Falling Platypus - Chapter 7

“I’ll be damned.”
—the author

“What had started as an innocent hijacking had turned into a
hornets’ nest and a spider’s tangled web.”
—the author

Marilyrilarilyn welcomed us from atop her sedan chair. “Hello!” she said, and waved. The two who’d escorted us bowed before her and stood to the sides, with their spears firmly planted in the dirt.

“It’s such a pleasure to see you,” she said. “Please, come up, there’s lots of room in my sedan chair.”

She unrolled a rope-and-plank ladder and we climbed, first Serena Mayfield, then me. Marilyrilarilyn helped us into the se­dan with one hand.

She was right: there was lots of room up here. Besides her seat, which was wide enough for three and presumably doubled as a bed, and the seats opposite where we sat, there were two wooden crates—the first sealed and the second opened, full of boxes of crackers—a water cooler and replacement jugs, an ice chest with a head of lettuce sitting on top, a cook-stove with a single burner and a tea kettle puffing away contentedly, and a stack of steamy romance novels. Gay romance novels.

She casually hid those under a pillow.

“I was just about to make lunch,” she said, filling a china teapot with water from the kettle. “If you’d care to join me, it would be my pleasure.”

“Absolutely,” Serena Mayfield said. “But the pleasure is ours. It is such an honor to be here. To meet you!”

Marilyrilarilyn smiled benevolently. “Thank you,” she said.

“I am such a fan of your work. I couldn’t believe it when I heard you were here in Africa at the same time as me. I’m Serena Mayfield, by the way,” she added, and she and Marilyrilarilyn shook hands.

“Serena Mayfield?” Marilyrilarilyn said. “Of course! I knew I recognized your face from somewhere.” She poured herself and Serena Mayfield a cup of hot water each.

“Are we not having tea?” I asked. “I mean, um. I notice there is no tea in that hot water.”

“Too many calories,” Marilyrilarilyn confided. She let the escape of a question pass without comment. “But I suppose if you’d like flavoring, you can always use a bit of lettuce leaf.”

She and Serena Mayfield clinked glasses. Marilyrilarilyn tutted. “Fancy this. The world’s smartest woman and the world’s most beautiful woman in Africa at the same time, sharing tea on safari.”

“I can scarcely believe it myself,” Serena Mayfield said, and almost giggled.

Marilyrilarilyn turned to face me. “I’m sorry, we haven’t been introduced yet,” she said.

“Oh, I’m nobody special,” I said.

“He used to be a human vending machine,” Serena Mayfield explained. I’d told her my story during the ride from the Wheel the day before.

“Really? How fascinating,” Marilyrilarilyn said. “I’ve never met one of them before. I once met a human jukebox. That’s kind of the same idea. So, how does it work?”

She poked me in a few places to see if anything came out. I grunted.

Serena Mayfield explained.

“How does the smartest woman in the world not know that?” I wanted to ask, but it was a question, so I bit my tongue, even if Marilyrilarilyn herself seemed to ask a fair number of questions without upsetting her nerves.

“Would you like to sit out on the balcony?” Marilyrilarilyn asked us. She poured me a cup of hot water.

“Yes, please,” Serena Mayfield said. “Africa is simply the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.”

Marilyrilarilyn reached between us and brushed the curtains aside, revealing that, behind the cushions on which we sat, there was a set of wooden steps leading to the head of the elephant. The “bal­cony”.

“What an interesting mountain,” Marilyrilarilyn commented, as if seeing Mount Commie for the first time.

“Haven’t you seen it before?” I asked, surprised.

“Well, no,” Marilyrilarilyn admitted, looking away from the mountain and down at her “tea”. “I was rather absorbed with my reading.”

I choked on my hot water.

“We jumped out of a helicopter over it yesterday,” Serena Mayfield said. She set down her tea and helped Marilyrilarilyn move the cushions so we could reach the steps. “It really is spec­tacular.”

“Is it Kilimanjaro?” Marilyrilarilyn asked.

“It’s Mount Commie,” I said.

“Mount Commie? I’ve never heard of that before. Lots of interesting things to learn, aren’t there?”

* * *

We climbed the steps to the elephant’s head and sat in the wooden folding chairs Marilyrilarilyn brought out. “I’ll just fix up lunch,” she said. “You two relax and enjoy the safari.”

“Have you noticed she doesn’t have a problem with ques­tions after all?” I asked Serena Mayfield when Marilyrilarilyn had gone.

“Shh!” she urged. “I’m sure she’s just being polite.”

“How do you like your hot water?” I pressed.

“It’s refreshing,” Serena Mayfield said.

“I’d love to read one of those books she has under her pil­low.”

Serena Mayfield eyed me for a moment. “Really?” she said. “I wouldn’t have guessed that was your style.”

“It’s not,” I said, and set my cup of hot water down on the balcony railing. “The point is, this whole safari seems a little bit… different.”

“You think she’s…” Serena Mayfield lowered her voice. “Crazy,” she whispered.

“It’s crossed my mind,” I said. “You know how it goes. There’s a fine line between madness and genius. You know how it goes.”

Serena Mayfield sipped her tea. Then she said: “You can think whatever you like. I think she’s wonderful.”

“Here we are!” Marilyrilarilyn said triumphantly, walking unsteadily up the steps with a silver platter balancing on one hand, above her head. She handed us each a white china plate. On each plate sat a single saltine cracker. On each cracker sat a single leaf of lettuce.

“Bon appetit!” Marilyrilarilyn said, and sat down in her chair.

Serena Mayfield and I looked at our plates. At the single cracker with the single leaf of lettuce. I shrugged and ate the whole thing in one bite. Serena Mayfield made hers last three.

Marilyrilarilyn had only taken one nibble before she set her plate down. She was holding her cup of hot water with both hands and looking at the view, although actually, her eyes seemed pretty blank and she looked spaced out.

“I’m wishing to know what she’s thinking about,” I stated aloud.

“I’m curious as well,” Serena Mayfield agreed.

Marilyrilarilyn snapped back to reality. “Huh?” she said. “Oh. I was just thinking about some questions readers gave me before I went on vacation. I’ll have such a lot of columns to write.” She smiled, and picked up her plate and had another nib­ble of cracker.

“I’m feeling mighty hungry,” I ventured. “I’m curious if it would be impolite to ask for seconds.”

“Please, help yourself,” Marilyrilarilyn said. “Everything you need is in the sedan chair.”

“I’ll go with him,” Serena Mayfield said, and we both went inside. “Okay, I see what you mean,” she said to me, pulling the curtain closed behind us.

“Thank you!” I said. I shook a handful of crackers out of the box and scoffed them down. Through a mouthful of food, I asked: “Kvucka?”

I swallowed with difficulty in a suddenly dry mouth and picked the lettuce up off the ice chest. I looked inside. Two more lettuces. I closed the lid again.

“If we’re going to be here for a few days, I hope someone else has some real food,” I said.

“I’ll see if Marilyrilarilyn would like any more hot water,” Serena Mayfield said.

She went back to the balcony and returned with all of our dishes. “No,” she said. “And I told her you and I had to do some­thing on the ground. But she invited us to dinner.”

“And you said?”

“Questions!”

“I’m curious as to what you said.”

“I said yes,” Serena Mayfield said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t eat before we go.”

* * *

We had to ask around, but in the end we found a sympathetic driver who had a box of chocolate bars in the back of his ve­hicle.

“Hop on in and take a couple,” he said. “And if you’re up at the crack of dawn, you can have beans for breakfast with us.”

“Much appreciated,” I told him, slipping a William Tell Chocolocowitz up my sleeve to go with the others in each of my pockets.

* * *

The safari stopped for the night at a waterhole. Mari­lyrilarilyn’s handlers and drivers, who ran ahead with rifles and bush-beating sticks, scared off whatever native wildlife had been there. Then they pitched camp and Marilyrilarilyn appeared at the window of her sedan chair. The plank and rope ladder rolled down, and then, carefully, one foot at a time, she de­scended.

As her first slipper touched the dirt, the two handlers who’d escorted us appeared and gave the cry: “Marilz on the ground!”

The camp echoed the cry: “Marilz on the ground!”

Marilyrilarilyn smiled. “It’s like a family,” she told us, taking each of us under an arm, even though she was shorter than both of us. Her dark hair showed no trace of gray, but I guessed she was old enough to be my mother.

We sat at the largest cook fire and ate whatever the safari chef cooked for us. Even Marilyrilarilyn ate more than a cracker-topped-with-lettuce’s worth.

“She hasn’t come down in days!” one of the handlers whis­pered to me while Marilyrilarilyn and Serena Mayfield were ab­sorbed in conversation. “Whatever you did, strangers, thank you.”

* * *

Serena Mayfield spent the rest of our time with the safari with Marilyrilarilyn, which was disappointing to me, because I’d been hoping for a repeat of the day we jumped out of the heli­copter over Mount Commie. It was not to be. In fact, it was never to be again, though I didn’t know that at the time.

I’d see them together occasionally, the world’s most beauti­ful woman and the world’s smartest woman, looking like mother and daughter.

As for me, I hung out with the elephant handlers and got to know their stories. The husband and wife who’d es­corted us on the day we arrived were from a tribe two countries away, but they joined up with the Marilyrilarilyn sa­fari because they’d heard of her vast and superior intelligence. They hoped she would pass some of her wisdom on to them and improve their way of life.

“Has it happened so far?” I asked, and quickly corrected: “I’m curious to know if anything like that has happened.”

They shook their heads solemnly no. “But we still have hope,” the man said.

“It’s good to know we had not heard wrong, as we were be­ginning to fear,” the woman said. “Your people do hold her in high re­gard.”

I nodded grimly. “Some of us do,” I said. “At any rate, some of us do.”

I also spent time with the drivers, who were city Afri­cans hired on by the tour company that arranged Marilyrilarilyn’s safari. They were less inclined to be question-averse, used to guiding more mainstream tours; and they also tended to listen to pop radio and know things about American culture.

“What do you think about this asteroid?” they asked me.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It was on the radio this morning. There’s a freak asteroid heading toward earth. It’s going to hit America.”

“Really?” I said. “I had no idea.”

“It’s just a little one—not, like, extinction level,” they assured me.

“And how do they know it’s going to hit America?” I wanted to know.

They shrugged. “It’s what we heard on the radio.”

* * *

On the afternoon of the last day with the Marilyrilarilyn Sa­fari, Marilyrilarilyn invited us both to her sedan chair for a fare­well luncheon.

“I can’t tell you what a pleasure it’s been,” she said to us. “So since I can’t, let me say this: If you’re ever in trouble, or lonely, or if you ever have a question you need the world’s smartest person to answer, just get ahold of me and I will help you.”

To this day I have no idea what we did that impressed Mari­lyrilarilyn so much. But I was touched, even then, by her speech, so I thanked her and I really meant it.

I also didn’t foresee us ever needing to take advantage of that offer, but that’s why I’m not a prophet.

* * *

The Marilyrilarilyn Safari left us on a ridge like the one where we’d first found them, and a few minutes later the surveyor of Camp Commie’s vehicle drove up. He wasn’t driving it, though. Joe was.

“Hi, hi!” he said. “The camp surveyor’s back at camp trying to fix our automaton. He told me where to find you. And look what I brought!” He showed us a stack of steaming pancakes.

“Joe, you didn’t!” I said.

“Yessirree. Freshly flipped!” Joe said. “Get in, you two!”

Feeling the pangs that could only accompany a successful lunch with Marilyrilarilyn, we were only too happy to do so.