Chapter 1
Dana and Vickie made quick work of their charge, making Marjorie feel like the centerpiece at a Bronze Age funeral, what with their wailing and tearing of their home-permed hair as they readied her to go forth. In very little time, they had disengaged her tubing and plastic bags, all while cooing at her that she would not need these any longer. (This was not comforting to our Marjorie.) They went on to tidy her, dress her in layers of fleecy clothes, and, while she was unfairly distracted by an ad on the television for Dairy Queen, managed to leather-strap her into a wheelchair which probably bore a placard across its backside reading “Caution: Wide Load.” With the sadness of a business owner closing up shop for the last time, Vickie switched the lights of her room off and, despite a plea from Marjorie to be released (the Dairy Queen commercial was over), she pushed her former employer to the door, while Dana, carried a well-stocked apricot shoulder bag which apparently held all that Marjorie would need for whatever time lay yet before her.
The little group left the room, Vickie and Dana rolling her quietly down an empty corridor painted in buttercream and hung with Norman Rockwell prints. Marjorie felt flooding out of her a slough of emotions, sensations like despondency, or maybe despair—she did not have her handy thesaurus nearby—then fear, of being trapped in this pastel labyrinth, then fear of tight seams—Why couldn’t these jello-jockeys distribute a plus-size jump suit?Thirdly, well, she was not sure what the other tinglings and twitchings that her animal brain was sending up like Roman candles—but it was a veritable rogues’ gallery of feel-wheel words. The novelty of these inner visitors was no picnic—but nothing that could not be set right with a little strawberry ripple.
With funereal expressions, Vickie and Dana attended Marjorie down one corridor (“Ah-ha,” thought Marjorie, “straight to the processing center…”), then another corridor (“I see,” Marjorie realized, “create a maze to keep the inmates confused…”), alongside one of those aluminum wheeled cases full of lunch trays (here Marjorie bargained, “No doubt sprinkled with happy-pill dust,”), and then by a corner nurses’ station where her pleas for help were ignored by pudgy young women in cartoon-character scrubs.
“I knew it,” Marjorie told. "My instincts are spot on. This place is just a way-station on the pipeline of kidneys and liver lobes and unsullied thyroid glands. My left-overs will probably get tossed into the food lot at the California condor rescue facility.”Marjorie ticked her chins up a notch at her clear-sightedness, quite sure that she had seen through this ruse of a ‘care center,’ but a wince of regret did follow this self-congratulation, since she had not been in on the ground floor of what had to be a real platinum mine.
Another turn of her wheelchair brought Marjorie into a spacious if depressing cafeteria—tables and chairs, where more scrub-clad young people crouched, knelt, and sat before other “residents,” grazed, nibbled and occasionally chomped on their spoons like tortoises.(Marjorie wanted to scream out that they had to escape, but she assumed that they had long ago been doped-up and were in the process of receiving yet more zombie juice.)
Near the doors to the outside world stood Geoffrey and Andreas in a tidy pair, both jacketed for the elements: Andreas insulated in a poofy zip-up from about 1978 which gave him, with his glossy jogging pants, the look of a cyborgenic mushroom, and Geoffrey in a beach-sand-beige windbreaker, doubtless with a red plaid lining and horehound candies in the pocket for deserving youngsters. Their luxurious pooches were not in sight, exciting Marjorie’s intuition to surmise that these fiends had done away with them, no doubt for sport. Those pups had probably been carried into the kitchen, never to come out—unless the truck from the cat-food factory had driven up in back to pick up some “filler” for their blue-ribbon brand. No living thing was safe once it was within the orbit of this ferocious dyad.
“Doesn’t she look nice and warm, Andi?” said Geoffrey. Andreas generated a sound of somewhat equivocating agreement. Marjorie thought that he was probably judging how much fat he could boil off of her for The Nose Knows, that artisanal candle/soap/essential oil/incense/potpourri “shoppe” at the Heart of Merryweather Retail Village—which reminded her, they were opening a new Creamatoria Hard-Scoop Café right next door to there.But, survival first.
Geoffrey said to Vickie and Dana, “Let’s take a stroll through the memory garden.”
Marjorie was in motion once more, toward the double doors at which Geoffrey tapped a code into a small silvery box too high for any resident to reach. Its tiny single red eye chameleoned to green, the lock on the doors produced a heavy clicking, Andreas opened them, and the fivesome made its way through them.
The day had begun some time before, but the sky overhead was still an eiderdown of clouds and fog and under this wet canopy the little band moved on into a garden, an enclosure of shrubs and plants that could take the salt and wind coming off of the ocean—which could be both smelled and heard, but not seen, over a charming ye olde stone wall. Along moss-and-stone paths grew azaleas, ferns, and herbs huddled in pillows and heaps of moschatel green and silver-gray—serpolet, sage, and santolina, in an horticultural echo of a mediaeval cloister. A trio of wind-twisted fir trees looking like interpretive dancers stopped in mid-motion and awaiting inspiration lent bit of verticality was lent the scene, while a touch of solidity came from concrete slabs arranged as benches here and there, where young strangers were taken up with visits to their elders, some of whom were enjoying the chat and others of whom were sadly unaware of the filial devotion. But when Marjorie shook at her bonds and yelled for aid, her struggles and cries generated nary a glance of compassion from these tribalists, concerned only for their own people.(A pair of stray staff members loitering around the birdbath on a smoke break did notice her; one whispered to the other like a mourning dove, “But she’s so young. "Her companion could only sympathize, “Her dad was so wise to make this place…”)
Marjorie was spared the rest of this pudding-cup of sympathy when Geoffrey, leading this little parade down the garden path, up and hummed, “What a serene place.”
Andreas agreed, “Ja, mien Herr. A morning stroll is very healthful.”
Marjorie figured that this was all exactingly stage-managed to incite her to some sort of nervous implosion. She demanded over the noise of noise of the briny deep, sea gulls, and the crunch of her wheelchair on the fine gravel, “Why’ve you brought me here?Why have you brought me here?”
“Don’t fret,” said Geoffrey. "You won’t be here too much longer." He turned back, caught the eye of Dana and Vickie, and Marjorie soon found Vickie pushing her that her wheelchair up a drab cement sidewalk that looked to be running straight into oblivion. At this latest betrayal, Marjorie snarled and Dana and Vickie, “I knew you two were bad news, as soon as you started asking about the minimum wage and why you had to work on Christmas morning.”Vickie only sniffled in grief and Dana murmured something about, “She’s gone, isn’t she?”
And after several feet between thorny hedges, this walk met another of those electronically-locked metal gates, this one in the garden wall. While Andreas took his turn at pressing buttons to open a lock, Marjorie loosed a final frightening keening shriek to summon any assistance, any succor, any charity, any kindness at all, even from a wandering band of Jenny Craig conventioneers. But she found herself with only an enflamed epiglottis and a sympathetic look from the yard man who peeked down the cement path at them. His downcast face seemed to murmur, “At least Old Man Sam did not live to see his little girl here.”
With a metallic clunk, gate unlocked, Andreas pressed it wide for all to pass through, and Vickie rolled Marjorie over the rough threshold into the outside world.
“Where are we going?” Marjorie snarled. "Where are you taking me? Where are you taking me? Where are we going?”
And from behind her, Geoffrey said, “You’re just taking a little trip.”
To Marjorie Mayfield’s desperate eyes, the outside world might have offered her much in the way of an opportunity to evade her captors. While the highest parts of the morning sky were becoming inspirationally clear, at ground-level there prevailed an oppressive whitish murk, a pale gloom of spectral miasmas and hauntingly apparitional mists—a good old “fog” that might hide Marjorie if she could zoom away from her escorts—and thus spare her the humiliation of being the headliner during sweeps week on show on the Gratuitous Violence Channel’s flagship series, She Went Missing. But given that each element of her spiffy new hospice house fruit salad duds—the aubergine fleece jacket, the kiwi-green stocking cap, the avocado sweat pants, the apricot shoulder bag, and a lanyard with a photo of Marjorie looking like an escapee from a high-priced fat farm—was stitched plainly with “Summerset,” should she break free, and any natives of this salty strand came running up on hearing her screams for assistance, they would just judge her ranting as the sad sequelae of her mental decay and drag her back to the reception desk and hand her over to Vickie and Dana, to end her days watching judge shows and living on cottage cheese garnished with mandarin orange slices.
By the time that Marjorie shook her head free of this vision of oblivion, she now found herself rolling along a paved path running between wild walls of huckleberry, gorse, and something with leathery leaves. Through the white wet air, she made out the lowing of foghorns, the New Age tinkling of wind chimes from an artist’s beach house, and the annoying cries of gulls crisscrossing in the air above them.(Hearing these, At these Marjorie wondered whether she could get her hands on a crossbow to practice her shooting one last time before the end came.)Deduction 101 suggested that she was being moved towards the ocean, where she guessed would meet with a neat, unforgiving “accident,” maybe at a wind-swept sandstone viewpoint.
Soon enough, she and her personal benevolence society arrived at the end of the path, where it forked.(There was no yellow wood to lend that touch of high-school-commencement-solemnity.)The fog was still floating thickly about them and through this murk, from the left, floated the sounds of ships’ bells, barking seals, and a chugging outboard motor. Towards these, Vickie rolled Marjorie’s on, silently save for the brisk click-click-click of her wheelchair axle.
Just then, the fog came to a surprising, bright, and insubstantial end.
In the cheery morning sunlight, Marjorie found herself to her surprise inhaling with pleasure and delight, charmed that her last hours on this earth might pass in such a postcard of a locale. The lynching party was rolling her on to a waterfront, where the light of the new day washed the broad, dark face of a bay ringed with rough barnacled stones. The bright windy air was sweeping and salty above a network of docks, where flocks of flags, pennants, and air socks were shaking and trembling in a busy summer-morning semaphore. Somewhere sea lions were barking, in the distance an arched bridge was spanning two heads of emerald-green land, the crying gulls were skimming against the blue, and in a waterside park across the way flyers of many-colored kites were vicariously riding the airstream. Just like Merryweather, she thought, but with clam chowder and a tsunami evacuation plan.
But further appreciation of this vacation-by-the-sea travel poster was rudely halted when the wheelchair suddenly stopped when she heard Geoffrey ask Dana, “She has her lactose patch?”
“Two, I think,” whispered Dana, as if embarrassed to have done too much or ashamed to have done too little. Marjorie heard her rummaging through the snazzy new apricot Summerset shoulder bag, which, Marjorie was sure, probably held a few lead weights to speed her descent down to the crab beds.
Now he told both her and Vickie, “You’ve done good work, more than you need ever have done. It’s time for you to go." And without wail or protest that their mistress to her doom, Dana handed Geoffrey the shoulder bag like a gift, Vickie stepped back and let Geoffrey take the wheelchair. Taking its handles, Geoffrey whispered down at Marjorie, “Now say goodbye to them, Sandra,” and turned it about, affording Marjorie the sight of her two workers mournfully setting off, slogging disconsolately back into the fog still haunting the asphalt path toward Summerset, now appearing through the breaking fog at the top of a sandstone rise amid the pine trees. So, these two women, with whom Marjorie had toiled for so many years, now seemed almost to merge into the mists like pinkish ghosts, apparitions in raspberry crème polo shirts—although in the gloom the color did darken up a bit to something more like mulberry whip.
And as they trudged out of sight, Marjorie Mayfield experienced an odd inner sensation, perhaps that thing that weaklings called sadness. Who could say?, she thought, since as far as Marjorie Mayfield was concerned, any human feeling was just a nuisance.
Geoffrey said, “They’re going back to work. They both have good jobs at Summerset, luckily, what with the recent demise of your resale empire.”
“You’re holding something over their heads,” Marjorie deduced.
Geoffrey merely leaned down and set her brakes, as he and Andreas moved close together and held conference, probably in some foreign language, Marjorie suspected, to keep her in the dark. But with a chipper cheeriness Marjorie told Geoffrey and Andreas, “Well, the sun’s out. Shouldn’t you two turn into stone pretty soon?”
At this, the two men ceased their sub rosa mutterings and Andreas broke off to go alone up ahead of them along the walk that wound on along the bayside. Marjorie asked, “Going to fire up the vat of General Tsao stir-fry sauce, to get a good boil up before they roll me in?”
But Geoffrey simply turned the wheelchair towards the undiscovered stretches of sidewalk yet before them and resumed their journey. Right then, a pair of power-walkers with piston arms panted around them and Marjorie caught a withering, pathetic gasp of conversation from one dimple-thighed Jane Fonda wannabe to the other, something with the syllables “Summerset” woven into it.
Breathing the bracing breezes blowing balmy off the bay and trying to lighten what was left of their time in each other’s company, Geoffrey said, “You know, your Mr. Milosh won’t concern us any longer.”
Marjorie’s ears perked with authentic interest, but she kept her freshly lip-balmed lips tightly shut.
“The plane transporting him back to the motherland was just shy of the Kamchatka Peninsula when it ‘landed where there wasn’t any land,’ as that nice agent Cameron Callahan phrased it.”
“I’d call that a clean kill,” Marjorie gave as her expert opinion.
“The Russians do have their ways. That means the field is clear and now you can start on a new phase in your life.”
“So, Geoff, make my day. What’s to be my fate?”
“You may not believe me, but we’re in the midst of saving your life.”
“Who’s trying to kill me now?”
“The entire American justice system. You are, technically, under arrest. Please be grateful that the judge did not order a twenty-four-hour guard. And then there was someone named Radu Prinzulescu? He left a message about a dip in business at his storage units because a group of young people called ‘millennials’ or something like that are selling off their extra things through one of your shadow enterprises. Radu said that you would know what he wished to talk to you about.”
Marjorie used one of her few remaining moments to remember Radu. She had met him—a glossy, bald-headed number—at one of Milosh’s rye-bread-and-pickle-juice bacchanals when she had stopped by to drop off a token tribute payment to the late Mr. Milenko. Radu had thought that he could impress her by explaining that he spent his evenings dropping weighted bags into the river.
But Geoffrey was still speaking. "And I did promise your papá that I would keep an eye on you and that is a promise that I intend to fulfill, not only out of honor, but, despite my proclivities, vices, failings, and general soddish propensities, I do strive to be a Christian gentleman.”
Unable to root out a particularly rotten verbal tomato to bung at this oldster, Marjorie simply snorted, “Oh, please. Spare me the sermon. I’ve been supplying your buddy God with customers for thirty years.”
“Yes. We know. I myself fully expect to burn in Hell for ever and ever and ever, but if the oven is set at two-fifty instead of three-seventy-five, that is something to look forward to.”
“A slow bake. How in the world did you survive this long without being eaten alive?”
“By remembering what I was taught.”
“How to mix a good Tom Collins?”
“A highball, please. But, no. Miss Summerfield, I would like to introduce you to an artefact that has survived the ravages of time: mercy.”
“Bah!” she bah-ed. “Another one of your museum pieces.”
“Ah, but you forget. The museum—Real museums, of course, not those warehouses with high-priced druck—”
“Dreck,” sniped Marjorie glad to be on the right side of the argument.
“Very well, dreck. But, the museum is a shrine for holding all that is best from the past to teach the simple and ignorant of the present day.”
“Well, I’m not in the mood for a field trip.”
“And that is why we have to bring the museum to Marjorie.”
At this point, the pair arrived at what Marjorie sensed was the last turn on the road to her unexplained disappearance: a perpendicular wooden walk running out to the docks which, from afar, had given the broad breezy scene of a few minutes previous such charm. Further down this walk branched out a pattern of gangways, each bulkily buttressed with silo-high rusty pilings and lined with any number of craft, mostly of the practical and smelly variety: purse seiners, squid jiggers, gillnetters, and maybe a Viking longship for good measure, though it was hard to tell from where she sat.
Geoffrey rolled the wheelchair in a right turn off of the bayside walk which was starting to tourist up now that the sun was out, and chauffeured his unwilling charge to a sizable aluminum gate. From each side of this portal impressive fencing stretched on in either direction to forbid entry to any troublemakers. After a swift glancing assessment, Marjorie sensed that an Agile Monkey move, as taught to her by Hatha Mama, might get her back over this impediment to freedom, but dragging the wheelchair along over a twelve-foot fence would he a chore. To Geoffrey, these barriers were as chaff and at the gate’s electronic lock—the favored mode of security in these parts, guessed Marjorie—he tapped the correct sequence of numbers upon a pad and the gate obediently disengaged. Once within the confines of the docks, he secured gate behind them, then pushed her along a floating walk of hinged cement panels rocking to the rhythm of the waters beneath.
Marjorie endured the bumpity-bumpity at every spacer between the walk-panels before Geoffrey turned her sharply towards the edge of a gangway. But rather than finding herself “accidentally” tipped over into the choppy, sea-lion infested waters and leaving as her legacy only a cloud of air bubbles rising to the surface, Marjorie found herself looking on what no doubt had been awaiting her arrival.
“Isn’t she lovely?” asked Geoffrey.
Along the dock stretched rustily a fishing trawler, its outriggers folded up and Japanese characters were painted on its bow. (Marjorie expected that it would translate into something like The Melinda Sue.) In her quick scan of the deck, Marjorie saw no evidence of human life, although on the tophouse stood an ominous, waddle-footed seagull (surely a bird of ill-omen in some culture somewhere).
And Marjorie proceeded to prophesy with abandon. “Ah-ha, I see. I see.Before anyone’s the wiser, the Equatorial Current will carry what’s left of me to New Guinea.”
“I’m not sure that you’d even make it to Micronesia. No, that’s not what awaits you. Young lady, you may not believe me—”
“I don’t.”
“So be it.”
At this impasse, a bit of human life finally appeared on the boat deck in the forms of Andreas and a smallish man of the same age cohort, although of East Asian stock. The latter was clad in dull practical clothes and a ball cap defended his head. He and Andreas walked to the edge of the deck and peered at Marjorie as if she were a beached sea hag.
Geoffrey said of the new fellow, “This is Jiro." Saying nothing to her or even to Geoffrey, Jiro turned and muttered something to Andreas, who grunted confidentially in return. Geoffrey resumed the introductions. "Jiro is old samurai stock. He was one of Mishima’s inner circle, but he had a bad cold on that fatal day in Ichigaya.1970, yes?”
Jiro nodded.
“Jiro has always been a great friend. For years he would ship us an extra porpoise from the tuna harvest so that at Lent we could cook Aunt Simonie’s Sea Hog en croût. But then his old trawler was sabotaged by Greenpeace and dear old Simonie went on that whale-watching jaunt in Baja and burned every last copy of that recipe. Oh, a bottlenose wrapped in pie dough and stuffed with garlicked lampreys and sautéed new potatoes with white truffles. Magnificent.”
Andreas, recognizing that Geoffrey, despite his newfound sobriety and a return to responsible dress, still possessed the fatal flaw of running off at the mouth, sped things along with a quick vault over the side rails and on to the dock. “This how we took the gold medal in Stuttgart in 1958,” he boasted.
Geoffrey told Marjorie, “A local meet, but meaningful.” As the aged champion took from Geoffrey the complimentary apricot shoulder bag, then leapt back on to the trawler.
And as Geoffrey unlocked its brakes of the wheelchair and pointed it directly on to the trawler’s gangplank and Marjorie Mayfield, losing that steely apathy which had blown like a nuclear wind through most of her adult life, burst into tears. "Why are you being so mean to me?”
Geoffrey sighed, “I leave it to a true reptile to burst into crocodile tears. Sandra—”
“That’s not my name,” she bawled.
“Then Marjorie. Your aliases are inconsequential. It’s time to learn a Valuable Life Lesson…”and he gave her an initial meaty shove on to the gangplank. “Being good...” He rolled her gingerly over the boards until she reached their end.“...is not the same...”Here he tipped her on to a second, improvised ramp and let her roll wildly forward into a heap of netting and plastic floats.“...as being stupid.”Skipping on to the boat behind her, he pulled her back from the piscine pile of fishing accoutrements, turned her about, and set her brakes once more.
“You let me out of here!” she shrieked.
Geoffrey shook his head. Andreas was taking from her brand-spanking-new apricot shoulder bag a box of loose white cardboard (labelled Pancreton High-grade) and then an ample supply of high-gauge disposable needles. These he handed Jiro. Marjorie overheard the ominous words “insulin treatments” and “Once you’re out of sight of land, cut her loose.”
Not being dead and still clinging to one morsel of hope, Marjorie asked demandingly, “And is the galley on this death ship well-stocked?” She pronounced the last word with the impatient certitude that Geoffrey knew exactly what she meant.
But in a tone not dissimilar to that of a narrator from a British Pathé film reel circa 1948, he shook his head. “The men of Nippon do not exploit cows. They do not have the land for it.”
“This joker’s lack of pasture is not my concern. In our modern transnational economy, we can get anything, anytime, anywhere. If you lived on the planet Earth you’d know that.”
Her barbs did not puncture her. “Do be nice to Mr. Jiro-san. It’s going to be a long trip.”
“I doubt that. Just off the continental shelf and down I go.”
Geoffrey told Jiro, “Let her blood sugar dip a little bit and she’ll eat whatever you put in front of her.”Then Geoffrey looked back to Marjorie, with a face of regret and tainted memories. He asked, “Any last words?”
But Marjorie Mayfield said nothing.
“Rest assured,” he explained, “I will call the doctor to examine your latest bloodwork and we’ll see what he says. It will be a sad discovery that you’ll be nowhere to be found. Their only guess will be that you wandered off toward the ocean. Goodbye, Marjorie.”
The last of the fog had burned away and the morning sun was lancing through the twisted firs bristling about the parking lot of Summerset Hospice Home when Geoffrey and Andreas seated themselves cozily in the Lombardi with Olga and Una on their laps and peeled away from the scene of their good deed. Within half an hour they were driving through tall timber, away from the ocean, inland toward Merryweather. All the while they chatted, about Felipe and that Basque ibex roast he had served them on Minorca, then a bit of mulling over what race of gamebirds to put on the EPA’s endangered list to ensure a well-laden Christmastide buffet. This was followed by the game of trying to stump one another with irregular verbs in Dutch, then recitations of the most dramatic stanzas of Racine or the most turgid stretches of Wagner. (Tristan und Isolde took the laurels and almost resulted in the car hurtling over an embankment when Andreas started falling asleep.)A short if prickly row did spice the drive when they argued about the details of Aunt Seiglinde’s recipe for mule soup.(Andreas: “Only the boot of a dead soldier gives the proper seasoning." Geoffrey: “I am not going to raid the mortuary at the VA for the sake of nostalgia. I think an old belt will do just as well.”Andreas: “But always garnish with old thistle heads”) But this interchange was balanced by simple sitting silent as the forest passed outside the car windows. The point of these snippets of travelogue is to show that having left the rocky, pine-studded coast behind them, they could not see Jiro’s bobbing craft chug out of the bay and nose out over the choppy waves, away from land; nor could they hear the grating, piercing howl of his prisoner, giving her cruelest cry of all as her breakfast was served: “But this isn’t ice cream!This is made with soy milk!”
