Magnificent Vibration (8 page)

She smelled of alcohol on the ride over. My father is staring at a wall. He is hard-eyed and stone-faced. I fear him too much to even try to get close. I’m leaning against the vending machine, struggling to distract my racing thoughts of blame and “if only” with a plot to free a bag of peanut M&M’s. I think I can stick my skinny arm up through the dispenser window high enough to knock the candy off its rack with a ruler or something equally viable. I’m also trying to use Jedi mind-power to will the yellow package free of its little metal corkscrew holder. But dark images of my sister keep pushing through my meager defenses.

Josie was deathly pale, damp-skinned and barely breathing by the time the paramedics got to her. I told them my mother didn’t know how to drive and asked if we could ride with them in the ambulance, so they let us. I didn’t want to say I thought she’d been drinking. My father met us at the emergency waiting room, in stony silence like my mother, both with their own thoughts to which I was not privy. We’d seen my sister briefly after they’d pumped her stomach and shot her full of something called Naloxene or Naloxone. She didn’t look like she was alive, so pale and fragile, with cables and wires running from her small body to vital life-sign machines bedside. I couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. She didn’t
appear to be. Her eyes were closed and with her head lolling to one side she gave me the impression that this is what a dead person must look like. And that I had been too late. Guilt comes naturally to me. A nurse has hustled us out into the waiting room saying the doctor is on his way to assess her condition. It sounds ominous to me and I hate the tone of it but at least she isn’t telling us they’ll send the body home after they’ve harvested her organs and given her clothes to Goodwill. Now contrition and despair are winding their way like boreal, binary serpents up my spine and into my brain no matter how many ways I come up with to free the damn peanut M&M’s.

If I hadn’t been at that stupid church trying in vain to get Woody some female attention or ingratiating my little ass to some Mormon mucky-muck and if my pea-brained parents hadn’t picked tonight to try and settle some scores, I would have seen what was going on with Josie sooner. Or I might have been able to talk her down off her desolate ledge. I could usually make her smile, even if I couldn’t chase the demons away completely. And now all my selfishness, all my abhorrent degenerate pursuits, and my fucked-up, eternally combative parents have caused the death of my beautiful sister. The only one I really cared about anyway. Hot tears sting my eyes and burn my cheeks at the realization that I will probably never see her alive again. I am so goddamn angry. I decide right then and there that I am done with the Mormons. I am done with the Presbyterians. I am done with my loony parents. And I am DONE with girls and their wanton disregard and toying with my and Woody’s heart. Forever!! In my Josie’s memory and in honor of her sweet, tormented and much too short life. Done!!! Finito! Terminado! Expletum! Finished!! My new life will begin here and now!! A grand and staggeringly significant celibacy! A brand-spanking-new and meaningful destiny that will heal the cosmos in honor of my precious and never-to-be-forgotten sister!

So who should walk past the waiting room window pushing a small trolley and dressed in a fairly tight-fitting, non-regulation nurse’s outfit, awesome hoo-ha’s mocking my freshly uttered declaration that I have just sworn on the memory of my precious sibling in four languages (and obviously God is in on this and having a really good laugh as well) but none other than Dracula herself!!! The intoxicating Mormon hot-hand-on-my-hot-thigh recruiting goddess. Woody springs to attention before she even clears the window and I go straight to hell. I move with such speed through the waiting-room door that no radar system on earth would be able to track me, so mom and dad don’t even look up. I almost bump into her, or more accurately, because I am still a kid and relatively short, her awesome hoo-ha’s.

“Hi . . . (she never told me her name), it’s ME!” I say, beaming, stifling my present broken heart for this until now very absent succubus.

She looks kind of bothered that I’m in her way and holding up the delivery of her much-needed plastic pee collectors, and says, “Do you need something?”

“Yes I need us to go forth and multiply for the Mormons” I want to say but don’t. My whole damn tortuous libido-driven devotion circuit is reconnected and firing away, despite my newly sworn oath. She is even more astonishing than I remember. And clearly she has no idea who I am.

Instead, I reply with a slight whine, “I’m Bobby Cotton. I’m the guy you introduced to the awesomeness of the Mormon Church, remember?”

She brightens momentarily, smiles and says “Super!” then appears to be ready to move on. It’s not quite going how I always thought it would.

“I have friends who want to join,” I lie like a bastard, trying to keep her attention at any cost.

“I don’t really do recruiting anymore,” is her disconnected reply.

“You’re fucking kidding me???” is what I, again, want to say, but I settle for “Oh.”

“But I’m happy you let Jesus and the LDS into your heart.”

“What’s an LDS?” I ask, still pitching to her catcher’s mitt, but she doesn’t return the ball.

“Excuse me, I have patients to see,” she says, and brushes by me with her cart and a curt, tight smile.

Like a man wronged, steely-eyed and determined to set his woman straight on his affections, I march after her, although I’m sure I look more like a whipped puppy running for a corner to hide from a well-aimed hose.

“But I’ve been going to that church for months now. You told me you’d see me there,” I whimper pathetically.

She stops and turns to face me. “Look, I must have recruited fifty boys your age, and I wouldn’t recognize any of them if they came up and bit me. Sorry. God bless you.” (God bless me?) And with that she turns and continues pushing her wheelie-tray full of tinkle collectors down the bright, antiseptic hallway—and out of my life. Camera pulls back, music rises. Fade to black. Cut and PRINT!!!

Woodydamnit!!!

I limp back into the waiting room, where the stone statues that are my parents still have not moved. I want to say something about the ignominy of life, woman’s inhumanity to man, the delicate balance of emotions that is “love,” and how life couldn’t possibly get any friggin’ worse if I stood up on my principal’s desk and told the whole damn faculty to go fuck themselves. But instead I cross to the vending machine I had been trying to rob earlier and give it a swift, hard ass-kick. Only my mother looks up briefly and then she goes back to staring at her folded, blue-veined hands. Is God really this careless with our hearts, I wonder, though probably not in those exact words, and as if in answer there is a muted, papery “plop.” I look at the vending machine dispenser drawer
where the sound came from and see that my hostile punt has dislodged a yellow packet of peanut M&M’s. Obviously God is still mocking me. So I grab it, tear it open, and stuff the M&M’s into my mouth in a sort of “substituting food for the absence of love, resulting in severe depression” thing. I am aggressively chomping away when the waiting-room door opens and a thin, balding man in pale-blue scrubs and an off-white coat steps into the room.

“Mr. and Mrs. Cotton?” he asks my parents.

“Yes,” answers my mother.

“I’m Doctor Ellis.”

We all freeze and time stands still. I am thinking now only of Josie.

“Uh-huh,” says my little, crushed, heartsick mom.

“We
have
managed to save your daughter’s life . . .” he says, with no flicker of emotion and no hint of what may come.

“T
here’ve been two calls, actually.” I don’t really know how to explain this as we convene over coffee at this late hour, the blistering-hot postulant and I. In my reeling mind the phone conversations all sound like scenes that might have been cut from
Agnes of God,
or maybe even
The Exorcist V.
And with good reason.

This is really freaky. I know it. And I suspect she knows it.

“Two? Lucky you,” she says lightly.

“Yeah, you’d think so, right? But it turns out he, God, may be a bit crazy, or a lot crazy. Or something totally different than we all thought he’d be.”

“Well now you’re not saying ‘he/she.’ You’re just saying ‘he.’ ”

“Yeah, I know. When you talk to this voice, it really doesn’t have
a defined sex to it. Like there’s no real gender distinction. It’s so strange. I don’t know how to explain it, and it’s not something you really notice, though it caused me to almost involuntarily say the ‘he/she’ thing, but it’s a bit of a pain to keep repeating and repeating it. It makes me sound like more of a freak than I already do.”

“As well as painfully politically correct,” she adds.

“I know. How hard does that su . . . how funny is that?” I avoid saying “suck” because she’s a nun and it seems like the appropriate thing to do, although she looks like no nun I’ve ever encountered. I did encounter more than a few at school—vicious, punishing, remorseless, sexless beasts who did everything they could to brutalize and devastate their young charges. Except for Sister Mary, who was awesome.

I smile at Alice. I’m still trying to find some common ground that isn’t inhabited by things I know would seem insane in the cold light of day, if not under the coffeehouse lighting, which is at this late hour warm, cozy, and as yellow as chicken fat.

Trying my best not to scare her off but really needing to tell this to someone, for maybe the first time in my life I opt for absolute honesty as an opening gambit. I don’t recommend it.

“I’ve been thinking about death and dying a lot in the past few months.”

A beat. Nothing from Alice. She seems to be waiting.

“I’ve heard that’s when you start looking within, around your early thirties, isn’t it? I read that somewhere.” I inhale deeply . . . and GO! “I’ve been really depressed lately and worried that maybe I’ve already shot my wad as far as life goes, excuse the expression, but it seems like my existence on this earth is completely laid out before me now with no more surprises, no more wonder or discovery, just a long, monotonous, dull gray grind until I finally flop over like a dead fish from a heart
attack or a stroke in my late forties, so I’ve been thinking about suicide as well, trying to figure out which would be the best way to go, either drinking myself to death, which in all likelihood I’m sure I’d enjoy, versus jumping out of my apartment window, but it’s only on the second floor so I’d probably just break an ankle or a hip or something and that would then make me even more depressed having to hobble round in a leg cast for six weeks and pee through a catheter, plus I’ve already just gone through a hellacious divorce, though I’m sure what I’m feeling is pretty normal considering, but I don’t know if maybe I just conjured all this God stuff up in my imagination as an alternative to my brain actually exploding in a bloody nerve-cell-and-myelinated-fiber spattered mess on the kitchen wall from all the friggin’ pressure, and who knows, maybe I even dyed this dopey stripe in my hair myself in the bathroom sink and then blocked it out of my memory and I
could
actually be insane, come to think of it . . . I mean . . . that’s a possibility, right?” It’s a staggeringly convoluted and ambitious sentence delivered without a break and without a breath. As I accept the award I thank the
Guinness Book of World Records
for naming it “longest and lamest speech in the history of humankind!” And
muchas gracias
to all those who voted.

A look has slowly crept onto Alice’s face that tells me there may be good reasons why absolute honesty is not always the best policy for a balanced and positive first impression.

I glance around the hazy room to see if anyone is listening in to my mad-as-a-March-hare monologue. No one is, but Alice still says nothing so I counter argue
for
her. “Okay, that’s dumb. Obviously I’m not crazy. I’m just stretched a little thin right now and I’ve been through a very strange couple of phone calls that I . . .”

She’s watching me with, I imagine, the same look a mouse might wear when confronted by a hungry but slightly deranged pit viper.

“Sorry, that was . . . ridiculous,” I try, “Let me have another shot at explaining this. Okay, I’m just going to tell you the story without my interpretations or side comments and then if you still want to run for the hills I’ll open the door for you, give you a push on your way, and pay for both of our coffees.” She relaxes slightly. Just
slightly.

I launch into the whole, extremely anomalous tale and for some reason start at the point where we met at the bar and tell the story backwards. I figure it wouldn’t seem any more plausible going in the right direction, so what the hell—and that last disturbing phone conversation is still fresh in my memory. I don’t mention my divorce again, or my desire to get myself iced by the Holy Spirit, and I end with the beginning of the first cell call I made from my bachelor digs. She has relaxed her guard a little more, enough to ask a question.

“How do you know it isn’t just someone you’re familiar with or who’s familiar with your life messing with you?”

“Because this . . . voice knows stuff about me that no one else knows. I mean, someone could, if they dug deep enough I guess, but who would bother, for a joke or whatever,” I answer, then continue the thought. “And I swear to God, okay, bad use of a phrase considering, but the men’s room sink really
did
catch fire. It was the most bizarre thing. It burst into flames and he laughed like a maniac in my ear. It scared me.”

I still don’t know how far from believing me she is when she asks, “So where did you find this phone number?”