For all the flash and glamour of the car collection, the garage had the atmosphere of a graveyard in moonlight. My old fear of large parking structures returned. I wondered if evil presences watched us from inside and under the vehicles. This might have been caused by the room’s techno-Gothic architecture: curiously ribbed walls, as if the metal was organic; a vaulted ceiling with thick tension struts like the spinal vertebrae of an ancient land leviathan.
At one end of the room, on a dais a foot higher than the rest of the floor, stood a Buick Super Woody Wagon, maybe vintage 1947. Although the Woody was a cool car, it was neither the most beautiful nor the most valuable conveyance in the building. We were drawn to it by the mystery of why it had been accorded the place of honor.
We circled the eggplant-purple Buick in puzzlement until Sparky suddenly dropped to his knees and looked under it and said, “The car is fixed solid to the dais. The dais isn’t part of the floor, maybe a one-inch gap between them. What we’re looking at here might be an elevator. The car is the cab. Hydraulics lower and raise the dais and with it the Buick.”
Such a trick seemed in harmony with the playful nature with which Bodie Emmerich had begun the Oasis, long before he started calling himself the Light and came to believe he was a godling. Get in the Woody, gang, and we’ll take a ride downstairs. It was more classic Disney design than the weird art that came later.
As cool as it might have been to ride the Buick Woody into the lower realms of the subterranean world that Emmerich had made for himself, none of us wanted to risk it. Once we were in the car, the doors would probably lock, and perhaps when we reached the level below, they would not open until someone vetted the passengers. As armed intruders, we would not be approved. With abrupt acceleration, we might then be dropped two floors farther, or four, or six, to a dungeon, or to an execution chamber where the car doors would then spring open and we would be ejected into a serpentarium of poisonous vipers, what started out as a Disney comedy like Flubber having turned into a scene more of a piece with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
The Brobdingnagian scale and pop grandeur of the Oasis were intimidating and inspired expectations of melodramatic events of catastrophic consequences. So I might have written if I had ever returned to Arizona! magazine.
Considering its impracticality, the Woodyvator most likely descended to a level originally intended, among other things, for the personal pleasure of Emmerich and the entertainment of important visitors. The need for a larger—and traditional—elevator suggested that the doors were incorporated in the ribbed walls. That one would be no safer than the Woody.
“Stairs,” Bridget suggested, and we went looking for them under the assumption that they would be located somewhere along the round chamber’s one long, shadow-draped wall. Winston padded quickly ahead of us and led us to a shaft recessed in the wall and fitted with a spiral staircase of stainless steel. We hesitated to descend until Bridget repeated what Panthea had said earlier—“We are what we are, and we need to have faith in that.” As a call to war, it was not as bold as the taunt Frederick the Great used with his soldiers at Kolín—“Come on, you rascals, do you want to live forever?”—but it got us moving just the same.
A stairwell is one of the most dangerous places you can find yourself, other than between an ambitious politician and a camera. Once you commit to stairs, you can’t get out between floors; you have nowhere to hide, and you can be riddled with gunfire from below or above, or from below and above. The stairs between the first and second levels of the Oasis were especially unnerving. Apparently to complete the illusion of a flying saucer filled with abducted automobiles, the round shaft through which the treads passed was lined with neon tubes programmed to send quick pulses of light from top to bottom, perhaps to suggest that, as per Star Trek, we were being teleported from the ship to the surface of some alien planet. The effect was disorienting. By the time we reached the bottom and fled through a door into the end of a corridor, we were dizzy, disoriented, and easy targets for anyone waiting to gun us down.
The wide corridor was deserted, and here the extraterrestrial theme gave way to Art Deco. The limestone floor featured polished black-granite harlequin-pattern inlays along its flanks, and a pure-black baseboard. The walls were clad with limestone, and the stepped molding at the top was black granite. Along the entire length of the barrel vault, an artist of considerable talent had painted packs of running dogs, all lean and elegant borzoi, some black and others white, and naked men in racing chariots pulled by equally stylized black steeds.