Meanwhile in the World where Kennedy Survived

  Chapter Four

  Mitch took Dorina home. He said that he would be back the next morning to take her back to work, as long as she felt up to attending. They rode along in silence because she had tilted the seat back as far as it would go, so that it became a bed. The howling pain of her migraine continued even after she took her first prescription Motrin. When Mitch would turn left she would feel herself lean that way, flopping back the other way when he turned right. It was already dusk when they entered the hospital parking lot. As they rode along she was aware of the light from street lamps and signs casting rays upon her face. She could feel warmth from them, as if the bulbs had been held inches away.

  When he reached the parking lot for the building where she lived, he stopped the car, turned off the low-playing radio and patted her lightly on her cheekbone. She wanted to stay on the comfortable car seat but knew that she had to pull herself up and climb the stairs for her second floor apartment. “Up, Sleepyhead,” Mitch said. “Let’s get you into a real bed.” He opened his car door, closed it, and hurried around to the other side to help her. As ill as she was, she still wanted to help Mitch along, at least be less of a dead weight for him as he lifted her upward. He put his arm around her and held her up while they both walked along the asphalt to the stairs at the building corner.

  The stairs were made of metal, except for the concrete steps and while he shuffled her along, her side-to-side loping movements banged against the wrought iron, creating hollow thronging sounds that reverberated inside her ears. It was funny, she thought, of how the migraine would heighten all of her senses this way. She had never noticed the metallic sounds before. Once they reached the second floor landing, he helped her along past a couple of her neighbor’s apartments. There was Sandy, who worked as a nurse in a doctor’s office, and Steven, an Asian guy who went to Cal State LA and worked for an armored car company.

  Dorina wanted Mitch to stay and thought about telling him so, to keep him from slipping away. She had given him her car and apartment keys back at the hospital and when they reached her apartment door, he let go of her for a moment to key it open. Once inside the door he dropped his suit jacket over the edge of the couch and she relaxed, knowing that he was going to be staying with her for a while. “Just have a seat, turn on the TV,” she said as she rubbed her eyes and stepped gingerly toward the bedroom.

  “Do you need any help at all?” he called out over his shoulder.

  “No,” she said as she looked down at the Berber carpet while taking baby steps toward the bedroom door. Dorina’s apartment was a perfect square and the living room was large enough that it could fit a couch on one side, which she placed just past the entrance, then an easy chair, which she called her “Archie Bunker” chair, and against the wall she placed the daybed. When she changed into her pajamas she would come back out and fall against the overstuffed, frilly pillows on the daybed while she would expect to find Mitch in the easy chair.

  Normal, everyday movements such as lifting her arms to shed herself of her blouse and unbuckling her shoe strap seemed like monumental tasks as her head continued to pound. Both the disappointment of being denied the medication she needed plus the exhausting pain made her arms and legs feel leaden as she unhooked her skirt and stepped out of it. To peel off her panty hose she had to sit on the bed and bend down as she rolled them down to her ankles. When she lifted herself back upward, the change in blood flow rushed from her head and caused blinding lights to flash in her eyes. Sleepwear that night, she decided, would be something simple. She reached for the old, comfortable Cincinnati Bengals football jersey in a size that fit her more like a gown. It felt good against her temples and cheekbones to wipe the cool baby cleansing tissue over them; she used those to take off her makeup each day.

  When she re-entered the living room she found Mitch channel surfing with the remote, blankly staring at the television screen. He saw her and smiled. “Feel better?” he asked.

  “A little,” she replied. Her nine-year-old ginger tabby cat, Samantha, had been resting peacefully on the daybed. Once Dorina loomed overhead, the cat lifted herself up and scurried toward the kitchen. Mitch lifted the chair by the armrests and shoved it a few inches closer to the daybed, angling it toward her. He had settled on the Starwind channel, which she knew was one of his favorites. She could take or leave most science fiction shows. They all seemed to feature actors who recited formal sounding lines without expression and endless battles between spaceships that fired light beams at each other.

  The daybed comforter and pillows were just too pretty, she thought, so when she slept in the living room, she would just lie atop the comforter and drape an angel blanket over herself. “Do you want anything? Like hot tea or hot chocolate?” Mitch asked.

  Dorina eased her head down onto the pillow as she said “No. But thanks for asking.” Mitch sat close enough to reach over and pat her on the shoulder. Being back in her apartment, in the company of a man she cared deeply about, and sinking down into the soft pillows and daybed mattress started to make her feel much better. When she pulled the angel blanket up around her neck, she felt as if she were seven years old again. A blur of commercials droned on the TV while she allowed herself to drift off into the twilight between waking consciousness and sleep. Suddenly the blaring horns that harkened the beginning of a television program jolted her back to reality.

  “Cool!” Mitch said, as one of the programs he liked was about to come on. “Wagon train to the stars,” or something like that, she supposed. A man’s deep voice narrated while an orchestra lightly played behind him. Dorina thought about asking him to turn down the sound but didn’t want to ruin his fun.

  “Oh, my God! It’s the Otranti episode with Empress Tigra!” Mitch exclaimed like an excited grade schooler.

  “Impress what?” she asked, allowing the blanket to drop down away from her face. “What are you talking about?”

  “Empress Tigra,” he said, pointing to the television. “On Starship Galaxia. It’s a really famous episode with Jacy Rayner.”

  The name sounded vaguely familiar to Dorina but she asked “Who?”

  “Jacy Rayner,” he repeated. “The leading lady in a million wet dreams. She plays this bitchy queen from another planet. Her costume was tight as hell, like body paint. Rocketed lots of boys to puberty back in the sixties.”

  “Like you, huh?” Dorina said. She lifted herself up on the pillow slightly so that she could see both Mitch and the television. So far the program Mitch liked seemed as silly as ever. Four grown men wearing burgundy tunics with golden military markings on them. It looked like someone made the costumes out of pajamas. They sat on what was supposed to be the control room of a spaceship but looked like a living room with a picture window of the whole universe. The man who looked like the leader, who spoke with an overly dramatic and halting voice, discussed a planet they were going to visit, showing pictures of the inhabitants on a big screen.

  “We can negotiate with them for a fuel treaty, but we’ve got to be careful,” the commander said. “Their leader is fierce and ruthless.” The next image onscreen showed a woman sitting atop a dais glaring down at what appeared to be a couple of shirtless and hairy peasants. To Dorina, her costume looked like part Las Vegas showgirl, part feline circus performer. As Mitch had said, it appeared to be a shimmering electric blue cat suit with bold orange and gold tiger stripes. Her hair was full and glorious, in a layered brunette style that accentuated her high cheekbones and dramatic eye makeup. The image faded out quickly as the television station cut to a commercial.

  “Man, she was awesome,” Mitch said, shaking his head, whistling.

  “Didn’t do anything for me,” Dorina said. “Not my type, I guess.” A commercial that announced a new line of turbomag subs with new non-stops to Tokyo played and then a public service announcement about planting trees to stop mud slides. Her eyelids started to droop as the first few waves of slumber washed over her.

  “I wonder what ever happened to he
r?” Mitch went on, staring into space for a moment, to ponder.

  “When was the last time she was in anything? When Bobby Kennedy was president? She’s probably a fat old hag in Reseda now, with a whole house full of cats.” She closed her eyes and her kind boyfriend allowed her remark to dissipate out into the air rather than respond. The sound from the television droned on and lifted away from her consciousness as she drifted down to sleep. With Dorina, the first thing to happen was that the volume of the sound around her slowed down to a crawl until she could no longer hear it. She then began the sensation of falling, floating, and easing downward.

  Suddenly she came to and when she did she felt as if she’d traveled a million miles away from the overpriced apartment where she lived. She calmly remembered reading the story “Alice and Wonderland” when she was growing up and found it odd that the title character calmly thought about latitude and longitude while she fell further and further into the dark hole. Yet here she was, doing the same thing except that she fell into a bright, sunny expanse.

  Dorina continued on her floating journey, gazing all around at the world below her, seeing hills, mountains, trees, and open meadows. A stream trickled past rows of yellow flowers, which gave off a scent like honey. She wondered if she would ever see any people again or had she floated off into a lonely realm where there were animals, but not people. The sun shone brightly but she could not see its individual globe.

  She floated down gently onto the ground as if she weighed no more than a feather or a leaf. During the first few moments she felt disoriented yet strangely aware at the same time. A slight breeze rustled the tree branches above her and carried bits of dried hay and cornflowers over the hills. She could hear the petals of the flowers flutter and then remembered that she would need to have a microphone that magnified sound if she was ever going to hear a sound like that for real.

  When she had turned to view the panorama around her from all angles her eyes suddenly stopped on a valley in the distance. A pristine, crystalline city rose from a meadow into tall spires and towers that stretched toward the blue sky. She thought about “The Wizard of Oz” and looked around for a yellow brick road, a cowardly lion, a tin man, or a scarecrow. There were none of these, of course, but she felt that in the city, there had to be people. It made sense to her to start walking toward it.

  Walking down the hill alongside the tumbling water of the stream felt very easy to her. She seemed to weigh less and her feet gradually propelled her forward. What was she wearing, she thought, as she looked down and saw a short, leathery skirt with a simple sleeveless top starting out from the top of it. It seemed like a short toga, something that would have been worn by females during the height of the Roman Empire. She could not look down at her feet, though, because they moved along too quickly for her to see anything.

  The forest followed the slope of the land all the way down the hill and it was thick and dark, like the forests she remembered seeing in Pennsylvania or New England when she was growing up. As she walked along, she gradually became aware of seeing something beside her, in her peripheral vision, flashing by on the outskirts of the forest. At first she thought that it was her imagination.

  During the next moment, however, she became aware of larger movement, plus sound. Until then she thought it could have been a thin tree branch swaying in the wind, but this movement was too big. She stopped and gazed across the dale at the forest. Still, she could see nothing, even when she scanned the line of trees leading upward and downward from the crest of the hill.

  She shook her head to collect her thoughts and attempt to move onward, the way double taking cartoon characters do it in the movies. The walls and buildings of the crystalline city seemed much closer than they had before. She paused for a moment to close her eyes and reopen them, to double check whether she was seeing things. It turned out that they weren’t playing a trick on her, that she had somehow closed the gap two fold in what seemed like just a few steps. She turned sideways to look at the forest again and received a surprise.

  This time when she looked at the tree trunks and hollows, she saw a man standing beside one of them. At first glance he appeared to be wearing a light shirt with stripes at the top but when she looked more closely, she realized that he was bare chested and possessed long hair that fell down past his shoulders. He held onto a tree trunk with one arm as he looked at her. Even from the distance, Dorina could still somehow sense that his eyes were warm and trusting, so she started to walk toward him.

  As she neared the man, she saw that he appeared to be leaning around the edge of the tree trunk to look at her. Yet his head was straight up and down. She knew that he would have been looking at her sideways if he was peeking around a tree at her. During high school she’d played a role as one of the wood nymphs frolicking about with Robin Goodfellow in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Had she run into a real-life version of one of the fairy characters?

  Soon she had closed the distance between them to less than fifty feet and she realized that his bottom half was brown...and furry. She gasped when she saw narrow, stick-like limbs with hooves where legs and feet should have been. It occurred to her to run but instead she just stood there, frozen with fear.

  The strange man laughed slightly. “You’re going to the Hall of Knowledge, aren’t you?” he asked.

  Dorina cautiously resumed walking toward him, closing the last few remaining yards between them. “I was walking toward that city,” she said, pointing toward the crystalline buildings that loomed ever closer. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Do you want to ride there?” He pushed away from the tree trunk and revealed a horse-like body with a perfect curvature for her to ride on.

  It was a fantastic creature, like none she had ever seen before, and normally such a sight would have made her scream. “Won’t I fall off?” she calmly asked him, noting that he didn’t have a saddle.

  “You won’t,” he said with an air of confidence. “Just hold on to my arms.” He had two arms just like a man’s to go with the lower body of a horse.

  When she sidled up next to him and gave the indication that she was going to try to lift her leg, to mount him, he lowered himself. With all four of his knees bent downward, she found it easy to step over his midsection and nestle herself down onto him. Once she had situated herself, she reached forward to grab hold of his arms near the thin part leading to his elbows.

  “Hold on tight, dear,” he said, as he suddenly broke into a gallop and carried her at blazing speed toward the crystalline city. As they galloped along down the hillside, Dorina could see glimpses of other half men; half horse creatures materialize alongside them. The images of them danced into and out of her field of vision as they neared the bottom of the valley and the dirt road winding toward the city.

  Dorina knew she was dreaming and decided to take advantage of her awareness by gazing all around herself, at her surroundings. The sky seemed a much brighter blue than what she was accustomed to during the daytime. It reminded her of the indigo sky in an El Greco painting or the cloudless dusk sky she sometimes saw when she went to the beach. When she turned her eyes downward she could see the dry dusty, rutted earth pounding along beneath the man-horse creature’s hooves. She remembered the name that such a creature bore: a Minotaur. His flesh melded in with the horse’s muscular body and fur where she thought instead that there might be a sharp line of demarcation.

  “We’re almost there,” he said. “I’ll be letting you off in front of the gate.”

  Dorina gazed ahead at the pale green crystalline walls for the city and the tall door that served as the gate. Would there be a potato nosed man with a Cossack hat and a droopy mustache acting as a sentry? What about a wizard? Once they reached the front of the door, her Minotaur friend astonished her again. Somehow he’d been able to turn the entire front half of his body, to face her even while she had stayed mounting on him. “This is where my part of the journey with you ends,” he said, as he reached ou
t and helped her dismount, her feet gently lowering downward onto the ground.

  She looked down again at the ground, which seemed sandy, like the rugged desert terrain further east along the freeways during her waking life. When she turned back toward the hillside, she saw that it was part of a huge mountain that rose skyward, with snow on its peaks. Trees and brush lined the crests as she’d seen on the way down. The Minotaur or the ghostly images of him riding down the hill were nowhere to be found, however.

  She shrugged and looked for a doorknob or latch on the great door but could find none. Instinctively she leaned forward and pushed on the smooth, glassy panels of the door, surprised that it started to give way. It moved with about the same speed and ease as a revolving door in a major building.

  It opened all the way into a grand foyer or building lobby, the most beautiful architectural sight she’d ever seen. The floor had been made of a swirling marble threaded with lime green and gold. Somehow, she thought that such a floor should have made footfalls and all the people traffic of the lobby to create loud clicking and booming sounds. Instead all she heard were faint shuffles as beautiful people in flowing, diaphanous robes glided along to a wide variety of kiosks, booths, and cubbyholes. At first it was too much to take in all at once and the images before her eyes metamorphosed the way pictures in dreams do. Scores of people milled about through the foyer and above her on successive floors but all she could hear was a pleasant murmur of conversation, as if she’d entered the most polite library on the face of this earth.

  Of course, this was not earth, as she quickly realized. Rather than get mesmerized by all the walkways and the glass elevators and shuttles above her, she decided to focus on the people. Every one of them, men, women, teenagers and children, looked to be in the full bloom of life and health. Their skin glowed under the angelic garments they wore. Angels had wings and halos above their head, didn’t they? Some people walked in pairs but most of them glided from place to place in the building with perfect, regal posture, all of them slim and vital.

  She only had a few short moments to take in the sights and sounds of the people cavorting about in someplace that seemed part way station and part professional office building. A young, tall woman approached her. At first she could see her fair, luminous face out of her peripheral vision, and when she turned to look at her she saw a faint, though pleasant smile and emerald eyes that sparkled. Her lustrous hair had been wound around her crown in a tucked French braid and when her lips parted to speak, Dorina could see that they were full and youthful. “Dorina Pettit?” she asked, somewhat in the tone of a doctor or dentist’s office receptionist.

  For a moment Dorina was too stunned to reply to her. On earth, someone would have repeated her question, but this woman simply gazed down at her and patiently waited. Dorina saw an ageless wisdom in her eyes that could have made her any age from twenty five to sixty-five though of course the woman’s face was smooth and china-doll flawless. Finally, she said “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Wonderful! I’m Corinne. We’re ready for you. I’m glad you could make it. Come with me.” With a slight gesture of a head tilt, Corinne indicated for Dorina to follow her to the bottom of one of the glass, tube like elevators. She knew that in such an encounter during ordinary waking life, she would have peppered her with questions about what she was doing here, and where they were going, and what would happen. Instead, following this unusually ethereal guide seemed to be the most pleasant and comfortable thing to do.

  They approached what must have been the bottom floor of the elevator. When Dorina looked down at the floor, she saw a hole where she could look down into what must have been the basement area of the building. She expected to see the outline of a door or hatch that would open for them but saw smooth glass. Would Corinne press a button or something, to bring up an elevator platform? As they neared the tube, she glanced over at her and smiled faintly again, making no effort to stop or slow down or lift her hand toward a control on the side of the elevator. Suddenly they were just a couple of feet away.

  A miraculous thing then happened: a line formed from the floor and led upward arcing above their heads and continuing down the other side. The glass wall slid open and a platform instantly materialized at the bottom at an equal plane to the floor where they were standing. Corinne simply stepped through the opening in the tube and onto the platform. Dorina cautiously followed, testing the platform with a skidding toe before she allowed her full weight to sink down onto it.

  That was another issue, she realized. In this place she felt airier, lighter than she ever had in normal, waking life. Maybe she wouldn’t even need the elevator, she supposed, since she felt as if she could just pick her feet up and glide through the air. The platform lifted for them and Dorina turned around to face the other side of the wall, which moments before had spontaneously traced open for them. It had re-congealed back into solid, faintly green glass as the platform lifted them upward slowly through the cavernous foyer. As they ascended, the light seemed to get brighter, washing out some of the details of the walls and people walking along the various floors they passed. Dorina had so many questions, so many thoughts.

  It seemed as though Corinne could read her mind, however. “There’s just a short distance left of your journey today,” she said, again in the same soothing, modulating tones as she had before. “Jacy has sent for you and she is waiting. She will help you.”

  Though her Junoesque guide still had not really said anything of note, Dorina understood that she was about to embark on a wonderful, miraculous experience. She had been gazing around at the converging lines, colors and light, counting the floors they had passed, but then the platform stopped. The arcing line tracing a doorway for them re-appeared, and the glass again seemed to part for them the way shifting water flows.

  Corinne stepped out onto a hallway with a soft floor that on one hand seemed to be carpet or fabric but gave slightly under their feet with a tender quality like flannel covered vinyl. Again, Dorina could only focus on that impression for the briefest of moments as they followed the corridor as it curved around the building. Unlike the foyer, this part of the building contained smooth, iridescent walls that breathed calm into her as they walked forward. When they stepped forward to the left around a long, curving section of floor, they came face to face with a young man.

  As with Corinne, the gentleman wore clothes in a diaphanous fabric that seemed to glisten in the light and radiate all the colors of the rainbow in pastel hues, one after the other. He was also tall, at least a head taller than Dorina, with curling, exquisite black hair on his head, sprouting from his temples and crown from a face that she’d only seen on classic marble statues before. The warmth of his eyes immediately soothed her, and unlike Corinne, he reached out his hand for her. They communicated volumes through their eyes and their touch as he led her rest of the way and thanked Corinne for her help. “I’m Nathaniel,” he said. “I am to bring you to Jacy so she can help you.”

  They seemed to be entering an arena from which emanated the most beautiful music Dorina had ever heard. It would be impossible to describe to anyone, she realized as she listened to the joyous singing voices paired with soft guitar and harp strings interspliced with horns all at the same time. She was slightly startled to realize that they would be entering a room splashed with an indigo hue.

  Dorina and Nathaniel walked through an archway into the arena and she realized that the indigo felt like dusk during a long, beautiful day. Other people had gathered in the arena also, having apparently entered through other archways. They traveled in pairs, each of them obviously a guide and a student, or charge. Young men and women with bewildered, beatific expressions on their faces were being led upward by the serene, wise angelic ones. She wondered if they were all on their way to a celestial performance, a gigantic theatre in the round or the most fantastic movie she would ever see.

  As with everything else in her journey so far, the building revealed itself to her in little bits and p
ieces at a time. They seemed to be walking up a spiral stairway and it occurred to her to look upward, to see where it might be leading. She saw a raised dais at the top, with a woman’s hand dangling downward. As they climbed effortlessly for the remaining levels Dorina gradually was revealed to a luminous, pearl-skinned woman wearing an oddly familiar gown that caught light the way all the other garments had but it had the curious added feature of a striped pattern, like a tigress. When she looked upward into her glowing countenance she realized she was looking at the face of the tigress character from the television show. A woman who looked like Jacy Rayner but had somehow ascended, with a contented, warm smile on her face. She watched Dorina and Nathaniel climb the last few feet of the spiral stairway toward her, lifting her palms to them gently.

  Nathaniel seemed to carry Dorina for the remaining distance to the heavenly woman who received her. It seemed impossible to her because her feet had been on the ground, hadn’t they? But she quickly realized that she was being set down in front of the goddess-like vision as she reached out and touched her arm gently. She was gigantic but beautiful with glorious hair trailing out from her head as if gravity had been relieved around her scalp and caused the strands to twist and turn around her face.

  Jacy, while much larger than Dorina, was still able to cradle her chin with her gentle, cool palm as she said “I’m very glad you’re here.” She paused for a moment to look at her, to drink her in as she regarded her, before adding “You’ve tortured yourself but there’s no longer a need.” Dorina felt as if she’d been floating in suspended animation while the mysterious Jacy blinked and she seemed to be thinking millions of thoughts before continuing. “You are enough.” Her cool fingertips brushed Dorina’s forehead and her scalp, flooding them with warmth and light.

  The words echoed, as if all the walls fell around them and they’d been back in the marble foyer which was acting as an echo chamber. Light flared up from beneath them and became so bright, so quickly that she had to shield her eyes from it, covering them. She floated up, and away from Jacy and Nathaniel, rising high above them while the light slowly dissipated. In the very next moment, when she opened her eyes, she found herself back on her daybed, across from Mitch, who was watching the television, oblivious of her.

  She still felt warm and light, opening her eyes wide as she slowly realized that her headache had evaporated as if it had been fog on a summer day.

  “You won’t believe what the fuck just happened,” she said, sitting up.