Tracklist:
Born To Run – Bruce Springsteen
Something About You – Level 42
Jubel (Original Mix) –– Klingande
3
Dean waved frantically. “That’s the ramp!”
Lin jerked the wheel and swerved two lanes across the path of a Toyota Yaris, earning a barely audible honk from the tiny car. The white lines on the highway ramp curved to the right and Lin merged the ambulance into the light-speed traffic of southbound 101.
“You could have just started World War III,” said Dean.
Lin held a hand over her mouth. “Oh, no. Was he Russian?”
“I doubt it, Lin. It’s the butterfly effect,” said Dean, his hands at the neck of the Godzilla costume. After a short, Herculean effort, the metal fastener broke and Dean pulled down the zipper. “A pensioner kills a butterfly in Lodi, Mad Ivan on the Arctic Circle dies of a heart attack, and his face smashes the launch button. Haven’t you seen Jurassic Park?”
“I don’t remember.”
Dean squirmed out of the scaly costume. “What? The greatest movie of a generation? Only a communist would say something that ridiculous, Lin. Are you really from California, or a spy from Pretty Red China? Your cover is blown, if that’s the case.”
“It’s the People’s Republic of China, not whatever you said.”
“Only a spy would know that!”
“Dean, you’ve known me for ten years, so stop being silly and focus on navigation. Are we going north or south?”
Dean squirmed his lower body out of the green costume. “Geography, Lin. West Virginia is east of California. Don’t swerve like that!”
Lin pursed her lips. “I know it’s east. What I mean is, should we take the northern route through Wyoming and Colorado, or south through Arizona and Texas?”
“Definitely north. I had a bad experience the last time I was in Houston.”
“What happened?”
Dean shrugged. “Nothing. There just wasn’t anything on TV.”
“In that case, we’ll go north. Can you program the GPS?”
“Of course I can,” sniffed Dean. “When you tell me what it is.”
“That big screen in the dash. I can’t do it and drive at the same time.”
“Leave it to me.”
In stark contrast to the flamingo-pink and primer-spotted exterior of the ambulance, the inside of the cab was immaculate and luxuriously appointed. Thickly cushioned seats were covered in brown swaths of what Dean imagined was rich Corinthian leather. Electronic screens, multi-colored toggle switches, and buttons with tiny labels covered the dashboard and overhead panels. Many glowed faintly, while others flashed in patterns of light that could have been Morse Code.
“This reminds me of the set of Space Questions,” Dean murmured.
“The what?”
“Space Questions, the best show on radio.”
“Dean ...”
“It’s a sort of sci-fi radio Jeopardy, starring Nando Phoenix as Captain James L. Sparx. I know you’ve heard of it because I’ve talked about it before. Next you’ll be telling me you’ve never heard of Nando Phoenix! That’s like someone who’s never heard of Coca-Cola. Or freedom, for that matter.”
The slight Asian woman rubbed her temples, one hand still on the wheel. “I think my headache is getting worse.”
Dean squeezed into the rear of the ambulance. “There has to be a first-aid cabinet. I’ll look for aspirin and trucker pills––you’ve got lots of driving ahead.”
The large patient area had been converted to an office that included a writing desk and a tiny computer with LCD monitor. The cabinets on the walls were clear and framed in aluminum, and were filled with video games, books, and camping gear.
“I know Chip installed a refrigerator,” Lin shouted from the cab.
Dean crossed his arms. “Where, oh, where did you put it, Chippy boy?”
He tugged at the silver latches on the cabinets but nothing budged. At last he wrenched open a small compartment to find a yellow-lit row of rocker switches. A center switch was labeled “UNLK.” Dean thumbed it down and all of the cabinets clacked loudly.
“There’s the ticket,” he said.
A tiny moon-and-stars symbol below another rocker switch caught his eye.
“Wonder what this is?”
Dean flipped it down and slapped hands over his ears as a screech like a mechanical egret filled the ambulance. The metal chair and table folded down and the compartment walls shuddered. Dean stepped back and narrowly avoided being squashed as a bed levered out from the wall like a lowering drawbridge.
“Holy Space Nazis!”
“What’s wrong, Dean?”
A very fat, dark-haired woman lay on the mattress. Her long blue robes resembled a sari, with layers of fabric delicately embroidered in pink roses and spiraling vines. However, numerous sweat stains and the corpulent frame of the wearer canceled any effect of elegance or royalty intended by the designer of the robes. Ejaculating loud phrases of foreign language, the bulbous woman squirmed off the bed and grabbed the front of Dean’s shirt.
“What’s all that racket?” asked Lin.
“Pull over,” Dean shouted over the noise coming from the strange woman. “We’ve got a stowaway.”
“I’ll need a second! The freeway is packed.”
Dean nodded and smiled at the blue-robed woman as she continued to give him volumes of her opinion on matters that Dean might have agreed were important if he spoke her language. He added a few eyebrow-raises and concerned pouts to the variety of his facial expressions, just in case any of those meant “Leave me alone, please” in her country. He contemplated whether he could survive a leap outside at highway speeds or not, when the ambulance swerved to a stop.
Lin jumped out of the cab, ran around the front of the vehicle, and pulled open the sliding door at the side.
“Where did she come from?”
Dean nodded and smiled at the woman’s insistent burbling. “From one of the cabinets.”
“That’s impossible!”
“Lin, much as I would enjoy a debate on the improbable circumstance of this woman’s existence within an enclosure not designed for her particular girth, I suggest we table that discussion and just get her off me.”
“Sorry.”
Lin touched the vice-like hands of the woman to gain eye contact, then waved her arms in the open-palmed, universal gesture that had the dual meanings of: “stop doing that” and “I’m not with the government, please don’t shoot.”
The woman released Dean and began talking excitedly to Lin.
“What’s she saying, Lin?”
“How am I supposed to know? The only foreign language I speak is French.”
Dean spread his arms. “That’s the point! This is the woman that slept on your floor last night. She’s probably from the French embassy.”
“She doesn’t dress like someone from an embassy. They don’t usually sweat that much and have so many grass stains.”
“Don’t be racist, Lin. She’s obviously a high-level attaché in disguise who became lost during a top-secret diplomatic mission.”
“What mission? To break into my house and cuddle up next to you?”
“Just ask her,” said Dean.
Lin said something in French. The woman immediately hugged her and began speaking in a different sort of burbling that made Dean think of red wine and girls planting potatoes in fresh black earth. After a lunch of garlic and horse genitals, of course.
“She does understand French,” said Lin. “She’s got a strong accent, though.”
Dean nodded. “They hire foreign spies all the time, it’s easier to infiltrate the drug gangs.”
“She’s saying something about a girl in the ambulance. Wait––outside the ambulance.”
The woman led them to a compartment on the driver’s side and tugged on a silver latch as cars on the interstate zipped a few feet away.
“Lin, watch fo
r traffic. I don’t want to be on the evening news.”
Dean jumped inside the cab and scanned the rows of toggle switches. After a series of choices that included violent, rocking hydraulics and flashing lights, he pressed a switch marked “OC2.”
“Got it,” yelled Lin.
Dean heard the squeal of metal hinges and a murmur of French. He slid out of the cab, walked a few paces to the open compartment, and froze as stiff and motionless as if he’d stepped into a minefield. His trepidation was not caused by a buried canister of explosive, however, but by the peculiarly beautiful young woman who squeezed out of the narrow compartment.
He’d been struck dumb only twice in his life––once when an Italian girl removed her shirt at a pool party and secondly, upon viewing Trisha Yar in the flesh at a Star Trek convention. For a motivational speaker with a mind like a steel mousetrap like Dean, love at first sight did not exist, was a fabrication before or after the fact by over-romantic high school boys and under-appreciated housewives. Upon seeing this young woman, Dean realized he’d been wrong, as wrong as he’d been about the positive effect of an ice cream bath or the need to check the expiration date on Spam. Dean saw no whizzing traffic or blue sky, felt no rumble in his stomach or pull of gravity. If someone held a shotgun packed with rose petals and Novocaine to his forehead and pulled the trigger, the effect would have been exactly the same.
“Holy action figure,” he murmured.
The girl was taller than the fat woman and wore filmy red robes layered in gold embroidery like a Mumbai princess. A sheer veil edged in tiny embroidered daisies framed black hair and an oval face with skin like warm sand. Almond-shaped eyes stared back at Dean, eyes as clear as the pond in a Japanese temple and as fearless as a child’s before she’s been told not to be. She smiled and tilted her head in a gesture of polite greeting, but received no response from an open-mouthed, glassy-eyed Dean Cook.
“Dean ...”
“Dean?”
“Dean!”
Car horns beeped and hands dragged him away from the traffic maelstrom.
“You can’t stand in the road like that,” said Lin. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Do you need some warm milk?”
Dean rubbed his face. “No, I’m fine now. Who are these people?”
“I could ask, or we could do that other thing––drive across the country to Charleston.”
“Right, right. Tell them to get inside and we’re going to Kohl’s or Jo-Anne’s or some other place women are always desperate to get to. We’re losing time!”
Dean followed the girl and her stout protector into the back of the ambulance and slammed the door. With a roar of flying gravel, Lin merged onto the freeway.
The two ladies sat on the bed and Dean stood in the rear compartment trying to remember the nonchalant, JCPenney-model poses he used in high school as the vehicle rocked and swayed at high speed.
“My name’s Dean,” he said to the girl. “If you were trying to get an autograph, you could have just asked. I’m easy.”
The girl whispered in her older companion’s ear, then folded her hands in her lap. The polish on her fingernails sparkled like crimson diamond dust, and Dean found himself transfixed. He barely noticed as the fat woman spoke his name and burbled a series of phrases.
“Translate, please,” said Dean, over his shoulder.
Lin chuckled, and glanced back from the driver’s seat.
“They don’t want an autograph, but what she said sounds like a joke. She’s saying you have to marry the girl.”
Dean held up his hands in front of the two women on the mattress.
“Stop right there, little missy and bigger missy. I’ve never had a love-crazed superfan but I guess there’s a first time for everything. Even shotgun marriages, of course. I’ve been there and done that, as the kids say.”
The fat companion pulled a copy of Dean’s autobiography from her robes and waved it, all the while babbling paragraphs of French.
“She claims your book fell out of the sky and struck the girl,” said Lin. “She says any man who touches a bride on her wedding day has to marry her.”
“That sounds fishy,” said Dean. “I’ve never been blackmailed before, but I guess there’s a first ...”
He trailed off as the girl in the red dress pulled back her silk veil. She turned her neck and exposed an intricate weave of black braids and clinking gold jewelry. The fat companion grabbed Dean’s hand and held it on the soft hair at the crown of the girl’s head.
“She wants you to feel the lump,” yelled Lin.
Dean cleared his throat. “I ... um ... it’s ... There’s definitely something. Is it hot in here?”
He closed his eyes and breathed deep, trying to remember his qigong meditation. The scent of lavender floated to his nostrils and Dean snapped his fingers.
“You’re the couch girl, the one I slept with! I’m sorry, that came out wrong. We lay together on the couch. No, that sounds too Biblical. I’m not even certain if it’s ‘lay’ or ‘laid,’ and that’s even more shameful for a writer than being caught with his proverbial hand in the proverbial cookie jar, if you know what I mean. I don’t think you do. Let’s start over: I was sleeping in a particular location, and you were sleeping in a particular location. As it happens––and not intentionally, mind you––these particular locations happened to be on the same couch.”
The girl turned her face to the ceiling of the ambulance and laughed, a sound of clear and honest amusement.
“You’re a silly person, Mr. Dean Cook.”
Dean pointed at her. “This one talks!”
“Of course I do.”
“But what about the large one? Why doesn’t she speak English?”
The girl tilted her head and the jewelry in her braids clinked. “She grew up on a farm and had no chance to learn English. She is strong and loyal, and my wedding guard. The wedding that you stopped by hitting me with your book.”
“I see.” Dean swallowed. “Before we approach the subject of delicate international reparations and possible marriage, would anyone like a drink?”
“Yes, please. We are both thirsty.”
Dean searched the unlocked compartments and found a refrigerator packed with Sunny D. He brandished the bottles high in the air like a pair of trophies filled with cold orange liquid.
“Sweet nectar of the gods,” he said. “Here you go, ladies.”
“I’d like one, please,” said Lin.
“Coming right up.”
Dean opened the wide-mouthed top of the orange bottle, but as he leaned forward to hand it to Lin, the ambulance jolted into the air. Whether this bounce was the result of a deep pothole, irregular pavement, or the ambulance tires striking a snazzy frame bought at Target and unwisely tied to a car’s roof, the result was the same. Dean fell forward onto the center console and spilled a considerable amount of fake orange juice into the electronics.