The wedding was being held in an enormous field on a farm outside the city. How I got invited I've no clue. I didn't know either the bride or the groom. In fact, I hadn't recognized a single face since I arrived. Probably someone felt sorry for me and begged an invitation on my behalf in the hope that I'd meet someone, but I seemed to be emitting "keep away" waves because no one approached me except for this one red-headed man who introduced himself to me as Martin Allah King.
He claimed to have known Jean-Paul Sartre. I assumed he meant that he knew Sartre through his work, but no, Martin claimed he knew him personally. He told me how Sartre had discovered existentialism behind an old chest of drawers in a furnished flat in Teaneck, New Jersey where they'd been neighbors for about a year. Existentialism was covered in dust bunnies, but Sartre recognized it right away. "That was his genius," Martin explained. He told me how Sartre had gone on to win the 1966 World Series with a broken bat single to right. He told me Sartre liked pistachio ice cream, but only the faux green kind you get in Chinese restaurants. He insisted on having Simone de Beauvoir give him a vigorous scalp massage with tea tree oil in preparation for a heavy bout of thinking and got quite "pissy" when she wasn't in the mood for it. "Oi vey, you should have heard the row they had then!" Perhaps, most improbably of all, Sartre had a passion for collecting stuffed penguins.
Well, if my luck could be embodied in a person, it would be Martin Allah King. I made my escape when he offered to get me another drink, some elaborate contraption with paper umbrellas and gerbera daisies I'd forgotten I was even holding. I beat my retreat and headed for the bathroom on the second floor. I tapped on the door and when I heard someone answer, "Come in, we've been waiting" I entered, defying all the normal rules of bathroom logic, as well as my own instinctual modesty.
Instead of the usual bathroom I found myself in a long narrow hospital ward. Jean Rhys waved weakly but cheerfully to me from a bed along the left wall. A nurse took me by the arm. She led me between the double row of invalid beds to the end of the aisle where a doctor stood holding the largest needle I'd ever seen in my life. "You're just in time," he said. "We're administering the medication now. Thank god we didn't have to send out the cavalry again." He ostentatiously prepped the syringe, tapping out pink air bubbles. "This won't hurt a bit," he assured me. And for once, it didn't.
They let me out of the door far above the earth. I was falling through the clouds, counting down from a thousand like they told me to when I could pull the rip cord. Down below, it looked like the circus was in town. I could see the ferris wheel, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the funhouse. Even the screams of terror coming from the direction of the rollercoaster sounded playful. The line for the funnel cake wasn't long at all. If only it didn't take me too long to fall.
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