by Terri Favro
“What’s Mom think?” I asked.
“I haven’t told her. She’s got enough to worry about with your sister.”
The two of us watched the John Foster Dulles float away to more interesting places than Shipman’s Corners. Then we all drove home: me, Dad and the secrets we were keeping.
That night, with Dad in the living room watching TV, I lay beside the great flat expanse of Linda’s deserted bed, the last of my comic books spread around me. Strange, to be all alone at night. The last thing I heard before falling asleep was the deep, concerned voice of an announcer on the Buffalo evening news: It’s eleven o’clock. Do you know where your children are?
five
Torture Chamber of the Lizard King
School days lumbered by like an overloaded bulk freighter. After my two-week absence, I floundered in deskwork that our teacher Mrs. Di Pietro ran off on the Gestetner machine in the office. You could hear it kuh-thunking away every morning, the drum inking thirty copies of tedious arithmetic questions.
Not long after Linda and Mom’s retreat to Toronto, I was sitting at my desk when I noticed Judy-Garland pass a note to Kathy F., who passed it to Lucy P., who passed it to Wendy D. Finally, nudged by Jayne-Mansfield, Wendy tried to toss it onto my desk with a snort of suppressed laughter. It fell short, landing on Sandy’s desk. She unfolded the paper. I craned my neck to look over her shoulder but all I could see was the skin on the back of her neck reddening. With an eye on Mrs. Di Pietro, who was absent-mindedly walking the aisles while we did deskwork, Wendy snatched back the sheet from Sandy, crumpled it and lobbed it onto my desk.
The tightly folded paper sat before me like a ticking time bomb. Something told me it would explode if I opened it, but I had to know what was inside. I unfolded the sheet, creased in a million places from making the rounds of the room.
It was an ink drawing of a naked woman with breasts like balloons and bullet-shaped nipples that had been crayoned a lurid pink. Her legs were high in the air, splayed wide open with a big black inkblot scribbled over her crotch. She had the eyes of a cat but her nose and mouth were missing.
At the bottom of the drawing, in capital letters, was the word “HOOR.”
I gripped the paper in disbelief, sickened by the raw hatred in it. This was a poison kids gobbled up with their breakfast cereal, or carried to school in bagged lunches, or absorbed from overheard telephone conversations between mothers: Did you hear about the older Biondi girl leaving school in the middle of the year and the mother going away, why it’s plain as the nose on your face what’s going on, who would’ve believed she turned out to be such a . . .
Whore. The power of the word made me queasy. I wanted Superman to spin time backwards by flying against the rotation of the Earth, so that when the wad of paper hit my desk, I would have a second chance to take it to the girls’ room and flush it down the toilet without looking at it. Too late now to squeeze the naked whore out of my head: she would be stuck there, forever.
A shadow fell across my desk, accompanied by the sweet plastic odours of breath mints and drugstore cologne. Sharp pink fingernails tugged the paper out of my hands. Mrs. Di Pietro made a tsk-tsk sound. She didn’t yell, or call the principal’s office, or threaten to keep us all in at recess if we didn’t tell her who had done it. She didn’t even put the paper in her desk drawer, which she did with other contraband like yo-yos, comic books and gum. She just crumpled it and threw it into the wastepaper basket, where the janitor might find it at the end of the day.
When we lined up for dismissal, I stooped to tie my shoelace, grabbing the crumpled drawing out of the wastepaper basket. I slipped the wad of paper into my knee sock.
Outdoors, I walked past the group of whispering kids, past the slap, slap, slap of the skipping rope against the cracked concrete of the playground and the chants that helped the girls keep time:
Doctor, Doctor!
Call the doctor!
Someone’s gonna have a brand-new baby!
Wrap it up in tissue paper!
Send it down the elevator!
Next girl come and jump with me!
* * *
Dad was waiting for me in the Country Squire to take me to have my teeth checked. With Mom gone, the duty fell to him. When I got in the car, he looked at me carefully.
“Everything okay?”
“Yup,” I answered.
We drove downtown to the dentist’s office in silence. He pulled up to the curb, idling the engine.
“Want me to go in and wait with you?”
I climbed out. “I’m thirteen. I’m not a little kid anymore, Dad.”
“See you later,” he said as I slammed the car door behind me.
From a young age, I recognized that dentistry was a type of sanctioned torture. Fortunately, because of my anaesthesia problem, they decided to play it safe by gassing me instead of sticking a needle in my mouth, which meant I forgot everything that happened while I was in the chair. Dr. Franken kept a stock of century-old comics in his waiting room to distract kids from the terrifying whir of the drill and the strangled cries of children with his hairy hands halfway down their throats.
Trying to keep my mind off of what was to come, I found myself paging through the same comics I’d read at every checkup for years. That day, I actually found one I hadn’t read before. It looked like it had been drawn when dinosaurs roamed the earth: Amazing Space Adventures Featuring ASTROGIRL! The characters were dressed as lords and ladies from the olden days, even though they were zooming around in rocket ships and zapping one another with ray guns.
In one panel, Astrogirl, her hair in a perm that even my mother would have been ashamed of, was comforting a slave girl who looked surprisingly like Linda. Long black hair, strong chin and big breasts trapped in bra cups shaped like pointy bullets.
“Please help me, Astrogirl! I’m in trouble!” sobbed the slave girl. She even cried like Linda. Tears the size of jellybeans squeezed out of her blue-black eyes.
“What kind of trouble?” Astrogirl wanted to know, fists on her hips to show she meant business.
“I was captured by an alien race called the Muluxions on the eve of my wedding to a member of the Andorrean royal family,” the slave girl said. “I’m actually a princess, not a slave! And now the Muluxions are forcing me to marry the son of their leader, but he’s . . . but he’s . . . not humanoid.”
Astrogirl gasped. “That’s unspeakable!”
She wasn’t kidding. A few pages later and the slave girl was in a wedding dress, standing beside a giant iguana in a Prince Braveheart outfit.
“Soon you will be mine, my dear!” he said, his red tongue pointing at her from between green jaws.
The slave girl put a fist to her mouth in the classic comic book gesture of horror. Before I saw how it all turned out, the dentist’s nurse came out and called my name.
“You’re the girl with the novocaine problem. Let’s get you started on the gas.”
I sat in the high leather chair. From the next room, I could hear the dentist’s asthmatic wheeze. Dr. Franken lumbered in, smelling of peppermints with an undertone of something sharp and boozy, and picked up one of his shiny implements of torture from the metal tray that he kept at eye level so that we could anticipate what he was about to inflict on us in the name of oral hygiene.
The nurse stuck a mask on my face and the room began to ripple like the surface of the canal on a windy day. From the venetian blinds on the big window in front of the chair, the Andorrean slave girl hung by her wrists, writhing in terror. The lizard king, in his feathered cap and a white dentist’s coat, rubbed his tiny green paws in perverse glee. Groggily, I wondered what, exactly, a lizard would do with a girl. A minute later, I had my answer: the lizard yanked the girl down from the venetian blinds, unhinged his huge jaws and stuffed her into his mouth, head first. I could hear her groans of horror from inside
the lizard king’s gurgling digestive system. Soon all that was visible of the girl were the ghostly imprints of her hands pressed against the lizard’s insides and her slippered feet protruding from his gaping mouth.
“Ssssixxx cavities! Ssssomeonesss been eating a lot of candy!” a voice accused.
Sleepily, I forced open my eyes. A long forked tongue rolled obscenely out of Dr. Franken’s jaws and lolled at me for a moment before rolling back up.
That was the last thing I remember before feeling a distant stab of pain like Fred Flintstone bonking Wilma over the head with his caveman club. As the gas dragged me off to dreamland, I imagined the horror of being eaten alive by a boy. I wasn’t sure I’d like it much, once there was nothing left but my screams.
“Debbie,” said a voice.
Mmmm.
“Debbie. Snap out of it.”
I forced open my eyes. The Trespasser was standing in front of me, wearing a white lab coat and holding a whirring drill.
“Dr. Franken had a bit of a fainting spell. Good thing I was available to take over.”
Don’t hurt me, I tried to say but my mouth was full of tools and cotton batten.
“Must feel like everything’s going off the rails,” said the Trespasser, shaking his head.
I tried to nod. Bum Bum and I had failed to rescue Kendal. Dad had lost his job and Mom still didn’t know. Kendal had been hurt. Billy was going to die in a rocket. Linda was having an anarchist’s baby. Everyone was calling her a hoor and getting ready to turn me into an outcast.
All my fault, I tried to say. But the Trespasser shook his head firmly.
“Open a little wider, please. Everything that’s happened the last month was caused by an algorithm glitch. My not-so-esteemed asshole grad student didn’t bother to double-check his data, which is what happens when you work with an Exceptional. I mean, I don’t want to sound geneto-misanthropic, but Billy’s SAT scores were so low, only an affirmative action PhD program like ours would accept him.”
I stared at him. “Linahsbilly?” I managed to mumble around the cotton.
He nodded. “Yep. Linda’s Billy. My grad student at MIT. Or will be, in about fifty years. As part of his thesis, he was doing research back here in the past to find a way to fix problems your generation left behind that could mean the end of humanity as we know it. But he was too convinced that he could adapt strategies he saw on low-bandwidth television from a timeline weakly coupled to ours. Earth Standard Time. That’s why he thought he could change history by creating a peaceful protest movement among youth. ‘Yammers.’ ‘Ban the Bomb.’ Idiotic. Not to mention, he identified the wrong sister. Linda’s not the Ion Tagger. You are, Debbie.” The Trespasser paused. “You need to rinse and spit?”
I shook my head. The Trespasser picked up a suction hose and stuck it over the edge of my lip. His breath smelled of cinnamon mouthwash.
“What’s done is done. Billy ended up on a one-way trip to the moon, so it’s up to me to sort out this mess. We’ve got no time to lose. You’re gonna have to swing Schrödinger’s cat.”
I watched him lift a syringe, clinking the glass with the stump of his amputated middle finger to check for air bubbles. “Wha . . . Schro?” I tried to protest as he angled the needle into my arm.
“Schrödinger’s cat. A cat, in a box, with radioactive material. It’s alive in one world, dead in another. A thought experiment by a buddy of Einstein’s — look it up. The point is, I can’t wait around for you to grow up or I’ll start losing more fingers and toes, and bits I’d miss even more, to timesickness. With this little enzyme cocktail in your bloodstream, you’ll hop forward in time exactly nine years to the day, November fifteenth, 1978, so you can get down to business saving-the-world-wise. Looking on the bright side, you’ll get through puberty in a big hurry.”
The dentist’s office was starting to swim like a flashback on TV. Only the Trespasser stayed in focus, watching me closely, the empty hypo still in his hand.
“How’m I s’posed to save the world?” I managed to mumble.
The Trespasser cleared his throat. “You’re going to stop the momentum of time, collapse the continuum where we’re living into a black hole of non-existence and hop into a safe alternate world, sucking everyone along with you through the vacuum of space. Basic physics. Still, it’s tricky. In fact, it’s never been tried before. But my research suggests it’s all quite doable. I’ll explain further after we hop into 1978. Once we’re there, we’ll have about six months to figure out our next steps before they drop the big one in ’79. Just don’t look too surprised when the nitrous oxide gas wears off. You’ll exist in two places at once, for a nanosecond or two. Don’t worry, I’ll be right behind you.”
HOLIDAY INN EXPRESS, SCARBOROUGH
June 2011, E.S.T.
I open my eyes. Painfully. My head feels like a bulldozer has just ploughed through toxic waste pooled inside my cerebral cortex.
Someone is snoring.
I turn my head. A man is stretched out beside me, facing the other direction. Wispy wheat-blond hair with flecks of white. A hunched pink shoulder dotted with birthmarks and moles.
Oh Jesus God. It’s all coming back to me now. I’m in bed with the Maytag Man.
I rise shakily to my feet. I am naked. And I am sticky. This alarms me until I notice two torn condom wrappers on the night table.
The anonymous, sterile environment of the room screams “hotel chain on the edge of the suburbs in a large North American metropolis.” Yanking open the floor-to-ceiling beige drapes, I see twelve lanes of high-speed traffic soundlessly flowing past a sprawling power centre anchored by a Loblaws, a Canadian Tire and a Mark’s Work Wearhouse. A grey-orange sky hangs low over the soulless landscape.
Oh, thank God. Thank God. I’m still in Toronto.
Meditating on this view of a smoggy morning in the suburbs helps me knit my scattered scraps of memory together. It started with the malfunctioning dishwasher in Bum Bum’s condo. Pretty handy myself, I had patched together a few quick fixes with the help of YouFixIt.com and a great little shop in Scarborough, in Toronto’s eastern suburbs, where you can buy spare parts for home appliances, every make and model. But the Maytag’s faulty latch was defeating me. Small as it might seem compared to the pump or the rotating washer arm — both of which I’d already replaced — I saw no way to stop the latch from slipping open, spilling water all over the hardwood kitchen floor and potentially leaking into one of the pricy condo units below. I dug through my purse and found the card for Scofield Appliance Repair. Two hours later, he showed up at the door, wearing the same all-black getup he had on in Montreal.
Examining the faulty latch, he shook his head: “You used to be able to keep a Maytag dishwasher, what, fifteen, twenty years? Today it breaks in five so you’re forced to buy another.”
“Or have it fixed,” I pointed out. “That must be good for your business.”
“You’d think so, but you’d be surprised how many people junk an appliance when they hear it’ll cost a couple of hundred bucks to repair it.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I feel like Decker in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, retiring dishwashers when their predetermined lifespan is reached.”
“Sounds like you’re a Philip K. Dick fan,” I said.
“Blade Runner is one of my all-time favourite films. But I read the book years before I saw the movie.”
“Since you’re here,” I said slowly. “There’s also a small problem with the washer-dryer. If you’ve got time, maybe you could check that out, too?”
He smiled up at me from where he was unpacking his tools on the kitchen floor. “Gladly.”
I led him into the laundry room where he gently pried open the Miele washer-dryer combo. There was something almost tender about the way he removed the drum.
“I like this brand. Well engineered,” he murmured.
Watching
Darren’s sensual handling of machinery made me oddly self-conscious. I scooped up the sweaty T-shirts and socks I’d left on the laundry room floor.
“There must be a ring of hell for people who leave dirty laundry lying around,” I said, stuffing my running gear into the hamper.
Darren looked up at me. “Laundry rings — in hell? Not in Dante’s time. They were less fastidious than I suspect you are.”
Turns out that Darren has a master’s in English lit, specializing in works in translation from the Italian Renaissance. He wrote his thesis on the Decameron. A repair guy who can translate Boccaccio.
“There were no jobs in academia when I finished grad school, so I started my own business. I’ve always been good with my hands,” he explained.
How did we get from Bum Bum’s condo to a Holiday Inn Express on Toronto’s outer rim? He needed a piece for the Miele, which, of course, he hadn’t come prepared to fix. I mentioned the great little parts shop in Scarborough. He expressed surprise — and arrogant doubt — at its existence; if it was so great, how come he didn’t know about it? Long story short, we got in his pickup and I guided him there. Once we had the part, we both agreed that it was getting late and we should grab a bite to eat. And, he said, I know this fantastic place not far from here.
Pretty soon, we were eating samosas and drinking Kingfishers. I ordered another beer. So did he. Soon, neither of us was fit to drive. Darren pointed out the Holiday Inn Express sign on the horizon and said there was probably a taxi stand. We walked there, hand in hand, in the rain and found the stand empty. Which is when he kissed me. I remember tasting the hot samosa spices on his tongue and lips before falling into an amber-tinged pool of forgetfulness.
On a desk littered with the detritus of a large nachos platter and empty minibar bottles of vodka and Kahlúa (was someone making White Russians last night? Did we use milk or cream? How many calories did I consume?) sits a coffee maker, dumbed down to the point that all I have to do is drop a plastic disc of Columbian Rainforest Blend into a Canadarm-like extrusion and add water.
