Magnificent Vibration (29 page)

“Okay,” answers L.V., like a little kid who’s been told by Mommy that there will be no trip to the zoo this Saturday because of his bad grades.

How did Merikh find us? Why is he following us? What’s with the long hair? All questions that need to be answered.

L.V. and I walk back to our seats on the lower decks with the rest of the Irish immigrants and wait for the possible collision with an ice mountain.

“We need some protection,” says Lexington Vargas. “Damn, I wish they hadn’t taken my knife.”

Okay, now I agree.

We decide not to tell Alice, but like a dopey kid who can’t keep a secret from his sister, I end up letting the nervous cat out of the bag and then wishing I hadn’t. She looks stricken.

My thinking is that if Merikh is going to bring this plane down, then Alice should know ahead of time so she can prepare for the afterlife or whatever. She sneaks up to take a look for herself.

“It’s him,” she confirms, squeezing past both of us to reclaim her seat, just as the plane starts to shake violently.

Again Alice and L.V. crush my hands into submission as the giant
aircraft pitches and yaws. Is this it? Is Merikh about to turn another plane and its occupants into ash and embers?

The intercom clicks on and a casual voice says, “Sorry, folks. We seem to have hit a little bit of rough air. Please make sure your seat belts are fastened. We should be clear of this is a few minutes.”

So we’re good for now. But we’re on high alert, condition red!
Danger, Will Robinson, danger!

We take turns at checking on Merikh to see if he looks like he’s planning some kind of sabotage, but all he seems to be doing is sleeping. And the militant flight attendant who first accosted Lexington Vargas is getting pretty upset with our cavalier attitude towards her God Almighty authority.

“Get back to the sardine-packed seats and the plugged up crappers where you peasants belong!” she says with her eyes and her demeanor every time one of us ventures toward business class on recon.

“That guy sitting over there brought down the plane on the 101 freeway. We think he may be the Angel of Death, and we’re all in great peril, including you and your little area of sovereignty here by the business-class toilets,” is what I want to tell her, but instead I say: “Sorry, I thought these bathrooms were for everyone.”

After seeing the awesome pods the upper-class passengers sleep in, what must their
bathrooms
be like? Do they have gilt-edged wall-to-wall mirrors? Attendants that hand out mints? Automatic butt-wipers?

The flight seems interminable, but eventually we land at Heathrow Airport in Jolly Olde England unscathed and in one piece, and the Angel of Death can bite me.

We watch for Merikh all through immigration (where I’m pretty
sure the young British admissions officer smirks at the photograph of the incestuous chicken-rapist masquerading as me in my passport—but I may be projecting) and the Angel of Death is nowhere to be seen. Nor is he on the flight from London to Glasgow. Believe me, we check. Often.

“I need to get us some protection,” says L.V.

Unfortunately, Woody thinks he means condoms because we’ll be shagging our brains out here in the Highlands with many of the fine young Scottish lassies. But I know what L.V. is referring to.

“Like what?” I ask as I hand over my eunuch of a MasterCard to the Hertz guy, who has no idea I could never pay the bill I’ve run up if I lived to be 150. “I need to get us a gun, I think,” says Lexington Vargas quietly and ominously to me.

“How?” This is way out of my very small area of expertise.

“Don’t worry about it. I know how to do that,” answers L.V. reassuringly, and I believe him. “I think they still get weapons smuggled in here from old IRA stashes. I’ll go digging for something when we get to where we’re going.”

I have absolutely zero idea how to do what he is suggesting, so I do what I know how to do and pay for the rent-a-car. Oh my God, it’s a Kia!! Yes! I think this is a very good sign. Alice is still anxiously looking for Merikh in every person she sees and doesn’t join in my Kia joy.

L.V. and I have decided not to tell Alice about the weapon he is going to attempt to procure, and I
do
manage to keep that secret. We are all famished (when did they stop serving real meals on airplanes?) so I ease the McKia into a restaurant parking lot just up the street from Europe Cars-for-Hire. We head inside the ultramodern glass-and-steel building and order up some traditional old Scottish
fare: haggis, neeps, and tatties (not really—we settle for a basket of soggy French fries and something resembling a hot dog). I am kind of disturbed by L.V.’s insistence that he get us some protection, and I wonder if he really will return from the dark streets of Inverness with the condoms—shut up Woody, Jesus!—gun.

“T
here are only two choices for opposing sides: force or reason. Why do they always seem to choose force?” thinks the OSB. “All force has ever done is inspire more force and more anger, never any lasting and true peace. Just ask the Vee-Nung. Well, you can’t, since sadly, the aforementioned organisms no longer exist. The dominant species is the dominant species because of the dominant weapons created by their dominant brains: that is, until these top-of-the-food-chain geniuses self-destruct. Weapons always provide the initial advantage, but then they become the genie that can’t be put back in the bottle. No principal life form has ever been able to avoid this. The ruling class on any planet always seems to fall into the same trap. And once they are in power, they think it’s their right to do whatever they want and take whatever they desire from their world and expect not to have a balancing of the books, a reckoning, an equilibrium to be reached at some point. And the longer they insist on their “free lunch,” the more dramatic and painful the counterbalance. The greater the yin, the greater the yang.”

The OSB is just riffing right now because, with the
whole Universe to watch over, it sometimes helps to organize your thoughts.

“How is it that the ascendant class of a world like Earth never seems to understand that their planet is alive and made of the same stuff they are? If I weren’t perfect, I’d be pissed off!”

W
e wedge ourselves back into the mighty, midget motorcar, accompanied by our queasy hot-dog-filled stomachs. I think that haggis might have been the better choice for lunch. I mean, traditionally, the Scottish know how to whip up this meal of sheep entrails and other minced internal organs boiled inside the animal’s stomach bag, yes? Yummy!

I gun the Scottish hamster, we jump onto the A82, and we’re on our way as we settle back for the three-hour-plus drive through some
magnificently craggy, stunningly brutal, and highly alien countryside. We are all exhausted and finally both Alice and Lexington Vargas fall asleep. Unfortunately so do I, which is not a particularly good move if you’re the actual driver of the vehicle. Thank God for those yellow bumpy things between the lanes, because the rhythmic
thump, thump, thump
wakes me up every time. Yep, I fall asleep more than once. You try flying from L.A. to Glasgow while keeping an eye open for the possible Angel of Death. It’s a little taxing on the system, to put it mildly. At least I’m not dialing or texting. And we do make it to Inverness in one piece.

As Alice and I take the stairs up to the law offices of McGivney, McGivney, and McGivney, Lexington Vargas quietly slips away from this civilized quarter and out into a world that only he knows how to navigate. When Alice notices he’s missing, I tell her he’s gone to get “the lay of the land,” and when she asks me what I mean by that, I say I don’t know; it’s all he told me. That he’ll be back in a while. She frowns and sighs but accepts it as some “L.V. thing” and asks no more questions. We get down to the business of her inheritance once we are introduced and settled.

After some extremely polite document-signing at McGivney, McGivney, and McGivney, as well as several increasingly embarrassing “I’m sorry, could you repeat that, please?” from us because of our untrained ear and the younger McGivney’s heavy Highland brogue, we get directions to 5 Holm Dell Park, Alice’s new house. And just like that, she’s a homeowner. It took me a lot more blood, sweat, and tears of torment dubbing crap movies like the staggeringly awful
Ghost Banana Hitman
to get
my
house, and even then it was snatched away from me as suddenly as if I were the proverbial Job. But I’m happy for Alice, and she is giddy with the reality of what, up until now, has
appeared to be something of an abstract lark, a secondary reason to come to this cold, beautiful, and forbidding place.

Alice’s “vow of poverty” notwithstanding, I pay her modest lawyer’s bill with my ass-helmet of a credit card and wonder why it isn’t bursting into flames as Miss McGivney (yep, the secretary’s in the family, too) hands it back to me after she’s run it. Unbelievably, the transaction goes through with no red flags, no over-the-limit messages, and no fraud early warnings screaming at her to call the cops! I momentarily wonder if Arthur’s hand is in this deception and if, like an irresponsible parent, he/she is encouraging me to live beyond my means.

Brand-spanking-new house keys in hand, we reboard the Kia and wait for L.V., who eventually joins us and gives me the curt nod that any down-with-it, hardcore homeboy like me understands to mean, “I got the goods, man. Let’s blow this taco stand.” Alice regards him but says nothing.

I somehow manage to maneuver the subcompact sedan through the maze of streets that eventually lead us to 5 Holm Dell Park. The house is a charming (yes, I said “charming,” which is not a word I would normally use, but it leaps out at me as we enter this place), fairly old (and by that I mean “ancient” in American terms), two-bedroom (“Hey, looks like one of us will be sleeping on the couch again”), quite cozy (okay, tiny) cottage (or “house,” but it has the general appearance of something you would call a “cottage”) backed up against trees that I believe should be referred to as a “wood” in this part of the world if I’m not confusing the Scottish with the English (which I understand is a
huge
friggin’ faux pas). We wander through the interior of Alice’s new digs, the three of us, in a kind of jet-lagged daze. Merikh is momentarily forgotten, phone calls to Arthur on the back burner, along with whatever greater purpose may have brought
us here. We are all sleep-deprived and completely enervated, and I feel like we’re adolescents left alone in the house with Mom and Dad gone off to Miami for the weekend.

The place is fully furnished in the eminently timeless “old grandma” style, with daring hints of Highland tchotchkes in the many nooks and crannies. It’s appealingly quaint, but the whole place smells musty and needs a good cleaning as well as a serious airing-out. No one’s going to do that right now, so Alice lights the gas fire in the living room—her living room—as we all huddle into the warmth and just stare through the blue-yellow flames, amazed that we have actually made this journey together.

“What do we do now?” asks Alice.

“Wait?” suggests L.V.

“For what?” Alice again.

No one replies, because no one has an answer for that.

There is an unexpressed, shared feeling that something will happen here: that we have somehow been summoned to this rough-hewn place, but none of us has even an inkling as to what that might be. We are the blind sheep looking for our shepherd.

What we have opened ourselves up to by coming here is both exhilarating and daunting. It’s a very scary feeling. Is it a waste of time, or something truly transformative? Again, no clue. We will have to wait and see. The brief phone calls with Arthur still do not sit well in the rational areas of my brain. Were they something real and a part of this universe we’re living in, or were they just our fertile imaginations struggling to create meaning in our pointless lives? I think we are either three very deluded fuckers, or we are all Moses. Or is there something in between that I’m missing?

“We probably should get some sleep,” I say. It’s only four in the
afternoon but my scratchy eyeballs are screaming at me to close their eyelids and give them a break. I don’t even want to try to figure out what time it is back home.

There are nods of assent, but nobody moves. We feel like we’re all alone on this Earth right now. No one (we hope) knows we’re here, and the “why” is so big that it can’t fit in this small room with us right now. So none of us is willing to further broach that subject.

“Well, I for one am not coming all this way to miss out on a possible Loch Ness Monster sighting,” I say, tempering the comment with a chuckle. But, secretly, I mean it. Or at least the kid in me does.

Alice laughs.

“Maybe that’s the whole point of this journey. To fulfill your childhood fantasy.”

She smiles at me.

“What’s a Lock whatever-you-said monster?” asks L.V.

“Loch Ness Monster.”

“Lock-nuts monster?”

“You’ve never heard of the Loch Ness Monster?” I ask incredulously.

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” is his staggeringly uninformed (to me) reply.