Read Online The Administrator by S. Joan Popek - Free Book Online Page B

bedside table and was now sitting cross-legged on the coffee table with the TV remote next to him. He looked up at Alice and said, “Since we are going to wait a few days, we may as well get acquainted. It’s always better to be the lunch of a friend than a stranger.”
    Alice stared at him. “Why?”
    “You reach a higher place in Heaven, silly.”
    “Where is that damn bottle?” She found it empty and sighed.
    “What is AA?” His tiny mouth smiled and his tiny black eyes looked at her expectantly.
    “What?”
    “AA. This morning, you said you needed to go to AA.”
    “It’s where drunks go when they have no place else to go.”
    “Are you a drunk?”
    “Shut up, will you? Just shut up.” She saw her reflection in the mirror again and groaned.
    “May I go?”
    “Go where?”
    “To AA with you. You said I should enjoy life. How can I do that if you never take me anywhere?”
    “Oh yeah, that’d be great. I’ll just take my six inch DT hallucination to a meeting and tell my counselor that I brought my lunch.”  
    “I’ll hide in your pocket. No one will see me.”
    “No one will see you anyway. You don’t exist.”
    “Then what can it hurt? And after I’ve lived a little, you can eat me. I’ll even tell you how to make the sauce.”
    Alice looked at the pudgy apparition. He looked more like a lollipop than ever. She glanced around her dingy one room apartment, and scratched at last night’s, now very painful, tattoo.
    * * * *
    A few hours later, Alice walked into her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in three years. Mr. Glump kept poking his head out of her pocket to look around, and she kept shoving him back in. She wondered why she tried to hide him. He was her hallucination. She knew nobody could see him but her. Mr. Glump’s irrepressible curiosity continued to plague her through every meeting after that, but she took him anyway. In fact, he jumped into her pocket every time she went anywhere.
    One month later, she had a job and had moved into a decent apartment. One week after that, she called her only daughter, in San Francisco, whom she hadn’t seen in three years. Her daughter was coming to see her in two weeks, and she was bringing Alice’s five-year-old grandson. Alice didn’t mention Mr. Glump.
    After she called her daughter, Alice was chain smoking and pacing the floor while Mr. Glump sat giggling in front of the TV.  
    “Mr. Glump, it’s been over a month since I’ve had a drink. Why aren’t you gone?”
    “Because you didn’t eat me.” He poofed from his TV seat to stand on the table facing her. He looked down at the fashion doll shoes she had given him, tugged at the fashion doll clothes she made him wear, and shuffled his foot back and forth. “Alice, I’ve been thinking. Maybe you were right. Maybe I was brainwashed into believing I wanted to be eaten. Maybe we should wait awhile longer before I tell you how to make the sauce. I think, maybe, I would like to stay here for awhile. After all, Heaven will always be there. I can go later. Maybe a lot later.”
    For the first time in three years, Alice laughed. It felt good. “Okay, Mr. Glump, we’ll wait.” She shook his tiny hand with the tip of a clean, white fingernail and laughed again. “But, we can’t have you poofing all over the place. If you’re going to stay, you need your own room.”
    “Wow! A room of my own? Great!”
    Together they fixed up the cookie jar to be Mr. Glump’s room. Alice laughed, “What better place for someone designed to be dessert to live, than in a cookie jar?”
    * * * *
    Finally, the day arrived when she would go to the airport to pick up her daughter and grandson. Alice fidgeted all day, smoked a pack of cigarettes, and drank two pots of coffee. She attended two AA meetings, had her hair done, and got a facial just to keep busy.
    Just before she left for the airport, she said, “Mr. Glump, you better not show yourself for a few days when the kids get here. At least until I