Chapter 36
John is stuck midway in a window in an imaginatively undignified manner. Imagine it.
Dr. Sloan has her hands on his enormous ass, pushing and shoving and grumbling uncharitably about John’s bulk and the inflexible, not to say brittle composition of his body’s advance toward entropy. His stomach is an unbudgeable fulcrum.
John stares at an unmade bed festooned with throw pillows and an afghan depicting cats engaged in varieties of cute cat behavior. It is hideous and frightening because John knows that a person who would purchase such an article is capable of almost anything.
The more Dr. Sloan shoves and heaves, the faster John rocks. His forehead nearly touches the floor on the downward cycle before snapping upward to the top of a painful arc. He is like one of those perpetual motion goony birds: up and down, fast and faster. He feels a little nauseous.
John allows himself to relax. Dr. Sloan will succeed, or not succeed, in propelling him into the immediate future; he understands that he is trapped in time—a moment ago he watched gaped mouth as the Warrior Queen broke glass—in a second, or in several minutes, he will tumble onto the illicitly gained floor, or into the arms of the law—he isn’t going anywhere just now: so he rocks, and waits.
Fiacre and the boy-savant Little Biggs, a refugee from Tisdale, Missouri, are at the bottom of an Eveningside stairwell leading to the Compound’s Grand Hall, and are about to open the door to enter it. They are looking for John, and for the Warrior Queen Sloan, and do not know that John is nearby, trapped between that old time and the about to happen time and that he isn’t able to move forward just yet.
Lulu Cooker, Little Jake Cooker’s replacement for the late, great Televangelism Superstar Tomi Raye Cooker, has awakened from her dead-a-away faint and begins to shake the beam from her eye. “What happened?” she wonders out loud. “Who was that tacky man in my closet? Was there a tacky man in my closet?”
Wobbling, Lulu gets to her feet and immediately begins to weep. Once, she had lived in a real place; now she lives in Wall Eye, Missouri, shackled in married to an old bald geezer who won’t shut up about end times. He has wet lips and wears high heels; he hasn’t ‘known’ her in months. Derelicts are popping out of closets now too, and shouting scary stuff and wearing really smelly T-Shirts about Jesus coming.
She wonders if she’s having a reaction to all the anti-depressants she’s taking; how long can you use Prozac and Xanax, Alprazolam and Benzodiazepine, Zoloft and Effexor, without hallucinating? Or, maybe she needs to up her dose; yes, that must be it: she intends to double down tonight.
As Lulu stumbles back over to her dressing table John continues to rock back and forth on the window sill. He is slightly amused at Dr. Sloan’s increasingly frantic labors. But he is also becoming disoriented by her failed efforts to propel him into the future: he is there, then he is here; he rocks back and forth between now and then.
Finally, she stops. “A little help, Heartbreak?” she inquires. “Would it be too much to ask if you would please reach out and drag yourself forward a bit?”
“There a really terrifying afghan on the bed. It’s full of cats driving Volkswagens and looking smug. I don’t want to touch it.”
Sloan has had enough. She takes her hands off his ass and crouches down against the wall beneath the window and crawls under John’s dangling legs. She puts her shoulders and back tight against his legs and, like a collegiate fullback breaking toward the goal line, shoots straight up with Warrior Queen resolve. John tumbles through the window and into the future.
“Oh my word,” he whispers hoarsely. “This is ghastly. The horror, the horror!”
“What?”
“There’s a stack of Kenneth Copeland books on the nightstand! And they’re paperbacks!”
Dr. Sloan clambered through the window. “You’re such a snob, John,” she said. “You live in a High Church Wonderland and look down on low churched slobs who don’t share your elevated religious fantasy.”
John picked himself up off the floor and moved away from the afghan on the bed. “Mission from God not withstanding,” he said. “I see we have a little work to do with you.”
Dr. Sloan ignored him and looked around the room. They were in an apartment or condo of indiscriminate but new construction exuding the scent of impermanence. Perhaps that, she thought, was because the entirety of Eveningside’s raison d’être was the near-term destruction of the Universe. One would certainly buy paperbacks under such a scenario.
“We need to blow this pop stand,” Sloan said. “How do we get out?”
John pointed to the obvious door and began to shuffle toward it. Dr. Sloan attached herself to his arm and slipped around and in front of him. “Let us make haste, John,” she said firmly. “I’ll lead, if you don’t mind.”
John did mind, but he was eager to leave the frightening afghan and the paperback Copelands behind; he acquiesced and revved-up his shuffle to keep pace with Dr. Sloan’s hurried pace. She crossed what appeared to be a living room and opened what was almost certainly a door leading out of the unit, cautiously stuck her head out, and quickly yanked it back in after slamming the door shut (in case you’re keeping track of the order of things).
“Chet Chandler is running up and down the hall,” she said breathlessly. "He’s naked and being pursued by minions.”
“Many minions? Mini Minions? Minor Minions? Or, are the minions full-blown Blackwater Consulting minions with automatic weapons and Slovenian accents?”
“Will you be serious?!”
“Sharon, I’m as serious as an Edith Wharton novel!”
“Hmmn. Serious indeed,” she judged. “Alright, then. What do we do? We can’t stay here?”
“I suppose we could go back out the window?”
“Are you kidding? And go through all that ‘trapped between times’ jazz again? Not on your Nellie!”
John edged around her and cracked the door open. He could hear rapid clomping and hammering of feet on carpet and shrieks—they had to be Chet’s shrieks—but the sound was coming from a stairway at the end of a hallway of doors. The hallway itself was otherwise empty.
John opened the door and stepped briskly out into the hall—well, with a moderate lope—and motioned for Dr. Sloan to follow him. They turned left, away from the shrieks and clomping noise, and headed toward what they hoped was an egress to the Great Hall. Eureka!
Standing in the Great Hall was Jake Cooker himself. His hands were on his hips and he was looking toward the ceiling of the hall, shaking his head. Several people holding clipboards and wearing headphones milled around him; they looked anxious and seemed to be trying to placate him.
“I’m not happy, people!” Cooker said loudly. “We’re on the air in 15 minutes and there is a crazy man running around. A naked man, in case you didn’t notice.”
Cooker’s voice was nasally and whiney and was timbered with tight high notes that were curiously girlish and adolescent at the same time. He wore tight black jeans and a black turtle neck and, of course, boots with four or five inch heels. It struck John that, if Agnes de Mille were still living, if she was a man instead of a woman, if she somehow lived in Wall Eye, Missouri instead of New York City, and if she were a television evangelist instead of a dancer, she would look exactly like Jay Cooker. And needless to say—but let me say it—vice versa.
“Fourteen minutes, people!” Cooker shouted. “And where, for the Love of Sweet Jesus, is Lulu!?”
“I’m here, darlin’,” answered a weak voiced Lulu as she entered the Great Hall from behind the stage and prepared to step onto it. “I’m all set.”
“For God’s sakes, what are you wearing,” Cooker said sourly. “And you haven’t finished your hair! You look like a tramp!”
“I…there was a…” she stammered. “A man, a terrible man…”
A door to the left of the stage opened and Little Biggs stepped through it, followed by Fiacre. They both blinked into the klieg lights that were suddenly turned on. Fiacre smiled.
“Hi Lulu,” he said amiably. “I’m afraid I gave you quite a start.”
Lulu stared, and then began screaming as she cumpled to the floor in a weepy heap.
“Good heavens,” John exclaimed, pointing across the hall. “It’s Fiacre!”
“Oh, what now!” Cooker screamed. “Ten minutes!”
Fiacre turned to Little Biggs. “This is going well. And look,” he said, pointing at John, who was pointing at him.
“There’s the dullard Heartbreak. And the Warrior Queen.”
“Cool,” Little Biggs said. “She’s pretty tall.”
Fiacre nodded. “It is the nature of Warrior Queens.”
