Chapter 33
Fiacre woke up with a start. He was in a fetal position, arms locked tightly around his knees and head tucked into the fold between his shoulder and the crooks of his elbows.
He was not alarmed; veteran Time Travelers get used to the various and myriad ways in which they land forward or backward away from the moment departed. Poor Procopius, the Roman Historian, always woke up grasping the ball on tops of flag poles. Fiacre was grateful enough for his relatively comfortable arrival stance.
You might well imagine that streaking through wormholes and five and six dimensions at a leap, plus general management of time dilation itself and velocity specifically within the context of special relativity exemplified by the twin paradox—along with gravitational dilation as required by general relativity—is complicated and requires special training, and so it does, unless you’re a Saint, RC, in which case it’s a snap. (Feel free to consult E.U. Condon and Hugh Odishaw, Handbook of Physics, 2nd ed. McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967, for the particulars. Or, just take my word for it.)
Time Travelers commonly share several initial seconds of disorientation after arrival along with a bit of nausea. Fiacre was no exception and he was experiencing both right now.
Happily, the feeling of disorientation falls away rather quickly, and Travelers can dose themselves with a couple of newt’s eyes and an image of Barry Manilow to ameliorate the nausea.
Clinical trials show, however, that Manilow side-effects may include esophageal hemorrhage, naughty thoughts about your sister-in-law, depression, suicidal ideation, barking, objects appearing smaller in mirrors, increased worries about spontaneously combusting, sudden weight gain, dementia, road rage, and desires to dress like Joan Collins. Discontinue use of Manilow if you experience any of these side effects and consult your physician immediately.
Fiacre, experienced herbalist that he is, simply ignored the nausea; he knew it would dissipate in a minute. He used the minute to uncurl and take stock of his surroundings.
He was in a small, very dark room. He knew it was small because he could feel the hard surfaces to his right and left with his hands. When he stretched out his feet they bumped up against another hard surface; he pulled his right arm in and then raised it out in front of his body as far as it would go, and hit another hard surface. He deduced that he was either in a closet, or stuck in the trunk of a 1976 Lincoln Continental Mark V.
The Mark V came to mind because he’d been locked in the trunk of Imelda Marco’s Lincoln back in ’76 and it was full of shoes, as was his current space. He hoped he hadn’t miscalculated and ended up back in Manila instead of at Eveningside.
Back then, Imelda’s security force had roughed him up quite a bit before stuffing him into the trunk of her car for safe keeping until an execution date could be set. It was an altogether unpleasant experience and not one he wished to repeat. He raised himself up to his knees and felt the soft brush of fabric against his cheek. Ah: not a trunk; he was in a closet.
Fiacre stood and fumbled around for a door. When he found the knob he cracked the door open quietly and squinted against the sudden onslaught of light. Lulu Cooker was sitting at a dressing table, brushing her hair. Her back was to him—brush, brush—and he quickly pulled the door shut. Oops.
Fiacre was an experienced avoider of women. Like many men of the 7th century his views of the fairer sex have and had been shaped by culture and custom. On one hand he, like the fool Heartbreak, idolized one woman—in John’s case the Fabulous Mrs. Heartbreak, in Fiacre’s case the Blessed Virgin for whom he had built an oratory and hospice in the province of Brie near Prodilius. On the other hand…
…suddenly the closet door opened! Mrs. Cooker and Fiacre stood nose to nose, she with a puzzled expression on her pretty face that morphed into a gasp. She quickly stepped back.
Fiacre quickly stepped forward. “Behold a pale horse!” he shouted, thinking fast.
“His name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him! And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth!”
Mrs. Cooker fainted dead away; Fiacre stepped over her body with a chuckle.
“Jeepers,” he laughed. “That worked out pretty good! And now, for a quick get-a-way.”
Fiacre scanned the room. He was probably in Jake & Lulu's bedroom. There was a frilly canopy bed in the center of one wall and two night stands on either side of the bed. Fiacre resisted the urge to peek inside the drawers but he did notice several pair of platform shoes, including a pair of tennis shoes, on Jim’s side of the bed. Fiacre estimated how tall Jim might be; maybe five one, five two tops, but it was so hard to tell by watching him on television. It was possible that Reverend Cooker was only eleven inches tall in the middle, and the top and the bottom was platform shoes and toupee. Maybe he would stay at Eveningside long enough to catch the show.
There was a door to his left, flanked by a Thomas Kincaid painting. Fiacre glanced at the painting and felt a post trip nausea burble, but gulped it back and hurried from the room. Twenty feet beyond the painting lay another door that was probably a way out of the Cooker's living quarters. Fiacre hoped that where the Cookers lived was in or adjacent to the Eveningside Compound; he needed to find the dullard Heartbreak and the Warrior Queen ASAP.
He opened the door and stepped out into a hallway that looked sufficiently like one in a Motel Six to warrant a nausea ameliorating burble of confidence. The trouble with time travel, he thought, and with being a Time Traveler itself, was the approximations of time and space that signaled the end of a journey. He had talked to God about some improvements, but the conversation had gone a predicable route:
Fiacre: “How about when I Time Travel I get to exactly where I want to be, at exactly the time I want to get there?”
God: “Where’s the fun in that?”
Fiacre: “It’s not about fun!”
God: “Oh, yeah?”
But it was looking better and better that he was at Eveningside. When he got to the elevator there was an ‘Out of Order’ sign taped to its door, and he noticed that the hallway carpet was fuzzy and delaminating even though the Compound itself was less than eighteen months old. Cooker was, no doubt, of the opinion that it made no sense to invest in 30 year construction if the world was ending in five.
He cocked an eye toward the end of the hall and saw an EXIT sign over a door to what he hoped led to a downward staircase.
As he neared it, the door opened and a kid walked through it. The kid had lank brown hair cut to look like Justin Bieber’s and was similar to the mod shags Fiacre saw when he visited London during the'60s. He smiled and flipped a peace sign toward the kid.
“Wow,” the kid said. “I love your shirt.”
Fiacre looked down and nodded. ‘Jesus is coming! Look busy!’ he read. “Yeah. It’s pretty cool. I took it off a guy when I was at a Tim LaHaye book signing. He whined like a girl.”
“Cool.”
“Say,” Fiacre asked, “have you seen a dull looking old guy and a fierce Warrior Queen anywhere?”
The kid shook his head. “I dunno,” he said. “One of our security guards went nutso and took his clothes off. He keeps screaming for tuna hot dish and is running on and off the television set. Pastor Cooker is going crazy.
“Anyway, security locked the front door and they’re trying to nab the guy. They’re not letting anyone in or out of the building until they grab him. Maybe your friends are in the parking lot.
“It’s pretty weird around here, today,” the kid finished. “Maybe today is the day?”
“What day?”
“You know,” the kid said. “The day we ago ka-bloey. End times?”
“Nah, it isn’t today,” Fiacre said. “It isn’t going to happen for a long time.”
“Really?” the kid asked. Hopefulness mixed with doubt.
“Yeah,” Fiacre said. “The world can’t end until Sarah Palin marries Snoop Dog and they have Korean triplets.”
“Dude?”
“Word.”
“Does Mrs. Palin even know Snoop Dog?”
“Not yet. But I had a vision, and they're always on the money. Snoop Dog repents, Palin refudiates, and they bump uglies.”
“Wow.”
“And then Snoop Dog becomes President.”
The kid nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah. That would be end times.”
“So you see,” Fiacre said, “You’ve got lots of time. Time enough to blow this pop stand; maybe go to California. Have some fun, maybe?”
The kid nodded. “Wow.”
“So,” Fiacre said. “How do I get to the television studio?”
The kid pointed down the stairs beyond the open door.
“I can show you,” he said.
