Just a Couple of Days (8 page)

“In the car.”

“How did it smell?”

“Real bad.”

Everyone fell silent, stumped at this four-year-old's riddle. “Ideas, anyone?” Blip opened the floor to all present at the table, but we may as well have been spinning around blindfolded trying to pin the tail on the donkey at a piñata party.

“What does it look like?” I tried, and for a moment I was the hero of the house. But the congratulatory backslapping ended abruptly when we looked to Dandy for an answer. She only giggled at our evident idiocy.

“I don't know.” She collapsed backward onto the floor once again. “I couldn't
see
it.”

We looked witlessly at one another, until Blip seized upon a partial solution. “She saw it in the car, right?”

Sophia finished his thought. “And she's not tall enough to see out the window.” Blip snapped his fingers in agreement.

Dandy looked at them, perplexed. “
Power
flower.”

“When did you see this power flower?” Morty Drecker attempted. He was a sociologist in Blip's department who earlier that evening had lost his temper while debating with Sophia that rationality was superior to emotionality. Blip called him “Mr. Bad Vibes,” gave him a peppermint candy, and told him to chase it with a glass of dandelion root iced tea (which he claimed aided relaxation) to chill out. Now, Morty's question was immediately chased off the table with barks of “She couldn't see out the window!” from every other adult present. He wasn't invited back.

“When did you
smell
the power flower?” Blip recommenced with Twenty Questions.

This question bewildered Dandy, who, it appeared, had never before considered the notion that there was any other moment but the present. She pointed behind herself and
turned around, baffled, and finally satisfied herself with this answer: “Then.”

“Did you see anything else then?”

“Pumpkins.”

“The Roundtown Pumpkin Jamboree!” Morty leaped at the opportunity to redeem himself, but the answer was obvious to everyone. The Roundtown Pumpkin Jamboree is a heavily publicized autumn festival forty-five minutes south of town. Every year, to celebrate the harvest, the people of the nearby rural borough of Roundtown throw a pumpkin festival to coincide with Halloween. It's the biggest event in Roundtown, whose next biggest attraction is a merry-go-round in the middle of the town circle. Everyone nodded courteously at Morty's observation, but he mistook it for encouragement, and continued cerebrally. “So the power flower is somewhere between here and Roundtown.”

All fell silent, while Dandy amused herself by turning and looking behind her own back, first one side, then the other.

“Power plant.” Sophia announced the solution simply and eloquently.

“Right! The power
plant
south of town,” echoed Morty.

“You smelled the power
plant
, Dandy?” asked Sophia. Dandy nodded innocently. “It's a power plant,” Sophia explained. “Not a power flower.”

Dandy smiled compassionately at her mother. “Flowers are plants, Mommy.”

“But not all plants are flowers,” Blip explained.

Dandy was as thunderstruck as the time she discovered that her parents had names other than Mommy and Daddy. “Then what's power?”

“You tell me.” Blip waved his spoon at her. “You smelled it.”

Dandy wrinkled her nose again. “I don't like power.”

“What do you like?”

She giggled like a ticklish faerie and galloped out of the room. A few moments later, having had time to consider, she called back to us in a voice that would give a hailstorm second thoughts. “I like flowers!”

 

25
Having a daughter allowed Sophia and Blip to circumvent the circumcision decision, although Sophia, despite her Hebraic heritage, made no secret of what the decision would have been had the chromosomes fallen differently.

“Why fix it if it isn't broke?” she explained one summer afternoon at a picnic they hosted in the organic garden behind the 50 percent self-sufficient geodesic dome home they had built atop a hill twelve miles outside the center of town. “It doesn't matter what the Bible says. Do you really think Mother Nature would create and evolve (for these are hardly mutually exclusive, she forever reminds me) sexual organs,
reproductive
organs, that are any less than perfect?” I shook my head no, feeling suddenly awkward with the discussion. I was trained to think about such matters in terms of nucleotides and DNA, or chromosomes at the worst. Larger processes made me uneasy.

“And besides,” Blip interjected, handing me a glass of his homemade dandelion wine. “Did you know that the loss of your foreskin decreases your enjoyment
and
your stamina?”

I could only shake my head again. My Anglo-Aryan background made me want to flee from these ethnics and their indefatigable frankness.

“It's true,” he continued. “The natural foreskin slips over
the head, where all the nerve endings are, every time you withdraw.” He used his hands to illustrate. “This breaks up the stimulation, and consequently you last longer. See?”

Sophia nodded in hot-blooded agreement.

 

26
Falling water, spent by a summer's worth of sunshine, trickled groggily into a shallow pool, yawning and stretching and preparing to hibernate for the winter. Draped only in billows of chiffon with modestly placed samite accents and wreaths of the autumn forest's most exquisite finery, Blip and Sophia met barefoot at the center of an ankle-deep lagoon, a few feet in front of the waterfall, and promised to be merrymates for as long as they both should live.

The acoustics of the gorge allowed them to project their voices easily over the sound of the waterfall as they vowed in front of their costumed family and friends and the rest of Creation not only to spend their lives together expressing love for one another, but also to search relentlessly for a word, a word whose existence was whispered breathlessly to them by a whirling dervish in Turkey, a word which expresses that which the overuse of the word
love
fails to express. As they took turns proclaiming this tale to their guests, a shower of rose petals fluttered upon us from an unseen source, causing me to sneeze and wheeze, as I was prone to do around such beauty.

Their dithyramb continued as they promised never to go to sleep angry with each other and to immediately disrobe whenever the circumstances of human communication pushed them into an argument. “Quarrels are best had naked,” they pronounced in turns, “stark, bare-assed naked; where a cantankerous
mood is difficult to maintain; where pride dissolves like the salt of our tears into the Sea of Love, lapping against the shores of Eden; where communication becomes true, honest, open, telepathic. We will reclaim the Garden our ancestors lost, experience the world and each other with no thought of ourselves. We will not fail you. Like Weeble-Wobbles, we may wobble but we won't fall down. We will keep the hope of humanity alive between us. For if love is not enough, if two people can't get along and make it work out, what hope remains for our world?

“And so may we be like two halves of an eternal sandwich. May we stick together and nourish those around us. May we never get moldy. May we never get soggy.” Pausing for a moment after this rhapsody, they vowed, “till death makes our union complete.” Proceeding to place rare autumn dandelions behind one another's ears, they looked expectantly at all of their guests and asked, “The rings? Who has the rings?” This caused a general murmur and shifting of hooves until a voice thundered from above, “Rope!” followed by, indeed, a rope plummeting and landing just next to the rows of seats. All heads immediately turned skyward, where a silhouette of a figure, hidden by the glare of the sun, was preparing to rappel down the rope into our midst. As he descended, an accordion strapped to his back, he belted out a dirty limerick in an accent thick with the verdant hillsides of Ireland.

 

I once met a magical faerie

Who pranced with raiments a-nary.

On her bosom she wore

Two rings of gold ore,

And gave them to me with her cherry.

 

Upon landing, he unclipped himself swiftly and fairly danced to the water's edge, proclaiming his possession of the needed rings. “I've the rings, kind folk, but I cannot enter the pool of your union!” At that, he unstrapped an accordion-like contraption from his thigh and hung the rings on the end of it. When he pressed the handles together like a bellows, it extended out to Blip and Sophia, who took the rings and nodded graciously.

As Brad the Red, as the airborne accordionist was called, bowed out of the picture, Blip and Sophia faced one another, and we could only witness them enter the universe they shared behind one another's eyes. Lips trembling but limbs moving with the grace of a dancer's dreamscape, they simultaneously placed the rings on each other's fingers and spoke their final vow in unison.

“Tickle tickle hee haw, whenever we get bored.”

At that, they turned and waded a few feet back toward the waterfall. Pausing briefly, they ventured beneath the trickle, and as the water leaped licentiously off their bodies and the currents of the swirling mist shifted around them, a circular rainbow burst forth and embraced them like only Mother Nature can. So near was the rainbow that I could see each individual droplet of mist drifting through the spectrum, shimmering and humming blessings like a choir of kittens purring in a sunbeam, as Sophia and Blip, wet but unruffled, kissed, and a glad-hearted geyser of spontaneous applause erupted, for we saw that it was good.

 

27
After the Pomp and Circumstance, as the ceremony was called, the Prance and Dance followed at a nearby inn. Brad the
Red and his accordion circulated among the guests, cracking jokes punctuated with his squeeze-box. Every few minutes, “just to keep everyone sharp,” he explained to me later, he bellowed a “mystical limerick” from his considerable repertoire:

 

There once was a planet called Earth

Who screamed with the pains of childbirth.

On her surface befell

A monkey-made hell,

Till she whelped out the spirit of mirth.

 

And,

 

The monkeys who call themselves human

Are still embryos in albumin.

In their heart there does dwell

A seed in its shell

Which will grow till their soul does illumine.

 

I thought the man a raving moron. In between his sets of Celtic good cheer, I asked him what else he did besides play accordion.

“What I can, good man.” He clicked his heels and sounded his instrument.

“What
don't
you do then?” I asked.

“I huff and I puff,” his accordion bellowed along, “but I don't do enough.”

“A jack-of-all-trades, master of none, eh?”

Faster than an auctioneer's stenographer and grinning like only a redhead can, he replied, just before launching into another
set of Celtic delight, “My good man, 'tis better than a jackass of one trade and bored as all hell.”

 

28
Speaking of jackasses of one trade other than my former self (for it now appears that I tinker with words as well as nucleotides—though the two are more similar than I ever imagined), let's not forget about Officer Wilt, the desk sergeant at the jail. He would release Blip into my custody only, since it was me, and not Sophia, who had talked to Captain Down. Blip insisted on riding with me anyway, which understandably hurt Sophia's feelings.

“Flake, you're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you.” Blip broke his sulking silence as we pulled into the campus parking lot to get his car.

“You're probably right. Where are you parked?”

“Up front there, under that big tree.”

I spotted his car, up on the grass and under the shade of an enormous sycamore. I pulled into a nearby space, not bothering to ask why he didn't use the lot.

“Aren't you going to ask why I didn't use the parking lot?” Blip asked, smiling triumphantly.

“Why didn't you use the parking lot?” I monotoned.

“Because I'll
never
pay the tickets they keep giving me. They're university parking tickets, and I won't be working here no more!” His voice rose a few decibels. “I can park anywhere I damn well please!”

“They could tow you. Haven't you thought about that? Look, Blip—”

“Flake, listen,” he interrupted. “There's something strange going on in that prison.”

“Jail,” I corrected.

“In the jail. They're doing some kind of experiments.”

“Blip, I really don't have time for this. You need to start thinking about others.”

“Flake, this is serious.” He put his palms up in surrender. “I'll admit I may have been wrong about the poisoned tea and radioactive staples, but you have to believe me on this.”

“What about the extraterrestrial mushrooms?”

“I'm not budging on that one.” Blip shook his head. “But listen, I'll buy you a coffee . . . no, an herbal tea! Just promise me you'll listen.”

I hesitated, and in that moment I recalled the way Sophia had looked when I was talking with her at the jail only a few minutes prior. A frightened despondency quenched the light in her eyes, her lower lip trembling like a weeping rose petal. What was happening here? Blip and Sophia are my rock, my reassurance that life is funny and beautiful. How can such perfect playmates be unhappy? Blip's madness and Sophia's sadness were shattering my precious illusions. Witnessing my two best friends, my two only friends, have difficulty with their relationship caused me great uneasiness. Perhaps I had a crush on their union and not just Sophia. A comfortable constant, a reassuring given, a taken-for-granted pillar of stability was beginning to shudder and come asunder. An island was drowning in the raging sea. A pool of water was evaporating in the blazing desert. There was no question. Of course I agreed to listen to what Blip had to say.