J. Lennon - See You in Paradise

“What,” I said, “what!!”

“We could see your blood and stuff!” This was Chester.

Luann said, “Daddy, that was so gross.”

“Like an x-ray?” I said.

Chester was laughing hysterically now. “Like it got chopped off!”

“Oh my God, Jerry,” Gretchen said, her hand on her heart.

My arm was fine, though. In fact, it felt kind of good — wherever the arm had just been, it was about five degrees warmer than this breezy little glade.

“Kids,” I said, “stand behind me.” Because I didn’t want them to see what I was about to do. Eventually we’d get over this little taboo and enjoy watching each other walk super slowly through the portal, revealing our pulsing innards, but for now I didn’t want to freak anyone out, myself least of all. When the kids were safely behind me, Gretchen holding them close, I stuck my head through.

I don’t know what I was expecting — Middle Earth, or Jupiter, or Tuscany, or what. But I could never in a million years have guessed the truth. I pulled my head out.

“It’s the vacant lot behind the public library,” I said.

I think that even then, that very day, we knew the portal was screwed up. It was only later, after it was obvious, that Gretchen and I started saying out loud the strange things we noticed on the family trip downtown. For one thing, the books we got at the library — obviously that’s the first place we went — weren’t quite right. The plots were all convoluted and the paper felt funny. The bus lines were not the way we remembered, with our usual bus, the 54, called the 24; and the local transit authority color scheme had been changed to crimson and ochre. Several restaurants had different names, and the one guy we bumped into whom we knew — my old college pal Andy — recoiled in apparent horror when he saw us. It was just, you know, off.

But the really creepy thing was what Chester said that night as we were tucking him in to bed — and how I miss those days now, when Chester was still practically a baby and needed us to hug and kiss him goodnight — he just started laughing there in the dark, and Gretchen said what is it, honey, and he said that guy with the dog head.

Dog head? we asked him.

Yeah, that guy, remember him? He walked past us on the sidewalk. He didn’t have a regular head, he had a dog head.

Well, you know, Chester was always saying crazy nonsense back then. He still does, of course, but that’s different — it used to be cute and funny. So we convinced ourselves he was kidding. But later, when we remembered that — hell, we got chills. Everything from there on in would only get weirder, but it’s that dog head, Chester remembering the dog head, that freaks me out. I guess the things that scare you are the things that are almost normal.

Anyway, that first time, everything seemed to go off more or less without a hitch. After the library we walked in the park, went out for dinner, enjoyed the summer weather. Then we went back to the vacant lot, found the portal, and went home. It’s tricky to make out the return portal when you’re not looking for it; the shimmering is fainter and of course there’s no set of stone steps leading up to it or anything. Anybody watching would just have seen us disappearing one by one. In an old Disney live-action movie (you know, like Flubber or Witch Mountain ) there would be a hobo peering at us from the gutter, and then, when we vanished, looking askance at his bottle of moonshine and resolvedly tossing it over his shoulder.

So that night, we felt fine. We all felt fine. We felt pretty great, in fact; it had been an exciting day. Gretchen and I didn’t get it on, it was that time of the month; but we snuggled a lot. We decided to make it a weekend tradition, at least on nice days — get up, read the paper, get dressed, then out to the portal for a little adventure.

Because by the third time it was obvious that it would be an adventure; it turns out the portal wasn’t permanently tied to the vacant lot downtown. I don’t know if this was usual or what. But I pictured it flapping in the currents of space and time, sort of like a windsock, stuck fast at one end and whipping randomly around at the other. I still have no idea why it dropped us off so close to home (or so apparently close to home) that first time — I suppose it was still trying to be normal. Like an old guy in denial about the onset of dementia.

The second time we went through, we thought we were in old-time England, on some heath or something — in fact, after I put my head in to check, I sent Gretchen back to the house to fill a basket with bread and fruit and the like, for a picnic, and I told Luann to go to the garage to get the flag off her bike, to mark the site of the return portal. Clever, right? The weather was fine, and we were standing in a landscape of rolling grassy hills, little blue meandering creeks, and drifting white puffy clouds. We could see farms and villages in every direction, but no cities, no cars or planes or smog. We hiked down into the nearest village and got a bit of a shock — nobody was around, no people, or animals for that matter — the place was abandoned. And we all got the strong feeling that the whole world was abandoned, too — that we were the only living creatures in it. I mean, there weren’t even any bugs. It was lonesome as hell. We went home after an hour and ate our picnic back in the clearing.

The third time we went through, we ended up in this crazy city — honestly, it was too much. Guys selling stuff, people zipping around in hovercars, drunks staggering in the streets, cats and dogs and these weirdly intelligent-looking animals that were sort of like deer but striped and half as large. Everybody wore hats — the men seemed to favor these rakish modified witch-hat things with a floppy brim, and women wore a kind of collapsed cylinder, like a soufflé. Nobody seemed to notice us, they were busy, busy, busy. And the streets! None of them was straight. It was like a loud, crowded, spaghetti maze, and for about half an hour we were terrified that we’d gotten lost and would never find the portal again, which miraculously had opened into the only uninhabited dark alley in the whole town. (We’d planted our bicycle flag between two paving stones, and almost lost it to a thing that was definitely not a rat.) Chester demanded a witch hat, but the only place we found that sold them wouldn’t take our money, and we didn’t speak the language anyway, which was this whacked-out squirrel chatter. Oh, yeah, and everybody had a big jutting chin. I mean everybody. When we finally got home that night the four of us got into a laughing fit about the chins — I don’t know what it was, they just struck us as wildly hilarious.

Annoying as that trip was, I have to admit now that it was the best time we ever had together, as a family I mean. Even when we were freaked out, we were all on the same page — we were a team. I suppose it’s perfectly normal for this to change, I mean, the kids have to strike out on their own someday, right? They have to develop their own interests and their own way of doing things, or else they’d never leave, god forbid. But I miss that time. And just like every other asshole who fails to appreciate what he’s got while he still has it, all I ever did was complain.

I’m thinking here of the fourth trip through the portal. When I stuck my head through for a peek, all I saw was fog and all I heard was clanking, and I pictured some kind of waterfront, you know, with the moored boats bumping up against each other and maybe a nice seafood place tucked in among the warehouses and such. I guess I’d gotten kind of reckless. I led the family through and after about fifteen seconds I realized that the fog was a hell of a lot thicker than I thought it was, and that it kind of stung the eyes and nose, and that the clanking was far too regular and far too deep and loud to be the result of some gentle ocean swell.