CHAPTER 12-1

Back at the Pelican, everything was just the way it had been before, except that Joe and Laura were sleeping in Room 1 and Matt was back in Room 5. With the danger gone, Joe and Laura could be lovers for everyone to see. They hugged and kissed and laughed and spent afternoons in their room with the door closed. At first Matt felt some jealousy and obsessed about images of them making love. But the jealousy subsided, especially when they made him feel so cared for and welcomed.  The shepherd’s pie was especially delicious, the beer cold. Matt remembered how he had felt when he first arrived at the Pelican in the big rainstorm so long ago. His first night back Laura organized a dinner in his honor. Everyone was happy to have him back. They said they had missed him. He felt sorry for Alfred, who by now would be on a lonely journey to Morocco.

They settled into a routine that reminded them of life in the nineteenth century—except for laptops and cell phones and the new high definition television they had brought back from the Olema and put in the Snug. Frankenstein’s chef cooked outrageous meals with fresh local food. They went for long walks and read for hours. With Frankenstein's endless bankroll and Joe's contacts, the inn continued to be staffed as a low security safe house. Wayfarers who dropped by or called were told booking was full for many months. No, the waiting list is too long, don't bother. The website was shut down. A sign on the roadside announced the restaurant was closed until further notice for earthquake repairs.

Matt joined Laura in the Snug where she continued her study of movies involving clones. Together they watched Multiplicity, a silly film with Michael Keaton. An overworked contractor finds a doctor who can copy him, making several very different personalities who confuse his wife.

“What do you think it would be like to have another of me?” Laura said. “Let’s talk to Dr. F about making one. I’d have a playmate, a perfect twin, though she would be a little younger than I am now if he redid Gene. Or maybe he could copy me. Imagine that. A second generation of whatever I am. Doesn’t that bring up questions? Maybe he could do a whole flock of us. Wouldn’t you enjoy having a half dozen of me around?”

Matt rolled his eyes. “More than one of you? I don’t think so.” He was wary of this mood.

CHAPTER 12-2

Dr. Frankenstein was curious about Laura’s attachment to the television. “Is she ok, Matt?”

"She's fine, I think. She’s good. It's reassuring she has a project, being locked up in this drafty fake English inn.

“We watched Leave Her to Heaven and agreed being a redhead doesn’t work for her,” Matt said. “Our Laura has no acting career ahead of her, so there's something bittersweet about her watching her other self in movies after 1944. She's finally been watching all of Gene Tierney's movies in chronological order. Mostly, she's been getting a kick out of it, though the last ones, when she’s showing her age, upset her. Our Laura doesn’t like the idea of getting old. But then, who does? Here, look at The Swan Song, 1964. Dreadful hair, bad perm. The review said: 'Hardly a glamorous swansong . . . more of a post-script to a film career which really ended with Advise and Consent.’ She cried when she saw that one."  

 "Hmm, I'm not sure it's a good idea leaving her alone with this career retrospective," Fr. Frankenstein said.

 "I've been sitting with her for most of them. Remember, I taught a whole semester course in the movies of Gene Tierney, so I know what's coming next and how each film fits in. Last week the Turner network did a Gene Tierney retrospective but we decided to choose our own pace in watching. A whole day would have been a little much for her. Besides, Laura set up her own Netflix and Amazon accounts. Imagine trying to stop her.

 "She's watched dozens of movies made by her Hollywood friends. That's been fun. After being startled and depressed by Lauren Bacall's aging when we watched the Academy Awards at the Olema Inn, she's been amused. I fill her in with post-1944 Hollywood gossip. She loves that. Our Laura has a catty side.”

 "Well. So what's next?"

 "She's either watched or researched and lined up every science fiction movie she can find about clones, replicants, robots who seem human, characters with super-human strength due to scientists messing with their DNA, people with a computerized brain. It goes on and on. Laura fits in with an enormous new genre.”

 "Uh oh. That could be trouble. Which movies?"

 "Let's see. The granddaddy of them all of course: Blade Runner.

 And you’ll like this one. Zero Hour was about a mad scientist who successfully creates a cloned baby on Plum Island and then escapes to keep the bad guys, neo-Nazis in this case, from learning his secret. The boy grows up, not knowing the secret.”

 “Really?” Dr. F said.  “A Plum Island clone? Does that mean they’re onto us?”

“I thought that would catch your attention. But no, relax. You won’t believe where they went with it. The hero finds he has been cloned from a Nazi’s DNA, his father’s I seem to remember, The bad guys, actually one bad woman here, finds the cross that Christ was crucified on. It’s been eaten by wood beetles. One of the bug bodies contains blood from the cross and from it they identify Christ’s DNA. So they want to clone a Christ for the Second Coming, all for evil purposes of course. But they need the doctor who cloned our hero to teach them how to do it. The Nazi woman wants to give birth to the Second Coming of Christ. All your fears of what could happen if we get caught, right, Dr. F?”

 “You’re making this up, right?” said Dr. F.

 “I’m not. Dr. F, I kid you not. It does make our story look a lot more believable though, doesn’t it? It was a prime time series, on ABC no less.”

 Frankenstein shook his head in disbelief. “How could anyone write such a crazy plot? And sell it! To a network!”

“My favorite is Almost Human, about a replicant cop with warm human feelings, unlike his robot-like counterparts. J.J. Abrams did that one. He can do anything. He would sure like to know about our Laura.

“Don’t even think of it.”

Frankenstein was thoughtful. "It won’t take that long for people with all kinds of bio-parts—though creating something as perfect as Laura, well, I like to think I’m way, I mean way way, ahead of the pack. But I see something for you to watch out for here."

 “What's that?"

 "In science fiction, as you know, clones and replicants almost always have a flaw. They're somehow lesser than the originals, or the originals have a flaw that’s repeated—like a propensity for criminal behavior, or they have something built in to make them self-destruct after a certain amount of time. What was it in Blade Runner? Built-in decrepitude. The Replicants didn’t age—they just wore out all at once. Laura is Gene Tierney in every way, every cell, every memory, but now she is her own person as Laura. So she could feel inferior if she identifies with the sci-fi replicants. She could worry that she’s less than a perfect human, even though I’ve assured her she’s indistinguishable from the rest of us in every molecule, every atom. In her consciousness."

Matt and Frankenstein nibbled on their cookies, chocolate almond.

Frankenstein said, “I hope she and Joe have a baby.”

CHAPTER 12-3

The months went by and finally it was spring again at the Pelican Inn. The hills were green and the Muir Beach Community was concerned about a heavy infiltration of a non-indigenous thistle. Not wanting to use toxic pesticides, they joined as a group to hoe, dig, and pull the offenders before they could go to seed. Matt spent much of his time on the hill above the Pelican digging with the others.

Life at the Pelican was going well. Every day Laura was identifying less with being Gene Tierney, as if time created a chasm separating her from her younger self, much as an older woman might feel a lack of identification with a photograph and memories from her youth. Not that much time had elapsed between Laura's last memory as Gene and now, but her current reality was so different from Hollywood of the 1940s that the process seemed accelerated. And she was motivated to have a happy life with Joe.

Dr. Frankenstein was lost most of the time in his twelfth dimension parallel universe hypothesis, hunched over the laptop. He took maintenance doses of the regular strudel drug, except for Sunday when he took a gigantic dose of his special blend and disappeared into whatever mathematical world he was investigating on his laptop full of formulas.

Joe was called away for an entire month. Although there were no new headline global hotspots, the simmering ones demanded more attention to keep from boiling over. Joe put Rondo in charge of security. Even though they were now relaxed, Joe knew there could always be a new threat. As usual he was the only one who took possible threats to their safety seriously. He always felt some perfect storm brewing, though the image was just that—unattached to the Pelican or the contentious global space in which he worked, or the fragile United States and world economy, or even something else, something abstract.

When he thought of it, his Perfect Storm, the hairs on the back of his neck and his arms leaped up like steel shavings to a magnet. He had taken Frankenstein’s advice to see Father Max about the Shadow. A few conversations with the wise old priest had helped him distinguish his own current alertness from the swirling imaginary phantom energy that Frankenstein had lent him from his Jungian depth experiment.

Matt missed Joe and enjoyed having Laura to himself, without feeling a contradiction. As he hacked at the taproots of the spreading thistle, he caught himself imagining this idyllic pocket in time lasting. No end to sabbatical, no return to teaching dim freshmen about film noir, about Laura-as-movie. How could he stand that? Imagine saying: I spent the last year with Gene Tierney, as she was when she was twenty-three. We shared a bed in a stormy romantic inn on the California coast. And the freshmen, younger than twenty-three, would stare at him like a madman, or worse, giggle and make suggestive remarks, the Dean would call him to the office and say, "What is this about you imagining yourself sleeping with some actress?" He would be carted away to an asylum where his brain would be addled by drugs a thousand times less sophisticated that the strudel drug, no 100,000 times stupider, until he himself would be wondering if he had imagined the whole adventure.

At dinner they had rare leg of lamb with mint jelly, oven-roasted organic parslied fingerling potatoes and steamed green vegetables—the lamb from a local farm, the vegetables all from the Green Gulch garden.

Matt watched Laura for a bit and then said, "This is real, isn't it? Things are as they seem?"

"And not what?"

"And not something else."

She pinched him.  "Pass the salt, silly."

CHAPTER 12-4

 "Join me for breakfast, Dr. F? I want to talk about my dreams,” Laura said.

 Frankenstein, dressed in hiking clothes, brought his coffee and baguette to her table.  "What’s up? Fire away."

 "I've been keeping a journal of amazing dreams."

 Frankenstein focused. How quickly Laura could shift from his friend, his daughter even, to his research subject.

 "Well, they're mostly wonderfully happy dreams, full of color and sound and smells."

 "Sound? Smell?"

 “Yes, I hear voices when people speak. And music. Sometimes background music, like a movie theme song. And I smell perfume and garlic and puppy. I feel so there that reality here, when I wake up, seems almost deficient. Matt tells me it's lucid dreaming. But I wonder, and this is my question for you, could these dreams be the result of the strudel drug?" I don’t remember such dreams when I was, you know, Gene.”

“Absolutely, my dear. The strudel drug enhances consciousness, waking or sleeping. Or in between, I suppose. We have more intense and beautiful dreams, fewer nightmares, though when something is not being attended to, they can happen and when they do, watch out. Mostly, though, the drug eliminates boring repetitious anxiety-motivated dreams. But tell me about yours."

 "OK.  Sometimes I'm Laura. You and Matt and Joe are in those dreams. Sometimes I'm Gene. I recently had a long dream about Howard. Leonardo DiCaprio was in the dream."

 “He played Howard in the Aviator."

 "Right, but in the dream, he was Howard at the end of his life, not Leonardo DiCaprio at all. And Kate Hepburn was there and the actress who played her. We were all at a party. Sometimes I'm just myself, and I see Gene and Laura as sides of myself instead of two people. Once I dreamed I was watching Gene and Laura play poker. The winner would get to keep the one soul they shared. That one wasn't such a nice dream, actually, come to think of it."

 Frankenstein anticipated going back to his room, getting this all down in his research file.

 "The landscapes of these dreams are always familiar, the Pelican, Hollywood, and I know the people. But for the last few days, I've been making up people and landscapes that don't exist. A woman, a house on a hill, a sinister scaly character on a motorcycle. A puppy even. The puppy nips, like all puppies. He drew blood. The woman gave me a band-aid. When I woke up, I expected the band-aid to be on my arm. Of course, it wasn't."  She looked at the unbroken skin on her arm. "See, no wound."

 "I remember one scene vividly. I had just arrived. On the side of the refrigerator was an 11 x 14 glossy photograph of Gene Tierney. It was like the one of me that Curt photoshopped as a joke, remember?"

 "I do. You weren't Gene Tierney in this film? In this dream, I mean."

 "No, I was Laura. The picture was taken at about my age now, but it must have been taken after my copy date because I didn't recognize it."

 "Couldn't it have been a photo someone took but you never saw?"

 "I thought of that, but I was wearing a blouse I've never seen. I asked the woman why she had a picture of Gene Tierney on her refrigerator and she asked me if I wanted a plate of coq au vin. That's when I smelled the garlic."

 "What's strange about this dream, unlike the ones that take place here or in Hollywood is that it's fiction. It's like a movie set and we're all playing roles. The woman is clearly from central casting. The house is just a two-dimensional photograph. The kitchen is a set. And the rest—a woman named Speechless, or Sleepless or something, a reptilian one called the Cobra, another Laura—all actors and actresses. I even thought I heard someone say 'Cut.'"

 Frankenstein wondered for an instant what would have happened if they had chosen a psychiatrist instead of Matt to be Laura's companion for her first months in the twenty-first century. But no, Matt had been perfect. And Matt solved Laura’s syphilis problem and therefore avoided her insanity in addition to everything else. Who else could have done that?

 "Anything else strange or unusual about these dreams?" As if this weren't enough.

 "Well, yes."  Laura's face lit up with enthusiasm, eager to give Dr. F the final detail.

 "It's the puppy. When he prances across the set, proudly showing us his favorite toy, a soft black and white rugby ball, he's a real dog."

 "What do you mean, a real dog?"

 "I mean, he's a real dog. We’re all two-dimensional, film characters. In color, though Gene is sometimes black and white, like the picture on the refrigerator. When the puppy nipped me, he drew real red blood, not fake studio blood. That's why I half expected a cut on my arm when I woke up this morning. When he barks, it's a real sound, not part of a sound track."

 "Are you disturbed by this dream?"

 "Disturbed? Not at all. Why would I be disturbed? It’s a lovely dream."

 "What about Cobra? He sounds dangerous."

 "Dr. F, nothing is dangerous in film. Don't you know? That's why we like films full of bad guys and monsters. They make us feel safe in real life."

 The next day Laura told Dr. Frankenstein another one of her dreams:

 “I’m wearing my kimono. I’m in the house on a hill again with several other people, all asleep. The neighbor with two donkeys braying is asleep. The fluffy white puppy, on a plain with mountains in the distance, sleeps his way into soft puppy dreams. He would have dreamed of chasing a fox, but he’s never seen a fox, so he dreams instead of creatures that live beneath the house in spots where three lines came together to form a corner. His left paw twitches.

“In the dream I feel like I’m made out of film. My blacks and whites are opposite. What is that called? Solarized. My right hand reaches for the puppy but his soft fur is just beyond my touch. I wonder how I know what the puppy is dreaming? I walk into the kitchen and touch a picture of Gene Tierney on the refrigerator with my negative-shaped hand. I know I am not her. I wake up.”

 “Fascinating, my dear.”

CHAPTER 12-5

Dr. Frankenstein found Laura in the Greenhouse, having just finished her lunch.

 “And how is your study of clones and androids and such coming along? Are you ready for your Ph.D exam? Is your film-professor chum helping?”

Laura smiled. “I won't bother you with the latest—an Andy Warhol Frankenstein, 1974.  Gory and grotesque. I turned it off when they were sewing the leg of the female on at the hip, but later I watched the bloody rest, complete with a final Greek tragedy pile of mutilated corpses. Magically, the beautiful woman had no suture scars. And all her actions were under the command of Dr. Frankenstein. She did vat she vas told.”

“Ah, yes, the fictional creations. Unlike you, a real woman.”

“You mean flesh and blood, as opposed to celluloid?”

“Yes.”

“Who never does what she’s told?”

“That’s for sure!”

“Dr. F, what’s my name?”

Frankenstein saw a trap.  “Laura?”

“And is Laura not a fictional character who lives on the screen? Am I not here in your movie, playing a role?”

“Dearest. You are Gene Tierney. The same as you were in 1944, but with a little twist in the calendar. And now you are Laura.”

For a moment Frankenstein looked into Gene Tierney's eyes. Then, in an instant, Laura was back in her role. It always spooked him when that happened.

“On to the next then.”

 “Yeah, well, you can be the dedicated film student. This fictional Dr. Frankenstein is going to take a nap.”

CHAPTER 12-6

Sitting on the window seat in the pub, Frankenstein savored afternoon tea and cookies while watching through the leaded glass window as Matt, Joe and Laura cavorted on the lawn. Cavort was the best word he could find. They were playing leapfrog. Matt was the solid base with Laura and Joe taking turns leaping over him. Muscular Joe jumped high; agile Laura skimmed over Matt's back in a perfect split. Amazing how flexible the woman was. They giggled, tickled each other, acted like children. As if, Frankenstein thought, the world is a safe place. Safety: how often that word entered their language.

Frankenstein sipped his tea and analyzed this feeling, one now familiar, something he had never felt before Laura entered his world so dramatically. He was the creator of this leapfrogging creature. Different from being a father or a scientist. Had anyone ever felt this particular feeling before? Frankenstein tried to grab it, but it dissolved as Laura shrieked with happiness.  

 What was she? Frankenstein went over in his mind yet again the materials that made Laura, the same materials that had come together to reproduce the other human copies—the materials that had turned chemical substances into perfectly formed body copies. Corpses.

In one of their first moments, when he had asked bleeding, bruised, disoriented Laura, "What is your last memory before you woke up?" she answered, so naive, so unaware of where she was or what was happening, so groggy: "I was brushing my hair."

 Playing leapfrog on the lawn of the Pelican Inn was the tangible proof that creating a living human being was not the idle fantasy of the failed scientist who could not replicate a mouse.

Matt decided to try writing short stories without a trace of science fiction or mention of the Pelican Inn. Settled into the Snug with numerous Pelican ales and shepherd’s pies, he tapped away on his laptop from early morning until it was time for them all to take their afternoon walk, followed by a nap. Joe left early every morning for a long run in the hills above the ocean. Laura spent most of her time in her room, glued to the television, continuing her film education. She bought some ivory lace blouses with high collars and long skirts and played being in the 19th century, being Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

For the first few weeks, they talked about their adventures on the road: hiding out at the Olema Inn, the earthquake, the Exorcism, the Castro safe house, sailing on Tango, the close escape when she blew up. Although the strudel drug was still a daily habit, they had cut their portions to almost nothing, what they called micro-strudel. On weekends Dr. F continued to disappear to distant places.  For now, Laura was secure at the Pelican, and Dr. Frankenstein as well.

Life was good.

Chapter 12-7

 Joe cut his last mission (he knew it would be his last) short to return to the Pelican.

He showed up at breakfast and when he walked into the reception area, Laura was there. Backlit, overjoyed to see him. He took her in his arms and kissed her and then held her for a long time. When he looked into her eyes, he knew that he would rather give up her secret and let the world be overrun with copies of the worst elements of the human species than terminate his lover. Terminate: the words he and Frankenstein had said, terminate Laura. And yet he knew he could kill her, and Frankenstein as well, if it meant the bad guys would own not just her secret, but her. To treat as a lab animal. Joe had been close to a lot of death in his job. There was a simplicity to death for Joe. The others had not had that experience.

It was time. Frankenstein had texted him.

"We leave in two hours. Pack one carry-on,” Joe said to Laura.

Then he went into the greenhouse where Frankenstein always worked in the morning. Frankenstein, who felt he was on the edge of perfecting his parallel universe formula, had been in touch with the world's foremost string theory physicist, someone he trusted, to ask one last question. He was not there but the laptop was open.

Joe saw golden letters scrolling across a vermillion screen.

Joe:

I did it. When you read this I will be gone to a place where no strudel drug is necessary for everything to work as it should, for my prefrontal cortex and my primitive brain stem and all the rest of this bag of meat I call myself to be in harmony, as it would be with all humans if evolution had not taken that infelicitous turn.

In your room are new identities and a password, coded as we have agreed, to an account with more money than you will ever need, enough money to do some good if that is what you choose. Trust me, I set it up so Goldman Sachs and the rest won't even notice it has gone missing. Enjoy the humor of this, my dearest friend. There are plane tickets to a place where no one will recognize Laura as Gene, and besides, as she ages (with you), she will day by day look less like Gene as she aged. Have babies. Make me a godfather.

Our Dear Boy will feel inevitable distress about our disappearing. The games we’ve put in play to keep him amused should help avoid our doing him the great harm of making his whole life after the Pelican Adventure a boring anticlimax and a story no one would ever believe.

I took good care of the lab guys and expect no trouble there. Just in case I figured out a last little joke: I tinkered with the formula so that if they do manage to hack my old system now, they will be able to replicate the body but not the living spark and therefore not the memory. I always suspected that Curt had figured it out, had maybe even made a human copy--but—oh well. If so he was circumspect. Curt is on his own now, isn’t he? They would, at the last moment, only have the lifeless bodies of non-animated Frankenstein monsters. When they try to say I was able to create life, they will be laughed out of the lab because they will invoke my name: Dr. He who Could Not Clone a Mouse.  I will miss our jokes, dear Joe. It’s good if Laura is the one and only successful living human copy.

I only wish I could have waited to say goodbye and hug you. But when the coordinates are right and the power is there—and they are at this moment in world history—this is the exact time for me to go.

I have just a few moments left to send my love to you and to our Laura.

Frankenstein

Joe, overcome with gratitude and affection for his friend (wherever he was), touched the screen again and a new message appeared: Disk reformatted.  All data lost.

CHAPTER 12-7

When Matt came down to breakfast to find Joe and Laura sitting at the main table, each with a suitcase, he felt his poor heart fall one hundred stories. He sat down.

"So this is it?"

"I'm afraid so," Joe said.

They were both dressed in khaki. Laura had on a new vest with many zippers. She no longer looked much like Gene Tierney to him, until she smiled and he saw the slight cross in her front teeth.

"Frankenstein?"

"Gone to a place beyond our comprehension."

"Heaven."

"Kind of, but Frankenstein is not dead. He did it. He figured it out."

"Rondo and Frieda?"

"They’ll be taken care of. Don't worry. And Frankenstein arranged a fabulous honeymoon for them."

Matt did not say, "And me?" because he knew. It was back to the dreary university.

"Dear Matt," Laura said, her eyes brimming. "Thank you for everything."

He hugged Joe. Laura kissed him on the lips and left her tears on his cheeks. With his eyes closed, she was Laura in the movie, stepping off the screen to kiss him, Matt, her greatest fan.

And then they were gone.

At the airport Joe picked up the New York Times and read:
LONDON — Civil aviation authorities closed air space and shut down airports in Britain, Scandinavia and other parts of northwestern Europe on Thursday as a high-altitude cloud of ash drifted south and east from an erupting volcano in Iceland.

Joe smiled and murmured to himself, "Goodbye Frankenstein, you old Trickster."

CHAPTER 12-8

 Matt went to Muir Beach and walked back and forth and then up the hill to the bench where he sat for a long time looking out to sea. What was he to do? He just could not go back to the university. He cried. Tears rolled down his cheeks. Finally, he went back to the inn and had a Pelican Ale and bangers and mash and then he went up to room 1 which seemed so empty without Laura and Joe. Most of her things were still there. It felt as if she could walk in at any minute and say something, but he knew she wouldn’t. He remembered how McPherson in the movie had wandered through Laura’s apartment when he thought she was dead.

 Then he went to room 5. On his bureau was the mummified chicken. Was this some joke? He picked it up and noticed immediately the sparkling blue rhinestone eye. This was not the copy chicken. This was the real mummified chicken. He twisted the eye and found the chicken to be completely stuffed with saffron threads, enough strudel drug for a lifetime. Beside the chicken was an envelop with his name in Dr. F’s cramped script. He opened it and took out a note, also hand-written. By now Matt could read the tiny script easily.

 Matt, my Dear, Dear Boy,

 You have no idea how much I will miss our philosophical teatime conversations. When you read this, we will all be gone. We met and pondered what gifts we could leave you that would make our desertion of you, for that is what it really is, less painful. So decided on four gifts. The first is enough strudel drug for the rest of your life, should you decide you prefer to continue to enhance your reality. Up to you. Feel free to analyze it, mass produce it, give it to humanity, whatever you like. The second is money. You know I’m immensely wealthy. I never told you about my investment hobby. So I have left money, gobs of money, dear boy, in your name with paperwork to show it as an inheritance so you will never have to explain it. You need never work again, so if you continue to teach, it will be from choice. I doubt that you will. Third, we have rented a house for you on the beach, not too long a drive from Hollywood. Enclosed is a picture. We would have bought it as a surprise but you have to decide where you want to live. 

 And finally, we realized that the story of your adventure with us, the one that Joe made you delete, need no longer be a secret.We no longer need to protect Laura. If you wish to write a novel—or a screenplay—about our time together, you have our best wishes and blessings. In the envelope you will find a thumb drive with the files you deleted, both the novel you began to write when you arrived and the journal of our time together. The second, if I dare say so, is far superior. Joe copied them from your computer before telling you to delete them, just in case circumstances ever changed. As they have. I’ve also left a file of photographs of all of us—including ones of you with Laura that I took when you weren’t looking.

May you enjoy writing. We know you’ve enjoyed imagining how you would cast us. If Charles Dance wants to play Dr. Frankenstein, I would be honored. If J.J. Abrams want to produce a Netflix series — go for it. Brad Pitt as Joe, Matthew Perry as you— excellent. Casting Laura will of course be a challenge. You want someone who can look 1940s gorgeous, who could redo the black and white scene when Laura surprises MacPherson. But that is your challenge. Maybe you will fall in love with the woman you cast.

You’re a sweet and loving person, dear Matt. It’s been my privilege to know you. I feel you have gained much self confidence being with us and have quieted to some extent the self-critical inner voices. Please accept my gratitude for taking care of our Laura as you did. We never could have managed her graceful transition into the twenty-first century without you. And we never would have solved the mystery of her health and mental problems.

 Laura and Joe were trying to figure how to take you with them. In the end it didn’t make sense and I don’t tell you this to make you wistful over what might have been but rather for you to appreciate how much they both love you.

May you live a long and happy life, dear boy.

Yours,

Dr. Frankenstein, aka he-who-could-not-clone-a-mouse

 PS: Enclosed is a very good plum strudel recipe. Use good pinot noir. You can afford it!

Matt read the letter over several times. The pain of loss was replaced by an enthusiasm he had never felt for a new beginning, the rest of his life, beginning now. He inserted the thumb drive in his laptop and there were his files and hundreds of pictures. He noticed that Dr. Frankenstein’s novel was there, too, with a note that he could claim it his own as it would obvious be a best-seller, though it would have to be cut down.

He opened the recorded file of his foolish draft of a novel from the night that he arrived at 9:00 at the Pelican Inn in a storm after driving across country. He laughed as he heard his voice: 

It was a dark and stormy night when Lance arrived at the Pelican Inn.

Plum Strudel with mint:

• One centimeter strand of strudel drug

•       2 pounds plums, seeds removed and cut into quarters

•       1 cup Pinot Noir

•       3-1/2 oz. sugar

•       6 Tablespoons unsalted butter

•       2 pinches cinnamon

•       1 pinch allspice

•       1 box frozen phyllo dough

•       6 Tablespoons vegetable oil

•       1 egg, beaten

•       3 Tablespoons slivered almonds

PREPARATION:

1. Pour wine and sugar into a saucepan and bring just to a boil.

2. Reduce heat and add the plums. Cook about 5 minutes and remove with a slotted spoon. Reserve the wine and allow to cool.

3. Melt 3 tablespoons of the butter in a frying pan, add the spice and stir.

4. Add the plums and fry briefly. Allow to cool.

5. Remove the phyllo sheets and brushing each sheet with oil, arrange them, slightly overlapping, to form a 12 x 16" rectangle.

6. Arrange the plums over the phyllo, leaving a 2" border.

7. Turn in the long borders on top of the fruit. Roll up the strudel from the short end.

8. Place the strudel seam-side down on an oiled baking dish. Brush with the beaten egg and place in the refrigerator to chill for 20-30 minutes.

9. Heat the oven to 425°F. Put the strudel in the preheated oven and cook for 20 minutes or until golden and crispy.

10. In the meantime, reduce the saved wine until it is syrupy, then whisk in the rest of the butter.

To Serve:

Pour the reduced wine syrup into a small pitcher. Slice the strudel and serve with the syrup.

Garnish with mint and a micro dose of Dr. Frankenstein’s special spice.

Copyright Deborah Hayden 2020

debhayden@sbcglobal.net