OtherWorld

by Sarah Dreher

  “There was nothing wrong with the equipment.”

  “If it was a male operator, he was probably incompetent.”

  Gwen took a deep breath. “He wasn’t incompetent. He cut into our line. He patched me in so I could hear you talking.” She hesitated, then pushed on. “Stoner, you were talking, but you weren’t talking to anyone.”

  * * *

  “I know I’m not crazy,” she said next morning as she fought a headache over breakfast in the Terrace Cafe.

  “Who said you were? Look!” Marylou pointed to something behind Stoner’s back. “It’s Goofy!” She jumped up and waved. “Hi, Goofy!”

  “For Heaven’s sake, Marylou.” Stoner picked at her scrambled eggs. “There was someone on the phone.”

  Gwen took a sip of her coffee. “I heard the phone, too, Stoner. That much wasn’t a hallucination.”

  “But I know I talked to someone.”

  Aunt Hermione piled bacon and fried potatoes onto her bagel and cream cheese and took an amazingly ladylike bite. “If you would only open your minds just a little—and I mean all of you, not just Stoner—you wouldn’t have to spend so much time searching for explanations.”

  Stoner shook her head, which made it pound like a drum. Sinus, no doubt. One day they were fighting the bone-gnawing cold of late fall in New England, the next day suffocating in Florida heat and humidity. It opened her pores, but played havoc with her sinuses.

  Or maybe it was last night’s Chicken Pago Pago. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I just can’t believe spirits make phone calls. If they want to communicate, can’t they do it more directly?”

  “Ordinarily. But suppose part of the point is to make you work. To appear quite mundane so that you learn whatever lesson you’re supposed to learn.”

  “You mean,” Gwen said, “kind of like the Medium is the Message.”

  “You might say,” Aunt Hermione said with a little giggle. “Excuse me for laughing, dear, but that’s sort of an in-joke among psychics.”

  The monorail slid into the overhead station.

  “God,” Marylou said wistfully, “he’s magnificent.”

  Stoner looked around. “Who?”

  “Goofy.”

  “Marylou, he’s a Character.”

  “All the better. I like a man with a sense of humor.”

  “A Disney Character. They come to the Character Cafe at breakfast time to entertain the children.”

  Marylou heaved a sigh. “What a waste.”

  “There have been instances,” Aunt Hermione went on, “well-documented instances, by the way, though of course one has to know where to look for the documents—of Spirit making use of material objects when it’s the only way She/He/It/Whatever can get through. I recall the case of a man who was driving down a dark mountain road late at night. He fell asleep at the wheel. Just as he was about to crash into a run-away eighteen-wheeled semi-tractor-trailer truck loaded with logs, Spirit stepped in and literally yanked the steering wheel from his hands.” She nibbled on a bit of jam-covered toast. “Just yanked it right away from him. It saved his life. My, this jam is quite ordinary tasting, isn’t it?”

  “What do you suppose they do after work?” Marylou pondered.

  “Spirit doesn’t have working hours,” Aunt Hermione said. “It has no conception of time as we know it. The idea of nine-to-five is quite amusing to Spirit.”

  “I meant the Creatures,” Marylou said.

  Stoner took another look at Goofy. “It’s probably a women. About nineteen years old. And after work she goes home and does her laundry and washes her hair and gets ready for the next day. Or she goes out to teen-oriented discos with her nineteen-year-old friends and they make plans for college and pick up boys with whom they don’t practice Safe Sex.”

  Marylou thought it over. “I think one should try to have a wide variety of experiences,” she said at last.

  Aunt Hermione turned to look at the Goofy Character. “It does have a nice aura,” she said. “Very calming.”

  “I wonder what it’s like to have that job,” Gwen said. “I mean, when you put on the Goofy costume, do you become Goofy? Does the essence of Goofyhood enter you?”

  Stoner looked at her.

  “You know,” Gwen went on. “Like the Kachinas. When the Hopis put on the Kachina masks, they become the Kachinas.”

  Stoner tried to think about it, around her headache. Maybe. And maybe Walt Disney Characters were the white man’s Kachinas. Gods of Enthusiasm and Entertainment. It was a sobering thought.

  Aunt Hermione wiped her mouth daintily and folded her napkin. “I have to be going. I promised some old friends I’d meet them at the Haunted House. Always such fun to see how the average person conceives of Spirit. Quite ridiculous, really, but I suppose a warped conception is better than no conception at all. Will Edith be joining us later?”

  “Probably,” Marylou said. “I’m supposed to leave a message when we decide where to have dinner. If she can get away, she’ll meet us there.”

  “Grand.” Aunt Hermione tucked her glasses into her fanny pack. “Have a pleasant day. Or, as they say in those dreadful, repetitive television ads, ‘Have a Disney Day’.” She shook her head. “Dreadful.” The crowd swallowed her.

  * * *

  The monorail pulled into the EPCOT station.

  “Well,” Gwen said, “here we are. Science. Technology. Children. Every teacher’s dream.” She leaned across Stoner’s lap and touched Marylou’s hand. “You can open your eyes now.”

  Marylou screwed up her face. “Are we ON THE GROUND?”

  “At the station.”

  “Tell me when we’re ON THE GROUND.”

  Gwen unlocked Marylou’s hand from the cuff of Stoner’s shorts. “Okay, follow me.”

  Two park employees in clean, freshly-ironed uniforms appeared out of nowhere and offered assistance. Gwen waved them off. “We’re trying to teach her self-reliance. She’s moving to independent living in six months.”

  The helpful young men moved a respectful distance away but kept a casual eye on them.

  The crowd was flowing down the stairs, toward the entrance to the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Stoner slipped into the human current and let it take her. Gentle New Age music tinkled around her like wind chimes.

  Pretty, she thought, and then for one panic-stricken moment couldn’t remember what she’d done with her World Passport. She found it in the back pocket of her shorts and transferred it to her hand. She glanced over her shoulder, looking for Gwen. Losing her World Passport would be bad enough. Losing track of Gwen would be dreadful. They hadn’t done any of the things they usually did when traveling or shopping—decide where to meet if they got lost, decide who would stay where she was and who would go looking, what code names they’d use if someone had to be paged...

  She was right behind her. Marylou seemed to be moving under her own steam.

  They stepped into the turnstile line.

  Another employee took and stamped their tickets and told them to enjoy the park. All around people were milling past, funneling toward a central point.

  Gwen slipped an arm around her waist. “Well, here we are.”

  “I really did hear someone on the phone,” Stoner said, studying the ground as they walked along. The headache was making her a little dizzy.

  “I believe you.”

  The sun felt warm and soft on her back. “I didn’t make it up.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t hear…”

  “Honest.”

  “It’s really crazy, you know?”

  Gwen stopped suddenly. “Stoner, look where we are.”

  She looked up, and caught her breath.

  Spaceship Earth sailed high against a pale blue sky. Wisps of gauzy cloud caressed the gigantic silver globe. Massive and delicate, it seemed to hover protectively over the earth.

  Stoner felt tears spring to her eyes, and swallowed.

  “Magnificent, i
sn’t it?” Gwen whispered.

  “Spaceship Earth,” Marylou read from the guide book, “is one-hundred eighty feet high and weighs a million pounds. The sheath is made of triangular panels of anodized aluminum, whatever that is, with a polyethylene core.”

  “It’s an illusion,” Gwen said. “This thing is not what it seems at all.”

  “How can you tell?” Stoner asked.

  “I feel it. Can’t you feel it?”

  Yes, she could feel it. Something unearthly about it, something other-worldly, something… mystical. Despite the music, despite the crowds in constant motion, there was a feeling of profound stillness and silence.

  A long line of people stood at the base of the geosphere, snaking between chains in an orderly maze. At the top of the maze, a carpeted ramp led into inky darkness.

  “Want to go in?” Gwen asked.

  The suggestion seemed like blasphemy. And something else. Something she couldn’t quite identify. “Not yet. Can we look around a little first?”

  “Well,” Marylou announced as she peered at the guidebook, “I know my first stop. Earth Station.”

  “What’s that?” Gwen asked.

  “Probably the most important spot in all of EPCOT,” Marylou said.

  Okay, where would Marylou want to go first in this whole gigantic, exciting park? On a ride? Hardly. Ladies’ room? Possible, but not likely. Souvenir counter? No. Information?

  She had it. “Earth Station,” Stoner said, “is where you make dinner reservations, right?”

  “Correct!” Marylou bolted through the sliding glass doors and made a dash for the TV monitors.

  “Think we should supervise this?” Stoner asked.

  Gwen shook her head. “Let her go. I feel guilty enough for dragging her here.”

  “Yeah,” Stoner said. She shoved her hands into her back pockets. “She really hates it, doesn’t she?”

  “Hard to tell.” They found seats where they could see Marylou set to work on a WorldKey Information screen, beginning her browse through the menus of every restaurant in EPCOT.

  “One thing we can count on,” Gwen remarked. “If we let Marylou pick the restaurants, they may be bizarre, but they’ll be good.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” Stoner said. “She likes some strange stuff, like snails. And smoked oysters.”

  Gwen grimaced.“I don’t want to hear about it.”

  Stoner stretched her legs out in front of her and watched the constantly changing images on the electronic billboards along the ceiling as they gave grainy previews of what could be found in the various exhibits. Now that they were finally here, she was so overwhelmed by impressions it was hard to think. Light, water, sound, heat—especially heat. Yesterday they had been shivering in Boston drizzle. Today warm air surrounded her, caressing and pressing.

  She glanced to her right. Outside, beyond the glass, the park shimmered as if under a film of water. The sun was cruelly white, and pricked her eyes like needles. Objects and people broke into shards of color and motion.

  Gradually, she began to make out larger masses. They resolved slowly into palm trees. Terraced flower beds blazing with crimson. Fountains spraying mist into the already-soggy air. Glaring green and white. Shadows as black as coal mines. In the distance, a softly curving building came into view. The facade of the building was brilliant blue, and shaped like a gigantic, stylized wave.

  “That must be the Living Seas,” Stoner said. She was feeling increasingly fuzzed-out lethargic.

  Gwen put on her reading glasses and consulted the guide book. “Looks like. Wow! They have a restaurant surrounded by a fish tank. We can order seafood, and watch them watching us eat them.”

  “Tacky,” Stoner said.

  Marylou had given up on the touch-sensitive screens and had summoned the image of an up-beat Disney hostess. Stoner couldn’t make out their conversation, but from the look of deadly seriousness on Marylou’s face, they were discussing either the meaning of life, or the relative merits of the French, German, Italian, and Japanese restaurants.

  “What?” Gwen asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You seem lukewarm on the Sea idea.”

  She forced herself to look alert. “No, really. I want to see everything. I just don’t know where to start.”

  “Well,” Gwen said, “we’re right here at Spaceship Earth. That seems a logical…”

  Stoner cut her off. “Birnbaum’s guide recommends leaving that for later in the day, when the crowds aren’t as heavy.”

  “There aren’t any crowds, Stoner. This is October, not the middle of summer.”

  She felt a funny, anxiety-like tingle along her backbone. “There were some crowds on the way in. Didn’t you notice?”

  “It certainly looked to me as if the line was moving with deliberate speed.”

  The tingle was growing to a cold itch. “But we don’t want to waste time standing in…”

  Gwen gave a little laugh. “Pebbles, we have a whole week here. Wouldn’t you like to stand in line in the sun for a few minutes?”

  “Sure,” Stoner said. She wanted to be agreeable, in spite of her apprehension, in spite of her pounding head. After all, they were on vacation. She got up. “I’ll tell Marylou...”

  Gwen grabbed her belt loop and hauled her back down. “Something’s bothering you. What is it?”

  “Nothing. The Ball would be great.”

  “The Ball?”

  She gestured in the general direction of Spaceship Earth. “The Ball.”

  “Stoner…”

  Her anxiety was becoming genuinely uncomfortable. “It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine. You’re as white as a ghost. Tell me what’s going on.”

  The trouble was, she didn’t know what was going on, except that something about going into the Ball scared her. Scared her a lot. “It’s dark,” she said lamely.

  “Sure.”

  “And weird.”

  “Weird?”

  Stoner nodded.

  “Weird in what way?”

  “I don’t know?”

  “Are you having a premonition?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “A personal premonition? Or is it more like the whole thing’s going to roll off its base and squash us all, and generations from now people will still be looking at grainy home video films and singing folk songs about the Disney Disaster?”

  She managed a weak smile. “Didn’t you notice how many people were going into the Ball, and no one was coming out?”

  “No,” Gwen said, “I didn’t notice that. But if people were vanishing off the face of the earth at the rate they’re going into the Ball, don’t you think CNN would have picked up on it?”

  “Maybe Disney and Ted Turner are in it together.”

  Gwen shook her head. “Jane Fonda would never agree to be a part of something like that.”

  “She could be a double agent,” Stoner said. “Maybe that trip to Hanoi was just to throw us off the track. I mean, don’t you find it strange that she could get a passport so easily? And why did the U.S. Government let her back in the country...?”

  “I knew we shouldn’t have gone to see JFK,” Gwen said with a heavy sigh. “You see twists and turns and conspiracies everywhere.”

  Stoner laughed. “They are everywhere.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Look around.” She glanced over her shoulder as if looking for…“Oops.”

  People were emerging from a door at the back of the room, a door which, if entered instead of exited, would lead directly into Spaceship Earth.

  Gwen grinned. “Gosh, Tinker Bell, it looks like we’ve found the Lost Boys.”

  “All right, all right,” Stoner said, trapped. “I’ll go.”

  “Stoner,” Gwen said, “where is it written that you have to go on each and every ride?”

  “But if you want to…”

  “If I want to go, I’ll go. That doesn’t mean you have to. You don’t have to protect me. You know I hate that.”r />
  “It’s not that,” Stoner tried again. “I just feel as if something’s going to happen, and I don’t think we should be in there when it does.”

  Gwen stretched her legs out in front of her. “Well, do you think it’ll pass if we wait a while?”

  She thought about that. “Maybe.” But she had a feeling it had to do with only her, and with knowing. With knowing something she really, honestly, sincerely didn’t want to know.

  The smile on the face of the upbeat Disney hostess behind Marylou’s screen had taken on a waxy appearance.

  “I think,” Stoner said, “I’d better help Marylou get closure on dinner.” She got up and crossed the room and put her hand on Marylou’s shoulder. “Time’s a-wastin’. Think you can wrap...”

  Marylou waved a hand to quiet her. “Hush, Love, I’ve almost got it.” She turned back to the screen. “You’re certain we can’t reserve for tomorrow while we’re at it.”

  “No, Ma’am,” the hostess said for what was probably—knowing Marylou and her total lack of belief in Rules—the twenty-eighth time, “we can only take reservations for tonight. You can reserve up to two days in advance from your hotel room.”

  “Okay, I say we go with Marrakesh at seven. That’s five of us. The name is Kesselbaum, Dr. Edith Kesselbaum.”

  The hostess suppressed a look of surprise. “Dr. Kesselbaum?”

  “Dr. Edith Kesselbaum. We’re with the psychiatric convention.”

  “I see.” The woman’s composure returned, and with it her Disney smile. “May I have your room number at the Contemporary, Dr. Kesselbaum?”

  Stoner had to admire the way the young blond woman handled herself. The quick appraising glance, the lining up of the woman she saw in her monitor—wild-haired, dressed in gauzy black slacks and revealing blouse, face nearly hidden behind sunglasses and a huge, floppy black hat that tied with scarf-like material beneath her chin and completely obscured her features, and wearing enough jangling silver jewelry to back up a full day’s output from the Treasury Department—against her own and the media’s view of The Psychiatrist. Do we have a match? Hit or miss? Kook, charlatan, or the Real McCoy? And what might this strange, obsessive woman have in mind with all her questions about restaurants and menus and what was fried in palm oil and what in sesame, and the kind of bread served in each restaurant, and to what extent each item was Americanized—more questions than the Disney people had ever dreamed of, which was a miracle in itself, God knew they were an obsessive lot?