Magnificent Vibration (10 page)

“Yes, of course,” I lie, finally putting a face to that droning, somnolent accompaniment of my constant erotic fantasies while struggling to get through another Sunday morning at the old Presbyterian.

Mother jumps in before I say something stupid.

“Reverend has come to offer us some Christian help with Josephine,” she says.

Christian help? No idea what that means. Will I now hear him pontificating from Josie’s room, poor girl? Is there an exorcism in the works? “The power of Christ compels you to stop crapping in your bed!!!” Or will he be absolving my sweet, childlike girl of her many, many heinous sins?

“The Father is offering us some aid in the feeding and maintenance of your sister, for a while. To give us a little breathing room so we can decide what’s to be done on a more permanent basis.” This from mother. I don’t like the sound of that at all! Plus, “feeding and maintenance” sounds like something you do to a houseplant.

“I can handle taking care of Josie. I don’t need anyone’s help,” I covetously object.

“I would like to be of service to your family, Horatio.”

What the hell? Who else besides my mother calls me Horatio? The small voice has come from behind me. I turn.

I didn’t even notice her when I entered the living room, so invisible does she make herself. She is thin and very pale, with fragile blue eyes.

Quite a few years younger than the older dude, but not young enough to be a daughter. Her severe ankle-length dress runs all the way up to her throat, covering her completely from head to toe, making her seem exceedingly prim and dour. Like a visitor from another century. There is a fatal meekness to her that is somewhat off-putting to me. Suddenly it lands on me. She’s his
wife
!! And as if in concert with my realization, my mother says, “This is Virginia. Reverend Whiting’s wife and a wonderful, wonderful woman. She will be coming to help with Josephine four days a week for the next few months so we can have some time to ourselves.”

I can’t stop myself. “You’ve got all the time to yourselves you need. I take care of Josie!”

“Excuse my son, Father. He still hasn’t come to terms with the full scope of his sister’s disability.” Again mom, misreading.

“I don’t need anybody’s help,” I repeat, a little loudly and possibly petulantly.

“Mrs. Whiting starts tomorrow, Horatio, and that is the finish of it!” Mother slams the lid down hard on my small-scale rebellion.

I storm out, too much like a little kid for my own liking, and head to Josie’s bedroom for consolation, validation, and just to be near her.

I sit on her bed holding her soft hand as she stares into space and sees I know not what. The conversational tone from the living room soon drifts toward the front door and disappears out into the night. Silence reigns in our home once again. I know what’s coming next, and sure-as-death-and-taxes, it does.

The bedroom door flies open, frightening Josie and causing me to leap to my feet. I am her knight in shining armor rising to defend her. Actually I’m just a needy little weasel in dire fear of being usurped and removed by degrees from the most meaningful ritual in my life: caring for my sister.

“How dare you embarrass me in front of the Reverend like that!” Whoa! Mom’s on fire.

I push past her into the hall to get the brunt of this away from Josie just in case her mind is able to register the sudden elevated emotions. She does get agitated from time to time and I don’t want to be the cause. The harpy follows me, continuing her rant.

“Don’t turn away from me!! Virginia, Mrs. Whiting, is starting here tomorrow and you will be courteous and help this good Christian woman administer to your sister or you can leave this house right now, you ungracious little bastard!!!”

Okay, she never swears so this is a rather large red flag to me.

I have no retreat. I would run from the house at full speed if I could take Josie with me, but even in my agitated state I recognize this is a solution somewhat full of major holes. For one thing, I don’t even have a job. At seventeen I have spent most of my free time either sucking up to the Mormons or taking care of my sister so the job thing is fairly nonexistent and when I say “fairly” I mean “totally.” And if I did leave, mother would stick Josie in a home faster than you could say, “Life isn’t fair so stop your whining.”

I slump onto my bed while mother stands in the doorway, claws barely retracted, wings tucked in behind her, tail lashing angrily.

“Fine,” is all I say. Having recently considered writing as a possible career path, I’m furious with myself that some answer a four-year-old might be satisfied with is all I can manage. “Fine”? That’s all I’ve got?
My mother leaves with her righteousness defended and intact and I head to the family bathroom for a quick, stress-relieving wank in order to deal with my raging emotions. Nothing calms the spirit of the beast like soothing music, meditation, the counsel of a wise sage, or a good monkey-spank. I choose this last option fairly regularly, and when I say “fairly regularly,” I mean exclusively.

G
od (or the entity’s preferred moniker, “Omnipotent Supreme Being”) creates a phone, creates a dial tone, then hesitates, momentarily distracted by something happening over in Galaxy 5,325,708A. The line disconnects. The life forms that identify themselves as the Vee-Nung on the planet they’ve named Ete Mee-Qwa have just fully grasped the concept of quantum entanglement and, utilizing the uncertainty principle, are, predictably, about to turn this really beautiful reality into a really ass-ugly weapon. This is not good, considering the global war–like state that is currently their evolutionary high point. The Vee-Nung are a technologically and organically advanced race of intelligent mucilaginous amphibians, and even though they dwell both in the water and on the land, they are having difficulty grasping that their planet is a living organism, and that constantly polluting, pillaging, and pummeling it and its inhabitants has its consequences and definite term limits. The people of Earth are even less connected to their caretaking responsibilities. It’s enough to make an Omnipotent
Supreme Being weep, for crying out loud. WTF! No wonder there are so many goddamn atheists in the Universe. After two conversations with the human named Horatio Cotton, the OSB (Omnipotent Supreme Being) is having even more serious doubts about the orbiting celestial body that the inhabitants have unimaginatively called “Earth.” Earth? Seriously? That’s the best they could come up with? It’s like naming it “Bunch of rocks” or “Dirt, water ’n’ stuff.” Unbelievable. The OSB’s original name for the planet translates, roughly, though incompletely and inadequately into “Beautiful Blue/Green/White Majestic Starlight.” And they picked “Earth.”

The OSB feels pain on this planet. And when the OSB “feels” something, it includes the whole of the Cosmos and time before and time to come as well as the extra fifteen dimensions that most of the “intelligent” Universe failed to grasp and have hence self-generated all kinds of whack-job theological explanations for something that to the OSB seems very natural and as obvious as swinging dog’s balls. It makes you wonder. The OSB is aware of it all. The devastation, the brutalizing, the destruction and torment of those who are meant to be nurtured and cared for. The poachers who recently rode into a herd of elephants (one of Earth’s more spectacular inhabitants) armed with rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47’s, and chainsaws to destroy whole families, even generations of these magnificently aware and frighteningly imperiled beasts just to savagely hack off their long, pointed teeth as they lay dead and dying in the blood of their brethren and
children. And don’t even start the OSB on these humans’ proclivity for hyper-breeding. You’d think they’d invented sex. Not to mention their industrialized powers, who still pour unfiltered and untreated waste, filth, and poisons directly into their own waters, killing and contaminating the once-abundant ocean life, as well as themselves and their descendants as an indirect result. Friggin’ idiots! And living on a planet where a few degrees of orbital shift would result in complete and utter annihilation of all inhabitants, they continue to send garbage into the sky, destroy life-giving vegetation, obliterate whole species of flora and fauna that hold curative secrets, and then kill one another as fast as they can over their thousand-and-one names for God. Truly. Self-serving, short-sighted disappointments, the lot of ’em. Thank the Omnipotent Supreme Being that the life that walks, swims, crawls, or flies around this big blue marble aren’t the only sentient beings that exist there. There is another. It has always been that way. The OSB made it so. And this one has a mother’s survival instincts and a hunger to protect her helpless and decimated children at all costs.

I
wrap my Houston Texans (America’s worst-ever football team) hoodie around me as the biting wind picks up. Obviously I have some odd penchant for wearing sports-team merchandise that advertises the ultimate losers in their fields. Pretty sure there’s a deep subconscious point I’m advertising about myself by doing this, but I haven’t really had the time or the inclination to sit down and fully analyze it yet. It does concern me, though not enough to stop Googling “worst sports teams” and consequently buying their wares. Although it’s chilly at this late hour, we
are
in Hollywood after all, so we’re in no danger of getting lost in a blizzard or contracting frostbite. But it’s definitely a bit nippy for the West Coast. Alice loops her arm around mine and huddles close to me for warmth against the cold breeze. “All
right
!” thinks Woody. “Shut up!” thinks I.

The extremely odd situation in which Alice and I have found ourselves has brought us closer than might be normal under, well, normal circumstances. We are both, after much conversation, and the occasional furtive glance from me at the outstanding shape of the tops of her breasts (sorry, but the rounded cleavage, the part that women
show
, is, to me, the most awesome part—and believe me I
am
trying to keep these stupid non-sequitur comments to a minimum, so bear with me), at a loss to come up with any real explanation for what we are both now pretty sure went down tonight vis-à-vis Alice, God, and me.

I have offered to drive her back to her temporary digs since the cab she caught to the club has long since vanished beyond time and space, where all Los Angeles cabs seem to go when you really need one.

She feels warm against me and I’m thinking this must be what they call a power connection. How long ago did we meet? Three hours
ago. It feels like three minutes—underwater! Hahahaha. Of course I don’t really mean that, but it’s an age-old joke that I’ll probably tell our kids. Hang on; I may be getting ahead of myself here.

My thoughts are racing. I haven’t been this close to anyone so beautiful, sexy, and religiously inclined since my mother rented the videotape of
The Sound of Music
when I was a little kid and I sat glued to the TV screen for the next week playing it over and over and over again.

It’s getting very late and we turn up a side street heading to where I’m pretty sure I left the car. We almost walk right into my whoreson of a boss. At least that’s my first impression of the shape looming ahead of us. My immediate thought is, “Damnit, did he follow me tonight so he could bust me for some imagined screw-up at work just to make me look like a goofus in front of this smokin’ wife of Jesus, who I am feeling seriously more and more attracted to by the minute?” It’s an anomalous thought but it might be something he’d do just for the sadistic pleasure of it. But I quickly realize I am about as far off the mark as I could possibly be. And Alice’s sharp intake of breath signals that this may not be someone either of us actually knows. The large figure is just standing there, in the center of the sidewalk, blocking our way. It certainly has the girth, heft, and approximate poundage of the bastard I slave under from nine to five, but as I look closer and my eyes become more accustomed to the darker side-street lighting, I see that the figure’s open mouth is mercifully free of secretions of any kind. This is not The Right Whale after all. So the next jarring thought I leap to is “Uh, oh. Are we going to be statistics on the morning news?”
The bodies of some loser and his totally stunning companion were found on a side street in Hollywood in the early hours of the morning. Though what such a sizzling-hot honey was doing with this clown is beyond all of us here in the Channel 13 newsroom.
Jesus, I can’t even get a break when I’m
dead.

Alice pulls me out of my reverie and to the left to pass around this now threatening figure. The man mountain moves as well and blocks our way. Always ready to defend a lady’s honor and prevent my own ass from being beaten, I whip out my wallet. “Here take it. I’ve got (I actually start counting) twenty, thirty, thirty-two bucks. It’s yours.”