Page 87 of The Bad Weather Friend
Benny plucked his wallet from a hip pocket. “I can put it on my credit card. But the delivery guy usually likes the tip in cash.”
“Bob’s generous,” Harper said. “He tips forty percent.”
“Then I’ll tip forty,” Benny said. “But I only have three hundred in my wallet. I’ll need maybe five hundred more.”
“Easy peasy,” Spike said, counting hundreds off his eternally fat bankroll.
ENGAGEMENT PARTY
As a detective who had investigated scores of women over the years and had conducted scores of investigations on their behalf, Bob understood that gender better than Benny did, and he had a good sense of Harper Harper’s taste, so he accompanied his friend to the jeweler’s to choose an engagement ring.
The ring delighted Harper. She said yes. To Benny. On that happy occasion, Bob felt the need to advise the future groom not just to hand the ring to Harper but instead to put it on her finger, and Benny was able to execute this maneuver without injury to either himself or his fiancée, or to any bystanders.
Spike planned and paid for the engagement party, for which he booked a table that turned out to be at a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona. This was not inconvenient. A friend of Harper’s was willing to babysit Lily Lapin and Virginia Woolf. Benny, Harper, Spike, and Bob time-folded to Scottsdale in the Explorer.
Although Harper Harper wasn’t a giggler by nature, she giggled a few times during the two-minute trip, while she and her fiancé snuggled in the back seat. As it turned out, her amusement wasn’t because Benny proved to be an awkward snuggler, for he was certainly adequate, but because she knew a secret that he did not.
The reservation Spike had made was actually for a private room at the restaurant, where the table was set not for four, but for eight. Although ten years had passed, Mengistu Gidada and Jurgen Speer were instantly recognizable.
Fantasy stories of recent vintage featured fearsome dragons and blood-soaked swordsmen with enormous dirty beards; there was usually a magical object that, if one possessed it, granteddominion over the kingdom or even the entire world, although it often looked like a badly designed Christmas ornament crafted in a Chinese sweatshop. Benny’s adventure involved none of those things. In nearly every such story these days, which extended to as many volumes as the author could write in a lifetime, an enormous cast of characters produced protagonist after protagonist, each of whom was, in his or her turn, vigorously beaten to death or hacked to death or burned to death or stoned to death or tortured to death, or a combination of the above. In Benny’s story, the people who were nice and sane had managed to survive unscathed at least until this emotional moment in a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Although Jurgen and Mengistu were only twenty-four and twenty-five, they owned the restaurant. It was an enormous success. Jurgen managed the operation, and Mengistu served as the highly creative chef. On escaping Briarbush, they had been taken in by Jurgen’s nice uncle in Arizona, the one despised by everyone else in the family, who knew how to obtain new identities for them and who raised them as his own, eventually financing their enterprise. They would soon open a second restaurant.
Bob Jericho’s skill as a detective and Spike’s special powers, when combined, resulted in their spending more time at long, lavish lunches than they had needed to find Benny’s former schoolmates.
The evening was rich with emotion, about which no one felt the least awkward. There was much laughter, as rarely occurs in those stories involving blood-soaked swordsmen with enormous dirty beards, because Benny and his friends weren’t contesting with one another to rule a kingdom or be the first to rape andsubjugate a princess, and none had recently—or ever—had a limb amputated by a dungeon master and cauterized by fire.
Mengistu’s guest at dinner was named Stone, and Jurgen’s guest was named Mace. To the best of Benny’s recollection, this was the first time he had been in a room where approximately 38 percent of those present were seven feet tall. Neither Stone nor Mace looked anything like Spike; however, when the evening came to an end and the restaurant staff were gone, when the group of friends had the premises to themselves, it was no surprise that the three tallest of those assembled knew all the words to the Craggle Anthem. They sang it with such feeling that there was not a dry eye in the house, though all eyes remained in their sockets.
WEDDING DAY
In spite of the eventful nature of Benny and Harper’s brief courtship, there isn’t much story value in the wedding. Weddings are all alike, except for those where gunfire breaks out or the groom’s first wife from whom he was never divorced shows up uninvited with their seven children. This ceremony wasn’t one of those exceptions. Here’s the church; here’s the steeple; open the door, and see the people. The ring bearer was a whippet. Spike served as best man. Harper’s dad gave her away, and her mother was the maid of honor. Robert “Fat Bob” Jericho fulfilled the role of bearer of the witness rabbit. Though the minister wasn’t as colorful as Brother Sunshine, he was sane and threatened no one with a shepherd’s staff.
Vows were taken. Bride and groom were pronounced husband and wife. Happy tears were shed. Organ music accompanied the couple as they walked the long aisle through the nave, basking in the smiles of their friends. They were almost to the narthex when a bogadril manifested from the Dark Dimension, a creature so hideous that mere words could not describe it adequately. Even if a description could be cobbled together that did justice to the monster, the image thus conjured in the mind would result in a significant percentage of readers suffering nervous breakdowns or spiraling irretrievable into a depth of madness usually endured only by characters in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.
Many might have perished and the church might have been damaged beyond repair if there hadn’t beenthreecraggles in attendance. The minister, organist, Harper’s parents, and the guests standing in the rows between pews were at once sidelined. The presence of a single craggle would have resulted in a fierce and extended battle that would have been thrilling to a ten-year-oldbut tedious to almost everyone else. The bogadril was surprised to find a trio of craggles where it expected one. Instead of a glorious battle, imagine this: three big men chasing a scurrying cockroach, trying to stamp on it before it could find a crack in which to hide. The bogadril wasn’t anything like a cockroach, and it was gigantically bigger than any beetle, but the action was pretty much as herewith suggested. No one attending the wedding was injured. None would have a memory of the incident. The invader was dispatched in less than three minutes, but those who had been sidelined needed to remain in that condition for almost an hour while Spike, Stone, and Mace swept up the bogadril debris and hosed the slime out of the church.
The wedding reception proved to be everything that a wedding reception ought to be. The celebration unfolded in a ballroom in a five-star hotel, with an open bar and food that even Mengistu Gidada found impressive. The bride was beautiful, and everyone complimented Benny on his new haircut even when they weren’t sure about it. So many gorgeous flowers had been incorporated in the event decor that those guests with serious allergies needed to resort to double doses of their medication. The place settings at the tables did not, not, not include little cups of those almonds in hard-candy shells that are usually provided at wedding receptions, the absence of which contributed to everyone’s good mood. There was much laughter and reminiscing, toasts raised and drank, plus dancing to the music of Tyler Pinkflower and the Cooltones, an LA group that Spike had known about and booked.
The music was so exceptional in fact that Benny felt compelled to take a turn at the piano, freeing Tyler Pinkflower—the pianist and lead vocalist—to concentrate on his singing for three numbers. This was the first time Benny had sat at the keyboard since he had livedin the shadow of Mordred Merrick. Something magical happened, as you knew it would. Benny, now too old to be a child prodigy, was a more gifted pianist than Tyler Pinkflower. He inspired the other four musicians to play at a level they had never quite achieved before, and Tyler brought greater power and deeper emotion to his singing. As was always the case in such moments, the wedding guests at first mockingly applauded the groom as he sat at the piano, for they assumed he’d drunk too much and would make a fool of himself, but then they quickly realized he was a terrific pianist, and soon everyone was on the dance floor, totally rocking out.
We have all been conditioned to expect dramatic developments like that to unfold in a certain way, and those expectations were fulfilled when Tyler and Benny and the boys launched into the next number, a profoundly stirring piece like something the Righteous Brothers might have recorded. The jubilant dancers quieted and stood very still, gazing at the band, in a condition of wonder, gripped by a suspicion that they were present at a moment of pop-music history. And of course they were. The third number was so fabulous that it made the first two sound like elevator music, and those assembled stood in awe, almost bovine in their fixation: Really, it was like when scores of cows in a field face the same direction, their heads raised, having ceased chewing their cuds, hypnotized by whatever it is that entices cows into a mass trance. If it had been a scene in a movie, the camera would have moved in for a close-up of the bride, whose eyes would be shining with tears of joy, her face a portrait of love and pride for her special husband. When the third number ended, you’d expect the crowd to soar out of the trance and erupt into wild applause, which they did. What else would you expect them to do—torch the place, murder one another in a mad ecstasy? Bennyand Harper’s story was not that kind of story, which is something you can get anywhere these days but you can’t get here. You would expect Tyler Pinkflower and Benny to hug, which they did, each aware that he had found a spiritual brother and that something big was going to happen for them.
After that, the fabulous wedding reception became even more fabulous, because there were still no almonds in hard-candy shells being forced on attendeesandthey knew that Benny, Tyler, and the Cooltones would come up with a new name and soon be the biggest stars on the music scene. These were not stupid people that Harper and Benny invited—mostly Harper, as she had far more friends than Benny did. The people in that crowd were smart and tuned into the culture, and they knew where a meeting of talents like this would inevitably lead. They knew that, by Monday, Benny would realize he could write great pop music. They knew that, by Wednesday, the band would listen to him play his first two compositions, and they would just about go nuts. If you’d been there, you would have known it, too. By Friday, Benny would realize he could sing as well as he could play and would do backup vocals for Tyler. Robert “Big Bob” Jericho would be their manager, tough and incorruptible. Spike would ensure that organized creeps motivated by ideology and the deranged loners who make celebrities’ lives dangerous wouldn’t inflict so much as a pinprick on any member of the band. Every guest at the wedding reception intuited all that and much more, and they were happy for Benny and Harper even if, in some cases, a little envious.
One thing few at the reception expected was that, during the new band’s first rehearsal, Harper would sing along on a number and reveal a spectacular voice, although if you think about it, there were only two ways the marriage could go.
First, as Benny and the boys became ever more successful and were on the road touring, some emotional distance would open between him and Harper; he’d be tempted by adoring women and drugs. Benny was too nice to cheat on Harper; so there was nothing to worry about in that regard. Spike would strongly advise against spiraling into drug use, and it would be difficult to imagine Benny doing cocaine and heroin and that sort of thing. On the other hand, Benny was human; therefore, it could not be ruled out that, like two other losers in the past eighteen hundred years, he might ignore the craggle’s advice and engineer his own horrific death.
The second option was that Harper would join the band, husband and wife bonding even tighter because of the respect they had for each other’s talent and because of shared experiences. So that was what happened. Nothing other than that could have happened, really, for their story wasn’t a soap opera likeA Star Is Born.
Moreover, considering that Benny witnessed the cold-blooded murder of his father, endured psychological warfare waged by his maternal grandmother, survived both Bugboy and Mrs. Baneberry-Smith, was abandoned by his mother, weathered the destruction of his real-estate career, accepted the smashing of his favorite chair, put up with much mockery regarding his hair, and abided through so many other troubles and offenses, there would be no point to a fantasy adventure that ended with him being hacked to death by a blood-soaked swordsman with an enormous dirty beard or in any other way than happily married to Harper.
Fantasies can become realities. There’s no reason that craggles couldn’t be as real as trains and cranes and girls named Jane. That is a conclusion to which the discoveries in physics over the past century lead us if we have the imagination and courage to think through the evidence.
As Spike the craggle observed in Llewellyn Urnfield’s kitchen, and as he went on at some length yesterday at lunch: On the quantum level, down at the subatomic bottom of everything, there is no such thing as matter. Matter as we know it—everything from rocks to water, bone and blood, flora and fauna, everything, everything—arises out of nothing tangible. The universe appears to be woven from something as immaterial as thought waves. Everything is at base impalpable, discarnate, transmundane. Furthermore, the smallest and most fundamental subatomic particles seem not to exist until they are observed in the process of human inquiry. And so it seems that, as a reader collaborates with an author to envision the story being told in a novel, so all of us collaborate with some author unknown to imagine what occurs in our world as it is and as it will become. In that case, to at least some extent, to a degree we cannot know, we possess the power to weave the lives that will bring us happiness if we’re wise enough to be nice, but not so nice that we’re foolish, and if we realize that our free will and creativity should be used with humility rather than to acquire power to oppress others.
Not least of all, if bitten and injected with the accumulated knowledge of an extraterrestrial species millennia more advanced than human beings, we must never succumb to the temptation to use it. As Spike noted at breakfast this morning, no knowledge of that kind could bring us greater happiness than the recognition of the truth that, as coauthors of reality, we can revise ourselves so that we are characters who have the courage to endure. Furthermore, we can write a life after this one that is better yet and that is no less real than the current world where matter is both a hard fact and an illusion, where at the bottom of everything we find only something like thought waves forever weaving.
