Bigfoot Dreams (3 page)

Vera sits down at her desk and types out the Bigfoot story in roughly the same six hundred words she’d thought of on the train. After five years she can pretty much think in final-draft
This Week
-ese, and the typing is in itself a kind of pleasure that calms and distracts her. She retypes it till it’s perfect, then moves on to the next best thing, which is telling herself that losing her job at
This Week
may be a blessing. She never planned on staying so long, but despite how she worries about its effect on her, she’s made no move to quit. What she needs to remember and often forgets is that there’s a world out there, a world in which every dog isn’t eating newborn babies or posing for cute photos talking on the phone.

Pushing the Bigfoot piece to one side, Vera clears a place and climbs up on her desk. Her office dates from a time when office work wasn’t supposed to feel like typing in the gondola of a balloon swaying high over Manhattan. Vera’s sooty little window isn’t there for scenic views—just, grudgingly, for light. She can’t see out of it without getting up on her desk—an effort she saves mainly for days like today, when she so needs the sight of other lives that what’s visible from fifteen stories up is better than nothing at all.

Now, looking down, Vera wonders how many of those tiny specks ever dreamed they’d be doing what they’re doing. No wonder they go for
This Week
’s basic message: Fate can just pick you up and put you down someplace else. You can be eating breakfast and a tornado will move you and your family three counties over without breaking the shell on Dad’s egg.

So it is with Vera. Fabricating tabloid news was hardly her childhood ambition—not that her childhood ambition was any less absurd. Vera’s first love was Peter Pan, her first wish to be reborn in an Edwardian nursery with a sheepdog, frilly nightshirts, and Mr. and Mrs. Darling for parents instead of Dave and Norma Perl. Only now does Vera see how even this marked her as their daughter, DNA-encoded for desiring the impossible.

By the time Vera set her sights on something closer, her friends were setting theirs on infinity. By graduation, a girl in Vera’s college class had discovered a new galaxy. Vera’s friend Louise took lots of acid and wanted to write poetry and see God. By comparison, Vera’s wanting to be a journalist seemed modest, yet even in this her aims were so lofty she’d settle for nothing less than telling the true stories that revealed the profound and fantastic nature of ordinary lives.

Her first published article profiled recent Russian émigrés: dour, craggy-faced Brighton Beach Solzhenitsyns. The second dealt with a family of storefront fortunetellers. After Rosie was born, the need for steadier employment drove Vera to the
Downtowner
, a weekly give-away paper consisting mostly of restaurant listings and ads for neighborhood chiropractors. Her last attempt at serious journalism reported Louise’s experiences in the Ananda Devi ashram—yet one more story that would have been better untold. Recalling it makes her cringe, with guilt and with its power to suggest that her coming to
This Week
was not quite the lark, the lucky accident she likes to pretend. She was sick of the truth. Writing for
This Week
seemed much simpler—dispensing with facts while exercising her natural bent for daydreaming at the edge of probability, converting the most ordinary incidents into the most bizarre.

It all seems so distant. Ten years ago she was a fool for truth, her heart set on nothing less than all history and human connection revealed in a pattern neat and colorful as an argyle sock. Now she’s just another company slob. What saddens her is not just the innocence lost, the time wasted, but that the passing years have turned her brain into a complicated trash compactor, shredding her inner life into Grade B drive-in Grand Guignol.

The spiritual implications of this have Vera fired up to quit on the spot when suddenly Carmen appears in the doorway and sails four letters Frisbee-style onto her desk. Pleased with herself, Carmen rocks on her heels like one of those huts on chicken legs in Russian fairy tales, then makes the okay sign, thumb and forefinger joined. Where else, Vera thinks, where else in the world will her mail be delivered like this? The sharp, freefall drop of loss she feels is her first hint that her five-year romance with
This Week
might really be ending. That special clarity of vision, that nostalgia before the fact, the pain itself is specific to leaving: jobs, apartments, cities, Lowell.

“Carmen,” says Vera, “tell me. Are we being sued over something I wrote?”

“I don’t think so,” mumbles Carmen unconvincingly, and backs straight out the door.

By now Vera’s reduced to folding her hands on her desk and plotting out her morning, overcarefully, like a drunk planning a trip to the bathroom. First she’ll read her mail, saving the most interesting letters for last. Then she’ll hit the coffee room. On the way back she’ll stop and see Mel Solomon or Mavis Biretta or whoever else is around. Then she’ll head for the morgue and look through back issues until she figures out which story Frank Shaefer and Dan Esposito are at this very moment dissecting line by line with their lawyer.

B
EGINNING WITH THE MOST
boring, Vera starts with a letter from some politician whose name she doesn’t recognize. Still, she opens it to kill time and on the chance that its bulk-rate-mailing look is deceptive, that inside is a personal note from Eighteenth District Representative Terry Blankett inviting her to write his speeches. Inside is Blankett’s voting record on power-company tax credits. Though the brochure’s printed in purple, Vera can tell that in real life Terry Blankett’s skin is pink. Light-haired, stout in the face, he grins up at her from behind the gapped teeth and clipped moustache of a German burgher. Automatically, her mind goes to work on a story about a Hamburg city councilman busted for wearing fat ladies’ lingerie. Then she remembers Howard Hunt’s talent for outguessing history and the possibility that at this minute, history is dressing Herr Councilor somebody-or-other in a lace bra and pink rayon tap pants.

As Vera opens the second letter, an overstuffed business envelope from West Myra, Illinois, grease spots hint at what’s inside—a sheaf of folded xeroxes and on top this note in ballpoint on looseleaf paper:

Dear Vera Perl,

I write this in the hope that there will be a miracle. I hope to be rescued. I hope this will reach the courtroom. I am the victim of a Nazi KGB game to do away with my life. They have a well-hidden operation going on. They use sight and sound from a distance. There is also ultrasound, I’ve heard, but it is more like heavy air pressure. They can also control certain body functions via astral projection. All this is mind control. Radio and TV waves.

The xeroxed pages include a programming guide to mind-control broadcasts, the names of fifty secret operatives, all in West Myra, Illinois, and letters from the FBI, the FCC, the attorney general, and various network news chiefs. Vera’s struck by the grace of their language:

In response to your letter of August 21, the Federal Communications Commission does not have jurisdiction over communication by sound waves. Your information concerning unlicensed radio operation has been noted and appropriate action will be taken.

Yours truly,

Richard C. Craney

Director, Public Relations

and by the knowledge that Richard C. Craney is a better person than she is. At least he bothered dictating a reply, instead of stuffing the whole thing in the wastepaper basket like Vera.

The third letter is an invitation to the annual convention of the American Cryptobiological Society, to be held this year at the beautiful Ghost Circle Lodge on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Clipped to the top is a note:

Dear Miss Perl,

My colleagues and I wish to take this opportunity to invite you to our annual meeting. Perhaps you might check with your employer about the possibility of a tax-deductible “jaunt.” If there’s any information or assistance we can provide, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Best wishes,

Ray Bramlett, President

American Cryptobiological Society

All that courtly concern for Vera’s finances and travel plans—who would guess that Vera and Ray Bramlett have never actually met? Still, they’re pen pals of sorts. He first wrote to Vera after her byline appeared on a story called
SASQUATCH COMES HOME
, about a Vancouver Indian cultural center that was having trouble keeping its employees because Sasquatch kept pressing its big hairy face against the window. Ray’s letter congratulated Vera on her rare sensitivity to Sasquatch’s Indian heritage, granted her honorary membership in the American Cryptobiological Society—which, it informed her, was dedicated to the scientific investigation of unexpected life forms—and, while acknowledging
This Week
’s unflagging interest in matters of cryptobiological concern, expressed the wish that such questions be taken more seriously. Had the Vancouver incident been listed as an official sighting by the Bigfoot Study Group? Vera was intrigued enough to write back.

From what she’s been able to gather, Ray Bramlett’s group consists mainly of academics from small colleges, forestry and agricultural schools, retired engineers and their wives. Like any scientific organization, they hold meetings, present papers, publish newsletters and journals, award an occasional grant. Now, looking over the conference schedule, she feels the presence of all those fervent cryptobiologists, each with a championed yeti or giant squid, and the effort to satisfy them all:

Thursday, August 24

8:30 P.M. KEYNOTE ADDRESS.
Ray Bramlett, President,

American Cryptobiological Society.

Sasquatch: Tradition, Authenticity, and Invention.
Professor Gerald Davis, South Oregon Community College.

Friday, August 25

9 A.M. TWO VIEWS OF NESSIE

Nessie: The Eco-biological Perspective.
Professor Duncan

Glengarrie, University of Glasgow.

New Light on the Loch Ness Monster.
Professor Mona

Miller, University of New Hampshire.

11 A.M. SEA SERPENT MYTHS IN THE FOLKLORE OF THE CANARY ISLANDS.
Professor Dorothy Chasteen, South Florida State College.

8 P.M. AUDIO-VISUAL PRESENTATION: OUR SEARCH FOR THE MOKELE-MBEMBE.
Mr. and Mrs. Carl Poteet.

Once Vera might have flown out there at her own expense in the hope that Mr. and Mrs. Carl Poteet and their search for whatever the Mokele-Mbembe is might reveal something profound and fantastic about marriage and adventure, curiosity, longing, and determination. But five years at
This Week
have so jaded her, she stuffs it into a desk drawer and goes on to the last letter, which despite its return address—Stormy Karma, Los Angeles, Cal.—she’s known all along is from Lowell. She holds it for a moment, puts it to the light, postponing the moment of opening it:

Howdy Sweetheart!

This letter is being written on a gangster’s typewriter. He’s just gotten out of the joint and is crashing on the floor of C.D.’s studio. Seems somebody told him how much money
The Godfather
and
Honor Thy Father
made. He decided since he used to work in the rackets in New York, he’d get in on a good thing. But though he has this electric typewriter, he wants to tell his life story to someone who’ll write it for him. And guess who the writer’s going to be? I don’t want any part of his plan but he won’t take no for an answer. Rubbed out ten FBI agents…2,000 kilos of pure heroin…me and Lucky…couple more guys got snuffed. Then he says to me, Know what, Lowell? If the big boys knew I was telling you this, our lives wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel.

Last week I got so lonely I actually took a bus just to be riding somewhere with people. I started talking to this total stranger about how I can’t go on attaching extraordinary significance to the most trivial things when the bus collided with a truck and all us passengers looked at each other like we’d been caught in the same superstitious thinking when the guy I’d been talking to (a good audience when not interrupting with his own story) interrupted me with his own story about psychic birth pangs culminating in a robin fetus he was busily sealing into a glass display mausoleum constructed from twin percolator tops. Shows me this fetus floating in formaldehyde and just as I am trying to tell him, Hey, I know someone who’ll write this up for national publication in
This Week
, he looks at me and warns me that we shouldn’t push the birth.

So I don’t know what’s possible. I’ve been trying to improve my economic situation, pounding out screenplays at the cost of one million brain cells per second when the only way to get anywhere in this town is to blow Arthur Godfrey’s cousin. But you know how it is, sweetheart—the winds of fortune don’t seem to be blowing in this poor hillbilly boy’s direction. I’d sure like to get to NY to see you and Rosalie. Maybe I can work out a deal with TWA—they’ll let me ride the baggage compartment if I clean out their reusable airsickness bags. I’m hoping to figure out some way to be there by Christmas. Meanwhile say Hi! to Rosie and give her a giant hug and kiss from her Daddy.

So my dear, the lights are going off one by one in the chandeliers of Hollywood as the dawn comes. I must go now, for if the sun hits me I will shatter like fractured glass.

Love and kisses,

Big Youth

Big Youth indeed. It occurs to Vera that Lowell’s letter is almost as crazy as the KGB receptor’s, as single-minded as the cryptobiologists’, as self-serving and loaded with meaningless rhetoric as Eighteenth District Representative Terry Blankett’s. By now, though, she’s come to accept it for what it is—Lowell’s idea of a love letter—and it’s the only one she reads twice. Then she refolds it and goes for the coffee that by this time she really needs.

In the coffee room she finds Mavis Biretta watching the coffeepot fill drip by drip. “Morning,” says Vera.