Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales

by Mark O'Donnell

  “Aunt Addle!” Bitty raced to her. “What’s wrong? Did you just discover the key to a very old and dangerous secret?”

  Aunt Addle was as unhinged as a screen door in a twister, and stared at the girls as if she had just awakened into an intense and unconvincing fiction. “The—! The—!” she began, and fell senseless to the floor.

  “Gee, that’s not much to go on,” said Bitty gravely. “So many things begin with ‘the.’ ” She knelt to examine her unkempt relation.

  “There may not be anything to worry about,” offered Anodyne faintly. “She does this every night, and sometimes she doesn’t get up till morning.”

  “Yes, but this is early afternoon,” Bitty pointed out sternly. “Aunt Addle wouldn’t abuse her only house-dress this way.” She felt for a pulse, and her own face paled to a cleanser-colored white. “I—I’m sorry, Anodyne,” she announced finally. “Aunt Addle is … unconscious!”

  Anodyne’s eyes widened, twin burnt cookies of terror. “Unconscious! What does that mean?” Again, Anodyne tended to be a few measures behind the rest of the band.

  “Unconscious is like being asleep—and not even knowing it!” Bitty explained. Silence fell over them like a dust cover.

  Then, just as suddenly, they were interrupted by an ominous clicking sound from the porch. “Bitty!” breathed Anodyne. “Someone—or something—is on the front porch! This is scary times six!”

  Bitty opened the thick windowless wooden door. There stood a handsome young man in a pristine lab coat, scanning the mission furniture with a Geiger counter.

  “I’m sorry if I startled you,” he smiled. “I was driving by and noticed a gum wrapper on your porch. I took the liberty of putting it in your trash can, but I thought I should check your radiation levels while I was at it. I hope you don’t mind. I’m Blaine Salvage.”

  Anodyne sighed with relief. “Of course, Doctor Salvage! Bitty, Doctor Salvage is in the teen-surgery ward at Las Perdidas Hospital. He helped me out with that little problem of mine in The Mystery of the Co-Ed Dormitory. This is my cousin, Bitty Borax. She was the one who saved the governor’s dog from those blackmailers.”

  “I certainly read about that, Miss Borax,” the doctor grinned. “You’re beautifully groomed. Will you marry me?”

  Bitty tastefully deflected his question. “Nice to meet you, Doctor.” A pause followed through which a symbolic train could have been driven.

  “I’ll see to this old lady,” Doctor Salvage offered. “She’s dead, I take it?” He stepped inside.

  “Oh, no, just unconscious, thanks!” Bitty answered.

  The doctor lifted Aunt Addle into his arms and carried her out of the room. “I’ll just take her into the kitchen. If you like, I can perform an autopsy. Can I fix either of you a sandwich while I’m in there?”

  “No thanks!” Bitty replied. “I never eat. But you might make one for Anodyne—she’s supposed to stay fifteen pounds heavier than me at all times. But again, Doctor, Aunt Addle isn’t dead.”

  “I’m surprised,” he called from the kitchen. “She got her hands awfully dirty at the old cavern!”

  “Isn’t he strong?” chirped Anodyne secretively. “He must lift a lot of heavy syringes!”

  Bitty was preoccupied, however. “How did he know Aunt Addle was at the old cavern?”

  “Well, maybe he’s a sleuth like you, and knows all the acid sludge in these parts by type.”

  Before they could resolve their curiosity, though, a sound of lumbering footsteps echoed from the cellar, ghostly clunks ascending the steps to the vestibule. With a disdainful clatter, a large, sinister man in a frayed dressing gown appeared, carrying several old-looking hatboxes.

  “Mister Packaday, you startled us!” gasped Anodyne. “We thought you’d be in town at the Carnal Nugget, getting inspiration.”

  Pilsener Packaday was a houseguest of the Borax family, a dissolute but assured writer from the East who had once saved Uncle Fleck in a beanery collapse. He was supposedly on a writer’s retreat, but several times Bitty had seen him furtively descend to the wine cellar when he said he was going out to scan the horizon charismatically.

  “How’s your new book coming?” she asked cautiously, watching the disheveled celebrity place the hatboxes on a side table.

  “I mustn’t be disturbed,” he answered testily, and lit a cigarette. He proceeded to stack and rearrange the inscrutable boxes as if absorbed in a game whose rules were private and unfathomable. “Leave me, please. I’m very busy.”

  “I hope all this commotion hasn’t broken your concentration,” Bitty ventured. “Aunt Addle had a fit of some kind.”

  Mister Packaday turned to her indifferently, his eyes as cold as fancy spherical ice cubes one gets from novelty ice cube trays. “I heard nothing. I must work. I tire of you both. Go at once.”

  This seemed a presumptuous request in a family room, but Bitty bore in mind that he was a guest. “Have you made any progress on your Quick Weight-Loss Way to Riches, Mister Packaday?” He continued to move the hatboxes around the table, as if seeking a perfect configuration.

  Anodyne attempted to flatter him into responding. “A famous writer like you must know a lot about human suffering,” she offered hopefully.

  “It’s true, I do. Get out please.”

  Bitty felt she had to be frank. “Isn’t there enough privacy in the room we fixed up for you, Mister Packaday?”

  He eyed her as if by legal compulsion, and the ash from his cigarette fell to the floor like a whispered insult. “I can’t work with a dead body lying around. Tell whoever changes the linen.”

  Anodyne was becoming agitated, a sign that she was finally growing up. “A dead body! Whose could it be? It doesn’t seem to be any of us!”

  Mister Packaday stacked his boxes in an apparent imitation of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, sighed enigmatically, and turned to face Bitty again. “I didn’t think it was my responsibility. But it seemed to be wearing corrective underwear.”

  “Uncle Fleck!” theorized Bitty. “He has been missing!”

  Young Doctor Salvage returned from the kitchen holding a large pair of hedge clippers.

  “As near as I can tell from the autopsy,” he said tersely, “your aunt failed to wash her hands after petting the cat. Infection was immediate.”

  “But she wasn’t dead five minutes ago!” protested Bitty, her head beginning to spin like a washing machine full of mismatched whites and colors.

  “By the way,” the doctor continued. “I don’t mean to alarm you, but it seems as if your phone lines have been cut.”

  “A killer, or at any rate, fatal germs loose at Rancho Contento!” cried Anodyne. “This takes the cake for spooky!”

  “Calm yourself,” cautioned Bitty. “You know what perspiration stains do to your clothes!”

  Surprisingly, it was the urbane Pilsener Packaday who suddenly panicked. “No phone! What if the pet store wants to reach me!”

  “What are you talking about, Mister Packaday?” Bitty asked. “By the way, this is Blaine Salvage. Doctor, Pilsener Packaday.”

  The distracted author gathered his hatboxes and stumbled up the stairs to his room. “They’re not going to get us! We’re going away! Far away!”

  “They? Us?” Bitty struggled to understand.

  “I’ll give him a sedative,” Doctor Salvage said briskly. He opened his hedge clippers and followed Packaday up the stairs. “Smoking, no matter what they say, does not calm the nerves!”

  Anodyne clutched Bitty in a frightened but non-suggestive manner. “Who’s getting who, Bitty? And what’s in those hatboxes?”

  Before she could recap the story any further, the shadow of a figure filled the front doorway, which had been standing open since the doctor arrived. Anodyne jumped like a jackalope, but Bitty faced the intruder. It was Lazlo, the surly half-breed gardener. Nothing grew in the parched desert, which is one reason he was surly, but another might have been that years before, when he had first come to Rancho Contento, La
zlo had been sleepwalking, owing perhaps to his conflicted nationalities, and groggy Uncle Fleck had mistaken him for an intruder and shot him in the shoulder. Supposedly the incident was long forgotten, but at this moment Bitty wondered.

  “Lazlo!” she breathed, as if to demonstrate she knew who he was.

  “City man take my boxes,” he said choppily. “I need boxes for debris. I must police area.”

  “Did Mister Packaday take your boxes, Lazlo?” Betty surmised. “Were they hat boxes, Lazlo?”

  Doctor Salvage came back downstairs, his hair tousled and his lab coat wrinkled. “I’m afraid lung cancer has claimed your Mister Packaday,” he announced impassively. “I think you’d all better come with me down to the airtight vault in the cellar.”

  “But what about the hatboxes?” Anodyne gurgled plaintively. “And— Oh!” A new horror swept over her like a forward stranger in a crowded elevator. “Bitty! The lights have gone out!”

  Bitty quickly surveyed the room. “You’re right! Luckily, it’s two in the afternoon!”

  “Just one second there!” barked Doctor Salvage with uncharacteristic emphasis. He had spied Lazlo sneaking up the stairs to Mister Packaday’s room. “Where are you going?”

  Lazlo turned, the lone feather in his headband drooping guiltily. “I need boxes—in case I have leaves to rake.”

  “There are no leaves in this wasteland,” the doctor shot back. He turned to Bitty. “Wait here, I’ll go with him. I don’t trust his mixed allegiances. Those bare feet suggest social discontent!”

  He followed Lazlo out of sight up the not-so-brightly-lit-as-before staircase. The air tingled like an application of iodine.

  “Bitty, this is Goosebump Central!” murmured Anodyne, nervously lighting a cigarette from the pack the late writer had left behind in his confusion.

  “No, Anodyne, don’t despair!” Bitty cried. “I’ll call the sheriff’s office from the pay phone by the waste site.” She drew a coin from her pocket and stared at it in disbelief.

  “Oh no! What’s wrong?” Anodyne babbled, puffing smoke like a toaster nearing short-circuit.

  “My dime has been bent,” announced Bitty. “Making it useless in pay phone slots.”

  Upstairs, the sound of a scuffle made the antler chandeliers in the vestibule shake. Bitty reviewed the evidence.

  “Anodyne, how could Aunt Addle have gotten herself so covered with cat hair in the old cavern?”

  Doctor Salvage reappeared at the head of the stairs, as obsessed as a locomotive, and steamed down to the girls with the hatboxes in his arms. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Lazlo seems to have succumbed to a rare case of fur balls in humans. His blood was more mixed than we knew.”

  “Hurry, let’s see what’s in those boxes!” shouted Anodyne, stubbing out her cigarette. The doctor glared at her disapprovingly.

  “Wait a second, it occurs to me that Aunt Addle had a threatening phone call last night,” recalled Bitty suddenly.

  Anodyne pulled the lid off one of the hatboxes and stared inside, at first with bewilderment, and then dismay. “Not more kittens! The ranch is overrun as it is, and there aren’t mice enough for the ones we already have.”

  “Yes,” Doctor Salvage said ominously. “Your Midnight has been a very, very careless animal, hasn’t she?”

  “Well, I—” Anodyne’s blank face seemed perfectly to complement the benighted mewing that rose from the open hatbox.

  “You don’t even know who the father is, do you?” he continued, his voice as smooth and contained as a medicinal caplet.

  Meanwhile, Bitty was absorbed in her real-life mental math. “Whoever it was must have been hysterical, because Aunt Addle got worked up herself. It was something about cycles of fornication, of profane and bestial horror, a rite of blood and rebirth.”

  “Bitty!” Anodyne called faintly, but powerful fingers on her throat prevented her from disrupting Bitty’s concentration.

  “Could Aunt Addle have taken Pilsener Packaday into her confidence? Where is Midnight, anyhow?”

  “We must sterilize, sterilize all unclean substances!” young Doctor Salvage declared, releasing Anodyne’s lifeless form to tumble to the floor with a drama unknown in her life. The sound of Anodyne’s charm bracelet striking the parquet roused Bitty from her distraction. She beheld her late cousin, whom several of the now released kittens were vainly nuzzling, and turned to face Doctor Salvage. He stood stiffly in his torn lab coat, and his breathing sounded like a great skyscraper’s heating ducts, soft but implicitly awesome in scope, and ineluctably mechanical.

  “Well, Doctor,” she said in as even a voice as she could muster. “If you insist, I will marry you.”

  THREE LOST POEMS

  (It is not generally known that Emily Dickinson worked for a time as a copywriter at BBD&O, in Boston.)

  THE DOVE BAR

  Some seek diviner Donuts

  Who hear of Heaven’s Sweets—

  They pine for flying Crullers

  Who dine on mundane Meats—

  The Bird of Peace Transfigured—

  Unconscious, on a Stick—

  For once, a Fruit the haggard

  And beggared Soul may pick—

  The Arctic cream of Bossie—

  That Aztec, Chocolate—

  The White and Black made glossy—

  And Justified—at that—

  Antipodes united—

  They must have used a Lab—

  The polar Host has lighted—

  The Word—a frozen Slab.

  THE TRIUMPH

  My heart could not accelerate—

  It was weighed down by Fact.

  Mere blood lacks petrol’s octane

  For speed’s triumphal act.

  The dead lie still while angels race;

  The slow know death in life.

  Velocity is Caesar—

  It conquers like a knife.

  I strove, in boots and bootless,

  And neither made me fly.

  Since Providence does not provide,

  Then Commerce may comply.

  This steed leaps from the foundry,

  A stallion told in steel,

  Exultant as the arrow

  That soars above the Real.

  Voracious clockwork panther,

  Amnesiac in its climb,

  It heedless fells the highway,

  Remorseless—as Time.

  SOMINEX

  Because Sleep tarried when I called,

  And care gnawed at the walls,

  I learned a faith in Chemistry,

  The Djinn that answers calls.

  Its powders spread like snowfall

  Or all-obscuring sand,

  Throughout the secret acres,

  To still the fevered land.

  The mob of thoughts disperses,

  The wrenching pistons cease.

  The greatest dream—is Dreamlessness—

  The blizzard’s whitening peace.

  False robes of absolution,

  Imposter’s crown of rest—

  The comfort of the blessed—here—

  Conferred on the Unblessed.

  DIARY OF A FAN

  SUNDAY:

  I saw Sigourney Weaver on the street today. She was alone. I pity her.

  Also—is this possible?—I think I saw Leslie Howard as a young man. It was near the Museum of Modern Art, so maybe he was there for one of their revivals.

  MONDAY:

  Maurice at work wants to get serious. He sent me a Xerox copy of his face that he did in the mailroom. It was not flattering.

  Lunch at the Chinese restaurant near the office. There were a lot of framed photos on the walls—struggling actors, I guess. They were all grinning like tigers, but their eyes were strictly deer caught in oncoming headlights. I asked the manager who they were, but all he could say was “Very famous.” I think certain someones, or should I say certain nobodies, have been taking advantage of his recent-immigrant status. One m
an’s photo I did recognize, but it was from seeing him at the newsstand where I get Cahiers de la Célébrité. He buys Back Stage, so how famous can he be?

  After work I went to my Support for Lovers of Unattainably Remote People meeting. This week we met at Garbo Spooney’s apartment. She’s a second-generation fan (her mother dipped a handkerchief in Dillinger’s blood), which I guess is what makes her so stuck-up. She has a framed picture of herself with the Invisible Man, but I suspect it’s just an Invisible Man impersonator.

  Right before the meeting began she asked if anyone was attending SLURP for the first time, when obviously it was the five of us, just like always.

  “You don’t have to be so formal, Garb,” I told her. I’ve been reading how successful people don’t take guff.

  “And you don’t have to be so informal, Sheel,” she said. Instead of Sheila. I guess she thought that was a comeback. “You might try wearing a dress or some makeup. Good grooming is the first step toward actual celebrity.” I pity her. She still hasn’t accepted that the Method and rock and roll changed all that forever.

  Right after the meet-who-you-can-and-accept-not-meeting-Madonna pledge, one of the Cynthias (the one who works at the Bureau of Not Yet Missing Persons) started crying because she’s finally faced the fact that Liz and Eddie will never reconcile. She’s very slow at working these things through. Then the other Cynthia started crying about how hard it is to keep tabs on ex-Menudo members, especially since she doesn’t speak Spanish. It’s her own fault. If you’re going to climb that mountain, you’ve got to do the work. No wonder real fans are a dying breed—people are getting too lazy for obsession.

  Of course Garbo, in that condescending way of hers, tried to distract everyone by firing trivia questions at us. Not just the standard year-of-birth stuff, or even “Name the Seven Dwarfs,” but “Name three or more rejected suggestions for the Seven Dwarfs’ names.” They’re not strictly celebrities in the corporeal sense, so I resented it—especially with a Cynthia still crying—but Garbo just barreled ahead and rattled off a few, like Hungry and Brackish and Biggo Ego, and who could contradict her? Apparently she had an aunt who slept with a Disney animator. But, she always adds, all they did was sleep. There were studio rules.