“Then what is—”
“Shh…”… five… two… three… The kid is interrupting my workout, so I temporarily suspend the remaining four sets of five until I can get back to it. It’s not like I’m pressed for time.
“Are you dead?”
“Yes.” But I don’t go into the boring details like Raymundo and Ingrid seem fond of doing. I shake out one chubby leg and then the other.
“Are my folks here?”
“Not yet.” But I have implemented a few rule changes on my own that make my existence a bit more tolerable. “Follow me, Ace.” We walk from the emergency room into an invisible tube that I call the coma pipeline.
Raymundo insists that I remain in the trauma unit, calming fears, until the patient is stabilized, but I prefer to avoid emotional outbursts and inappropriate displays of weeping. It is not in my nature to calm anyone, and I avoid it at all costs.
“Is your hair blue?”
“Unfortunately.” When I was first thrown into this hell, I’d stalk the surgeons’ locker room and slip into the shower with them in an attempt to rinse the blue from my hair. I might be dead and look like a hillbilly, but I have my standards, and most surgeons—especially orthopedic surgeons—take better care of themselves than the hospital’s general population.
Ace and I step from the pipeline and into the coma unit. Unfortunately, every time I entered a shower my energy repelled water away from me, charged water particles, and shocked the doctor’s wet skin. They got all jumpy and not one part of me got in the least bit damp.
We continue down the hall toward the Limbo Lounge and I begin, “You’re in a coma. From the time of birth, your spirit creates energy to fuel your physical body. When you die, your spirit leaves the earth plane, and without fuel your physical body is returned to earth.” Blah blah.
“?‘Energy is always conserved but cannot be created or destroyed.’?”
I stop and turn to him. He looks like he’s still in shock. “The first law of thermodynamics.” In shock or not, Ace isn’t as stupid as his wasp’s nest behavior suggests.
Raymundo catches my attention as he moves toward us. His mustache is pulled downward at each side of his mouth, which is never a good sign, but I go in with a preemptive smile and some fast talking. “This is our newest guest,” I tell him. “Ace was stung by over a hundred wasps and suffered anaphylactic shock. I couldn’t leave him standing there, staring at his gruesome condition.” I put a hand on my chest. “As an apprentice concierge, a PORC participant trying to earn my wings, I had to ask myself, ‘What would Jesus do?’?”
He sets his golf club on one shoulder. “You need to be more concerned with, ‘What will Raymundo do?’ We don’t make the rules. We don’t bend the rules. You best get hooty right quick before you get sent back to Ingrid for a different assignment. Ingrid doesn’t like to look bad to her judicator, and there will be hell to pay if you make her mad.”
Ingrid is my ticket out of here. “What kind of hell?”
“I hear Connie at Vista Hills is clamoring for an apprentice. You’d love her. She’s as cuddly as a shithouse rat.”
“Charming.”
He stands up a little straighter and turns to our newest visitor,
all business. “Welcome to UMC El Paso, Ace.”
“My name is Maynard Motley, sir.”
“Ace has a nicer ring. Don’t you think, Ace?”
Raymundo turns his angry brown eyes on me. “You don’t learn, and I’m glad I ain’t you right now.” He lowers the head of his club. “If Ingrid loses her temper”—he pauses to shake his head—“she has six ways to Sunday of making you pay.”
19
I stand in the residents’ lobby of the Book Cadillac and a long maroon car with shiny hubcaps and whitewalls pulls beside the curb. It looks like something out of an old Hollywood movie, and Donovan gets out and moves to the back passenger door. I step from the relative quiet of the lobby and into the sounds of downtown Detroit. A rush of cool night air lifts a curl from the shoulder of my gray wrap coat.
I haven’t seen Marv and Claire since I moved, and I give them a pleasant smile and a polite greeting. “Father, you look handsome, and you’re as beautiful as always, Mother,” I say, and don’t trip over the words.
“Thank you, dear. You look lovely.”
As Donovan pulls away from the curb, we make small talk like Claire has taught me, and I ask about the car.
“This is your grandfather’s ’thirty-nine Packard limousine. It was custom-built at the old plant on Grand Boulevard,” Marv tells me. “It’s a shame to see what’s become of the factory now.”
I was in a limo once, but it had runway lights on the ceiling, a bar for shots, and smelled of mold and last night’s party. This limo is more impressive than Charles’s Classic Limousine, better known as the Chuck Bucket.