Pandora by Holly Hollander

How I Had Breakfast in Bed and Received Visitors

Somehow I rolled out from under the table and got up. Maybe it was quiet—I don’t know. My ears were ringing so bad I couldn’t have heard a garage band from the front row.

I stared at the wall, because some way I’d gotten the idea it had been blown down. It hadn’t, and if it had I don’t think I’d have been standing there; but at the moment it seemed like a miracle to see it where it had always been.

I was all alone there in the chem lab, with so many books and so much broken glass and stinking chemicals all around that I could hardly walk. I don’t suppose I would have balanced very good even if the floor had been clean. I was wearing my boots, and I could feel blood sloshing in the right one.

Just about when I got to the door, people started screaming—or maybe it was only that my ears had quieted down to where I could hear them.

Outside was a mess. Nobody had gotten there yet—no fire trucks, no ambulances, no cops. There were people all over the ground—I thought a hundred of them were dead at least. There were others staggering around like me and half the time stepping on them. There was blood all over—some alongside people where it ought to be, and some out on the grass as if it had dropped from the sky, which maybe it had. I tripped over something and looked down, and it was a shoe, a man’s brown shoe; it had laces and they were still tied, but there was no foot in it.

There were people giving first aid, and a lot more who were trying to but had forgotten anything they ever knew about it. I saw one man working over another man who looked better than he did. There were maybe a couple dozen people who were hysterical—most of them were women, but some were kids and some were men. There were dazed people wandering around for reasons they didn’t understand, looking for something that made no sense; and after a while I realized I was one of them.

Then the sirens started. I don’t know who got to the high school first, but the first thing I saw was the hook-and-ladder. There are some little trees about as tall as a good basketball player out front, and I remember having some crazy idea that the firemen would use the ladders to climb them and get bodies down. I don’t know what crazy idea the firemen themselves had; maybe they just brought along their hook-and-ladder thinking it might be useful, the way you drop a pair of scissors into the basket when you’re packing for a picnic.

So all of a sudden there were guys in white coats running around carrying stretchers, and firemen with stretchers and aid kits, too, only the firemen had on slickers, and those terrific hats they always have. Lots of people were finding each other: “Bob! Oh, Bob!” Sob, sob. “Betty! You’re okay!” Pant, pant. “Billy! Billy!” “Let go, Mom!”

Just about then I caught sight of Aladdin Blue. Something had happened to his shirt, and he was knotting a rag around some other guy’s hand. I ran to him and grabbed him and hollered, “I thought you were dead!”

He said, “You’re hurt,” and bum leg and all hauled me over to an ambulance. A couple of guys there cut open my jeans and bandaged my leg, working so fast I hardly knew what they’d done. Next minute we were swaying along, going like hell and hitting every chuckhole on Main Street. Somebody’d shot me up, and I was dizzy from it. A woman on one of the other stretchers said, “Where’re they taking us?” and I said, to the hospital, meaning Barton Community Hospital.

Only we never got there. We just went on and on, “Rrrr, rrrrr, rrrrrrr … ,” until I thought we had to be in Wisconsin, or maybe Canada.

I’ll spare you the rest of the bloody details. There were lots of people hurt worse than I was. It turned out that B.C.H. had been full, or maybe they were saving it for the people who might really die or something, and they’d taken us to Palestine, which isn’t where you think but a suburb closer to Chicago than Barton is. The emergency ward there patched me up some more—stitches and about two pints of blood this time instead of just gauze and pads—and told me I’d been cut by flying glass (which I’d already figured out for myself) and not zapped by shrapnel. That was the first time I heard of shrapnel. Then they tucked me away in one of those nice cozy hospital beds that are about five feet off the floor and eighteen inches wide, and gave me a pill, and after a while I went right to sleep.

When I woke up it was morning; and believe it or not for ten minutes or so I wasn’t sure what had happened or where I was. I felt like I’d had terrible dreams all night, but whenever I tried to put a finger on them, they turned out to be something that had really happened, like my throwing my arms around Aladdin Blue and getting my blood on him. I felt, too, that somehow something had changed—that my old world had stopped while I was sitting behind the card table, and a new one had started when I came to under one of the lab tables; and I would never in my whole life ever be able to get back to my old world again. I kept telling myself it was crazy, and it’s only about now that I’ve come to realize that it was absolutely true.

I was in a private room with nobody around to talk to me or answer questions. Instead of medicine, all I could smell was flowers; there was a big bouquet on the table beside my bed. My head hurt and my leg hurt, but I couldn’t do anything about them and I wanted something that would take my mind off them. There was a TV up almost at the ceiling, looking down as you might say at me in my bed; but I didn’t know how to switch it on. I kept thinking how lucky it was I’d ridden into town in the Caddy with Elaine, because if I hadn’t I’d have been worried to death about Sidi, and the way it was I knew Bill would take care of him till I got back. Then I started thinking about everybody I thought might’ve been at the Fair and wondering if they were all right. Aladdin Blue was okay or pretty close to it, because I’d seen him. But what about Elaine? Uncle Dee? Les? Megan? Larry?

Then it hit me. What had blown up must have been Pandora’s Box; and if that was right, Larry’d been right on top of it.

After about half an hour a nurse came in. She sure wasn’t like the beautiful nurses you see on the tube, but she wasn’t a battle-ax either, and she gave me a little smile. “We’re awake! Could we see someone now? We have a visitor.”

I thought it was going to be Aladdin Blue, so I said yes, but the truth was I’d have seen anybody. I also asked if there was any chance of getting some breakfast.

The nurse said she was sure there was, and a minute later a young cop I’d seen around Barton once or twice came in. Uniform, gun, the whole nine, except instead of wearing his hat he had it with his clipboard. He smiled and told me he was Officer Ritter. Blue eyes and crew-cut blond hair made him look like a handsome storm trooper. I told him I was Patient Hollander.

He sat down and laid his hat on my table and fixed up his clipboard on his knee. “I’ve got your name already, and your age. Where were you when it happened?”

“Why is it you that’s asking me? Aren’t you going to call in the Bomb Squad from Chicago?”

“We already have,” he said, “but that’s just for technical advice on the bomb.”

“Who’s we?”

I expected him to tighten up, but he didn’t. “The Barton Police and the Pool County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Aren’t you going to call in the FBI or something?” He shook his head. “Only if we uncover evidence indicating that a federal law’s been violated.”

“Maybe I could pray in school.”

“I wish you would,” he said straight-faced. “I’d appreciate it. Where were you when it happened?”

So I told him just like I’ve told you, but in a whole lot more detail because he kept going over it and over it and asking screwy questions like how far was my table from the window, and had Blue flinched before the bomb went off. I said how could he have flinched when he didn’t know there was a bomb, and he read me back all that stuff Blue had reeled off about Pandora before the explosion.

“Okay,” I said, “you got me. Or anyway you got him because I shot off my mouth. But do you think he’d be dumb enough to go around talking like that if there was a bomb and he planted it?”

Straight-faced again, he said, “I don’t know. Would he?”

“Heck, no. Listen, nobody’s ever told me—is my mother all right? Elaine Hollander?”

He studied his clipboard. “She must be. She’s not on the injured list.”

“And she’s not dead?”

He shook his head. “So far the only identified fatalities are Drexel K. Munroe and Lawrence L. Lief.”

“So far?”

He looked grim, like it might actually be getting to him a little. “A lot of the injured are hurt worse than you are, Miss Hollander.”

“I’m hip.”

Just then the nurse came in with my breakfast tray: coffee, vitamin, fake orange juice, small bowl of oatmeal, tablespoon of cold scrambled eggs, and half a slice of toast. Whoopee. “I’ll let you eat now,” Ritter told me. “Somebody will come by to see you again later.”

“Don’t be a party pooper. Stay and join me.”

It was too late—he was halfway to the door. The truth was I had a lot more questions to ask him; I think he must have seen them coming, and that was why he beat it. I decided next time I’d ask questions first, and if I didn’t get answers I wouldn’t give any.

And by golly I stuck to it, too. Next time turned out to be some kind of plainclothes detective—I never got it straight where he was from, maybe Illinois Bureau of Investigation, which is a ripoff of the FBI, exactly like it sounds. He wasn’t giving any info and wasn’t getting any info, and pretty soon he went away.

Lunch was peachy keen—a li’l square of broiled fish, the cutest tiny paper cup of tartar sauce, some boiled carrots, two slices of white bread, a pat of margarine, and a glass of milk. I could have cried.

After lunch came proof positive that Elaine Hollander, also known as Mommy and my Aunt Elaine, had come through with flying colors, plus talking a blue streak. “My darling, my poor little darling, you’re conscious! Do you like my flowers? I was here half the night, did they tell you? How are you feeling? Isn’t it just too awful, too terribly awfully terrible!”

“Right on,” I said. Then—first things first—“You got a roll of Life Savers in that little bag? Chiclets? Breath mints? Anything?”

“No, dearest, nothing but cigarettes, and I know you’re trying to stop smoking.”

“Gimme a cigarette,” I told her. “I’m going to eat it. As soon as you go, I’m going to eat the flowers, too.” I looked at them when I said that, and all of a sudden I didn’t feel funny or even hungry anymore.

“Well, you really shouldn’t, you know. I shouldn’t either. It’s terribly hard on the complexion.”

She lit me up. It was my first in three days, and though I’ve never been a heavy smoker (half a pack a day was my limit at the worst), it tasted pretty damn good. I took a big drag. “Elaine, where’d you get it?”

“Get what, dearest?” She couldn’t be that dumb. She was playing for time.

“That goddamn box. By now they must have asked you fifty times already.”

“You don’t think it was the box, too, Holly dearest?” She sounded hurt. Sounding hurt’s one of her very top talents, and she was so good I nearly felt sorry for her myself.

“Certainly it was in the box. It had to be in the box. Where the hell else could it have been?”

“Anywhere else.” Elaine waved her hand so her rings made a little rainbow dazzle on the wall. “Underneath the platform, or in that man Lief’s tool box. Personally, I think that man was wearing a belt of dynamite, just waiting for a chance to blow up where everyone would see him.”

“Larry Lief?” I couldn’t believe this.

“The other man—the one who won. You must have seen him raise his arms just before the bang … .”

“No, I didn’t,” I told her. I could smell her perfume over everything; over the flowers, over the smoke from our cigarettes, and the hospital smell. And somehow it was shrinking everything, bringing the bomb and the broken glass and the blood and death and confusion down to the level of what-can-I-wear-for-bridge.

“Well, he did. I was watching and I saw him, and hundreds of other people must have seen him, too.”

“Elaine, it had to be in the box.”

She shook her head positively. “Holly, dearest, that box hadn’t been opened in a great many years. If there had been a bomb in it, it would’ve gone off long ago. Or it wouldn’t work anymore.”

“I don’t think they do that, Elaine. They just sit there waiting. Where’d you get it?”

“I really must be running now.” She got up, smoothing her clothes. “On Wells, I believe. Or perhaps it wasn’t—it was a shop I’d never been to before. Bill might know … .

“Holly dearest, you can’t imagine what a state everything’s in. All those valuable antiques, and everyone just swarming over them.”

Elaine bustled out. I took a couple more drags on the butt and was grinding it to death in a little tin ashtray just as the nurse came in again. She smiled and said, “Do we think we could stand one more visitor? Our uncle’s here.”