Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (23 page)

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Gordon didn’t just pass out. His brain suddenly clicked over into full-blown REM sleep. He’d turned narcoleptic, like his dumb basset hound. Blame it on post-traumatic stress or whatever–there was no real cure for it. From that point on, whenever he got too excited or scared or horny, there was a chance he’d fall over and dream. The attacks would keep him off-balance all through high school and earn him the nickname that would later make him famous:
Crash Gordon.

Gordon’s first narcoleptic dream was kind of interesting–right there in the den beside his dead father. He dreamed Mal was teaching him to fly, but not in an airplane. Not even with wings. All Gordon had to do was stretch his arms at his sides and catch the wind in his fingertips a certain way. Mal showed him how it was done. At first Gordon had to get a running start and jump into the air. He noticed that each jump seemed to last longer and travel further than the last, until he was spending more time above ground than gravity should have allowed. While he was up there, he experienced a delicate floating sensation. Sometimes, like a spastic Icarus, he panicked or squirmed in the wrong way and he fell back to earth. But then all he had to do was push off the ground with one foot and he bounced back up into the sky again, floating like a balloon. It felt great. Gordon learned to remain calm and feel the breeze in his fingertips, as Mal had shown him. Soon he was actually flying, like a bird riding the wind currents. Mal was up there with him, a Daddy Dadaelus, doing loop-de-loops and heading too close to the sun. Then something happened and Mal melted. Gordon woke up bereft.

It’s tough when you wake up and see your splattered dad sitting next to you. By then the sirens from the police cars and fire trucks could be heard approaching. Gordon and his father didn’t have much time left to be alone together. Gordon said a little prayer for him, a sort of thank you and farewell. He reminded Mal to head toward the Light. His father was an atheist, so far as Gordon knew. Maybe he could use a little reminding.

But Mal was just fine. He’d planned the whole thing out that way long ago, before he was even born. His death would become the central mystery of Gordon’s existence, but for Mal there was no mystery at all. For Mal it was just, “Mission accomplished. And now, thank God, I can go home.”

See, here’s the thing about death: we’re all suicides, in a sense. We all plot the course of our lives before we incarnate, and along that course we always designate the exit points. Most lives have more than one.

So say you’re driving along Highway 1 through Big Sur in a neat little sports car and some cutesy-pie woodland creature darts out in front of you, maybe a self-absorbed raccoon. You swerve to avoid hitting it. The car skids, the front bumper clips a guardrail, the steering wheel wrenches hard to one side. Then something goes horribly wrong. You find yourself airborne, somersaulting through clear blue sky, tumbling down an iceplant-covered embankment. A rocky shore at low tide fills the windshield. It shatters in your face. You’ve arrived at your self-designated exit point. Every task you’ve set for yourself has been accomplished–or attempted and botched.

Or maybe not. Maybe there’s still more for you to do. So you run right over that raccoon and keep going: heading to New York, getting married, writing books, adopting two beautiful, laughing baby girls from China…. It could be anything. The main thing is, you don’t look back. If you pass one exit point, there’s always another one further up the road. Every human body is like an unlaunched rocket, waiting to hurtle you through death to the Other Side.

Be grateful for that. We all need an escape plan. Because incarnating in this world is like a descent into hell. Those of us from the Other Side only do it because we love you. It’s almost embarrassing to admit, but that’s the big, sappy secret:

The dead love you.

Take Mal, for instance. Sure, he was just a half-assed dad while he was still alive. He barely would’ve known Gordon existed, if it hadn’t been for the doctors’ bills. He had his own problems. And that’s just the point: life on Earth is so full of cruel pressures that almost everyone ends up a little damaged. No one escapes, really. Some totally cave in–they howl and prance and slay, committing acts of depravity wherever they go, so the world can see them for the demented souls they’ve truly become. Others, more cunning, might command acts far more heinous in the name of God or democracy. But absolutely everyone is in the same trap–the high school janitor and the secretary of state, Presidents of great nations and run-of-the-mill schizophrenics, stay-at-home moms and Islamic terrorists. Only when they die do they figure out, as Mal realized, that we’re all one. Every single thing in the whole universe–and beyond–is interconnected. No one can be at peace until we’re all at peace. And that realization creates an enormous sense of compassion in the newly departed for those still left behind on Earth. Or let’s just call it what it really is: love. The dead love you. God loves you (whatever your conception of God might be). You are loved, in spite of everything. Get that through your head. It’s important.

Often, it’s the newly dead who end up taking the biggest risks for those they’ve left behind. Any spirit or guardian angel can intervene on behalf of the living to make their lives a little better, but for the most part, the longer the dead stay on the Other Side, the more conservative they tend to get. Like I’ve said, it’s nice there. The (non-)living is easy. They start to think like slaves under a kind new master, worried they’ll be sold back to humanity. So they end up doing nothing–trying to shove the turmoil of man’s world out of their thoughts, deliberately forgetting how bad things are down there. Which is why most guardian angels are kind of crappy. And why you’ll find, in the lives of the famous or exceedingly fortunate, that they also saw a lot of tragedy–a lot of people died around them. Fame or good fortune usually requires a blood sacrifice. It’s not witchcraft. It’s just life–and the brand-new opposite of life, doing what it can to provide.

The biggest risk, of course–the greatest act of love–is to incarnate again to help others. Some souls get lost on Earth. They forget they’re eternal and sometimes they can’t find their way home again. Sometimes, they forget the love of God–who is, admittedly, not without His terrors. Although fear and suffering are necessary for spiritual growth (I’ll explain that one later), sometimes enough is enough. At a certain point, there’s only one thing left to do. It’s what I’m about to do, on July 13th, 1979 (A Friday, of course. Friday the 13th. I can’t seem to catch a break): you put on one of those ridiculous human suits and you get down to business.

Just before I’m born, an angel will put a finger to my lips and make me forget everything I’ve told you. I know why they do that now. It’s for my own good. If I could remember all I know about the Other Side while I was stuck in a puny human body, it would drive me absolutely fucking nuts. But hopefully I’ll remember a little something, like Gordon, so I won’t be totally clueless, either.

Gordon’s daimon is watching out for us both, which makes me feel better. It’s always a little nerve-wracking when you’re as close to incarnating again as I am. But don’t worry about me. I can still see the past and the future from right here, remember? I know things will turn out pretty much the way they’ve been planned (that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy). I’ll still be able to comment on the action from my little newswomb even after I’m hauled out of Cynthia’s stretch-marked old belly (she’s having a Cesarean, did I tell you?). A few things have to happen before I arrive–John Wayne has to die and Skylab has to scatter itself across parts of Australia and the Indian Ocean–but then some overworked doctor will be yanking me upside-down by my bloody ankles.

Wish me luck. Like everyone else on Earth, I’ll be needing it.

ALL IS VANITY

E
veryone has a theory about Mal’s plane crash. The first theory is voiced by aging but still vain Mrs. Bigani, who emerges from her pink stucco duplex just as the fire trucks are pulling up across the street at the Swannson’s damaged house. She walks over to get a closer look in a pair of Dr. Scholl’s flip-flops and a begonia-dappled silk kimono that barely covers her crotch. She had the forethought to bring along her old Polaroid Swinger to document the wreckage, but underneath the robe she’s still wearing the same bedraggled peach and mauve string bikini that she had on while she was sunbathing in her backyard. As a team of firemen escorts Gordon back out through the hole in the living room wall, Mrs. Bigani–smelling strongly of gin and cocoa butter–hysterically confesses to them: “I know what happened. In a way, it’s even my fault!” When they ask her to explain, she says, “I was trying to get a tan with my top off in my backyard–only I was getting rained out–and then this pervert started flying around too low, trying to get a look at my you-know-whats.” Mrs. Bigani doesn’t know yet that it was her pervy good neighbor, Mal, who was flying the plane. Gordon, though still in shock, is fairly certain she’s arrived at the wrong conclusion, anyhow. Mrs. Bigani is a shrill, rabbitty woman with pancake-flat breasts and Gordon knows from his father’s choice in magazines that it’s unlikely he would have had any interest in her at all.

Mechanical failure, pilot error, exhaust fumes leaking into the cabin, thermal downdrafts in combination with rogue winds–everyone has theory, but no one has any definitive answers. Johnny Hoss comes up with one of the more plausible scenarios. When he and Gordon get together again just before the funeral to talk over a few beers, Johnny suggests that Mike and Mal might have gotten into a fight and wrestled for the plane’s controls. Gordon has no trouble with that theory. Both he and Johnny still believe it was Mike who bit Mal’s leg on the night of the Hoo-Hoo Club initiation all those years ago. Although Mal treated Mike like a surrogate son, perhaps, Gordon speculates, Mike had an Oedipal complex and thus an unconscious wish to kill his father–or in this case, Gordon’s father. But then did it follow (and here the mind boggled) that Mike also wanted to screw Gordon’s mother? Sigmund Freud’s dark, puppet-string-pulling vision of human sexuality always ended up giving Gordon the creeps. He’d take Carl Jung–or even that orgone-box-building maniac, Wilhelm Reich–over Freud, any day. Or so he tells Johnny, who goes on to wonder out loud if Mike, or even
Mal
, had been suicidal.

No answers are forthcoming. The Fresno County Coroner’s inquest finds no trace of drugs or alcohol in Mal’s bloodstream and no clues as to why he might have piloted a plane directly into his own house. The Kingsburg Police Department’s report is similarly inconclusive. No one seems to know enough.

Maybe Gordon will never know enough. Not just about the plane crash, but about life in general–especially now that he doesn’t have a father to guide him and watch his back in the world. He can’t stop thinking about his father’s anger on the way home from the liquor store, especially his pronouncement (practically his last words): “You may be book-smart, but that doesn’t mean you have good judgment–or even common sense.” Did his father always secretly dislike him? Resent him for being a sickly, skinny-necked Mister Know-It-All, the runt of the litter, a kid who didn’t have enough sense to breathe right, but could read at a college level by the time he was five? Maybe Mal had wanted him to die.

It makes a certain amount of sense. Gordon thinks about how close that lowered wing came to hitting him. Could he have been the real target all along? The more he thinks about it, the more it seems possible. Gordon had always thought his mother was the one who had it in for him, but maybe his father’s ill will ran deeper. He remembers a conversation he once had with his father, in which the merits of having children were compared with owning a basset hound such as Sam: “Sam’s a lot better,” Mal said, only half-joking. “She comes when I call her, she doesn’t talk back, and even after I kick her, she’ll still turn right around and lick my hand.”

Gordon failed on all those counts. He couldn’t help but think that he’d failed as a son, period. It’s becoming increasingly clear to him that Mal thought he’d deserved better. And now that he’s gone there will be no squaring it with him. No matter how glorious his future accomplishments, there’s nothing Gordon can do that will ever make Mal say he’s proud to be his father. Shame and self-consciousness will be his legacy. The voice of Mal inside Gordon’s head will forever be rendered as a critical, competitive, displeased ghost.

A ghost–a disembodied soul–is how Gordon pictures his father whenever he thinks of the plane crash, which is often. In his mind’s eye he sees the Cessna roar over Mrs. Bigani’s rooftop, watches the lowered wing clip the power lines and the plane begin to disintegrate all over again. But then Gordon’s imagination takes over, altering the course of actual events. Somehow the sky unfolds and a pinkish-orange cloud breathes Mal in. While Mal’s body remains strapped to the pilot’s seat–just a puppet made of meat now, jerking around in the plummeting cockpit–his soul is whisked outside the plane to stand in the cumulus’ vapor like a half-transparent faith healer (or newly paroled ex-con) waiting for a bus in heavy fog.

Mal’s soul watches without anxiety–and without the usual Clark Kent glasses–as the plane’s fuselage glances off the Hovnanian’s roof, crashes through their cinder-block wall, then tears through the living room of the house he designed and built himself. Down in the street, he watches his son watching it all happen, thunderstruck. Mal’s soul shapes his vaporous face into an expression of piety and petulance as a pair of mottled downy wings sprouts from between his shoulder blades. He launches himself into the sky like a hebephrenic owl, taking one last, pitying look at the world between his dangling legs. He must be having his final thoughts as he starts to flap his way toward heaven. Gordon tries to imagine what those thoughts might be:

“Shake ‘em, Mrs. Bigani! I loved those hot tits!”

“Damn you, Mike Shriver, you just ruined everything!”