indefinite future but probably before I died of old age or hell froze over.
I had lost track of the number of times I’d gone completely through my compressed T’ai Chi routine by the time the doctor stepped in. I froze in the middle of Lan Ch’ueh Wei (Grasping the Bird’s Tail).
“Well, I see you can still dance,” he said. “I’m Dr. Jones.” He held out his hand for me to shake. “Sit down, Mr. Sorrow.”
“Sowa,” I said. “Karl Sowa.”
He was maybe fifty with no hair at all on his head or face and that made him look a little rounder than he probably was. Oddly, his nametag said Dr. Smith. He flipped through the pages on his clipboard. “Things look pretty good, Karl. I see you’ve been eating right and exercising regularly.”
“How could you know that?”
“The usual channels,” he said. “No jogging?”
“No jogging,” I said.
“Yes, well, never mind. I see you don’t smoke. Moderate alcohol. Good, good. A little goes a long way, as they say. Ha ha. Your cholesterol count is good. All things considered I’d say you’re in excellent health.”
“That’s good to hear,” I said.
“Except for the bus, of course,” he said.
“Actually it was the bike,” I said. “The bus missed me.”
“You may be confused,” he said. “But even so, what about next time? No, I won’t beat around the bush, Mr. Sorrow. You are in the awkward position of being totally healthy. That is, the odds of you dropping dead from some disease are quite small.”
“Why is that awkward?” I asked. “It sounds pretty good to me.”
“Awkward for you,” he said. “This makes you perfect for us.”
“Perfect for you?”
“We have something to help you.”
“Help me with what?”
“The bus,” he said. “The healthy ones always get hit by a bus.”
I waited for him to smile, but he seemed deadly serious. After another moment of eye contact, he said, “There is a new medication from our corporate partner, Philosophical Pharmaceuticals, called Pilula Omnibus. Just out. The latest thing.”
“What does that mean?”
“You could call it the ‘Bus Pill.’”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s it for?”
“For people like you,” he said. “Guys like you you’re all the time exercising. Right? You get a lot of fiber in your diet. Not much red meat. Vitamins. You don’t smoke. Maybe a couple of fingers of Old Cow after dinner, am I right?”
“I think that’s Old Crow,” I said.
“Whatever. So what happens to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“All that clean living means you’ve just got to get hit by a bus, Karl.”
“And you mean this pill . . .”
“Exactly,” he said. “Pilula Omnibus protects you from life’s last little irony. Here’s a sample.” He put a small blue pill in my hand.
“So, does it work on other stuff?” I asked. “Like icy sidewalks?”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” he said. “Let me get you some water.”
He walked over to a water cooler and brought me back a little paper cone of water. “Go ahead. Take it.”
So, I did. Hey, he was a doctor, after all.
“Good. Good.” He walked to the door. “Now just wait here.”
“But what am I waiting for?”
“The next bus,” he said and closed the door behind him.
I found my clothes on a chair to one side of the examination table. My socks were in my shoes. My pants were folded neatly on the chair. My shirt was draped around the back. It didn’t look like an arrangement I would have created myself, but at this point I could not be sure. I got dressed.
I wondered what the pill would do.
I didn’t feel any different.
But then I caught a whiff of tobacco smoke. Incredibly, someone somewhere in the Medical Mall was smoking. The smell got suddenly stronger and louder as a woman stepped out of a nook over by the soda machines, and the space expanded and filled with many people moving in all directions, everyone with a noise to contribute to the heavy echo in the big bus station. I could see lots of cigarette butts crushed out on the floor where the woman had been lurking. She must have been waiting for some time for the doctor to leave so we could be alone in the crowd.
“There’s no time to lose,” she said. “We’ve got to get you out of here before they realize what I’m up to.” She meant the people watching through the big glass windows above the mezzanine — it could have been the whole medical staff up there elbowing one another and pointing and whispering behind their hands.
Now along with the cigarette smoke, there was the heavy odor of old cooking grease and diesel fuel.
The woman was more than thirty and dressed in jeans and a shirt that wasn’t long enough to hide her navel. Long frizzy red hair poking out at odd angles, brown eyes, no smile at the moment, but I imagined her smile would be a very nice thing to see. I didn’t know her, but I did recognize the bicycle helmet under her arm. It had fuzzy donkey or maybe deer ears attached to it.
“Look out!” she yelled and pushed me back, and a bus roared between us.
When it passed, the woman who had just saved my life was still there. She hurried across to me, and we ran. People got out of our way, but when we tried to merge with the bus station crowd, they wouldn’t let us in. Whenever we approached they pushed us back into the path of the buses. I took the woman’s hand, and we ran again. I could hear the next bus screaming up behind us.
I thought the bus pill was supposed to protect me from buses. Instead it seemed to be attracting them. I imagined someone up there among the medical people was telling the others it was time to go back to the drawing board. Get another test subject. This one was going to be a goner soon. There seemed to be no safe place for us.
But then an idea hit me. “Wait.” I looked around but didn’t immediately see what I wanted and felt a moment of despair, and then I spotted it and said, “Over there,” and took off, dragging her behind me.
I pulled us to a halt by a small blue sign on a post. The sign read, “Bus stop.”
“Get back up on the sidewalk,” I said, “and then follow my lead as fast as you can.”
I waited until the next bus appeared and then put out my hand to signal the driver. I got up on the sidewalk beside the woman and waited. As the bus roared ever closer, I lost all confidence in my plan. What was there to stop the bus from crashing onto the sidewalk? Nothing. Maybe we should run again. Too late.
