The Face

A lot of the weird stuff he knew didn’t have much application in daily life, didn’t alter the fact that he was short for his age, and thin for his age, or that he had a geeky neck and the huge unreal green eyes that magazine writers slobbered about when describing his mother but that made him look like a cross between a hoot owl and an alien. He liked knowing these weird things anyway, even if they did not lift him out of the mire of Fricdom.

Having exotic knowledge rare in other people made Fric feel like a wizard. Or at least like a wizard’s apprentice.

Aside from Mr. Jurgens, who came to the estate two days every month to clean and maintain the large collection of contemporary and antique electric trains, only Fric knew everything about the train room and its operation.

The trains belonged to that world-renowned movie star, Channing Manheim, who also happened to be his father. In the private world of Fric, the movie star had long been known as Ghost Dad because he was usually only here in spirit.

Ghost Dad knew very little about the train room. He had spent enough money on the collection to purchase the entire nation of Tuvalu, but he rarely played here.

Most people had never heard of the nation of Tuvalu. On nine islands in the South Pacific Ocean, with a population of just ten thousand, its major exports were copra and coconuts.

Most people had no idea what copra might be. Neither did Fric. He’d been meaning to look it up ever since he’d learned about Tuvalu.

The train room was in the higher of two basements, adjacent to the upper garage. It measured sixty-eight feet by forty-four feet, which amounted to more square footage than in the average home.

The lack of windows ensured that the real world could not intrude. The railroad fantasy ruled.

Along the two short walls, floor-to-ceiling shelves housed the train collection, except for whatever models were currently in use.

On the two long walls hung fabulous paintings of trains. Here, a locomotive exploded through thick luminous masses of fog, headlamp blazing. There, a train traveled a moonlit prairie. Trains of every vintage raced through forests, crossed rivers, climbed mountains in rain and sleet and snow and fog and dark of night, clouds billowing from their smokestacks, sparks flying from their wheels.

At the center of this great space, on a massive table with many legs, stood a sculptured landscape of green hills, fields, forests, valleys, ravines, rivers, lakes. Seven miniature villages comprised of hundreds of intricately detailed structures were served by country lanes, eighteen bridges, nine tunnels. Convex curves, concave curves, horseshoe curves, straightaways, descending grades, and ascending grades featured more train track than there were coconuts in Tuvalu.

This amazing construction measured fifty feet by thirty-two, and you could either walk around it or, by lifting a gate, enter into it and take a tour on an inner racetrack walkway, as though you were a giant vacationing in the land of Lilliput.

Fric was in the thick of it.

He had distributed armies of toy soldiers across this landscape and had been playing trains and war at the same time. Considering the resources at his command for the game, it should have been more fun than it was.

Telephones were located at both the exterior and the interior control stations. When they rang with his personal tone, the sound startled him. He seldom received calls.

Twenty-four phone lines served the estate. Two of these were dedicated to the security system, another to the off-site monitoring of the hotel-type heating and air-conditioning system. Two were fax lines, and two were dedicated Internet lines.

Sixteen of the remaining seventeen lines were rationed to family and staff. Line 24 had a higher purpose.

Fric’s father enjoyed the use of four lines because everyone in the world—once even the President of the United States—wanted to talk to him. Calls for Channing—or Chan or Channi, or even (in the case of one infatuated actress) Chi-Chi—often came in even when he wasn’t in residence.

Mrs. McBee had four lines, although this didn’t mean, as the Ghost Dad sometimes joked, that Mrs. McBee should start to think that she was as important as her boss.

Ha, ha, ha.

One of those four lines served Mr. and Mrs. McBee’s apartment. The other three were her business phones.

On an ordinary day, management of the house didn’t require those three lines. When Mrs. McBee had to plan and execute a party for four or five hundred Hollywood nitwits, however, three telephones were not always sufficient to deal with the event designer, the food caterer, the florist, the talent bookers, and the uncountable other mysterious agencies and forces that she had to marshal in order to produce an unforgettable evening.

Fric wondered if all that effort and expense was worthwhile. At the end of the night, half the guests departed so drunk or so drug-fried that in the morning they wouldn’t remember where they had been.

If you sat them in lawn chairs, gave them bags of burgers, and provided tanker trucks of wine, they would get wasted as usual. Then they’d go home and puke their guts out as usual, collapse into unconsciousness as usual, and wake up the next day none the wiser.

Because he was chief of security, Mr. Truman had two lines in his apartment, one personal and one business.

Only two of the six maids lived on the estate, and they shared a phone line with the chauffeur.

The groundskeeper had a line of his own, but the totally scary chef, Mr. Hachette, and the happy cook, Mr. Baptiste, shared one of Mrs. McBee’s lines.

Ms. Hepplewhite, personal assistant to Ghost Dad, had two lines for her use.

Freddie Nielander, the famous supermodel known in Fricsylvania as Nominal Mom, had a dedicated phone line here, although she had divorced Ghost Dad nearly ten years ago and had stayed overnight less than ten times since then.

Ghost Dad once told Freddie that he called her line every now and then, hoping she would answer and would tell him that she had come back to him at last and was home forever.

Ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha.

Fric had enjoyed his own line since he was six. He never called anyone, except once when he’d used his father’s contacts to get the unlisted home number for Mr. Mike Myers, the actor, who had dubbed the voice of the title character in Shrek, to tell him that Shrek absolutely, no doubt about it, rocked.

Mr. Myers had been very nice, had done the Shrek voice for him, and lots of other voices, and had made him laugh until his stomach hurt. This injury to his abdominal muscles resulted partly from the fact that Mr. Myers was wickedly funny and partly because Fric had not recently exercised his laugh-muscle group as much as he would have liked.

Fric’s father, a believer in a shitload of paranormal phenomena, had set aside the last telephone line to receive calls from the dead. That was a story in itself.

Now, for the first time in eight days, since the Ghost Dad’s most recent call, Fric heard his signature tone coming from the train-room phones.

Everyone on the estate had been assigned a different sound for the line or lines that were dedicated to him or her. Each of Ghost Dad’s lines produced a simple brrrrrrrr. Mrs. McBee’s signature tone was a series of musical chimes. Mr. Truman’s lines played the first nine notes from the theme song of an ancient TV cop show, Dragnet, which was stupid, and Mr. Truman thought so, too, but he endured it.

This highly sophisticated telephone system could produce up to twelve different signature tones. Eight were standard. Four—like Dragnet—could be custom-designed for the client.

Fric had been assigned the dumbest of the standard tones, which the phone manufacturer described as “a cheerful child-pleasing sound suitable for the nursery or the bedrooms of younger children.” Why infants in nurseries or toddlers in cribs ought to have their own telephones remained a mystery to Fric.

Were they going to call Babies R Us and order lobster-flavored teething rings? Maybe they would phone their mommies and say, Yuch. I crapped in my diaper, andit don’t feel good.

Stupid.

Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo, said the train-room phones.

Fric hated the sound. He had hated it when he’d been six, and he hated it even worse now.

Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.

This was the annoying sound that might be made by some furry, roly-poly, pink, half-bear, half-dog, halfwit character in a video made for preschoolers who thought stupid shows like Teletubbies were the pinnacle of humor and sophistication.

Humiliated even though he was alone, Fric pushed two transformer switches to kill power to the trains, and he answered the phone on the fourth ring. “Bob’s Burger Barn and Cockroach Farm,” he said. “Our special today is salmonella on toast with coleslaw for a buck.”

“Hello, Aelfric,” a man said.

Fric had expected to hear his father’s voice. If instead he had heard the voice of Nominal Mom, he would have suffered cardiac arrest and dropped dead into the train controls.

The entire estate staff, with the possible exception of Chef Hachette, would have mourned for him. They would have been deeply, terribly sad. Deeply, deeply, terribly, terribly. For about forty minutes. Then they would have been busy, busy, busy preparing for the post-funeral gala to which would be invited perhaps a thousand famous and near-famous drunks, druggies, and butt-kissers eager to plant their lips on Ghost Dad’s golden ass.

“Who’s this?” Fric asked.