White Rabbit Chapter 14

14.

            The cab driver needed no instructions as to where to take Delores; he knew where to go. As he drove Delores didn’t say a word or bother to instruct him at all. She felt abysmally hopeless. She slumped down in the backseat and exhaled a long meaningful breath as though she was purging herself of what poisoned her—if only it were that easy. Seeing Eric made her feel miserable and her stomach hurt but she didn’t know why or how. The cab driver introduced himself as Martin—the “tin” sounding like “teen.” She sat in the back with abnormally terrible posture as though the seat was absorbing her. The snow that normally made her excited and wish for a sled or skates didn’t do anything for her. She wanted to get back to the Underworld and be away from this dreadful place. She didn’t fit in this life, not in Denmark, not in Maine, nowhere on Earth. She felt like an alien must feel.  

            Martin looked back in the rearview mirror repeatedly at the dejected girl and though he reflexively thought to say something during lags in traffic as he customarily would, he kept quiet. He let her alone understanding that sometimes people need fewer words than more and logic and reason are sometimes little more than gasoline and a match. Finally, after a brief moment, Delores perked up remembering that although the whale was vague he did offer her some hope and she leaned forward towards the front of the cab to finally inquire as to where they were going. “The whale,” Delores said carefully, “said that I need to go see a bird.” She was bizarrely optimistic that this might mean something to the cab driver.

            Martin smiled in the rearview. His Green Bay Packers hat was pulled down to his large bright white eyeballs. A smile appeared on his face like an albino nudist in the dark behind the parting cover of a pink trench coat, without perversion. He laughed patting the passenger seat a few times looking back at Delores who began to smile at his odd response. Then he added to the jubilee in his thick African-English excitably, “The sperm whale is the smartest animal on this planet, did you know?”

            “Yes. I am aware.” Delores replied calmly.

            “He told me already where I would take you.”

            “When did he tell you?” Delores probed.

            “I eat my lunch there in the museum every day and today he tells me, he says, ‘Martin, there is a girl we are to meet today who comes back from the Underworld, a girl that wants to go back. Pick her up and bring her to me and then take her to the bird.’ he says. That is what he said so I did. Sure enough, you were walking along there and when you said take you to a whale, baby, I was already thinking the same thing!”

            Delores was excited that someone else had spoken to the whale. There is a point when things become all too much to believe even when you are one who is apt to believe the unbelievable, had witnessed the unbelievable, and one who doesn’t need logic or reason. But had Martin not known where to take her she simply wouldn’t know what or where to go. She might then have given up and gone back to her new home and called Eric like her mother suggested to find out what had happened to her in Denmark—all that she couldn’t recollect. She wouldn’t have asked her mother or father for they would very likely have her committed to some institution or forced some new medication in her. They once put Ritalin in her applesauce and when she stopped eating applesauce they put it in pudding so Delores doesn’t trust anyone offering her desserts. Making sense of her present predicament in her own head she reasoned that she was in a parallel universe, like the whale. It was the only sense she could make of it.

            “I know the place with the bird!” Martin said eagerly. “Trust, Martin! I will take you to the bird!”

            Twenty minutes later Delores was walking up to a small blue airport hangar as Martin was in the green and white taxi waving goodbye. The sound of her boots on the shoveled salty walk was the only thing she heard, the melodic clip clop, clip clop, more intensely when she paid attention. Martin honked the horn and drove away. He must be sure, Delores thought, or else I’m dreaming like that dumb Alice. She stopped at a shoddy looking black door with a window in it and a white sign covering most of the window that said “Come In. We are open!” in thick red letters. Most peculiarly, Delores noticed, the sign was in plain English. As soon as Delores entered there was a British fellow named, Turk, who looked stunningly familiar, perhaps, without the handlebar mustache or with longer or shorter hair than the toffee-colored tuft he had parted over on top of his gourd. He introduced himself eagerly, perhaps, too eagerly, not the sort of way a fellow who gets the girl does it. And he hurried Delores along through the makeshift office/training center as though they were late, or he was hopped-up on amphetamines, Ritalin, or coffee, or all three. Delores had seen the effects of two of them. “Right you go, girl!” he said repeatedly as she did what he instructed her and he shuffled her on to the next task. First, she put on an olive-colored jumpsuit, then she began packing what a bag with what she presumed to be a parachute and finally she imitated the moves he instructed to imitate, presumably that of landing after some few thousand feet through the air. Even Alice would know what was coming.

            “I don’t quite understand why I am—“

            “The whale!” Turk interrupted ambitiously. “Smartest creature in the goddamn universe, you know? Phones me up and says, ‘Turk, got a girl coming your way. Take her up in the bird and show her how to fall.’  Clever fellow. How to fall! S’pose you are going to the Underworld?”

            “But this bird…?” Delores asked distracted by her own thoughts. She was following him around like a lost puppy.

            “This bird.” He repeated opening a door to a magnificent yellow biplane in a much larger part of the hanger with a wide opening to the runway. On the biplane’s tail was the explanation, The Fleet Finch, it said fancifully. On the wall by the plane was a large framed picture of a man who looked even more familiar than Turk, but familiar to him in a similar way. Delores stared at him and was lost. There was something comforting in his face, older, middle-aged, someone very much at the apex of his existence, shortly thereafter likely to fall and shortly there before yet to meet his potential. He had a curious grin as though he was full of splendid secrets, the sort that would make everyone in a crowded room laugh hysterically. There were little lines below his bright blue eyes that were perfectly etched. There was life in his cheeks, in his lips and his hair was deliberately tousled on top and cropped short on the sides, brownish gray like leaves just before autumn when they possess a drunken glow like 6:30 at a bar. Delores knew him but she couldn’t connect it.

            “Who is that?” She asked flatly.

            “That?” Turk asked as he cranked a busy wrench in the engine of the plane. He was standing on the nose, how he got there, she missed. He knew who she was talking about. “Oh, that is him.”

            “Him?” Delores replied.

            “Yes. Him.” Turk repeated loudly British.

            “Doesn’t he have a name?” Delores complained.

            Turk stopped where he was working and stood upright looking at the girl who stood beside the picture. “I don’t know. Does he?”

            “Why are you asking me?” Delores countered.

            “Never mind him.” Turk groaned. “Right you go, girl! Let’s go!”

            “Where are we going?”

            “You are going to fall up and land back to the Underworld. Here.” Turk handed her an aviator cap stuffed with goggles and gloves and then he gave her a large brown leather backpack—one like she had previously stuffed in a hurry. “Put that round your front, like a baby.” But suddenly, Turk sounded as though he said something terribly wrong at a funeral and got an uncomfortable expression on his face. “Right, well, up we go then.” he finished.