Crazy (13 page)

She filled my head with a ton of information in just seconds, but I’ll have to set it down here very roughly because I haven’t much time, only minutes, and my brain and my heart are exploding suns. The time that I’d died and come back, she explained, at the end of my “life review” it was clear my next stop would be limbo, or maybe the word that she used was “purgatory.” Not sure of it, okay? The Other Side. But it wouldn’t be in one of the better rooms, so Mom pleaded with God that I should get another chance because she’d died when I was born and wasn’t there to give me spiritual formation when I was young, which could have set me up to walk in the right direction. She’d blamed herself for her pneumonia just before I was born! Can you believe it? She said it all happened because of her vanity, insisting against Pop’s objections that she had to go out in a freezing storm to buy a couple of barrettes and a “really pretty robe” for her hospital stay. “Oh, please send Joey back to his childhood,” she’d pleaded. “I mean,
only if just in his mind,
so I can give him the formation he should have had and that I owe him! A few times when he’s little and can be molded, that’s all, and
then
you can see what choices he makes or that he
would
have made! Alright? You’re God, the God of Abraham and Jacob! You mean you can’t be the God of virtual reality?”

“Oh, Mom, you’re so beautiful!” I marveled.

She smiled and primped her hair for a second, then got up and came over to the side of my bed and I could swear the room was filled with the scent of mimosa.

“I guard!”

“Almost time, Joey. Time to go home. Pop’s waiting for you.”

“Really, Mom? Pop?”

“Oh, well, of course. He’s jumping up and down with wanting to see you. He’d be here now except he had this appointment.”

“What appointment?
Inner Sanctum
?”

Still smiling, she nodded, and said, “Something like that.”

“What’s it like there, Mom? Tell me!”

And now suddenly her smile became that rising of the moon I’d once seen in Jane, her face aglow with a joy she had no words to express but that she knew would never fade, not even long after the sun had grown cold and, beyond, when time no longer existed. She put her head back and her laughter flowed out in warm waves.

“Oh, my Joey, you have no idea!
No idea!
”

After that she looked down at me and placed her hand on top of mine, which I could see but couldn’t feel. “Are you ready?” she asked.

“Oh, no, please! A few minutes! Can’t I have a few more minutes? I need to finish what I’m writing, Mom!
Please!
Five minutes! Okay, four! Give me four!”

“Go ahead,” she said softly. “Do what you can and we’ll see.”

Well, my fingers fairly flew at the laptop keyboard, completing these final four or five pages, and in parting let me say I’d like to thank my director and my wonderful cast and crew, my niece Emilia, and all the barbers who flew to location that elate a love a life a laugh along the

New York City

December 25, 2010

Oh, well, hi! My name is Rose Ellen Bloor and I’m a Registered Nurse at Bellevue Hospital in New York City where it was my privilege to care for the coauthor of this work, Joseph Michael El Bueno, the noted screenwriter and humanitarian who was a two-time winner of the PETA Compassionate Colleague Award, once for “never writing scenes in which a character is shown using a flyswatter,” and the other time for “never setting the action of the story in either fall or winter or in Russia at any time of year, thus avoiding the use of wardrobe made of fur.” After my collaborator’s passing it was both my sad yet supremely satisfying privilege to bring this current work into the light of day, even though it was my choice to leave my part in it uncredited, more or less as a tribute to El Bueno, who in fact performed most of the manual labor on the work—the typing, the writing and so on. My most significant creative contribution, perhaps, consisted of the posthumous editing of the manner in which my character was depicted, which, while originally wholly accurate, I thought to be so cloyingly sweet—in fact virtually heroine worship—that the work might lose its credibility, and so I rewrote those scenes, virtually fictionalizing them by making my character at times seem eccentric, even psychopathically hostile and threatening, thus adding both “color” and the necessary tension that had been curiously absent from the work. I know that Joey—that’s what he begged me to call him—would approve. He was always so kind. He once told me he would probably die in some movie theater lobby reading audience preview-card comments at a sneak of one of his films, whereas in fact he passed away while composing the present work, thus explaining the incomplete sentence at the end and which only the inexplicable resistance of the publisher prevented me from completing my thought being to add the words “Navajo Trail.”

Well, at least now you know.

Rose Bloor