One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 34

LEILANI KLONK, dangerous young mutant, decided that few things were more inspiring than the bonding that occurred when an American family gathered around the breakfast table. Only the night before, Mom and Dad and daughter might have been fussing at one another over who had left the lid off the peanut-butter jar, might have been in disagreement about weightier issues such as whether to watch Touched by an Angel or an episode of Miracle Pets, might even have been setting snakes loose on one another and killing young women; but here at the start of a new day — well, eleven o'clock — the differences of the past could be set aside, and new harmony could be built on the old discord. Here they could plan together for the future, share new dreams, and reaffirm their mutual devotion.

Old Sinsemilla made her breakfast from twenty-seven tablets and capsules of vitamin supplements, a bottle of sparkling water, a small tub of tofu sprinkled with toasted coconut, and a banana. After slicing the unpeeled banana in half-inch circlets, she ate the peel and all, for she believed that good health could be achieved only by the consumption of whole foods as often as possible. Considering her understanding of the term whole foods, dear Mater was well advised never to touch red meat; if she prepared a hamburger, she would also have to whip up a side dish of hoof, horn, and hide.

Dr. Doom breakfasted on chamomile tea, two coddled eggs, and English muffins spread with orange marmalade. Not sharing his wife's preference for whole foods, he failed to eat the tea bags, the egg shells, the cardboard containers in which the muffins had been packaged. He was such a supernaturally neat eater that in his hands the toasted muffins left not one crumb on table or plate. He took small bites and chewed his food thoroughly, ensuring against the possibility that he would choke to death on a honking big piece of something. The best that his optimistic stepdaughter could hope for seemed to be salmonella contamination of the undercooked egg yolks.

Leilani enjoyed a dish of Shredded Wheat garnished with a sliced banana peeled and doused in chocolate milk. The doctor of doom had purchased this forbidden beverage without the tofu-eater's knowledge. Though Leilani would have preferred regular milk, she used chocolate on the cereal to see if her mother would have a cerebral aneurysm at the sight of her child ingesting this hideous poison. The taunt was wasted on Sinsemilla. Crimson-eyed, gray-faced, she languished in the morning-after slough of despond. Whatever drug she'd taken as an eye-opener had not yet delivered her into the Mary Poppins mood that she desired. She probably wouldn't be flying around under a magic umbrella, singing "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," until late afternoon.

Meanwhile, as she ate, she read a tattered copy of Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar. She had read this slim volume twice every month since she was fifteen. With each reading, the book had a different meaning for her, although to date none of the meanings had been entirely coherent. Sinsemilla believed, however, that the author represented a new step in human evolution, that he was a prophet with an urgent message to those who were further evolved than the human society that had produced them. Old Sinsemilla sensed that she was a further-evolved human, but in all modesty, she wasn't prepared to make this claim until she fully understood Brautigan's message and, in understanding, achieved her superhuman potential.

While immersed in the book, Sinsemilla was no more communicative than the tofu that quivered on her spoon, yet Dr. Doom frequently addressed her. He didn't expect a response, but seemed to be certain that his comments reached his wife on a subconscious level.

Sometimes he spoke of Tetsy, the young woman whose heart he had "burst" with a massive injection of digitoxin less than twelve hours ago and whose fate he had shared with Leilani upon returning home in the dead hours of the night. At other times he relayed to Sinsemilla and to Leilani the latest gossip and news circulating on the various Internet sites maintained by the large international community of UFO believers, which he monitored on the laptop computer that rested on the table beside his breakfast plate.

Details of the Tetsy snuff were mercifully less vivid than had been the case with other killings in the past, and the latest saucer stories were no weirder than usual. Consequently, the creepy quality of the conversation — and there was always a creepy quality to the most casual chats in this family — was provided by Dr. Doom's coy references to the passion that he had visited upon Sinsemilla during the night.

Over dinner with Micky and Mrs. D the previous evening, Leilani had said that the doom doctor was asexual. This wasn't strictly true.

He didn't chase women, ogle them, or seem to have any interest in the secondary sex characteristics that preoccupied most men and made them such endearingly manipulable creatures. If a total babe in a thong bikini walked past Preston, he wouldn't notice her unless she happened to be a UFO abductee who also carried an alien-human hybrid baby spawned during a steamy weekend of extraterrestrial lust aboard the mother ship.

Under certain circumstances, however, the doom doctor did have a passion for Sinsemilla that he — and these were the perfect words for the act — visited upon her. In a motor home, even in a large one, when a family lives on the road all year, an inevitable intimacy arises that would be stressful even if every member of the family were a saint; and the Maddoc family currently fell three saints short of that ideal composition. Even if you could avoid seeing things that you didn't want to see, you couldn't always avoid hearing them, and even if you clamped pillows over your ears at night and created an acceptable deafness, you couldn't escape knowing all sorts of things that you didn't want to know, including that Preston Maddoc could get romantically inspired only when Sinsemilla was so deeply unconscious that she might as well have been dead.

Leilani had shared a hundred nightmares' worth of creepy stuff with Micky and Mrs. D, but she hadn't been able to bring herself to mention this creepiness. Sure, old Preston qualified as a nutball's nut-ball. But he was tall, good-looking, well groomed, and financially independent, which was exactly three qualities more than required to attract women younger and even prettier than Sinsemilla; financial independence alone ought to have ensured that he would never have to settle for a drug-gobbling, electroshocked, road-kill-obsessed, moon-dancing freak who had simultaneously too much past and none at all, and who came with two disabled children. Clearly one thing that won Preston's heart was old Sinsemilla's frequent drug-induced near-comas and her willingness to allow him to use her while she lay inert and insensate and as unaware as mud — which was an arrangement you didn't want to think too much about, considering his fascination with death.

Something else also attracted Preston to Sinsemilla, a quality that no other woman could — or might want to — offer, but Leilani was not quite able to put a name to it. In truth, though she sensed the existence of this mystery at the heart of their strange relationship, she didn't often wonder about it, because she already knew too much of what bonded them and was afraid of knowing more.

So while Sinsemilla read In Watermelon Sugar, while Dr. Doom surfed the Net for the latest saucer news, while all three of them ate breakfast, and while no one mentioned the snake, Leilani made notes in her journal, using a modified form of shorthand that she'd invented and that only she could read. She wanted to complete her account of the incident with the snake while the details were still fresh in memory, but at the same time, she recorded observations about their family breakfast, including most of what Preston said.

Recently she'd been thinking about being a writer when she grew up, assuming that on the eve of her upcoming tenth birthday she was able to avoid the gift of eternal life as a nine-year-old. She hadn't given up on her plan to grow or purchase a set of fabulous hooters with which to bedazzle a nice man, but a girl couldn't rely entirely on her chest, her face, and one pretty leg. Writing fiction remained reputable work, in spite of some of the peculiar people who practiced the art. She'd read that one of the difficulties of being a writer was finding fresh material, and she'd realized that her mother and her stepfather might be a writer's gold mine if you were fortunate enough to survive them.

"This situation in Utah," Preston said, scowling at the screen of his laptop, "is highly suspicious."

On and off, he'd been talking about the blockades on all highways leading into southern Utah and the manhunt for the band of drug lords who were said to be armed like sovereign states.

"Let's never forget how in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the government kept people away from the alien-contact zone with a false story about a nerve-gas spill."

To Preston, Close Encounters of the Third Kind wasn't a science-fiction film, but a thinly disguised documentary. He believed that Steven Spielberg had been abducted by ETs as a child and was being used as an instrument to prepare human society for the imminent arrival of emissaries from the Galactic Congress.

As the doom doctor continued to mutter about the government's history of UFO cover-ups, which he believed explained the true reason for the war in Vietnam, Leilani suspected that when their motor home was repaired, they would be hitting the road for Utah. Already, UFO researchers and full-time close-encounter pilgrims like Preston were gathering at a site in Nevada, near the Utah border, in anticipation of an alien advent so spectacular that the government, even with all its resources, wouldn't be able to pass the event off as swamp gas or weather balloons, or as tobacco-industry skullduggery.

She was surprised, therefore, when a few minutes later, Preston looked up from his laptop, flushed with excitement, and declared, "Idaho. That's where it's happening, Lani. There's been a healing in Idaho. Sinsemilla, did you hear? There's been a healing in Idaho."

Old Sinsemilla either didn't hear or heard but wasn't intrigued. In Watermelon Sugar utterly enthralled her. Her lips didn't move as she read, but her delicate nostrils flared as if she detected the scent of enlightenment, and her jaw muscles clenched and unclenched as she ground her teeth on some wisdom that needed chewing.

Leilani didn't like the prospect of Idaho. It was next door to Montana, where Lukipela had "gone to the stars."

She expected that Preston would haul them to Montana when her birthday approached, next February. After all, if aliens had beamed Luki up to glory in Montana, logic would require a visit to the point of his ascension on the eve of Leilani's tenth, if she had not been miraculously made whole before then.

Besides, the symmetry of it would appeal to Dr. Doom: Leilani and Luki together in death as in life, Lucifer and Heavenly Flower feeding the same worms, one grave for two siblings, brother and sister bonded for eternity in a braiding of bones. Preston, after all, had a sentimental side.

If Montana was six months away, she might have time to prepare an escape or a defense. But if they were in Idaho next week, and if old Sinsemilla wanted to cross into Montana to see where Luki had supposedly met the aliens, Preston might be tempted to bring brother and sister together ahead of schedule. She didn't have an escape plan yet. Or a strategy to defend herself. And she wasn't ready to die.