A Near Life Experience

118 A Near Life Experience Ron Savage During her fifty-two years, Erma Rapoport imagined having an active social life, particularly when it came to her neighbor of at least twenty of those fifty-two years, the wonderful Mr. Whoever. Once she secretly observed him tending his garden through her mail-order 20 x 30 mm Explorer binoculars—this being in the fall of ‘81 or ‘82—and his eyes caught her attention. He had the kindest, dearest eyes she had ever seen, a grayish-blue, unusual eyes that could probably look deep inside a person and touch the heart. Oh, my, she thought, and cooled her flushed cheeks with quick little waves of her hand. Then yesterday Mr. Whoever died, a massive coronary. The shock of his abrupt departure took Erma’s breath away. She saw the James City County EMS truck in front of his house, its blue-and-red lights flashing. Ten or fifteen minutes later, a fat balding man and a roughlooking blonde woman, both wearing navy blue jackets, wheeled out a gurney with a plastic body bag strapped to it, presumably Mr. Whoever. The following day, she read his obituary and, after more than two decades, learned his name—Alvin Lipka. What’s Lipka . . . Polish? She thought she knew a couple of Lipkas, maybe. He was, or had been, a fifty-eight-year-old bachelor who was survived by no one, the poor thing. If Erma had possessed the nerve to leave her house, she would’ve called one of those yellow cabs and gone to his funeral, but she hadn’t been outside since childhood, when Mama had swept her to this physician and that. At the age of eleven—after seven exploratory surgeries and numerous poisonous bouts with her crazy mother’s homemade medicines—Erma had acquired a diagnosis that satisfied everyone except Mama, though it did stop the madness. Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, the doctor called it, named after Baron von Munchausen, the eighteenth century traveler, adventurer, and liar. Erma’s daddy, a withdrawn but generous man who more than likely felt some guilt for 119 Ron Savage not curbing his wife’s insatiable desire for medical attention, decided to leave his daughter a trust fund that contained enough money to avoid every human being on the planet for the rest of her life. Instead of going to her neighbor’s funeral, Erma lit a candle and placed it on the dining room windowsill, facing the glassed-in sunporch side of Mr. Lipka’s house, may he rest in peace, briefly wondering if the dear man with the beautiful grayish-blue eyes would have approved. On the second day after his death, while changing a used candle for a fresh one, she glanced out the window and saw a small hairy person sitting on Alvin Lipka’s roof. Then the small hairy person wrapped a tail about its shoulders like a comforting arm. Erma immediately dug around in the hall closet for her mail order 20 x 30 mm Explorer binoculars, hoping to get a better view. And there it was, huddled by the chimney and trembling, a small gray monkey wearing a red fez tied beneath the chin and a matching red vest. Panning the binoculars down to the window of the glassed-in sunporch , she stared into the room and saw the top of a large brass cage . . . and the door was open. Case solved, Erma thought. Now she’d make a call to the SPCA, and that would be that. But what if they asked her name? Erma wasn’t the type who talked to others. She certainly didn’t want people traipsing around her clean house, leaving dirt on Mama’s Oriental carpets, requiring soft drinks and snacks. Give an individual an inch and you’ve got yourself a friend attached at the hip. Still, you ought to call, she thought. You can’t just let a helpless creature starve to death, or worse . . . become the supper of who-knows-what. Erma was about to have another look at the monkey, but she heard a soft tapping sound at the front door. This got her anxious enough to...