Dragons and Roses and Bridges and Atoms: A Mike Dodge Mystery

January 1/Pasadena

“The great illusion…”

The problem with being the scientist’s granddaughter. Out close to $2,000 to bring in 2024 with aged beef and not-so-well-aged strangers and an oldies DJ somewhere in age between the prime rib and the Boomer-Plussers in a Claremont Double Tree conference room with a cash bar and a 9 p.m. Times Square ball drop so we could pull it together at 5 a.m. for the Pasadena bus.

Not that I minded. It was probably Grandma’s last New Year, and she cashed in her Make-a-Wish on a parade. Grandma had never had much use for parades, fireworks, fairs, festivals, TMZ, or Survivor. “If there were the slightest chance of non-survival, I might be enticed,” quoth Gran.

But while it seemed surreal to be bundled up and packed into a set of bleachers along Colorado Boulevard fronting Pasadena City College, on a chilly SoCal morning at the dawn of a new year I was all but sure would end poorly for everybody, Gran seemed hyped.

She’d offered a few acid observations on the succession of religious proselytizers and doomsters and I swear even Hare Krishnas who preceded the floats and horses and flag corps. “’Jesus will return,’ huh? Hope he finds a parking spot,” she recited as a scuzzy-looking Father Time with a megaphone and a nearly life-size crucifix rousted street corn and sweatshirt vendors. After 25 years in the federal labs, Grandma winced slightly at the roar of the B-2 flyover and stood for the Marine color guard only at my prodding. But once the City of Alhambra’s beaming dragon lumbered down Colorado, she was the little girl from Ohio I’d always theorized. Or so I thought.

“What is?” I half-shouted. She had what I guess you’d call a beatific glow -- she usually clocked in between judgmental severity and cynical amusement, and it was a little chilling. But I’d made it out over the rolling color commentary from the millennial giving me free spinal shiatsu with her bony knees.

“Electrons into atoms into molecules into matter into lavender and cranberries and mums and lettuce into dragons and planets,” Grandma chanted. “Into beautiful girls and withered crones and nattering chattering amazons.”

A pair of kneecaps withdrew as supersized Hoda Kotb abruptly stopped cataloguing the 20,000 flowers that went into creating the illusion of an imaginary beast. I snarted a giggle as I looked back to Grandma, but her expression had already shifted to something analytical, anxious? She’d slipped into this state a couple of times on the trip – at Lake Havasu, over morning breakfast. 

I wrapped an arm around Grandma’s skinny shoulders and squeezed. She patted my mittened hand briefly. Indulgent affection was her love language, and I turned back to the Japanese marching band and rhinestone cowgirls.

“Of course,” Gran muttered a second later, “it’s all in the lighting.”

**

The third-floor room was tiny, but Gran settled onto her side of the queen with a satisfied half-smile as I surfed for Bang or Seinfeld or ultimately some local news.

“You had volunteers working 24 hours a day the last few days,” the tanned dude in the signature white Rose Parade suit told an enthusiastically nodding newswoman in the shadow of a rapping plant-based crocodile. “It’s all mapped out – every square inch of each float is diagrammed, almost like a paint-by-numbers, so volunteers know exactly where to place each petal or fruit or seed mosaic or even seaweed sheet …”

“We’ll see all this tomorrow morning,” I said, digging around the comforter for the remote. Grandma threw up a crinkled hand, and struggled for the bedside table.

“Get me a pen and some paper!”

I located a pad next to the mini-fridge. Gran scribbled emphatically, causing the clock radio to dance on the table, then laid back against the pillow.

“Early morning tomorrow,” she piped. “I’m going to hit it.”

January 2/Claremont

A mariachi band busted in on us, and fumbled for a light switch. My brain kicked into gear as I stumbled to the desk and shut off the damned 5 a.m. alarm. I gently patted Grandma’s shoulder.

Atoms are constantly on the move, making lamps and beds and widescreen TVs and moderately attractive girls and feisty Grandmas, but whatever force made Gran Gran had left the building. I had an ugly cry until the manager and the EMTs arrived.

The formalities were a godsend. The paramedics and cops established Gran’d probably just expired post-date, and the hotel manager helped me pull it together enough to make the calls – Mom and Dad, the funeral chain’s pre-arranged L.A. pickup/transport service. The tour director gratefully left without me to hit Floatfest and the Golden Corral on schedule. The manager hooked me up with Enterprise, bagged up some cookies, and sent me off toward the 15 up to the 40 with excruciating detail. Sometimes, life’s a Fred Armisen/Bill Hader sketch.

Calizona Tours sent a man out to release my Subaru from the chainlink lot behind the Havasu main drag. I got as much condolence as I needed from the monotony of the two-lane down to Quartzite and the mindless chaos of the I-10 back into Gilbert.    

The weight settled back in as I turned onto Melville Bay and into Palm Shadows with a crumpled sack of cookie crumbs and Sam Smith doing the drive-time wrap.

January 5/Gilbert

Mom and Dad assured me it wasn’t in any way my fault. About five times by lunch, in fact, between speculating on the stress of long-haul travel on the excessively old and lamenting the costs of Grandma dying out-of-state and for my impulsive birthday/bon voyage gift.

The old guy with the pie showed up around 3 on Friday. Cargo shorts and red Skechers and a Rick and Morty T-shirt.

“Turkey pot pie today for lunch, and I made way too much filling,” “Mike” explained. “Then Sarah told me about Barb, and I thought with everything going on…”

Dad had enough class not to point out that the only folks who might pop in were digging out of a foot of Toledo snow.

“Dodge,” Dad grunted after Mike limped off. “Illinois snowbird – used to be a reporter of some sort, and one of the guys told me he was even involved in solving some murder here a couple years back. Though he strikes me like he couldn’t find his fat ass with a mag lite and GPS.”

January 7

I took Tiger along – Mom told me Mr. Dodge made over him “like some brain-damaged eight-year-old.” Which was probably just what I wanted. I found him on the back patio of Unit 125, snoring slightly in a cheap anti-gravity lounger with a black hoodie pulled over his eyes.

“Tiger, no!” I said sternly. Mike snorted, pulled the hood back, and grinned as he felt with his bare foot for a lost sandal.

“Ti-grrrrrr!” he called. Tiger’s tail-stub twitched insanely, and Mr. Dodge kneeled on the concrete nose to muzzle with my pit baby. It took him about two minutes, and I began to wish I’d brought my gait belt..

“The pot pie rocked,” I said, waving the clean pie plate. “Thanks for bringing it over. It was really kind. Ah, there’s something else.”

“Yeah, I thought,” Mr. Dodge smirked. “Sarah’s friend in 131 thinks I’m her on-call IT guy, so I fake-sleep when anybody comes up the walk. ‘Sup?”

**

Mike brought us a couple bottles of Walmart water, and his wife appeared in the patio window. He shrugged, and Sarah, I assume, rolled her eyes and waved before disappearing.

“Gran was 91. She moved in with Mom and Dad a few years back – she and Mom had some old baggage, maybe Grandma’s fault, and Dad thought they’d just leave her with Aunt Lacey in Ohio when he came out here to golf 24/7. We both needed time away.”

Mike swirled his water. “Yeah, I always feel your dad thinks military school would do me a lot of good.”

“Ex-Marine. They shut down my nursing home back home – a couple orderlies were abusing patients, and the bosses were faking patient records – I moved here to get my RN. Dad doesn’t let a day pass without letting me know my poor judgment and lack of ambition are why I’m a 28-year-old CNA.” 

“My daughter started as a CNA,” Mike noted, taking a swig. “You should ask your dad why he only got to senior bank VP by 55. You know what? Don’t. Now, your grandma and I, we always had some pretty intriguing Happy Hour conversations. Though she could be a real Drano-drinker.”

“Gran could be a lot, but she grew up in the Depression, had to put up with all kinds of patriarchal BS getting her degree from Stanford and working with the boys’ science club during the late ‘50s. She actually met Oppenheimer once. Why she wouldn’t go to the movie– said Barbie might have been a destroyer of worlds, too, but the dance numbers were cool. Mom thought it was a jab, and Dad didn’t get it. We were sorta sister black sheep.”

“Which brings us to what?”

“Dad said you were some kind of, well, detective. Grandma was acting a little strange before, you know. Not normal old lady strange. We’re watching TV New Year’s night, and she gets real worked up, like something just hit her. She wrote herself a note.”

Mike’s left eyebrow arched, but he waited silently until I pulled the folded Double Tree notepaper out of my jeans. He jumped for it like the last slice of pizza.

“And you got no idea what this means,” Mike finally asked.

“Something seemed to be eating her the whole trip. At least after Lake Havasu.”

“London Bridge is there, right? Sarah wants to see it someday.”

“Havasu was the takeoff point for the tour, but we got in a day early. Gran didn’t seem real excited about the bridge until we stopped at the Visitor’s Center. There’s all kinds of pictures there of the bridge and that chainsaw dude bringing it over in the ‘60s.”

“McCullough.”

“That guy. Anyway, I had to drag Grandma out of there – she was staring at a sketch of the thing, like she was hypnotized.”

“Had she ever been there before?”

“Grandpa died in ’65 -- I think Grandpa thought the whole science thing was a phase or something, and when it wasn’t, he started drinking himself to death. Mom said one time he called Gran a whore in front of her and Aunt Lacey. So the point is, Grandma never traveled after he died. Before that, most of her work was in New Mexico. It was her first time at Lake Havasu.”

Mike scanned the note again. “Okay, tell me everything. I mean everything.”

January 12

Grandma came home, at least the really stubborn molecules the good folks at Repose couldn’t charbroil away. The box sat next to me on the backseat, and as the Telluride rolled down Baseline, Gran edged closer. She’d insisted on straight “incineration” with no graveside, no screwtop vase, and no bagpiped scattering to the sea or sands. No muss, no fuss, no UPS back to Toledo.

“So what do we do with her?” I asked.

Mom’s head turned slightly. “Asked her one time, and she said some nonsense about wanting a ‘Hiroshima service,’ which I couldn’t find anywhere online.

“So I guess the patio shed,” Dad grunted.

I hugged Gran Concentrate to my hip.

January 14/Gilbert

“Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”

Grandma’d turned me onto Vonnegut when I was 14. Mom acted like she’d found porn instead of Slaughterhouse Five in my schoolbag, and Dad called Kurt a commie, which made me lose my shit, putting Vonnegut on the no-fly list. Grandma drove me to the Toledo main branch, found me Breakfast of Champions, and quoted Father Kurt.

“I was 12,” she said.

The rain cancelled Dad’s day on the course and Mom’s shopping, so I settled in behind one of the terminals at the Southeast Regional library branch. “5D50” turned up a 1998 Chevrolet muffler, assorted model drill bits and keys and front axle-pressure sensors, and 50-sided dice. Gran had never been a gambler or a gamer, and I couldn’t find any scientific significance.

Gran was a Cold War scientist with a chip against the government, the military, nukes. Was 5D50 some secret file number, an Indiana Jones warehouse shelf where they’d stored some doomsday weapon along with the ark? I stuffed my notes in my backpack and started to log out before reconsidering, Googled “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki,” snagged a lonely copy of Cat’s Cradle, and set a course for the Dana Park Panda before my shift.

January 20/Tempe

Mike texted while I was in my 11 o’clock class. I found a bench outside Edson.

“Heading out of town next few days with Sarah, but may be onto something.”

He’d cut and paste what looked like a Wiki entry:

“…In 1968, the bridge was purchased from the City of London by Robert P. McCulloch. However, McCulloch only had the exterior granite blocks from the original bridge cut and transported to the United States for use in the construction of a new bridge in Lake Havasu City, a planned community he established in 1964 on the shore of Lake Havasu.”

I began to wonder if maybe Dad hadn’t been right about Mike Dodge’s ass.

January 24/Gilbert

I hate IKEA, from the ABBA-rynthine show-maze and the Warehouse of Lost Hope. But the Swedes made a fine Smorgashloppen.

I didn’t know my bookcase’ name, but I quickly realized something was amiss. I sucked on my Jamba Juice and reviewed the instructions. After Oasis Assisted Living promised me an RN slot after graduation, I’d put down a deposit on a place just north of the I-60 ramp on Val Vista and broke it off with my existing landlords. I took Grandma along; nobody cared.

At least the Scandinavians and us stubborn bastards could agree on numerical systems, and I carefully pulled a couple lock screws and double-checked the numbered schematics. And lost my Allen wrench.

**

“Your grandma was a woman of science, a cynic by nature, but something meaningful was lodged under the surface even as her memory started to punk out. You mentioned her obsession with Hiroshima. Heard of ash shadows?”

I was starting to get Mike’s rhythm, I think. “When the Bomb went off, the bodies didn’t totally vaporize. The flash of the bomb was so quick and intense it turned concrete and stone white except for the shadows in its way and the vaporized residue in the shadows. What’s that got to do with this?”

Black Dia de Los Muertos tee and gray sweats today – my guess, Target loungewear. Mrs. Dodge was doing taxes, but when I popped by unexpected, she handed me off with a Diet Decaf Coke.

“They’re scattered across Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like markers, freezing that day, that tragedy, in time. Like that day was burned into your grandmother’s mind, among other individual moments and events. When you took Barb to Lake Havasu, to the Visitors Center, it triggered another marker.  

“When the original London Bridge was dismantled in England to ship to the Port of Long Beach and Lake Havasu in 1968, 10,246 granite stones were numbered for precise reassembly. When Grandma wandered into the bridge gallery, she locked in on the centerpiece — a map of every numbered stone. It unlocked a reference point she never realized existed.”

“A reference point to what?”

“I called the Visitors Center -- the diagram is of the east side, facing the Lake Havasu business district. And the bridge folks sent me photos.” He cast one of the .jpgs to a big-screen Sony opposite us. “That diagram gave Barb a focal point for a fading or faded memory. Then, learning how the Rose Parade floats were assembled, it clicked into place. She had a guide for relocating her memory, but she needed to lay in the flesh and bones. In this case, I’m guessing a photo taken at the bridge, during her research days after she married your grandpa.”

“I told you, she never visited Lake Havasu.”

“So that puts it before 1968. Barb was a physicist during the Cold War. I’d think somebody in your family can tell you when she visited London, and Aunt Lacey can search any old scrapbooks. If we’re talking about a news photo, a photo of some scientific symposium, then you got the web or social media. You have a specific location – the left side of the first arch on the northeast end of the bridge.”

“But what am I looking for?”

Mike leaned back and grinned. “What do you think a young woman abroad might keep from her hard-drinking, insecure, resentful husband? Maybe her one romantic adventure in a life of cold, rational science? A bittersweet episode that made seeing real life as an illusion preferable?”

Gran, I thought, a little shocked, a little impressed. “You know, in the end, do I really want to know?” 

“Maybe your takeaway’s on a subatomic level,” Mike suggested. “Pull apart the petals and seeds and tissues and bark, the moorings and connective arches and the lintels and decorative flourishes; the cracks and fault lines and design flaws that threaten the integrity of the overall structure.”

“Deep,” was about all I could say.

“I used to cover high school sports — florid metaphors helped disguise that I mostly didn’t know what I was doing. Plus I get a little melodramatic when the Zoloft wears off. Put it this way: People aren’t more than one thing — we’re potentially anything, if the conditions are right. Leave your shadow how and where you want it. Call it a lesson from Gran.”