The Yggyssey (4 page)

The Hermione Hotel has a very nice roof. It is all done in terra cotta tile, and there is a little parapet wall all around, so you won't fall to your death. I like to go up there. There's an excellent view in all directions, and usually a nice breeze.

In the middle of the roof there is a stucco structure, consisting of a half-dozen rooms on either side, with doors opening onto a corridor that is open on both ends. It looks sort of like a hotel hallway, or maybe a motel. The rooms are small, about eight foot square, with tiny bathrooms. These were rooms for servants in the old days. People used to travel with their personal maids, or valets, and when they stayed at the Hermione, this was where those servants
would sleep. They are the cheapest rooms in the hotel, obviously—and most of them are vacant, except for a few where extremely old ladies live. And also Kitty Nebelstreif.

Kitty Nebelstreif is one of the good things about the Harmonious Reality School. She is the visiting art teacher. Once a week, she comes to give art classes. Of course, art is a big part of the curriculum at Harmonious Reality, and all the teachers, in all the classes, have us kids doing all kinds of painting and drawing and making sculptures out of clay, and papier-mâché, and nailing pieces of wood together—also gluing pasta and seashells and pebbles to hunks of cardboard, and making mobiles out of coat hangers and lengths of yarn, and hanging cutouts, and spools and Ping-Pong balls from them, and everything slathered with poster paint, and sparkles. But Kitty Nebelstreif tells us about things like perspective, and color theory, and vanishing points, and light and shadow, and line and mass and shading, and reads to us from
Lives of the Artists
by Giorgio Vasari. In other words, she is an actual real art teacher.

The rest of the art instruction at Harmonious Reality is more stress-free, free-expression, do-whatever-you-want stuff, and whatever you make, whatever goopy, bloppy, drippy, sparkly thing, the teachers will all say ooh and aah and tell you what a wonderful thing you did. I'm not saying it isn't fun whacking away with great big brushes dripping with thick paint and then sprinkling sparkles all over whatever it is—but the results get boring after a while, and there is no way to tell if you're making progress.

Kitty Nebelstreif brings in plaster casts of classical sculptures and has us try to draw them. Or she takes us outside and has us try to draw trees and vegetation. It's hard, and it's frustrating, and stress-making, and it's optional like everything else at the school, so only a few kids do it.

Kitty Nebelstreif is the aunt of Dr. Nathan Pedwee, the founder of the school, which is why they even have her there. She used to work in the art department of one of the movie studios. When she isn't teaching us art, she is one of the old ladies waiting to die on the roof of the Hermione Hotel.

Sometimes I visit her in her tiny room and she serves me cups of ginger tea, which she makes on a tiny hot plate.

Kitty Nebelstreif has lived in the Hermione for years and years and knows everything that goes on. I was visiting her—it was a nice day, and we were having our tea and some of these crescent-shaped almond cookies, the ones with powdered sugar, at one of the wrought-iron tables on the roof—when she said, "La Brea Woman seems to have disappeared."

Of course, Kitty Nebelstreif knew all about the hotel ghosts.

"You mean you haven't seen her lately?" I asked.

"Nobody has. She doesn't seem to be anywhere."

"That's odd," I said. I realized that I hadn't seen the ghost of the only human found in the La Brea Tar Pits for a while myself. "She's usually all over the hotel."

"Just so," Kitty Nebelstreif said. "Something funny is going on."

"Do ghosts take off and go elsewhere?" I asked.

"Except for that Billy the Phantom Bellboy who visits your friends Neddie and Seamus, I've never heard of one who does," Kitty Nebelstreif said.

"Maybe she's just keeping to herself," I said. "Though that wouldn't be like her. She's very friendly."

"It's a mystery," Kitty Nebelstreif said.

As I've said, I am not an expert on what ghosts do and do not do. What I know about them is what I have picked up from being around them. Chase, my ghost bunny friend, said more or less the same thing when I asked her.

"Asking me about the habits of ghosts in general is like expecting someone from Argentina to know the principal crops and exports of Paraguay just because they happen to come from the same continent," she said. "Which are principally cotton, tobacco, and to a lesser extent coffee and sugar cane. Paraguay also exports cottonseed, soybean, peanut, coconut palm, castor bean and sunflower oils. And, now that you mention it, I haven't seen La Brea Woman around for the past few days."

"So what do you think happened?" I asked.

"No idea," Chase said. "But, you know, there are a lot more ghosts here than you have ever seen, or know about. Dozens and dozens of ghosts. It's like a whole town of ghosts. You just see the ones who don't mind being seen. La Brea Woman might have just taken up with ghosts in some other part of the hotel, or maybe she went off visiting, or moved."

"Do ghosts do that?" I asked.

"Again, no idea," Chase said. "Did you know they are cleaning up the restaurant?"

There used to be a restaurant in the hotel, but it was shut down and locked up years ago. Of course, I have let myself in with my master key, and sometimes fix myself a hot chocolate in the kitchen, and do my homework at one of the tables.

"They're reopening it?" I asked.

"Not exactly," Chase said. "What I heard was that Gypsy Boots is going to use the place to give some kind of health food cooking class."

If you want to know what's going on, ask a ghost. They hear everything. It turned out my own mother was behind the restaurant cleanup and the cooking class. She, along with some other mothers of students at the Harmonious Reality School, had arranged for Gypsy Boots to give a series of lectures and cooking demonstrations, and at the end they were going to cook and serve a health food banquet in the restaurant, and charge a big fee to attend. The profits would be donated to the Harmonious Reality School Parents Association to pay for things like ... health food cooking classes. It all sounded completely stupid, especially since, as far as I understood it, Gypsy Boots thought you should eat practically everything raw and uncooked.

I saw that guy, Ken Ahara, again. He was in the garden of the Hermione Hotel, creeping around in the bushes. He had a sort of box with a shoulder strap attached, and a rubber tube coming from it with a rubber bulb in the middle. It looked a little like the thing in the doctor's office they use to check your blood pressure. He was sticking the end of the rubber hose here and there, and squeezing the rubber bulb.

I walked up to him. He was halfway under a bush. "What are you doing?" I asked him.

"Collecting specimens," he said. Then he looked up.

"Oh! You're the little girl I met at Clifton's Cafeteria, with Mr. Billy."

I just love it when people call me "little girl." "And you're the guy who studies ghosts but never saw one before that day," I said.

"Well, I hope to see many more," Ken Ahara said, standing up and dusting off the knees of his Joe College khaki trousers. "Mr. Billy says this is the ghostiest place he has ever seen."

So, Billy has thrown in with the ghost experts at Cal Tech,
I thought. I should have known he would not be able to resist the stinky cheese lab.

"Have you ever seen a ghost here, young lady?" Ken Ahara asked.

I like being called "young lady" almost as well as being called "little girl." "Asking this young
woman
about ghosts is like asking someone from Argentina about the principal products and exports of Paraguay," I said.

"You mean like cotton, tobacco, coffee, sugar cane, and cottonseed, soybean, peanut, coconut palm, castor bean, and sunflower oils?" Ken Ahara asked.

"What is that gimmick you're using?" I asked him.

"It's a sniffer," Ken Ahara said. "Same as the gas company uses. See, there's a gauge on top, and it's calibrated to register any ectoplasmic traces it picks up."

"Picking any up?" I asked.

"Not so far," Ken Ahara said. "I might do better in the interior of the building, but Mr. Glanvill, the manager, said I may not sniff inside."

"So what do you think of a ghost who suddenly stops showing up in her regular haunting spots?" I asked.

"It's really rare for that to happen," Ken Ahara said. "Most ghosts keep to a fairly regular schedule and stay in one haunting territory, very often one specific spot."

"Is there anything that would make a ghost go away altogether?"

"Well, if it was exorcised, or someone called in a professional de-ghoster. In time past, there was a fair amount of that. People didn't want ghosts around."

"They didn't? Why not?"

"Well, to this day," Ken Ahara said, "people are frequently uneasy with ghosts. I think it may be because they feel ghosts can walk in on them in the bathroom whenever they want."

"Ewwww."

"But they don't take into account that there are always mirrors in bathrooms. Ghosts dislike mirrors."

"That's true," I lied. "They find it unnerving not to be able to see their reflections—makes them feel sort of ... dead. And if you're a ghost, you can never know if you have spinach stuck in your teeth unless someone tells you. By the way, my name is Yggdrasil Birnbaum. I'll let you get on with your sniffing."

I left Ken Ahara crawling around under the bushes. Of course, he was all wrong about the mirrors. Rudolph Valentino spends hours looking into one and combing his hair.

There is a regular hotel-type desk or counter in the lobby, but there is never anyone standing behind it. People who live in the hotel just go behind the counter to get their mail out of the little cubbyholes, or to get to the office of Mr. Glanvill, the manager.

The person who does most of the actual work around the hotel is Mr. Mangabay. There are a couple of old ladies who come in and run vacuum cleaners up and down the halls, but he does everything else. He takes care of the gardens, fixes the plumbing and wiring, runs errands, collects packages, picks up and delivers laundry, and does tailoring and last-minute repairs in his little room across from the elevator. The door to his room is always partially open, and you can hear his radio playing, always tuned to a hillbilly music station.