Like a fertilized condor egg, filled with blood and promise, the bald head of Dr. Morgenstern split open. He died instantly.
Huxley Anne was not so heavily damaged, although when police arrived she was exhibiting no vital signs and was believed as dead as the professor. Nevertheless, oxygen and CPR were administered. After twenty discouraging minutes, a tiny birthday-candle flame of pulse began to flicker.
She was taken to Swedish Hospital, a few blocks away, and by the time her father got there, physicians were venturing that she had a twenty-five-percent chance of living, although only a ten-percent chance of having escaped permanent brain damage. Should she survive, which was improbable, she would likely be, in terms most disparaging to the consciousness of beets, “no more than a vegetable.”
Naturally, the news traveled swiftly. It involved a famous scientist and the child of an infamous heretic, it involved the “occult” (for that is the context in which the press placed immortalistic research), it involved murder, a guarded mansion, and, probably, drugs. The media snatched it up and streaked with it, galloping toward tons of pay dirt, and Priscilla knew about it almost as soon as Wiggs did.
She heard about it at work. When it had sunk in, and that took a minute or two, she set down her tray, tables away from its destination, untied her apron, and walked out of the coffeehouse. “Where are you going?” yelled the fellow who operated the espresso machine. “Seattle,” she replied.
Of course, she had practically no money. Within minutes, she was back at the coffeehouse, pleading with the manager for an advance on salary. He refused, but when he saw the tears breaking loose, when he recognized that they were massed in huge numbers and might be expected to march, two abreast, for hours, he allowed her to call Seattle on the office phone.
After hacking through several thousand feet of red tape, she managed to reach Wiggs at Swedish Hospital.
“I'll be there as quick as I can get there,” said Priscilla.
“It isn't necessary,” said Wiggs. He spoke with hardly any accent at all. “I appreciate it, but it isn't necessary.”
“I don't care. You'll need help.”
“Marcel and Alobar are with me. Marcel's left an open bottle of her favorite scent by her bed. To call her back. Alobar has some ideas, too. Bandaloop stuff. I'm confident, Pris.”
“You sound pretty good. But I'm sure I can help you.”
“No. Huxley Anne's mum will be here by morning. She'd probably be uncomfortable if you were around.”
“Screw her comfort! Don't you care about me?” The instant she said it, she regretted it.
“I do care. But right now my energy is totally with my daughter.”
“I'm sorry. I understand. You can call me if you need me. Here, or else they'll take a message at the Y.”
She hung up and after a heroic belt of the manager's bourbon, returned to duty. If Huxley Anne died, however, she'd proceed to Seattle with all possible haste, even if she had to steal the funds, because she and she alone knew that if Huxley Anne went, Wiggs would go, as well.
At birth, we emerge from dream soup.
At death, we sink back into dream soup.
In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land.
Life is a portage.
That was the way Marcel LeFever had always looked at it. After his encounters with Dr. Dannyboy and Alobar, after the experience with little Huxley Anne, Marcel began to suspect that it might be more complex than that. He went so far as to consider that there might be more than one type of afterlife experience, that there might be several, that there could be, in fact, as many different death-styles as there were life-styles, and “dream soup” was merely one of dozens from which the dead person might actually choose.
It was pure conjecture, of course. Moreover, he much preferred to think about fragrance. Yet, wasn't fragrance somehow involved? In the case of Huxley Anne, at least it seemed to have played a part. Alobar and Dr. Dannyboy agreed that it had, although the physicians were equally convinced that it had not.
The physicians had no explanation of their own, however, so Marcel was prepared to attribute the miraculous recovery to fragrance, or, rather, an interaction between the powers of fragrance and the powers of human spirit. Why not?
It was a miraculous recovery, no one would deny that. The child lay comatose for nearly a month, neither advancing nor receding, just sort of standing hip-deep in the dream soup, connected to shore by, as they say, “artificial means,” and then, toward midnight on Saint Agnes's Eve, her eyes popped open, she asked, in a completely normal voice, for SpaghettiOs and chocolate-chip cookies, and demanded to know why there was no television in her room. “Mmm, smells good in here,” she said. Within days she was walking the corridors. Were there damaged parts in her brain, they were well concealed.
When he felt that she was strong enough, Wiggs inquired if she had felt at any time, especially during the minutes immediately following the attack, that her soul had left her body. “Oh, Daddy!” she said, “Don't you know that when you die, your soul stops leaving your body?”
“Uh, no. What do you mean?”
“Our souls are leaving our bodies all the time, silly. That's what all the energy is about.”
“You mean the energy field around our bodies is the soul being broadcast out of the body?”
“Kinda like that.”
“And at death this transmission stops?”
“Yes. Can I have some ice cream?”
“In a minute, darling. When your soul stopped leaving your body, what did it feel like?”
Huxley Anne screwed up her face. “Well, kinda like a TV set that wasn't quite off and wasn't quite on. You know, the TV had cartoons in it, but it couldn't send them out.”
“But your, ah, TV set, it didn't go completely off?”
“No. That would have been something different, being all the way off. I didn't want to go off without you, Daddy. I tried hard to stay on. I knew where you were because I could smell my White Shoulders, but it took a little while to get back on all the way and warmed up and everything. Can I have my ice cream now?”
They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong.
Compared, calendar page against calendar page, it looks to be the shortest, all right. Spread between January and March like lard on bread, it fails to reach the crust on either slice. In its galoshes — and you'll never catch February in stocking feet — it's a full head shorter than December, although in leap years, when it has growth spurts, it comes up to April's nose.
However more abbreviated than its cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old.
February is pitiless, and it is boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.
Except to the extent that it “tints the buds and swells the leaves within,” February is as useless as the extra r in its name. It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui, holding both progress and contentment at bay.